Sadly Over-hyped

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Many people considered this like a continuation of Wall Street. To me it looks much better, because it has a much more balanced view of the finance industry.The movie was so realistic that it seemed real and made me wonder who the unnamed company was. What was interesting that people from so many different levels were presented, all of them very well paid, all them willing to burn the midnight oil, and all of them trying to do what they thought best for the company.There was no false sentimentalism, their business was to make money. Once they figured out that the ground was shifting under them, they did the logical thing, getting rid of the toxic assets at the first chance. This was their job, not saving the world.So I had more sympathy for the Jeremy Irons character than for the Kevin Spacey characters. All the actors were very good as was the direction and the dialogue. It makes me wonder which company provided the inspiration for the movie. Because of its quality it could have been only Goldman Sacks or Morgan Stanley. Since GS went relatively early out of MBS and since one of the management sacrificial lambs was a woman I think it was Morgan Stanley.

I work in unrelated industries in NYC (first UN, now econ growth) and was blogging on NYC development from 2005 and wrote posts on the fairly obvious growing storm.The film has a beautiful look, pacing, casting, acting, gripping story, what appear to be the main thrusts are all there. But three are not, that I could see, and would have made for an 11 if they were.First, the great underlying crime and real victims. The crime is what the Countrywide Mortgage Company under Angelo Mozilo was up to, extending mortgages initially at low payments to poorer folks, way too many of them Hispanic or Black, and then jacking up the rates after around 5 years, thus causing giant waves of defaults and foreclosures on millions of homes. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was in this game too. He foreclosed on a 90 year old woman over 27 cents and over 50,000 in total. The toxic sub-prime "paper" that resulted (these mortgages bundled with more highly rated mortgages) was the cancerous cause of the situation seen in the film. Merrill Lynch/Bank of America were forced to buy Countrywide as the cost of their being kept alive; Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers (the models for this film) had less luck. Google this 2016 article in the New York Times for more. "Countrywide Mortgage Devastation Lingers as Ex-Chief Moves On".Second, it was widely known from 2000 on that the derivatives market was a house of cards. MOZILO HIMSELF SAID SO!! Around 2003. The mentality in the banks was "So what? We are smart enough to be the first out the door."The spark that started the race to get out was the property market flattening out around 2006, as seen by a whole lot of quants (who often did warn the deaf ears higher up.) Third, the regulators were asleep at the wheel. Are they mentioned in the film? It was a bit hard to miss them, they dont work in an ivory tower in Washington. They are embedded in every bank! But they are atoms and the whole gestalt was not being seen.

I had read good reviews of this film, and combined with the subject matter which interested me, I was expecting to enjoy it a lot. To be honest I was a little disappointed. The whole thing just came off as rather flat and "bloodless" to me. I guess "bloodless" is perhaps what the movie makers were going for in a sense -- depicting the rather cold-blooded reality of a big financial corporation on Wall street. I just could not especially get excited by the action of a bunch of people in suits grimly talking about what they seemed to all see as a foregone conclusion, the moves they would have to make, etc. That said, I do feel that the film has an important message at least: through so clearly depicting the utterly immoral (or better, should I say "Amoral"- a world that where it seems "morality" is not even as something real), the utterly non-moral world of Finance Capitalism. A bunch of people trying to make money because they just believe that is the only thing there is to do.

The movie is a great story about a financial crisis unfolding. The portraying of the problem occurring casually as someone checks out a formula is very nice. The story escalates nicely into shape but still in a great manner of keeping the cool, even though as the people struggle to move around it over the night. What's even nicer is that the movie keeps the cool even after the no-turning-back move has been decided and being taken, with only one character expressing his feeling, in a secretive way. The acting overall is indeed a great one. Zachary Quinto did well in portraying the newbie with concerns. Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons did great in their roles, depicting the ruthlessness of a boss. Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Stanley Tucci and Penn Badgley completed the movie with balancing character angles