I doubt many really understood the film

[deleted]

Yeah it was a little to hard to follow and felt a little to much like wolf of wall street and since it was released just a year or two after it felt kinda lame for me personally since topic wise this movie was way more serious than wolf
also I dont think it helped having kind of a hard businness/market plot mixed with multiple chatacters bouncing in from scene to scene made me loose intrest in the story halgway through :p

I really enjoyed the film. I understood about 10% of it. I kept waiting for the big payoff scene in which Carell and Bale jumped up and down in fits of Euphoria over their I Told You So Billions, but never got it - which confused me more. I guess I've lived in a bit of a bubble myself because I may as well have been watching a movie in Chinese. That said, all I can do now is educate myself and read and research and figure out what the hell is happening in the world.

While I have read Liar's Poker and have a basic understanding of macro economy, I was not familiar with the industry terms except subprime mortgages and I think the movie does a decent job of explaining complex financial instruments to an average person. NINJAs are easy, no job, no assets, credit default swaps also, the one bit I didn't entirely understand was synthetic CDOs. Using the black jack game as a setting to explain seems like a good idea and the way I understood it it's that the secondary agents do not bet on the current hand (Selena vs. dealer) but whether or not Selena will keep on winning. What is the difference, though, isn't it all ultimately connected to the hand of black jack in question and the result of Selena vs. the dealer?

This film is easy to understand. Financial institutions are f#####g us. And as we saw today with the announcement of the settlement reached with Wells Fargo, they are still f#####g us.

Ladies and gentlemen...Mr.Conway Twitty

I followed the GFC with interest and like many in today's society have a deep hatred of bankers and the banking sector as a whole. In fact after the GFC the very first thing I did was knuckle down and pay off my mortgage so I I didn't have to give these vultures a cent more than I had to, now it's done and every time the bank calls me up offering a new load or some dodgy credit card with hidden fees and a high interest rate I tell them to *beep* off. So yes I followed it fairly well.

Many of us will need to watch it at least twice to come close to understanding. That said, the writers used some pretty clever devices to explain the financial "products." I liked the way they played with the fourth wall.

No, I did not understand much, but afterwards I had at least some understanding of what happened in the financial crisis, which is a lot more than the almost nil that I did before. Previously I had only vague ideas that it involved huge banks covering up a lot of corrupt and wild leveraging of worthless investments and crappy mortgages. That the film managed more than that and kept my attention on a subject (unfortunately) rarely covered in grade or high school and that I have never found interesting before was impressive.