Ryan Gosling wears an IWC Portugieser

Adam McKay's The Big Short (2015) keeps stopping its own story to explain itself. Margot Robbie does subprime mortgages from a bubble bath. The film adapts Michael Lewis's book about the handful of outsiders who saw the 2008 housing collapse coming and bet against it, and Ryan Gosling narrates much of it straight to camera. He plays Jared Vennett, based on Greg Lippmann, the Deutsche Bank trader who bet early and loudly against subprime.

Vennett wears an IWC Portugieser Chronograph, identified by Oracle of Time in its rundown of the film's watches. The Portugieser dates to the late 1930s, when two Portuguese businessmen asked IWC for a wristwatch as accurate as a marine chronometer, and IWC answered by fitting a large pocket-watch movement into an oversized case. Gosling's version is the chronograph, with a black dial and two subdials stacked in symmetry. Oracle of Time made a point of it: in a film where almost every other wrist wore a Rolex, the IWC stood out.