The Big Short: A grand romp

The Big Short (2015) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.23.15

This is the mostly audaciously entertaining economics course you’ll ever take.

The Big Short isn’t merely a ferociously impudent adaptation of financial journalist Michael Lewis’ nonfiction 2010 book of the same title. Under the careful guidance of writer/director Adam McKay and co-scripter Charles Randolph, it’s a blistering primer that explains — precisely and unflinchingly — why the country fell off a cliff in 2007.

Mark Baum (Steve Carell, seated center) and his talented young financial analysts — from
left, Vinnie (Jeremy Strong), Danny (Rafe Spall) and Porter (Hamish Linklater) — react
with various degrees of concentration, disbelief and anger while Jared Vennett (Ryan
Gosling, seated far right) outlines his improbable scheme for making a fortune by
betting against the entire American financial institution. Jared's assistant Chris (Jeffry
Griffin) wisely keeps his mouth shut.

At the same time, it’s a raucous and yet tightly controlled showcase for a gaggle of unlikely antiheroes, played with whole-immersion glee by a top-flight cast of scene-stealers. McKay employs every trick in the filmmaking book, from Robert Altman-style overlapping dialog to characters who routinely emphasize a point by breaking the fourth wall and addressing us directly.

It sounds like total chaos, and in lesser hands that likely would have been the case. But McKay & Co. deliver the equivalent of the best, most savagely satirical Saturday Night Live sketch ever made ... and they keep it going for a full 130 minutes. True, the result sometimes feels like a series of self-contained scenes, but they’re strung together to build a cohesive narrative that is breathtaking, suspenseful and wildly entertaining.

And, ultimately, infuriating and unbelievable. Because it’s absolutely true.

Think we all got screwed by the 2007 housing bubble collapse? You have no idea how badly, or the degree to which the fat-cat, blithely indifferent — and, in many cases, reprehensibly ignorant — Wall Street and banking oligarchy danced on the ashes of your investments, retirement accounts and foreclosed homes.

McKay’s film reveals all, in torturous — and yet excruciatingly funny — detail, via the activities of a quintet of outliers and weirdoes, real people all, who smelled a rat early on and...

... wait for it ...

... still waiting? ...

... took a financial position against the supposedly rock-solid American housing industry.

Everybody else thought these guys were lunatics. Huge Wall Street corporations cheerfully took their wildcat investments, believing them the equivalent of going “all in” on the off-chance that a single number would come up on a colossal roulette wheel with 100,000 slots.

Because — and here’s the thing — most of the idiots pulling the country’s financial strings didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing.

And the others were fully aware, but did it anyway, because a) they knew they’d never get caught; and b) knew that even if they did get caught, they’d undoubtedly be “punished” with a slap on the wrist and a fat bonus.

History — history that goes back only eight years — has proven them correct.

Magic in the Moonlight: A cute little trick

Magic in the Moonlight (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for fleeting sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Every year, like clockwork, Monarch butterflies return to Pacific Grove; Punxsutawney citizens await the arrival (or no-show) of their famed groundhog; surfers brave “the most dangerous waves in the world” during Half Moon Bay’s Mavericks Competition; and Woody Allen makes another movie.

Stanley (Colin Firth) doesn't believe in Sophie's (Emma Stone) claimed powers of
clairvoyance: not for a moment. But his debunking skills get nowhere with this charming
young American, and soon he begins to doubt: Could she be the completely genuine
spiritualist that the 1920s world has clamored to find?

The man is amazing; he hasn’t missed a year since 1981 ... and he compensated with two films in 1987.

An output that prodigious can’t help delivering mixed results, and even Allen’s staunchest fans will acknowledge that his crowd- and critic-pleasing smash hits — 2011’s Midnight in Paris being the most recent — are vastly outnumbered by quieter, smaller charmers (Scoop, To Rome with Love) and the occasional stinker (Anything Else).

Magic in the Moonlight belongs to the middle camp. It’s a modest little rom-com that feels like a mash-up of P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie: a flapper-era bit of froth set in the south of France, replete with upper-class twits, social climbers and a central mystery that becomes more provocative by the minute.

Actually, Allen’s cheeky, dialogue-heavy script would make a marvelous play; aside from a few of cinematographer Darius Khondji’s luxurious overviews of the opulent Riviera, the action is confined to just a few locales that easily could be reproduced and/or conveyed on a theater stage. On top of which, the story’s second-act kicker would be a bravura delight, live and in person.

Not to mention how much more fun Allen’s razor-sharp verbal duels would be, delivered by actors declaiming mere yards in front of a rapt audience.

But I certainly don’t mean to downplay this project’s equally droll enticements on the big screen, many of which spring from the feisty banter between stars Colin Firth and Emma Stone.

Firth is all but unrecognized at first glimpse, in his “professional” persona as Chinese conjuror Wei Ling Soo, the most celebrated magician of his age. The film opens on a typical performance, highlighted by his famed vanishing elephant trick, and his eye-popping de-materialization from a closed sarcophagus to a chair, visible at all times, at the opposite end of the stage.

Off-stage, though, the magician strips off the robes and make-up to reveal Stanley Crawford, a grouchy, arrogant Englishman with the snooty, insulting manner of an aristocratic boor: a man with absolutely no friends — well, maybe one or two — and a cold-fish fiancée who seems to respect rather than love him.

Firth has a marvelous time with Stanley’s waspish put-downs and supercilious bearing; he’s so cheekily condescending that we can’t help admiring the man’s pompous elocution.

Lola Versus: Undone by a bogus script

Lola Versus (2012) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and drug use
By Derrick Bang

Lola (Greta Gerwig) wanders aimlessly during the year following her 29th birthday, her fickle and frequently self-destructive behavior often destroying any good will she establishes during brief flashes of actual maturity.

When best friend Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones, left) encourages Lola (Greta
Gerwig) to jump back into the dating pool, the waters suddenly seem
full of sharks and minnows ... neither of which is good news for a
mildly desperate woman on the rebound.

The same can be said of the film she inhabits.

Lola Versus opens with promise, but rapidly devolves into an overly talky quagmire that feels (and sounds) like a bad Woody Allen film. Co-scripters Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein introduce Lola as a self-assured and obviously intelligent woman — not everybody has the smarts to be inches away from a Ph.D. — but then subject her to an escalating series of bad decisions and stupid choices, not to mention enough drug and alcohol binging to send the next half-dozen people into rehab.

In short, it becomes impossible to retain our sympathy for Lola, despite Gerwig’s heroic effort to showcase her character’s quirky charm.

Then, too, the dialogue exchanges concocted by Lister-Jones and Wein are too arch, too contrived, too knowingly earthy and too faux trendy. Granted, nobody in real life talks like the folks on the big screen, but — best-case scenario — we viewers at least can delight in witty, sophisticated banter when it’s delivered with well-timed snap. Too much of the conversational chatter here is ostentatiously smutty, as if Lister-Jones and Wein are taking their cues from the gals in Sex and the City.

Sorry, but talking like Kim Cattrall’s Samantha is not the height of chic refinement. Not even close.

We meet Lola on her aforementioned 29th birthday, an event celebrated in the arms of longtime boyfriend Luke (Joel Kinnaman), who climaxes the milestone by proposing. Cue several weeks (months?) of excited wedding planning, with some decisions second-guessed by Lola’s fashionably cool parents, Robin and Lenny (Debra Winger and Bill Pullman).

Pullman is a hoot: one of the film’s stronger elements, actually, and I wish we could have spent more time with him. Lenny is recently retired and loving this opportunity to hang loose and embrace social media and all the other “with it” joys of the early 21st century; he and Lola also enjoy a frank and loving relationship.

Winger’s Robin is perhaps somewhat controlling, but Lola is strong enough — and savvy enough — to maintain the necessary barriers.