![]() I mean, I thought one of the most poignant parts of the movie is when Brad Pitt’s characters scolds the two young guys for celebrating their good fortune when so many people are going to be devastated by what’s about to happen.” “I think the movie makes it pretty clear that while there were a lot of black hats out there, there weren’t too many white hats. That, and that the main characters are to some minds beatified for pocketing enormous profits as millions lost jobs, retirement income and homes. ![]() “The concept of derivatives is not an easy thing to explain, and I was impressed that they did it as well as they did.”Īs you might expect, criticism for what is a two-hour piece of popular entertainment has turned on what for some is a too-facile depiction of the meltdown, the notion that these characters alone saw the apocalypse on the horizon and the insistence that this was a case of conscious fraud on the part of the giant banks. “I thought it did a nice job of handling the facts of whole event,” says Levin. ![]() The film is an alternately hilarious and fury-inducing adaptation of Michael Lewis’s eminently readable book, built around a handful of characters who: understood what Wall Street was actually selling in its opaque tranches of “AAA”rated mortgage investments long before the business press and financial experts and bet - at enormous risk - that the junk would inevitably fail and ended up making a bittersweet fortune. Levin not only had seen “The Big Short,” but took his entire office of roughly 40 people along with him. The one outlier among the local mainstream was Ross Levin of Accredited Investors, who wrote a bimonthly column for the Strib’s business pages for 15 years. Maybe I should have asked people if they had seen “Star Wars”? But after three weeks on screens all over town and very good to enthusiastic reviews, you’d think people with, presumably, a higher-than-average interest in how The Great Recession went down and who saw it coming would find time and invest $10 in a ticket.īut, whatever, it was pretty much nada. There’s no law requiring anyone to be a movie buff. Quickly my problem became this: Almost none of the locals had seen it. And the answer is yes, in all the ways that matter.” Impressed, distressed, bored … whatever.Īs Paul Krugman, one of the few in the press who foresaw the financial crisis, wrote about the movie: “You don’t want me to play film critic; you want to know whether the movie got the underlying economic, financial and political story right. ![]() With “The Big Short” getting some Hollywood love at today’s Oscar nominations - it received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay - I’d chat up local business/financial columnists and gurus for their impressions of the movie. It grossed more than $300 million globally.The idea here was pretty simple. The Blind Side, his study of a black teen adopted by a white family who goes on to become a highly successful American football player, was turned into an Oscar-nominated film starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. The last film to be adapted from a Michael Lewis book was 2011's Moneyball, also starring Brad Pitt, which won six Oscar nominations and grossed $110 million worldwide. As this clip shows, he's brought his comic sensibility to this ostensibly serious film, laying bare the absurdities of the banking system (as well as giving Gosling an outrageous fake tan and Carell a monstrous wig). The film is directed by Adam McKay, most famous for making the stupendously silly Anchorman with Will Ferrell. ![]() The Big Short follows four outsiders in the world of high finance, each of whom predicted the collapse of the credit and housing bubble in 2008 and made millions from the ensuing crisis.Īs well as Gosling, the film stars Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Marisa Tomei. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |