Gosling portrays a somewhat sleazy Deutsche Bank trader who senses the shaky underpinnings of the booming mortgage market and tries to convince investors to bet against it. The complex mix of greed and shenanigans isn't easy to understand, even when you're reading Michael Lewis’s 2010 best-seller “The Big Short.” But the big-screen adaptation gives viewers an innovative way to gain more insight into how creatures of the bond market ultimately contributed to the financial panic of 2008-09.īy mixing in clips of junk pop culture that set the tone of the times, and by sprinkling in cameos by celebrities like Selena Gomez (who deciphers the meaning of those CDOs from a Las Vegas blackjack table), the movie takes what Wall Street wrought and turns it into something hilarious, heartbreaking and deeply furious. Using an A-list cast and a grab-bag of creative strategies, director Adam McKay - a frequent collaborator with Will Ferrell on projects like "Anchorman," "Talledega Nights" and the Funny or Die website - shows how tricky labels like collaterized debt obligations were meant to distract and confuse regular people from what was happening with the huge mortgage bubble.Īnd McKay doesn't flinch from spelling out how a handful of people - including Gosling's character - got rich from the wheeling and dealing while the rest of us lost jobs, houses or substantial chunks of hard-earned nest eggs. “The Big Short" is one of the most subversive movies of 2015 - and also one of the best. “This was a test that I crammed for, then I forgot everything when I walked out,” he says of learning the meaning behind the rapid-fire acronym patter of his ambitious corporate banker, who spends one scene explaining the precarious mortgage bundling process and ratings system using a Jenga game.
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The questions are too esoteric for almost every person, including the 35-year-old actor who's in “The Big Short,” the funny, furiously angry new movie about the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown of 2008. “And what’s in it? What’s a credit default swap?”
That story centered more on the few weeks leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the government's decision to bail out the nation’s largest banks and companies.Ryan Gosling is on the phone and, just for fun, he’s giving an Economic Schemes 101 quiz.
In 2011, HBO adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s crisis tell-all Too Big To Fail, which also had a star-studded cast. The Big Short was not the first film adaptation of a successful non-fiction book covering the financial crisis. Despite some criticism, The Big Short is generally acclaimed for its energetic, innovative, and even humorous depiction of Wall Street greed and the complicated events that led to The Great Recession.