This is a great drama with some elements that are actually really funny too. It's a good story, well written with good characters, and there is some top notch acting in it. Bale and Carrell are terrific.

This is the story of the hedge fund operators who saw the housing bubble collapse coming and profited by betting against it. We have glimpses of the personal lives and idiosyncrasies of the main characters. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) saw it two years before it happened. Mark Baum (Steve Carell) got wind of it from a wrong number and checked it out himself. There were also two men from Boulder who had figured things out separately but needed the help of Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to pull it off.The first hurdle was that there was no mechanism to buy a short or swap against the real estate market. Michael Burry had to negotiate them and the investment companies were happy to take his money and party with it as bonds are never down graded.The film had a number of asides and documentary style interjections. It took the complex task of explaining market terms by using stars and metaphors. For instance Selena Gomez explains synthetic CDOs at a blackjack table, something that even investors didn't know existed, or at least the film portrayed it that way.Now the folks who made millions on the collapse of the world economy didn't celebrate on screen. They felt bad winning by betting against the little guy who ultimately had to pay with his job and home.The film feels partially like a documentary. When something didn't really happen "that way" they did an aside to let you know it is a dramatization. And sometimes they did an aside to let you know it really did happen. This film is told from a different point of view then the other films out there, told from the viewpoint of the investment companies.It was hard not to love the bold character of Steve Carell.Guide: F-bomb, brief nudity (Mark Baum had to interview a stripper/real estate owner on the job)The film conclusions point blank disagrees with the conservative line which blamed the people who took out the mortgages and not the banks. (Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger.)

The movie wasn't entirely accurate some average people did know that subprime mortgages, balloon mortgages (5 year balloons which proves this happened entirely on Bush II's watch), etc. were a ticking time bomb. I was one of them, in 2005 when I invested in the mortgage business specifically in an outfit called American Home Mortgage, I only invested in them because they did not engage in subprimes or other risky loan practices, but guess what while on vacation in Orlando with my family, summer 2007, I saw my position and my kids positions in American Home Mortgage disappear via a Treo phone. American Home Mortgage was the 10th largest mortgage company in the country and it was the first to go! Anyone with half a brain saw the bubble but virtually everyone I knew, including my fat redneck boss, hung on every word spoken by Alan Greenspan and Alan was telling everyone to stay the course and all was well. This movie shows the criminal dealings of Goldman Sachs but they got bailed out and no one went to jail. This will happen again! This country is nothing more than a criminal enterprise! Kudos to Iceland for jailing the banksters and helping out the homeowners! By the way words right out of the idiots mouth: "We can put light where there's darkness, and hope where there's despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home." - President George W. Bush, Oct. 15, 2002... Bush gave the green light, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to risky lending practices, and that's a freaking fact!

It's smart not because it wants to but because it needs to. Facts are thrown in to this brilliant emotional narrative with just the right angles to tell the story from. It presents the hard truth to the characters and they all take it in their own way. You're watching an event that brought down the world economy through the eyes of the people who first discovered it and their reactions are what make the movie. Steve Carell plays a well-written character with real emotion put into the performance making it his best one so far. The way the movie is told is innovative, charming and funny when it needs to. It uses the advantage of breaking the 4th wall in unexpected ways that add to the experience. The soundtrack is fitting too.