Praew and I watch quite a few movies. Just in the last week or so, we’ve seen Analyze This, The Grifters, Spotlight, and last night: The Big Short. If I’m not forgetting anything. And tonight we are planning to watch Sicario.
I’ve been reluctant to begin including movie reviews in this blog, mostly because the internet is rife with people posting their opinions and impressions of pretty much any movie you can think of. I might make the claim that I have a bit of something to share regarding film, having been raised in Los Angeles, taking cinema appreciation classes all the way from junior high school through to university and then immediately after graduation working in the film industry for another 20+ years (albeit on the VFX side). But I decided that you’ve probably got more interesting things to do with your life than listen to me bloviating about whatever random movie I happened to watch last night.
And if you don’t, you might want to take some inspiration from this blog and go out and start up whatever project takes your fancy. 😉
I started this blog to keep a journal of the kinds of projects that take my fancy. Construction, electronics, mathematics, software, whatever. Generally pretty geeky stuff.
But after watching The Big Short, a wonky movie about a wonky topic, I just couldn’t resist the intersection between movies and geekdom. So please forgive me.
Despite liking The Big Short movie and previously finding the book the most enjoyable and convincing account of the 2008 financial meltdown that I’ve encountered (I read it about a year ago), my feelings about the movie aren’t as positive as I would have expected.
Don’t get me wrong. It is a good movie. It has an all star cast who give amazing performances. The screenplay is clever. The editing is slick. The musical scoring is wry. The overall style is fresh with witty asides and a dry humor. (Probably my favorite scene shows a conversation between the hedge fund manager Mark Baum, played by Steve Carell, and a stripper who is giving him a lap dance while he interviews her to try to understand how the mortgage industry can possibly be giving multiple loans to people with low FICO scores. The cognitive dissonance between the imagery and the topic of conversation is matched perfectly by the cognitive dissonances within the topic of conversation itself.)
The problem comes in the subject material itself. Despite changing the names of most of the characters from their real life counterparts, the movie comes out almost like a documentary. There is even a somewhat surreal aside in one scene where a character says “it didn’t actually happen like this, in fact I learned about this from …” As a result, the movie takes on the feel of a greater degree of realism than probably any Hollywood movie I’ve ever scene. This includes Spotlight, which while based on even more serious real life subject matter, still runs it through the usual Hollywood dramatization process.
But as a “documentary”, the movie falls short. It gives you enough understanding of the nature of the events to feel outrage at what was allowed to happen. It wants and practically needs you to feel outraged. But it doesn’t give you anywhere near enough information to really understand the nature of the problems that you are now outraged about.
This isn’t even meant as a criticism of the movie. There is absolutely no way that within the two hours and ten minutes running time of the movie they can possibly pack in the full story of what happened, how it happened, and why it was allowed to happen.
On the other hand, the book does an amazing job of this. For comparison, though, I listened to the unabridged audiobook of The Big Short from Audible with a run time of 9 hours and 27 minutes. And even then, I would guess that the author, Michael Lewis, and his editor probably took quite a bit of pains to pack the materials down into under 300 pages.
So my conclusion is this…
If you are looking to watch an enjoyable and clever movie that gets you outraged about the injustices of the 2008 financial meltdown in the US, then go ahead and watch this movie. But if you actually want to understand how the financial meltdown occurred and be able to talk about it intelligently to your friends, you are still welcome to watch the movie. But watch it the same way you might read a pamphlet for a medical procedure at the doctor’s office. It is the starting point to find out if you are interested in learning more. And if you are interested, please go ahead and read the book.
Movie poster is copyrighted by owner and is included for the minimal purposes of identifying the movie only. By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48292566
