Film review: THE BIG SHORT (Adam McKay, 2015)

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was quite the talking point. People became bankrupt; many lost their jobs and their homes. The haphazard behaviour of bankers cost many people’s livelihoods and the developed world has never fully recovered. Adam McKay, famed for directing entertaining comedies such as Anchorman and The Other Guys, steps into the realms of the big boys with the multi Oscar-nominated The Big Short, an adaptation of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by financial journalist Michael Lewis.

My favourite film critic Mark Kermode has a trope he often enlists in film reviews, known as ‘Meg Ryan as an airplane pilot’ (an allusion to Courage Under Fire), whenever he comes across a piece of casting in a film that nobody would buy in real life because the actor is too glamorous or mis-suited to the role. Well, going by that benchmark, there are three Meg Ryan as airplane pilots in The Big Short, with mis-casting so shockingly woeful, these proverbial helicopters would easily crash into each other.

Firstly, Ryan Gosling as a smarmy banker, complete with brunette hair-dye and poor treatment of his Yes-man of an assistant, does not ring true in the least. In films such as Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Notebook, dishy Gosling was in his element playing the dreamy heart-throb. Even in grittier, violent movies such as Drive or Only God Forgives, Gosling is able to transcend his good looks and lends credibility to the role of guys who will travel through the road to hell, laced with good intentions, trying to do what they believe is right. But in The Big Short, as the know-it-all smug Deutsche Bank employee Jared Vennett who spots a loophole in the fragile housing market that he can capitalise on to his gains, he does not convince, and no amount of dark hair or sharp suits will make him a credible banker.

Then we’ve got Christian Bale. Somehow, miraculously recipient of an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Michael Burry (although Jennifer Lawrence is on four Oscar nominations now, so, there’s no accounting for taste), a former doctor-come-number cruncher who runs his own asset management company, Bale reaches his intense peaks of American Psycho and The Fighter, but nowhere near the same level of credibility. As his eyes dart around at you (one of his eyes is a glass eye, although I never worked out which) in an attempt to convey Burry’s inability to relate to other people, I couldn’t help but feel faintly embarrassed. The heavy metal music and frenetic drumming that his character has a penchant for are all components in the novel, but by retaining them all in The Big Short for Bale, they do nothing other than illustrate how mis-suited he is to the role. As he is photographed lying on the ground, notes strewn across the floor, I never buy the frame as anything other than an over-cherographed scene of MOVIE STAR Christian Bale, surrounded by some finance notes.

Brad Pitt completes the Holy Trinity of awkward casing. He, like Gosling, has to overcome the hurdle of having to transcend his good looks, and his role in The Big Short is as misanthropic eco-aware Ben Rickett, who, having worked there previously, despises everything Wall Street stands for, but begrudgingly uses his reputation to get a seat at the table for The Brownfield Trust, a small investment firm run by yuppies played by Finn Wittrock and John Magaro. These two lads who a

re not particularly likeable in their roles but at least one of the film’s few believable elements, in their earnest, callow enthusiasm, and their interactions with each other as they stumble upon the mess of sub-prime lending are some of the slightly more nuanced elements of The Big Short's shambles of a screenplay. In one scene, Pitt's character lectures Wittrock and Magaro for being excited that their bets against the housing market are coming in, because whilst it's good news for them, it's awful news for many others. This is certainly true, but having handsome Brad Pitt playing morose with nothing but an unconvincing wig deliver it definitely dampens the strength of the message significantly.

Of the A-list poster-billed cast, only Steve Carell escapes with any pride in tact. His character is angry and has a very personal score to settle with the finance world, having a brother who worked there who suicided years previously. Carrell balances the pathos that this loss causes his character, along with amusing comedy of his raging tirades and general poor social etiquette, so that when his character is disgusted by the amoral people in finance and the little caution they throw to the wind when dealing with other people’s lives, we, too, share his disgust. The crew who work for him, which includes Rafe Spall, are also a semi-honourable bunch, amidst all the other wankers, and the camaraderie and fraternity between them, and the way they look out for Carell’s character, was one of the few elements of The Big Short I enjoyed.

Many critics have commended The Big Short’s irreverent take on the subject and off-the-wall execution. Admittedly, there are some effective scenes; the use of Gorillaz’s Feel Good Inc was nostalgic heaven, and the use of pop culture references to depict the passing of time certainly sits quite well. But mostly, the machine-gun, rat-tat-tat, not staying with any scene for too long, breaking the fourth wall and making Family Guy-style cutaways film ultimately gave me a headache.

I love Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez as much as the next person. But to enlist them to dumb down the subprime mortgage crisis to me, when I hold an Economics degree from the University of Bath, was the wrong side of off-kilter, and downright patronising. Margot Robbie, covered in bubbles, tells us that whenever we hear the word ‘sub-prime loan’, we should think ‘shit’. Well, in that vein, whenever someone mentions The Big Short, you should think, The Big Sh…

5/10

Make-up review: THICK & FAST MASCARA (Soap and Glory)

 

Relatively inexperienced with mascara I may be, but even I knew enough about them to realise that this was a complete dud of a product. As aforementioned, my eyelashes are already woefully short, so you could argue that this product doesn't have a whole lot to work with. 

An awful attempt to give myself a French manicure.

I've graduated!~~~ I got a 2:1 in Economics, which means all those endless nights of studying Taylor Rules, logit and probit regressions, memorising elasticity equations, solving mathematical problems pertaining to moral hazard and auction theory, pretending to give a damn about the stock market, reading the FT, deriving Hotelling formulae and memorising facts about tax evasion have amounted to something.

To celebrate, I went on a bit of a splurge, buying a tonne of girly crap I didn't really need. One of these things was a Bourjois Paris French manicure kit, because I'll be entering the working world next month and I want give the semblance of a ~classy lady~ in worldplace, even if I'm anything but. The kit was £9.99 for three things:

It's classily packaged stuff, and extremely functional. I can imagine that if applied correctly and accurately, it will give the look that you can get in the salon. However, I'm a completely nail polish n00b and so my attempts were rather amateurish, to say the least:

This is somewhat of an embarrassment: uneven application, chipped at parts, smudged... I definitely need to train.

I'm a big fan of this product though, and will continue to use it until that elusive day when I actually get it right!

Book review: MELTDOWN (Ben Elton)

Pride, as we all know, comes before a fall, and nothing epitomizes this better than the recent financial crisis, wherein ill-advised gambles made by bankers and a hubbub of lending loans for people who weren’t ready to buy a house came together in the mother of all hubrises. Ben Elton uses the credit crisis as the backdrop to his book, wherein a group of University friends who have all lucked out – to varying degrees – in their following life choices find that none of them are untouchable from the financial woes of the world.

At the centre of the story is London investment banker Jimmy Corby, an affable, happy-go-lucky man who fell into his trading job with the touch of good fortune that had accompanied him in almost every other step of his life, including meeting his ditzy, well-meaning wife Monica, without whom, it is generally agreed that Corby would have spiralled into the descending spiral of a heart attack or crack addiction. 

His old Uni mates, which include fellow banker Rupert, who carries his craft out with much more of a sneering veneer than Jim, Dave, an established architect, Henry, a self-conscious political activist and Lizzie and Robbo, a married couple, amongst whom she is the frontline of a popular food company that caters for upmarket events and he, mooching off her success.

The friends – and all their wives – have all been in frequent contact since their callow University days, though it is noted that their friendship has barely been tested, such is the cushiness of their jobs (all of them are comfortably on £50,000, minimum, their kids are in private education and they all have big-ass mortgages to match.)

But then along comes the financial crisis, and everything the main characters are used to, comes crashing down. Jimmy and Monica, with their three kids in their gigantic £7million house in Notting Hill, first have to let their nanny go, before facing the awkward conversation with the Headteacher wherein they’re told that as they can no longer afford their son Toby’s fees, they won’t be welcome there. Social satire is rife; the conversation between Jim and the teacher when state education is suggested as a viable option wouldn’t be out of place in a Catherine Tate sketch.

Before the crunch, Jimmy had invested in a road in Hackney with a view of having his friend Dave’s company re-designing it, making it more glamorous and bringing in some big bucks, but when the possibility of this goes out of the window, the street becomes nothing more than a popular squatting site for a local hobo called Bob. In one hilarious moment, Jimmy contemplates re-using a nappy on his youngest daughter Lillie in order to save 18p.

The fall-from-grace overtones could not be clearer, and Jimmy realising the error of his city culture ways is the ultimate in bolting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but there is joy and bathos to be had in his adventure.

Ben Elton throws in a few of his signature twists in the story, and with the unfurling of various friends’ economic situations, also reveals that the oh-so-perfect lives that each of the friends thought they led were really anything but – and how important their finances played in sustaining the illusion that all was well.

It’s very hard to be at the bottom, especially having been at the top for so long, but Jimmy and Monica are fairly likeable protagonists who we as the audience can warm to, even if some of their dialogues (such as the one when first deciding about what state school to put their son in) hint at the blissful ignorance that those who perceive themselves to be the upper strata of society have on certain life matters.

For the most part, Ben Elton tries to abstain from coming across as overly preachy and playing the blame game in his cautionary tale, and rather than pointing fingers or going for the banker bashing route, cannily points out that he without sin can cast the first stone; Henry, at the time of the crunch an esteemed politician, reprimands Jimmy and Rupert for their heady banker ways, yet he doesn’t hesitate to claim benefits on his second house in Berkshire – a wily nod at the actions of various MPs in the news currently.

The majority of the novel is written in his pithy, witty tone, but there is the odd line of writing that exhibits genuine emotion and does the impossible – has us sympathising for characters living in a mansion. There’s an uncharacteristically sweet denouement from Elton at the end, which, whilst pat, doesn’t ring any less true; it takes losing all the superficial stuff to work out what really matters in life.

Money, after all, doesn’t buy one love.

Grade: A-