Friday
31Oct2008
Movie Review - 'I.O.U.S.A.'
Friday, October 31, 2008 at 12:13AM | I.O.U.S.A.
Featuring Warren Buffet, Ron Paul, and Alan Greenspan  |
Knowing that its subject is a little dry and doesn't
have a lot of laughs, the filmmakers of
I.O.U.S.A. have gone out of their way to make
this film about the current economic crisis and its early indicators as
accessible as possible. Why would you want to see a movie that just reinforces
the compounding news reports of our grim financial outlook? Does the phrase
"those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" mean anything to you?This documentary was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival back in January. To those audiences, these concepts must have seemed vaguely foreign. Everybody knows the economy was worse in 2006 and 2007 than it was in 1999, but it hadn't really taken hold the way it has in the past three months. For a narrative, it follows two campaigners active in the cause of government spending reform, David Walker and Robert Bixby. Walker, until recently, was the nation's top accountant, the head of the Government Accountability Office. Bixby is the current head of the bi-partisan Concord Coalition, founded in the 1990s to raise awareness about and analyze government spending. Together, these men have embarked on a national Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, which is probably as exciting as it sounds.
In between scenes of Walker and Bixby trying to explain how big a creek we're up at the moment, director Patrick Creadon gives us some pop culture moments we can cling to - Saturday Night Live sketches, Jon Stewart, etc. Creadon understands that when you're talking about an unseen problem in terms of trillions of dollars, you need more than talking heads to break through with the message.Creadon divides the film's message into four parts, illustrates each with charts and graphs, gets Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffet to talk about economics, and does about as much as you can to explain the national debt to as many people as you can.
I.O.U.S.A. doesn't ask us to make those decisions - would you do away with NASA first or the DEA or the National Endowment for the Arts? - but it does help us understand that, even with elections, it takes a lot more than four years and one man to make a damn bit of difference. Everyone has to practice more fiscal responsibility, from a guy named Joe who might plumb for a living all the way up to Congress.
Or do you like the idea of borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars every year from one country simply to pay for products and services from another one?
Colin Boyd | Permalink | in Documentary, Reviews | Print Article | Email Article | Post a Comment | Share Article
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