'And stop sending me email about penis enlargement, Santos.'
“In a world where nothing is funny, humor is powerful. First, it’s the medium through which alliances are forged, coded data shared, and the illusion of humanity preserved. But the joke is also a small act of rebellion within the pompous corporate state, and as such, is vaguely threatening to viziers who view all jovial behavior as unseemly…In short, he who laughs last laughs carefully.”
— Stanley Bing (pen name of CBS corporate communications vice president Gil Schwartz) in an essay entitled Going for the Jocular in The Big Bing: Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe
A chocolate fondue fountain is used as a metaphor for the kind of debt — called CDOs — that precipitated the 2008 global meltdown. (www.itsrainingchocolate.com)
A CDO is a bundle of debt you can buy. In the sense of loans, it works like this: An underwriter, or investment bank, buys many loans, and pools together everyone’s first few payment, then their next few payments, and calls these tranches. Each tranche is sliced up and sold as CDOs, and each tranche carries an increasing degree of risk. The highest quality rated tranches get the first dibs on payment from the loan pools. However, because they are less risky, the interest rates they earn are not as high as those for tranches that are later in line.
Think of it as one of those tiered chocolate fondue fountains that’s shaped like upright, stacked satellite dishes. The top bowl has to overflow to fall into the next bowl. If the chocolate stops running (think default, early repayment), the first cup gets filled with what’s still in the system, and maybe some of the second tier, but people at the bottom, who otherwise would have had the most chocolate are instead stuck there holding their toothpicks and wishing they’d just ordered the cheesecake.
— Chris Benz, one of five of McSweeney’s interns who prepared the glossary found in Michael Lewis’ Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
Waste of time, money, if you ask me. ( Pic from Wikipedia)
By no means is George Clooney ugly.
And I say that as a Filipino male who has an unblemished record of staunch heterosexuality (to quote my fictional idol also named George, Jerry Seinfeld’s best friend, Costanza). [See: More of George Costanza and his quote.]
However, Clooney’s latest film — The American directed by Anton Corbijn — is another matter altogether.
The movie sucks big time.
And no amount of interesting babes — the movie has two: an assassin and a call girl — can make up for the energy, patience, and expense moviegoers incurred to see it.
For the first fifteen or so minutes, the movie progresses along nicely, helping clarify character motivation, establish narrative action, and build cinematic tension.
Clooney, an American hitman, manages to eliminate a killer out to get him while in Sweden. After meeting his principal in Rome, he is told to cool his heels in an Italian town.
And that marks the time the movie jumps the shark, so to speak. [See: Jump the shark]
Posing as a photographer, the taciturn protagonist goes around the village, sharing drinks and meals with the parish priest and visiting a call girl in the next town.
No witty one-liners nor smart barbs are traded between the characters, further blunting whatever passes for narrative movement in this movie.
Moreover, as Clooney does his best to protect his cover, viewers are treated to the town’s rustic offerings, a river, a field, and an overview of an oddly-shaped highway.
As individual images, they’re fodder for Flickr.com.
But scenes on an image hosting website does not a movie make.
These arguably picturesque views do nothing but to exhaust the tolerance of the audience, many of whom have been tricked into expecting some kind of action.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t take place until the film’s last 10 minutes.
And by that time, the audience is already way too sleepy to care.
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From the Fine Print Dept. The title of this blog entry was taken from a 1958 novel of the same name, which later became a movie starring Marlon Brando.
