“The Big Short”: Smug, Preachifying, Gimmicky, Lying, Liberal Mess
By Debbie Schlussel
I don’t need comedic actor Will Ferrell and uber-hypocrite Brad Pitt
lecturing–and lying to–me about what happened in the 2008 mortgage
crisis. But that’s essentially what “The Big Short,” in theaters today nationwide, is.
“The Big Short” (TBS) is a smug, arrogant, lying, preachy, gimmicky mess, the narrative of which bears little resemblance to what actually occurred in the mortgage meltdown. Brad Pitt executive produced this movie. And while Ferrell isn’t in the movie, his guru–Adam McKay–wrote and directed this crap-pile. McKay is the director of such movies as “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” its sequel “Anchorman 2,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” and “The Other Guys”–all Ferrell star vehicles and all dopey, juvenile comedies. He’s also the writer of liberal “short” films, “Cops: Ferguson” and “Mexican Donald Trump,” as well as several other Ferrell flicks, including the disastrous anti-“White privilege” comedy, “Get Hard.” TBS is in the same “spirit” as these–a preachy, lying liberal message, bad jokes, and a lot of gimmickry. Throughout the movie, there are scenes form pop culture at the time. Who cares? Also, airheaded bimbo starlets like Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez talk to the screen and “explain” to you complicated financial issues. Haha, funny. Arrogant leftist chef Anthony Bourdain uses cooking analogies, like putting bad fish in his stew. Wow, soooo insightful. Actually, not really.
Based on a best-selling book of the same name by liberal writer Michael Lewis, TBS follows three groups of investors who discover independently of each other that mortgage investments–specifically subprime mortgages issued to people with bad credit and little income–are going to collapse. And, so, they bet against the market and win gazillions.
The movie, while respecting these very smart and insightful investors, also mocks them. Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a medical doctor and brilliant hedge fund chief at the time, is mocked for his glass eye, and his Asperger’s Syndrome. Mark Baum (Steve Carell) is mocked for being Jewish–a religion with which the movie seems to have a sub rosa obsession. We are introduced to his stereotypical, silly rabbi who taught him Talmud as a kid and is upset with him for questioning the Talmud and the word of the rabbis and G-d. That’s interesting because even the most religious Judaism encourages adherents to question everything. Oh, and by the way, when they make a movie mocking Muslims, imams, the koran, and those who study it, please let me know. Baum and his minions are approached by a sleazy, pseudo-Jewishy investment banker, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) who tells them about the collapse of the housing market and wants to sell them investments shorting the market, so long as he gets a huge percentage in fees and cuts.
There is also a third group–a couple of young investors eager to make a lot of money, who stumble onto information about the collapse of the housing market–one of whom has a Jewish-sounding surname, Geller. The pair involve their eccentric, retired, wealthy former investor friend (Brad Pitt) to obtain the licenses they need to short the mortgage investment market and make a killing.
TBS allegedly tells the story of how the housing mortgage market collapsed. And you guessed it: the banks and Wall Street are the villains. Never ever mentioned in this extremely long diatribe is the fact that banks were forced to grant mortgages to minorities who were not creditworthy and that government regulators regularly told banks they weren’t allowed to use that RAAAAAYCIST! criteria called “credit” to issue loans. Instead, banks were forced to give credit and mortgage backing to people from the poorest cross-sections of America–people who would never ever be able to pay it back. But the movie doesn’t show you any of that. That would be racist, and you should know better than to use your “White-privileged” call for facts and accuracy in a movie. Also, it’s beyond the comprehension of Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez and their abilities to memorize scripts and look pretty.
Instead, the banks are the big, bad evil villains who take advantage of poor people. No responsibility is required here on the part of those poor people because we are apparently required to accept at face value that all poor people are idiots–like the White stripper the movie shows you with her five condo mortgages. She isn’t supposed to be able to do the math or understand when the ARM portion of her mortgage comes into play and her payments go up significantly. The bad guys are the two evil White men–one of them a former bartender and the other a Yale grad–who wrote up the mortgage policies and approved the stripper because–come Monday morning–they are selling her subprime mortgage to a bank or some other investors. White privilege again. The privileged White guys tell us about their primary mortgage candidates: NINJAs (No Income, No Job or Assets). Again, the government–not the banks–rigged the system this way.
The movie assumes and puts forth the assumption on you as fact that banks gave subprime loans to poor people and investment houses backed bonds in the mortgages because they knew the government would bail them out. But the fact is that most banks and investment houses lost money on these, and they aren’t in the business of giving money out only to know they won’t get it back. Whether or not the government bails them out isn’t a foreseeable result and not something any banks were counting on. Remember Lehman Brothers? Nobody bailed it out. The movie also mentions investment houses selling these crappy investments to “ignorant people” who are average investors and retirees. But what do banks do when they are forced to give bad mortgages to poor minorities who don’t make payments? They sell them to another bank or investment house and the cycle continues. The government caused this, not greedy bankers. That’s not to mention that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back a lot of these mortgages. Without those agencies, a lot of these mortgages would never have been issued.
Maybe the one accurate thing in this movie is the portrayal of federal regulators who were unwilling to investigate the mortgage investments and their artificially high ratings. As the movie notes, government regulators are always looking to get private sector jobs with the parties they “regulate.” And, as the movie fails to note, government workers are lazy, politically correct, and have zero creativity, imagination, or incentive to do anything of value.
But, as I noted, here’s what government regulators are, indeed, willing to do: I have a close friend, who is now retired but was a part owner in a bank until relatively recently. And he told me that every month bank regulators were at his chain of banks, breathing down bank officials’ necks, looking over the books, and making sure that a certain percentage of the bank’s loans went to minorities, especially the mortgage loans. Since not enough creditworthy minorities patronized the bank, my friend and his fellow investors had no choice but to issue loans to minorities who would predictably fail to pay back their loans. And the bank would sell those loans to another party . . . at a loss. That is the price of doing business as a bank in America today and was in 2008 and before.
But there is no “The Big Short” movie about that. Facts are stubborn things. It turns out, though, that Hollywood liberals bent on an agenda, are more stubborn. And that’s why this phony baloney movie is served up on the ignorant American movie-going public. Posters for this movie announce, “THIS IS A TRUE STORY.” Uh, no it isn’t.
The acting in this is good, but the story is a big fat lie. You see that–they just did a Big Short on the truth.
Merry Christmas, chumps.
THREE MARXES PLUS TWO OBAMAS PLUS TWO MICHELLE LAVAUGHN ROBINSON HUSSEIN OBAMA IDI AMIN DADAS
Watch the trailer . . .
“The Big Short” (TBS) is a smug, arrogant, lying, preachy, gimmicky mess, the narrative of which bears little resemblance to what actually occurred in the mortgage meltdown. Brad Pitt executive produced this movie. And while Ferrell isn’t in the movie, his guru–Adam McKay–wrote and directed this crap-pile. McKay is the director of such movies as “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” its sequel “Anchorman 2,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” and “The Other Guys”–all Ferrell star vehicles and all dopey, juvenile comedies. He’s also the writer of liberal “short” films, “Cops: Ferguson” and “Mexican Donald Trump,” as well as several other Ferrell flicks, including the disastrous anti-“White privilege” comedy, “Get Hard.” TBS is in the same “spirit” as these–a preachy, lying liberal message, bad jokes, and a lot of gimmickry. Throughout the movie, there are scenes form pop culture at the time. Who cares? Also, airheaded bimbo starlets like Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez talk to the screen and “explain” to you complicated financial issues. Haha, funny. Arrogant leftist chef Anthony Bourdain uses cooking analogies, like putting bad fish in his stew. Wow, soooo insightful. Actually, not really.
Based on a best-selling book of the same name by liberal writer Michael Lewis, TBS follows three groups of investors who discover independently of each other that mortgage investments–specifically subprime mortgages issued to people with bad credit and little income–are going to collapse. And, so, they bet against the market and win gazillions.
The movie, while respecting these very smart and insightful investors, also mocks them. Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a medical doctor and brilliant hedge fund chief at the time, is mocked for his glass eye, and his Asperger’s Syndrome. Mark Baum (Steve Carell) is mocked for being Jewish–a religion with which the movie seems to have a sub rosa obsession. We are introduced to his stereotypical, silly rabbi who taught him Talmud as a kid and is upset with him for questioning the Talmud and the word of the rabbis and G-d. That’s interesting because even the most religious Judaism encourages adherents to question everything. Oh, and by the way, when they make a movie mocking Muslims, imams, the koran, and those who study it, please let me know. Baum and his minions are approached by a sleazy, pseudo-Jewishy investment banker, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) who tells them about the collapse of the housing market and wants to sell them investments shorting the market, so long as he gets a huge percentage in fees and cuts.
There is also a third group–a couple of young investors eager to make a lot of money, who stumble onto information about the collapse of the housing market–one of whom has a Jewish-sounding surname, Geller. The pair involve their eccentric, retired, wealthy former investor friend (Brad Pitt) to obtain the licenses they need to short the mortgage investment market and make a killing.
TBS allegedly tells the story of how the housing mortgage market collapsed. And you guessed it: the banks and Wall Street are the villains. Never ever mentioned in this extremely long diatribe is the fact that banks were forced to grant mortgages to minorities who were not creditworthy and that government regulators regularly told banks they weren’t allowed to use that RAAAAAYCIST! criteria called “credit” to issue loans. Instead, banks were forced to give credit and mortgage backing to people from the poorest cross-sections of America–people who would never ever be able to pay it back. But the movie doesn’t show you any of that. That would be racist, and you should know better than to use your “White-privileged” call for facts and accuracy in a movie. Also, it’s beyond the comprehension of Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez and their abilities to memorize scripts and look pretty.
Instead, the banks are the big, bad evil villains who take advantage of poor people. No responsibility is required here on the part of those poor people because we are apparently required to accept at face value that all poor people are idiots–like the White stripper the movie shows you with her five condo mortgages. She isn’t supposed to be able to do the math or understand when the ARM portion of her mortgage comes into play and her payments go up significantly. The bad guys are the two evil White men–one of them a former bartender and the other a Yale grad–who wrote up the mortgage policies and approved the stripper because–come Monday morning–they are selling her subprime mortgage to a bank or some other investors. White privilege again. The privileged White guys tell us about their primary mortgage candidates: NINJAs (No Income, No Job or Assets). Again, the government–not the banks–rigged the system this way.
The movie assumes and puts forth the assumption on you as fact that banks gave subprime loans to poor people and investment houses backed bonds in the mortgages because they knew the government would bail them out. But the fact is that most banks and investment houses lost money on these, and they aren’t in the business of giving money out only to know they won’t get it back. Whether or not the government bails them out isn’t a foreseeable result and not something any banks were counting on. Remember Lehman Brothers? Nobody bailed it out. The movie also mentions investment houses selling these crappy investments to “ignorant people” who are average investors and retirees. But what do banks do when they are forced to give bad mortgages to poor minorities who don’t make payments? They sell them to another bank or investment house and the cycle continues. The government caused this, not greedy bankers. That’s not to mention that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back a lot of these mortgages. Without those agencies, a lot of these mortgages would never have been issued.
Maybe the one accurate thing in this movie is the portrayal of federal regulators who were unwilling to investigate the mortgage investments and their artificially high ratings. As the movie notes, government regulators are always looking to get private sector jobs with the parties they “regulate.” And, as the movie fails to note, government workers are lazy, politically correct, and have zero creativity, imagination, or incentive to do anything of value.
But, as I noted, here’s what government regulators are, indeed, willing to do: I have a close friend, who is now retired but was a part owner in a bank until relatively recently. And he told me that every month bank regulators were at his chain of banks, breathing down bank officials’ necks, looking over the books, and making sure that a certain percentage of the bank’s loans went to minorities, especially the mortgage loans. Since not enough creditworthy minorities patronized the bank, my friend and his fellow investors had no choice but to issue loans to minorities who would predictably fail to pay back their loans. And the bank would sell those loans to another party . . . at a loss. That is the price of doing business as a bank in America today and was in 2008 and before.
But there is no “The Big Short” movie about that. Facts are stubborn things. It turns out, though, that Hollywood liberals bent on an agenda, are more stubborn. And that’s why this phony baloney movie is served up on the ignorant American movie-going public. Posters for this movie announce, “THIS IS A TRUE STORY.” Uh, no it isn’t.
The acting in this is good, but the story is a big fat lie. You see that–they just did a Big Short on the truth.
Merry Christmas, chumps.
THREE MARXES PLUS TWO OBAMAS PLUS TWO MICHELLE LAVAUGHN ROBINSON HUSSEIN OBAMA IDI AMIN DADAS
Watch the trailer . . .
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