Lets Talk, Market Watch

Movie Break: Wall Street (1987)

Published by Octron on May 3, 2010

After last week’s hindi movie Gafla, this week, I got chance to watch 1987′s Hollywood hit movie Wall Street. It was directed by Oliver Stone and stars Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah. The screenplay was written by Stanley Weiser and Stone. The film tells the story of Bud Fox (Sheen), a young stockbroker desperate to succeed and becomes involved with his hero, Gordon Gekko (Douglas), a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider.

According to Wikipedia, Stone made the film as a tribute to his father, Lou Stone, a stockbroker during the Great Depression. The character of Gekko is said to be a composite of several people, including Owen Morrisey, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself.

Synopsis (IMDB)

Bud Fox is an ambitious stock trader who will do just about anything to get into the big leagues. He has been actively courting Gordon Gekko, one of the biggest stock speculators on Wall Street. Gekko manipulates the market using inside information and his motto best describes his approach: greed is good. Nothing will stop him from pursuing a good deal and he takes advantage of Bud’s burning to desire to succeed. Soon, Bud finds himself getting information from any source and using to gain an advantage. It all comes to a head however when Gekko targets Blue Star airlines, the company where Bud’s father has worked for 24 years, secretly planning to break it up and plunder the employees’ retirement fund.

The film was well received among major film critics including Roger Ebert and The New York Times. Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas’s character advocating that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. It has also proven influential in inspiring people to work on Wall Street with Sheen, Douglas and Stone commenting over the years how people still approach them and say that they became stockbrokers because of their respective characters in the film.

Stone and Douglas have reunited for a sequel titled Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which will be released on September 24, 2010.

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