At the beginning you think the Big Short is a boring documentary movie, in the middle you think it's a comedy, when the credits roll you realize it's a horror movie.
More horror than most people would realize. The guy that saw it all coming now only trades in one commodity... WATER! People should google "Water privatization in Bolivia". Also, props to the writers of "Quantum of Solace" and "No Escape" for hinting at the same IRL horror story.
@@LoneWolf-k1m I've been saying it for years, the "Water Wars" will likely be the next major Global Conflict (unless it gets started over something stupid before that).
@@LoneWolf-k1m I've been saying it for years, the next Full Global Conflict will be the "Water Wars" (unless some random nonsense triggers it before that).
Ryan Goslings assistant was actually a guy on set that Ryan got along with really well. He wasn't originally in the script, but they had such good chemistry they gave him a part.
The real-life person that Christian Bale is playing (Michael Burry) was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I personally found Bale's performance to hit unnervingly close to home for me. An extremely well-deserved Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for him, and a great Adapted Screenplay win for the movie too! I also recommend VICE from the same director where Christian Bale plays Dick Cheney too.
Watched this three times: Years ago, I couldn't see why he was weird, then I got diagnosed, and he made me cringe, and now, I kind of love how he doesn't mask at all while still not liking his amorality.
@@PickpocketJones Given that it depicts Burry around 2005, when he was not nearly as famous as he is now, I suspect his shyness would have been higher back then.
Yeah, it's such a great performance, he was definitely the highlight of the movie for me. It's also so tragic yet relatable the way that no one understands or listens to him, and even in the end he still loses because of that
Came here to post this. Any time someone watches The Big Short I always recommend them to watch Margin Call afterwards (which is better imo), two movies that take wildly different approaches but handle somewhat similar subjects.
Before the crash, I was working for a private car service - I remember one day in the summer driving an attorney up to a big tower in downtown L.A. where she was meeting with auto executives. I'd overheard a lot of rich person conversations by then, but this was startling; the entire drive back to her office she was yelling into her phone. "They have no idea...They won't listen...they have NO IDEA HOW BAD IT'S GOING TO BE." Thought back on that a lot when it all started going to hell.
I worked at a fairly large lender in IT. But I had a background in real estate sales. It was hard to convince anyone to care, and the $$ was crazy for mortgage types. I bought a Scion and all my coworkers snickered. But when we got laid off, I was able to keep and pay it off.
The unofficial trilogy of the 2008 financial crisis is between The Big Short, Margin Call, and Too Big to Fail. Each movie gives a different perspective of the events where TBS comes from the view of investors and regular people, Margin Call takes an interal look of a nonspecific company going through the events, and TBTF gives the perspective from the US government trying get handle on the events. Combined they paint a good picture of the events and they're all pretty entertaining.
Thanks. I didn't have the other 2 on my Must-See list. Fixed! Oh, one to add to yours if you haven't see it... "The Biggest Little Farm". Quality; and just as educational as this one, but more uplifting.
God, I remember this era so well. I was a freshman in high school when the recession started and seeing whole streets of stores close down really freaked me out. My dad's business was in land development, so we were hit really hard that recession. If that time period taught me anything it's that anything and everything can be gone before you even realized you had it
The Big Short is one of my favorite movies, in my Top 5. Also, "I'm going to find moral redemption at the roulette table." is one of the best line in the whole movie.
Graduated college in 2008, along with most of my friends. With our UG degrees, we got the following jobs: Asst. Produce Manager at a grocery store, TV salesman at BestBuy, a bread truck driver, and freelance reporter in Western New Hampshire.
When I was a kid, it was widely understood that only the best and the brightest ever got accepted into good colleges. Yes, the earned degrees, but the degrees were irrelevent. What was relevant is that by hiring the best and the brightest you knew you were getting exceptional young people as new employees. What they learned while in college was of little value to businesses. The plan was to snag the very best talent and then teach them the very specific needs of their new job once they were on the job. The government decided to make it easy for any high schoolers to get loans to fund a college education. Parents and students, all of whom were either already voters, or soon to be voters, loved the idea. Colleges loved the idea, too, and hired lots of new employees or either leased or had built new buildings for their campus. The business of running a college ramped up very quickly with all the new money showered on them via student loan programs. But the expansion completely broke the hiring system. Employers could no longer rest assured that if they hired a college grad, they were getting an exceptional young person. Also, nobody ever checked beforehand to see if a doubling or tripling of college grads was needed due to massive shortages of available grads to fill positions that required a college degree. It wasn't. Not at all. Sorry fellas, at the end of the day the most blame needs to be dumped on the shoulders of any kid who never bothered to research whether the college degree they wanted to obtain would enable them to earn more money when they graduated.
I work in finance and every once in a while, I go into the office wearing a Bear Stearns sweater that says “Risk management, employee of the month 2008.” 😂
You are hilarious. Please, keep it up. That kind of thing is NEEDED to keep people from growing complacent. (Our founding fathers couldn't afford to be this kind of stupid; the were building a Nation. We have let our education be dumbed-down and our integrity be compromised to the point where we are are in danger of Losing that Nation. Hey John Q. Public of America?? DO BETTER)
@@jacobsweet7327 You are hilarious. Please, keep it up. That kind of thing is NEEDED to keep people from growing complacent. (Our founding fathers couldn't afford to be this kind of stupid; the were building a Nation. We have let our education be dumbed-down and our integrity be compromised to the point where we are are in danger of Losing that Nation. Hey John Q. Public of America?? DO BETTER)
It's truly criminal that there are people in this world who treat everyone like their own personal ATMs and feel absolutely no remorse or sympathy from stealing all your money. This movie made me so mad.
There’s another finance movie that I never thought I’d watch, went into it blind. Pretty interesting. “Margin Call” About investment bank going bankrupt.
@@Theomitehmm, interesting take. I didn’t see it that way but I was probably too stuck in the weeds of just trying to understand exactly what’s going on when it comes to all of the financial details to recognize some of the bigger picture aspects.
@@HidingFromFate It's not terribly obvious and I don't wanna spoil it here, but it's in the subtext of what the 2 1-on-1 scenes with Tuld & Sam (the 2nd is in the dining room). Watch those 2 scenes back-to-back and you see it's as plain as the nose on Jeremy Irons' face.
@@Theomite the value of their investments was a fact. They didn't start anything. It happened to them and they reacted. They bought a bunch of assets that were worth nothing in the end. Whether they decided to sell those assets before everyone else realized it or not, does not change the reality of the housing bust, that had just happened.
One of my favorite films, every performance is great. The editing is great. The storytelling is great. 10/10 from Adam McKay, he took his end credit animations from The Other Guys and made a masterpiece
I would normally feel the same way as you about the celebrity cameos. In this movie, however, I think they really work. The whole point is that when the complex information content is explained in a dry seminar or news format, people can tune out because they feel stupid and bored. When celebrities try to explain it, no matter how limited their understanding is, people actually listen and think they know something. The crown jewel of the ongoing joke is when they partner Selena Gomez with Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and non-celebrity (at least in the wider culture) who really does understand a lot of what happened in 2008. It's almost like Adam McKay is saying "I've given you the nice facade, NOW are you listening to the real thing?" Particularly given that he's explaining the part of the story that causes the world to burn. I would also highly recommend Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short," which this movie was based on. It's even funnier than the movie is, and that's a high bar.
Also this is a great way to be faithful to the original book. t's a general problem "how do we adapt to screen a book with many two page long asides and footnotes?". Often writing teams would just ignore them, but in this case that would make the movie only watchable for people in the world of finance. This brought levity, but also makes the movie more accessible.
I read a handful of the major books to come out about the 2008 crash -- House of Cards, 13 Bankers, All the Devils Are Here, Bailout, etc. -- but I missed The Big Short until it came out in movie form. While I absolutely love this film, the most startling revelation in it for me was Steve Carell's amazing performance as Mark Baum. I didn't think too much of him on The Daily Show (classic), I didn't care for The 40 Year Old Virgin, I couldn't get into the U.S. version of The Office (the U.K. one SO much better)... and then he turns in this *amazing* and heart-wrenching performance. I honestly didn't know he had it in him.
If you had watched The Office, you'd know. The UK & US versions are both different shows, different qualities. Carell is amazing, lots of improv and it shows.
I appreciate that you specifically consider sound design in your ranking. It's an undervalued aspect of a movie, and can have a dramatic effect on the viewers' emotions.
So refreshing to see a reactor actually understanding the movie, even though she kinda missed why selling the SWAPS when the market was collapsing was a good thing. Best reaction I've seen of this movie so far ❤
Not only are they still doing this with mortgages, they're doing it with most other debt. Why don't they ever forgive any student debt without making someone else pay for it?(usually suing the institution) Because a HUGE amount of investing is wrapped up in SLABS, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. And yes, they have multi-tier betting on these just like CDOs. *ALSO* get this, *you* no longer get to enjoy a bailout if it happens. Because of how unpopular the bailout was, the law was rewritten that we're no longer depositors, we're creditors. And banks can institute a 'bail in' to take money out of bank accounts to pay the banks debts since 'creditors have to pay their fair share', and the only thing you might get is stock in the bank, that just failed, that they will hold 'on your behalf' so you can't even sell it to try to get something out of it. And this is *not* FDIC insured, because the worthless stock is considered fair compensation for your 'contribution'. It's been tested, look up Cypress Bail In, and that might be in the EU but the US has the same thing.
The best part is US Congress trying to pass legislation to stop corporations from owning real estate/housing properties, because they fixed it: the people who own the CDOs and own the shorts can't ever fail if they're also the people paying the mortgages. As long as I, the investment bank, pay these mortgages, then my CDOs stay valuable, and the collateral I collect for shorts against them keeps coming in.
Investors backing debt isn't an issue. Lots of things went wrong in 2008 to make the crash happen, but perhaps the worst is the ratings agencies rating everything incorrectly. If the MBS products were rated correctly, then they would not have ended up in peoples pensions and retirement funds. Yes the housing bubble would still pop and people who chose to invest in sub prime mortgages would take the losses. But it likely doesn't become a worldwide financial meltdown.
I know someone who worked on Wall Street during the '08 crash. He once told me 'wealth isn't made, it's transferred.' Unfortunately when it comes down to it, wealth is usually transferred from the poor to the rich.
What's more terrifying is that I think in the event that it doesn't, then it will be transferred by force. In this recession, the wealthy are hurting, and lo and behold, the political situation to turn citizens into subjects is getting more and more overt.
And billionaire propaganda has convinced people that the ones telling them that billionaires are the enemy are just jealous and lying. The saddest part about all of this isn't the predictable unlimited greed of the super rich, it's the millions of poor people who still buy into their bullshit and vote for policies that literally only hurt them.
I was pretty impressed that you actually knew quite a bit about the topic. I have seen several people discuss this movie and they had trouble keeping up. It allowed the reaction to stand above most.
This film is 1 of a triptych of films dealing with the Great Recession from various POV s of the industry. The other 2 are MARGIN CALL (the banks) and TOO BIG TOO FAIL (the government). All of them are amazing and worth watching. And Mark Baum's real name is Steve Eismann. And it wasn't his brother it was his infant son; he was accidentally smothered to death, so they understandably changed that for the movie. Oh, and on the January 11 scene, when Mark finds out the stocks aren't changing price and goes to S&P, the people are walking around New York in regular clothes. January 11th, 2007 had unseasonably warm weather for January so people actually could forego their winter clothes.
one of those movies that I can watch over and over for some reason..I love it!! we might disagree but I think the Anthony bourdain and Salena Gomez parts are really well done and do a great job explaining complex financial products with analogies.
Margin Call is a great follow up on this, but delivers a way more serious tone from the bigger bank's perspective and those who were at the root cause. Acting is 10/10 and truly makes you feel the weight of an incoming crisis.
A great way to get various angles of the 2008 crisis are three films in order: The Big Short; then Margin Call which is from the perspective of the big banks; finally Too Big To Fail which is from the perspective of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve (Carrell hints at this at the end of Big Short).
I graduated college in 2004 and everyone was telling me to buy a house during the bubble, family, friends…. I said no thanks, there was no way I felt homes should be that expensive. Glad I listened to my gut. I sat on the sidelines and when it all crashed, I bought my first home for a fraction, and put a lot of cash back into investments. Also got an $8,000 tax credit refund for buying my first home in 2009.
My wife is very selective about books she will read. Because she ALWAYS prefers to save time by watching something as a movie instead. So she will never read a book that might be made into a movie. That's why she almost exclusively reads nonfiction. She was an economics major, so when this book came out, she was interested and thought there was no way this could be made into a movie, so she read it. It read like a textbook, so she was confident it was the right choice, and was shocked when someone found a way to adapt it into a very funny movie script. I heard an interview with the script writers on NPR a while back where they talk about how the movie is intentionally split in half in two styles, where the first half is comedy and the second is tragedy. My takeaway from what happened here is that it really is the ratings agencies that should have the most blame in this. We rely on auditors and rating agencies to be the backstop and tell the truth. A bank can say, "Here is a pile of... something. Put a value on it." When the rating agency is calling garbage gold, THEY are the ones lying and committing fraud.
We-ell... the first fraud happened when people were given those loans. Both sides of it were complicit in lying about the applicant's ability to pay, because they were simply selling them on. Banks giving a loan and then holding on to it would have done their due diligence and not given those loans. Those loans were always going to default because they simply couldn't pay past the initial payments and the paperwork was all lies. Of course, the people taking those loans should have understood it but many didn't. It's possible some of them were lied to as well. That's where it started. The second case of fraud was the loangivers selling the loans they knew to be complete fabrication and doomed to fail as a normal, valid loans. After that sale, people basically relied on the paperwork. They maybe knew it was crap but they couldn't have easily proven it on paperwork alone. After they were bundled and repackaged the paperwork became near impossible to track back to the original loans. I think many traders didn't actually understand the CDOs and CDSs but they saw the profits and the upward trends. There was a data-based mathematical explanation on how it should have worked but the data used was a very short period in Texas markets, I think, and the model was flawed. It e.g. failed to account for how the loans weren't actually mathematically independent so that enough of them failing would cause a systemic effect through markets to basically cause the rest of them to fail too. Sure, the ratings agencies have very bad incentives and are/were horrible but at the end of the day, they were just the last backstop. Everyone else before them should have also caught it. They didn't because they all had the same incentives not to. So, you really can't dump it on the ratings agencies. Honestly, people should have also known their business model and understood what that meant for the reliability of the ratings. Having been bitten, they now know. I guess everyone, who might have cared, expected the rest of the system to work properly so that them grifting on their part of it wouldn't matter.
Ultimately the blame is on the state. It's the government's job to regulate things like this, whether directly or indirectly through rating agencies. If the rating agency is not regulated and is just a private company raking in the profits with no repercussions then the state has failed. Americans like to pontificate about freedom and privatizing everything but when the regulating body is completely privatized and separated from the state then there's no accountability left whatsoever. People talk about America heading toward "idiocracy" but on some levels it has already been there for a long, long time.
I enjoy watching with you. This one was unique for me. I used to work in the Hedge Fund industry, in NYC. I sold the the tech and software hedge funds needed to function. My world consisted of 5th, Madison but mostly Park Ave, where 90% of the NYC hedge funds are located. A lot more of the industry know this was coming. They just didn't have positions to profit from it, aside from just shorting stock as the larger mkt was tanking. I remember being at the Argyle Conference and hearing fund managers saying, "If you can't accurately price these stocks (CDOs) then it's worth nothing." This was back in 2006/7. I got out in 2007, right before this all went down. My office was right around the corner from the Bear/ Sterns building. I couldn't imagine watching those folks all lose their jobs at the same time.
FINALLY! I’ve been waiting for a popular reactor to do this! Now it will start a chain reaction and reactors that copy this channel will watch it as well, then reactors that copy those channels will continue, until this movie is all over the radar of everyone… …then again it took me two tries watching this movie to even understand how it all works, so it should yield some interesting results depending on who else all watches this.
It's been a long while since i've watched a Natalie Gold video. I realllly like the inclusion of rating the movie on those four categories - it gives me a better understanding of your reaction to the movie... which was probably the point. Good shit.
elder millennial here (i'm 42). i was three years out of college when this crash hit. the job market shriveled up. the only upside was that my ex and i were able to buy a cheaper house as the market was on the upswing a few years later.
I’m 47 & have never thought of myself as elder; that’s pretty funny because my wife is about to turn 42. Wonder if she’ll mind me borrowing that phrase?!
@@chemquests that's because you're a young X. We 42s are the first of the millenials, hence 'elder'. I find myself a lot closer to X's than younger millenials most of the time.
I was in junior year of high school when this happened. I remember that year very well. I was able to get my first job through a school program. Three months later I got laid off from my first job because my employer yes we have entered a recession. I didn’t know wtf a recession was. I remember seeing many people lose their homes in my neighborhood that was just 2 years old. That event shaped my entire world view. Not only when it comes to the importance of money but also how events that are not in our control can have such far reaching consequences to regular people like me. It was a learning moment. I took it to heart ever since then. And fortunately 16 years later, it’s all good. 😊
This movie captures the tone of the book exceptionally well. One of the best book-to-film adaptations imo. I graduated uni in December 2008 but spent the next couple of years travelling/living abroad, so I was very lucky in how I avoided most of the impacts (without knowing much about it at the time). A few years later (2013-16) I was working as a debt collector and speaking with people whose businesses had collapsed, through no fault of their own 😢 really put things into perspective. The "just don't fucking dance" speech gives me chills every time.
As to the use of the Phantom of the Opera, I suspect it was done to suggest going into the heart of financial darkness as represented by that Vegas conference. Kind of like hearing Darth Vader's unmistakable score when he enters a scene. You mentioned the smaller roles and one that was set up to be visially symbolic was Melissa Leo's, in addition to being expertly acted. Karen Gillan's contribution, while very brief, was notable for well establishing a loathsome character.
You are more informed and sharper than most viewers and they need simpler explanations, hence the parts you didn't like or need. I have watched a lot of reactions to this movie and in most cases the viewers needed the explanations.
Basically, they are buying insurance contracts where they know the house is already on fire while the banks acting as the "insurance companies" believe they are selling insurance on a home that will never, in the history of the world will burn. In other words, the banks are betting that Michael Jordan is going to win a pick-up game against a nine-year-old but they don't know that Michael Jordan has been left a quadriplegic in a car accident while these guys, Burry and Baum, know about the accident.
My favorite moment in this movie is when the two garage band investors are dancing and Brad Pitt puts them in their place. Such a great bait and switch to remind the audience that while this all seems like a game, it’s very real.
It has probably been mentioned, but, if you didn't notice: the Money Maker scene is even funnier when you realize that by taking the mugs he is LITERALLY mugging them. I've watched this movie many times but that symbolism didn't strike me until maybe the third watch. And I definitely think it's totally intentional and not just something people are reading into it.
@@Theomite He is, but the fact that he is collecting MUGS as his trophies I believe is deliberate and symbolic. It's too specific. Why not a pen? Why always a mug, and not a variety of things? He's passing it off like he's just this affable nitwit on the spectrum, but really he's going in there like a cold blooded killer to rob them blind. It's sort of him making a subtle statement to them and, by proxy, us as the audience.
Margin Call. It's not a "true story" like TBS but it's a depiction of something that almost definitely happened, probably a few times over in various places. I think of it as a financial horror movie. Slow paced, major tension, fantastic acting
Once a year I watch Margin Call and The Big Short just to remind myself how quickly and completely the cards can tumble, and what it means when you live at the bottom.
When they said they were doing the book I thought no way, un-filmable. I was very very wrong. Almost every point of the book is in the movie, with some great performances.
@@__Obscure__ Another good one is The Martian. Both smart enough to realise that anyone watching your movie is smart enough to keep up. You don't necessarily need to adapt it. If you do? World War Z. An average zombie movie that's not anywhere near as good as the book. Still annoyed I didn't get to see the Battle of Yonkers!
I was at the very last semester in college when the market crashed (Graphic Design). It was weird. I remember walking through busy skyways for nearly 4 years while I went to class, and then when the recession hit, it was like walking around on a Saturday in downtown, but it was Tuesday. Buildings were bare-bones. After graduating, trying to get a job was a full-time job in itself. My folks were fortunate to have recession-proof(ish) jobs, but I remember having to help our neighbors move out (because we had a couple trailers). My wife's county became one of the top 5 poorest counties in the nation. It took a VERY long time for those counties/people to recover, and it still shows scars today. Interestingly enough, my parents built their house and rejected a sub-prime loan because they thought about this very thing. While others took a sub-prime and used it to get a bigger house, my folks stayed locked in, and even refinanced their mortgage. House has been paid off for about 10 years now. Property tax... well that's an all different, new type of hell they and others face 😂
Great movie. I was just coming out of graduate school in ‘08 & had accepted a position in February. Only in the fall did I realize how lucky I had been. Turned out to be the perfect time to start a 401(k), at the bottom with 20 years of growth to go!
This is one of those movies i had to re-watch multiple times. Each new time learning/picking up on something further. Which only served to further horrify me. Such a good movie.
Love that you watched this. A fav movie of mine and Carrell was great, as was the full cast. I do take a particular angle on the slightly odd and absurd 4th wall break cameos. I loved them. It was a pressure release moment in a stressful film that gave me a silly laugh as I am a silly man. So Bourdain and Robbie and Serena... yes... I found Serena's part to be forced but not her fault, Robiie's in a bathtub telling me to fuck off is glorious, and Bourdain's analysis is real. Why I make a casserole w leftovers. But I hadn't thought about the production and how it did feel "older"... I appreciated that comment and others, such as Mark being on a roof top when he is choosing between his anger over the situ and knowing he will financially gain from it. The cast down the line was amazing for their characters and that speaks well to the Direction. Nat is Gold again. Very glad you watched this. I've many people who found it too "brainy" where I found desperate humanity struggling to deal with the reality that was to come crushing down. As always, ☮☮💜💜
I left secondary school in 2007 so I was very much in the "at university during the crisis" age group. I mostly coped by getting slightly too obsessed with understanding the mechanics of the crisis and economy afterwards. So this film was a sureal watch when I first saw it! I'd seen plenty of Bloomberg videos with Baum in, for example, and there he was as a character in a movie. Very weird. The most surprising thing for me that's not movie related, but just in doing economics and politics stuff during that time, was that the feeling I came away with was that the finance bro people (while definitely almost infinately less likeable as individuals!!!) were not the ones I ended up most irritated with. It was people on my own side, in my own political camp (and political party for that matter) who resolutely refused to do things that would have helped due to us "needing" to "look tough" tighten our belts, "show responsibility" etc. Despite the fact that the best evidence from before 2008 and also all the best evidence since 2008 says that one of the few times there are basically zero trade offs is in the kind crash. To know the serious wonky economics textbooks say, essentially, "yeah, if you have a big recession and inflation and interest rates are zero then you can basically fix everything, essentially cost free, by just giving everyone money" ...like how often is that the case?? What a gift of a situation! But no no, we have to be seriousTM and look tough. That, honestly, makes me about a trillion times more angry than some idiot selling a synthetic CDO squared. It was an economist in my political party, as it happens, who first demonstrated that that was the case so it's particularly embarrassing for us to have squandered the opportunity to help people in need.
Excellent reaction Natalie. I absolutely love this movie. I appreciate both the message and the way the message was told. I love the celebrity explanation. I think the purpose of these cameos was to make a very complicated and dry material more easily digestable for the average audience member who isn't very sophisticated about the financial markets. Anyway, since you are such a Steve Carrell fan I wonder if you would consider reacting to 'The Way Way Back' with Steve Carrell and Sam Rockwell among others. Its by far one of my favorite coming of age movies.
I’ve seen this wonderful person on reaction compilations but this is my first time watching her react alone………Idk if this is too early but I’m in love with everything about her And now I wish I was Steve Carell so, great lol! Oh and I’ve seen this movie probably 6x love it
I entered college in 2004 with a major in journalism. If you look up the value of local newspapers, it begins to plummet starting 2004. Then I graduated into 2008. This movie is very personal to me
24:05 "To be fair, you _do_ buy more when it's low. You don't sell as it's _falling."_ You buy when it's bottomed _out._ _Absolutely,_ you sell while it's falling, it it looks like it's gonna _continue_ falling, before it falls any _further,_ because it's the value of stock you _own._ The more value it _loses,_ the more wealth _you_ lose. The best circumstances under which to buy are circumstances in which the stock only has room to gain _value._ The best circumstances under which to _sell_ are circumstances under which the stock only has room to _lose_ value. But if you've missed the peak and the stock you own is now losing value, it's in your best interests to sell it before it loses any _more._
@@AceneDean The only way for the less wealthy avoid financial ruin is to participate in the markets. The more you can make your income on gains instead of earnings the safer you will be. Historically the lower classes have been scared off from participating but they should be encouraged to invest as much as possible
This movie's topic is so dry for me; but the directing and acting is so top notch, the scrip keeps you invested and interested (even though you know how it ends!). I keep rewatching this movie every year, and I can't honestly tell you why. I think it's the whole package that is simply a masterwork.
"People don't like to think they got scammed. They don't like to think they were stupid and got scammed." When I bought my house, I actually seriously pissed off my loan agent. I was in my Senior year of HS during the collapse. So when I bought my first house a few years ago, I assumed I was a complete idiot and was actively being scammed by a criminal. In the middle of a call, I just straight up redirected his call to my new stepmom who is a mortgage underwriter. Guy was super patient and did a great job, but I could tell deep down he was imagining smashing my face against a campfire. That was in 2019. My appraised value of the house more than doubled within 2 years, and I'm still paying 2.5%.
On my Staylist. So glad you jumped in. The cast is spectacular. The content is unnerving but needed. The screenplay too a horribly boring situ, made it honestly real, and the cast ran. Watch this at least every year or change. Staylist. And danke to Nat ☮☮💜💜 Always a needed watch.
I'm really glad they made this movie. I remember, when the Great Recession started, wanting to know just what was going on, and picking up the book on which this movie is based. By the end of the first chapter, I had had the _hardest_ time making heads or tails of it. But the movie spells everything out in _crystal_ clarity.
I remember Black Monday, the financial crash of 1987. I was just a clerk and the crash didn't hurt me in any way. As usual, I with all my co-workers went to a local bar for the free food that kept us alive. It was in a finance-heavy area but the vibe in the place was completely different. We'd heard about the crash on the news during the day but didn't care; we were just a group of happy-go-lucky poor people out for a drink and to hoover up everything at the buffet. As we walked in, though, that vibe hit us in the face. There were guys in suits all over the place looking like their world had come to an end. Part of me was heartened to contemplate the misfortunes of people I considered vultures. I couldn't resist the opportunity to twist the knife a little. As our group passed several forlorn guys with their ties loosened, looking shell-shocked, I stopped and said "Hey, guys, what's wrong?" They looked up and one said "We got wiped out today. Apparently you didn't." I came back with "Are you kidding? Y'all didn't see this coming? We all went short pretty much across the board almost 2 weeks ago! We cleaned up today!" As my little group walked away, I swear one of those guys dropped his glass while they all dropped their jaws right on the floor. My God, we laughed over that one all night.
25:26 the credit default swaps are basically the opposite of the mortgage securities - now that the housing market has crashed, the swaps are worth millions and the securities are worthless (no point in owning debt if so many people are unable to pay it). So every bank and investment firm is racing to buy up credit default swaps to mitigate their losses from mortgage securities. And at this point, Mark is the last person/firm willing to sell their swaps, so the price is sky-high. He makes a fortune, but (as you said) only by profiting off other's misfortune.
Kudo's Natalie. When you talk about this topic boring or putting people off is and understate. There were time that I tried to simplify the subject matter and would be explaining to a person ... one second they would be wide awake and 15 seconds later there were dosing off! By the fifth time then I understood it was the subject matter. Great Movie ... Thanks! Great analysis also!
One of my top 10 movies of all time. About "Chris", the assistant to Jared (Ryan Gosling's character); apparently he was only supposed to exist in the "Jenga" scene as a silent extra, but Gosling took a liking to him while they were talking and goofing off between scenes, and the filmmakers expanded his role and ascended him by providing him lines.
At the beginning you think the Big Short is a boring documentary movie, in the middle you think it's a comedy, when the credits roll you realize it's a horror movie.
It's an often funny Docu-Horror. And like all Horror Franchises, it will happen again....
More horror than most people would realize. The guy that saw it all coming now only trades in one commodity... WATER! People should google "Water privatization in Bolivia". Also, props to the writers of "Quantum of Solace" and "No Escape" for hinting at the same IRL horror story.
@@LoneWolf-k1m I've been saying it for years, the "Water Wars" will likely be the next major Global Conflict (unless it gets started over something stupid before that).
fantastic synopsis
@@LoneWolf-k1m I've been saying it for years, the next Full Global Conflict will be the "Water Wars" (unless some random nonsense triggers it before that).
Ryan Goslings assistant was actually a guy on set that Ryan got along with really well. He wasn't originally in the script, but they had such good chemistry they gave him a part.
Chris, god damn it!
Shut up, Chris!
omg that’s good filmmaking right there
Goddammit Chris.
The real-life person that Christian Bale is playing (Michael Burry) was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I personally found Bale's performance to hit unnervingly close to home for me. An extremely well-deserved Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for him, and a great Adapted Screenplay win for the movie too!
I also recommend VICE from the same director where Christian Bale plays Dick Cheney too.
Watched this three times: Years ago, I couldn't see why he was weird, then I got diagnosed, and he made me cringe, and now, I kind of love how he doesn't mask at all while still not liking his amorality.
Yep. Yep.
It's an exaggerated depiction of the real guy, he comes across much more comfortable in interviews than how Bale portrays him.
@@PickpocketJones Given that it depicts Burry around 2005, when he was not nearly as famous as he is now, I suspect his shyness would have been higher back then.
Yeah, it's such a great performance, he was definitely the highlight of the movie for me. It's also so tragic yet relatable the way that no one understands or listens to him, and even in the end he still loses because of that
Margin Call - underrated movie from a bank's perspective, with fantastic acting.
Absolutely
That one is too close to reality
seconded tho. margin call is excellent. she would love it.
Came here to post this. Any time someone watches The Big Short I always recommend them to watch Margin Call afterwards (which is better imo), two movies that take wildly different approaches but handle somewhat similar subjects.
@Darkstar_Dayne weirdest thing is that big short is based on real people and events, margin call isn't though. Both excellent films Imo
Before the crash, I was working for a private car service - I remember one day in the summer driving an attorney up to a big tower in downtown L.A. where she was meeting with auto executives. I'd overheard a lot of rich person conversations by then, but this was startling; the entire drive back to her office she was yelling into her phone. "They have no idea...They won't listen...they have NO IDEA HOW BAD IT'S GOING TO BE." Thought back on that a lot when it all started going to hell.
That’s like a hot stock tip; you got some forewarning at least. Lucky
I worked at a fairly large lender in IT. But I had a background in real estate sales.
It was hard to convince anyone to care, and the $$ was crazy for mortgage types.
I bought a Scion and all my coworkers snickered. But when we got laid off, I was able to keep and pay it off.
The unofficial trilogy of the 2008 financial crisis is between The Big Short, Margin Call, and Too Big to Fail. Each movie gives a different perspective of the events where TBS comes from the view of investors and regular people, Margin Call takes an interal look of a nonspecific company going through the events, and TBTF gives the perspective from the US government trying get handle on the events. Combined they paint a good picture of the events and they're all pretty entertaining.
And Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps lmao
I'd add Inside Job from 2010 as well, a great documentary about the 08 crash.
Thanks. I didn't have the other 2 on my Must-See list. Fixed!
Oh, one to add to yours if you haven't see it... "The Biggest Little Farm". Quality; and just as educational as this one, but more uplifting.
@@sydhamelin1265 And _99 Homes._
God, I remember this era so well. I was a freshman in high school when the recession started and seeing whole streets of stores close down really freaked me out. My dad's business was in land development, so we were hit really hard that recession. If that time period taught me anything it's that anything and everything can be gone before you even realized you had it
The Big Short is one of my favorite movies, in my Top 5.
Also, "I'm going to find moral redemption at the roulette table." is one of the best line in the whole movie.
“Escape reality for a little bit” - Funny.
So glad you have watched this very rewatchable masterpiece.
Graduated college in 2008, along with most of my friends. With our UG degrees, we got the following jobs: Asst. Produce Manager at a grocery store, TV salesman at BestBuy, a bread truck driver, and freelance reporter in Western New Hampshire.
When I was a kid, it was widely understood that only the best and the brightest ever got accepted into good colleges. Yes, the earned degrees, but the degrees were irrelevent. What was relevant is that by hiring the best and the brightest you knew you were getting exceptional young people as new employees. What they learned while in college was of little value to businesses. The plan was to snag the very best talent and then teach them the very specific needs of their new job once they were on the job.
The government decided to make it easy for any high schoolers to get loans to fund a college education. Parents and students, all of whom were either already voters, or soon to be voters, loved the idea. Colleges loved the idea, too, and hired lots of new employees or either leased or had built new buildings for their campus. The business of running a college ramped up very quickly with all the new money showered on them via student loan programs.
But the expansion completely broke the hiring system. Employers could no longer rest assured that if they hired a college grad, they were getting an exceptional young person. Also, nobody ever checked beforehand to see if a doubling or tripling of college grads was needed due to massive shortages of available grads to fill positions that required a college degree. It wasn't. Not at all. Sorry fellas, at the end of the day the most blame needs to be dumped on the shoulders of any kid who never bothered to research whether the college degree they wanted to obtain would enable them to earn more money when they graduated.
I graduated in Econ in 2008. I got severely depressed together with the economy. I guess I was really supposed to be an economist.
I work in finance and every once in a while, I go into the office wearing a Bear Stearns sweater that says “Risk management, employee of the month 2008.”
😂
I’m an auditor in Houston and will wear an Enron hat on Fridays.
You are hilarious. Please, keep it up. That kind of thing is NEEDED to keep people from growing complacent.
(Our founding fathers couldn't afford to be this kind of stupid; the were building a Nation. We have let our education be dumbed-down and our integrity be compromised to the point where we are are in danger of Losing that Nation. Hey John Q. Public of America?? DO BETTER)
@@jacobsweet7327 You are hilarious. Please, keep it up. That kind of thing is NEEDED to keep people from growing complacent.
(Our founding fathers couldn't afford to be this kind of stupid; the were building a Nation. We have let our education be dumbed-down and our integrity be compromised to the point where we are are in danger of Losing that Nation. Hey John Q. Public of America?? DO BETTER)
It's truly criminal that there are people in this world who treat everyone like their own personal ATMs and feel absolutely no remorse or sympathy from stealing all your money. This movie made me so mad.
There’s another finance movie that I never thought I’d watch, went into it blind. Pretty interesting.
“Margin Call”
About investment bank going bankrupt.
Margin call is amazing. Its so subtle and awesome.
I personally don't see it that way. I see it as a bank president planning to take over Wall Street by starting the Recession.
@@Theomitehmm, interesting take. I didn’t see it that way but I was probably too stuck in the weeds of just trying to understand exactly what’s going on when it comes to all of the financial details to recognize some of the bigger picture aspects.
@@HidingFromFate It's not terribly obvious and I don't wanna spoil it here, but it's in the subtext of what the 2 1-on-1 scenes with Tuld & Sam (the 2nd is in the dining room). Watch those 2 scenes back-to-back and you see it's as plain as the nose on Jeremy Irons' face.
@@Theomite the value of their investments was a fact. They didn't start anything. It happened to them and they reacted. They bought a bunch of assets that were worth nothing in the end. Whether they decided to sell those assets before everyone else realized it or not, does not change the reality of the housing bust, that had just happened.
One of the most rewatchable movies and spectacularly made, pretty underrated too.
I don’t think it’s particularly underrated
It's almost a purely A-Plot film with the B-plot being C-plot. I fucking love it.
@@jstuka8286 Maybe not in the US but you have to look at it from a global perspective.
One of my favorite films! Pair this with Margin Call and it'll give you all the entertainment you need about the financial crisis!
One of my favorite films, every performance is great. The editing is great. The storytelling is great.
10/10 from Adam McKay, he took his end credit animations from The Other Guys and made a masterpiece
I would normally feel the same way as you about the celebrity cameos. In this movie, however, I think they really work.
The whole point is that when the complex information content is explained in a dry seminar or news format, people can tune out because they feel stupid and bored. When celebrities try to explain it, no matter how limited their understanding is, people actually listen and think they know something.
The crown jewel of the ongoing joke is when they partner Selena Gomez with Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and non-celebrity (at least in the wider culture) who really does understand a lot of what happened in 2008. It's almost like Adam McKay is saying "I've given you the nice facade, NOW are you listening to the real thing?" Particularly given that he's explaining the part of the story that causes the world to burn.
I would also highly recommend Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short," which this movie was based on. It's even funnier than the movie is, and that's a high bar.
The Margot Robbie setpiece alone is genius because of how unbelievably effective it is.
Also this is a great way to be faithful to the original book. t's a general problem "how do we adapt to screen a book with many two page long asides and footnotes?". Often writing teams would just ignore them, but in this case that would make the movie only watchable for people in the world of finance. This brought levity, but also makes the movie more accessible.
Need more roles like this for Gosling. LOVE him in this
Have you seen Nice guys? He was great in that 👍🏻
@@JoeWedgwood-ik9zo nope but I’m adding it to the list. Thanks 👍🏽
Gosling is one of my favorite actors no matter the role, comedic or dramatic
@@JoeWedgwood-ik9zoI'll second the recommendation for The Nice Guys. Another good one is The Ides of March, with an all-round stellar cast.
@@JoeWedgwood-ik9zo Funniest movie in recent years. Goslings true talent is comedy. I like him as an dramatic actor but I love him as a comedic one.
Now you have to follow up with Margin Call. Same topic, but a very different kind of film, with an excellent cast.
At the time when nobody knew that Kevin Spacey was a sex offender...things change fast!
Just an fyi, Kevin spacey was found not guilty.
@@leighanderson5621🤡
I read a handful of the major books to come out about the 2008 crash -- House of Cards, 13 Bankers, All the Devils Are Here, Bailout, etc. -- but I missed The Big Short until it came out in movie form. While I absolutely love this film, the most startling revelation in it for me was Steve Carell's amazing performance as Mark Baum. I didn't think too much of him on The Daily Show (classic), I didn't care for The 40 Year Old Virgin, I couldn't get into the U.S. version of The Office (the U.K. one SO much better)... and then he turns in this *amazing* and heart-wrenching performance. I honestly didn't know he had it in him.
If you want to see another good performance check out Little Miss Sunshine.
Carrell is amazing in foxcatcher
If you had watched The Office, you'd know. The UK & US versions are both different shows, different qualities. Carell is amazing, lots of improv and it shows.
I'll throw in the very underseen Dan in Real Life too.
The Big Short in book form, is amazing.
I appreciate that you specifically consider sound design in your ranking. It's an undervalued aspect of a movie, and can have a dramatic effect on the viewers' emotions.
So refreshing to see a reactor actually understanding the movie, even though she kinda missed why selling the SWAPS when the market was collapsing was a good thing. Best reaction I've seen of this movie so far ❤
Gosling and Carell did a great job, but the work of Christian Bale in this movie was off-the-chart good for me.
Not only are they still doing this with mortgages, they're doing it with most other debt. Why don't they ever forgive any student debt without making someone else pay for it?(usually suing the institution) Because a HUGE amount of investing is wrapped up in SLABS, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. And yes, they have multi-tier betting on these just like CDOs. *ALSO* get this, *you* no longer get to enjoy a bailout if it happens. Because of how unpopular the bailout was, the law was rewritten that we're no longer depositors, we're creditors. And banks can institute a 'bail in' to take money out of bank accounts to pay the banks debts since 'creditors have to pay their fair share', and the only thing you might get is stock in the bank, that just failed, that they will hold 'on your behalf' so you can't even sell it to try to get something out of it. And this is *not* FDIC insured, because the worthless stock is considered fair compensation for your 'contribution'. It's been tested, look up Cypress Bail In, and that might be in the EU but the US has the same thing.
I will be looking all this up, cause what 👀
@@paradox_productions I apologize for your impending existential crisis.
The best part is US Congress trying to pass legislation to stop corporations from owning real estate/housing properties, because they fixed it: the people who own the CDOs and own the shorts can't ever fail if they're also the people paying the mortgages.
As long as I, the investment bank, pay these mortgages, then my CDOs stay valuable, and the collateral I collect for shorts against them keeps coming in.
Investors backing debt isn't an issue. Lots of things went wrong in 2008 to make the crash happen, but perhaps the worst is the ratings agencies rating everything incorrectly. If the MBS products were rated correctly, then they would not have ended up in peoples pensions and retirement funds. Yes the housing bubble would still pop and people who chose to invest in sub prime mortgages would take the losses. But it likely doesn't become a worldwide financial meltdown.
I AM SO GLAD YOU'RE REACTING TO THIS! I loved this movie and come back to it quite frequently....
Oh hell yes! More people need to see this movie
I know someone who worked on Wall Street during the '08 crash. He once told me 'wealth isn't made, it's transferred.' Unfortunately when it comes down to it, wealth is usually transferred from the poor to the rich.
What's more terrifying is that I think in the event that it doesn't, then it will be transferred by force. In this recession, the wealthy are hurting, and lo and behold, the political situation to turn citizens into subjects is getting more and more overt.
The poor don’t know how to transfer wealth so it just doesn’t exist in the other direction
And billionaire propaganda has convinced people that the ones telling them that billionaires are the enemy are just jealous and lying. The saddest part about all of this isn't the predictable unlimited greed of the super rich, it's the millions of poor people who still buy into their bullshit and vote for policies that literally only hurt them.
@@chemquests🤡
sounds like a depressed dude. To me, wealth is goods and services, jobs are a means to get those things (+ free time), and money is an intermediary.
Such a great film!
Margin Call is a great movie showing a different perspective on this topic.
I was pretty impressed that you actually knew quite a bit about the topic. I have seen several people discuss this movie and they had trouble keeping up. It allowed the reaction to stand above most.
“The big Short” “ “Margin call” and especially “Too Big to fail” are essential for understanding the 2008 financial crisis.
This film is 1 of a triptych of films dealing with the Great Recession from various POV s of the industry. The other 2 are MARGIN CALL (the banks) and TOO BIG TOO FAIL (the government). All of them are amazing and worth watching.
And Mark Baum's real name is Steve Eismann. And it wasn't his brother it was his infant son; he was accidentally smothered to death, so they understandably changed that for the movie.
Oh, and on the January 11 scene, when Mark finds out the stocks aren't changing price and goes to S&P, the people are walking around New York in regular clothes. January 11th, 2007 had unseasonably warm weather for January so people actually could forego their winter clothes.
15:20 is one of the greatest ranges of emotional reactions I have ever seen 🤣
one of those movies that I can watch over and over for some reason..I love it!!
we might disagree but I think the Anthony bourdain and Salena Gomez parts are really well done and do a great job explaining complex financial products with analogies.
I love this movie, thanks for reacting to it!
Margin Call is a great follow up on this, but delivers a way more serious tone from the bigger bank's perspective and those who were at the root cause. Acting is 10/10 and truly makes you feel the weight of an incoming crisis.
A great way to get various angles of the 2008 crisis are three films in order: The Big Short; then Margin Call which is from the perspective of the big banks; finally Too Big To Fail which is from the perspective of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve (Carrell hints at this at the end of Big Short).
I graduated college in 2004 and everyone was telling me to buy a house during the bubble, family, friends…. I said no thanks, there was no way I felt homes should be that expensive. Glad I listened to my gut. I sat on the sidelines and when it all crashed, I bought my first home for a fraction, and put a lot of cash back into investments. Also got an $8,000 tax credit refund for buying my first home in 2009.
Same. I almost bought a place in 2004 right out of college, but through a number of circumstances didn't buy until last year. Really glad of that.
My wife is very selective about books she will read. Because she ALWAYS prefers to save time by watching something as a movie instead. So she will never read a book that might be made into a movie. That's why she almost exclusively reads nonfiction.
She was an economics major, so when this book came out, she was interested and thought there was no way this could be made into a movie, so she read it. It read like a textbook, so she was confident it was the right choice, and was shocked when someone found a way to adapt it into a very funny movie script.
I heard an interview with the script writers on NPR a while back where they talk about how the movie is intentionally split in half in two styles, where the first half is comedy and the second is tragedy.
My takeaway from what happened here is that it really is the ratings agencies that should have the most blame in this. We rely on auditors and rating agencies to be the backstop and tell the truth. A bank can say, "Here is a pile of... something. Put a value on it." When the rating agency is calling garbage gold, THEY are the ones lying and committing fraud.
Scary that the rating agencies get most of the money from those they rate.
We-ell... the first fraud happened when people were given those loans. Both sides of it were complicit in lying about the applicant's ability to pay, because they were simply selling them on. Banks giving a loan and then holding on to it would have done their due diligence and not given those loans. Those loans were always going to default because they simply couldn't pay past the initial payments and the paperwork was all lies. Of course, the people taking those loans should have understood it but many didn't. It's possible some of them were lied to as well. That's where it started.
The second case of fraud was the loangivers selling the loans they knew to be complete fabrication and doomed to fail as a normal, valid loans. After that sale, people basically relied on the paperwork. They maybe knew it was crap but they couldn't have easily proven it on paperwork alone. After they were bundled and repackaged the paperwork became near impossible to track back to the original loans.
I think many traders didn't actually understand the CDOs and CDSs but they saw the profits and the upward trends. There was a data-based mathematical explanation on how it should have worked but the data used was a very short period in Texas markets, I think, and the model was flawed. It e.g. failed to account for how the loans weren't actually mathematically independent so that enough of them failing would cause a systemic effect through markets to basically cause the rest of them to fail too.
Sure, the ratings agencies have very bad incentives and are/were horrible but at the end of the day, they were just the last backstop. Everyone else before them should have also caught it. They didn't because they all had the same incentives not to. So, you really can't dump it on the ratings agencies. Honestly, people should have also known their business model and understood what that meant for the reliability of the ratings. Having been bitten, they now know.
I guess everyone, who might have cared, expected the rest of the system to work properly so that them grifting on their part of it wouldn't matter.
Ultimately the blame is on the state. It's the government's job to regulate things like this, whether directly or indirectly through rating agencies. If the rating agency is not regulated and is just a private company raking in the profits with no repercussions then the state has failed.
Americans like to pontificate about freedom and privatizing everything but when the regulating body is completely privatized and separated from the state then there's no accountability left whatsoever. People talk about America heading toward "idiocracy" but on some levels it has already been there for a long, long time.
I wonder why all those comments went missing.
It's insane that the ratings agencies are privatized and have to give good ratings to ensure an edge in a market of competition.
One of my favorite movies. So glad you enjoyed it 🤘
I enjoy watching with you. This one was unique for me. I used to work in the Hedge Fund industry, in NYC. I sold the the tech and software hedge funds needed to function. My world consisted of 5th, Madison but mostly Park Ave, where 90% of the NYC hedge funds are located. A lot more of the industry know this was coming. They just didn't have positions to profit from it, aside from just shorting stock as the larger mkt was tanking. I remember being at the Argyle Conference and hearing fund managers saying, "If you can't accurately price these stocks (CDOs) then it's worth nothing." This was back in 2006/7. I got out in 2007, right before this all went down. My office was right around the corner from the Bear/ Sterns building. I couldn't imagine watching those folks all lose their jobs at the same time.
FINALLY! I’ve been waiting for a popular reactor to do this! Now it will start a chain reaction and reactors that copy this channel will watch it as well, then reactors that copy those channels will continue, until this movie is all over the radar of everyone…
…then again it took me two tries watching this movie to even understand how it all works, so it should yield some interesting results depending on who else all watches this.
It's been a long while since i've watched a Natalie Gold video. I realllly like the inclusion of rating the movie on those four categories - it gives me a better understanding of your reaction to the movie... which was probably the point. Good shit.
elder millennial here (i'm 42). i was three years out of college when this crash hit. the job market shriveled up. the only upside was that my ex and i were able to buy a cheaper house as the market was on the upswing a few years later.
I’m 47 & have never thought of myself as elder; that’s pretty funny because my wife is about to turn 42. Wonder if she’ll mind me borrowing that phrase?!
@@chemquests lol i'm 42 also
@@chemquests that's because you're a young X. We 42s are the first of the millenials, hence 'elder'. I find myself a lot closer to X's than younger millenials most of the time.
I did not know how much I needed a channel where I could watch someone like you react to movies like this!
Escapism 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Brilliant movie! Love the editing choices! Amazing acting all around!
Great choice 🤛😎👍
Love the person who is deciding these movies ♥️♥️
This video was worth it just for watching Natalie laugh so much.
This is an awesome reaction. Thank you Nat!
Mind blown by that Red Hawk fact. Great reaction!
I was in junior year of high school when this happened. I remember that year very well. I was able to get my first job through a school program. Three months later I got laid off from my first job because my employer yes we have entered a recession. I didn’t know wtf a recession was. I remember seeing many people lose their homes in my neighborhood that was just 2 years old. That event shaped my entire world view. Not only when it comes to the importance of money but also how events that are not in our control can have such far reaching consequences to regular people like me. It was a learning moment. I took it to heart ever since then. And fortunately 16 years later, it’s all good. 😊
This movie captures the tone of the book exceptionally well. One of the best book-to-film adaptations imo.
I graduated uni in December 2008 but spent the next couple of years travelling/living abroad, so I was very lucky in how I avoided most of the impacts (without knowing much about it at the time). A few years later (2013-16) I was working as a debt collector and speaking with people whose businesses had collapsed, through no fault of their own 😢 really put things into perspective.
The "just don't fucking dance" speech gives me chills every time.
As to the use of the Phantom of the Opera, I suspect it was done to suggest going into the heart of financial darkness as represented by that Vegas conference. Kind of like hearing Darth Vader's unmistakable score when he enters a scene.
You mentioned the smaller roles and one that was set up to be visially symbolic was Melissa Leo's, in addition to being expertly acted. Karen Gillan's contribution, while very brief, was notable for well establishing a loathsome character.
You are more informed and sharper than most viewers and they need simpler explanations, hence the parts you didn't like or need. I have watched a lot of reactions to this movie and in most cases the viewers needed the explanations.
Even though i never have understood anything that happens in this movie, i still love it every time i watch it lmao
Evergreen thought
Encourage mortgage companies to approve loans for people who could never pay back the loan.
@@Dularr oh wait that actually really helped haha
Basically, they are buying insurance contracts where they know the house is already on fire while the banks acting as the "insurance companies" believe they are selling insurance on a home that will never, in the history of the world will burn. In other words, the banks are betting that Michael Jordan is going to win a pick-up game against a nine-year-old but they don't know that Michael Jordan has been left a quadriplegic in a car accident while these guys, Burry and Baum, know about the accident.
My favorite moment in this movie is when the two garage band investors are dancing and Brad Pitt puts them in their place. Such a great bait and switch to remind the audience that while this all seems like a game, it’s very real.
The rating agency part is the one that shocked me the most. The actors reactions are really well done.
It has probably been mentioned, but, if you didn't notice: the Money Maker scene is even funnier when you realize that by taking the mugs he is LITERALLY mugging them. I've watched this movie many times but that symbolism didn't strike me until maybe the third watch. And I definitely think it's totally intentional and not just something people are reading into it.
I personally thought he was collecting trophies.
@@Theomite He is, but the fact that he is collecting MUGS as his trophies I believe is deliberate and symbolic. It's too specific. Why not a pen? Why always a mug, and not a variety of things? He's passing it off like he's just this affable nitwit on the spectrum, but really he's going in there like a cold blooded killer to rob them blind. It's sort of him making a subtle statement to them and, by proxy, us as the audience.
I was at a mortgage closing but the bank didn’t fund the loan. The bank was New Century Mortgage, they filled bankruptcy the day of our closing.
Margin Call. It's not a "true story" like TBS but it's a depiction of something that almost definitely happened, probably a few times over in various places. I think of it as a financial horror movie. Slow paced, major tension, fantastic acting
Watching the two mortgage brokers wander through the job fair with the deer in the headlights look, made me happy.
You would love Margin Call, another stacked cast from a different perspective of the same event.
Once a year I watch Margin Call and The Big Short just to remind myself how quickly and completely the cards can tumble, and what it means when you live at the bottom.
Just watched this yesterday with my dad, we both absolutely loved it!
When they said they were doing the book I thought no way, un-filmable. I was very very wrong. Almost every point of the book is in the movie, with some great performances.
Good film adaptations of difficult books are always fascinating!
@@__Obscure__ Another good one is The Martian. Both smart enough to realise that anyone watching your movie is smart enough to keep up. You don't necessarily need to adapt it. If you do? World War Z. An average zombie movie that's not anywhere near as good as the book. Still annoyed I didn't get to see the Battle of Yonkers!
such an important & entertaining movie! 👍👍
This is one of my favorite movies of all time, glad to see someone reacting to it on here!
I think this is one of my favorite movies. Everything from the acting to the story and the editing. 🔥
I love this movie for its effective illustration of what happened.
My second favorite on this subject is a companion piece: MARGIN CALL
I appreciate you and thank you for making content.
I was at the very last semester in college when the market crashed (Graphic Design). It was weird. I remember walking through busy skyways for nearly 4 years while I went to class, and then when the recession hit, it was like walking around on a Saturday in downtown, but it was Tuesday. Buildings were bare-bones. After graduating, trying to get a job was a full-time job in itself. My folks were fortunate to have recession-proof(ish) jobs, but I remember having to help our neighbors move out (because we had a couple trailers). My wife's county became one of the top 5 poorest counties in the nation. It took a VERY long time for those counties/people to recover, and it still shows scars today.
Interestingly enough, my parents built their house and rejected a sub-prime loan because they thought about this very thing. While others took a sub-prime and used it to get a bigger house, my folks stayed locked in, and even refinanced their mortgage. House has been paid off for about 10 years now. Property tax... well that's an all different, new type of hell they and others face 😂
Great movie. I was just coming out of graduate school in ‘08 & had accepted a position in February. Only in the fall did I realize how lucky I had been. Turned out to be the perfect time to start a 401(k), at the bottom with 20 years of growth to go!
So glad you reacted to this movie, one of my favourites
This movie is based on a Michael Lewis book. He’s had other books of his made into film. You’ll love Moneyball.
Oooh Moneyball is great!
This is one of those movies i had to re-watch multiple times. Each new time learning/picking up on something further. Which only served to further horrify me. Such a good movie.
That “it’s like his drumming, it’s how his brain works” such a brilliant catch !
Love that you watched this. A fav movie of mine and Carrell was great, as was the full cast. I do take a particular angle on the slightly odd and absurd 4th wall break cameos. I loved them. It was a pressure release moment in a stressful film that gave me a silly laugh as I am a silly man. So Bourdain and Robbie and Serena... yes... I found Serena's part to be forced but not her fault, Robiie's in a bathtub telling me to fuck off is glorious, and Bourdain's analysis is real. Why I make a casserole w leftovers.
But I hadn't thought about the production and how it did feel "older"... I appreciated that comment and others, such as Mark being on a roof top when he is choosing between his anger over the situ and knowing he will financially gain from it. The cast down the line was amazing for their characters and that speaks well to the Direction.
Nat is Gold again. Very glad you watched this. I've many people who found it too "brainy" where I found desperate humanity struggling to deal with the reality that was to come crushing down. As always, ☮☮💜💜
The book is really good too. Lots more juicy details. Sometimes the audiobook is on ytube
Despite the stress of this topic, I can rewatch this very happily. The director made some deep magic here.
I enjoyed The Big Short, but my favorite movie on the Financial Crisis is Too Big To Fail with William Hurt and Paul Giamatti
I left secondary school in 2007 so I was very much in the "at university during the crisis" age group. I mostly coped by getting slightly too obsessed with understanding the mechanics of the crisis and economy afterwards. So this film was a sureal watch when I first saw it! I'd seen plenty of Bloomberg videos with Baum in, for example, and there he was as a character in a movie. Very weird.
The most surprising thing for me that's not movie related, but just in doing economics and politics stuff during that time, was that the feeling I came away with was that the finance bro people (while definitely almost infinately less likeable as individuals!!!) were not the ones I ended up most irritated with. It was people on my own side, in my own political camp (and political party for that matter) who resolutely refused to do things that would have helped due to us "needing" to "look tough" tighten our belts, "show responsibility" etc. Despite the fact that the best evidence from before 2008 and also all the best evidence since 2008 says that one of the few times there are basically zero trade offs is in the kind crash. To know the serious wonky economics textbooks say, essentially, "yeah, if you have a big recession and inflation and interest rates are zero then you can basically fix everything, essentially cost free, by just giving everyone money" ...like how often is that the case?? What a gift of a situation! But no no, we have to be seriousTM and look tough. That, honestly, makes me about a trillion times more angry than some idiot selling a synthetic CDO squared.
It was an economist in my political party, as it happens, who first demonstrated that that was the case so it's particularly embarrassing for us to have squandered the opportunity to help people in need.
That's one of the things the Australian government did right at the time.
One of the most important movies ever, thanks for giving it attention!
Excellent reaction Natalie. I absolutely love this movie. I appreciate both the message and the way the message was told. I love the celebrity explanation. I think the purpose of these cameos was to make a very complicated and dry material more easily digestable for the average audience member who isn't very sophisticated about the financial markets.
Anyway, since you are such a Steve Carrell fan I wonder if you would consider reacting to 'The Way Way Back' with Steve Carrell and Sam Rockwell among others. Its by far one of my favorite coming of age movies.
Thank you for turning on the subtitles 😊
I’ve seen this wonderful person on reaction compilations but this is my first time watching her react alone………Idk if this is too early but I’m in love with everything about her
And now I wish I was Steve Carell so, great lol! Oh and I’ve seen this movie probably 6x love it
I entered college in 2004 with a major in journalism. If you look up the value of local newspapers, it begins to plummet starting 2004. Then I graduated into 2008. This movie is very personal to me
One of my most favourite movies. It’s just done so well.
24:05 "To be fair, you _do_ buy more when it's low. You don't sell as it's _falling."_
You buy when it's bottomed _out._ _Absolutely,_ you sell while it's falling, it it looks like it's gonna _continue_ falling, before it falls any _further,_ because it's the value of stock you _own._ The more value it _loses,_ the more wealth _you_ lose.
The best circumstances under which to buy are circumstances in which the stock only has room to gain _value._ The best circumstances under which to _sell_ are circumstances under which the stock only has room to _lose_ value. But if you've missed the peak and the stock you own is now losing value, it's in your best interests to sell it before it loses any _more._
Such a great movie and really helps highlight how our profit-driven system is fundamentally broken.
Or how anyone can capitalize on wealthy hubris
This movie has prepared me to be opportunistic at every dip
@@chemquests hmmmmm
@@AceneDean The only way for the less wealthy avoid financial ruin is to participate in the markets. The more you can make your income on gains instead of earnings the safer you will be. Historically the lower classes have been scared off from participating but they should be encouraged to invest as much as possible
Not broken, It's working exactly as intended
This movie's topic is so dry for me; but the directing and acting is so top notch, the scrip keeps you invested and interested (even though you know how it ends!).
I keep rewatching this movie every year, and I can't honestly tell you why. I think it's the whole package that is simply a masterwork.
Great film, incredible editing... should make anyone who watches it scared and furious
"People don't like to think they got scammed. They don't like to think they were stupid and got scammed."
When I bought my house, I actually seriously pissed off my loan agent.
I was in my Senior year of HS during the collapse. So when I bought my first house a few years ago, I assumed I was a complete idiot and was actively being scammed by a criminal. In the middle of a call, I just straight up redirected his call to my new stepmom who is a mortgage underwriter.
Guy was super patient and did a great job, but I could tell deep down he was imagining smashing my face against a campfire.
That was in 2019. My appraised value of the house more than doubled within 2 years, and I'm still paying 2.5%.
Wow, you're amazing. Please tell us more about yourself not related to the movie if possible.
I’m doing good in the game, so I’m doing good in life!!!
2015 for my house. Still sitting at a nice 3% and some change.
I'm still getting refi offers for rates higher than my current mortgage rate.
On my Staylist. So glad you jumped in. The cast is spectacular. The content is unnerving but needed. The screenplay too a horribly boring situ, made it honestly real, and the cast ran. Watch this at least every year or change. Staylist. And danke to Nat ☮☮💜💜 Always a needed watch.
I'm really glad they made this movie. I remember, when the Great Recession started, wanting to know just what was going on, and picking up the book on which this movie is based. By the end of the first chapter, I had had the _hardest_ time making heads or tails of it.
But the movie spells everything out in _crystal_ clarity.
I remember Black Monday, the financial crash of 1987. I was just a clerk and the crash didn't hurt me in any way. As usual, I with all my co-workers went to a local bar for the free food that kept us alive. It was in a finance-heavy area but the vibe in the place was completely different. We'd heard about the crash on the news during the day but didn't care; we were just a group of happy-go-lucky poor people out for a drink and to hoover up everything at the buffet. As we walked in, though, that vibe hit us in the face. There were guys in suits all over the place looking like their world had come to an end. Part of me was heartened to contemplate the misfortunes of people I considered vultures.
I couldn't resist the opportunity to twist the knife a little.
As our group passed several forlorn guys with their ties loosened, looking shell-shocked, I stopped and said "Hey, guys, what's wrong?" They looked up and one said "We got wiped out today. Apparently you didn't." I came back with "Are you kidding? Y'all didn't see this coming? We all went short pretty much across the board almost 2 weeks ago! We cleaned up today!"
As my little group walked away, I swear one of those guys dropped his glass while they all dropped their jaws right on the floor.
My God, we laughed over that one all night.
This was right when I was graduating university and is probably why I live in Japan to this day. Love this film!
25:26 the credit default swaps are basically the opposite of the mortgage securities - now that the housing market has crashed, the swaps are worth millions and the securities are worthless (no point in owning debt if so many people are unable to pay it). So every bank and investment firm is racing to buy up credit default swaps to mitigate their losses from mortgage securities. And at this point, Mark is the last person/firm willing to sell their swaps, so the price is sky-high. He makes a fortune, but (as you said) only by profiting off other's misfortune.
love ur reactions! you are so sharp, funny and insightful!
Kudo's Natalie. When you talk about this topic boring or putting people off is and understate. There were time that I tried to simplify the subject matter and would be explaining to a person ... one second they would be wide awake and 15 seconds later there were dosing off! By the fifth time then I understood it was the subject matter. Great Movie ... Thanks! Great analysis also!
Really incisive commentary here! You introduced some new traits to this film that I didn't consider before.
One of my top 10 movies of all time.
About "Chris", the assistant to Jared (Ryan Gosling's character); apparently he was only supposed to exist in the "Jenga" scene as a silent extra, but Gosling took a liking to him while they were talking and goofing off between scenes, and the filmmakers expanded his role and ascended him by providing him lines.