Subprime

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2016)

The finance system machinations were virtually unknown during, now that we have crashed there are a few hundred books written. They do a good job of explaining them here. They probably thought they were upholding the spirit of All the President's Men, brave exposure of a corrupt system while events are fresh in mind and people will leave the theater armed with insight to demand change. Like Redford's film, it is too close to events to do more than chronicle them. Unlike that film, it's barely a film.
It's an illustrated article with a few name actors in enactments, never convincing it has any other reason to be. It does drum up anger and frustration at what a sorry affair the years leading to 2008 were and a Michael Moore kind of disgust at how the same affair is allowed to continue. Government ineptitude is confined to a regulations agency woman mooning over a Goldman Sachs exec (the type she's supposed to regulate) in a Vegas pool party in hopes of landing a more lucrative job there.
So this is fine as an article I guess. But a lot of it is inane. It's the cinematic equivalent of a CDO. A triple A rated product (vetted by the ratings agency of the Oscars, a great film we're told) that is really made up of little tranches of subprime crap. You'll see this nowhere better than in the filming style, slice upon slice of noisy nothing. If you know what went wrong from elsewhere you can skip it.