Bates, chatting with CNN’s Piers Morgan, went to bat for President Obama while excoriating those who put the U.S. economy on the brink of destruction. And no, she wasn’t talking about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

BATES: The last two years, I want to go back, something my father said to me — he always said, “Stand up on your hind legs and fight.” And that’s what I’d like to say to my president, whom I’m so proud of. But I want him to stand up on his hind legs and fight these rat bastards. And he has got do it.

MORGAN: Who do you mean by the rat bastards?

BATES: Well, I think he’s got to indict these guys from Wall Street. Somebody’s got pay for that mess. And I don’t think it’s the American public.

Morgan might have earned his paycheck for the week by casually informing his guest that Obama has received more money from Mr. Man – or Wall Street to you and I – than his political rivals. But he’d rather let his guests tee off on corporations rather than make his guests feel a tad uncomfortable.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail.

The cast was right out of a Robert Altman film, there was a large number of well known actors including William Hurt (Paulson – Sec. Treasury), James Woods (Fuld – Lehman Bros), Paul Giamatti (Bernanke – Chair, Federal Reserve), Bill Pullman (Dimon – JPMorgan Chase), Ed Asner (Buffet – Berkshire Hathaway), Billy Crudup (Geithner – President, Federal Reserve), Matthew Modine (Thain – CIT Group), Tony Shalhoub (Mack – Morgan Stanley), Topher Grace (Wilkinson), Cynthia Nixon (Davis), and many others. They all looked and played their parts very well with the exception that there seemed to be no effort made toward sounding like the people they played. It was difficult to get past the notable voices of the actors. Paul Giamatti sounds like Paul Giamatti and nothing like Ben Bernanke. Hurt sounded nothing like Paulson. Crudup nothing like Geithner. Perfection wasn’t necessary, but it seemed as though there was little to no effort made at all by the actors to at least sound a little more like the real people they were portraying and less like themselves.

The story opens on a  shot of Ronald Reagan. It is news footage of a speech he gives on deregulation. Credits play as we see an image of Clinton signing a piece of legislation as the audio of newsmakers make mention that this is Congress’ bill being singed. Alan Greenspan is seen and states, “Don’t regulate for regulation’s sake,” which is followed by Bush proclaiming everyone should live out the American dream and own their own home. Miscellaneous clips talks of high profits and subprime loans, and then mortgage meltdown and government bailout.

At this point, I am thinking this film is going to be about blame… and that blame is going to be deregulation ushered in by Reagan, the Republican Congress during the Clinton years, Bush 43, and Reagan through Bush’s Federal Reserve appointee, Alan Greenspan.

This prompts me to check the cast and crew to see who they support and if they are bringing their agenda to this story in their hopes to rewrite history and put Republicans in a negative light and Democrats in a positive light before the election in 2012. And, of course, the Director and the Writer are both ardent Obama supporters. All those at HBO support Obama like Co-President Eric Kessler, Co-President Richard Plepler, President of HBO entertainment Sue Naegle, President of HBO Films Len Amato and Executive Producers Paula Weinstein, Carol Fenelon, and Ezra Swerdlow. Even the Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau and Casting Director Alexa Fogel have contributed to Obama’s 2008 campaign. And the Obama supporting list of actors is long too: Topher Grace, William Hurt, Matthew Modine, Cynthia Nixon, and Amy Carlson. As if that’s not enough, there are many other ardent left-wingers like Paul Giamatti, Bill Pullman, Tony Shalhoub, and Ed Asner.

Then the story opens on James Woods playing Dick Fuld, Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers… an ardent Democrat and Obama supporter. James Woods stands out as the political maverick in the cast. In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Woods is quoted as saying, “I’ve always said that the next Obama slogan should be, ‘Barack Obama: Putting America Out of Business,’ because that’s what he’s doing.” So I decided to turn off my bias filter and give this story a chance.

As the story unfolded, I saw that the villains in this film weren’t the Republicans, rather it was a single villain… the total and complete financial collapse of our nation, or as Bernanke puts it, “[replaying] the depression of the 1930s. Only this time… far, far worse.” So, regardless of any one American’s political affiliation watching this film, total and complete financial collapse is an enemy we can all collectively desire to defeat.

The heroes, however, that’s a little more complicated. The actual heroes of the story are Republicans Henry Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury), Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve), and Independent Timothy Geithner (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). They artfully maneuver their way through the minefield of economic collapse. Bear Stearns has already collapsed, Lehman Brothers is on the brink, Merrill Lynch next, and with all this going on, AIG – the safety net for all these creditors – was in the process of imploding from its own lack of liquidity and inability to meet its obligations. If AIG falls, all the banks fall. People would pull their money out of their banks and there would be no George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) trying to stop the “run on the bank” by convincing his depositors to take only what they need from his honeymoon stash. America, as we know it, would be in ruins.

Every maneuver in their quest to stabilize the markets is met with unpredictable reactions. Once they believe they’ve averted disaster, the pundits, investors, and citizens react differently than expected. It’s a reminder of Nobel winning economist F.A. Hayek’s precept that, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

But in the end, as we all know, it was capital injections in the form of a Troubled Asset Relied Plan (TARP) that would “save the day.” In short, the plan would see the U.S. government purchase assets and equity from all financial institutions, even if they didn’t need it, in order to stabilize and strengthen the financial sector. As Bernanke put it, the upside would be stabilizing banks faster, the downside would be nationalizing a few banks. Their plan to soften the blow was that they would force private banks to participate in this plan under law, but that the government would not have a voting interest or the ability to tell the banks how they use the money injected into their coffers… leaving the question to the viewer, “They will lend it out, won’t they?”

But, was TARP the right solution? If one believes it was, then the heroes of this story are without a doubt Republicans Paulson and Bernanke. But, if one believes it wasn’t the right solution, then the Republicans are just kicking the can down the road. Regardless, the story is a quest for a private solution, according to Paulson.

As Republican public relations guru Jim Wilkson (Topher Grace) says at one point, “You just can’t hand the banks massive piles of cash. Nobody’s going to go for it. To the Republicans, it’s nationalization. To the Democrats, it’s a bailout. And the banks are going to go ballistic.”

The story is well crafted and builds suspense out of the unexciting topics of finance and economics. There were parts that bothered me, like making the Republican Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, look like an immature boob, or Republican presidential candidate Senator McCain look like he is clueless on economic matters contrasted by Senator Obama’s grip on the subject, or simplistically blaming deregulation while omitting the fault of Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, or that derivatives and subprime loans were born during Clinton’s presidency, or more importantly that in 2006 Republicans pleaded with the Democratically-controlled Congress to begin taking measures by pulling the reigns back on Fannie and Freddie to mitigate the impending economic disaster.

Those criticisms, however, were offset by so many of the lines delivered by Topher Grace’s character, Jim Wilkson, who best resembled the attitudes and feelings of most Americans during this time. At one point, it is suggested that the government purchases up the toxic assets of the banks, to which he responds, “Ohhh, call it cash for trash,” he also calls nationalization “the N-word” and that it is un-American, and he suggests that the government running the banks would be like the government running the Post Office, which they “run like a dream.” Another character addresses the issue that the government having the ability to dictate compensation would be the biggest “brain drain this country has ever seen.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is characterized as something like the head of the Mafia. Her character comes across as an elitist snob, which I particularly enjoyed.

The movie was a surprise. Although it wasn’t 100 percent balanced, it was enough for this right-winger to actually enjoy it. And the filmmakers did a pretty decent job packing in a lot of characters and a lot of story into a short amount of time. If Obama-loving HBO can pull off the upcoming Sarah Palin story, Game Change, and the Dick Cheney movie, Angler, with the same deftness and fairness, I will be pleasantly surprised.  Better yet… I will be astonished.

I also found these quotes from Ms. Fox:

“I don’t want to have to go on talk shows and pull out every single S.A.T. word I’ve ever learned, to prove, like, ‘Take me seriously, I am intelligent, I can speak.’ I don’t want to have to do that. I resent having to prove that I’m not a retard.”

And…

“Women are expected to be conformist automatons in L.A. but in Britain you can be more yourself and people will take you on face value.”

Far be it from me to point out that the base audience for “Transformers” is young males in Middle America, the same men that Fox condemns to a robot apocalypse.  I doubt the bi-coastal elites from Beverly Hills to the Upper West Side will be waiting in line for the midnight showing of Michael Bay’s latest opus.  Alienating your core audience is never a good idea.  Perhaps Ms. Fox holds an associate’s degree from the Timothy Geithner School of Business Management.

Fox asserts that she is “not a retard” and that she bucks the system by not being a “conformist.”  Is it bad for me to call foul on both points?

I learned something a long time ago.  Back in my fraternity days at USC (oops, man, did I just give the Huffington Post ammo?… A USC FRAT BOY!!!!!!  No wonder…) I noticed how the guys who constantly bragged about their sexual prowess really didn’t do too well.  The guys who were discrete, never bragged, never felt the need to prove anything, had a steady stream of attractive dates and girlfriends. The braggarts would spend their weekends regaling in tales of three ways and sex with strippers while drinking forty-ouncers and challenging each other to games of “Street Fighter” on the Super NES.

The same goes for intelligence.  When you feel compelled to tell the world how smart you are, how intellectual your positions are, how deep your education runs, the sad truth is that you probably aren’t that bright.

Megan Fox is a panderer.  She trashes Middle America to the British Press.  She wears “Star Wars” T-shirts to make Fan Boys drool, then calls those Fan Boys “retards” to the hipsters in Silver Lake.  She talks up her intelligence and non-conformity…. by making stupid, conformist statements.

Lauren Bacall made this observation about Hollywood: “When I first went into pictures, women absolutely ran the show. Bette Davis practically owned Warner Brothers.”  Bacall doesn’t know many of the stars of today. “They’re all too self-involved, y’know? And they’re so unaware of what goes on anywhere else.”

Hmmmm…is there any way that we can draw a parallel between the rise of “correct” thought in Hollywood as evidenced by self-absorbed automatons like Megan Fox and the observation that Hollywood used to be BETTER for women?  Is it, perhaps, that whiny divas who parrot talking points to look cool, who lack independent thought and rely on their good looks instead of honing their craft, have made Hollywood WORSE for women?  That may be a stretch.  Maybe I need some self-professed smart person to help me make that argument.

Bacall, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford…these women are legends.  Not just because they are superior, gifted actresses, but because you can feel their presence, their intellect, their “moxie” in every thing they did.

As a reformed frat guy I can tell you…these women had “balls!”

I have a friend.  An actress.  The one pictured above that you might not recognize.  Her resume is similar to Fox’s, before her lucky break in “Transformers.”  This actress is not an automaton.  Her politics are a unique blend of feminism, social liberalism, libertarianism, and hawkish neo-conservatism.  She has a business degree from BYU, although she’s never mentioned it to anyone to further her “smart” credentials.  When she walks into a party she doesn’t instantly turn the conversation into a discourse on her sexual habits a la Ms. Fox, nor does she sit by and let a comment about that “fascist George Bush” go by without a rebuttal.

Yet while Megan Fox was busy being pampered on the set of “Transformers,” this actress worked with me on the direct to video knock-off movie “Transmorphers.”  While Megan Fox sat in her trailer waiting for make-up, this actress did her own make-up, then stood outside in the freezing rain for 12 hours in an old junkyard near Topanga.  While Megan Fox pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars, this actress got paid $50 a day.  No complaints.  No crying.  Just smiles and hard work.

Yes, Megan Fox, women in Hollywood still face issues and obstacles.  But not in the way that you think.  While you are gaming the system, being part of the problem and not the solution, others are advancing the cause despite you.

I know a couple of other actresses like my friend.  They feel alienated, blacklisted, and closed off.  Not because they are as attractive as Megan Fox and people can’t get past their looks.  Not solely because of the male stranglehold on Hollywood.  They feel out of place because they have “balls.”

And the last thing you want to be in the tolerant world of Hollywood is a woman with “balls.”

Megan Fox is clearly lacking a pair.