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Connections, in both directions
Network (1976)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced Don't Look Up (2021), Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013), The Big Short (2015)
Visuals Themes Dialogue
At its best, The Big Short feels a little like a lost script by the great screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (who penned Network , among many others), filmed in the style of The Bourne Identity .
Ironically, the right's present clarion call comes from liberal Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote in Network (1976), "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
McKay was clearly inspired by classics in the genre from Dr. Strangelove, which turned nuclear war into comedy, to Network and Wag the Dog among other fondly-remembered gems we now recognize weren’t far off from getting at some real truths.
But The Big Short and Vice could also be furious, frothing-at-the-mouth diatribes, laden with self-righteousness that resembled unironic homages to Sidney Lumet’s Network.
As well as the aforementioned Strangelove and Armageddon , Don’t Look Up also has echoes of Deep Impact , Network , Wag the Dog , Bob Roberts and Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, as banging their heads against a brick wall of bureaucracy – and a divided public, some of whom believe it all to be a massive conspiracy theory – takes its toll on the protagonists.
One scene has a panel of science deniers claim: “They want you to look up, so they can look down on you!” Watching DiCaprio have his full Peter Finch in “Network” moment: (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”) had me rolling out of my seat.
The Laundromat (2019)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
influenced by The Big Short (2015)
Visuals Themes
One moment, Soderbergh and friends attempt to recapture the magic of films like The Big Short; complicated issues handled with a wink and a smile as they mesh playful interaction with concise descriptors of what exactly occurred.
Con un estilo reminiscente al de cintas como The Big Short y Vice, el director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) expone en The Laundromat (La Lavandería) uno de los escándalos fiscales más grandes a nivel internacional.
“The Big Short,” Adam McKay’s 2015 film about the financial crisis that ushered in the Great Recession, is an obvious precedent.
The most successful recent film in this didactic form—essentially fictionalized Michael Moore movies—was probably Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about a particularly cynical exploitation of the late-aughts financial crisis.
The Laundromat, The Big Short-esque collection of celebrity-laden vignettes explaining the ins and outs of a recent financial crisis, is a showcase for Steven Soderbergh’s vim and vigor.
The 2015 Oscar-nominated financial crisis satire The Big Short covered similar territory with sharper focus and better results.
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)
Directed by Josh Greenbaum
influenced by Step Brothers (2008), The Other Guys (2010)
Themes
There are clear antecedents for Barb & Star’s vibe; the whole double role and supervillain schtick recalls Austin Powers, and the surreal digressions recall Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s comedies of the early 2000s, particularly Step Brothers .
With musical interludes, talking crabs, magic culotte pants and literal embodiments of Tommy Bahama (played by an actor whose eventual closing credit is even a pretty funny joke), Barb and Star conjures a surprising stoner vibe, as well as surreal tangents a la Step Brothers , to counter the gal-pal echoes of Wiig and Mumolo’s 2011 sleeper hit.
Their latest feature feels of a piece with McKay’s comedies Step Brothers and The Other Guys, blending humor, absurdity, and the occasional musical number to great effect.
So, it is with this acknowledgment of my own sad ass drama burnout in mind, that I announce: Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is GODDAMN DELIGHTFUL, the most singularly absurd comedy since Step Brothers and an instant classic.
Their latest feature feels of a piece with McKay’s comedies Step Brothers and The Other Guys, blending humor, absurdity, and the occasional musical number to great effect.
Based on a best-selling book by Michael Lewis about folks who anticipated the financial crisis of 2008, “The Big Short” is the film that “The Wolf of Wall Street” wanted to be.
And, while it deals with the unchecked recklessness of the financial sector, it's not like 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street.
While there is a certain undeniable fascination in watching the so-called experts go down while a few visionary mavericks escape on self-made lifeboats, you can never escape the thought that Paramount probably made this film only because of the success of The Wolf of Wall Street two years ago and then recall how much better made and more entertaining that was than what's onscreen here.
Cut to Robbie—whom many viewers will have last seen in “The Wolf of Wall Street”—swathed in foam and holding a glass of champagne.
While "Short" lacks the naughty bravado of "The Wolf of Wall Street," Martin Scorsese's skinny dip into suit-and-tie avarice, it's still a feisty, rattling good film that likely will make you spitting mad.
That approach works until McKay’s control begins to slip: Unlike “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” (which is explicitly invoked in one of those celebrity cameos), “The Big Short” can’t exactly be accused of celebrating the greedy bro culture it’s indicting.
From Wall Street (1987) to Margin Call (2011), from American Psycho (2000) to, of course, Wolf of Wall Street (2013), filmmakers' answers to that question have ranged all over the map.
Like thematic predecessors such as Wall Street, The Big Short is all about greed and making money.
The great American tradition of filling one’s pockets with other people’s money has inspired milestones from “Glengarry Glen Ross” to “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Wall Street” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Unlike the slick suits and killer sheen of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street , this is a world of chaos and disorder filled with misfits who understand numbers more than people; from Christian Bale’s Michael Burry, a socially awkward heavy-metal enthusiast who dreams up the credit default swaps that enable him to “short” the housing market, to Steve Carell’s bereaved and fractured Mark Baum (a character inspired by the real-life Steve Eisman) who balances moral outrage and repressed self-loathing as he swims with sharks in the cesspool of the financial market.
Conceived as a ‘financial crash film’ in the vein of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street , it was first offered to these two men.
It is serious business – both literally and figuratively – and yet this 2008-financial-crisis cautionary tale ( The Big Short director Adam McKay is one of the producers) channels the stylized form of a female buddy movie.
The marketing for Hustlers gives the impression that this has The Big Short or Vice (and Adam McKay, the director of both, is a producer on Hustlers) or even Ocean’s 11 vibes, but Hustlers is a more grounded and sombre movie than those dramedies.
Indeed, Hustlers feels akin to the crime films of both Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, Casino) and Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice).
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), “The Big Short” (2015) and “Wall Street” (1987) all capture fast cash and high times in vivid blurs of overindulgence, articulated through mounds of designer drugs, $100 bottles of champagne and long-legged women in G-strings sashaying about for well-fleeced oglers.
There have been many Wall Street movies that include strippers and sex workers as background filler or punchlines; these can range from Martin Scorsese’s intentionally debauched The Wolf of Wall Street —where the line between documentation and exploitation is intentionally blurred—to even Hustlers producer Adam McKay’s own The Big Short , which might be the definitive cinematic tragi-comedy about the housing crisis.
McKay was clearly inspired by classics in the genre from Dr. Strangelove, which turned nuclear war into comedy, to Network and Wag the Dog among other fondly-remembered gems we now recognize weren’t far off from getting at some real truths.
As well as the aforementioned Strangelove and Armageddon , Don’t Look Up also has echoes of Deep Impact , Network , Wag the Dog , Bob Roberts and Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, as banging their heads against a brick wall of bureaucracy – and a divided public, some of whom believe it all to be a massive conspiracy theory – takes its toll on the protagonists.
While wildly aware that Don’t Look Up is absolutely a political satire that applies a dash of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Network (1976), and Wag the Dog (1997) with a nice helping of Armageddon (1998), the way in which an extinction-level event serves as the metaphor for climate crisis doesn’t always land because of the ever-present concern of COVID-19 and its variants.
Rush (2013)
Directed by Ron Howard
influenced by Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
Plot Themes
While there isn't really a Formula One racing film to compare to Ron Howard 's " Rush " (unless the Sylvester Stallone starring " Driven " from 2001 counts), the Nascar themed " Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby " came to mind with Jackie Chan 's " Thunderbolt " coming in a close second.
In the 2006 comedy Talladega Nights , Will Ferrell and Sasha Baron Cohen were hilarious as NASCAR drivers bent on each other’s destruction, while the mesmerizing 2010 documentary Senna traced the real-life competition between the Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna and his career archrival, the French driver Alain Prost.
Subject wise car racing of any facet has not transitioned well to the big screen, with only the Steve McQueen led Le Mans and Will Ferrell NASCAR spoof Talladega Nights crossing the finish line intact.
We don’t get many films about professional racing, only “Senna”, “Days of Thunder”, and “Talladega Nights” come immediately to mind, so it’s always refreshing to see a film attempt to capture the speed and power of the elegant machines built to satiate humankind’s relentless need to race.
War Dogs (2016)
Directed by Todd Phillips
influenced by The Big Short (2015), Step Brothers (2008)
Themes Visuals
Greed soon trumps reason and the fingerprints of The Big Short, American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are evident in the storytelling style.
It never reaches the zany mayhem of “Pineapple Express,” the educational message approach of “The Big Short” or the revelatory magic of a Scorsese film.
There are moments when War Dogs approximates the effective politics-channelling comedy of The Big Short, with entertainingly presented facts and figures; Teller and Hill make for great screen buddies; and, bar the occasional lull, Phillips keeps the movie rattling along.
At times Phillips’ movie nods in the direction of Martin Scorsese’s nauseatingly brilliant “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in which Hill played a riotous second banana, as well as Adam McKay’s “The Big Short,” another example of a mainstream comedy director shifting gears and tackling a recent political outrage.
"War Dogs" seems to want to be everything from "The Social Network" to "The Big Short" and while it flirts with moments of greatness, the script just can't compete with the brains of those other films.
“War Dogs” plays like a movie made by someone who has spent a life in cinematic isolation, watching nothing but “The Big Short” and “Goodfellas” on a constant loop.
As well as the aforementioned Strangelove and Armageddon , Don’t Look Up also has echoes of Deep Impact , Network , Wag the Dog , Bob Roberts and Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, as banging their heads against a brick wall of bureaucracy – and a divided public, some of whom believe it all to be a massive conspiracy theory – takes its toll on the protagonists.
Don’t Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain.
We are jolted along by an end-of-days blockbuster like “Deep Impact” (the art-house-inclined can throw in “Melancholia”) but also swept up in a behind-the-scenes realpolitik farce like “Dr.
Unlike disaster films like Deep Impact and Armageddon , nobody in the presidential administration gives a damn.
As seen in Armageddon , Deep Impact , Independence Day, and so forth, the scientist discovers the doomsday maker, and the attention slowly shifts to the “real” heroes: the brawny brave astronauts tasked with saving the planet.
Other examples include Adam McKay’s The Big Short (co-written by Randolph and shot by Ackroyd) and Vice, as well as Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat.
Randolph served as co-writer on The Big Short; a movie that I actually quite enjoyed despite some flaws.
Charles Randolph wrote the script for "Bombshell"; he also wrote the script for "The Big Short," again signifying his credentials.
Of course, the narrative shouldn't revolve entirely around Theron’s bold transformation, “Bombshell” - directed by Jay Roach - takes “The Big Short” route by taking an important topic and giving it the mainstream treatment (it’s also an excellent companion piece with Showtime’s excellent miniseries “The Loudest Voice” which featured Russell Crowe as Ailes from earlier this year).
And this is a problem, overall, for director Jay Roach (Meet the Parents, Trumbo) and writer Charles Randolph (The Big Short), whose work is powerful, to a point, though could go deeper into the murkily complicit office politics on show.
Directed by Jay Roach and written by The Big Short‘s Charles Randolph, Bombshell brings the sexual harassment scandal of Fox News and Fox Television Stations CEO, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) to the forefront.
As executed, “Don’t Look Up” plays like the leftie answer to “Armageddon” — which is to say, it ditches the Bruckheimer approach of assembling a bunch of blue-collar heroes to rocket out to space and nuke the approaching comet, opting instead to spotlight the apathy, incompetence and financial self-interest of all involved (including Mark Rylance’s Sir Peter Isherwell, an extreme Asperger’s case — and campaign mega-donor — who combines elements of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to uniquely irritating effect).
Rather than a pandemic-level virus that continues to mutate because of political and partisan ineptitude, McKay goes Armageddon with an extinction-level comet heading straight for Earth.
Then there’s a creepy, world-famous tech visionary (Mark Rylance, unfortunately hitting some tone-deaf notes in a distractingly strange performance), who has a grand plan for mining the comet for its trillions of dollars in valuable raw materials and THEN blowing it up, “Armageddon” style.
While wildly aware that Don’t Look Up is absolutely a political satire that applies a dash of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Network (1976), and Wag the Dog (1997) with a nice helping of Armageddon (1998), the way in which an extinction-level event serves as the metaphor for climate crisis doesn’t always land because of the ever-present concern of COVID-19 and its variants.
Don’t Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain.
On another, it’s a quite brilliant pastiche of the Hollywood movies of the mid-to-late ‘90s ( Armageddon is firmly in film-maker Adam McKay and his team’s sights) when it was believed that any external threat could be solved by the President and someone willing to make “the ultimate sacrifice”.
Gold plays like a metallurgical spin on The Big Short, spelling out mining concepts to anyone so amused.
The combination of financial derring-do and the myth of the self-made American millionaire is in the spirit of recent films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street.
And there are flickering reminders of other ambitious, money-chasing mock epics, as if the filmmakers were hoping an algorithm would deposit “Gold” in the queues of viewers who liked “American Hustle,” “The Big Short” and Mr. Gaghan’s own “Syriana.”
Most directly descended from The Wolf of Wall Street , with thematic echoes of American Hustle and a dash of the capitalism-run-amok of The Big Short thrown in for good measure, Gold falters not only due to the oversaturation of its premise but also from heavy-handed pacing, dull characters and adherence to tropes over dramatic depth—problems which can’t be disguised by slapping a bald cap and some crooked teeth on a slightly pot-bellied Matthew McConaughey.
The narrative combines avarice, naiveté, corporate throat-slitting, and betrayal in ways that claim thematic kinship with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (more recently) The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Loosely inspired by real events, Stephen Gaghan’s ( Syriana ) satirical drama Gold plays like some sort of bug-eyed, whiskey-swilling love child of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
A House of Dynamite (2025)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
influenced by Don't Look Up (2021)
Themes Plot
A House of Dynamite is a scarier, less preachy movie than the likes of Don’t Look Up, but it’s no less didactic or unsubtle in what it’s trying to say.
…the narrative spins its wheels without deepening or going anywhere that wasn’t handled better in the underrated “Don’t Look Up.”
While the film is never as outwardly comedic as, say, Don’t Look Up (and between these two films, this is definitely the better one, though Netflix really seems to have a fetish for releasing prestige pictures about incompetence causing the end of the world)…
Adam McKay’s smug, overlong and mostly insufferable “Don’t Look Up” (2021) at least provided third act spectacle…
Based on Michael Lewis's 2010 bestselling book of the same name, McKay's film operates on a gambit as audacious — and as ultimately unsuccessful — as the one that J.C. Chandor risked in Margin Call (2011), which also centers on the economic catastrophe of seven years ago: Both ask viewers not only to empathize with but to find heroic obscenely overpaid finance workers.
“The Big Short” joins and compares favorably to other laud-worthy films about the tanking of the economy or the insane housing market, including the exceptional “Margin Call,” the anger-inducing documentary “Inside Job” and this year’s indie gem “99 Homes.”
Filmmakers looking to rectify this have already approached the story from a number of angles, from sober-minded documentary (“Inside Job”) to operatic boiler-room drama (“Margin Call”), but the route taken by “The Big Short” is by far the most radical, turning a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food.
A number of other films have been set against the financial collapse, including J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) and Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2015), as well as a host of outraged documentaries, but The Big Short does something unique in trying to dramatize the collapse itself and what led to it, rather than using it as a backdrop for character drama.
Ford v Ferrari (2019)
Directed by James Mangold
influenced by Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), Step Brothers (2008)
Visuals Plot
Having caught on fire in a scene that recalls Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, Shelby has been stripped of his driving career.
It also inevitably begs comparison to everything from Days of Thunder to Talladega Nights to, um, Stroker Ace to, uh, The Love Bug and, sure why not, Cars and The Cannonball Run and Death Race 2000 .
Just before the lights dimmed on the latest feature from Logan mastermind James Mangold, my partner whispered to me, “This better not be real-life Talladega Nights !”
But over the last 30 years we’ve only seen Tom Cruise in “Days of Thunder” (1990), Vin Diesel in “The Fast and the Furious” (2001), Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights” (2006) and Chris Hemsworth in “Rush” (2013).
It’s understandable considering the subject matter is motor-racing, which outside of the comedic Talladega Nights hasn’t really achieved podium finishes at the box-office, with Rush and Driven both sent to the scrap pile.
Damon and Bale are as solid as foundation as you can build a film on (the two have a mid-film scrap that’s essentially the “I tea-bagged your fucking drum set!” fight from Step Brothers put in the middle of Grand Prix ), and it’s actually quite nice to see the latter actor, famous for his brusqueness, work on a project that spotlights his warmth.
Greed (2019)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
influenced by The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018)
Themes Visuals Plot
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
In detailing how the system works, “Greed” borrows a few pages (and a comic/furious tone) from “The Big Short.”
On the one hand, the film yearns to be a British version of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice , which use formal experimentation and humour to explain the financial crisis and the career of Dick Cheney.
In the production notes of “Greed,” Winterbottom says that when he was seeking financing for the movie, he told potential investors that the tone of “Greed” would be similar to “The Big Short,” writer/director Adam McKay’s 2015 Oscar-winning satire of Wall Street’s manipulation of the U.S. housing market.
Recent films such as The Big Short and The Laundromat have explored the division between the rich and the poor.
This is where Greed closely resembles The Big Short, a better film that also stopped its plot to teach its audience.
If the idea of watching two grown men act like children - oversize, shouting, stomping, mouth-full-of- Cheez Whiz 12-year-olds - was actually comedy gold, Tom Hanks would be on his fourth "Big" sequel by now and Judge Reinhold would have rode a "Vice Versa" train all the way to retirement.
Picture Tom Hanks in a de-cornified “Big”: Wouldn’t his first move have been a mission for porn and beer?
Credit Ferrell and Reilly for most of them, as they not only commit to the material but really give these adult children a kind of plausibility (one day this will make a good triple feature with "Big," and "13 Going on 30.").
That bar sequence was just one of the parts that reminded me of The Other Guys, a far superior send-up of buddy-cop comedies.
In "The Heat" we're closer to full-on action mode, akin to "48 Hrs." or "Lethal Weapon" territory than a spoofy affair on the order of the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie "The Other Guys."
Feig’s indifference to craft hurts the movie—to name a counterexample, Adam McKay’s similar The Other Guys could pass as an impressively crisp actioner even without the comedy—but he knows funny, and he gives his actors plenty of room to work.
She’s the crassness of Mark Wahlberg in “The Other Guys” paired with the laughing at authority personality trait of Hutch in “Starsky and Hutch”.
Since then, fans of the relatively new sub-genre have enjoyed the pairing of such opposites as Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker (“Rush Hour,” 1998), Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (“Hot Fuzz,” 2007), and Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (“The Other Guys,” 2010).
Considering female-led comedies though, the comparison situation Bridesmaids drew to The Hangover absolutely pertains to The Heat, which certainly gave me more of a laugh-induced belly-ache than The Other Guys did on its opening night.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
Directed by Jay Roach
influenced Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
Dialogue
This is unfortunate, since the movies, and Ferrell’s performances in them, are not nearly as brilliant as what we saw in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me or Zoolander, where the comic had secondary but memorable roles.
And in a strange way, the movie sets itself up (à la "Austin Powers") with the possibility of a sequel that could outdo the original.
Anchorman is not likely to be as big a hit as Farrell’s last movie, Elf, but I think it has the potential, once it hits home video, to achieve Austin Powers-like status as a highly quotable movie.
Anchorman is Will Ferrell’s Austin Powers, here’s hoping he gets a sequel.
Yeah, one of the jokes rips off a classic Mike Myers bit from the “Austin Powers” movies, but it’s obvious that Ferrell is willing to “go there” for the sake of keeping in character as Ron Burgundy and Good ably plays along.
When cult hits rise to the top of the pop cultural swamp it’s customary for them to be go the way of Austin Powers.