DVD Review: The Flaw (2011)
Director: David Sington
Country: UK
Genre: Documentary
Official Trailer: Here
Purchase Now!
Editor’s Notes: The Flaw releases 4/17/2012 on DVD and VOD from Newvideo.
The Flaw comes on strong like a blaxploitation film with walleyed shots of cityscapes driven by the funky grooves of the street. This is a documentary that wants your attention, and in its fun populist methods it creates an easily accessible portrait of the fatal flaws inherent in our global economic structure. It is filled with well-armed economic theorists that lay down the reasons for recent economic crises, the impossibility of infinite growth, and the impact that these course corrections have on a population for reasons outside of their knowledge and control. It’s no fun when Adam Smith’s invisible hand pulls down your pants and smacks you on the ass, but these short term course corrections are going to happen as long as there are people that continually push their luck for tangible short-term gains. Unfortunately, this type of stupidity might be inherent in the human condition and no one can truthfully claim complete immunity to intellectual myopia.
The Flaw comes on strong like a blaxploitation film with walleyed shots of cityscapes driven by the funky grooves of the street. This is a documentary that wants your attention, and in its fun populist methods it creates an easily accessible portrait of the fatal flaws inherent in our global economic structure.
One must forfeit the trappings of national identity in order to objectively assess the complexities of these kinds of issues. For too many, there is an ideological component that cannot be overcome long enough to see the issue as it really is. There are rarely evil-doers behind the scenes, and when there are they seldom twist their mustaches. The problem occurs when humanity collectively places its blinders on and is incapable of forecasting the ways in which it is kicking its own ass. When times are good, doomsayers look a bit like Randy Quaid in Independence Day and discourse is halted until the inevitable breakdown occurs. Unfortunately we haven’t had the foresight to elect Bill Pullman as president. Yet.
The Flaw does a great job of explaining the housing crisis, and how the deck is stacked against fools that buy houses with the wacky intention of living in them. When housing is treated as a good instead of an asset, you will eventually end up with rows upon rows of soulless unoccupied houses like something out of a King Vidor film. The documentary also understands and laments the death of the innocence that the fifties brought us, a time when manufacturing jobs were lucrative enough to provide the Average Joe the means of obtaining that elusive “American Dream”. It isn’t that the ethics of hard work and stick-to-itiveness have died, it’s simply that the complex nature of the global economy and short-sighted decision making have made it much more difficult to see the gains that “hard work” used to readily provide.
The documentary also understands and laments the death of the innocence that the fifties brought us, a time when manufacturing jobs were lucrative enough to provide the Average Joe the means of obtaining that elusive “American Dream”.
One of the strengths of this film is that it doesn’t lean on rhetoric, nor does it condescend to the intelligence of those that came from more affluent generations. This isn’t a problem of decaying morality or shifting values, it is a problem of values and morality that naturally adjust to the changes of the global economic landscape. We just haven’t reached the inevitable stasis (or complete collapse) that needs to occur so that things “fit” in the current world model. This is why the young and old are incapable of seeing eye to eye on ideological matters. We’re all made out of the same stuff; we just come from times when the deck was stacked differently. This “in my day” attitude and reactionary morality judgments do little but fuel the generational chasm on the false notion that one generation is inherently better than another.
DVD Extras:
Included is a featurette with director David Sington that was endlessly captivating. It shows a guy that is well aware of his own knowledge deficiencies, but who takes the actions necessary to correct those gaps. As he searched for answers needed to create this documentary he earnestly explored these new fields of study with an open mind. The objective of the documentary is to illustrate the flaws in our economic system and the “bubbles” that form and collapse as a side-effect of imbalances, but what was refreshing in Sington’s method was the way he approached his interview subjects without a pre-established script. The documentary would either sink or swim in the editing room and Sington was prepared to bend to the truth of the moments that were captured. This seems like a far more objective approach than utilizing a steadfast linear agenda that each interviewee would be beholden to. Sington seems like a brilliant guy, and I would get along fine with anyone that tries to relate the problems of the world to particle physics.
Related Posts
Review: The Lucky One (2012)
Review: Lolita (1962)
Spotlight on the Czechoslovak New Wave: The Cremator (1968)
Review: Battleship (2012)
Subversive Saturday: Work (1915)
