The Big Short

The Big Short

Rating 8.5 out of 10

When the big housing meltdown happened in early 2007 into 2008 I read up on it trying to understand what went wrong.  Had several try to explain it to me.  I should have just waited for this movie.  The Big Short does a good job of explaining things in a way an average Joe like myself can understand and makes it entertaining to boot.

The movie starts with Michael Burry (Christian Bale).  He is a trader that smells a rat in the market for sub prime mortgage loans.  The packages started out a good idea in packaging large groups of AAA mortgage loans of people with good credit and paying history.  The problem (as I remember) begins when the packages run out of good loans and not wanting the lucrative money train to stop the bankers start filling in with worse and worse loans.

While this could sound like a boring documentary director Adam McKay explains much with scenes like Margot Robbie in a bubble bath describing how loans are bundled or Selena Gomez at a blackjack table explaining other things.  It's pretty scary how close we came to a total economic meltdown and sad how not that many things have been fixed.

Great acting is what makes this movie sing.  Steve Carell is fantastic.  Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Jeremy Strong to name a few.  This movie is like one of those films they showed in Economics class that you dreaded yet turned out to be very good.  I was definitely entertained and plan to go see this again to catch what I missed.