Terrifying, interesting, well acted, but a stylistic mess.

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2016)

Moving right along with these Best Picture nominees. According to IMDb, The Big Short is about:
"Four denizens in 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."
As A horror fan I would like to say that this may be the most horrifying, frightening movie I have seen in the last few years. By the end of the film, I was considering pulling all my money out of the bank and burying it in the back yard. Only to realize I have no money, no back yard, and plenty of student debt to fuel the fear. This is the kind of movie that makes people who hide their money in their mattresses seem like they have the right idea.
The cast is great, everyone delivers solid performances from start to finish. Although, I have a feeling that there is something in Brad Pitt's contract that he can never play a bad guy. Even in a movie that is chiefly about terrible people being slightly less terrible than other terrible people, he manages to take a righteous stance in the movie, which felt a bit disingenuous (similar to his character in 12 Years A Slave as "Only Non-Garbage White Guy")
Solid as the story and characters are in the movie, I definitely had some issues with The Big Short. Primarily, the editing of the movie is bizarre. In what is, essentially, a drama like Spotlight but the movie is cut like a Bourne movie. Quick cuts, zooms, shaky cameras, the whole thing. It doesn't make any sense, and only served to confuse me a bit in the beginning of the movie. It also cuts away to seemingly random images from time to time, and it has something of an art-film quality about it.
There are some weird comedic moments in the film as well, like cutting away to different famous faces to "dumb down" some of the more complex things that the movie deals with, which are honestly just as foreign to me now as they were before Selena Gomez told me about them. That said, I didn't mind the comedy in the movie, as troubling as the story is, it helps to go through things like this and be able to laugh at least a little.
I've always been a fan of unpacking horrible things through comedy, which is probably why I was such a fan of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or Jon Oliver's new show Last Week Tonight. Those elements here did help to lessen the blow a little bit, while still shaking me up in the process.
Honestly, the movie works, and is worth seeing completely. It's not impossible to get passed the stylistic choices that are a bit bizarre and take in an incredibly disturbing and frightening story. One thing I appreciated was that, at certain points, the movie would stop and remind you that this was in fact real. The level of corruption and fraud at work is definitely pretty unbelievable at times.
Worth the watch, and I could see it taking an Oscar or two home. The movie is nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Editing (yikes), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Christian Bale). While I'm not ready to call this Best Picture by any stretch, I'm sure it will take something
For those keeping score in my reviews, The Big Short's total number of people who are not straight, cisgendered, heterosexual, white, males who make significant contributions to the plot progression is a whopping.... zero. Though, Christian Bale has a glass eye and "awkward social interactions".
You may argue, in this case (I suppose), that they were trying to keep it as real as possible, but at more than one point in the film the characters address the audience saying that "this isn't EXACTLY how this part went down", so I'm not buying that argument.