The Big Short (***1/4)

This unusual adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction bestseller is about the financial industry, but really it can be thought of as a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Except, imagine that instead of everyone being unwilling to say what everyone knows, everyone has been hearing the same thing so long that almost everyone actually believes it. “It” is, in this case, that housing prices never go down, only up. Even Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the Asperger-y hedge fund manager who seems most certain that the conventional wisdom is wrong, has a slight moment of doubt. The great thing about the film is not the way it explains things like collateralized debt obligations, or shorting, using such techniques as having Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining them. No, the great thing is the way it portrays the behavior of complex societies.

Even as you know the financial collapse of 2008 is going to happen, you can see Burry and his fellow short-sellers — traders Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) — having to convince themselves that everyone can be that wrong, and facing enormous pressure to follow the crowd. The film is unusual, for one thing, in that none of these characters is the star. It’s an ensemble cast in an adaptation of a book that is actually telling three separate stories that are mostly unrelated, except for the common thread that these men —and this is a very male-dominated world — are making the same bet. Vennett is the seller of the bonds Carrell wants his New York investment group to buy, but both of them stand to make a fortune from calamity, and both are having to fight their own employers — big investment banks like Morgan Stanley — in order to do it. Geller and Shipley are do-it-yourself investors from Colorado who use an ex-trader friend (Brad Pitt) to do the same thing. These are all great characters, but Carrell and Bale stand out, possibly because their characters have the strangest, strongest personalities.

The other thing about this movie is the way it reminds you of its own artificiality, as if its telling you not make the mistake most financial people did during the early 2000s, failing to think critically. The bathtub scene is just one way director Adam McKay keeps telling you that this is just a movie. In another scene, Geller and Shipley find a brochure that seems to give them the idea to bet against the housing market, only to have Vennett, who is also the narrator, tell us that it actually happened a completely different way. The point is, exactly how it happened doesn’t matter. What happened matters. I think people who don’t have a familiarity with the subject may still miss some of the finer points. They can comfort themselves with the idea that a lot of the financial experts didn’t understand it well either, which is part of why it happened. Greed is the other part, and in the debate as to which factor explains more, McKay lets the viewer decide.

IMDb link

viewed 1/24/16 1:30 pm at Roxy and posted 1/25/16

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


IMDb link

viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

All Good Things (***1/4)

Some are ruined by being born into the wrong family. And some by marrying the wrong person. It’s not obvious, except in the fact that the story flashes back from a courtroom scene, that things will go wrong for David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the personable young son of a wealthy New York real estate speculator (Frank Langella). Nor for his future wife Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a sweet girl he meets in 1971. With her, he moves to Vermont, where they run a health-food store called All Good Things. Seemingly metaphorical, this was in fact the real name of the store operated by the husband and wife who inspired this movie, directed by Andrew Jarecki from a script by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling.

Jarecki is best known for another family saga, the Capturing the Friedmans. That was a documentary whose intrigue came in part because the truth about this strange family was somewhat elusive. The reason this heavily researched drama is not a documentary becomes clear eventually; although Jarecki is subtle about depicting some of the darker elements of the story, he obviously has assumed (or very strongly implied) facts that in real life must have been uncertain. Where the film remains ambiguous is in why David’s life goes sour, or at least why it happens when it does. Jarecki succeeds in depicting the progress of his disintegration, and Katie’s different sort of decline. Gosling is typically fine, Dunst heart-rending in her later scenes, and Langella suitably imposing. And obviously, that David witnesses his mother’s death as a child, that he is emotionally repressed, and that his father was an overbearing presence are part of what leads him astray. Yet what is apparent, especially the hold the family real estate business has on him, is not always palpable. In the end, this is a character who remains as elusive as he must have seemed to the Texas jury he testified before in 2003.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/13/11

Adam (***3/4)

Strongly written characters elevate the story of two New York neighbors (Rose Byrne, Hugh Dancy) and their unusual romance.

Though it has also has comedic elements, I would call this more a comedy-drama than a romantic comedy, since it lacks some of the frothiness associated with that term. Adam’s haphazard attempts to engage Beth, who’s just moved into his building and done him the favor of making the first move, betray a distinct lack of social skills, but she persists, proving that even an awkward loner can find love, provided he is unusually handsome. Adam’s awkwardness has a name, and we and Beth learn that after a time, and one of the notable things about the movie is how our perceptions of Adam change when we associate him with a diagnosis. Writer-director Max Mayer wisely waits awhile before this happens.

Beyond the plotting, he shows the real difficulties relationships can encounter after they grow serious. That some of the saddest scenes in the movie are also among the funniest is a testament to Mayer’s screenwriting, and solid acting by both leads. Both characters change in the course of the movie, and that’s well depicted, too. Highly recommended, and not just because of the title.

IMDB link

viewed 7/15/09 (screening at Ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/15/09