And there are the young indie upstarts, Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), college buddies whose “garage band” fund was started with their own money and who want to show that they can play in the big leagues. There is the righteously angry crusader, Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a disaffected Wall Streeter who sees a similar wager as the perfect expression of his contempt for the big banks (including the one he technically works for). Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a fund manager who sits in his office wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, blasting death metal, beating on his desk with drumsticks and betting his client’s money on financial catastrophe. McKay, with a comedy writer’s eye for archetypes, sorts them into an amusing array of strongly defined characters. The truth about what the banks and their enablers were doing was obvious only to a handful of people (one of whom, in the movie, is shown demonstrating the Jenga tower metaphor I just borrowed). Certainly not the government officials and banking executives who remain at liberty and in positions of power to this day.
Of course a drop in the housing market would bring the whole thing crashing down like a Jenga tower. You could read about the insanity of bundling subprime mortgages into highly rated investment products and think: Well, of course that was a recipe for disaster. Part of the book’s appeal - a side effect of its author’s smart, breezy, plain-spoken style - was that it offered readers the illusion of retroactive prescience. Lewis’s book came out, it was as ubiquitous an accessory for business-class airline passengers as the “Twilight” novels were for adolescent girls. I don’t condone mob violence and I’m supposed to keep my political opinions to myself, but as soon as I’m done writing this I’m going out to the garage to look for a pitchfork.īack in 2010, when Mr. McKay has set for the audience, which I hope is vast and various. What is to be done with those feelings is the great moral and political challenge Mr.
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But that queasy, empty feeling is the point: This is a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair. At the end, your brain hurts and you feel sick to your stomach, as can happen when too much adrenaline has been surging through your system. The performances, the script and the camera itself seem to be running on a cocktail of Red Bull, Adderall and mescaline. The story swerves and swings from executive suites and conference rooms to hectic Manhattan streets and desolate Florida subdivisions. Celebrity cameos (from Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez, among others) are turned into miniseminars on the finer points of credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. It wants not only to explain the financial crisis of 2008 - following the outline of Michael Lewis’s best-selling nonfiction book - but also to make the dry, complex abstractions of high finance exciting and fun. McKay and released in the midst of “Star Wars” advent season, the film sets itself a very tall order. Written by Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Anchorman 2”) and Charles Randolph, and directed by Mr.
A true crime story and a madcap comedy, a heist movie and a scalding polemic, “ The Big Short” will affirm your deepest cynicism about Wall Street while simultaneously restoring your faith in Hollywood.