The Big Short

[kauaioo]

Well, I've been on a roll with the cinema trips! I think this movie was almost as good as it gets for this particular subject matter. Firstly, the cast was stellar with excellent performances all round. The story was interesting, I certainly never know that some people made investments of this type, the opposite of what everyome else was doing. And then there was the information overload that made up the rest of the movie, that was fairly intense! I understood about 90% of what was going on because I had read about and listened to pod casts on the subject area and of course there have been lots and lots of chats with Gav over the years so I am reasonably up to speed with the ins and outs of sub-prime mortgages and the evils of CDOs, and I actually enjoy lerning about and thinking about this stuff.

For audience members who perhaps haven't read much or don't understand a lot about this, the movie does a reasonably good job at explaining the important points in layman's terms. They use celebrities to explain the concepts, but if this is the first time you're hearing it I am guessing that it is still too complicated to grasp well enough to keep up, it's quite fast paced and it has to be in order to fit that density of information into a single movie. But, they do what they can, they explain things without holding up the story too much, and they do it in a reasonably entertaining way.

There's a bit of funky camera work / editing where random scenes are flashed on screen while we're subjected to long voiceovers, and I hated this. Thankfully, it's mostly contained to the first 30 minutes and while there is a little more of it later in the movie, it's not as bad as the opening sequence. This was clearly a device to try to make this subject matter suitable for a mainstream movie, but I really don't think it ever will be, not in this level of detail. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed The Big Short and I thought this was a valient effort, but I think this topic would be much better suited to a documentary style movie. Of course, we wouldn't get to enjoy this amazing cast and their very strong performances if it were a documentary, so that was a definite plus!

Think of this movie alongside The Wolf of Wallstreet - The Wolf was much more entertaining, and we didn't need to understand the intricacies of the investments, big picture, broad strokes were sufficent. The Wolf was about an interesting character set against the backdrop of the financial industry, while The Big Short seems to be about educating the masses on the intricacies of the financial crisis, with a few bits of characterisation sloppily thrown in to try to get us on board. It doesn't work, the characterisation is poor and superfulous to the movie.

And then there was the bit I just didn't understand! We get to 2007, the interest rates hit an all time high and so huge numbers of mortgages begin to default and everything starts to fall apart. Apparently the banks were underhanded and corrupt as this happens and I am not sure how. Things start to get really complicated as the banks go insolvent, and before I could figure out what the implications of this were we were into bail-out talks and things were resolving but I just didn't understand it in enough detail for it to be satisfying. They didn't do a celebrity interjection for this part, it's like they were purposefully glossing over the details here (perhaps it would have required another 2 hours to get it right, I'm just not sure!) and so I felt a little let down by this. I wanted to understand it more, and I will watch the movie again and perhaps it will be clearer to me next time around, but I guess if you have to watch it again to grasp it, it hasn't really worked.

In sum - I really enjoyed it, and the acting was brilliant. This subject matter just isn't suitable, in this level of detail, for an entertaining movie. The Big Short was a valient effort, but it fell short in the end.

Comments

[giftederic.livejournal.com]

Banks gave people loans with really low interest rates initially that reset to quite high interest rates after a few years, lulling people into false sense of what they could afford. Also they were NINJA loans, No Income, No Job or Assets, so there was no collateral and so people had no reason to keep paying when they saw how much their payments escalated.... Hope that helps....

[kauaioo.livejournal.com]

It did not help at all, I'm not in the remedial class :) It's when the banks are actually crumbling and how that affects the 'big short' investments - there's all this talk of the regulatory organisations not allowing the security ratings of the CDOs to change in response to the high volumes of defaults so the 'big short' investment isn't materialising (I still get this bit) but but then it all resolves without them being (in my mind) explicit on the details. There's something about the banks taking out these 'big short' investments first before they collapse, maybe it is as simple as that, they (the banks) manipulate the facts until they can get in on at least some of the action. But why did they fail then, was it just not enough. And then there's a case where one of the 'big short' investors is actually linked to one of the insolvant banks so they talk about his investment having to go on their books and him losing everything, but then that magically changes but I'm not sure why. It's like they wanted the audience to experience some of the confusion and panic that was happenig at the time becauee there was no precedent or road map...and if so, that worked! I had invested 2 hours in the movie and was panicking that I was going to lose everything, job well done :)

Watch the movie, I think you'll really like it. Call me when you're going and I'll go again. I think John will come too because I left him just coffee and orange creams this weekend and he's bitter ;-)