“She’s made of iron, sir! I assure you, she can and she will.” exchange between Bruce Ismay and Thomas Andrews in “Titanic” (1997)
Clocking in just over an hour, “Boom Bust Boom” is the most easily digestible educational video about the financial crisis I’ve seen. It’s less muddled than “The Big Short” and less harrowing than “Requiem for the American Dream,” and though it covers much of the same territory, it does so with a playful irreverence typical of its co-writer, co-director and host, Terry Jones. After brilliantly skewering the absurdity of human nature with his Monty Python cohorts, Jones is an ideal person to tackle the delusions and greed that have led mankind into a cyclical string of disasters. In order to illustrate the herd mentality of capitalistic economies, Jones borrows a scene from his 1979 classic, “Life of Brian,” in which a crowd declares, “We are all individuals!” in zombie-like unison.