Erin Brockovich
A quintessential American story: some megacorp poisons thousands for decades, gets caught and squirts out some cash to shut them up (no trial, just a fake Potemkin village, no jurisprudence is settled).
The lawyers get rich with their massive cut, no word about the cancerous child, they bring in some amoral corporate lawyers too, in the end, after all the shoeleather work is already done. Hey Erin, you can’t be made whole if your uterus was removed, not if your kid dies. Money is not the measure of all things.
The lawyer dude sounds like an ambulance chaser, outright scum of the earth. I shudder to look them up now, in the Trump era.
There is an enormous amount of Wonderbra on display, they should have been mentioned in the credits. This is directly alluded to, when the title character says:
They’re called boobs, Ed.
This doesn’t have much of Soderbergh, seems like a workman director for this. Only the cast was reused in the /tag/franchise-ocean-s.html (LeMarc, Linus’ FBI mother, Tess), and there’s minor music callouts.
Apparently this was scummy from the start:
Masry & Vititoe, a personal-injury firm
The case started in open court in front of Judge LeRoy Simmons. But before too long, Simmons retired. Ironically, in view of later events, he became a private arbitrator and landed a paying part in the movie playing his former self
In a separate but similarly contentious interview, Ed Masry, the attorney Brockovich worked for, would not explain the process either. “Why are you being stupid?” he said
some residents say they saw a pattern in the distribution method. “If you were buddies with Ed and Erin, you got a lot of money,” said Smith. “Otherwise, forget it.”
Residents also were confused about the high fees charged to the town’s 100 children.
Girardi and Lack, flush from their winnings and wanting to “give something back” to the California legal community, organized a weeklong Mediterranean cruise for 90 people, including 11 public and private judges. The three PG&E arbitrators were among those invited.
The attorneys also steered some clients with large awards toward certain financial planners, one of whom was Ed Masry’s son, Louis
It seems closer to a mob-style shakedown, where the corporate lawyers cook up something, convince rubes to sign on the dotted line, and pressure large corporations to pay them to go away. Arbitration is ideal, as an ersatz courtroom, without the rules and expensive paperwork.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.