The Big Short

First for newbies, the events here took place prior to the Kevin Spacey film Margin Call (2011). So the Spacey film would have depicted events near the end of this film. Both are superb movies.

Back to the review. This film is very unusual in that the producers have shown fierce determination in taking a serious topic and making it as user friendly as one possibly can. Multiple techniques are used to this end and they all work well. In fact in places the film has a Monty Python quality. Why was this done? One can only assume that the producers understood the multiple studies showing that the modern city-dweller becomes uncomfortable when confronted with any facts which suggest that he or she was not paying attention when bad things were happening. After all we live in a democracy so the voters should have been more alert? Isn't that their job? The techniques mentioned attempt to appeal to our SESAME STREET side and make the whole thing as pleasant an educational experience as possible. But make no mistake, this is an educational movie.

One that should be mandatory for adults. Like getting a driving test before a license. How about learning about Wall Street and the banks before you invest with them...? Carell steals the film and may finally get the attention he deserves. Great actor.

Finally the message. The film suggests not only that Wall Street is corrupt but that the corruption extends to the agencies mandated to supervise Wall Street and (possibly) to Washington itself. The implicit message, conveyed in the end credits, that unless we deal with the problem at the source the symptoms will keep happening over and over and over.

Duh!

((Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." Please check out my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))

Harry Knowles once wrote a review of Das Boot that said the movie was so well made that you'd find yourself rooting for Nazi sailors trying to sink American ships. So here. You find yourself rooting for clever "outsiders and weirdos," as one of them puts it, who saw what nobody else wanted to see -- that an immense structure of mortgage based securities was doomed to collapse because it rested on the backs of subprime borrowers who couldn't support the weight and should never have been loaned the money. We have been taught by generations of fiction to identify with characters who are outsiders and rebels. Because these guys are smart, because they are antisocial and because they were laughed at by smug fools who believed the conventional wisdom, you identify with them, and you wait anxiously for their vindication. Then you realize that their vindication means the collapse of the American economy. They were the guys on the Titanic who knew what the iceberg meant and booked reserved seats in the lifeboats.

Michael Lewis, from whose book the movie was adapted, got his training at Salomon Brothers in the mid-80s, as mortgage based securities were being invented. (There's an early shout-out to Lew Ranieri, the Salomon trader who invented them.) As anyone knows who's read Lewis's memoir of those days, Liar's Poker, the culture at Salomon was that your job was to be smarter than everybody else in the bond market, understand values better, and know what other traders were going to do before they knew it themselves. If you were smart enough, you deserved whatever you took away from somebody less smart on the other side of the trade. That's why Lewis admires his protagonists and that, despite a thick coating of moral outrage, is the heart of the movie. The guys who shorted the housing market weren't any more virtuous or less greedy than the great majority of complacent, conventionally minded bankers who believed that the trees would keep growing all the way up to the sky. They just saw more clearly and had plenty of nerve and faith in their own judgment. If they had been wrong, as shorts often are, they and their clients would have been wiped out. When they turned out right, they took the money and kept it, even if some of them felt guilty about it.

I know somewhat about this area, having litigated some of the aftermath. The celebrity cameo explanations of subprime debt, collateralized debt obligations, and synthetic CDOs are not only simple but accurate -- the two involving Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez are downright elegant. The key concept of the credit default swap comes out nicely through the dialogue -- a chance to buy fire insurance on the house down the street just before it catches fire. There are a couple of more points that could have used the same thing, especially when people start talking about "FICO scores." It could also have been a little more clear that the eventual collapse was delayed because the smarter investment banks like Goldman finally woke up, saw it coming, unloaded their CDO inventory on investors who were still asleep, and cut their losses by buying swaps themselves. But this is a smart, entertaining telling of an outrageous true story. It deserves all the praise it has gotten, and maybe an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. If it teaches people without a financial background a little of what went on, it will be more than a momentary entertainment. But it will certainly entertain.

Great drama moves you. It excites you. Scares you. Makes you sing. Makes you cry.

The Big Short makes you shake your fist. The Big Short is driven as much by its Iago as it is its Othello, and deservedly so.

The events in the story did happen. Many people still don't care. The Big Short gives you reason to care. That is what separates this film from being merely a documentary and turns it into high drama.

No matter your politics - mark this, like Citizen Kane, as a movie that should be seen at least once. It is not always comfortable to watch. And that is a good thing - The Big Short is a documentary of a real life horror that unfolds in slow motion, and reminds us that even after the fact - no one is listening. Because truth is like poetry.

The Big Short (2015)

**** (out of 4)

Four different groups of people notice that something isn't quite right with the housing market and soon make a large wager that the economy is going to fall apart.

Trying to sell America on a film that deals with a true story of the market collapse isn't the easiest thing to do and I must admit that I was shocked when THE BIG SHORT became a modest hit at the box office. I was even more shocked when I realized Adam McKay was the director behind this film but I was even more shocked at how wonderful he handled the material once the end credits started to roll. I mean, who thought that McKay would handle such a tricky story just like you'd expect Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman?

I purposely used those three filmmakers to make my point. The Hitchcock connection comes from that director liking to let you know you're in danger and then he milks the suspense. THe same is done here as you know going into the movie that millions of Americans are going to lose their homes and their jobs so McKay lights the bomb at the start of the film and THE BIG SHORT just grows with tension leading up to the final collapse. The Altman connection is how McKay uses four different groups of people acting during the same period to build up to the conclusion. All four stories are all very interesting on their own and the director perfectly mixes them together and plays them well off of each other.

As for the Scorsese connection, there's a whole lot of creative style on display here and just look at the wonderful cinematography that pretty much throws you into the middle of these meetings and you almost feel as if you're listening and watching something that you're not supposed to be. The style also really shows off the various lifestyles and the wild nature of Wall Street. Scorsese had tackled the excess in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, which would make a perfect double feature with this film. The score, the music selections and the dialogue just jump off the screen and perfectly create a world that most watching the film probably won't be a part of.

Of course, then there are the wonderful performances that bring these characters, the situations and the dialogue to life. Christian Bale, is there anything this guy can't do? He plays another weirdo here but is there anyone who does it better or more believable? Steve Carell plays perhaps the most troubled character here and the actor turns in the greatest performance of his career. Ryan Gosling's dry humor is perfect for the black comedy in the film and Brad Pitt is also extremely good even though he plays the most laid back character. Throw in Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, Rafe Spall, John Magaro and Finn Wittrock and you've got some of the best acting that you're going to see all year.

THE BIG SHORT left me a tad bit nervous the first ten minutes because I wasn't quite sure if it was going to be able to grab me and hold my attention throughout. After all, it's story is a confusing one that you have to keep up with but McKay does a marvelous job at using humor to get the more confusing parts across and it works perfectly. This is certainly a very intelligent film that gets its message across without having to scarifies the entertainment level. It's certainly a creative gem that actually works.

I appreciate that The Big Short tries to dumb down the housing crisis of 2008, but, apparently, I'm still not smart enough to fully understand it. A lot of this movie went over my head, but I grasped the generalities and it kept me entertained, so I applaud it for that. This film also featured some great performances by the cast, who lose themselves in their respective roles. This movie is a downer, but it's an educational downer.