The Big Short

The problem with hindsight is that its so correct that it hurts. These four separate individuals knew about the end of the financial roller coaster of the housing market before everyone else did. They then put money on said recession and correction taking place and when they won out they won big. Explore the men behind the crash which almost ended capitalism.

I have stayed very much outside of the usual descriptive intro to this film. Why? well it is so well trodden and so well known that it feels patronising for me to write a hack version of so much better copy. What I will do instead is this. The art of Hollywood blockbuster film is often its way of making the complex, simple. By this I mean the extremely complex math of A Beautiful Mind and game theory condensed into a 4 minute bit or the space shuttle physics lesson of Apollo 13 that took 5 years of research and work. Then condensed it into 10 minutes of exposition. This underlines the Big Short brilliance and its undoing.

Its brilliance is that it allows for the great acting of the male voices to shine through. Take Bale who is amazingly contained and cold. Pitt who is warm and drips intellegence or Correll who understands his acting dynamics and plays them hard. Gosling too is very good but this is again because he has a natural ability to understand comedy and mannerism of people in this industry (They are almost all like him and it is hilarious how well he gets this). The film is made for these people because we do not know the real life personality or do we need to. The film also looks great and has a very well paced feel to its whole. I also will commend the work of the DVD producers to keep this clean for the transfer.

The downsides are the factual chewinga and clunky dialogue you get with this sort of film. The lets cut away and lecture you about the subject because you might not get it. You might need a little easing into the thing and we have to tell you without making you feel stupid or lazy. It is often not difficult stuff but it is packaged to look harder than it is. CDO is slang word for crap now and it should be. This film tells us this but in a rather abstract and slightly reverential way.