“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
In The Big Short, someone did the math, others checked the numbers and as it turned out, the person was right and the system was corrupt. In the hands of any other filmmaker, this film will fall flat but in the hands of Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Other Guys), the story about the financial crisis of 2007-2008 thrives. It doesn’t hurt too that he has Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt leading his ensemble cast.
The Big Short is based on the accounts of real people revolving around the discovery of Michael Burry (Bale) of how unstable the housing markets are in America and predicted that the market will collapse in no time; Jared Vennett (Gosling) also had the same belief and as the story progresses it turned out that they were right thus causing millions of people losing not only their jobs but their homes.
The film is such a lighthearted take on a disturbingly problematic situation. It all sounds so boring when you just read about it but to actually see it unfolding in front of you and realizing just how massive the dishonesty will make you think what kind of people commits such fraudulence at the expense of so many losing everything they have. At first, the pace of the film can be a little too much because of the jargons you have to remember to understand the plot but after a few minutes you get used to the energetic pace, the many cutaways and you’re finally caught up. Speaking of cutaways, McKay did such a brilliant job by taking pieces of history together, put them in brief successions and help viewers piece all those information to form a clearer perspective on the narrative of the film. And if you’re ever worried about how you can cope with the finance and banking jargon, there’s a few celebrity cameos (think pop star, famous chef, Suicide Squad) who can slightly help you make sense of the all too complicated situation.
So… my beaming recommendation?
-F
the F word 