05.07.11
How do you make Henry Paulson watchable? Not a trick question
Astonishingly, HBO is devoting an hour long promotion to its upcoming Hollywood-ization of the Wall St.-led global economic collapse, Too Big to Fail.
This meant trotting out all the A-list actors chosen to portray the Masters of the Universe.
There’s William Hurt as Henry Paulson.
Paul Giamatti, an unbelievable choice despite the salt ‘n’ pepper beard, as Ben Bernanke. However, Giamatti is unbelievable as a wrestling coach, which was his most recently publicized role in Win Win. Paul Giamatti is only ever believable when playing pudgy schmucks. He is not a chameleon.
As for the rest, they’re all here.
The big underlying problem is what I now call the Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein Rule.
As I found, after writing a decent song about the CEO of Goldman Sachs, hardly anyone — except people who’ve read Matt Taibbi religiously — know who Blankfein is. So few had any inkling what the song was about and why lynching was recommended.
While they vaguely grasp that Wall Street did very bad things, fucking everyone over, that’s the extent of general static knowledge on the affair.
HBO has the same problem and I’m wagering it’s why it has such a long pre-explaining promotional segment devoted to pimping the dramatization.
However, if Michael Moore’s Capitalism — A Love Story and Ferguson’s Inside Job couldn’t catalyze change, this certainly has no chance.
And I’m assuming that’s not its purpose. Too Big to Fail’s purpose is as a loss leader for cable TV award nominations and blow jobs from big city newspaper television critics.
When the best you can come up with, other than actors talking about the parts they play — the equivalent of the porn industry’s solo sessions, are assholes like Fareed Zakaria and John Fund explaining why something is good, there’s no way you’re selling for people who actually, uh, like entertainment to be entertaining.
You watch Fund and regardless of whether or not you know who he is, the most likely thing to spring to mind is: “A dermatologist could do something about the wart on that guy’s eyelid.”
On a scale of one to ten rate the way you’d look forward to the following (with ten being $5,000 and a weekend in the Florida Keys and one being another weekend with only flaring hemorrhoids):
Watching a famous actor play Henry Paulson, the 74th Secretary of the Treasury of the US, in a made-for-tv movie.
Dick Destiny » Export balance explained, among other things said,
May 8, 2011 at 8:58 am
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