An excellent, entertaining movie.

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2016)

If this film hadn't been multi-Oscar-nominated and also hadn't been so well regarded by the critics, I doubt whether I would have bothered to watch it.
This is notwithstanding the fact that it stars one of my favourite actors, Steve Carrel. After all, do I really want to hear yet again about how the world went into recession and resulted in me to losing hundreds of thousands of dollars? Quite frankly, it is an event I'd rather forget.
But I'm glad I did see it.
Not only did it add to my understanding of the whole sorry saga, but it was surprisingly entertaining – full of dark humour.
The Big Short is essentially the true story about a few clever people who actually foresaw the crash coming and bet everything they could get hold of on that certainty. We, the audience are given an easy to follow lesson on what caused the recession and just how corrupt and deceitful the whole crazy US financial system turned out to be.
It is also a cliff-hanger, in as much as these disparate entrepreneurs who gambled their lives on the system crashing, were nearly derailed by the utter corruption of the financial establishment. Even when it was commonly known throughout the markets that the sub-prime bonds were worthless, none of the major banks would admit to it.
Even worse, (if that's possible) the disgusting rating agencies colluded with the establishment and continued to rate these worthless bonds as triple 'A' bonds. Yet they freely admitted they knew the truth but were worried about losing their rating business.
We can't help but applaud these clever folk who foretold the market crash and succeeded in becoming multi-millionaires. We also deplore the fact that nothing much seems to have changed, and not one of the principal criminals has spent a single night in jail.
It is an excellent, entertaining movie and definitely worth a viewing, but I'm not totally convinced it was worthy of nomination for the best film Oscar.