Wednesday 22 May 2019

The Big Short (2015 Adam McKay)

What Oscar-winning screenwriters McKay and Charles Randolph do well is interpret the extremely complicated financial mechanisms (no doubt detailed in the source non-fiction book by Michael Lewis) with easier to understand models, like synthetic CDOs interpreted as Vegas gamblers being bet on by people in the audience, then other audience members betting on that bet. This is coloured by strong performances from the people in the key play positions - Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling. With the always great Marisa Tomei, Jeremy Strong (good), Rafe Spall, Finn Wittrock, John Magaro, going to have to do an etc. there.



Also characters speaking to camera to annotate what actually happened in key moments is good.

The only thing is it's somewhat lacking in a strong human perspective.

This all enormously well coloured (tricked out) by Hank Corwin's montages, some of which at extreme speed.

Greed, complexity, fraud, irony and ... nothing's changed.


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