Arts, Entertainment & Media

The Big Short- a review

TheBigShortCSHeader

The Big Short Image: theatrical release poster

The Big Short speaks about concepts that need to be known and understood.

The banking crisis that started in 2005 and led to the financial collapse, in 2008, of many countries is an untold and unexplained phenomenon.

The Big Short tries to unravel what happened.

The film is also a warning that there are problems that happened in 2001 in our worldwide banking systems that have not been rectified.

Claudia Winkleman was right when she pronounced ‘you need to see this’ in her BBC Film 2016 show on BBC 2.

The film knows it’s talking a lot about concepts most people don’t understand.

And it uses filmic devices to bring the language out of the world of finance into more understandable words.

Ben Rickert played by Brad Pitt said something that really hit home for me:
If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about f*cking banking? It reduces people to numbers — every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?

I had a couple of problems with it.

There was little to no racial diversity in the film.

Among the speaking roles two out of approximately 25 characters were non white.

The roles for women in the film were not exactly a positive representation of female gender.

The only scene in which one character was alone with no-one else speaking to her in person or on the phone, was set in a bubble bath.

The strong woman character in a position of power featured in four scenes.

And in each one it was pointed out that she was pregnant/wanting to be pregnant/had had a baby.

The pregnancy was used as a plot device to show the audience time had passed.

It highlighted that there are bigger and more important things happening in the world.

However the mentioning of it in every scene she was in felt a little contrived.

1 reply »

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s