The Big Short.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqG3ITMv1Q

stars! gags! lousy wigs! not sure if it's meant to be funny or a drama this? whole trailer is baffling IMO.
looks like another of these Men In Suits In Offices movies.

Looks exactly like Wolf of Wall Street (cinematically anyway--although maybe thematically too).

Further perpetuating the myth that guys working in finance are in shape.

Hmm, directed by Adam McKay.

Yeah I like the idea of big budget movie with ensemble cast taking on this subject but Adam McKay?? Trailer looks like straight-ahead drama. Beyonce cameos btw.

Assuming this is based on the Michael Lewis book, Dr. Michael Burry is a pretty interesting character. Half-blind guy with Asperger's syndrome that escaped his disaffection with a neurology residency by starting a finance blog, negotiated contracts for some of the first subprime CDSs, turned a few million of investor money into several hundred million, returned his investors' money and profits (when Wall St. would have thrown billions at him) and "retired" from public life, reinvesting his own winnings into farmland 2008-9, capturing that bull.

The book is very interesting but there are obvious cinematic difficulties to make reading thousands of pages of prospectuses dramatically interesting, so instead it looks like they're having the characters do a lot of grandstanding about greed that they probably never actually did.

This is far closer to Michael Moore than The Wolf of Wall Street as far as working triple-time to make its subject entertaining and palpable. (Also reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in tone.)

Haven't felt a similar combination of exhilaration and nausea in a multiplex movie since Roger and Me, maybe. (Edelstein gets it right and Scott, too.

The best way to see this may be in a half-empty theater after wading through Star Wars crowds, perfect way to be a brainy contrarian in your own way and rewarded for it.

Also: cinematography by Barry Ackroyd, who's done a bunch of Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass films. Here, in part because of Carrell, it feels weirdly like The Office.

When you think you've clicked on the star wars thread but no...

i wonder if anyone w/ a bullshit loan had to dip in and sell their starwars dolls id watch a movie abt that prob

I thought this was pretty grotesque in its insistence on having COMPLEX THINGS SHOUTED and UNDERLINED.

The 2010 Inside Job was shorter and more entertaining.

for a few minutes I forgot this wasn't directed by David O. Russell.

this was much more dramatized documentary than movie, but it was pretty bad ass, satisfyingly nerdy

this might has well have been in chinese but i'm no good at math

Hated this. The book's great, though.

and far more entertaining and less condescending

Michael Lewis delivers the goods pretty reliably.

When he's not [writing essays about a German obsession with shit](http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/08/germany).

didnt totally get what this film was trying to say. it didnt even do a good job of communicating ambivalence. not nearly enough on show to really incriminate our oh so clever/clued up/conflicted/concerned heroes for profiting from others' impending misery. obv it was not their fault what was happening, but im sure in real life, they were rather more gleeful about it than was painted in this. good if rather too smug acting though. wasnt really fun, wasnt really hard hitting (though i suppose they did a good job of trying to help you understand the market and the terms etc), it never quite hit the mark, though it was generally entertaining. somewhere between wold of wall street and 99 homes (though still not seen that one). also puzzling why we need yet another semi-critical/mostly celebratory film about bankers. i would prefer a film about people like the guy whose landlord got a mortgage in his dogs name.

also wondering why there was no hot selena gomez or margot robbie type woman explaining how the billions these guys made from the crisis was actually public money.

some Oscar pundit sites now installing TBS as fave for best picture, director, adap script, editing

lastly, brad pitt was boring in this. im waiting for him to do a role that isnt so self congratulatory.

I thought it was really good, can definitely understand why ppl have issues with the tone of it though. To me talking down to the audience works b/c the whole film is based on the premise that it all happened because very few can or want to understand semi-complex financial stuff and therefore it gave the banks an opportunity to make bad/greedy decisions

i didnt mind being talked down to, it was done with humour, it never felt patronising.

We were shouted down though

so like Network?

no one crusty but benign here

.....referring to movie or yknow.....here?

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/31300000/Faye-Dunaway-faye-dunaway-31383610-500-250.gif

just finished the book, so good. gonna watch this tonight. my expectations are high, while reading i could really picture some of the scenes

brad pitt is so nothing in this movie you're like "why is brad pitt in this movie" until suddenly he turns around to deliver the movie's single big moral speech and you're like oh that's why

much preferred carrell's approach to conscience as full-body rash; "i'm going to go try and find moral redemption at the roulette table" was the movie's biggest laugh for me

liked the standard and poor's lady with the dark glasses that said DO YOU on one lens and SEE? on the other

i didn't like it all that much but i do think its incoherent tone is the incoherent tone of capitalism or whatever.

didn't make any sense as a film, much as i liked the book.

The book was much better. The celebrity explanations in the movie were so distracting and jarring that I ended up more confused than if they would just have the characters or narrator explain the concept. It defeated the purpose

this movie is feces

Damn I thoroughly enjoyed this, seemed so lighthanded, funny, fun. Surprised at the near unanimous hate here.

yes this movie is fine, it's only bad in the ways that every american movie with any of these people in is bad, but has the additional merit everything else is deficient of in being about something, for something, successfully informative, &c. everyone in the film industry today will be looked upon from the future the way we see the nobel prize committee who gave the award to lobotomy pioneers, just so profoundly & damagingly misinformed trying to rest the dramatic weight of a film on a steve carrell performance, but otherwise it is really fine, is you know very adequate, replete with peppy sub-alec-baldwin-in-the-departed-enjoyable-one-liners, &c.

it has no plot, and no motion to the story.

it sort of captures "everyone was stupid and then the economy collapsed" in very broad strokes, but didn't actually fill in any details very clearly.

and it talks about all the outsider people who you could perhaps feel ambiguous/sympathetic towards but who really cleaned up was the gosling character and that was the real center of the story in the book, but that's sort of only touched on because its entirely mercenary.

also there's this silly notion that the demand of these little guy traders for cds on mbs is what created the product but that's not true at all, and sort of veils the real and much worse reason you had cds on mbs getting pushed so hard to begin with -- taking the protection side of the bet let you create virtual cdos.

and it talks about all the outsider people who you could perhaps feel ambiguous/sympathetic towards but who really cleaned up was the gosling character and that was the real center of the story in the book, but that's sort of only touched on because its entirely mercenary.

well we do see his enormous bonus check and then he gives a little speech to the camera about how enormous his bonus check is and the unattractiveness of it, idk if we needed more of him or anything. he's also rendered as a douche bank cartoon whose only virtue is not being dumb like all the other douche banker cartoons in the movie.

also there's this silly notion that the demand of these little guy traders for cds on mbs is what created the product but that's not true at all, and sort of veils the real and much worse reason you had cds on mbs getting pushed so hard to begin with -- taking the protection side of the bet let you create virtual cdos.

yeah this was weird. there is a hint of the more frightening idea that the whole thing makes money regardless in the wing chau scene and the attenuated "there's a bailout!" finale, and you can kinda-sorta understand (tho not via the movie's alleged docudrama standards) why they fudge at the beginning like michael burry invented the concept of betting on a mortage: they want the movie to be a perfectly ironic universe in which the engine of the plot and weapon of the heroes is revealed by chuckling satan (this scene went so far as to have an evil laugh track! for a moment i thought of the rodney dangerfield scene in natural born killers) to be in fact the seed of a vast and heretofore unsuspected crop of etc etc -- but then they also want this to be a story about mavericks who were smarter than everyone else. and the takeaway from the movie still mostly has to do with smartness (cf gosling's cynical aria about "faith in the system") rather than this other deeper nihilism it touches on occasionally (mostly thru bros) but is like pulled away from by the emotional necessities of the modern american swinging-dicks movie... idk.

it had verve. idk if there was anything in it as funny as the beginning of inside job when the iceland sequence smashes into the opening titles (have not seen that movie since i was actually on the barricades but p confident i remember this accurately).

marisa tomei's supportive-but-exasperated-wife part kind of a new low for parts like this, made sissy spacek's part in jfk look like cleopatra.

also puzzling why we need yet another semi-critical/mostly celebratory film about bankers. i would prefer a film about people like the guy whose landlord got a mortgage in his dogs name.

at the end it plays "when the levee breaks" and it's like, but, this is a song about weather, and this stuff is only weather to the guy with the dog for a landlord. i guess that's the point. but yeah that momentary detail made me think of dead souls, a book about a loophole-exploiting dealer in obscene abstractions that has all those locals in it. someday there's gonna be a rly good american satire about this shit!

We liked this a lot but I suspect the wife and I aren't going to sleep easy. I saw all this shit coming too but I didn't have any money to play with much less know how to invent an instrument to bet with or whatever. Most of the movie reminded me of Calculated Risk blog posts from a decade ago and how Ally used to get so sick and tired of my inability to shut up about this shit.

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

I liked this, much more than I thought I would, and as far as Oscar winning righteous indignation might even prefer it to "Spotlight," though both films handle the "why do people do bad things/why don't people do the right thing" questions in very different ways. But in some ways I think "Big Short" is an even more surprising achievement, too, because not only has Adam McKay never made a coherent film before, here he does it with some of the most complicated material possible, though I guess the source helped.

Speaking of which, never would have guessed Michael Lewis as a font of Oscar winning narrative films, but there you go.

I liked it more than I thought I would too. I expected The Wolf of Wall Street all over again, and it really wasn't like that. I wrote a bit about it here (mostly about "When the Levee Breaks," which someone above didn't like--I loved it):

https://heardjustwhatiseen.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/the-single-most-effective-thing-we-can-do/

it wasn't that i didn't like it, it was that it felt like the end credits to a different movie

lol tho @ my giant pvmic upthread where i end up by complaining that this movie was not as good as dead souls

i think almost famous also has "tangerine" in it, btw

it also has a (mercifully) deleted scene in which patrick fugit puts on the entirety of "stairway to heaven" while frances mcdormand sits thoughtfully on the couch and decides anything with tolkien references can't be all bad, but you have to sync stairway to heaven up to it yourself

(p sure there aren't any tolkien references in stairway to heaven, but the scene says there are)

oh good we're discussing Zep instead of this irritating movie

DLH: You're right about "Tangerine"--was reminded of that when I looked up the "That's the Way" clip.

i remember the line "what are you, four?" drew many lolz in the theater

the voice Steve Carrel affects in this movie was unforgivable imo. by the end i was cupping over my hands over my ears in anticipation whenever he came onscreen.

it also has a (mercifully) deleted scene in which patrick fugit puts on the entirety of "stairway to heaven" while frances mcdormand sits thoughtfully on the couch and decides anything with tolkien references can't be all bad, but you have to sync stairway to heaven up to it yourself

didn't want to let this amazing sentence go unremarked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra9YR1ze0w0

has any movie, coens or not, ever actually deserved frances mcdormand

not only has Adam McKay never made a coherent film before

gtfo

He's made funny movies! But coherent? Like, Anchorman? That's basically a sketch series. Even Step Brothers, I literally have no recollection what happens after they join sides. Something about a Billy Joel cover band? I can't imagine any of his other films were funny on paper, it's all about the performance. But this one? It's entertaining, but it is also structured and paced and relatively free of non sequiturs about bat sandwiches or rubbing your balls on someone's drum set or whatever.

wow this was surprisingly good. wonder if they spent 1 billion dollars in music licensing though.

something i loved: when the one kid is yelling on the phone something like "you don't get it! this is the end of capitalism! this is the dark ages all over again!... yeah okay mom i will."

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, April 12, 2016 3:28 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^

there're a bunch of nice touches like that kinda; theres also plenty of stuff u have to look past or maybe wince @, the voiceover, lots of the beginning, talking to the camera;

i thought having the standard and poors lady as literally temporarily blinded was great; all the peripheral stupidity is well characterized imo, and the drama of waiting for the bonds to fail, when they should be but aren't yet, is affecting

yeah dlh's posts itt otm generally

this is my favourite movie

how many 'movies' have you seen?

Lol

the voice Steve Carrel affects in this movie was unforgivable imo. by the end i was cupping over my hands over my ears in anticipation whenever he came onscreen.

― de l'asshole (flopson), Tuesday, April 12, 2016 3:29 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

once i learned to get over this i was able to accept this 'movie' into my heart where it is now my favourite

by the end i was cupping over my hands over my ears in anticipation whenever he came onscreen.

covering my eyes in distaste and horror whenever this thread comes onscreen

a lot can change in four months.

carrell is approx 100 times less annoying and terrible in this than in that wrestling movie w the prosthetic nose

otm

for a few minutes I forgot this wasn't directed by David O. Russell.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 16, 2015 10:38 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

it was an interesting movie in spite of itself, bale was good, but overall it was an obnoxious movie

celebrity cameos to explain some of the financial concepts was ...... ugghhhhh

after this and the wolf of wall street i never really want to see a movie like this about bankers again

xpost That's an interesting argument, because it's such an obnoxious industry that I don't know how it could be not obnoxious. It's like "Wolf of Wall Street." I totally get how it could put someone off, but at the same time I think its repulsiveness is part of its (paradoxical) appeal. It's very Rorschach test.

Anyway, I haven't read too many books about the financial industry, but every one I've read underscores how that world is populated by eccentric sociopaths, fly by night grifters and misfits. My friend's book about shareholder activism (which was surprisingly fun! It's called "Dear Chairman") features a foreword that more or less states outright that morality should be set aside when reading about this stuff, because the world of people with money doing everything in their power to make more money for the sake of making more money is a moral morass.

ha, Wolf of Wall Street, you beat me to it!

i feel like this movie and wolf of wall street both fall prey to the problem highlighted by that old line about how it's impossible to make a war movie that doesn't at least to some extent glamourise conflict.

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

celebrity cameos to explain some of the financial concepts

i've seen the future and it... works?

haven't seen this movie tho

i feel like this movie and wolf of wall street both fall prey to the problem highlighted by that old line about how it's impossible to make a war movie that doesn't at least to some extent glamourise conflict.

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 (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

while neither is intended as polemic (although the big short is openly critical of modern finance) war is limbs falling off in a stinky ditch and finance is rich people in fancy clothes making bets, kinda inherently glamorous

tt has assured me that TWOWS is vile shit. We both quite enjoyed TBS. make of that what you will

i feel like this movie and wolf of wall street both fall prey to the problem highlighted by that old line about how it's impossible to make a war movie that doesn't at least to some extent glamourise conflict.

part of what makes WOWS so great is that this problem seems to be very much on its mind (and possibly at the heart of the movie). hence the sense throughout of a double reality or pov or how the narrative uses forward propulsion as a kind manic thrill and evasion of dread. I joked on twitter that after Silence it almost seems like a critique of Protestantism.

that critique centering on the Protestant equation between the endless accumulation (of capital) and salvation

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?