The Big Short
Well, I've been on a roll with the cinema trips! I think this movie was almost as good as it gets for this particular subject matter. Firstly, the cast was stellar with excellent performances all round. The story was interesting, I certainly never know that some people made investments of this type, the opposite of what everyome else was doing. And then there was the information overload that made up the rest of the movie, that was fairly intense! I understood about 90% of what was going on because I had read about and listened to pod casts on the subject area and of course there have been lots and lots of chats with Gav over the years so I am reasonably up to speed with the ins and outs of sub-prime mortgages and the evils of CDOs, and I actually enjoy lerning about and thinking about this stuff.
For audience members who perhaps haven't read much or don't understand a lot about this, the movie does a reasonably good job at explaining the important points in layman's terms. They use celebrities to explain the concepts, but if this is the first time you're hearing it I am guessing that it is still too complicated to grasp well enough to keep up, it's quite fast paced and it has to be in order to fit that density of information into a single movie. But, they do what they can, they explain things without holding up the story too much, and they do it in a reasonably entertaining way.
There's a bit of funky camera work / editing where random scenes are flashed on screen while we're subjected to long voiceovers, and I hated this. Thankfully, it's mostly contained to the first 30 minutes and while there is a little more of it later in the movie, it's not as bad as the opening sequence. This was clearly a device to try to make this subject matter suitable for a mainstream movie, but I really don't think it ever will be, not in this level of detail. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed The Big Short and I thought this was a valient effort, but I think this topic would be much better suited to a documentary style movie. Of course, we wouldn't get to enjoy this amazing cast and their very strong performances if it were a documentary, so that was a definite plus!
Think of this movie alongside The Wolf of Wallstreet - The Wolf was much more entertaining, and we didn't need to understand the intricacies of the investments, big picture, broad strokes were sufficent. The Wolf was about an interesting character set against the backdrop of the financial industry, while The Big Short seems to be about educating the masses on the intricacies of the financial crisis, with a few bits of characterisation sloppily thrown in to try to get us on board. It doesn't work, the characterisation is poor and superfulous to the movie.
And then there was the bit I just didn't understand! We get to 2007, the interest rates hit an all time high and so huge numbers of mortgages begin to default and everything starts to fall apart. Apparently the banks were underhanded and corrupt as this happens and I am not sure how. Things start to get really complicated as the banks go insolvent, and before I could figure out what the implications of this were we were into bail-out talks and things were resolving but I just didn't understand it in enough detail for it to be satisfying. They didn't do a celebrity interjection for this part, it's like they were purposefully glossing over the details here (perhaps it would have required another 2 hours to get it right, I'm just not sure!) and so I felt a little let down by this. I wanted to understand it more, and I will watch the movie again and perhaps it will be clearer to me next time around, but I guess if you have to watch it again to grasp it, it hasn't really worked.
In sum - I really enjoyed it, and the acting was brilliant. This subject matter just isn't suitable, in this level of detail, for an entertaining movie. The Big Short was a valient effort, but it fell short in the end.
For audience members who perhaps haven't read much or don't understand a lot about this, the movie does a reasonably good job at explaining the important points in layman's terms. They use celebrities to explain the concepts, but if this is the first time you're hearing it I am guessing that it is still too complicated to grasp well enough to keep up, it's quite fast paced and it has to be in order to fit that density of information into a single movie. But, they do what they can, they explain things without holding up the story too much, and they do it in a reasonably entertaining way.
There's a bit of funky camera work / editing where random scenes are flashed on screen while we're subjected to long voiceovers, and I hated this. Thankfully, it's mostly contained to the first 30 minutes and while there is a little more of it later in the movie, it's not as bad as the opening sequence. This was clearly a device to try to make this subject matter suitable for a mainstream movie, but I really don't think it ever will be, not in this level of detail. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed The Big Short and I thought this was a valient effort, but I think this topic would be much better suited to a documentary style movie. Of course, we wouldn't get to enjoy this amazing cast and their very strong performances if it were a documentary, so that was a definite plus!
Think of this movie alongside The Wolf of Wallstreet - The Wolf was much more entertaining, and we didn't need to understand the intricacies of the investments, big picture, broad strokes were sufficent. The Wolf was about an interesting character set against the backdrop of the financial industry, while The Big Short seems to be about educating the masses on the intricacies of the financial crisis, with a few bits of characterisation sloppily thrown in to try to get us on board. It doesn't work, the characterisation is poor and superfulous to the movie.
And then there was the bit I just didn't understand! We get to 2007, the interest rates hit an all time high and so huge numbers of mortgages begin to default and everything starts to fall apart. Apparently the banks were underhanded and corrupt as this happens and I am not sure how. Things start to get really complicated as the banks go insolvent, and before I could figure out what the implications of this were we were into bail-out talks and things were resolving but I just didn't understand it in enough detail for it to be satisfying. They didn't do a celebrity interjection for this part, it's like they were purposefully glossing over the details here (perhaps it would have required another 2 hours to get it right, I'm just not sure!) and so I felt a little let down by this. I wanted to understand it more, and I will watch the movie again and perhaps it will be clearer to me next time around, but I guess if you have to watch it again to grasp it, it hasn't really worked.
In sum - I really enjoyed it, and the acting was brilliant. This subject matter just isn't suitable, in this level of detail, for an entertaining movie. The Big Short was a valient effort, but it fell short in the end.