The Big Short

In May 2020, I watched The Big Short for the first time on DVD. 

The movie was released in 2015. The director is Adam Mckay. The lead is Christian Bale. It is based on the nonfiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine written by Lewis Michael, a journalist, and published in 2010. 

It follows the men who have predicted the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble and acquire enormous wealth in the end. 

It realistically describes how ugly and stupid the company persons were, who had completely relied on the financial system health and the ratings published by credit-rating agencies in the 2000s. I think that persons always must have a curiosity about everything and a sense of crisis no matter how good the economy is, yet they cannot resist if all the people around them have the same opinion. As for Michael and Jared, acted by Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling respectively, both of them have strong nerves in addition to excellent foresight. Character and encouragement are needed, not to mention intelligence, in order to succeed in anything. 

The 1987 movie Wall Street directed by Oliver Stone describes how greedy people are. However, the 2015 movie does the contrast between people who are blinded by their greed and cannot perceive a crisis and persons who calmly analyze the times, go against the current and believe in themselves to the end, which really touched me. 

I sometime have felt that people around me are all foolish and that that is the way it goes. Then since I watched the movie, I have thought that precious few people, who are really brilliant and have a strong belief, are deceiving, manipulating and saving this world and that that is the way it goes.