Over the holidays a friend suggested a fun column to get through the year-end slowdown in news. Why not rank the 10 best business movies of the decade?
Cool idea!
It didn't go that well. Without counting documentaries, a list of 10 was way too ambitious.
There was a "Wall Street" sequel, but I wouldn't even watch it on cable, as the 1987 original had enough laugh-out-loud lines to almost be a self-parody. As for a vulgar 2013 movie called "The Wolf of Wall Street," I still resent the $11 for the ticket and two hours that were taken from me.
The list got to three and stopped.
I can assure you, the standards here were not too high. It had to be both a good movie and one I had watched. It also had to be one that treated business seriously. That was maybe the main achievement of my third-place film, the "The Big Short," even though it was made by a guy known only for his comedies.
The mortgage security derivatives industry employs rocket scientists, yet the filmmakers not only put it on screen but seemed to get the facts right enough. There were lots of quirky moments but just one big idea: You didn't have to be a savant in the middle of the '00s decade to realize that out-of-control subprime mortgage issuance had led to a bubble in housing values and monstrously mispriced securities.
The misfit heroes of the 2015 movie didn't just suspect, but really knew it could only end in disaster. That's after doing research so simple a first-year associate could have done it.