The Big Short.

the glamorization was less of a problem with me in either film than smug pricks breaking the fourth wall

The moral of Wolf of Wall Street is that it's better to be a bad person than a good one. Feel like Scorsese made that very clear.

Didn't get that out of it all, any more so than I got that moral out of Goodfellas. I feel like WOWS was way too long (unlike Goodfellas), and because of that, it had way too many scenes of these guys living the party life. Still, by the end, in no way did I envy them or want their lives, so I can't really say the movie glamorized them very well. The worst I can say is Scorsese perhaps does personally does enjoy seeing grotesque scenes of hedonism and violence, and could've edited the movie down to 50-75% of it final runtime -- but he's a good enough director to make a movie about those people without expecting I'll share his taste.

i don't think the movie says it's better to be bad, but it does seriously entertain the idea that it's more fun. (and concludes that it isn't). and yeah scorsese has a definite fascination for and guilt over hedonism/violence/power etc. i find that tension in him really interesting but ymmv of course.

i probably argued on the actual WOWS thread that the punishing length is also intentional but i suppose im not gonna be converting anyone here. i just found the whole paradoxical continuum of feelings and tones explored in the movie to be incredible.

This was a great movie. Kept me awake last night a bit.

I do like how they took the time to illustrate so many of the different players in the perverse system and how each one had proximate incentives to just keep propping up the fraud.

There was still a lot of good "you can't make this shit up" throughout, saving the best fact for last with the closing text explaining that in 2015 banks started hawking "Bespoke Tranche Opportunities" because hey obviously the problem with the CDOs was they weren't bespoke enough

yeah otm. Generally find anything about behaviours being incentivised in unexpected ways fascinating (expected if like the protagonists you look at the whole system not just each individual chunk that makes it up)

should i bother with this, or just read the book?

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

in considering almost any movie from a book, the book's going to be a more complete story. so, yeah, just read the book.

i'd say both, but start with book

even the book is a very incomplete account of the crisis. Lewis cares way more about the zany characters' quirks than the finance or the larger narrative, and it's interesting to compare how you imagined the characters to McKay's realization

it's hard to make a movie about the excesses of reckless bankers without sprinkling a little bit of stardust on them in the process. i liked both of these movies a fair bit but i don't think they stand up very well as polemic

― for sale: steve bannon waifu pillow (heavily soiled) (bizarro gazzara), Monday, February 13, 2017 10:18 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

magin call and boiler room both manage to avoid this fwiw.

w/r/t "even the book is a very incomplete account of the crisis" well its not an account of the crisis, its an account of the actors who sort of set the whole thing off. in that regard i think its pretty good and complete...

The people who set it off barely figure into the book or movie, both book and movie are about some people who figure out what's going on and try to short it (with the twist that their short position is being leveraged into even more CDOs). widespread misconception from ppl who see the film that Lippman, Burry, the Cornwall dudes &c are somehow responsible for the financial crisis when it's the Wing Chaus of the world who bear the blame for the Subprime crisis (which itself was only the straw that broke the camel's bank and led to banking crisis, etc.) it's like saying the hoop is what causes a basketball to hit the ground after a point

i should really see Margin Call

Well. Keep in mind a dog dies and Kevin Spacey feels bad about it. All these movies about plutocrats are so fucking kitschy.

Watch Inside Job.

I think the misconception is that, oh, this is a movie about people doing finance, finance is evil, therefore they must be the bad guys. when, at least in the Big Short, the real bad guys are (for the most part) off-screen

and that's why imo Lewis and by extension MacKay's focus on quirky characters rather than nailing down the causal chain of the finance is a bit of a wasted opportunity, from a Public Education pov

pretty sure part of the point was that everyone is culpable in the descent of our society into a cesspit where being a complete bullshitter with bad judgement works just as well or even better as trying to be honest or giving a fuck about stuff - that's what I took from the closing scenes. There's no lesson here other than we're all assholes and it will all inevitably happen again. Trying to find some manichean villain in all this sewage is for the dull and self-obsessed.

Zzz

*Plutocrats deregulate finance, shadow banking industry leverages itself to the hilt and destroys the economy for a decade*

Tombot: see, the real moral of the story is we're all assholes and [flopson falls asleep reading another brick of sophomoric misanthropy]

sorry I was talking about the movie - are we still talking about the movie?

ah my bad, yah true the movie does ham it up a bit from that angle... blegh

the book is more of an account of how the thing was set off than the movie though -- even though it doesn't like follow the people around and interview them who concocted the cdos etc as much it does go into a lot more detail on the products, and how and why they were created. the db stuff in particular talks about the sell-side folks quite a bit.

did we ever get Big shortened?