It's about the banking crisis, but before you drift off to sleep at the mere thought, it's actually witty, fast and filled with drama...
Movie: The Big Short.
Directed by: Adam McKay.
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Marisa Tomei, Finn Wittrock, Margot Robbie and Rafe Spall.
The Big Short is the film adaption of the Michael Lewis book about a group of people who foresaw the housing crisis in 2007 and managed to make a whole lot of money when everybody was purposefully looking the other way.
Lewis is also renowned for writing other famous books such as The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, both of which were made into hugely successful films. Anyone who has seen these films will know just how good they are.
The plot follows Michael Burry played by Christian Bale, who appears to discover before anybody else that there's a housing bubble and makes a series of investments which will pay off hugely if certain bonds, made up of mortgages, were to fail.
It then advances to the entirely funny Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling, who spreads the word of the upcoming burst (mostly accidentally) to a few other characters including Mark Baum (Steve Carrell).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqG3ITMv1Q
Video via Paramount Pictures
The whole movie offers a digestible background into what exactly caused some of the biggest economies in the world to stall and almost collapse in some cases.
It's serious, without converging on boredom which would be very easy considering the subject matter, it's witty with Gosling's relationship with his assistant raising some chuckles and Carrell's angry humour is riveting throughout and it's fast-moving, you're not going to get bored watching this.
While based on true events, as is always the way, some moments have been dramatised and tweaked to make it appeal more on screen, but the movie itself is definitely worth a watch... if only so you can throw out a soundbite about how the economy really collapsed and sound pretty damn intelligent.
