#6 The Big Short
Prior to this film, Director Adam McKay was best known as 50% of the Gary Sanchez Production company, the other half of the creative stake belonging to Mr. Will Ferrell. Over the years, he can also take partial credit (for better or for worse) for you hearing all of the following quotes yelled out at bars by folks in their early-to-mid twenties:
-"Milk was a bad choice!"
-"I'm kind of a big deal."
-"That really escalated quickly."
-"Sixty percent of the time, it works every time."
-"I'd like to think of Jesus like with giant eagle's wings, and singin' lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd with an angel band."
-"Shake-n-bake, baby!"
-"The Catlina f---ing Wine Mixer."
-"Wanna go do karate in the garage?"
-"Did we just become best friends?"
...etc.
Everybody has to grow up sometime, and Mr. McKay's rise from purveyor of screwball comedy to best director nominee came as a bit of a surprise, certainly, but a warranted one, considering the genre-bending, fourth-wall-demolishing Big Short.
Working with nonfiction guru Michael Lewis's book of the same name as the source material, BS details the lives and personalities of those who made big money on the housing crash of 2008. It's morally ambiguous territory, obviously, and as the stakes begin to ramp up, the lead characters all are well aware of the fact that they are about to making a killing at the expense of everyday Americans.
The first to spot the trend is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an oddball hedge fund manager with a glass eye (childhood accident) who spends his days in the office studying algorithms, walking around barefoot and banging out Metallica beats on his drumsticks. He comes to realize that the top 20 mortgage bond sellers are all backed by subprime mortgages, i.e., home loans granted to people with lousy credit histories. He hits all the major lenders (Goldman Sachs, et al.) and says he would like to put up all of his client's money against the housing market, known as "shorting" the market (hence the title). He is laughed out of each respective building as countless people sign off and take his money, and his hedge fund clients demand their money back.
Meanwhile, Jared Vennett (raven-haired Ryan Gosling), who narrates the action throughout, finds out about these Burry reports and meets with a group of investors, managed by the always-stressed Mark Baum (Steven Carrell) and advises them to buy up groups of subprime mortgages and put them together as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). He says they should pool their money into this and their money will eventually balloon. Eventually, they take his advice, as do young Charlie and Jamie (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock), who bring in their buddy, retired trader Ben Wickert (Brad Pitt) to help them pitch to all his connections. Fortunately for those select few involved and unfortunately for millions of others, Burry is right.
The best fourth-wall breaking convention (Gosling leaving a scene to turn to the audience and explain is by far the most common)that McKay implements by far is his use of celebrity cameos to talk us laymen through the big words and trading phrases: Margot Robbie in a bubble bath drinking champagne to explain subprime mortgages; Anthony Bourdain comparing CDOs to seafood stew composed of fish that didn't sell on it's own; Richard Thaler and Selena Gomez at a craps table to discuss how synthetic CDOs screw the people betting on them.
The Big Short does indeed lose a little steam in the final act, but throughout it is a highly entertaining look at the men who made millions while America plummeted. I mean, if the government had screwed us all by deregulating Wall Street anyhow, why not get rich?
#5 Sicario
In 2012, Denis Villenueve's Prisoners made my top 5. It was incredible, but it was certainly not anything I was rushing out to see again. Everything he has made so far relies on building almost unbearable tension and getting the viewer to tent his or her eyes as they wait it out. I have not seen Enemy yet, but it apparently, according to one critic, "Might have the scariest ending of any film ever made."
Sicario, too, is relentless throughout in ramping up the tension. It more or less never lets up.
Emily Blunt is Kate Macer, an American FBI agent who is looking to climb the ladder. When they perform a raid on a complex associated with cartel leader Manuel Diaz in the near-border town of Chandler, Arizona, they capture a few low-level drug runners and discover dozens of bodies standing up in the drywall, bags over their heads. While everyone is vomiting in the yard, two officers are blown to smithereens by a bomb in the garden shed.
Are we convinced yet that this movie is intense?
Back at HQ, she is introduced to Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and Alejandro (Benicio del Toro). The boss (Victor Garber) tells her these are her new partners, and they are off to Juarez to bring down Diaz. Graver is the shoot-first-ask-later type, but Alejandro is a little harder to read. It seems at first he is there because of his skill set, saving their collective asses on multiple occasions. However, there's more to it than that.
The two or so sections of downtime don't last long. This one is all go, all the time. When they invade the drug tunnels in yet another pulse-hammering sequence, it gets a little Zero-Dark-Thirty-ish and feels just a touch derivative. It all pays off by the end. Blunt continues to show more and more range and felt highly believable. The Josh Brolin character felt like amped-up Josh Brolin, and del Toro was excellent as per usual, withholding both emotion and intel in his droopy eyes.
4 to go! Back in a flash.
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