TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

You won't understand The Big Short . "Stop calling me Michael Scott!" That is, unless you're an insider in the banking business. That's probably not even how you use that phrase. Banking industry? How about super villain headquarters? Yeah, I like that a little better. As we learned from The Wolf of Wall S treet (and uh, common sense: how many articles talk about the nice guys of Wall Street?) there are plenty of bankers and investors willing and ready to make a profit at the risk of the 99%. Ryan Gosling's Jared Vennett certainly knows this. He's one of the insiders who saw the 2008 bubble pop, the housing and banking collapse that led to one of the largest recessions in U.S. history. Everyone in this movie is based on real people, based on Michael Lewis' nonfiction book of the same name. But this movie will tell you when it's fibbing on the truth a little: and that's the biggest thing it has going for it. As I said, laymen to this bus...

I'm a sucker for coming of age movies. "Meatballs," "Stand by Me," "My Girl" just to name a few of my favorites. Perhaps it's because I'm not quite done growing up, so I like seeing other go through with that struggle, if not just to confirm I'm not alone. I've been on a Netflix kick of the show "Freaks and Geeks," entirely devoted to chronicling high school children face obstacles in 1980's Michigan. So high school movies especially are my bread and butter (note "Perks of Being a Wallflower") but give me a story where a kid finds himself in a water park and I'm down. I'm especially down if the co-director/writers/actors/executive producers of the movie Jim Rash and Nat Faxon are involved. They co-wrote one of my favorite films of all time, "The Descendants," the gorgeous Hawaiian set tale of a man coming to grips with his comatose wife. This is a pretty big 180 from that film, about a boy nam...