LGM Film Club, Part 543: Wall Street

I used this image earlier today because it fit but also because I was watching Wall Street again. We hardly have to go over this film, but a few notes:

1. No one has ever played a complete sleaze ball like Michael Douglas. He’s the true master of the genre. Other notably liberal actors have played against type for most of their careers, such as Edward G. Robinson and Robert Ryan. But what Douglas has in playing the biggest scumbag imaginable is special.
2. The #1 problem with the movie is that Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah are both bad actors and their scenes together have zero chemistry at all.
3. Martin Sheen played a young officer in Apocalypse Now in 1979. In 1987, he looks at least 20 years older, like he should be an old union guy.
4. I do love how the union leaders in this movie are all like, “of course we agree that the capitalists should demand enormous givebacks in our contracts, we’d happily go along.” Ah, the 80s, what a shitty decade.
5. From Roger Ebert’s review of the film: “Although Gekko’s law-breaking would of course be opposed by most people on Wall Street, his larger value system would be applauded. The trick is to make his kind of money without breaking the law. Financiers who can do that, such as Donald Trump, are mentioned as possible presidential candidates, and in his autobiography Trump states, quite simply, that money no longer interests him very much. He is more motivated by the challenge of a deal and by the desire to win. His frankness is refreshing, but the key to reading that statement is to see that it considers only money, on the one hand, and winning, on the other. No mention is made about creating goods and services, to manufacturing things, to investing in a physical plant, to contributing to the infrastructure.” Good thing America stopped that kind of crazy society!