• 2015 movie review

    From Skuz@9:91/1 to All on Wed Dec 30 18:19:00 2015

    The money smelt, and earned, by the adventurers of this story of the real-life 2008 world economic meltdown is arguably tainted by bad karma. Based on a book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short is about how several traders and hedge fund managers made fortunes because they saw that the housing markets decline would cause a collapse of bonds contrived from sub-prime mortgages. The terminology is both dry and dizzying, the machinations incredibly convoluted. The main thesis of the story, adapted for the screen by director Adam McKay and his co-screenwriter Charles Randolph, is that as banking became the top industry of
    the United States, bankers deliberately concocted Byzantine financial tools whose main function was to help the rich get richer and screw over the little guy. You can expect a lot of pushback against this film of the where do these affluent Hollywood types get off criticizing income inequality but that wont mean the movie is wrong.

    I started off feeling skeptical about this movie: the hairstyles and clothes of
    the main characters were more 90s music-video than early 2000s, and the sometimes-color-desaturated flashbacks to some characters back stories were a little on the drearily commonplace side. But the narrative momentum, combined with the profane wit of much of the dialogue, and the committed acting going on
    beneath the hairpieces, all did their job. And they got across the angry, pessimistic conviction behind the movie, which is that the major banks all engaged in fraudulent, criminal activity, and that the U.S. government bailed them out at the expense of the little guy, and that theres no indication that the banks arent going to do something like the exact same thing all over again.
    You are free to disagree. But this is a movie that uses both cinema art and irrefutable facts to make its case. Its strong stuff. [rogerebert.com]

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