11/12/2022 0 Comments The big short based on![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Like even if it just kicked the conversation a little bit, like if you just started hearing about it more because the movie comes out, and if it ends up doing well, that people in some of the debates would have to talk about it, that would be a huge victory. “I’m hoping that would be the effect,” he says. Oh, and that they’ll be entertained in the process.Įven Adam McKay, who structured this particular product with exactly those outcomes in mind, has a hard time telling anyone to put their money on that. And that ultimately this experience will lead to some kind of reckoning that causes us to face uncomfortable truths about responsibility and financial capitalism and our entire way of life. And then there’s the riskiest tranche of all: the bet that those who do see it will come away with not just an understanding of what a CDO looks like but a fuller awareness of the cornucopia of shitty human behavior that led to the Biggest Financial Collapse Since the Great Depression and that it will cause them to reflect on those traumatic events, which have arguably never been properly processed despite their corrosive effects on our politics and culture and psychology. Then there are the chancier bets: for instance, that this holiday season, Americans will put down their smartphones and tune in to a Hollywood version of Occupy Wall Street, a movie about an event that happened nearly a decade ago, one that they’d probably like to forget. There’s the bet that McKay, the director and writer best known for movies like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, and Steve Carell, also known as The Guy From The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Office, can convincingly pull off a movie set in the world of high finance and that the other A-list actors playing the other “outsiders and weirdos” who saw the crash coming - Ryan Gosling as a version of Greg Lippmann, the slick Deutsche Bank trader whose body language swears he is lying, especially when he’s telling the truth Brad Pitt as Ben Hockett, an eccentric ex-banker who grows his own food and Christian Bale as Michael Burry, a California doctor who, despite having only one functioning eye, saw the crisis before anyone else - will turn in performances worthy of the kind of attention that will (a) have made it worth lowering their fee and (b) cause the studios to pat themselves on the back for taking a chance on a worthy, artistic project instead of throwing up their hands and casting robots in everything. As a package, it is composed of bets upon bets upon bets. Nor is it a solid investment, not in these distractible, budget-minded, please-everyone times. Like the collection of derivatives Carell had finished sketching, The Big Short: The Movieis a very weird product - for starters, it’s a comedy about deadly serious things and a leftish movie lionizing hedge-funders. This was just as well for the actors, to whom the language of high finance wasn’t coming easily. Even though it was a sweltering day in New Orleans, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, as the casino was roughly the temperature of a meat locker, the better to keep gamblers awake. McKay, who resembles a taller, shamblier version of Waldo, as in Where’s, was seated in a red leather banquette behind the monitor, holding a megaphone that he would occasionally lift to offer direction in his laid-back California drawl. “Any chance I have to illustrate this stuff, I take advantage of it.” “He’s drawing out the CDOs,” the director explained, as the camera zoomed in on Carell sketching the financial product in a way that looked vaguely like Italian spumoni. Though that wasn’t why McKay wanted the shot. Set designers hadn’t gone so far as to re-create the restaurant’s 90-foot waterfall, but they’d done their best to conjure the atmosphere, with a toqued chef at a sizzling hibachi and authentic details like the cocktail napkins. For budget reasons, and because Okada had closed not long after the market crash, the scene was being shot at another casino, Harrah’s, in New Orleans. Nearly ten years later, the scene between two once-obscure money managers was being reenacted, this time on film. ![]()
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