Rough Draft

Snakes on a Plane

The teaser trailer for what is sure to be the best movie of 2006 is available. There's a bunch of snakes. They're on a plane. And Samuel L Jackson (armed with a taser) has had enough of them. How will this movie not be awesome? A group trip from work is already being planned for its release on Aug 18th.

By the way, if you haven't heard of this movie before, read the Wikipedia entry about it.

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

A group of us at work spent our lunch a couple days last week listen-watching Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. I had heard nothing but good things about the movie, so I was definitely looking forward to finally seeing it. I had intended to see it in theaters last spring, but never got around to it. This ended up being a fitting time to see it though, since the trial is just getting under way.

I have to admit I wasn't familiar with many of the specific details of the scandal or even all the major players. The two biggest things I didn't realize were 1. how many people outside of the company (the accounting firm, investment bankers, etc) were just as responsible as the top Enron execs and 2. how many people got screwed that weren't really a part of the company (such as the PGE electricians that Enron bought). The PGE people basically had to put some percentage of their 401K savings into Enron stock, and at a a company meeting Skilling and another exec answer a question about whether they should put all their savings into company stock by laughing and saying "yes, of course!".

The film was incredibly depressing and disturbing to watch. The shear number of people that the Enron execs convinced to just blindly believe them was stunning. Sure, lots of them were getting bribes, but you'd think at least someone would realize it couldn't go on forever. I mean seriously, how legitimate really is the weather futures market. And there was the scene where Fastow was pitching his LJM scheme to some investment bankers and one of them asks "isn't this a conflict of interest since you are the CFO of Enron and in charge of this LJM fund?" and Fastow basically says "no" and then later in the same meeting the investment bankers are all like, "well this sounds great". Um, no?

I have to say the one guy that did things "right" was Lou Pai. He got in, made his millions and got out long before the shit hit the fan. It seems he was the smartest of them all.

Another thing I hadn't realized was how responsible Enron was for the rolling blackouts in CA. They were literally calling up power plants and asking, or rather telling, them to shut down the power for certain amounts of time and then make up a reason that the power needed to be turned off. All the while, Ken Lay's friend Bush turns a blind eye. And then Lay starts holding meetings with Arnold Schwarzenegger. His gubernatorial victory seems like so much less of a surprise now.

My one disappointment with the film was with the presentation of some pieces of data. The main thing that comes to mind is a statement regarding mark to market accounting. It was something like, "they could just make up any numbers they wanted". It wasn't really like they could just write down numbers out of thin air. They had o actually come up with all these schemes (like the Blockbuster deal), so they could book revenue in one quarter, even if that revenue was never realized. Another point that came up with my co-workers is that they could have provided some slightly better statistics. For instance instead of saying that Skilling or Lay sold X million dollars worth of stock, it would have been nice to know what percentage of their holdings that number represented.

Overall the movie was incredibly well done and I highly recommend you see it, especially if you aren't all that familiar with the story.

The Training Is Nothing The Will Is Everything

While I'm talking about movies, I thought I'd mention that I saw Batman Begins as a office outing on Wednesday and I highly enjoyed it. After using the trailer for Soundtrack Pro demos for so long, it was great to finally see the movie. The day before the movie, I had looked it up on IMDB and saw that the running time was 141, which sounded long to me. But the time really flew by while watching the movie. It was good to see a darker Batman movie again. I liked how they spent a good deal of time on Batman's origin. The main villain, Ra's Al Ghul was also interesting in the sense that it wasn't your typical trying to take over the world bad guy. I definitely recommend going to see this movie.

Fast Track

Just found out there's a movie called Fast Track in the works starring Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) and Jason Bateman (Arrested Development). Seeing as Scrubs and Arrested Development are two of the funniest shows on TV, this promises to be good entertainment.

Initially found out about the movie on AP.net of all places. Also found a bit of info here.

Congratulations Zach

Congratulations to Zach Braff on winning the 2005 Best First Feature IFP Independent Spirit Award for Garden State! Zach's Garden State Soundtrack also won a Grammy for "Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture, Television, Or Other Visual Media." I highly recommend the movie if you haven't seen it, and you should give the soundtrack a listen too; it's filled with really good songs by really talented bands. Zach has impeccable taste in music, which you can often hear on the song choices for Scrubs, such as last week's episode which ended with Windmills by Glen Phillips.

NetFlix

I recently signed up for NetFlix mainly to catch up on some TV series (The Shield, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Coupling). I've gotten pretty far along with that, so now I'm looking for some suggested viewing items. Leave suggestions (movies, anime, or tv shows) in the comments.

Spellbound

Lynn and I watched Spellbound, a documentary on the National Spelling Bee, this week. I found it very interesting, and some of the practice those kids do is insane. One kid did 7000-8000 words every day. The best person they featured in the show though was a 7th grader from New Jersey named Harry. He couldn't sit still for a second, and made some really entertaining comments. During the Bee itself, one of the judges had to say "Harry turn back around to the mic and finish your word." Though we were rooting for him, he didn't win, and we checked the National Spelling Bee website to see if he made it the next year, but sadly he did not.

Movies and other things to watch

I'm just making a quick list of movies and such that Lynn and I had talked about needing to watch next semester.

Movies showing at Strosacker:

Pirates of the Caribbean

A group of us went to see Pirates of the Caribbean in Strosacker last night. I had wanted to see it over the summer, but never had time. I really enjoyed the movie. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was just a really fun movie to sit back and enjoy. I also really enjoyed the Captain Jack Sparrow character. It was great the way he never looked like he knew what he was doing, but as it turned out he always had a plan. If you haven't seen this movie yet, I'd highly recommend checking it out.

Kill Bill

A bunch of us are going to see Kill Bill Vol. 1 on Friday. Jeff ordered tickets online, so we are good to go. It looks like it's going to be an excellent movie. Since the movie got split into 2 parts, I'm looking forward to seeing how Vol. 1 ends. I'm definitely expecting a crazy cliffhanger type ending to Vol. 1 from Tarantino.