#41 - Wall Street (1987)

Piece of advice: if you are as unfamiliar as I am with terms and concepts of the stock market, make sure to have access to Google or Wikipedia if you plan on watching Wall Street. While I really liked this film I often got mixed up with some terms or didn't know what was going on.

Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, a rookie and ambitious stockbroker,  is given the chance to do business with the Wall Street legend Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), who takes him under his wing and skyrockets him into fortune. You can guess what happens later, turns out Gekko is a greedy douche and tries to sell a company Bud had acquired. And his dad, played by Martin Sheen, has been working there for 24 years and that means he loses his job. So Bud snaps out of it and tries to fix what he has done.

While Bud is the main character and all that and seeing him realize how much of a shmuck he's been, Douglas as Gordon Gecko steals the show, now considered a small icon. While the performance and character is great, being incredibly power hungry but still keeping that image concealed under a certain charm; his philosophy of life is what stands out. That speech about greed and how it is positive to society is by far the best moment of the film.

       

If you think as greed as ambition to improve upon yourself and shit, it's not that terrible.

The rest of the supporting cast is really good too. Daryl Hannah does an okay job playing an on/off love interest; John McGinley's (the guy that plays Cox in Scrubs) Marv, Bud's coworker, is surprisingly entertaining; and Bud's father is sort of the moral compass of the story, both caring and proud of his son while trying to keep him from becoming into a cold and greedy person.

I know the message of the story is very clear and thoroughly exploited (the moral consequences of greed), but I personally wanted to see more scenes with Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas together. The scene where the blue-collar, hard working and honest mechanic meets the insanely wealthy but ruthless corporate raider was awesome. It would be great to see those clashing ideologies being explored further, but what the heck, what we have is still great.

This is one of those films with a shitload of dialogue that I would have considered a snorefest a couple of years ago, but it has really good characters of a wide moral spectrum and offers a very interesting apporach to a concept we all consider bad, but in a certain way, "greed, for lack of a better word, is good". And by the way it's a great way to see Charlie Sheen before he ruined his life with drugs, booze, chicks, and stupid sitcoms. And he's still considered by plenty of people to be an awesome person.

       

Oh, Charlie, at what point did you become an asshole that turns down million dollar jobs over childish tantrums?