Documentary look at American mortgage crisis
THALIA FILM SUNDAYS: AMERICAN CASINO (Leslie Cockburn, 2009)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, October 18 & 25 and November 1, $11, 4:00 & 8:00
212-864-5400
http://www.symphonyspace.org
http://www.americancasinothemovie.com
“I have spent much of my career filming in war zones and postapocalyptic societies — Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan,” notes director Leslie Cockburn in a statement about her latest film, AMERICAN CASINO. “But I never expected such a disaster at home.” Beginning in January 2008, Leslie Cockburn and her husband, writer-producer Andrew Cockburn, began to delve into the U.S. financial crisis, focusing on the controversy surrounding the subprime mortgage loan fiasco. What they found was both shocking and infuriating. Bloomberg financial reporter Mark Pittman and Professor Michael Greenberger explain how it all happened from the Wall Street side, while mortgage bond salespeople and loan officers describe doctoring forms and making up numbers in order to push through loans that were clearly destined for foreclosure. The Cockburns personalize all the billions of dollars by speaking with Maryland high school teacher Denzel Mitchell, Rev. Almalene Wade, and Johns Hopkins therapist Patricia McNair, three individuals seeking the American dream but instead facing being homeless. And it’s no coincidence that Mitchell, Wade, and McNair are all black, as the Cockburns reveal that low-income minority communities were specifically targeted by banks and mortgage companies, who were building a house of cards destined to collapse. AMERICAN CASINO has several slow patches that meander a bit, as if the filmmakers needed to stretch it to reach its running time of eighty-nine minutes, but hang in there — you’re not going to want to miss how exterminator Jared Dever connects to the crisis.