Tells people what they want to hear but in a well done way

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2016)

One has to hand it to "The Big Short" that it tries to package the financial crisis in terms that most people can understand. It successfully re-creates a variety of real-life characters who saw the sub-prime crisis coming, profited from it - and felt bad about profiting from it. Its strength is that it is very driven about its subject matter. Its weakness is that it takes an ethical stance that doesn't allow viewers to truly reflect on what they're seeing. The brilliant "Margin Call" was all about the atmosphere of the crash. It didn't try to explain it all, it dwelt in the moment, and is therefore still the defining film on the subject. This film is about putting the blame solidly on the side of the banks. And it does so in sometimes annoyingly over-acting their ignorance and greed.
However, everyone was and is greedy. The characters shorting the markets didn't do so just because they wanted to teach the banks a lesson. They did so primarily because it was an opportunity. A stripper who obtains five homes and a condo through sub-prime mortgages on speculation to resell them at a higher price is just a source of information here. But in fact, characters like hers were just as responsible for the crisis as the banks who were selling those loans. That aspect is completely lost in this film. If you take a 5% interest loan to buy stocks, can you really blame the bank if you don't make 5% returns? I'd love to see a film that calls for people to act responsibly in what they're doing financially. Without greedy borrowers, there could be no greedy lenders.
From an investors' perspective, neither the book nor the film tell anything that was not previously known. One would presume that a crisis which cost virtually everyone money would be familiar to the general public to such an extent as to render lengthy explanations about what CDOs are obsolete. My biggest take-away from "The Big Short" is that, apparently, it strikes a lot of people as ingenious when synthetic CDOs are explained by Selena Gomez at a black jack table. Most Americans are involved in the financial markets through their pensions, loans, insurances, properties and stocks, so this "making it easy" should feel somewhat insulting to them. But it seems the author and film maker were right on the mark with that approach, and THAT is the worrying message to me - everyone is STILL in the haze and needs that kind of schooling.
"The Big Short" is not a masterpiece, but the effectiveness of its storytelling makes it probably the most important film among this year's Oscar contenders.