Exposed is a film suffering from blunt force trauma to the head. Director Gee Malik Linton’s name only remains as screenwriter after his largely Spanish-language film – more meaningfully called Daughter of God and centring on Dominican-New Yorkers – had a helpful supporting role from producer Keanu Reeves greatly expanded by its US distributor, hoping to transform it into a Keanu cop movie.
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something.
It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks off on Sky Atlantic on Monday 15 February.
In the latter half of the 1980s, Wendy James’s band Transvision Vamp created quite a stir. Their music, including a chart-topping second album, was fizzing, bright-coloured, punky power pop and James was a pouting, hissy-fit of a frontwoman, emanating urgent wannabe-famous sexuality. She disappeared from view in the Nineties, turning up again in the new millennium, first with a band, Racine, and then solo.
Lion Babe’s lion babe, Jillian Hervey, does, indeed, have a mane to match the title. The daughter of the actor, soul-pop star and dethroned Miss America 1984, Vanessa Williams, she also has a voice that lives up to the moniker, running from the feline to full leonine soul. Lion Babe is not just Hervey, though. Her production partner Lucas Goodman is also on hand to provide the necessary beats, basslines and electronic backing. The New York pairing, who made an appearance on Disclosure's last album, have been much touted as faces for 2016.
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.
The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial industry was perpetrating a fraud of historic proportions based on bullshit and sleight of hand. Some of the names have been changed, but one which hasn't is Dr Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a former neurologist with a glass eye, a passion for playing heavy metal drums, and Asperger's syndrome. Subsequently running his own Scion Capital hedge fund, Burry had the monomaniacal tenacity required to sit down and read through all the individual mortgage agreements which had been bundled together to create the "mortgage-backed securities" which became a critical component of the banking Armageddon. He discovered that many of them were worth much less than the paper they were printed on, and thus the financial instruments derived from them were doomed to crash.
But that was only the start. In order to exploit his startling insight, Burry had to persuade the bankers to create the credit default swap, whereby he could bet large on the collapse of the US housing market. Since everybody had convinced themselves that the housing business, anchored on the personal investments of millions of honest Americans, could never go wrong, they were delighted to oblige.
The rest is history, but McKay has transformed it into a rollercoaster of big characters, moral hazard and blackly comic digressions. He's hugely assisted by a powerful cast. Bale, ever the method fanatic, was a shoo-in for the charm-free, obsessive Burry. Brad Pitt (also one of the producers, pictured above) does a senior statesman turn as veteran finance-Einstein Steve Rickert.
Steve Carell is superb as Mark Baum, a bull-headed, bad-tempered hedge fund manager who gets wind of Burrell's activities and leads his team of wisecracking whippersnappers (including a sparky Rafe Spall) through their own personal investigation into the looming financial tsunami. Down in Florida, they find insanely overstretched buyers being fed lavish mortgages by lenders who haven't a clue what they're selling. In a scarily comic climactic scene, Baum shares a debating platform with a senior banker who's blithely declaring his faith in his company's shares while assembled financial journalists are watching the price plummet to oblivion on their Blackberrys.
Rude and crude as he is, Baum does at least feel shock and remorse as the full extent of the crisis becomes clear, with its crushing impact on millions of fellow-citizens. McKay sprays moral outrage over the bankers, but his protagonists aren't much better as they rejoice in being clever enough to create a personal jackpot out of this collective purgatory. Particularly smarmy is Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling like a weasel dipped in Brylcreem, and the most eminently punchable banker on Wall Street (Gosling and Carell pictured below). McKay also uses him as narrator, letting him break the fourth wall with asides to the audience ("yes, this meeting really did happen").
That's just one of several devices the director shuffles to fend off glazed-eye syndrome. On-screen text might pop up helpfully, while spliced-in flashes of pop-culture imagery add a subliminal timeline. A deadpan sequence of how staid and boring banking used to be before the 1980s evokes a sleepy world of sludge-green and taupe, where bankers were mostly at lunch and two per cent was considered a handsome profit. The best trick is the unashamedly gratuitous introduction of celebrities to explain thorny plot points – "to tell you about subprime mortgages, here's Margot Robbie in a bubble-bath", or svelte popstrel Selena Gomez teaming up with economist Richard Thaler to give y'all the lowdown on "Synthetic CDOs".
Smart and sharp as the movie is, turning arcane financial activities into mass entertainment is like Splitting the Atom II, and on top of that there's no avoiding the fact that this is a movie all about men, most of them not very pleasant. Marisa Tomei gets a bit of room to shine as Baum's wife Cynthia, but Melissa Leo's Georgia Hale is little more than a stick with which to beat the corrupt ratings agencies which played a contemptible role in the crash. Nonetheless, as an investigation of a bout of collective insanity which almost destroyed the civilised world, this is a ride worth taking.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
OVERLEAF: RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.
The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoyant way to inaugurate the new theatrical year is hard to imagine.
The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. What previously played as a somewhat wearing Wildean pastiche here assumes creepier colours as a play about two brothers gifted with language who use words in part to forestall the bleakness that lies in wait when things go silent.
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art.