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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 4:38:00 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 17:14:30 GMT
A 2016 NYTimes piece on the general surge of films on the last financial crisis: www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/business/media/a-booming-market-for-art-that-imitates-life-after-the-financial-crisis.html?_r=0 “We were like a depressed Catholic family avoiding the subject at dinner,” said Adam McKay, who directed and co-wrote “The Big Short,” which is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. “But people are realizing that all those problems that caused the crash are still around.”
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“We were like a depressed Catholic family avoiding the subject at dinner,” said Adam McKay, who directed and co-wrote “The Big Short,” which is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. “But people are realizing that all those problems that caused the crash are still around.”
“We were like a depressed Catholic family avoiding the subject at dinner,” said Adam McKay, who directed and co-wrote “The Big Short,” which is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. “But people are realizing that all those problems that caused the crash are still around.”________________
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 20:20:02 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 21:27:51 GMT
A.O. Scott's NYTimes review: www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/movies/review-in-the-big-short-economic-collapse-for-fun-and-profit.html“The Big Short” will affirm your deepest cynicism about Wall Street while simultaneously restoring your faith in Hollywood
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The performances, the script and the camera itself seem to be running on a cocktail of Red Bull, Adderall and mescaline.
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This is a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair. What is to be done with those feelings is the great moral and political challenge Mr. McKay has set for the audience, which I hope is vast and various.
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... the achievement of “The Big Short” is that Mr. McKay doesn’t only underline the moral of the story in dialogue. The film’s final images, its abrupt shift in tone from exhilaration to exhaustion, its suddenly downbeat music (by Nicholas Britell) all combine to trigger a climactic wave of almost unbearable disgust.______________
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Post by Tuulia on Jun 9, 2017 20:31:58 GMT
from The New York Times article Six Directors Pick Their Favorite Films of the 21st-CenturyJUNE 8, 2017 linkAlex Gibney Director, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”
I don’t like 10-best lists. How do you rank “Spirited Away” over “Eastern Promises”? And I don’t even like proclaiming “great films.” I remember that my father spent most of his life wanting to be a “great man,” but became more interesting and important to me when he became a “good man,” sharp, curious and more interested in listening than making speeches. My list comprises “good films” that stirred my heart in unexpected ways. [from his list:] ‘The Big Short’ (2015)
It’s hard to make abstract economic concepts understandable and fun. This film is cinematic Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart — free to go where it wants to go. And Christian Bale’s performance — ooh la la.
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 25, 2021 1:20:23 GMT
This WSJ review is worth a read. I've highlight one comment toward the end which I found very interesting, comparing this to the Wolf of Wall Street. www.wsj.com/articles/the-big-short-review-the-comic-beauties-of-a-bubble-1449771708"No nation has a corner on the cupidity, duplicity, stupidity and willful blindness that fueled the subprime mortgage bubble of the mid-2000s. Only in America, though, could filmmakers illuminate such a dire subject, and the financial debacle that ensued, with the sort of scathing wit, joyous irreverence and brilliant boisterousness that make “The Big Short” an improbable triumph. The film was directed by Adam McKay, working from a script that he and Charles Randolph adapted—ever so freely—from the widely admired book by Michael Lewis. Where the book was calmly incisive and instructive, the screen version swings mainly between elation and mania. Yet that’s a reasonable representation of the national zeitgeist when the story’s protagonists, four eccentric clairvoyants from diverse backgrounds, make massive bets against the housing market and the banking system because they share the same vision of a shimmering bubble that’s bound to burst. “The Big Short” on screen even manages to be instructive, both whimsically— Margot Robbie sipping champagne in a bubble bath while she explains subprime mortgages—and philosophically. Its larger concern is human folly, a subject explored with resplendent zest by a cast that includes Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt. All four stars are smart, fascinating and funny in their respective ways, so much so that their performances—and the script’s solid moral structure—sweep away any concerns about asking us to root for people who get unimaginably rich by betting against the health of the American economy. Mr. Bale is Michael Burry, a physician turned hedge-fund guru. This flat-affect refugee from mainstream society has a fondness for banging on a drum set in his office, and a conviction—justified, as it turns out—that he’s right about the economy and everyone else is wrong. Mr. Carell is Mark Baum, a fictionalized version of Steve Eisman in Mr. Lewis’s book. An investor driven by a volatile mix of anger, sadness, deep-dyed cynicism and principled outrage, Mark is the Last of the Just on Wall Street. Mr. Gosling’s Jared Vennett, the real-life Greg Lippmann in the book, is a subprime mortgage specialist at Deutsche Bank; he ratchets up the meaning of tightly wound and teaches the meaning of subprime collapse with a little tower of wooden blocks. Mr. Pitt’s Ben Rickert, a version of the book’s real-life Ben Hockett, is above the fray though still part of it, a blithely laid-back plutocrat who speaks quietly, walks slowly and believes civilization is doomed. (“Seeds,” Ben says, “are gonna be the new currency.”) Until now the director was known primarily for his partnership with Will Ferrell ; they’ve made five big-screen comedies of steadfast raunchiness and widely varying quality. (My favorite is “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”) On the face of it Mr. McKay might have seemed an unlikely choice for making a movie based on a book that’s full of financial arcana, as well as human drama, but his freewheeling style, underpinned by the script, brings the whole surreal spectacle to life. It’s not just Ms. Robbie’s effervescently teachable moment; or chef Anthony Bourdain’s cheerful explication of collateralized debt obligations (three-day-old halibut, representing the BBB-rated tranche of a mortgage bond, goes into a brand-new creation called a fish stew); or Selena Gomez and the economist Richard H. Thaler explaining synthetic CDOs while seated at a Las Vegas gambling table. (In fact the film doesn’t clarify a central concept I gleaned from the book, that credit default swaps are simply insurance policies.) What gives “The Big Short” its surprising resonance is the breadth of its comic vision, which makes room for collateral tragedy. The comedy comes explosively— Mr. Bale’s performance is scarily hilarious—or in one-liners and quick takes, deftly edited. (The editor was Hank Corwin. Barry Ackroyd did the fine cinematography.) “The market’s in an itsy-bitsy little gully right now,” says a bleached-blond and relentlessly cheerful real-estate agent in Florida, where a tsunami of delinquencies has just begun (the year is 2007), a symbolic alligator appears in a brackish backyard pool, a stripper-cum-flipper owns five houses and a condo, and a member of Mark Baum’s team uncovers a mortgage application that was made out in the name of the applicant’s dog. In a wicked sight gag about a supposed watchdog’s sight, Melissa Leo’s Georgia, an official at Standard & Poor’s, wears wraparound dark glasses indoors because there’s something wrong with her vision. (Others in the AAA-rated cast are Marisa Tomei, Jeremy Strong, Finn Wittrock, John Magaro, Byron Mann, Hamish Linklater, Tracy Letts and Adepero Oduye.) As the meltdown approaches, the film darkens in tone while keeping much of its comic edge—high dudgeon giving way to heightening disbelief, followed by horrified belief, about rampant deception, self-deception and the system’s fragility. The main voice of the new awareness is Mark’s; it falls to him to deliver an impassioned peroration that perches on the edge of preachiness, but is powerful and affecting all the same. (In a haunting coda, two young traders who’ve become rich by betting short venture into the offices of the newly defunct Lehman Brothers just as stunned staff members are being ushered out.) It’s usually unfair to praise one production by derogating another, but it’s also irresistible to say that “The Big Short” has all the energy of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” plus the coherent point of view that the earlier film lacked. Too bad this new one didn’t open a decade or so ago, when warning signs were detectable, but then no one would have paid any attention to it."
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