The plot is too technical, really hard to understand
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the_new_indie — 13 years ago(February 27, 2013 03:37 PM)
Thankfully I watched Inside Job before this film or else I wouldn't have known the technical aspects of it either. Inside Job does a great job of laying out the financial aspects of what happened prior to the collapse and how it contributed to it. It's not too hard to understand once it's laid out for you. So yeah, my recommendation is to watch Inside Job beforehand.
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drew_atreides — 13 years ago(March 08, 2013 04:30 AM)
I found the film dense a bit difficult to process on a first viewing.
However, it has been playing pretty regularly on the satellite up here in
Canada, and I always find i wind up putting it on The more you watch it
the more you process. It really is a pretty fine movie!
"You have offended my family, and you have offended the Shaolin Temple" -
lenlarga — 13 years ago(March 23, 2013 05:11 AM)
I don't feel I really had to understand the technical aspects to fully enjoy this film. To simplify, the firm in this film is holding onto to a bunch of near worthless paper and makes a decision to dump the paper before anyone else figures out how worthless the paper really is, thereby cutting their own losses at the expense of everyone else.
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PenTheater — 12 years ago(May 13, 2013 07:35 AM)
in life there is always a category of movie that comes under the list
"This should be shown in every high school".
Unfortunately this one needs to be on the list of, "needs to be seen 2 or 3 times in high school. and explained."
OR nothing will ever change. -
tauiota2 — 12 years ago(June 14, 2013 10:21 AM)
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/912d85e8-2d75-11de-9eba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2WDCXg1r6
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jennypage028-1 — 12 years ago(November 29, 2013 07:41 PM)
I didnt understand the technical parts but I understood the firm made a bad investment and needed to sell said investment to other companies at a loss, and I guess they wanted to create a sense of moral dilemna among the people involved. But I didnt think it worked, I liked the build up and all the actors were great, wll maybe not Demi Moore or the guy from The Mentalist but in the end nothing really happened, everyone fell in line and towed the company line which I would have guessed would have happened anyway.
"Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never -
oldboywasagoodfella — 11 years ago(May 05, 2014 06:25 PM)
I enjoyed the movie but also found the plot overly technical, however i don't think the writer really understood what he was doing either :), so i wouldn't worry about it and just enjoy the film, for the performances and the drama of the story, etc.
Here's the problem with the script and why i think people are confused.
The story changes tack halfway through. in the first half -- mr. spock is given a flash drive with the words be careful. he discovers that the companies risk model has broken. the company is over-leveraged on its assets.**
**if i want to buy $100 worth of stock, i only need to put up $10, and can borrow the other $90, this is known as leverage. The $10 is the 'margin required'. if the stock falls in value and my stock is now worth $80 , i've lost my $10 and also owe $10 that i didn't have to start with.
If an asset falls too much in value so your getting deeper and deepe into debt, the person lending you the money will require more margin, cause they are worried that you won't be able to cover your debts and that $10 just isn't enough any more. The 'margin required' will need to increase. This is known as a 'margin call'.
In the movie they have taken on so much risk and over-leveraged, that mr. spock says if the assets drop 25% in value, they will owe more money than what the entire company is worth. - Enter jeremy irons. Now, what he should do is offload some of that risk (perfectly legal and acceptable) however, the writer has decided to use a rather famous speech about 'the music of the markets has stopped' at the start of the financial crisis.
So, on a whim, jeremy irons has now decided that these assets are going to be worthless in the future (thats why he gets paid the big bucks) he then asks kevin spacey to offload the lot.
This has nothing to do with what mr. spock was given on the flash drive. - The film now goes in a different direction, focusing on spacey making his traders dump all the assets, that are now considered worthless by jeremy irons. I find this bit confusing because unless i missed something in the movie, the future value of any financial instrument is decided by the free market, so jeremy irons could not know for sure the future value of these assets, in which case dumping them all wouldn't be immoral.
Either way, it had nothing to do with what was on the flash drive.
So, i can see why a viewer could easily become confused, wondering how all this 'dangerous' information on the flash drive (broke through risk model days ago) suddenly turns into selling worthless assets to unsuspecting punters.
- mr. spock is given a flash drive with the words be careful. he discovers that the companies risk model has broken. the company is over-leveraged on its assets.**
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Bree_33 — 11 years ago(September 24, 2014 03:05 PM)
The HBO film
Too Big To Fail
was also a great showing of the facts behind Wall Street.
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-_\<,_ ___(*)/ (*)____ nec spe, nec metu
Michael
Biehn
smoking
hot:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/S4cVxN6.gif -
Ithilfaen — 11 years ago(January 10, 2015 10:33 PM)
The problem is not that it's too technical, it's that they think their viewers are morons and they never even try to detail or explain anything. They keep talking fast and using a lot of acronyms, they're wearing suits, it's about money, that's all you need to know, right?
For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco -
JurijFedorov — 10 years ago(October 30, 2015 10:41 AM)
Exactly, this is the problem. They didn't even explain anything. Interstellar has time travel and black holes but all viewers understood it because they explained a lot of things that are basic (but didn't explain the hard to get things). In Matrix not one thing goes unexplained, Fight Club the same. These movies are simple, but more complicated than Margin Call. They could have used 2 minutes to explain the things they were doing but didn't for some reason. Possible because the producers thought it was too complicated. This is why Matrix had to use heat as energy and not brain power from the humans. The producers wanted to simplify the movie at any cost.
Seriously, watch some of these much more complicated documentaries. You will understand everything in them, because it is explained:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/
