New Movie Hotel Mumbai Looks Legit

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Motivational Poster o' the Day

Holy Crap -- What the Hell Happened to Billy Jack?

Oh, my.

Here's Billy Jack in his heyday (played by Tom Laughlin).

And here he is on YouTube recently.

Well, this is certainly a depressing turn of events.

Math and the Movies: An Interesting Quiz!

Chrissie sent this one in.

This math test can predict your all time most watched film, mine was Saving Private Ryan. Try it without looking at the answers. It works!

Pick a number from 1 to 9.

Multiply by 3.

Add 3, then multiply by 3 again.

You will get your answer by adding the two digits together to find your all time favorite movie listed below.

Good Luck!

The master list is:

1. Gone With The Wind.

2. Aliens.

3. Oliver.

4. Star Wars.

5. Forrest Gump.

6. Saving Private Ryan.

7. Monte Python and the Holy Grail.

8. Grease.

9. Joy of Wearing Women's Underwear: the Keith Olbermann Story.

10. Mary Poppins.

Linked by: Denny. Thanks!

The Bust Out

A scene in Martin Scorsese's classic film Goodfellas offers a classic definition of a "bust out". The set up: mobsters Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Peschi) have acquired a share in a nightclub through their loansharking operation.

Their gang uses the joint as a clearinghouse for its black-market operations: cigarettes, liquor, food and clothing are acquired on credit -- ostensibly for the bar -- and then sold at 100% profit margins. Hill describes the scene:

As soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and sell it for a hundred. It doesn't matter. It's all profit.

Sonny, the club's titular owner, is legally on the hook for all of the purchases.

Unable to make payments, the gang executes the traditional "bust out".

And, finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out.

Which means: set the place on fire and file a claim for the insurance money that covers the hollowed-out shell.

The twin pillars of the bust out: The legal owner of the business has all of the criminal responsibility while the vendors who offered goods on credit are stuck paying the tab.

There are many laws that explicitly prohibit this sort of activity: racketeering laws; laws against fraud; bankruptcy fraud; concealment of theft using bankruptcy; etc.

Yet this is precisely what has happened to the entire U.S. economy.

AIG was the infamous insurance conglomerate that sold every type of insurance product imaginable, most notably insurance on financial instruments. These included the ill-fated credit default swaps (CDS), the unregulated insurance contracts that nuked AIG last year.

Years before, Warren Buffett had called CDS products "weapons of mass financial destruction." Buffett presumably envisioned a scenario that AIG's modelers never did: a severe downturn in the market.

Yet AIG kept producing CDS contract after CDS contract, carefully greasing palms to ensure that the insurance products would never be categorized as such to ensure a complete lack of regulatory oversight.

When the S.S. AIG-cum-Titanic went down, with its toxic swaps polluting every sector of the financial system, the U.S. government was forced to step in. While the investment bankers at Goldman and other well-connected institutions were made whole, the U.S. taxpayer remains on the hook. Or rather, the taxpayers' children and grandchildren. Consider it a form of economic indentured servitude for subsequent generations.

Maurice "Ace" Greenberg ran AIG before it imploded. Ace led AIG's dramatic expansion of its CDS business. Ace left a handful of months before the calamitous collapse having made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ace is in no legal jeopardy whatsoever.

As the head of AIG, wouldn't Ace be able to assess how risky its products were? Of course he would. By late 2005, AIG began to brag that it had started to extricate itself from the CDS business. Too late, it turned out. And too siloed, as other AIG business units never got the memo.

Did Ace successfully execute a bust out? It sure looks that way.

Now Ace is setting up a new shop, reportedly cherry-picking all of AIG's best people, starting up with a clean balance sheet, unencumbered by those pesky taxpayer IOUs and looking to create a brand new company.

By setting up a new shop, Mr. Greenberg is basically cloning AIG, while leaving behind the empty bankrupt shell of AIG to the hands of the suckers who bailed it out — namely, the government, and ultimately, the people. In other words, Mr. Greenberg will wind up with a new AIG sans the insolvency, sans the government oversight (minimal though it is), sans the "bad reputation" of AIG, and on top of that, he will keep all the money he made off the CDS that AIG underwrote.

It could even happen that, if and when this new Cloned-AIG goes broke again on credit default swaps or some other clever bit of financial engineering, Mr. Greenberg will again leave it to its fate just before it bankrupts. After all, life is a wheel, endlessly repeating...

Why isn't the government going after these banksters? Where are the prosecutions? Why isn't the media screaming bloody murder?

What's preventing the next bust out?


Major Hat Tip: Zero Hedge Guest Post by Gonzalo Lira.

The $400 Million Club

The top-grossing movies of all-time, via the invaluable Rotten Tomatoes.

Colussus, the Forbin Project

When I was a kid, I recall seeing a movie called Colussus, the Forbin Project. It was a 1970 blockbuster that offered a startling look at a future dominated by computers.

Its plot was basically that of War Games -- before there was a War Games -- or Terminator's "SkyNet", decades ahead of those movies.

Here's the original movie poster, which really doesn't do the story justice:

Check out something interesting: note the logo of the corporation that manufactured Colussus (above the inexplicable firing squad):

Now check out the logo of America Online:

Now, that's just freaky.

I smell an Oscar for Death Race!

Hey, add it up:

A sadistic, evil warden.

A futuristic prison.

A highly rated, televised race pitting prisoner against prisoner...

...to the death, with the winner gaining their freedom.

Jason Statham...

...who plays a NASCAR driver unjustly accused of killing his wife (hint: it was a setup).

Three obligatory prison fight scenes.

A crafty race veteran who befriends said NASCAR driver.

The very same sadistic, evil warden who demands said NASCAR driver compete in the Death Race.

A Mustang, V8 Fastback with 3/4" armor plating, smoke bombs, oil and napalm...

Oh, and "30mm Gatling guns" (word to the producers: those ain't 30mm chambers)... all hand-crafted by said crafty race veteran.

A said former NASCAR driver who figures out he was set up by said sadistic, evil warden to benefit her Nielsen ratings.

Who, during the race, is able to drive backwards to use his "30mm Gatling guns" to take out opponents.

And who, of course, exacts revenge against said evil warden while gaining his freedom (it's a loophole in the televised "death race" law).

Best of all... a movie trailer that spells out the entire freaking plot in excruciating detail.

I smell Oscar, baby, Oscar!