What Five Big-Budget Hollywood Movies Can Teach You About The Financial Crisis

One major insight: rich bankers really love riding in helicopters.

By EJ Dickson

If you don't watch Bloomberg, read Paul Krugman's New York Times op-eds, or have a secret fangirl crush on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, you may not have mastered the nuances of the worldwide financial crisis. That's why Hollywood producers decided to help you out by releasing financial crisis-themed movies like Tower Heist, a big-budget comedy that spins the suffering of millions of Americans into box-office gold. Starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, Tower Heist follows a group of building employees plotting to rob the apartment of a Madoff-esque Wall Street financier, who stole their pensions in a Ponzi scheme. But it's not the first movie to use the economic crisis as a source of cinematic inspiration. In honor of Tower Heist's release — and in honor of Hollywood's long-standing tradition of turning lemons into shittier lemons — here are five cinematic takes on the financial crisis, and what you can learn from them. Grab a copy of Wall Street 2 from your nearest DVD bargain bin, 'cause you're about to get schooled.

1. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

The premise: The sequel to Oliver Stone's Reagan-era classic, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is set in 2008, after antihero Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is released from an eight-year prison sentence. The movie focuses on Gekko and star propriety trader Jacob Moore (Shia LeBeouf)'s takedown of investment banker Bratton James (Josh Brolin), a cutthroat motherfucker who profited from the collapse of Moore's old firm.

What you learn: With its smash-cut montages of cable news reports and stock listings, Stone's slick film aims for "ripped from the headlines" relevancy. But it's less interested in providing insight into the inner workings of the financial crisis, and more interested in showing how much investment bankers enjoy riding in helicopters and racing Ducatis. Although screenwriter Alan Loeb consulted with numerous investors during the project, we don't actually see anyone doing any of the hot 'n sexy shit that helped bring about the financial crisis, like say, turning crappy subprime mortgages into toxic CDOs and selling them to investors. But that would probably have been too steamy for the movie's PG-13 rating.

Best finance-y lines about finance things: "Sometimes I think that only seventy-five people in the world know what CDOs are. But I'll tell you what they are: WMDs. Weapons of mass destruction." — Gordon Gekko

"You're the worst kind of toxic debt in the system." — Moore, to James

2. Too Big to Fail (2011)

The premise: Based on Andrew Ross Sorkin's book, Too Big to Fail (or as I like to call it, "2 Illegit 2 Quit") premiered on HBO last May. Featuring an all-star cast of good-looking actor types made up to look like slightly less good-looking finance types, 2I2Q maps out the events between the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the government bailout.

What we learn: A lot, actually — the film's primary goal is to provide an accessible, user-friendly account, so it goes out of its way to define terms and elucidate concepts for the benefit of the viewer (think of it as a SparkNotes for the subprime mortgage crisis). Unfortunately, this makes some of the dialogue seem clunky and expository. Still, as far as white-knuckled, financially-themed nail-biters go, the film is as white-knuckled a nail-biter as you can get.

Best finance-y lines about finance things: "No one wanted it. We were making too much money." — Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (William Hurt), asked why the banks weren't more well-regulated