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.
Jan 1, 2016 i thought this movie was great imo...it did a great job in explaining the mortgage crisis and the story that I didn't know of the people who benefited from the recession
Jan 3, 2016 This movie was a 9/10 Steve carell did the best followed by bale... Although they all did great
Jan 12, 2016 the cast is great though and they all did a good job my only gripe with this film was the editing/direction at times. but i know some people who absolutely loved it
