Margin Call was good but there was no humor in it
Posted on 12/14/2015 7:02:38 PM PST by Lorianne
THERE’S NO SUBJECT ON EARTH, with the possible exception of sex, that human beings find more inherently fascinating than money. Yet somehow most of the movies about the 2008 financial collapse have been as enticing and zesty as a raw potato.
That’s finally changed with The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis about a small assortment of “outsiders and weirdos†who made hundreds of millions of dollars betting that the housing bubble of the 2000s would collapse. Near the end of the film one of them, played by Steve Carell, declares, “We live in an era of fraud†— not just fraud on Wall Street, he says, but sports fraud, corporate fraud and government fraud.
What sets The Big Short apart and makes it truly great is that it portrays this worldwide, straight-faced fraud accurately; that is, as not just dangerous and enraging, but also extremely funny. It calls to mind Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch about a pet store salesman who defrauds his customer and then offers an endless stream of preposterous, contradictory obfuscations to conceal the obvious reality. The Big Short demonstrates that we’re now all living in that pet store.
The credit for this clearly goes to Adam McKay, The Big Short’s director and cowriter, who could have been grown in a lab to make exactly this movie.
(Excerpt) Read more at theintercept.com ...
I just saw the trailer for this movie like 5 seconds ago. It does look hilarious.
Margin Call was good but there was no humor in it
The bubble had to collapse. It was a bubble.
The question was, When?
The fact that it collapsed just in time to throw the election to Obama is the main point of interest.
The bubble burst has the stench of soros and steyer all over it.
I really enjoyed the book. I would recommend following it up with “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” by Lawrence G. McDonald, which shows things from the perspective of inside Lehman.
Read the book. Still scratching my head how the managed a screenplay and film out of that.
After Rush recommended it, I too went and saw Margin Call.
GREAT movie.
Stark and somber.
Yes, me too. Great book. I am curious how they made a movie out of it.
yes it was, prolly more than a little truth in it too
Bbb
Thanks for the McDonald book reference.
Thomas Wood’s “Meltdown” (2009) and Naomi Prins’ “It Takes a Pillage” (2013) are both very good and can be purchased for a good price today.
Michael Lewis is an expert writer about money issues.
BUMP!
Bush helped inflate the bubble with his “American Dream” program that paid down payments for low income minorities who couldn’t qualify. Trump is wrong about some things, but not about Bush. - Bush WAS a disaster
I Read the book - great story - it was bad enough that the government - ie Democrats - coerced banks and mortgage institutions into giving loans to poor people who could never pay them back, creating a housing and bond bubble that eventually had to go bust, but when many of those same banks started betting that the bubble wouldn’t burst by selling credit-default swaps - essentially insurance against the bonds failing - financial institutions really put themselves on the hook for billions of dollars more than they could ever hope to cover - the story of how a few people saw what was coming and made millions off the collapse that ruined hundreds of others is fascinating....
It started with that idiot Jimmy Carter, and then Clinton pumped up the bubble.
“Read the book. Still scratching my head how the managed a screenplay and film out of that.”
I read the book too, and from the trailers I’ve seen, the movie appears to be so over-the-top Hollywoodized that it appears to be essentially unrelated to the events in the.
I seriously doubt I’ll bother to see the movie because it’ll probably just piss me off.
The movies “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side” are entirely different matters however. I thought both were excellent adaptations of the corresponding Michael Lewis books.
“Moneyball and The Blind Side”
Missed those, but I read Boomerang too.
I think one of the really ridiculous things that happened with Lehman is that the CEO almost doubled his salary up to the $70 million area just before going in for a life saving loan in England. Kind of like the Auto CEOs flying to DC in their private corporate jets to beg for a handout.
I see that you really studied the causes of the meltdown. Not. I don't know if the film goes into this, but there have been many stories about these causes and Bush wasn't it.
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