Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Louis C.K
Elizabeth Warren
Directed By:
James D. Scurlock
Along with documentaries about germs and microbes, Maxed Out ranks up there as one of the most alarming things I've seen in recent years. Credit is there, it's your friend. Use it. Well, no. James D. Scurlock (which curiously sounds like a Morgan Spurlock sibling) begs to differ. Credit is not your friend and it's there to fuck you up. Like many ultra-liberal documentaries that have gathered major momentum during the last ten years, Maxed Out does an amazing job at pointing the finger at the conservatives and saying how bad they fucked up. Well fucked up, they did. But like many movies of its kind, Maxed Out doesn't offer its viewers weapons to argue the point its trying to make.
The point is this. Credit card companies have zero interest in good, responsible, Mr. Everyman credit users. If you're middle class and you pay your credit on time, the only thing you'll get from a credit card company is more ways to ruin your life. Bigger credit margins, better credit cards, with more options. If you use your credit card responsibly, you're not profitable. If you use it all the time and build up a debt that you can't repay, they will then milk you like a fat cow. There are two ways for credit card companies to make money. Merchant fees and late fees. If you use your credit card for petty purchases like a Starbucks coffee or a McDonald's sandwich, the merchants get charged (and so are you). Also, when you can't pay back your credit debt, late fees and other things piling up are where they make their money.
So here's where credit gets really evil. It's not profitable unless it rules your life. If your debt is big enough so you constantly work to pay it off, only then you're a profitable credit user. Maxed Out shows plenty of displays of credit going out of hand. Credit cards offered to students who never had to handle money before, collection agencies prospering like gold miners and my favorite one, the bill against personal bankruptcy that George W. Bush passed in 2005 while basically shutting up every opposing mind. That bill was not even written by a member of the republican party. It was written by MBNA, Bush's main political contributor. When a bill is written by a heavily profit oriented company, something's brewing. The odds are stacked against the middle class.
Maxed Out runs for eighty-five minutes long, which is short, but somewhat of a standard for documentary format. I would have loved to see more though. I would have loved for James D. Scurlock to take the time to explain me the inner workings of credit profit. Late fees, merchant fees and all that. Even if I didn't understand from the get go, the rewind button on my remote control serves that purpose. How long could it have possible taken? Ten? Twenty minutes? Then it would have made Maxed Out into this tool to win arguments. Why not taking Elizabeth Warren to explain it? I'm sure she knows how it works and she's good to explain complex things in a simple way. Like in Capitalism: A Love Story, she's stealing the show . It's good and deep enough so I can recommend a viewing to everybody, from the most liberal to the uptight conservative, but the shock value being used over the rational and practical approach, makes it miss excellence.
SCORE: 81%
