Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

The Big Short : A Review, a Diagnosis and a Warning

ESTIMATED READING TIME: TEN MINUTES

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!****

MY RATING: SEE IT IN THE THEATRE!

"IT AIN'T WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW THAT GETS YOU IN TROUBLE, IT'S WHAT YOU KNOW FOR SURE THAT JUST AIN'T SO." - MARK TWAIN

The Big Short, directed by Adam Mckay and written by McKay and Charles Randolph (based on the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis), is the story of a collection of men who foresaw the financial collapse of 2007/2008 and bet big against the housing bubble and Wall Street and won.

The Big Short is a truly remarkable film, without a doubt one of the very best of the year. It takes the difficult and complex subject of finance in general, and the collapse of 2007/2008 in particular, and not only breaks it down into understandable pieces, but does so in an extremely entertaining and insightful way.

When The Big Short ended and the credits rolled, I was curious as to who directed the film. I was stunned when I saw that Adam McKay, of all people, had directed it. Prior to The Big Short,  Adam McKay was better known as Will Ferrell's director, having been at the helm for the Ferrell films Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Stepbrothers, and Anchorman 2 : The Legend Continues. In my mind, directing a singular comedic talent like Will Ferrell amounts to turning on the cameras and getting out of the way. It was previously unthinkable that a director with Adam McKay's resume would have the skill to make a film as impeccably crafted as The Big Short. McKay's direction is nothing short of masterful. McKay is able to flawlessly weave together the multiple, complicated narratives of the film, all while never losing the mesmerizing pace of the story. He shows a tremendously deft touch even with the most minor of scenes and lets the visuals tell as much of the story as the dialogue. 

There is a subtlety and specificity to McKay's direction that speaks volumes to his talent and vision. Two sequences stand out in this respect. The first is when we see a brief daytime long shot of Las Vegas with a freeway in the foreground where a homeless man urinates in the shadows of the traffic. The man, with his shopping cart filled with his possessions by his side, is barely visible in the shot, but that is the point, because those obliviously driving by him on the freeway above are blind to his plight and the one that awaits them as well.

The second shot is of a man and his family, who we meet very briefly earlier in the film, evicted from their rental home because of a landlord who gets foreclosed upon. The family now live in their van parked at a convenience store. This scene, which is visuals accompanied by a voice-over not directly connected to the action, shows a little boy running away from the family van. The shot is maybe three seconds long, but it stops your heart it is so well done. This shot cinematically conveys to the viewer absolutely everything they need to know, and all without a word. It shows how vulnerable and dangerous life is for people on the margins in America. My reaction to that brief shot was visceral…how could it not be? The shot is so quick you can only react to it on a gut level, and at that level, you instantly fear that the little boy will run into traffic. That shot connects the bigger story of The Big Short, to the human story of those devastated by the housing collapse. That little boy is in danger and it is because of the shenanigans of the big banks. These two shots/sequences are the type of small details that make all the difference in a film, and they highlight Adam McKay's exquisite direction of The Big Short.

The acting in the film is solid across the board. Ryan Gosling easily does the best work of his career as Jared Vennett, a bond salesman at Deutsche bank. He gives a funny, dynamic and charismatic performance that is the engine driving the film forward. Steve Carrell does exhaustive work playing the unlikable but ultimately compelling Michael Baum, the manager of a hedge fund whom Vennett approaches to invest against the housing market. Christian Bale gives a layered and intricate performance as Dr. Michael Burry, the eccentrically awkward mastermind who uncovers the fraud at the heart of the housing bubble. Brad Pitt brings a surprising gravity and humanity to the film as former JP Morgan trader Ben Rickert, and acts as a counterbalance to Gosling's fast talking and ego-driven Vennet. The rest of the cast is superb as well, with Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Max Greenfield and Billy Magnussen among others who all do standout work.

"TRUTH IS LIKE POETRY, AND MOST PEOPLE HATE POETRY" - OVERHEARD AT A WASHINGTON, D.C. BAR

I saw The Big Short in the theatre on the same day that I saw Spotlight. This was just by coincidence, but in hindsight it is easy to see that the movies are actually companion pieces. They have a lot in common as both The Big Short and Spotlight are flawlessly crafted films. Both pictures are superbly written, acted, directed, shot and edited. In addition both The Big Short and Spotlight explore similar themes, namely institutional blindness, perverted forms of religion, and the moral and ethical rot at the center of American life. 

"TO SEE WHAT IS IN FRONT OF ONE'S NOSE NEEDS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE." - GEORGE ORWELL

The institutional blindness on display in The Big Short runs not only through Wall Street, but also the media and Washington. When you hear talking heads on television say that no one saw the financial collapse of 2007-2008 coming, realize that this is just one more form of that blindness. Hindsight is usually 20/20, but not when you are unable to admit you were catastrophically wrong in the first place. As the great American Prophet (or is it Profit?) Dr. Phil is fond of saying, "you can't change what you don't acknowledge"…you're god-damned right about that, good doctor. Besides the characters at the center of The Big Short, there were other people who saw the collapse coming too, but they were the "wrong" people, so no one listened to them. Hell, even a clueless dope like me saw it coming. Ask my poor clients who had to listen to me ramble on and on about it day after day. Of course, most of those clients, and most of my friends, just nodded politely at my ramblings and ignored them…and lost a ton of money. I, and a very tight circle of friends, ended up being right not because we were geniuses, God and you dear reader know that isn't true, but rather because we weren't infected by the mania brought on by the lure of easy money that had gripped, and still grips, the nation. One of the glaring symptoms of this mania is that it brings with it a greed-induced frenzy that makes it, to paraphrase Orwell, 'hard to see what is right in front of your nose'.

The institutional blindness at the core of American capitalism comes from years of uncritical thinking from the people inside its foundational institutions. No one at any level of the American capitalism food chain, from University economics and finance departments, to the media to government to Wall street, dare question the basic premise of American capitalism because it has become a most-holy, sacred religion. This religion deems insatiable greed not only healthy for the economy, but a "good" and worthy attribute for everyone. This new church of American capitalism found a cinematic saint in Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, but St. Gordon was just preaching the gospel of the semi-non-fictional Saint Ronald Reagan from the early 1980's. Both St. Gordon and St. Ronnie were followed by free market saint and snake oil salesman extraordinaire, Bill Clinton in the 90's, who cleared the way for "unfettered, free-market capitalism" to take a giant shit on all of us.

"THE CAPITALIST WILL SELL YOU THE ROPE WITH WHICH YOU INTEND TO HANG HIM" - VLADIMIR LENNIN

Ask anyone with an advanced degree in economics or finance if during their long years of schooling they ever had to take a course on an alternative economic system to capitalism. The answer will be a resounding "no". That is not to say that socialism or communism or any other "ism" is better than American capitalism. But it is to say that when people are taught, or more accurately, conditioned, to NOT think critically about their economic system (or anything else for that matter), then that system stops being an economic one and starts being a religious one. Religion is based on faith and to its faithful adherents, is beyond reproach…see Spotlight as evidence of that. When something as profane as American capitalism becomes sanctified, corruption and collapse are sure to follow, just as it did with Soviet "socialism". With religion comes magical thinking, and so it is with American capitalism, which must contort reality in order to reinforce its faith based belief system. So we get deformed and distorted economic information from the powers that be because they must keep the house of cards standing at all cost. The Big Short humorously shows how while the underlying mortgages crumbled, the mortgage backed securities made up of those same bad mortgages actually went up. That is what happens in religion when reality doesn't conform to the sacred belief system, magical thinking kicks in and…MIRACLES OCCUR…up can become down, black can become white, or as those of us living in reality say…FRAUD HAPPENS. This charade of American capitalism can only last so long, as reality has a funny way of cutting through the bullshit of magical thinking and kicking you right in the nuts…just ask Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns.

"TELL ME THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STUPID AND ILLEGAL AND I'LL HAVE MY WIFE'S BROTHER ARRESTED" - JARED VENNET, THE BIG SHORT

See, in American capitalism, fraud is not a bug, but a feature, it is baked into the cake. Fraud and magical thinking are at the very heart of American capitalism. The fraud that runs rampant is easy to see.  We have all of the big banks rigging bids on municipal bonds and bilking every city in the nation for billions of dollars. Then we have Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, UBS and Citigroup and the LIBOR scandal, where they manipulated the world's interest rates and in so doing a good portion of the world's economy. Then there is the fraud on display in The Big Short where big banks defrauded their customers in order to cover their asses as the mortgage market tumbled. This doesn't even touch upon the criminality of banks laundering money for drug cartels, or rate-rigging the currency rates. 

In all of these scandals, no one was sent to prison. No one was held criminally liable. The Banks simply paid a fine, sometimes in the billions of dollars, but never had to admit to wrong doing. This is the casino-gulag business model, banks make $10 billion in fraud and only pay $1 billion in fines. That is a pretty good deal if you can get it…and the big banks know how to get it.

I had a conversation recently with an older friend, very conservative, who told me that he was "sick and tired of all the big bank bashing" because Wall Street "creates a lot jobs and a lot of wealth". I nodded politely so as to not offend his religious belief in American capitalism. The reality is that Wall Street, like Las Vegas, "creates" nothing, but they do "engineer" more gambling opportunities where the house always wins, and the concept of "the common good" never has to rear its ugly head.

"THE IGNORANT MIND, WITH ITS INFINITE AFFLICTIONS, PASSIONS AND EVILS, IS ROOTED IN THE THREE POISONS. GREED, ANGER AND DELUSION." - BODHIDHARMA

This taps into the moral and ethical rot at the center of America. Wall Street and Main Street, both infected with an insatiable greed, no longer invest, they speculate. The myopic greed and lure of easy money that has infested America makes corporations and regular people cut off their nose to spite their face, all in the name of higher short-term earnings and to the detriment of the long term, the common good and common sense. This is no way to run a company, or a country…but it's what is happening all around us. We have CEO's who mine their company for short term profits, which often times includes profit through fraud, in order to appease shareholders and get their bonuses before moving on, all the while ignoring the long term health of their business. The same is true of government, where politicians ignore the long term health of the country in favor of the short term health of their political careers and the next election. Regular Jane's and Joe's did the same thing by "flipping" houses and trying to run with the wolves on Wall Street…but found out the hard way that it is a rigged game. Now, they do the same thing in a different way by going into debt just to pay their bills month to month. This myopic approach to finance, politics and life, can only last so long before the bill comes due. Robbing Peter to pay Paul only ends up, at best, with either Peter or Paul breaking your thumbs, or at worst, with the two of them burying you in a shallow grave out in the desert.

The Church of American Capitalism and the moral and ethical rot that comes with it, has also infected American Christianity in the form of the "Prosperity Gospel". This Prosperity Gospel is the perfect symbol for the lascivious and lecherous greed, that like a cancer, has metastasized through all walks of American life and bastardized Christianity into little more than Santa Claus for adults. Turning greed into spirituality and religion is the last straw in the fall of the moral underpinnings of any nation and its people. Gordon Gekko once said, "Greed is good", but the Prosperity Gospel of the Church of American Capitalism teaches , "Greed is God".

"WHENEVER I WATCH TV AND SEE THOSE POOR STARVING KIDS ALL OVER THE WORLD, I CAN'T HELP BUT CRY. I MEAN I'D LOVE TO BE SKINNY LIKE THAT, BUT NOT WITH ALL THOSE FLIES AND DEATH AND STUFF." - MARIAH CAREY

The other religion, besides the church of American capitalism and greed, so masterfully on display in The Big Short, is the uniquely American religion of Celebrity. Director McKay wisely uses famous people to talk directly to the audience and explain complicated financial terms and processes. This has a dual effect, one, it breaks down the complex language of finance which Wall Street uses to make people think only they can do this stuff, terms like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), Mortgage Backed Security (MBS), and Credit Default Swap (CDS), into language the layman can understand. Two, it surreptitiously tweaks the audience for being so mindless as to only pay attention when a celebrity is talking. The celebrities involved, Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and chef Anthony Bourdain, all get the point across both on the surface level of explaining the information, but also on the subversive level of proving the audience as suckers for the famous, a.k.a. high priests and priestesses of the Church of American Celebrity. If Collateralized Debt Obligations, Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps were explained by some dry academic, people would, as they've been trained to do, instantly tune out, but when it is done by Margot Robbie in a bubble bath…attention will most surely be paid. 

"WE FORGET THAT THE WATER CYCLE AND THE LIFE CYCLE ARE ONE." - JACQUE COUSTEAU

Speaking of bubble baths…at the end of the movie, there is an update on what the main characters are up to since their big short paid off. We are informed that Dr. Michael Burry, who closed his hedge fund right after the collapse of 2007/08, now focuses his investments on one commodity…water. This is pretty interesting because running throughout the film there is a very subtle subtext about water. If you watch the film again, pay attention when water is in a shot (like Ms. Robbie's bubble bath cameo), what characters drink it and when they drink it. There is one scene where Dr. Burry, while talking about shorting the housing market, chokes on a swig of water from a bottle, which, knowing the context of his later investing work, is very intriguing. Another scene involves a swimming pool with an unwanted reptilian guest lurking in it behind an abandoned Florida house. The house no doubt abandoned because of the "gully" (definition of a "gully" is "a water worn ravine") in the housing market. That scene is juxtaposed with a scene of a lavish swimming pool at Caesar's Palace, which is populated by investment bankers (from Goldman Sachs!!) and a woman from the SEC. Gators, bankers and feds…oh my!!! Water is the hidden secret within The Big Short, and the secret about water in today's world is that it will soon replace oil as the commodity over which we go to war.

"EVERYONE, DEEP IN THEIR HEARTS, IS WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD TO COME." - HARUKI MURAKAMI

In conclusion, The Big Short is a phenomenal, must-see film, that shows us what went catastrophically wrong back in 2007/2008, and what is still wrong with our system. It is up to us to break free from the magical thinking brought on by the Church of American capitalism, and the distraction from thinking brought on by the Church of American Celebrity, and to see the truth that sits right in front of our nose…the American financial system is not only fundamentally and structurally flawed, it is irreparably broken and untenable. The house of cards is coming down whether we are ready for it or not…it isn't a matter of if…it is a matter of when. You can either prepare for the coming tsunami* or not, that is up to you…but what you cannot do this time around...is say that no one told you it was coming. 

*See what I did there? Tsunami…water? C'mon..pay attention!!!

©2016