Director Adam Mckay
Staring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling & Brad Pitt
Rated M
Score 6/6

Four denizens of the world of high-finance predict the credit and housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s, and decide to take on the big banks for their greed and lack of foresight.

Before I get too far into things I would like to express my sincerest thanks to the US banking industry for the Global Financial Colonoscopy of 2007-’08 which exposed what could be described as a level of incompetence that had only been previously been seen in the British Public Service in the lead up to World War 2. For the record I was also thinking of some sort high school joke about the tendency of the popular kids ignoring the outsiders and the nerds, but I’ve already gone for one easy joke in this review.
If I really sat down and thought I’m pretty sure that I would only be able to think of a handful of movies that had moved me to actual tears, I’m going to have to add The Big Short to the list. In the interest of full disclosure by the time the credits rolled around I was overcome with the need for a shower.
It should be noted that this was director Adam McKay’s dramatic directorial debut. McKay was previously known for movies such as Anchorman and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The Big Short was based on American author Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, it should also be noted that Lewis also wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game which the 2011 movie Moneyball was based on.
Despite the uneasiness that I felt when the credits rolled The Big Short is definitely a movie that you need to watch because this is a part of recent history that a lot of us have lived through, though considering this a movie and not the book of course there is the very real possibility that names of some characters in the movie have been changed. In places especially at the beginning the overall look that you would usually associate with a documentary. The breaking of the fourth wall was a good touch as the filmmakers used those moments to explain mortgage-backed securities (MBS), shorting and synthetic CDOs and the use of beautiful actresses to explain these terms didn’t either. At the moment (considering the early in the year nominations for awards season) it really would not surprise me if Christian Bale wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and possibly motivated me to get off my ass and watch Carell in the 2014 movie Foxcatcher.