Saturday, December 19, 2015

Go see "The Big Short"

I had heard about the new movie "The Big Short" and it sounded interesting, but after I read a Krugman editorial about it, I ran out immediately to see it, which is very rare for me. I usually wait for movies to show up online.

And it is really great movie! Much more entertaining than you dare hope for in a movie about finance. Any movie about the 2008 meltdown must find a way to explain the complex factors that caused the disaster. The Big Short does a very good job making the explanation both entertaining and informative.




And bonus - the phrase "dark market" is used towards the end of the movie.

Also of interest - as I was watching the character who goes to Brad Pitt's character for help, I kept trying to figure out where I'd seen him before. He's the guy on the left, talking, in the opening seen of this preview:




And I finally figured it out. He plays a rapist in an episode of Law and Order - SVU ("Wonderland Story") who raped the girlfriend of a guy named Matt, played by my actor buddy Matt DeCapua. Here is a screen cap of Matt getting into the rapist's face - the character is played by Finn Wittrock.



There is a stellar cast, including Christian Bale - aka Gloria Steinem's step-son - and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts as one of the finance suit guys. And Ryan Gosling is hysterical as you can see in this featurette about his bitchy character. I just die laughing when he shrieks "I'm jacked to the tits!"




I also had to buy the non-fiction book "The Big Short" on which the movie is based to see how they're different. It's funny though, in the first scene with Wittrock's character, his character talks directly to the camera (characters or random famous people, like Anthony Bourdain. talk to the camera throughout the movie) points out that the dramatization of how they discovered important information didn't really happen like that, lampshading the fact that the movie takes liberties with the true story to make a tighter narrative. I thought that was pretty neat.