Plasma Pool

Stuff We Like

• Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

  

  Karen Schmeer, the editor of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, died last week in a tragic hit-and-run accident in New York. Upon her passing, most obituaries noted her work with the film's director, Errol Morris, but what they didn't say is that Morris once considered this film uneditable. Then Schmeer came along and transformed it into one of the most amazing viewing experiences I've ever had. A documentary about four people with odd professions (a lion tamer, an MIT robotics professor, an expert on the naked mole rat, and an elderly topiarist), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is ostensibly a series of interviews and clips of the four men doing their jobs and other related videos. But Morris and Schmeer layer and crosscut the interviews and clips in such a way that the men become inextricably linked even as there seem to be no overt connections between them -- everything is suggested by the editing. This is a film about pretty much everything, but the most noticeable themes involve the human desire to create life, our need to box in that which we did not create, and the ways in which life -- both the natural world and our own -- expands beyond anything we can predict. It's one of the best-edited films of all time and a clear reminder of the talent we lost last week.  -- Eric Freeman

• Too Big to Fail

  

  Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail is the Wall Street Book of the Moment, capturing the recession zeitgeist as surely as Barbarians at the Gate caught the go-go '80s wave of corporate takeovers in a steroid-pumped bull market.  Sorkin's narrative is incredibly complex, reconfiguring the economic crisis as a kind of white-collar version of The Wire, with a dizzying array of various forces (investment banks like Goldman and Lehman, government agencies like Treasury and the Fed, and companies like Fannie Mae that sit uneasily between the two) all racing to avoid an economic apocalypse, like Norse gods trying desperately to stall Ragnarok. There are juicy details (like the CEO with a daily helicopter commute) and fascinating character studies (like the slow-burn corrosion of Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld, whose manic descent into paranoia is a King Lear narrative for our time), but more fascinating is the portrait of dozens of brilliant minds and trillions of dollars wrestling with disaster so all-encompassing it begins to seem existential. Too Big To Fail doesn't necessarily make the economic crisis easier to understand, but it does leave the reader with a cold-comfort bit of wisdom: the people who were supposed to anticipate the crisis don't understand it, either.  -- Darren Franich

• A Fan's Notes

  

  Frederick Exley's A Fan’s Notes is one of those books that blurs the line between fiction and memoir, like if James Frey had acknowledged the fictional nature of his books and possessed a sense of humor.  This "fictional memoir" is rich with irony and derision, whiskey-soaked and atavistic. I haven’t had this much fun reading in a long time. Perhaps it is not better known because Exley made it so difficult to describe. It's about an alcoholic writer doing time in mental institutions and generally fucking his life up ... and that’s really it, with a strange extended metaphor about the Frank Gifford New York Giants, written in the first person with long periods of total inactivity on the narrator’s mother’s davenport. Depending on your taste, it’s either way more fun than it sounds or exactly as much fun as it sounds. For me, few books have so wisely summed up the fractured psyche of the American '50s.  -- John Collins