The Big Short.

(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

dark glasses

cuz blind

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

"Kashmir" is in Ridgemont High

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-CriM6vx0

And re:Dazed and Confused--Linklater wanted to use "Rock and Roll" for the end credits, but had to get approval from both Plant and Page. Plant apparently balked at the drug content of the film, kiboshing the deal. The director later succeeded in getting "Immigrant Song" into School of Rock.

xp: i didn't read the book but i read griftopia and it takes a pillage and 3925723957823 furious articles 2008-2011, so it was interesting to go in knowing the selena gomez stuff (unconvinced that this was made any clearer by selena gomez) but none of the characters/plot. idk, it's zippy, it's funny more than once, and it contains Information. i don't think it does any of the things a dramatic narrative about a historical event is uniquely suited to do--there is Character Stuff, christian bale looking pensive, steve carrell looking conflicted, etc., but really these people are just here to discover, describe, and develop attitudes towards financial instruments--so it mostly exists to save people a read. the whole knot retains untapped, almost dreamlike possibilities for fiction imo.

How could I forget "Kashmir," one of my favourite movie lapses ever (not sure if it's Ratner's mistake or Amy Heckerling's)?--he's supposed to be playing side two of Led Zeppelin IV.

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."

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

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?