The Big Short: A Collateralized Debt Obligation
A Collateralized Debt Obligation or CDO is (according to The Big Short) a lumping together of many different loans into one big loan. And the market crashed in 2008 primarily because many of these CDOs were full of loans that should have been rated poorly, but due to a combination of greed, stupidity, and fear, the CDOs were rated at the highest possible rating, a AAA. Think of The Big Short as a CDO. It is a mixture of ideas from lots of better movies, all lumped together, and it desperately wants to be given the highest rating. But it doesn’t deserve it. Because this movie--like the CDOs that crashed the market in 2008--may have been started with all of the best of intentions, but along the way some combination of greed, stupidity and fear
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It features multiple (poorly made) photo montages, fourth-wall-breaking, words that appear on screen to define economic terms, jarring music choices, and celebrities who--on three separate occasions--stop the film completely to explain economics directly to the audience in layman's terms. It is almost impossible to talk about The Big Short without talking about a movie it is obviously inspired by. The other big, recent, aggressively-stylistic movie based on a true story involving economics--The Wolf of Wall Street. So how does The Wolf of Wall Street’s style succeed where The Big Short’s fails? The problem with The Big Short is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Wolf doesn't care about the specific economic choices its main characters make and The Big Short does. It cares a lot. And it uses stylistic techniques to explain the economics. So the choices in Wolf feel like an extension of the movie, where the same choices in TBS feel like lazy exposition dumps. Unfortunately, many of the tactics used have lost a lot of the luster since Wolf came out, and while watching them used in TBS, the audience is stuck thinking about how much more original they were two years ago. Not to mention that in addition to the fourth-wall-breaking exposition dumps that the film utilizes, it also leans on normal, run of the mill exposition filled dialogue to explain things,
It features multiple (poorly made) photo montages, fourth-wall-breaking, words that appear on screen to define economic terms, jarring music choices, and celebrities who--on three separate occasions--stop the film completely to explain economics directly to the audience in layman's terms. It is almost impossible to talk about The Big Short without talking about a movie it is obviously inspired by. The other big, recent, aggressively-stylistic movie based on a true story involving economics--The Wolf of Wall Street. So how does The Wolf of Wall Street’s style succeed where The Big Short’s fails? The problem with The Big Short is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Wolf doesn't care about the specific economic choices its main characters make and The Big Short does. It cares a lot. And it uses stylistic techniques to explain the economics. So the choices in Wolf feel like an extension of the movie, where the same choices in TBS feel like lazy exposition dumps. Unfortunately, many of the tactics used have lost a lot of the luster since Wolf came out, and while watching them used in TBS, the audience is stuck thinking about how much more original they were two years ago. Not to mention that in addition to the fourth-wall-breaking exposition dumps that the film utilizes, it also leans on normal, run of the mill exposition filled dialogue to explain things,