Maxed Out

Maxed Out

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Editorial Reviews

Maxed Out takes viewers on a journey deep inside the American style of debt where things seem fine as long as the minimum monthly payment arrives on time. Shocking and incisive Maxed Out paints a picture of a national nightmare which is all too real for most of us.Runtime: 87 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 876964000864 Manufacturer No: 10086

In Maxed Out, author/director James D. Scurlock (Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders) takes on America's debt crisis. Consequently, he touches on related issues like race, corporate malfeasance, and political subterfuge. Scurlock’s multi-media approach incorporates statistics, news excerpts, and interviews, but it's rarely dull (comedy bits from Louis CK and tunes from Queen and Coldplay don't hurt). Speakers include economic professors, debt collectors, pawn brokers, investigative reporters, beleaguered consumers, and even Robin Leach (Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous). Instead of New York and Los Angeles, he concentrates on mid-size cities, like Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, and Seattle. Plenty of small towns also come into play. Though he never presses the point himself, Scurlock allows his subjects to note the similarities between the credit industry and the drug trade (others use such incendiary terms as "rape"). One thing he neglects to mention, however, is pride. If house payments are ruining your life, selling that property may be the only solution. In most cases, however, it's hard not to feel for those individuals who didn't know what they were getting into before they signed their lives away. For some viewers, this will be a dispiriting documentary--three subjects recount the suicides of relatives who found their debt too much to bear--but in explaining exactly how lenders and creditors make money, Maxed Out can help others to avoid some of their most egregious practices. In other words, debt may be a downer, but knowledge is power. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Customer Reviews

Content Great, Technical Features Suck

Reviewed by J. Cipriani, 2009-12-25

The material presented in this video is appropriate and totally relevant in today's economy. For content alone, I'd rate this DVD at least a four.

The problem is that the people who produced the technical features of this film are retarded. A common style used in documentaries these days is to show action or live footage and then follow with a screen of printed text to add factual commentaries on the footage. Obviously the producers of this DVD were either too lazy to preview their creation prior to release of the DVD for sale or they were too stupid to notice that the printed text they used was a) too small, b) lettering not at all crisp or clear and c) the use of a highly cursive type font that indicates the technician who created it was at the time under the influence of crack cocaine.

In order to read the pages of text within the movie footage, even if you have 20/20 vision you need to set with your nose about two inches away from the TV screen in order to read it ... and even then it is a struggle.

I mean, come on ... don't DVD producers actually watch their own crappy, shoddy productions before they pawn the junk off on an unsuspecting public?

This is real and true! needed it sooner.

Reviewed by Movie Fan, 2009-12-09

I wish I would have came across this sooner! It is an awesome look inside debt and how it affects families. I thought this dvd was very educational and touching. You must see this. I think it will inform you and help you to start taking steps to either get out of debt or not get into debt. All children, families etc should watch this dvd. Try it you won't be disappointed!

Pretty decent

Reviewed by Matthew Brooks, 2009-12-07

I am fairly well read in this topic, at least for the lay person. I found this movie worthwhile. The problem with documentaries is that compared to spending the same amount of time reading, you get an awful lot LESS information and a lot MORE emotion. Still, it wasn't a shallow and heart-string pulling as some other documentaries *cough Michael Moore* can be.

I also have a soft spot for the material in this one because I agree with it so thoroughly. Excess debt destroys household finances and the government is quite literally in bed either by appointing ex industry shills as heads of agencies or just straight old lobbying, both of which are to me abhorrent bastardizations of democracy.

This movie was interesting in when it was set. I haven't checked but it seems it was released around the top of the bubble. It follows one realtor around a bit in Nevada and I bet that if they did a follow-up with her now things would be quite different. She talked, for example, about the $450k house she personally bought and sold (her own house) for twice that and how it was just a simple tract house. And today 60% of houses in Nevada are under water. her best line was, paraphrased, if you look rich eventually you will be. She had a nice luxury car, btw and a plate on one of her cars matching the name of the subdivision she sells houses in.

Personally, as I become more educated in finance I become more sympathetic with those who aren't. To be experts in every field that touches our lives is not realistic, from health to mechanics to finances to home construction, etc.. We pay taxes and expect better from those who are literally paid to defend our interests and through the poison of lobbying these interests are continually ambushed.

So, this movie is entertaining. You can't find a long essay about it but it's pretty watchable and certainly illuminating to some of its audience.

Doing my part to help create an accurate rating for this film

Reviewed by Brion C. Finlay, 2009-12-02

I saw this film because I have an interest in the subject and because it was one of the few available on Netflix streaming.

The biggest problem with this movie is bad planning. It started strong, but then fell apart. I don't think it is as misleading as other mockumentaries.

First the good:
Approximately the first 1 hour was compelling. The movie had real life stories of people who had problems with credit card debt. It let people talk about how they got into debt and the consequences of that debt.

It also portrayed a radio talk show host whose show seemed to be about helping people with money, and briefly told his story of almost losing everything, and slowly and painfully recovering, and crying when he had to give up his fancy car (was it a Porsche?). He even made the point that we think we're entitled to these things but we're not unless we pay for them.

The film showed a Minnesota collections company, and went to great lengths to show how this particular collections company wasn't entirely evil because it treated people with respect when it performed collections, unlike comparison collection companies described in other scenes. These was compelling, and looked like it might promise some balanced views in the piece.

In the beginning the film raised interesting questions such as why credit card companies pursue 18 year olds without income, why FICO score calculations do not contain income as a component, why credit is offered freely to people who have no ability to pay, and why credit card companies target people who have previously been bankrupt and people who are likely to go bankrupt. These were compelling, and sounded like they promised to be insightful.

I think the film even made a good case for establishing that the credit card companies have a vested interest in restricting the consumers ability to utilize bankruptcy - although it did not give much information on the history of bankruptcy law. (It seems to me that bankruptcy law had been more strict, was made more lenient in the 90s, and then become more strict in 2005, but I don't know much about bankruptcy. The film only covered how it became more strict in 2005.).

So I thought the film started well.

The bad:
At about 1 hour in, after a compelling opening, the film went off the rails.

Suddenly the film was talking about the government. It makes sense to talk about the government's role in bankruptcy law and credit card regulation, and for the first 10 minutes it was tolerable, but then it became obvious that the film believed government should be the solution and that government was not doing enough. There was no examination of the American individual's role in the credit card problem.

And it got worse. The film did not actually examine government's role in the credit card problem. It did not interview anyone in the government (a first hand source) or anyone who studied and had expertise on the government's role in the credit card market (a second hand source) it simply resorted to clips of news footage and cspan, interspersed with frames of text for the filmmakers to interject their own viewpoints and commentary, and from a filmmaking perspective, provide at least some narrative to (poorly) tie together these scenes. But at least the film did show how gullible Congress seemed to be when listening to the executive vice presidents of the credit card companies.

And it got worse. There were a number of clips featuring George W. Bush. And some of them were clips of Bush saying silly things. But some of them were clips of Bush saying things that weren't so silly, but were taken out of context and framed by other clips that made Bush sound silly. So as I watched this film alledgedly about Credit Card debt, all of a sudden I found myself confronted by these obviously manipulative film techniques that seem to be blatantly directed at attacking George W. Bush. And its not clear at all to me what this had to do with the first part of the film - the part about credit cards.

And it got worse. There was a scene where Congress was discussing the 2005 Bankruptcy bill - or so we are told. Except its not clear what is going on, because it is edited down to less than a minute, and the filmmakers decided to loop the sound of the Speaker of the House banging a gavel saying "without objection ... the gentleman from Florida" and playing it over and over on top of the *ending* of the speeches (when representatives are *always* in a rush to finish their speeches within their alloted time) of 3 or 4 **Democrat** legislators making it look like a presumably Republican Speaker of the House was cutting off an entire lineup of Democrat speakers and not allowing any of them to speak about the problems with the Bankruptcy legislation at all. It seemed so unfair! Except that it was all film making trickery. And that's appalling in a documentary.

There is nothing more dishonest that filmakers can do than editing material, splicing in sound, and presenting it as factual. Its like photoshopping guns and hostages into photos in the New York times. And to be so blatant about it loses credibility with the people who make policy and know how these tricks work. And to lie like this is incredibly destructive to the audience that this film is probably trying to help - how many people are going to watch this film and walk away believing that the government actually works the way they present it - controlled by a political party who has it out for the little guy and coldly and unfairly ignores disagreement and debate from anyone who cares about the individual?

At this point in the film, after raising so many interesting questions, the film goes lazy and answers them all by pointing the finger at government.

Like so many other reviewers point out, this film had the potential to educate people about how the Credit Card companies work, about the problems that credit cards can create, about the demographics and statistics of credit card usage and debt, about the role that individuals play and about how they can more intelligently manage their money (the filmmakers did, after all, splice in old footage on personal finance education as well as footage of a personal finance radio show) - but instead the film started looking to the government to solve the problems and utterly ignored the consumer's role in the debt market. Not only that, but it took a very anti-Republican and specifically anti George W. Bush stance in an allegedly documentary film about a subject that didn't need to involve partisanship, and did so at the expense of examining the issue.

Another scene that was very partisan and disingenuous - the filmmakers cut in a scene featuring Ronald Reagan as an actor in an old film with which I am not familiar, and I'm sure most viewers are also not familiar with it because it is too old and too un-notable. The scene involves Ronald Reagan in a position of authority, talking to a character who works at a bank and is explaining to Reagan's character that there is no money left in the vault. Ronald Reagan's character seems to suggest unethical behavior - that they can lie and find a way to misrepresent how much money is in the bank - and with that he winks at the bank character. The way that this scene was framed by the clips surrounding it, I felt like the filmmakers were trying to lead me to believe that this was Ronald Reagan, as president, making bank policy for the United States. Its hard to see that the filmmakers didn't intend this - even if the audience is supposed to recognize that this was Reagan as an actor, the clip's use was as a lead-in to another clip that featured Ronald Reagan as president and a segment on US credit card/bank policy, and so the clip nevertheless served as an analogy for how the filmmakers felt about US bank policy. It is very difficult for me to understand why the filmmakers chose a clip with Reagan instead of any other corrupt banker movie if not to be disingenuous with the audience, and that is the cardinal sin of documentaries. Lying to the audience like this earns documentaries 1-star ratings.

I already mentioned that at the 1 hour point the film went off the rails. The film continued its off-rail adventure through the wild frontier of national debt and social security, which have absolutely nothing to do with the credit card industry and the borrowing decisions that individual Americans make that create the debt problems we saw at the beginning of the movie.

My guess is that the filmmakers were trying to show parallelism between the debt that individual Americans have and the debt that the US Government has. However, in reading some of the other review comments left by other Amazon viewers, it seems that the audience has conflated the two issues. It seems that some audience members actually believe that "The National Debt" is the total of each and every Americans' credit card balances, and that George W. Bush borrowed from Social security to pay off the national credit card debt.

To be clear - the "national debt" is not related to your credit card debt, and if you walked away from this film thinking that it was, then this film has utterly failed.

And again - as this film explored this national debt/borrowing from Social Security issue, it again dove into partisanship. There was a sequence of recent presidents (post Reagan only) with text about their contribution to this national debt/social security issue, as the film presented it. For each president, it explained how that president made the problem worse. Except for Bill Clinton, where the language was softened and it was explained that while Clinton was president, the world got worse around him - but it wasn't his fault; not like the other presidents. To be clear - Bill Clinton was the only democrat president in this sequence. The film had harsh criticism for each of the Republican presidents, but soft criticism for Bill Clinton. Such partisanship has no place in a good documentary about credit cards. Of course, the national debt and social security borrowing have little place in a good documentary about credit cards, either.

Once you reach the epilogue, the wheels completely fall off the bus. In one of the epilogue scenes, we revisit the pawn shop owner who talks about customers that have come in 15 times to ask for body armor for their sons in Iraq because George Bush won't buy it for them. (What does this have to do with credit card debt?) Then the pawn shop owner talks about some "blue collar machinists" who did not want to pay more taxes to provide health care to people who could not afford it. The pawn shop owner sees this as a contradiction, because to him the blue collar workers were the people who could not afford health care, and he insisted "they don't get it! They just don't get it!" (What does this have to do with credit card debt?) And it's with that scene, as the pawn shop owner closes some arbitrary french doors in his shop, that the film goes to black and resumes David Bowie/Queen's "Under Pressure" song, with which the film had opened, as if the filmmakers thought they had just made the most important point of the entire film. Except that it had nothing to do with credit cards.

And then we got the trailing credit clips - all backed by David Bowie/Queen's "Under Pressure"
* A confusing clip about the personal finance talk show mentioning a special price on bed mattresses - was this to remind us about the personal finance show showing us how to spend our money better? Or was it to point out that mattresses/beds along with the other basics in life were difficult for the average American to afford?
* Another clip with George W. Bush - this time talking about Disney World - was this clip intended to be another attack at George W. Bush, with the point being incredulity at how the president can be so out of touch with credit card debt as to talk about blowing money on Disney World? Or was this clip intended to demonstrate that Americans' priorities are out of order? Or was this clip intended to demonstrate that advertising for useless things is so pervasive that the American Dream is to go to Disney World? The message of this clip is confusing and completely lost because of how many times this film portrayed George W. Bush in a negative light. This is just another clip that is out of place and probably pointlessly unrelated to credit card debt.
* Closure with the Abtronic - this was humorous and well placed, an example of the kinds of clips that should show up in the trailing credits.
* Interesting question about high interest rates on credit cards - except the credits are rolling and this film never answered the question, so it is enraging to see it brought up now, still unsatisfactorily answered, after the film wasted so much time on political drivel.
* A scene with Bill Clinton explaining that his credit card - his American Express card - was rejected when buying books - was this to demonstrate the mistakes that credit card companies make? Wasn't it explained that important people got special treatment without mistakes? Was this to show that even Bill Clinton has credit card problems? Isn't he a multi-millionaire? My guess is that the filmmakers thought it was cute and funny. And it is. But it doesn't fit, and it is another example of what makes this a bad film.
* A return to the education video - "Do girls have to learn all this about credit too?" - Is this a commentary on sexism? A commentary on how gender roles have evolved in the US over the past 60 years? A commentary on how young single women still expect men to buy them drinks at the bar and expensive engagement rings and outrageously priced weddings so that the women can still fritter their money away on frivolous things, get into credit card debt, and then saddle their future husbands with it (a reference to the abtronic scene)??? I don't get it. Another failure.
* News clip closure for the women who disappeared from the gas station - so she also committed suicide --- this probably belonged earlier in the film when talking about the other suicides, not in the closing credits.
* An INCREDIBLY interesting and poignant scene about how special people are given special treatment by the credit score companies --- WHAT IS THIS DOING AS THE NEXT TO LAST CLIP AT THE END OF THE CREDITS??!?!?!? THIS IS WHAT THIS FILM WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT!!! AND THIS IS INCREDIBLY INTERESTING!!!

As a documentary, the film should have offered us statistics and hard data about people in debt and credit cards - but it offered virtually nothing in hard data.

Overall, this movie seems like a student project that started with a good idea, reached a deadline, and while being hastily finished to meet the deadline meandered off into the students' personal philosophies as filler for missing material. And then they tried to wrap a bow on it with a closing they thought was clever and poignant but just ... wasn't.


Incredibly disappointing.

A Must View

Reviewed by D. Lloyd, 2009-11-06

I highly recommend this to highschool and college bound students in addition to a discussion about personal responsibility . Though I seriously believe that anyone with a shred of intuition , and who actually got the point of this movie, could misunderstand that concept .

If nothing else it will be a great edition or anyones ' really scarey movies ' collection .