The Big Short

The Big Short

All these ‘experts’ on the so-called economy gathered as if in round table meetings, have found new trappers in this turning point of the US economy and so did the prospectus appear to be. Working with co-screenwriter Charles Randolph, McKay was able to modify the bestseller written by Michael Lewis, which describes people The Rain Creatures and Chancers who “shorted” the market prior to the 2008 Great Recession.

In other words they were betting the house on the delusion that battered and troublesome sub-prime bonds would collapse and take the entire economy down with them. Lewis was also one of the authors of Moneyball, which was filmed by Bennett Miller and is dedicated to the capabilities of statistics and baseball, another book that contains a story about nerdy innovators who see things that are not visible to most of us at the very deep moreover molecular level.

I showed up for The Big Short with great hopes, only to be let down by how irritating, pompous and unnecessarily grand it is, attempting to capture the sexually provocative side of Gordon Gekko, with anti-banker hipness, the way Oliver Stone’s Wall Street might appear as if written by Malcolm Gladwell and Justin Welby. It is a film that simply does not let you have your cake or eat it, needless to say.

And excruciatingly, it stops in between several times to explain something technical and calls in celebrity guest stars like super chef Anthony Bourdain or singer Selena Gomez to read out loud for the audience the obnoxious and superficial mini-explanations they were paid to recite. (To illustrate how easy it was to unnoticeably and dangerously ‘bake’ high-risk subprime mortgage products with rather decent loans, Bourdain uses the example of some chefs who throw in a few disgusting fish cuts into stews. Hold on. Is he saying that the stew is going to make us sick?)

The Big Short is ultimately confused whether it sees itself as a moral outrage against the wrongdoing it depicts, or whether it is just a black comic romp where there are seductive amoral characters and rebellious outsiders. You do not get the joyous hysteria typical of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of the Wall Street nor the straightforward documentary informational calmness of Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job.

Subprime brokers go too far for investment purposes and someone asks how they court admission like that. The answer is: “They are not making confessions they are boasting!” There is a problem of that kind in this case as well. Bale gives an acceptable interpretation to the image of Michael Burry, an introvert reluctant fund manager. He is given a new perspective with Burry attempting to double down when everyone else sees that subprime are about to blow. He manages to convince his boss to bet the entire capital on financial instruments that will pay the firm when the market bursts.

Go even lower, into the guts of the operation. Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling, is a fashionable hot head who get to know about the trade, understands the reasoning and persuades Mark Baum’s team, played by Steve Carell, the parent who barely holds himself together due to losing something really important and private and having an unbearable wish to take vengeance on Wall Street. Also, Ben Rickert played by Brad Pitt is still a broker who surprisingly did not change any of his views. He retired from business in shame but eventually comes out of retirement to aid two youngsters in targeting this same vengeance.

What a captivating tale it is: looking at them all together, any of these unrelated individuals might seem like members of Ocean’s eleven or The Dirty Dozen or the characters from Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. But in a slightly more cheerfully cynical or ironic one, which is the sort of mood that helped create Adam McKay’s successful comedies, The Big Short could well have been a sort of heist film.

However, irritation and piety rule this one out: and Pitt gives the two younger colleagues an exaggerated self-righteousness on and how they mustn’t gloat since they are only making things worse than they are already and their gloat is based on suffering which will bring loss to many many families.

Carell himself gives a rather mediocre, monotonous performance, sticking to one emotion, being permanently enraged: an emotion, which can be directed towards everything he learns about the subprime scam, as well as other people’s reactions, which is strange and in an unfunny way, merely impotent. Something’s going on and there is no way to stop it, and there is no enjoyment in taking advantage of the wreck either so even accessing this part becomes an annoyance.

Speaking of his character, he is also a part of my new favorite, the most exaggerated type of “sex position” I have seen anywhere having characters pepper speeches with lap dances in one part to break the mundane nature of narration. While Mark Baum is talking to a stripper who works in a strip club about her inappropriate mortgage.

In a most aggravating fashion, the ending of the film seems to smirk about all the events that unfold before the viewers, as if saying, “what are you going to do?” It makes the homeless subprime victims seem a lot less relevant, dramatically speaking at least when considering the sensitive tortured artist-turned businessman Christian Bale, who just so happens to have an endearing spouse he met on match.com. Some people made money; more people lost money (not anyone worth losing sleep over). The climax is embarrassingly a sort of collective surrender. I was looking for a proper assault. This does not deliver.

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