Kevin Spacey leads an all-star cast that includes Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore Stanley Tucci and Jeremy Irons in Wall Street thriller “Margin Call.” A trailer for the new movie is well timed as the nation teeters on yet another financial crisis.
The movie focuses on a 24-hour period in 2008 when the financial markets imploded and every major Wall Street firm and most of the nation’s major banks faced financial ruin.
The nation is still reeling from the aftershocks of the collapse, nearly three years later, and most people still don’t get what happened.
If they realized how the nation’s financial Masters of the Universe recklessly gambled with their retirement accounts, heads would roll. Of course, that hasn’t happened.
Ironically, the title of the movie, “Margin Call,” is a bit of a misnomer.
It’s a throwback to the Great Depression when individual investors were allowed to borrow against stock accounts to buy even more stocks by putting only 10% down.
That’s great as long as markets go up and stocks rise in value. When they go down, the system tumbles like a house of cards. But that’s not what happened here.
The greed and malfeasance was solely the responsibility of the investment banks and the large institutional investors that supported them. They sold junk bonds, but claimed they were Triple-A.
J.C. Chandor makes his feature-length writing and directorial debut, and his work won kudos at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival.
The trailer sets up the movie. It follows a powerful investment bank in the 24 hours leading up to the meltdown, as it figures out that financial disaster is at hand.
Margin Call hits theaters on Oct. 21. Might be a nice kick off to the 2012 presidential election campaign.
