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Arts & Entertainment
Imprint, Friday, November 12, 2010
Movie Review Saw 3D: The Final Chapter Kevin Greutert Maple Pictures
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ello readers, I want to play a game. Sound familiar? It should, since it wouldn’t be the Halloween season without a rendition of the Saw series for the past six years. Director Kevin Greutert (Saw VI) is back this fall along with jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and Jill (Betsy Russell) with the Oct. 29 release of Saw 3D: The Final Chapter. According to MTV, the film made $24.2 million on opening weekend, banking beyond the low budget for production. Fuelled by a number of enticing trailers, the short teasers leading up to Saw 3D created more hype than the actual film did. I mean, what Saw fan wasn’t thrilled with the 3D trailers? Strapped into your seat, saws flying at you through the air, and a pig-masked jigsaw minion reaching out from the big screen? Admittedly, my inner Saw fan was screaming, “Yes, please.” Looking back now, it’s more or less cynically scoffing, “Give me a break.” Truly jigsaw and truly gory, the opening scene of the film is the first “game,” where we find three characters chained to a device that will result in
one of them having to die. Ultimately the opening scene comes down to two guys deciding whether the cheating girlfriend hanging above them (who is currently two-timing them both) should live or die. Enough suspenseful music and drama to bring me to the edge of my seat, the fantastic opening scene only ended up making me laugh. Call it what you will, but noticeably fake intestines and pink blood? Come on, Lionsgate, I thought you could do better than that. As all Saw movies prior, this 3D movie follows the unravelling of one “big game” while revealing random details of jigsaw’s life through flashbacks to Saw I-VI. Predominantly following self-help guru and bestselling author Bobby Dagen’s (Sean Patrick Flanery) experiences to save those around him through torturous tasks, the film also works to tie up the loose ends of all Saws prior, without any real success. While the devices and scenarios throughout the film are exceptionally top-notch, with many being realistic enough to make my stomach turn and my gag reflex kick in within seconds, most of the excitement was short lived, overshadowed by repeated use of devices from the previous movies and the mediocre use of special effects.
So what could Saw 3D have had less of? First and foremost, the buckets of fake pink blood. No further comment. Secondly, I really do wish the trailers lived up to the content of the flick. With no taunting pig-masked minions and never strapping viewers into their seats, the concept of being the last puzzle of jigsaw’s game just flew out the window. And of course, let’s not even talk about the countless cameos of past Saw victims and survivors. It’s hard enough to keep track of them all as a fan, but stopping midway through the film to think “Oh wait, which game did this one play?” is really annoying. Not to mention Dr. Gordon’s (Cary Ewles) comeback. Really? He’s still alive? I thought he crawled away leg-less at the end of the original Saw. Despite high anticipation and the full 3D production of The Final Chapter, this Saw fails to live up to its name. Fake blood and a blur of random details, the film never really ends the series after all. Like all Saw movies before this one, it leaves you hanging, wondering whether Lionsgate finally wrapped it up. Overall, the film deserves four sawed off limbs out of a potential 10 and a direct-toDVD verdict. Oh, and don’t bother buying the 3D edition, either. — Eleonora Meszaros
courtesy of IMDB
Book Review
courtesy of amazon
Michael Lewis The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine W.W. Norton & Co
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n Oct. 22, 2008, Deven Sharma, president of Standard & Poor’s, a key credit rating agency in the U.S., would appear before the U.S. House of Representatives testify that “[v]irtually no one… anticipated what is occurring.” Enter Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short, which details the lives of Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Charlie Ledley, Jamie Mai, Vincent Daniel, Danny Moses, and Greg Lippmann who all saw the growing crisis and decided to short-sell Wall Street’s sub-prime mortgage bonds and collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s). Lewis takes the reader through the explosive growth of sub-prime lending where mortgage rates were generally several points below the prime rate set by banks. $30 billion U.S. was considered a big year for sub-prime mortgages in the 1990s, though in 2000 $130 billion U.S. sub-prime mortgages would be sold with $55 billion U.S. being repackaged into mortgage bonds and sold off by investment banks. In 2005, Lewis states this number would grow even larger, rising to $625 billion U.S. with $507 billion U.S. being repackaged as bonds. Also, while sub-prime mortgage sales were rising, the percentage of Americans taking variable-rate mortgages was rising with 35 per cent of households taking a variable rate in 1996 growing to 75 per cent in 2005, usually with a two-year “teaser” rate. It would be this “teaser” period that would be of significance to Lewis’s story, as he explains how seven people saw the end of teaser rates and falling house prices as potentially devastating to the mortgage bond and CDO system. Since mortgage bonds couldn’t be shortened, these individuals would turn to credit default swaps (CDS’s) which were invented by bankers in J.P. Morgan. They would allow institutions to buy protection on a bond for regular payments so that if the bond were to default, the seller of the protection would pay the buyer the par value of the bond. In 2004, Lewis explains that AIG Financial Products would start selling “naked” CDS’s (naked in that you didn’t have to own any part of the bond to buy protection, thereby inviting speculation) which by 2008 would make up a $15.5 trillion U.S. market. While Lewis explains the origins of mortgage bonds, CDO’s and CDS’s,
he also explains the great failures in the credit rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s in granting triple-A status (virtually riskless or U.S. Treasury Bond equivalence) to CDO’s made up of very risky triple-b mortgage bonds with a few triple-A’s for the higher credit-average. Because the credit rating agencies didn’t know how to rate these derivatives they took money from investment banks to devise ratings and were staffed by what Lewis considers analysts that didn’t make it to the big banks. The rating agencies inappropriately gave low-risk ratings which would allow investment bankers to make more money on the spread in interest rates. After years of issuing loans to some of the least credit-worthy individuals in the United States, the music would finally stop in August 2007, when the first few batches of sub-prime mortgages would leave the teaser-rate period and enter the usually much higher variable rate. With falling house prices, Americans would not be able to refinance their homes to quickly gain capital. So what would come to be called the Great Recession, began as millions of homeowners started defaulting on their mortgages. Woven with the personal tales of the seven who foresaw the Great Recession, Lewis writes a down-to-earth account of Wall Street in the run-up to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the significant government bailouts under the Troubled Asset Relief Plan. It is dotted with quoted profanity as hedge fund giants verbally lash at investment bankers, CDO managers, and humourously in one instance at the CEO of Option One, in front of an audience of sub-prime mortgage bond sellers and investors. In the high-stakes world of investment banking, Lewis follows the lives of these seven men, who seeing the looming crisis, risked a little money in betting against the incentive-based greed of Wall Street and came out big. The Big Short is a must-read for students considering or interested in investment banking and the recession, we are now only slowly leaving behind us. The Big Short can be found at the UW Bookstore. — Matt Austin