Go Long

Rating: 10/10 (8 March 2017)

The Big Short is a movie based on a book by Michael Lewis who has brought us such stories as Liar's Poker and Moneyball and who bluntly is a national treasure. Nobody seems to be able to explain complex ideas about Wall Street as well as he does and the movie adaptation does a fantastic job explaining how various bond instruments work and how people ended up buying junk which was rated AAA.
As someone who has worked on Wall Street (and Broad and Midtown and Boca Raton ) I have a good foundation of what happened and even I found myself learning something and having complex things explained in such a way as an aha moment clicked in.
Now I don't want to make this sound like a dreary documentary. This is more The Wolf of Wall Street than a Ken Burns documentary. The film follows some of the people who realizing that there was a housing bubble and deciding to try to short the market. The Big Short emphasizes that even if they were right (and they were) they still could lose everything by getting the timing wrong or simply by having the investment banks refuse to price the instruments accurately. This brilliantly creates a true tension where the film could have simply been a disaster film with the audience screaming at the screen don't invest in that house.
The Big Short sometimes is too on the nose for its own good. (=As an example having the spokeslady for the rating agencies wearing giant glaucoma glasses is a sledgehammer where none was needed. But the film quickly redeems itself with some wonderful fourth wall breaking where one of our heroes explains they did not find the answer in a pile of discarded prospectuses in an investment bank waiting room but actually by doing research but that we need a Raider's of the Lost Ark type discovery because movie.
A great film that entertains first. I cannot recommend enough. Also, I learned never order the fish stew on Sunday.