BEFORE: Once again, I feel like I've done a disservice by only linking between appearances, and not by director - because the same directors sort of keep popping up again and again, and it might have made more sense to look at each one's body of work together. Certainly Michael Moore has his style, and my system forced me to separate his two films, just to keep my chain going. Today's film was directed by Alex Gibney, who also directed "The Armstrong Lie", "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", and "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown", among many others. After today he'll be back for two more docs in a couple of weeks, and I'm sort of relying on the fact that he tends to leave his questions in the interviews, so you can hear his voice - I'm going to need to use that as a link later.
I've also got a few Errol Morris docs coming up later this week, and I think he also tends to appear in his own films. Here's hoping.
Political consultant Roger Stone carries over from "Fahrenheit 11/9".
THE PLOT: An in-depth look at the rise and fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, including interviews with the scandalized former politician.
AFTER: If you're not familiar with Eliot Spitzer, he was the state of New York's attorney general for quite some time, and he built up a stellar resumé fighting corruption on Wall Street, taking down banks and insurance companies (like AIG) for their shady business practices. Then he started going after those large bonuses that companies give to their CEO's, the ones that are now like 500% higher than they used to be - in some cases, giving such high bonuses are illegal in some way, especially if the everyday workers aren't seeing similar pay increases.
Then Spitzer won the election to become New York's governor in 2006, and that's when his troubles began. For a while he applied the same sort of anti-corruption stance to Albany's lawmakers, and from what I understand, that was a process that was long overdue. But the problem there is that he might have stepped on the wrong toes, and created some enemies in the state legislature who were looking for any way to take him down.
The film opens with a quick look at some of NY's high-class escort services, which makes sense if you know where the story is going, but if not, then this may seem a bit confusing. But if they didn't open with the bit on prostitution, then the "rise" part of Spitzer's career would probably seem very boring, which it is. Hell, it's boring even after the segment on call girls, by definition it's boring by comparison. But then in the "fall" part of Spitzer's career, it all comes together. Ehh, you know what, it's still pretty boring. The governor of New York was having sex with high-priced escorts, and it's not half as exciting as it probably should be.
He was never even charged with any crime - in the prosecution of prostitution, "johns" rarely are. The police are usually more interested in breaking up the call girl rings, which might have ties to organized crime, and arresting the clients are usually just a means to that end. Like, who cares that these men are screwing around, they've done it before and they'll probably do it again, and somehow this is regarded as a mere nuisance of a crime, doing more damage to their family unit than to the public at large. In some states it may even be legal, which calls into question why we've got a set of laws that aren't evenly enforceable across the country.
But Spitzer felt the need to resign, the damage to his reputation was done, and his wife was forced to stand next to him at the world's most embarrassing press conference when he quit. (Unless you count the one in 2004 held by New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, where he came out as a "gay American" and resigned while his wife just stood there passively...) And that led to the first black and the first blind governor of NY, David Paterson, formerly the Lt. Governor. (OK, he was "legally blind", but that's a meaningless B.S. term, really, because nobody can be "illegally blind".) Paterson and HIS wife both admitted to affairs, but at least that seems more equitable than one spouse having sex with hookers while the other one remained faithful.
I'm sure someone here didn't set out to make a film about prostitution as boring as one about politics, but sometimes things just work out that way.
Also starring Eliot Spitzer, Ashley Dupré, Michael Balboni, Richard Beattie, Zana Brazdek, David Brown, Joe Bruno, Lloyd Constantine, Fred Dicker, Darren Dopp, Peter Elkind, Karen Finley, Hank Greenberg, Noreen Harrington, Scott Horton, Kenneth Langone, Jimmy Siegel, Kristian Stiles, Cecil Suwal, Hulbert Waldroup, John C. Whitehead, and the voice of Alex Gibney, with archive footage of Maria Bartiromo, Bill Clinton (also carrying over from "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Stephen Colbert (ditto), Newt Gingrich (ditto), George Stephanopoulos (ditto), Katie Couric (last seen in "RBG"), Penelope Cruz (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Andrew Cuomo (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), John Kerry (ditto), John Edwards, Richard Grasso, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "Koch"), Michael Jordan, Steve Kroft (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Monica Lewinsky, Robert Morgenthau, David Paterson, Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Mark Sanford, Diane Sawyer (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Silda Wall Spitzer, Jack Welch,
RATING: 4 out of 10 black socks
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