The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

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90sCoffee
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The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

Post by 90sCoffee »

The Big Short was a fantastic expose about part of the reason behind the economy going downhill since 2007 (I say part because I think some other conspiracies may be at play). It was informative, entertaining, well-paced, philosophical, and made you inquisitive. It's the sort of movie that makes you wanna do your own research not necessarily to follow up on the characters but also on the subject. The Wolf of Wall Street on the other hand is basically 3 hours (could probably have been cut down to 2) of debauchery and excess. It didn't really teach us what we didn't know and the 'here's Leo with lots of coke and boobs and everyone's on drugs' thing got pretty boring after a bit. It was a somewhat fun movie to watch but just didn't get anything interesting out of it or learn anything the way I did with The Big Short. WoWS has a slightly higher rating on imdb than The Big Short but I'm convinced that this comes from a lot of people not being able to follow The Big Short and rating it lower as a result based on what I read from the more negative user reviews from it.

I think these reviews sum it up somewhat:

"The two address the same topic, have a similar confidence and swagger but DiCaprio’s film spends its bloated running time ignoring the issue it professes to address, glorifying the people it seeks to condemn while frittering away its three hours in an epic rerun of Animal House. It’s a classic example of popular culture acting as a piece of misdirection for big business. The Big Short should leave The Wolf whimpering sheepishly in the corner with embarrassment."

"Both films share that reckless glee at turning a complicated story into a thrill-ride fantasy about beating the market and reaping insane rewards through clever insight. But whereas Wolf only paid lip service to the ramifications of its protagonist's illegal and immoral behavior, before reveling in the power fantasy of that behavior, Short keeps its disapproval clear and present at all times — especially toward the end, as Baum shifts from being an exploratory audience avatar to reminding viewers that they paid the cost of everything they're seeing onscreen. It's all the fun of Wolf without the sticky feeling of compromise afterward; it has an authentic conscience and a belief in its characters' intentions."

BillyShears
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Re: The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

Post by BillyShears »

NO BOOBS NO SALE

Stewball
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Re: The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

Post by Stewball »

There's already a thread on this:

https://www.criticker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5496&p=52304#p52304

And Margin Call, though a generic story, is the movie those both should have been. 9/10

TheSean
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Re: The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

Post by TheSean »

They're both pretty good. I prefer Wolf of Wall Street. It was more... fun.

carlitt
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Re: The Big Short is the movie The Wolf of Wall Street should have been

Post by carlitt »

Curious, I said the opposite just after seeing The Big Short: you're probably right when you say many people didn't like it because they couldn't understand it, but I wouldn't blame them. You can't expect the public to enjoy long boring explanations of finance, and sometimes The Big Short feels more like a bad written documentary than a comedy: if you're interested in the issue and you don't know much about it, it makes you want to know more, but if you're not interested, or you already know the big picture, it's just boring.
The Wolf of Wall Street is the opposite, it doesn't want to make you curious, it wants to make you furious: when DiCaprio starts explaining how the "cheating" works and then he stops, because "you're not following" and afterall "it doesn't matter", it's clear the purpose of the movie is not to explain anything, but to show the excesses of the finance world: undeserved wealth gained with a job that didn't serve anyone else in the society, contempt for the law, drugs, and so on... and when conviction comes, it's the rich people version, the one where you're sure you're gonna be great once you're out, since so many people benefited from your stolen money in the previous years.
That's what I think when I see The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a satire on the finance world through an extreme case (which is a true story, even if of course exaggerated). While, when I saw The Big Short... well, I couldn't even understand why the script tried to make some of the main charachters look bad and some others look good: they saw what was coming, they bet, they won. The "political" meaning of the movie seems much less significant to me than WoWS's one.

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