Wall Street (1987) [VHS]

Charlie Sheen, the quintessential 80's heartthrob, takes on a new role as Bud Fox, an ambitious young stock trader. He works his days selling stocks, all the while hoping to be a player in the same league as the big guys. One such big guy is Gordon Gekko (Michaek Douglas, in a standout performance), a millionaire tycoon who makes his living buying out companies and liquidating them for profit. He takes Fox under his wing, gives him a taste of the wealth and power, and Fox becomes insatiable. So much that he makes some wrong decisions, not realizing that this new power and wealth comes at a higher cost, one that he cannot afford.

The 80's was characterized by hotshot young executives looking for the quick and easy buck, and Oliver Stones portrayed that very well here. Gordon Gekko is the benchmark corporate villian, someone who one see's the world only in shades of green. The acting in this movie is first rate, especially from Michael Douglas. The long lines of dialogue, the speeches, and the emotional undertones are a challenge for any actor, and all involved here did an excellent job. I often watch "Wall Street" just for the acting.

The DVD is not a full-blown Special Edition, but it's a quality release nonetheless. Oliver Stone's commentary is insightful and articulate, even though he rambles and speaks in an annoying deep voice. The "Making Of" documentary is a real treat. Simply titled "Money Never Sleeps", it is over 1 hour of new interviews with the cast and crew, discussing all major points of the movie and the stories behind the scenes. It is one of the better DVD-exclusive documentaries I have seen.

Whether or not you find the subject interesting, "Wall Street" is a great movie in almost every way. While the script wanders off into technical stock jargon, it is one of the best scripts I have ever seen put to film. The acting is top notch, and Oliver Stone directs with panache and style. A must have.


"Now let me show you *my* charts." (cue lightning)   October 17, 2005
Dark Mechanicus JSG (Fortified Bunker, USSA)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful

"Wall Street" is iconic.

But let's step back a second: I'll beging with a little Wall Street habit called Full Disclosure: Oliver Stone's stunning, iconic "Wall Street" is an amazingly hard movie for me to review, in part because it was, for me, one of those rare watershed events that shaped my futue and changed---even charted---my career.

One of Oliver Stone's best movies, it was intended as a morality play in which Stone's mouthpiece, played by Martin Sheen as a stoic airline mechanic who has seen it all, condemned the helter-skelter rampant greed of the corporate raiders, Wall Street insider tycoons, and high-flying investment bankers of the 1980's, the much maligned "Decade of Greed".

But let's stop for moment, and consider: how many of you who've seen the film wanted to *be* Gordon Gecko, "Wall Street"'s cigar chomping, greenmailing uber-dealmaker, who ratcheted up Ivan Boesky's "Greed is OK" into what became the motto of deal-makers the world over: "Greed is Good. Greed Works."

I sure did. Born during the hippy Summer of Love and a proverbial child of the eighties, I saw "Wall Street" and knew, immediately, what I wanted to become. I sliced off my mohawk, grew my hair, and slicked it back, and dedicated my life to mastering high finance and the art of the deal.

And I wasn't the only one, to judge by fellow MBA alums and investment banking colleagues; even a sequence in "Boiler Room" shows a new generation of deal-seeking young Turks watching "Wall Street" on a plasma TV, regaling each other with their word-perfect recitation of Gecko's lines.

"Wall Street", then, should be served up piping hot to the innocent with a dollop of caution: as one reviewer noted, what Stone had intended as a bloody criticism of greed gone rampant quickly became a full-bodied recruiting video for the investment banking industry.

And what a recruiting video it is: Stone perfected his quick cuts and 'wall of information' with "Wall Street", proving his mastery of the new MTV-era of rich, lush, rapidly moving images and an editing style that wouldn't have been out of place in a music video.

Stone is like that. As a director, he has an uncanny ability to glamorize that which he most wants to criticize, just as he did with the alluringly violent Mickey and Mallory Knox in "Natural Born Killers."

And "Wall Street" is one of those rare reversals where life imitates art: throughout top-tier MBA programs and modern investment banks, the image of the stalking, cigar-smoking, summer-home in the Hamptons, limo-insulated, braces-sporting deal maker has become the ideal, sometimes getting the better of real Wall Street mavericks who let romance cloud their common sense and appeared on the covers of Fortune and Forbes---only to be shot down by their envious employers.

The plot is nothing new: a Horatio Alger story in which hungry young stockbroker (played perfectly by Charlie Sheen) Bud Fox tires of spending his days in a cheap Queens apartment chasing small retail investors, and sets his sights on the 'elephant': the maverick corporate raider Gordon Gecko (played by Michael Douglas in the role of his career).

Fox, for once, has an opening beyond Gecko's favorite box of cigars: he knows his father's airline, Blue Star, is worth more than the market thinks it is because of impending deregulation in the airlines; Gecko takes the bait, and brings Fox, quickly, into the high-octane world of deal-making and insider information---as Gecko's spy.

The acting is uniformly good: apart from Sheen and Douglas, you have the inimitable Sean Young as Gecko's social-climbing wife, Darryl Hannah puckish as fashion designer Darien, pre-"The Limey" Terence Stamp hard as nails as a British corporate raider and Gecko's nemesis, and a troop of veteran character actors: Hal Holbrook as Fox's brokerage house mentor, James Spader as a naive M&A attorney, and the immortal James Karen as Fox's fickle boss.

From the opening riffs of Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" to the closing image of a trading grid imposed over the lower Manhattan skyline, Stone's editing and direction is fast-paced, frenetic, and exotic: the viewer, like Fox, is pulled into the upper reaches of a world where anything is possible and money is the common denominator.

There are some subtle touches, like Gecko's beach house, festooned with atrocious artwork kept only as an investment---and as a barometer of the notoriously fickle and fast moving Market itself.

And for those "Wall Street"-heads who have seen the movie a thousand times (I must be getting close), there are some sweet glitches the editors never caught: when Gecko makes his pitch for a 'friendly' takeover of Blue Star, watch his feet carefully.

Often imitated, never surpassed, "Wall Street" is a stylish, intoxicating, stunning embodiment of an era when anybody could carve his way to the very top of American society by ruthless ambition and sheer determination; it was true when it was made, and it is possibly even more true today.

So strap on your braces, slick back your hair, light up an Esplendido and fire up the DVD player---money never sleeps, pal.

JSG