Video review: "The Big Short"

Fresh off its Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay (and a strong late bid for Best Picture), I’m hoping more people will give “The Big Short” a look. I’ve no doubt many potential ticket buyers took one look at the subject matter – high finance rebels who foresaw the real estate bubble bursting – and said, “No, thanks.”

What they need to know is how smart, funny and downright entertaining this movie is. While its primary fuel is anger at a rigged system, the film uses comedy as its entry point.

Consider Adam McKay, director and co-writer, whose previous credits include lowbrow comedies “Anchorman,” “Step Brothers” and “The Other Guys.” And Steve Carell as Mike Baum, a cartoonishly loud and obnoxious money manager. Even Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale, actors not normally known for eliciting laughs, are funny and engaging in an ensemble cast with no real traditional lead.

What’s most astounding is how the film takes a complex subject and breaks it down into digestible bites. The problem began when financial institutions started packaging risky mortgages as assets to be traded and sold. There’s no real single villain, just a system in which everyone looked the other way -- including the government’s watchdogs -- in order to maintain the appearance of financial stability.

Hilarious and bitter, “The Big Short” is a heist movie in which we’re the ones getting fleeced, and the good guys are the ones pointing to the crime who get dismissed as loons.

Bonus features are pretty decent, though you’ll have to buy the Blu-ray upgrade to get them: the DVD contains none.

These include five making-of documentary shorts: “In the Trenches: Casting,” “The Big Leap: Adam McKay,” “Unlikely Heroes: The Characters of The Big Short,” “The House of Cards: The Rise of the Fall” and “Getting Rea: Recreating an Era.” There are also several deleted scenes.

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Review: "The Big Short"

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie as simultaneously funny and angry as “The Big Short.”

Ostensibly a dramatic, spit-flecked tirade against the real estate crash and the widespread financial shenanigans that caused it, the film is also wickedly hilarious, dripping in black humor and rife with sharp one-liners. It’s a smart, insightful howl against a system that was rigged -- and, the movie argues, still is.

Here is a sure Oscar contender, and one of the year’s best films.

Director and co-writer Adam McKay, known for lowbrow comedies often starring Will Ferrell (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”) unbeloved by me, makes the unlikeliest left turn in Hollywood history. He and Charles Randolph deftly adapt the book by Michael Lewis, celebrating a disparate band of anti-heroes who bet against the real estate market when the rest of the world of high finance, from the most junior broker to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, viewed it as Gibraltar solid.

The most amazing accomplishment of the film, beyond maintaining that bravura blend of wit and fury, is making the complicated world of mortgage financing not only understandable, but turning it into the villain of the piece. We glimpse a few smarmy manipulators, a handful of real estate brokers writing mortgages they know their clients won’t be able to pay, etc. – but they’re cogs in the machine.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former M.D. who founded his own hedge fund. It was he who first looked at how banks were packaging subprime mortgages and selling the debt as an asset, using volume to hide the millions of cracks in what appeared to most observers to be an unassailable wall of strength. Burry, a kook who runs his office barefoot, bet early and bet big that it would all come tumbling down.

Others took his cue and ran with it, further uncovering pieces of the jumbled puzzle. Steve Carell is terrific as Mark Baum, a money manager operating his own shop under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley. A provocateur who lashes out at those who seek to take advantage of others – an odd disposition for an investor, obviously – Baum sees the looming crisis as less an opportunity than a fount of outrage.

Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a slick operator who helps put the pieces together for others and acts as our snide narrator. Brad Pitt turns up as Ben Rickert, a dispossessed trader brought in to act as mentor/facilitator by a pair of young hotshots (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) who sniff out the opportunity. Pure mercenaries looking for a score at first, they slowly become educated that those numbers on a spreadsheet represent real homes, families, lives.

The story essentially moves forward as a triad, each of the three investor groups experiencing pushback and pressure from their colleagues. Just when we think the house of cards must come tumbling down, it magically stays afloat through the sorcery of confidence and delusion.

Like “Spotlight,” this is an ensemble film that essentially has no central character or leading performances. Only with Carell’s Baum do we learn much about him outside of the office, which provides a little illumination into how somebody dedicated to making money could wear his conscious so plainly on his sleeve. As good as he was in “Foxcatcher,” Carell is even better here.

Even as it lauds the rebels who went against the grain and said ‘no’ when everyone else said ‘yes,’ “The Big Short” never lets us forget that the accounting chicanery that caused the worst recession since the 1930s is the real story. Burry, Baum and company may have won a pile of money for their insight. But we all lost in the big game we didn’t even know was being played.

Review: "Love and Other Drugs"

Here's a fairly conventional romantic drama that does a fantastic job of showing off the charms of two very attractive performers, Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's almost a throwback to an old-fashioned type of movie-making in which stars were stars, and it was the job of the director, screenwriter and crew to make them look as good as possible.

"Love and Other Drugs" is set in the late 1990s when Viagra first hit the market, and Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Randall, the salesman who was born to hock it. Good-looking and with a rogue-ish charm that he uses to great effect, Jamie has a twinkly smile that melts the heart of the orneriest receptionist guarding access to the doctors he needs to pitch.

Jamie comes from a family of physicians (George Segal and the late Jill Clayburgh play the parents) but was a med school washout. Even his slovenly younger brother Josh (Josh Gad) is a dot-com millionaire.

He's eager to please -- "I'm very trainable" is his pet phrase -- and hides his self-loathing behind a charismatic veneer built on can-do ambition.

Jamie's not above playing dirty. A Pfizer man, he dumps the drug samples from his chief competitor from Lily (Gabriel Macht) into the dumpster, and bribes an influential doc (Hank Azaria) to let him tag along on patient rounds, posing as an intern.

There he meets Maggie Murdock (Hathaway), a waitress with Parkinson's and an attitude. After baring her breast during the exam, she clocks Jamie in the head upon learning he's a pharmaceutical rep.

In classic meet-cute form, in moments he transforms her anger into admiration for his magnetism. Soon they're in bed, but Maggie lays out the rules: Just empty sex, no relationship. I don't think I have to tell you this rule gets shattered.

Director Edward Zwick, who co-wrote the script with Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz, is better known for testosterone-laden flicks with a martial bent ("Courage Under Fire," "Glory"). His touch is light and sure, and he knows how to give Hathaway and Gyllenhaal that extra bit of star sparkle.

Maggie's disease, which is merely a reason for them to meet initially, takes on more weight as the narrative adopts an increasingly somber tone. The similarity to "Love Story" -- about a young cad who grows up when his lady has a life-changing illness -- is more than passing.

They're a solid pair of performances, as the actors show us layers to their characters we might not have initially guessed at.

They're also revealing in another way -- as in both actors show off an astonishing amount of skin. I can't remember the last time I saw two mainstream stars partaking in this much nudity.

The supporting performances are tidy and worthwhile. Oliver Platt plays Jamie's senior partner, who's hoping to ride his coattails to a spot in the Chicago office. Judy Greer is a slightly awkward receptionist who falls prey to Jamie's charms.

Azaria gets one nice scene where the doctor laments dealing with HMOs, drug companies and litigious lawyers instead of just making people's lives a little better.

Gad is the go-to man for comic relief, moving in with Jamie after his own marriage fails. Although, as Jamie himself finally thinks to ask, why does a multi-millionaire need to shack up with his brother?

"Love and Other Drugs" is sweet, funny, sad and occasionally even moves us a little. Despite the title, it doesn't really have anything insightful to say about drug companies making a profit by having doctors pump us full of medicine that may not even help us very much.

Call this movie a pleasant little placebo -- it may not make the world a better place, but it tastes good going down.

3 stars out of four