Don't get me wrong, I happen to be a huge fan of Ondi Timoner. But this one is really unbearable to watch. The topic seems to be that the system that investors use is vulnerable to abuse, so why not abuse it? There is no moral to the story. It is just a long list of abusers telling all of us why they do it, what kind of a high they got by doing it and when they get their fix, how good it feels to get it again and again.
The high that the many subjects get from investing and pushing bogus stocks up and up is a strange form of psychosis -- they remove themselves from humanity, and even a mother of small children seems to get more emotional satisfaction out of referring to her endless streams of stock investments than she does from her kids playing somewhat ignored just a couple of feet away from her gigantic screens.
The odd thing that happens is that somehow the investors speed freakiness seems to permeate the storytelling so that the whole experience is one in which everything being displayed has to be shown in milliseconds and then suddenly vanishes before we have a second to grasp whatever it is we are watching.
The parallels between the structure of the film and the content of the interviews is such that one constantly seems to be trying to obscure the other, the visuals try to one-up the talking, and vice versa. Neither one is given even a moment to consider, to evaluate, to understand if there is any meaning to the process of investing in something regardless of how inane the product or company is -- as illustrated by the pumping up of GameStock, a totally insignificant dealer of video games, into the stratosphere, "just because we can."
As much as I wanted to enjoy this, I cannot recommend it, and so I have to caution anyone who thinks, as I do, that Ondi is a very competent and accomplished documentary filmmaker, but has utterly missed the mark on this one.
The high that the many subjects get from investing and pushing bogus stocks up and up is a strange form of psychosis -- they remove themselves from humanity, and even a mother of small children seems to get more emotional satisfaction out of referring to her endless streams of stock investments than she does from her kids playing somewhat ignored just a couple of feet away from her gigantic screens.
The odd thing that happens is that somehow the investors speed freakiness seems to permeate the storytelling so that the whole experience is one in which everything being displayed has to be shown in milliseconds and then suddenly vanishes before we have a second to grasp whatever it is we are watching.
The parallels between the structure of the film and the content of the interviews is such that one constantly seems to be trying to obscure the other, the visuals try to one-up the talking, and vice versa. Neither one is given even a moment to consider, to evaluate, to understand if there is any meaning to the process of investing in something regardless of how inane the product or company is -- as illustrated by the pumping up of GameStock, a totally insignificant dealer of video games, into the stratosphere, "just because we can."
As much as I wanted to enjoy this, I cannot recommend it, and so I have to caution anyone who thinks, as I do, that Ondi is a very competent and accomplished documentary filmmaker, but has utterly missed the mark on this one.