The Big Short (2015)

THE BIG SHORT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Adam McKay
    Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling,
    Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Hamish Linklater,
    Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei
You wouldn't expect a movie about the housing bubble and financial crash of 2008 to be a comedy, but this one is. The issues are complicated, so every once in a while somebody will conveniently appear to explain them to you. Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez are two of them, but my personal favorite is Margot Robbie, who delivers her lecture while sipping champagne in a bubble bath. The characters are all operators on various levels of the food chain, guys who saw what was happening and predicted what was coming and raked in millions from what they knew was a house of cards. It was a big-bucks scam, and the people who lost their homes and got stuck with the bill were not the same people who made off with all the loot. What's scary is that nothing much has changed, some of those same crooks are still moving huge sums of money around, and it's only a matter of time before something just as bad (or worse) happens again. Sometimes you just gotta laugh.