Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New extras worth double dipping, September 14, 2007
When Oliver Stone made Wall Street, he was riding high from the commercial and critical success of Platoon (Special Edition). His father, Lou Stone, had been a stockbroker on Wall Street in New York City and this film was a son's way of paying tribute to his father. Almost twenty years later, it has become one of the quintessential snapshots of the financial scene in the United States and epitomizes the essence of capitalism, greed and materialism that was so prevalent in the 1980s.
Michael Douglas owns the role of Gekko and by extension dominates the movie with his larger than life character. He gets most of the film's best dialogue and delivers it with such conviction. There is a scene between Bud and Gekko in a limousine where he tells the younger man how the financial world works, how it operates and lays it all out, pushing Bud hard to go into business with him. It is one of the strongest scenes in the movie because you really believe what Gekko is saying and how Bud could be seduced by his words.
The culmination of Douglas' performance is his much lauded, often quoted, "Greed is good" speech that his character gives to a shareholders' meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he is planning to take over. He concludes by saying, "Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words -- will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A." This is one of the best delivered monologues ever put to film as Douglas goes from charming to downright threatening and back again, succinctly summing up the essence of '80 capitalism and greed.
The original DVD did not have many extras but the quality of what was included was excellent. They have all been carried over to this new release (minus the trailers) but do the new extras really merit a double dip?
There is an audio commentary by co-writer and director Oliver Stone. Stone talks about Michael Douglas' early struggles with the huge amount of dialogue he had to deliver and how he dealt with it. The filmmaker is candid with his shortcomings and those of others (i.e. Daryl Hannah, Charlie Sheen, etc.). As always, Stone delivers the goods, offering all kinds of fascinating insights into the making of the film.
The second disc features a new introduction by Oliver Stone that is brief and really should have been put on the first disc.
Another new extra is "Greed is Good," an hour-long retrospective documentary with Hal Hoolbrook, John C. McGinley, Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas amongst others returning to offer their impressions of the financial world depicted in the movie. This substantial doc examines the appeal of Gekko and why he inspired people in the business world.
Also new to this edition is over 20 minutes of deleted scenes with optional commentary by Stone. There is a nice little scene with Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller as one of Bud's clients. Also included is an earlier scene where Bud and Darian (Hannah) meet in a bar but Stone cut it because the Hamptons scene at Gekko's house was stronger. The filmmaker puts all of these scenes into context and why there were cut.
Finally, carried over from the original edition is "Money Never Sleeps: The Making of Wall Street," a top-notch, 47-minute making of documentary. There is very little overlap with the "Greed is Good" documentary.
If you're a fan of this film and already own the previous edition, the new extras definitely warrant a double dip. They are quite substantial in nature and shed more light on this excellent film.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The movie that helped to end the Cold war, March 19, 2005
To watch this movie in Moscow in 1988 as a student was a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is the capitalism close-up, warts and all. And we loved it. In three more years the Soviet communism will be dismantled, free market hurriedly introduced, and some of my friends and fellow students will proceed to become very rich people themselves. I did not know then, that Gordon Gekko, a villain who incidentally was much admired by me, was a thinly veiled portrait of Ivan Boesky. Boesky, who incidentally was a son of Russian immigrants, became a center of the biggest insider trading scandal and government investigation in the 1980s, which let to the collapse of junk bond powerhouse firm Drexel Burnham. However, I knew that Gekko must be much more than a villain, otherwise how this ugly character could be so attractive? Of course, a huge part of it was a superb acting by Michael Douglas. But watching this film now, 17 years later, gave me an opportunity to ponder more on the subject from a different perspective. I think now that Gekko's character is archetypal and has the same qualities as Bulgakov's Woland from `Master and Margarita'. He is the Wall Street Mephistopheles, the Grand seducer, not just some greedy upstart and `faux bonhomme'. But one of the qualities of Lucifer is that he `brings out the light', he helps to illuminate things, partly because of his own darkness. Untimely, in the movie it was his turbulent encounter with Gekko, which helped Bud Fox to find his character and, in a way, redeem himself. So in some strange way, the movie is a Wall-Street-version of age-old story of Faust.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Now let me show you *my* charts." (cue lightning), October 16, 2005
"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
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