Benefit
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2002
- Messages
- 5,193
This is one of those movies that will completely change your opinion of an actor whom you previously assumed was crap. Clearly that actor is not Charlie Sheen since he still sucks and will never get out of Emilio's shadow. The actor I'm talking about is Michael Douglas.
Douglas as Gordon Gekko is a must-see. Gekko is the Jay Gatsby of the 1980s junk bond boom, a corporate raider who epitomizes capitalism gone bonkers under the aegis of the Reagan administration's supply side economic policies and push for deregulation. His famous line "Greed is good" has been endlessly recycled by ambitiously ruthless entrepreneurs and cautionary liberals alike for the last 20 years. But that's doing a disservice to one of film's great characters as pretty much every syllable of dialogue that falls from his lips is pure gold. His character handily captures everything we love and hate about the free market: an unnatural amount of wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of one man. He is rich, he's powerful, he's ruthless. He bulldozes over the notion that capitalist titans have an obligation toward being socially responsible. He's not really a complex character; he merely reflects the moral and structural complexity of the system.
The movie by itself is not that great and pretty simple: naive ladder climber Bud Fox (played with an abundance of mediocrity by Charlie Sheen) ingratiates himself to unscrupulous corporate raider and multi-millionaire Gordon Gekko (Douglas) who uses Bud as a proxy to make illegal stock transactions and engage in insider trading. Bud's father (played by Martin Sheen) is a blue collar union rep with a strong moral compass who never wavers from his belief in the value of hard work and distrust of wheeler dealers. Bud is predictably fucked over by Gordon and seeks redemption. Everyone cries. The end. Bad sweaters, cheesy 80s music and Darryl Hannah's awful performance as Bud's idiotic girlfriend help to spice things up.
Basically, the movie has the verve you'd expect from Oliver Stone. It definitely makes it seem cool to be rich in the 1980s (keeping in mind how hard it is to make anything that happened in the 80s look cool). The camera work is a little too aggressively mobile for my tastes, but the inclusion of the Talking Heads song This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) pretty much shoots the film into the stratosphere of greatness.
Without Michael Douglas' iconic performance, the film probably wouldn't be worth going out of your way to watch. But seeing his perfectly tanned face sitting in a massive, opulent office overlooking the financial district and buying up controlling shares in companies he doesn't even want just for spite is too great to miss.
Douglas as Gordon Gekko is a must-see. Gekko is the Jay Gatsby of the 1980s junk bond boom, a corporate raider who epitomizes capitalism gone bonkers under the aegis of the Reagan administration's supply side economic policies and push for deregulation. His famous line "Greed is good" has been endlessly recycled by ambitiously ruthless entrepreneurs and cautionary liberals alike for the last 20 years. But that's doing a disservice to one of film's great characters as pretty much every syllable of dialogue that falls from his lips is pure gold. His character handily captures everything we love and hate about the free market: an unnatural amount of wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of one man. He is rich, he's powerful, he's ruthless. He bulldozes over the notion that capitalist titans have an obligation toward being socially responsible. He's not really a complex character; he merely reflects the moral and structural complexity of the system.
The movie by itself is not that great and pretty simple: naive ladder climber Bud Fox (played with an abundance of mediocrity by Charlie Sheen) ingratiates himself to unscrupulous corporate raider and multi-millionaire Gordon Gekko (Douglas) who uses Bud as a proxy to make illegal stock transactions and engage in insider trading. Bud's father (played by Martin Sheen) is a blue collar union rep with a strong moral compass who never wavers from his belief in the value of hard work and distrust of wheeler dealers. Bud is predictably fucked over by Gordon and seeks redemption. Everyone cries. The end. Bad sweaters, cheesy 80s music and Darryl Hannah's awful performance as Bud's idiotic girlfriend help to spice things up.
Basically, the movie has the verve you'd expect from Oliver Stone. It definitely makes it seem cool to be rich in the 1980s (keeping in mind how hard it is to make anything that happened in the 80s look cool). The camera work is a little too aggressively mobile for my tastes, but the inclusion of the Talking Heads song This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) pretty much shoots the film into the stratosphere of greatness.
Without Michael Douglas' iconic performance, the film probably wouldn't be worth going out of your way to watch. But seeing his perfectly tanned face sitting in a massive, opulent office overlooking the financial district and buying up controlling shares in companies he doesn't even want just for spite is too great to miss.
