Love The Book. Hate The Movie

Rating: 2/10 (27 January 2016)

You don't have to love "The Big Short" the book to hate "The Big Short" the movie, but it helps. The book is about people. Most of Michael Lewis's books tell the same story about outsiders who go against conventional wisdom. His thesis is that to go against the tide, you must be an abnormal person. His books tell the story of their abnormality. The financial world is just the background. In other books, he has used baseball as the background. Billy Beane in "Moneyball", for example.
The movie makers invert the emphasis and makes the financial background the foreground and makes the book's fascinating characters little more than decoration. The book is mostly about Mike Burry and explains how he always though of himself as different because of his glass eye, but it turns out that it was really because he had Asperger's Syndrome, which isn't even mentioned in the movie. Instead, we get Christian Bale walking around in bare feet and playing loud music in what is surely one of the worst written characters and shoddiest performances ever to be seen in a major movie. It was just painful to watch and has no resemblance to the Mike Burry of the book They couldn't even be bothered to give him a glass eye, which is the dominant part of his appearance.
The reason for the inversion is obvious - so that left wing Hollywood could make an attack on their favorite target, big business. While they got some things right, they selectively omitted a lot. Like how pressure from left-winger politicians like Barney Frank and Mario Cuomo lit the match on the melt down by forcing banks so abandon sound lending practices and give loans poor people who would never be able to pay them back. Or how many state governments tried to reign in subprime lending but were attacked by do-gooder housing advocates and couldn't get legislation passed. Or how the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae used same do-gooder housing advocates to prevent any oversight and allow them to run wild buying subprime securities with losses insured by taxpayer money. Or how academic computer quant nerds told Wall Street that they could sell the subprime securities with virtually no risks. Or how most of the subprime money went, not to first mortgages, but to speculators and refi's, greedy homeowners who used the money to live beyond their means. Most of all, they ignore the fact that the little band of heroes were actually throwing fuel on the fire by buying the credit default swaps. Each credit default swap equaled the creation of thousands of new toxic mortgages.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. If you want to see a good movie about the financial crisis, try "Margin Call".