Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

brolin + langella, ok
labeouf, no

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV5hEBqYfTE

gordon gekko get gordon gekkowned with that limo gag

i appreciate the cell phone

ugh @ the music

wow that looks so bad.

sad jd didnt live to see this :(

lol it was the 80s

haha there was a huge spread about this movie for some reason in the vanity fair w/ tiger woods on the cover

why did we trade daryl hannah for someone who looks like a hobbit's wife?

"One pair Z. Cavaricci brand dungarees. One vinyl record album, group: Men at Work."

First movie was good pulp. Can't wait to watch this.

There are some cringeworthy lines in the trailer -- "I once said that greed is good. Apparently now it's legal" (paraphrasing)

Many early reviews indicate Ollie lets the big boys off the hook. No shock, he did the same w/ Nixon.

Any shots of saturnine white men cutting into rare meat?

First hour is quite good. Second hour dithers. I really like that David Byrne and Brian Eno record, but boy was using all those songs a misjudgement.

Holy shit this was awwwful. The song choices were bad, but not nearly as distracting as the shitty, bad-showy editing, and holy shit is the last 15 minutes ever nonsense.

Ollie lets the big boys off the hook

Yep.

I'm looking forward to this, although realistic about Stone's lengthening run of mediocrity. I hope the other Ollie (Josh Mostel) turns up--I love when he does that little wiggle to "Half a million shares, in the bag!"

Was he ever anything better than mediocre though? He was awesome in a NY Post way from 1986-1991.

Well, I think Wall Street/Talk Radio/Born on the Fourth of July/JFK/Nixon (I know I'm way in the minority there) is an impressive run. If you add in Salvador (haven't seen it), Platoon, and Natural Born Killers (not a fan of the last two), even more so. I think we basically agree that there's a real junky aspect there. But I always have a hard time pulling myself away from any of those first four when they turn up on TV, and Nixon I rewatch once a year.

Platoon and JFK are all time. Nixon, Salvador, and Natural Born Killers are very good. Any Given Sunday might belong in that category as well.

Salvador's the best of the early run.

Glad someone else likes Nixon! If you can accept Hopkins--clearly it's not an imitation, he's doing something else--I think it's borderline great. I'm not sure why Morbius thinks the film lets anyone off the hook.

It does let him off the hook, but that's not the film Stone was making. Same thing goes for Wall Street 2, fwiw. I would have liked him to make that film, but clearly he had no interest. The one he has made fails on its own terms, and not because he lets anyone off the hook.

I don't know, I just don't see that (with regards to Nixon). You see pretty much every side of Nixon: the self-pity, the manipulation, the despotic blowhard, the smallness, the largeness, the social ineptness, the sentimentality, the vindictiveness, all of it. It shuffles stuff around (sometimes badly so, like the implication that RFK's assassination prompted Nixon's '68 run, something he'd been scheming since almost the minute he lost California in '62), but I don't think it hangs Watergate or the prolonged war on anyone other than him--even if there is some shadowy talk about "the system" and all that. It came out soon after Nixon's death, so it reminds me of Neil Young's "Campaigner": a lifelong Nixon-hater struggling to make sense of him at a moment when he was able to grant him some semblance of humanity. (I'm guessing that "Nixon" and "some semblance of humanity" won't compute for anyone here.) I looked up Greil Marcus's J.T. Walsh essay in O.K. You Mugs--for me, this describes the appeal of the film well: "I was pulled in, played like a fish through all the fictions and flashbacks, dreaming the movie's dream: waiting for Watergate."

You'd have to ask Morbs about what he meant by 'letting him off the hook', but I'm sure there are a lot of people who would argue that Nixon's crimes were so egregious that any attempt to humanize him is letting him off the hook.

Agreed--that's the divide you have to cross, and probably most Nixon-haters won't be able to. I do think, though, that just in terms of a three-hour film, an unrelenting indictment is less interesting than some attempt at shading. And I also think that if you delve into Nixon at all, you have to concede that he was complicated. That's not an endorsement of anything he did, just a simple acknowledgement that there was a complicated person there (in a way that, for me, isn't true of George W. or Sarah Palin).

The last third is a wheeze -- you might as well walk out. Two-thirds of it though are not bad at all except for the awful Sarandon and Langella bits.

Langella bits probably the best thing about the film.

I thought he overacted.

Douglas' character makes no sense: he goes through so many involutions in the last thirty minutes that he could have Bill Clinton, not Boesky.

*could have been

you thought that was overacting? in a film like this?

Has he, finally, no sense of decency?

Finally saw this tonight. Sleepy LaBeef, quite good--I don't think I've ever seen him in anything else. Josh Brolin was sort of doing a less doltish W, and Michael Douglas was (big surprise) playing Michael Douglas, and I thought they were both pretty good. (Did I spot a photo of Kirk Douglas directly behind Gekko at one point?) The waifish fiancee was stuck in a hopeless role. I thought Langella was a poor substitute for somebody like Jason Robards. The Charlie Sheen cameo was...awkward. A lot of David Byrne. I kept waiting for the inept ending--"That's not too bad...that's okay...where's all this bad stuff?"--and then it was, "Okay, now I understand." Overall, I liked it, and didn't think there was anything nearly as memorable as Sean Young or Josh Mostel from the original (or as funny as Sheen's "She asked me the wrong question: 'What are you thinking?'").

wall street: money has insomnia

is the cold-fusion greentech in this movie viable? they seemed to have put a lot of effort to making it seem that way.

this movie wasn't bad imo, pretty entertaining all-around albeit utterly ridiculous.