Tuesday’s Top Trailer: The Big Short

Welcome back to a weekly feature here at Movies with Abe, Tuesday's Top Trailer. One of my favorite parts about going to see movies is the series of trailers that airs beforehand and, more often than not, the trailer is far better than the actual film. Each week, I'll be sharing a trailer I've recently seen. Please chime in with comments on what you think of the trailer and how you think the movie is going to be.

The Big Short – Opening December 23, 2015

I saw this trailer before a showing of “Steve Jobs” with no knowledge whatsoever of the film. This trailer was the first in a while that really surprised me in terms of the actors who showed up as its stars. The first was Christian Bale, who did wow me with his Oscar-winning turn in “The Fighter” but hasn’t usually impressed me too much in other roles, including his unnecessarily Oscar-nominated performance in “American Hustle.” Bale has worked with a number of actors, and Brad Pitt makes some sense since he too has tended to jump around from action films to more serious movies without much concern for whether he’s the lead or a supporting player. The two who I wouldn’t have pegged for this are Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling. The former has been foraying into more dramatic films recently, earning an Oscar nomination for “Foxcatcher,” and here he appears with blond hair messy on his head, and the latter, a dependably intense actor, has completely different hair, making him look much more buttoned-up and less reckless than usual. These four make a formidable foursome to take on big banks, a natural faceless but omnipotent enemy for a film like this. With this diverse talent, this film is sure to be electric and watchable; it’s just a question of whether, with this potential, this will be a big Oscar contender or somewhere more along the lines of “The Company Men,” which looked like it could have been that and then turned out to come and go with no fanfare at all. Director Adam McKay’s credits are essentially all Will Ferrell movies, which conjures up a bizarre resume for this movie, and the screenplay is based on a book by Michael Lewis, the author of both “Moneyball,” which was adapted by Aaron Sorkin as a fantastic script, and “The Blind Side,” which was not. We’ll see what happens here as this film opens just around when every other big film does: Christmas.