Reviewed at the Los Angeles Film Festival. This review was originally published at Words About Film.

As the film's end credits rolled, drummer Hal Blaine appeared on screen playing an impressive drum solo as part of a 1970 performance with Nancy Sinatra in Las Vegas. As the clip ended, a voice shouted from the audience, "What an incredible drummer!"

The voice was Hal Blaine's.

Just finished watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and I'm extremely disappointed. Filmaker Alex Gibney completely missed the mark in this adaptation of Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean's book of the same name. What should be a complex dissection of CFO Andy Fastow's financial shenanigans, an unforgiving examination of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay's dealmaking corporate environment, and a scathing indictment of Wall Street in the bull market of the 90s is instead little more than a dumbed down story of the big company that fell down and went boom.

Gibney inexplicably spends 30 minutes, well over a quarter of the movie, discussing Enron's role in the California electricity crisis of 2000-01. Nevermind that Enron, as Elkind and McLean clearly explain in the book, 1) never broke the letter of the law with their California transactions, 2) was just one of many companies engaged in profiteering during the crisis, and 3) actually made money from these transactions (whereas Enron went bankrupt because it ultimately lost money from other transactions -- most of which are ignored in the film). As if wasting our time with an irrelevant tangent isn't enough, Gibney concludes this segment of the film by implying that Enron is to blame for Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California.

The film also tries to make much of alleged links between Enron and the Bush family, but as any reader of the book knows that while Ken Lay did little to deny a close tie to each President Bush, in reality his ties were tenuous at best, and in the case of the younger Bush virtually nonexistent.

Oh, and Arthur Andersen is barely mentioned.

The heart of Enron's misconduct was the creation of several partnerships by Fastow designed both to keep Enron's losses off the books and to make millions of dollars for Fastow and his cronies, yet Gibney devotes only about 10 minutes to these schemes. Most of those 10 minutes are consumed by Fastow's own conflict of interest and provide little information on what the partnerships were or why they were illegal. While it's true that descriptions of these special purpose entities are hard to follow (I suffered a lot of headaches while reading about them), their inexplicability was one of the reasons they succeed for so long -- because Wall Street analysts couldn't make enough sense of them to see the frightenting truth.

All in all, it seems Gibney simply wanted to make a movie everybody could watch and understand without actually dealing with the details. To accomplish this he played up the human (Lay and Skilling) and emotional (California and lost pensions) elements while downplaying the financial (everything that mattered). What this leaves is an oversimplified version of events that is nearly as deceptive as the one told by Enron itself.

Read the book.

Last night I finally started reading Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, by Peter Ames Carlin. After reading a section about Brian's adoration of Phil Spector in the early 1960s, I started thinking about the group of session musicians Spector used on many of his recordings. Known collectively as "The Wrecking Crew," these professional players turned up on many of the biggest hits of the sixties for a wide array of artists, including The Beach Boys. (In fact, they were the studio musician's for the 1966 BB masterpiece Pet Sounds.)

With my curiosity piqued, I began to wonder whether there were any books or movies out there that would tell the Wrecking Crew's story, even telling M. that I wished there was a documentary about the group, something like Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the 2002 film about the Funk Brothers, a group of Detroit musicians who played on numerous Motown hits.

I kept reading the Brian Wilson book, all the while thinking about the need for a Wrecking Crew documentary, even being so bold as to think that if there was nothing suitable out there, perhaps I should look into making the documentary myself (because, you know, I have SO MUCH filmmaking experience!).

After I put my book down and started getting ready for bed, I did a quick Google search to see if such a documentary already exists.

It does.

Not only does the film exist, but it starts THIS FRIDAY at the IFC Center in Manhattan. This freakin' Friday. Two days from now. What are the odds?

The movie is titled, fittingly, The Wrecking Crew and was directed by Denny Tedesco, son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco.

Anyway, looks I'll be in NYC this weekend if anyone wants to join me.

If you haven't had a chance to catch all four parts of "Heavy: The Story of Metal" on VH1 yet, do yourself a favor and make it a priority. I'm not even much of a metal fan, but this documentary is converting me quickly. (I even made a special trip to the music store last night to pick up the first two Black Sabbath albums.) Watching interviews with people like Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, and Quiet Riot's Frankie Banali is simultaneously hilarious and enlightening. These guys worked so hard for so many years to be dark and menacing and all things metal. Now they're articulate upper-class middle-aged men who can look back in amusement at the lives they once led. The series is doing little, however, to make me like 1980s hair metal bands. I don't like Mötley Crüe, I despise Poison, and I have no use whatsoever for the Scorpions. But if I had to pick just one band as my least favorite of all time, it would be Warrant. And if I had to pick just one song as my least favorite, it would be "Cherry Pie." And it wouldn't even be close. Just the sight of Warrant lead singer Jani Lane makes me cringe. And I mean really cringe. As it turns out, however, I have an unlikely ally in my hatred for all things "Cherry Pie:" Jani Lane. Here's what he had to say about the song during part 3 of "Heavy:"

I hate that song. I had no intention of writing that song. The record was done. The record was called "Uncle Tom's Cabin." And Donny Inner [president of Columbia Records] called up and said, "I don't hear the single. You gotta give me a fucking single like 'Love in an Elevator.' I need something like that." So that night I wrote "Cherry Pie." Sent it to him. He lived with it over the weekend. Then all of a sudden the album's called "Cherry Pie." The record's called "Cherry Pie." I'm doing cherry pie eating contests. The single's "Cherry Pie." Right? If I'm lying, I'm dying. And my legacy's "Cherry Pie." Everything about me is "Cherry Pie." I'm the "Cherry Pie" guy. I could shoot myself in the fucking head for writing that song.

I actually feel bad for him. Hell, I've hated him for 16 years because I thought he wanted to be the "Cherry Pie" guy. Some people might see his comments as sour grapes from a has-been, but I think it takes pretty big balls to trash your own legacy with such panache. Of course, as much as I admire Jani for his comments, this still isn't enough to make me like any of Warrant's music. Not even close.