Jan 13, 2015

Dat cast

 

Jan 12, 2016

It was cool. Trailers were still awful though.

 

Dec 16, 2015

I really enjoyed this one for the most part.

In the movie's opening scenes, its editing and its camera movement come across as overly fussy...like director Adam McKay's impressionistic attempt at jazzing up proceedings that primarily consist of people yelling on cell phones or looking at computers in office buildings. While the movie never completely settles, one does eventually get caught up in the film's energy and freewheeling style.

There's the old maxim to "Show, don't tell", but in The Big Short, the telling is actually what the film is about. Through a number of inventive gags, including Jenga blocks and celebrity asides, the film is able to distill not necessarily intuitive financial concepts, like subprime mortgages and synthetic CDOs, in a manner that's both easily digestible and highly entertaining (If only Margot Robbie actually offered tutorials for my finance exams...). Not only does it convey the specific machinations of these financial products, the film successfully gets at the mix of informational asymmetries, conflicts of interest, and outright fraud that contributed to the global economic crisis in 2008.

While the character drama feels mostly shoehorned, the film is stronger when just letting its game cast (Gosling here doing a riff on his Crazy, Stupid, Love character) go back and forth on the pressing matters at hand. Overall, I couldn't help but be impressed that there exists a major Hollywood film primarily on asset securitizations, which to the film's credit is much, much more fun than it sounds.

 

Apr 15, 2015

 

Jan 13, 2015

Say you want to make a movie about of the financial crisis of the mid-aughts. It doesn't sound like the most enticing proposition for blockbuster-driven studios these days, does it? Okay, now attach three hot slices A-list of hunkdom in the lead roles…guess what, your movie gets made!

Variety reports that Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling— who it must be said are also extremely talented on top of their chiseled features— will star in "The Big Short." The film will be an adaptation of "Moneyball" writer Michael Lewis' bestseller. Here's the book synopsis:

The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower--and middle--class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.

The project is set up at Paramount with Pitt's Plan B producing andAdam McKay ("Anchorman") writing. The latter might seem like an odd choice until you remember his totally left field credit sequence for "The Other Guys," which featured a ton of non-funny financial world stats soundtracked to Rage Against The Machine. No word yet on when production or who will direct, but the idea is for the movie to be a "Traffic"-esque sprawling tale with the opportunity for more A-list stars to fill smaller roles.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplayl...e-housing-crisis-drama-the-big-short-20150113
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Jan 9, 2016

This was so good

 

Nov 24, 2015

still in