my posting will be light this week because of traveling, but i didn't want to leave without starting a thread on this movie. :P
did anyone else see it? if so, what did you think?
i actually made it through the entire picture with out wanting to kill lebouf's character.
over all the story kept me interested. and i was really surprised that oliver stone openly illustrated the good side of wallstreet (investors motivated by profit funding projects that make everyone's life better). plus i really liked lebouf's suits.
over all, i give the movie a thumbs up.
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine - Elvis Presley
Good movie, horrible anti-climactic ending. "Oh, here's your 100m back, can I be your father?" Very lame. Oh yeah, you stole 100m off me and made 30b, but thanks for the 100m back. Want to be my daddy again?" It was just so... lame.
I loved the scenes of all the bankers sitting around a table talking about how they're going to screw the world tomorrow. Hopefully the Alex Jonesers pay attention and realize THAT is the supposed NWO.
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
^ yah the ending really didn't ring true to me either. it actually felt more like a re-write, like maybe someone said at the last minute "we want gekko to have a happy ending!" *shrug* just a guess though.
Non-Americans know how cheesy American story endings are.
In preparation for this movie, I streamed the first one off of Netflix. The first Wall Street is filled with memorable, even insightful, quotes. I've described it to my friends as The Godfather meets Boiler Room. "Money never sleeps, pal" or "If you're not inside, you're outside." But Money Never Sleeps felt more like a documentary with a little dramatic tension thrown in. And it didn't even manage to grab you by the balls or give you that feeling of authenticity, like you're getting a glimpse at the Man Behind the Curtain. The first Wall Street really gave you that feeling. While I didn't expect a Meltup from Stone, I did expect him to really gut punch the audience to get their attention. He didn't and I was disappointed by that.
<spoiler alert from here on>
To give you a feeling how confused I was by this movie, I at first thought Shia Labeouf was supposed to be a big-shot Ivy League kid with bazillions of inherited money he was using to fund some fusion reactor research. But then, his lifelong mentor (who came across like just a tired old guy Labeouf happened to know) gives him a $1.45M check and he says something about "never having held a check that large", an obvious reference to the original movie where Gekko gives his protege a $1M check (and, wink-wink, the $1.45M check has, presumably, been inflation-adjusted). The inside jokes referencing the first movie were fun and drew several laughs from me.
There were less-than-completely veiled references to Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan throughout but the worst crime they are depicted of being guilty of is making an old man depressed. The depiction of the Federal Reserve was truly wimpy, sort of portraying them as a bunch of hand-wringing old men rather than the masters of the financial universe. Even if the Federal Reserve weren't the masters of the financial universe, the movie would have been far more interesting if they were so portrayed! The antagonist was really 2-dimensional, nothing compared to Sir Larry Wildman from the first movie.
For a Stone movie, it was a complete dud, it didn't push the envelope at all.
Clayton -
Addendum: Ironically, I noticed the writers were named Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff. They wouldn't happen to be relatives of Solomon Loeb and Jacob Schiff, would they? (I have no idea if they actually are related, I just found it ironic.)
I figured I'd just forward a few comments we were talking about here in case they leader to any extra discussion.