Peter Suderman points to a pithy/wonderful Tyler Cowen review of Inside Job, which culminates in this culturally incisive powerhouse punch:
Overall, the movie’s smug moralizing makes me wonder: is this a condescending posture, spooned out with contempt to an audience regarded, one way or another, as inferior and undeserving of better? Or are the moviemakers actually so juvenile and/or so ignorant of the Western tradition — from Thucydides to Montaigne to Pascal to Shakespeare to Ibsen to FILL IN THE BLANK — that they themselves accept the very same simplistic moral portrait? If so, most of all I feel sorry for how much of life’s complexities they are missing and how impoverished their reading and moviegoing and theatregoing must be.
Do you remember the scene in Hamlet, where Hamlet tries to judge the King by enacting a pantomime play in front of him, to see how the King would respond to a work of art? I think of that often.
