Lists

Picture of a movie: Hacksaw Ridge
Picture of a movie: Hidden Figures
Picture of a movie: Fury
Picture of a movie: The Finest Hours
Picture of a movie: Free State of Jones
Picture of a movie: Patriots Day
Picture of a movie: Deepwater Horizon
Picture of a movie: The Founder

8 Movies

Historic/True Story

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Picture of a movie: The Big Short
movies

The Big Short

2016
Three separate but parallel stories of the U.S mortgage housing crisis of 2005 are told. Michael Burry, an eccentric ex-physician turned one-eyed Scion Capital hedge fund manager, has traded traditional office attire for shorts, bare feet and a Supercuts haircut. He believes that the US housing market is built on a bubble that will burst within the next few years. Autonomy within the company allows Burry to do largely as he pleases, so Burry proceeds to bet against the housing market with the banks, who are more than happy to accept his proposal for something that has never happened in American history. The banks believe that Burry is a crackpot and therefore are confident in that they will win the deal. Jared Vennett with Deutschebank gets wind of what Burry is doing and, as an investor believes he too can cash in on Burry's beliefs. An errant telephone call to FrontPoint Partners gets this information into the hands of Mark Baum, an idealist who is fed up with the corruption in the financial industry. Baum and his associates, who work at an arms length under Morgan Stanley, decide to join forces with Vennett despite not totally trusting him. In addition to Burry's information, they further believe that most of the mortgages are overrated by the bond agencies, with the banks collating all the sub-prime mortgages under AAA packages. Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, who are minor players in a $30 million start-up garage company called Brownfield, get a hold of Vennett's prospectus on the matter. Wanting in on the action but not having the official clout to play, they decide to call an old "friend", retired investment banker Ben Rickert, to help out. All three of these groups work on the premise that the banks are stupid and don't know what's going on, while for them to win, the general economy has to lose, which means the suffering of the general investor who trusts the financial institutions. That latter aspect may not sit well with Baum. Some of these assumptions may be incorrect and may be far more manipulative than they could have ever imagined, which in turn may throw curves into the process.
Picture of a movie: The 33
movies

The 33

2015
A docudramatic account of the 2010 Chilean mine disaster is presented, where the thirty-three miners who went into the San José Mine in Copiapó, Chile in the middle of the Atacama Desert on August 5 were trapped 700 meters underground for sixty-nine days, with all thirty-three eventually able to make it out of the mine alive. That day, mine foreman, Luis "Don Lucho" Urzúa, reported his concerns to mine owner, Carlos Castillo, about the unstable nature of the mountain under which the mine is located, those concerns which went unheeded. Don Lucho one of the thirty-three, went to work as usual into the mine, when that instability led to collapse in some of the underground shafts, the thirty-three who were able to make it to the refuge area, however with communication channels to the surface inoperable. Under normal circumstances, the refuge area had enough supplies to last thirty men three days. The miners also discovered that the company had failed to place the requisite ladders from the refuge area to the surface, and that the primary route out was now blocked by a shifted rock, its mass the equivalent of the Empire State Building. The thirty-three were ultimately led by Mario Sepúlveda, who was not going to let any of the thirty-three take priority over any of the others, especially in the initial panic and instinct for self-survival among some. On the surface, loved ones of the trapped miners held vigil at the mine, with María Segovia, elder sister of trapped miner Dario Segovia, arguably the most outspoken in condemnation of the powers that be not doing anything to search for the miners, not knowing if they were dead or alive, but who was also quick to give praise where praise was due. That praise largely went to the relatively new Minister of Mines, Laurence Golborne, who was determined both to do whatever he could on behalf of the government to look for the men and to provide accurate assessments to those holding vigil of the situation, especially in Castillo seeing miner deaths solely as an unfortunate nature of the business. The chief engineer assigned to drill toward the refuge area in the hopes that the miners were there was Andre Sougarret, who admitted that the process was not a scientific one as one would have hoped. Once the miners were discovered alive in the refuge area, the next phase of trying to extract them held its own new challenges for all concerned, both logistical and emotional.