The recent movie The Big Short, based on a book by the same name, features a number of high ranking actors and received positive reviews. And yet the movie, like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Wolf of Wall Street spend a lot of time focused on the finance industry and the recent financial crisis. Do films like this inform us for the better or leave us with a sense of dizziness and circularity, that history can and will repeat itself again?
I don't think that any mainstream film will ever truly help to educate the masses about the inherently corrupt banking system. What we see instead are 'smoke and mirrors' designed to mislead us into thinking that, despite numerous scandals, crashes and frauds, the system will somehow clean-up its own mess, which it never does - and time after time it is we who foot the bill. I've already recommended 'Four Horsemen' (2012) in reply to another topic suggestion. This film is just as relevant to this topic suggestion. – Amyus5 years ago
Love this topic. I think all of those movies you picked do a pretty good job of informing audiences on many complexities of the financial industry without feeling too overwhelming. Especially with The Big Short, I think the flaws in the system are outlined in a fairly understandable way; whether or not and how these flaws might be addressed so as to avoid similar crises in the future is less clear. Despite their digestibility, these movies don’t exactly leave me feeling optimistic that things won’t repeat themselves, so maybe it’s not one or the other, but a little of both. A couple of other films I might recommend for this topic are Margin Call and the HBO adaptation of the book Too Big to Fail (though that’s a made-for-tv film). – bradleyhewittk5 years ago