Continuing my yearly trek through the various best picture nominees, my latest film was the Adam McKay directed The Big Short, which was an incredibly entertaining, and turn hilarious and heartbreaking look at the financial crisis of 2007-08.
The film is made up of three and a half interlocking stories about various investors who predicted the housing crisis ahead of time, and worked to find a way to beat the system. The movie is narrated by a trader named Jared Vennett (played by Ryan Gosling), who brings the three main stories together and helps the audience along with the trickier bits of exposition necessary for a film like this; by using celebrity cameos and analogies which are both highly disturbing and entertaining.
This was a movie I was a little sure of coming into, but left feeling pretty amazed; unlike character driven movies this year like Brooklyn, The Martian, and The Revenant, this film is focused largely on an event most of us affected by, but few of us fully understood (me included).
This was actually the second Adam McKay-directed film about economics I've seen the last few years, the first being The Unbelievably Sweet Alpacas, for the the online series We The Economy. That film was also pretty great, animated, and much more educational than expected. Check it out here!
Along with Brooklyn, this film may have been the most surprising to me from the nominees, as it's not my usual fare, but was an incredibly engaging film.
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