Why Brad Pitt is so mad

The whale is not the focal point of this film.

The global financial crisis has inspired hundreds of books, but only a handful of movies. "I got no complaints, really". The movie, based on the best-selling book, offers an inside look at the financial crisis during the 2000s. McKay and co-screenwriter Adam Randolph (whose screenplay "Love and Other Drugs" satirized Big Pharma) base their new film on the premise that bankers are the biggest bank robbers of all. It's one thing to write your style and direct it, but that's always why I think Martin Scorsese is so awesome.

Explain it, in some novel ways. McKay seems to regard his film as some form of edu-tainment, using his big-name cast and guest stars to get across the absurdity and outrage of the 2008 crisis. McKay further disrupts his narrative so that random celebrities (Selena Gomez, Anthony Bourdain) can explain complicated concepts to us. And in his case, it was a total resistance to the propaganda coming out of Wall Street coupled with an insistence on seeing what the numbers were. "Economics is actually fascinating, it's the language of power-but somehow we've been conditioned to treat it like it's boring", McKay says.

Adam McKay's quickly and stridently establishes a superior, condescending tone as it aims to mythologize a few men who were smart enough to recognize that a huge downturn in the housing mortgage market was looming in the period before September 2008, and endeavored to profit greatly from it. Bully for you, fellas! It is what drives the world. "I felt like, 'Oh I got this, '" Gosling said. They don't necessarily do a great job of clarifying things either, but it's an amusing (and eventually wearying) way to comment on the fact that nobody really knew anything at all. Their characters stand to make billions from the financial collapse, but the audience can never hate them because they take no delight in being proven correct - and barely even want to collect their payday. Synthetic CDOs were just bets that Curry would make that next three, and then side-bets on whether that person would win that bet, and so on.

Believe me, Will [Ferrell] and I fuck with genre as much as anyone. I knew that it happened. That serves Bale to great effect here, as he's playing a genius who doesn't know how to connect with the world around him. Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a socially awkward hedge fund manager with one eye, a bad haircut, and an unexplained hatred of shoes is the first to identify the opportunity. Yet that's a reasonable representation of the national zeitgeist when the story's protagonists, four eccentric clairvoyants from diverse backgrounds, make massive bets against the housing market and the banking system because they share the same vision of a shimmering bubble that's bound to burst. That guy's played by Christian Bale. The material is heavy, the fallout catastrophic, the actors angry.

But it often feels like McKay is working his hardest to spice up a film that mostly consists of phone conversations. We shot for nine days and just banged out the pages.

The film is more strident than Michael Lewis's book, but the conclusion of each is the same: It took outsiders and pessimists to see the truth, because the insiders were making too much money to care. Barry Ackroyd did the fine cinematography.) "The market's in an itsy-bitsy little gully right now", says a bleached-blond and relentlessly cheerful real-estate agent in Florida, where a tsunami of delinquencies has just begun (the year is 2007), a symbolic alligator appears in a brackish backyard pool, a stripper-cum-flipper owns five houses and a condo, and a member of Mark Baum's team uncovers a mortgage application that was made out in the name of the applicant's dog. If they're right, millions of Americans will lose their homes. "He treats his audience as intelligent", says Lewis.

Collateral reading, er, viewing for The Big Short might include the doc Inside Job, Margin Call and The Wolf of Wall Street.

"I gained like, 25 pounds", he reveals to US breakfast show Good Morning America. It will be a healthier system. When the movie's plot takes dramatic license that feels convenient, the characters break the fourth wall and acknowledge it, which lends the absurd moments that they later insist actually happened an extra level of oomph.