A Really Inconvenient Truth

Films: Don’t Look Up
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

It took me a couple of days to get through Don’t Look Up. Part of that is that I’ve been screamingly busy this week, as per the norm lately. The other part of it is that, frankly, it’s hard to get through. That naturally sounds like a negative, but it’s not in this case. The fact that Don’t Look Up is difficult to get through is one of the strongest points in its favor.

It’s likely that you’ve already heard about this film, so I’m probably going to be a bit summary. We start with the discovery of a new comet by astrophysics Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence). She shows the comet to her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who calculates the comet’s trajectory. And that trajectory is impact with Earth in about six and a half months.

Power Corrupts

Film: Vice
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

I’m going to warn you off the bat here: this is a political movie and I have political opinions. If you were a fan of George W. Bush or the current American president, you’re going to have problems with this review. This isn’t because I’m going to go on some kind of rant (I hope), but because Vice shows a precise template for exactly how, over the last 20 years, the American right has done everything it can to damage the democracy that we still enjoy. If you’re going to have a problem with me saying exactly that, the door is over there. If you’re going to go on a screed in the comments and use words like “libtard” and “cuck,” I’ll be deleting your comments. You’ve been warned.

Vice is more or less the biopic of Dick Cheney, who hovered around the halls of power during multiple Republican presidential administrations. While I can’t be sure, my guess is that Christian Bale was selected to play Cheney because he was able to slightly modify his Batman voice to be a little more understandable. Bale looks staggeringly like Cheney in a good portion of the film as well, something that can be mildly said for Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush and not at all for Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld.

Money, Money, Money, Money

Films: The Big Short
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

People say that money is the root of all evil, but that’s not what the actual quote says. The actual quote says that the love of money is the root of all evil. I came of age in the greed-happy Reagan years, so it’s not like these are sentiments that I don’t understand. But, even as those heady years of hostile takeovers went away, the underlying desire for greenbacks certainly didn’t. Billions were made and lost during the dot-com bubble, and still, nothing changed. And then the housing market died and everything changed, except nothing changed. That’s the story behind The Big Short.

This is more or less the story of several groups of investors who virtually simultaneously discovered the dismal truth behind the American housing market and decided to short the various mortgage bonds. I’m not much of a financial wizard here, but understand the basics of what happened. Essentially, these investors bet against the housing market because so many of the mortgages were risky and were defaulting. So, while tons of people lost everything when virtually guaranteed investments went bad, these investors made a killing.