The Big Short - terrific....funny, sobering and infuriating ..which takes some doing - but pulled off by a combo of slick directing /editing and knock out performances....as others have said Steve Carell excels, but all the big guns - Bale, Pitt and Gosling - also contribute...managing to convey the complicated tale of sickening greed, arrogance and corruption into a comprehensible but depressing warning as to how fucked we are - and exposing it rather than reveling in it as last years Wolf of Wall Street did. A film that should watched by everyone and well worth a double viewing. 9/10
Agree with all that. Sums up the film perfectly. That it can balance all those things/ideas and still manage to present the complexity of all these financial 'products' and their destructive nature in such an entertaining way is an act of brilliance. A week or so after watching, it's Bale's character that sticks with me. That it was a one-eyed (& perhaps) autistic man scrutinising data in California who saw all this coming is deeply ironic. Looking forward to reading the book.
And I'll defo be watching it again.
By contrast, 99 Houses takes up the story from the events after The Big Short - once the implications of the financial crash have hit the ground in Florida. It is about a single father (Andrew Garfield) trying to save his family home from a corrupt and amoral real estate agent (Michael Shannon). In desperate times, desperate actions are required...Watchable and really well directed, but far from groundbreaking, the plot seems a bit too predictable to me. However, it gives a vivid and devastating portrait of the fall out from the actions of all those Wall Street guys shown in The Big Short. Not a companion piece by any measure, but interesting to view in relation to The Big Short. And Shannon is absolutely outstanding.
Btw, this is interesting piece in which the writer argues that the big banks during the 2000s acted exactly like counterfeiters.
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/02/i-was-wrong-big-banks-actually-were-exactly-like-counterfeiters/