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Powerfully Useful: ‘The Big Short’
If you had told me a year ago that the most powerfully useful American film of 2015 would be brought to us by the man who helmed “Talladega Nights,” I would have told you to fix your damn time machine. Yet it is absolutely true that Adam McKay, the goofball extraordinaire who gave us such national treasures as “Anchorman,” has directed and co-written “The Big Short,” the adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 nonfiction bestseller about the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. What’s that, you say? Put simply, McKay has crafted the definitive movie about the 2008 worldwide economic meltdown that stemmed from the bursting of the American housing bubble – and he’s done so with rigorous detail and more than a spoonful of his slapstick sugar.
Sugar is the operative term here, and even as we’re gobbling it up, we’re made aware that this is exactly how our country got itself in such a financial black hole in the first place. Start with the eye candy that is Ryan Gosling, who plays Jared Vennett, the Slick Rick narrator doubling as a banker whose alpha-douchery actually outstrips that of his colleagues. He’s been lucky enough to notice the seemingly insane-in-the-membrane investments of financial idiot-savant Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who’s prone to blasting death rock while crunching numbers and rubbing his smelly, naked feet. After sifting through the kazillions of individual mortgages that make up the securities underwriting so much of the banking industry, Burry has decided to bet against the housing market by investing more than a billion dollars of his clients’ money into credit default swaps. Scratching your head yet? Just wait, there’s more. Vennett ropes in mega-misanthropic hedge funder Mark Baum (a wild-eyed Steve Carell), and the two go into the credit-default-swap business, as does the pee-wee investment team of Charles Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who enlist former banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, who also co-produces), a New Age-y Cassandra, to help them play in the big leagues. Continue Reading →
The Church of Extroverted Introverts
Yesterday was unseasonably warm—so warm that I felt compelled to stay outside the whole time the sun was out, as if I were a squirrel stuffing acorns in her cheeks (though with climate change, who knows how long this weather will last?). It was my first day off since Thanksgiving weekend, so I sat out with my coffee shop Muppet critics, bopped down to the farmers market, read my book on a bench with one eyebrow cocked at the early-afternoon brunchers. Around 3 pm I rolled over to Gowanus to toast a pal’s birthday at a backyard bar, and was happy to spend time with a new friend of whom I’ve very fond—at least until the sun dropped, at which point I hit my wall regarding people time and had to scurry home. I fell asleep on the subway—if I’d been wearing a red hat everyone would have assumed I was yet another Santa Con casualty—and put on my nightgown two minutes after I walked through my front door. Right before I passed out, I realized it was only 7pm.
That’s how I am right now. My back injury of last spring made it clear that I had to stop being such an island and, ever the obedient student, I took note. It also taught me that I had to keep moving—literally and figuratively—so ever since I regained my mobility I’ve been a she-rooster with her head cut off, a blur of grownup-lady bluster, a to-do list that takes no prisoners. I walk at least six miles a day, often right into the heart of what scares me, and it’s not just my waistline that thanks me. Continue Reading →