Margin Call (2011) Rewatch

[iamwhatiseem]

There are a lot of opinions about this movie. Some say it's oversimplification, leaving out the governments role entirely and showing only one firm with little to no details makes it a bad movie about 2008 and what led up to it.
I disagree, with one exception - how Hollywood conveniently left out the governments role. And of course there is no explanation necessary as to why they did.
Outside of that - to me it is a fictional "representative" story that is filled to the brim with analogies of realty. The Firm represents all investment firms and investment banks that are guilty of "the cheat".
The top three execs represent all of the financial giants who absolutely knew what they were doing was outrageous cheating, but it was making them $100's of millions personally so they did it anyway.
And then these same execs - which was true in the real world - and thanks to Obama bailing them all out - gave each other record - AGAIN - RECORD bonuses and golden parachutes during and immediately after the collapse. And Obama's administration was perfectly fine with that.

It is a good movie. But not showing the governments role in taking $100s of billions of taxpayer money and giving it straight to these same people while taxpayers who paid these taxes, by the millions, lost everything. And they gave each other record bonuses the same year. And many of these same people made record profits between 2009-2014. During the same period 100,000s of small businesses foreclosed, millions lost their homes and more bankruptcies than you can count. - All left out of the movie.

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Character review - John Tuld. CEO of the investment bank in the movie.




Probably the most meaningful character in the movie. He is the greedy CEO of the investment bank the movie is about.
Some people, myself included, describe people like him as "Wasp".
And like Wasp, they are predatory and parasitic at the same time. They prey and exploit anything they can find to make money with little to zero regard for who it harms, or how badly it harms them. The only care about themselves. Period.
At the same time, they are parasites. They achieve nothing. They build nothing, They produce nothing. They design nothing. They live and survive by sucking off the benefits of what others achieve, build, produce and design.

Best line - "It's not wrong (what we do) or any different than what has always been done for centuries.... there has been and always will be the same percentages of winners and losers, sad sacks and happy foxes, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Sure, there are more of us now than before, but the percentages are the same, and always will be. "