AlterNet calls American Casino “An incredibly powerful new documentary finally lets those who’ve lived it tell the story — from the “creative” financiers to the home buyers duped by brokers. … by leaving behind the narrator’s voice that’s so common to the documentary form — the story that gets told is incredibly powerful.”
The piece also features an interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, the films director and co-producers.
Read the full AlternNet piece here.
A number of artists contributed music to “American Casino,” including Moby. The Roq Off Crew created some original tracks that have been getting great response nationwide.
Listen to the original song by Roq Off Crew
Listen to the original song, “Foreclosure” by B. Dazzle
Listen to the original song, “American Casino” byu Kojo Hotflow
The New York Times calls American Casino “A meticulously structured film.” The review gives a full outline of the film, which you can read here.
The New Yorker featured American Casino this week, in current cinema. David Denby writes:
The movies are still one of the best ways of giving body, flavor, and emotion to the abstractions and puzzlements of an enormous crisis. In the most fascinating scenes in “American Casino”—a terrific documentary chronicling the subprime-mortgage mess and the financial collapse of the past two years—a former banker for Bear Stearns sits in the dark, his face shadowed and his voice (I believe) slightly altered. We might be watching a retired criminal or spy, a man both proud of his dexterity and ashamed of the disaster that it led to. Out of the shadows, he explains how such bizarre instruments as collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.s) quieted the normal skepticism of investors. Here’s the drill: when the bank assembled a group of mortgage-backed bonds as an investment product, it submitted them to a ratings agency. But the agency, rather than run its own computer models on the trustworthiness of such bonds, he says, merely handed the job back to the bank, which ran its models. Having received a fee of perhaps a hundred thousand dollars for not doing anything, the agency then signed off on the phony ratings.
Read the New Yorker article here.
From Don’t Miss It.
In this film (that all American taxpayers should rush to view), the complex, still-molten mortgage meltdown is brilliantly dissected in a tour-de-force that is one part crystal-clear economic primer, and one part revelation of its effect on homeowners who were duped and traumatized by appalling practices. Filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn have managed to remain even-handed by fielding a cast of movers and shakers (good guys and bad), unusually articulate and appealing victims (largely well-educated, middle-class professionals whose lives will never recover from the body blows they received),americancasino3 a real estate investor who made $500 million by “betting against Wall Street” that the bubble would implode, and even a pest-control expert who tries to keep up with the plague of rats and mosquitoes that breed in and around abandoned homes and pools.
Journalist and author, Gary Weiss, wrote two books probing the underside of Wall Street (Wall Street Versus America,and Born to Steal). He’s been published in Parade magazine, Salon, The New York Times and other publications, and he wrote the “Muckraker” column at Forbes.com. He was a senior writer with Business Week for many years, and before that he worked for Barron’s.
Gary says,
American Casino, which opens in New York in a few days, … totally blew me away. It’s deft, sophisticated, and riveting–a really impressive piece of work.
To be frank, I almost expected to be either bored to tears or blasted with overgeneralizations and conspiracy theories. Instead, what I saw was a documentary that performs a real public service. …
American Casino sets a high bar for Michael Moore’s impending documentary and the other films that will follow.
The hugely popular progressive radio and TV show Democracy Now has just run extensive excerpts from American Casino in a segment on the Wells Fargo bank and predatory subprime lending. Listen and watch here.
Illinois is suing Wells Fargo for discriminating against African Americans and other minorities. Read Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s statement.
“In terms of monetary scale, no heist thriller could ever compete with this probing documentary about the subprime mortgage scandal and the financial services industry’s greedy embrace of a $12 trillion taxpayer bailout. Longtime muckrakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn (brother and sister-in-law of Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn) interview a handful of money guys–all white–who explain the dizzying complexities of the subprime market and mortgage-backed securities, conceding their own big winnings with miens that range from mild sheepishness to chuckling nonchalance. The street-level effects of their chicanery are evident in the profiles of miserable Baltimore home owners–all black–who were targeted by the mortgage industry, sucked in by predatory lending practices, and ruined by foreclosure. A more tightly edited version of this would have packed more punch, but the movie manages to get its arms around a complicated story that constitutes one of the great moral outrages in U.S. history.”
-J.R. Jones
Read the Chicago Reader piece here
“n case you’ve been asleep for the last 10 months, American Casino offers a decent refresher course on the financial meltdown, but what gives this homegrown doc an edge is the way it alternates between explaining the insanity of CDOs and chronicling the crisis’s impact on everyday lives. The film zeroes in on Baltimore’s heavily affected minority communities. Watching empty houses being boarded up, you’ll work up a healthy desire to throw a brick through Hank Paulson’s window.”
Read the Time Out Chicago piece here.
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American Casino presented by Table Rock Films, produced by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn
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