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But even in the post-"Dark Knight" era, there are still some clear battle lines when it comes to flawed characters. As an audience, we're well past the point of needing sympathy and likability from our main characters.
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As delicious as it is to contemplate, this paradox could well make some viewers uncomfortable and might make the movie a tricky sell to mainstream viewers. One hardly needs an advanced understanding of derivatives to understand the challenge this presents. But it's far rarer to see people whose ambiguity is so baked in from the start. There are heroes, there are antiheroes, and there are even heroes who become antiheroes.
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A movie that actively pulls against itself like this - that deliberately clouds the question of heroism, that asks us to contemplate the very reasons we root for characters - is another. " McKay might be selling himself, well, short. I'm sure if you went back and met Hercules you may find he's kind of a. Julian Assange is kind of a creep, but he did some good things. I'm a big believer in not using cartoon heroes. "That's my favorite thing about this movie," he said. When I volleyed the question to McKay a few minutes later, he offered his own elaboration. And that makes watching the film a wonderfully challenging and complex experience.Īt the after-party at AFI Fest, Carell told me how he sees the characters' actions: "I think you are supposed to be rooting for them and at the same time see the conflict inside of them." He also said, tellingly, when asked where he came down on Baum, "I think he saw himself as a hero," leaving viewers to possibly take a different view.
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But for much of the film, the issue just kind of hovers in the background, leaving audiences to puzzle out exactly how to feel about it. Some of this tension is of course built into "The Big Short," via a climactic conflict for one character and, earlier, a speech from Rickert in which he asks that colleagues curb their enthusiasm about their activities. Whatever the moral shadings of a "Wall Street" or a "Wolf of Wall Street," whatever narcissism and vacuousness afflict the characters, their wealth is not really built on the suffering of millions of people. There have been plenty of comparisons to other films about Masters of the Universe, but it's this last point that makes me think "The Big Short" is offering a different proposition from that of most movies about making money.
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