Margin Call [HD]

First-Time Filmmaker Deftly Handles the Financial Meltdown on Human-Size Terms
Having been the victim of corporate downsizing more than once, I was immediately engaged with this propulsive 2011 corporate drama from the beginning as Stanley Tucci's character, a seasoned risk management executive named Eric Dale, is told in a coldly indifferent manner that he is being laid off after 19 years with the same unnamed Wall Street firm. It's a piercing yet dramatically economical scene that perfectly summarizes how bloodless the corporate world can be, and in first-time writer/director J.C. Chandor's effort set on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, it is very cold indeed with 80% of the trading floor being let go. As Dale is escorted out of the building, he hands a flash drive to his prodigious assistant Peter Sullivan and tells him to take a look at it and "Be careful."

Once Sullivan analyzes the data, he realizes the universal gravity of Dale's warning - that the firm is so over-committed to underwater mortgage-backed securities that the total potential...

Excellent, but brainy and low-key
Up-front warning: there are no exploding cars, steamy sex scenes or "You can't handle the truth!" catch-phrases in this remarkable movie. Don't get me wrong, I like that type of movie, but this is something different. It's a drama, not a melodrama. It's a reality show about actual reality, which unlike most reality shows, usually moves along in an orderly fashion.

If you've never been a manager in a serious company, it might not appeal to you. As an ex-software company exec, I can say it felt real to me. I found the story exciting, because I could relate to the characters and their understated pain. Many things are shown, rather than stated. For example, they work all night long in their suits, but no one ever talks about going home, or the hours, etc. If you've been in a management crisis and experienced a long hellish night, you'll feel this movie in your bones.

The best part was the placement of the viewer in the shoes of the company execs. Imagine your place...

LTCM LLC
Having been a wall streeter for most of my professional life I can say that this film gets it right it gets right the firing, it gets right the way in which people are so disconnected, so self serving, it gets the way many young misguided college graduates think of wall street. I started working in the 1990s on wall street at a time when Risk Management meant something and at a time when firms like JP Morgan out of 23 wall was leading risk management with risk metrics and most of us coming out of great Universities with technical degrees were welcomed, albeit heralded as the saviors of the new age of finance. Sadly we believed it and so did the rest of the world including key people in the administration "Summers" defended our new financial engineering products so much so that even in light of the near collapse of LTCM they said that we had it right. Why do we believe that we can dilute ourselves? Mass delusion I say. And I say it again we must be mass deluded. As an insider working...

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