theholtsite

We just saw this movie tonight. It was largely about debt in America. This is a good subject, however the movie was horrible, for several reasons:

1) There are entirely too many movies that use short clips of our President (with gratuitous editing and captions) to prove their one-sided point these days. I’m getting sick of it. As one reviewer put it:

“…it devolves into a political screed, essentially blaming George W. Bush (and his Republican predecessors) for everything that’s wrong with average Americans’ lives. The film takes a scattershot approach, throwing everything it can — from the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina — into the mix to see what can stick (and stink) the most.”

2) The whole movie was most concerned with blaming the government, credit card companies, and collection agencies rather than stupid consumers. As the saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” I resonate with extreme cases where people are taken advantage of, but it seems to me that most consumer debt is exactly that: Debt incurred by consumers of their own free will. Watching this movie I got the feeling that the person who created it had the mentality many people do today – rack up tons of debt and blame someone else when you can’t pay. From the same guy:

“The propagandistic Maxed Out is ultimately undermined by the fact that, as vile as many of its corporate interviewees seem, its everyman subjects are often just as culpable in creating and perpetuating the whole mess.”

If it wasn’t the credit card companies, it would be something else people blew their money on.

3) The sob stories… oh geez. Showing me people who are crying their faces off or pictures of people who killed themselves is the WRONG way to convince me of anything. It seemed like “Maxed Out” was very short on facts and generous with the sob stories. I don’t mind one or two in this kind of movie, but when that’s all the material you have it makes for a stinky movie. Another reviewer said:

“Supposedly we are literally killing ourselves because of credit-card debt. The film is so shameless as to use the families of three suicides – backing their comments with Coldplay on the soundtrack, thus treating genuine pain as though it were on the level of rejection by “The Bachelor.”

4) The movie also attacks rich people because they are so rich and not struggling with debt like “the rest of us”. This is idiocy. First of all, many upper class citizens have just as much (or more) debt as the lower classes. In addition, they pay a lot more taxes. “Maxed Out” seems to be whining at the “rich snobs” like a teenager who wants his money for nothing. “Life is unfair because some people are richer than me,” it screams. More useful lessons to America would be delayed gratification, saying no to junk mail with the word “pre-approved” in it, saving money, etc.

The movie had one good clip about a pastor instructing people to tithe to God as a primary financial responsibility. However, it was completely misplaced and nothing was said about it at all. It also had some clips of a 1960 educational short on the responsible use of credit. Honestly, watching that would have been a far better use of our (and America’s) time.