Went to watch Fun With Dick and Jane yesterday with harrybons. IMDB users give it a rating of 5.7. You can watch the trailer here. At first, I wasn’t too sure what the movie was about. The trailer seem to say that Dick and Jane were getting rich from robbing people, but the story was completely different from what I imagined. Having rewatched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room earlier this week with Antegra, SueOn, and DNG, there were many similiarities with the Enron scandal. In fact, at the end of the movie, they had listed Enron, WorldCom, and several other companies which went bankrupt for financial fraud as contributors to the movie.
Spoilers:
The movie starts off with Dick (Jim Carrey) getting a promotion, shortly followed by the stock of the company plumetting. Frank was the CFO which basically mimicked Andrew Fastow from Enron. He was taking the blame and Sam, the CEO (basically Ken Lay) was pleading ignorance, but had secretly liquidated all his stocks before the fall of his company. You also learnt that the company had created a bunch of fake companies to take in the debt of the main company, just like what Enron did.
Dick and his wife plays the part of one of the employees who lost their job, their retirement savings and most of their assets because most of their investments were tied up in company stock and their house’s value dropped below what they owe the bank since there’s no employment in that area. People were desperately trying to find work, but no work was available. When a spot opened up, hundreds of employees would be lining up.
Times got so desperate, they had to pay their nanny with appliances (still not too sure why they kept the nanny) and they sold almost everything in their house. It was so bad, it got to the point where Dick had to welcome people into Walmart clone, fight among the illegal immigrants to get hard labor (as you see in the streets of LA), get deported, and finally robbing banks and local stores.
The movie itself had it’s funny moments, but I wouldn’t say the movie overall was that great. It was fun and worth the time though.
In the end, they were able to trick Sam into donating all his money into their employees who lost their jobs pension fund and everyone got a check.
Harrybons is actually up in Seattle for his Microsoft interview. Tonight, he treated me to Cheesecake Factory. Good Luck to him tomorrow!