gavin6942 A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.The film was released in 2005 and I watched it in 2015. Is it dated? Perhaps a bit. But it is also just as important as ever, really recapping some great history of finance, energy, and California politics. The names of "Ken Lay" and "Jeff Skilling" have not been forgotten.What would perhaps be interesting is a follow-up film about some of the key players. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big winner. Ken Lay is, I believe, dead. I forget what happened to Skilling. And Gray Davis? Still tainted, and for something he had no control over.

pittsley I thought this was a well-performed documentary. I took a different view of it altogether. I believe that Enron is a small microcosm of the Conservative ideology. The greed, the flagrant disregard for innocent people and the manipulation of politics, economic policies to profiteer are all staple traits of Conservatives around the world. These people were not necessarily the smartest people in the room. They had no morals values, or considered ethics in any decisions made. Anyone can profit if you have no conscious.If Enron's practices and policies, corporate/ environmental deregulation (conservative values) were applied to global economics, we would all see the global economy crumble much the same, and the wealthy profit, while the working class pay the price and the poor become poorer.They showcased their new company motto, not as the world natural gas leader, but as the World Leading company. It appears they believed they were writing new economics and capitalism and proving to the world that their ideology was the right way.A great example of conservative policies/ ideologies negatively impacting the world and leaving a catastrophic mess for others to clean up and fix.

cfs-907-920005 If you haven't seen it or haven't seen it recently, it's well worth watching. Systemic fraud -- accountants, lawyers, regulators, investment banks, etc: "complicity across the board", "all too easy", accounting gimics, Alan Greenspan connections to the company, con man extraordinaire dissection of Jeff Skilling, massive egos, greed, lack of ethics among execs, connections with Bush family and Gray Davis downfall, testimony before House and Senate -- all well laid out in this documentary few years before the financial crisis hit: "Enron gambled entire future on the idea that its stock price wouldn't fall." Same rationale repeated a few years later with real estate as substitute. Doesn't offer much confidence that same exact thing is happening again in some form, papering over the losses from the the credit crisis with something else...Warning though: your blood will be boiling by the end of it.

virek213 Were it not for the fact that its collapse led to over twenty thousand employees being pink-slipped, the situation involving Enron might very well be considered a black comedy. Unfortunately, the corporate shenanigans of its morally bankrupt potentates, to wit Andy Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and, last but not least, the late (but not lamented) Ken Lay, led to what was, in its time (late 2001/early 2002) the single biggest corporate failure in the history of the United States, and a sign of what was to come in the next seven years. This saga is told here in writer/director Alex Gibney's compelling, and at times infuriating, documentary ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM.Taken from the book of the same name by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean, this film details the rise of the Houston-based energy giant and how it manipulated its finances to hide the fact that it was a house of cards ready to collapse for several years before it did. Even more than that, however, the film shows us just how Lay and his boys, with the always-reliable help of his deregulator-in-chief George W. Bush, manipulated energy prices and the energy grid in California to produce the rolling blackouts that caused electrical costs to skyrocket, thus putting the world's seventh biggest economy in a $38 billion hole from which it has yet to re-emerge.Gibney, with able assistance from narrator Peter Coyote (remembered as the mysterious "Keys" in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL), wisely interviews those Enron employees who knew what was going on inside the bowels of their company but were powerless to do anything, and thus makes them sympathetic. But he also gives us those phone calls in which Enron traders chuckled profanely about the pain and suffering their shutting off of power plants caused Californians during one of the hottest summers on record, something that'll definitely cause one's blood to boil.If we need any reminder of how important ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM is, it comes from one of those unemployed Enron employees who warns us that what happened to them and their company would happen again. Need I say more?