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peter-vidlicka
Reviews
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
Great premise spoiled by too many plot points
The Wall Street Money Never Sleep had a great premise at the beginning - return of great characters from the original and very interesting subject matter (worst financial and economical crisis since the World War II). While the movie succeeds in taking us through the financial crisis as it gradually unfolded, it is constantly dragged down by way too many plot points, but mainly the hardly believable revenge and very slow paced love story subplots.
Let's get one thing clear at the beginning first. It is an immensely difficult task for the writers to portray the financial crisis into a movie for general masses, while explaining the workings of the crisis, not bogging down the viewers with too much financial jargon and at the same time keep the movie entertaining. This is the part that you can see the makers have made their homework and is something to be appreciated about the movie, such as the Bear Sterns inspired collapse of Keller Zabel.
My biggest problem with the movie is that the character with the most screen time, Jacob Moore, is not a believable character. It might be due to casting Shia LeBouf, who for one looks too young and too soft to be earning $1.5m bonuses and living in a $6m apartment. Second, he is a "prop trader," which means that his job is to constantly trade stocks on his company's account. Yet, we see him trying to raise $100m for a renewable energy source, which isn't the job of prop traders. Even he is pitching the idea to Chinese investors, which is nonsense, since he would have had nothing to say about the company unless he was an equity analyst responsible for the energy sector. This brings the obvious question, why was he so interested in the little fusion plant project? His job is to make money not save the world.
And than there are the inconsistencies and plot holes: At the beginning of the movie Jacob invests $1m from his bonus on 50% margin into his firm Keller Zabel and keeps his position even as the stock is plummeting putting him into sizeable amount of debt (film hinted $0.5 mil). Now, first firms usually prohibit employees on speculating on their own stock due to the possibility of having insider information and second if Jacob was such an excellent prop trader he wouldn't have touched the stock if there were rumors of its impending collapse. This alone is hardly believable and our intelligence is assaulted again when the film somehow forgets his debt (before he even admits the debt when proposing to his girlfriend), when he writes his mom a check for $200,000 without a second thought.
Jacob spreads rumors about an African oil rig being nationalized in which Bretton's company has a big stake, which ended up costing the company millions. And Gekko ends up explaining to Jacob that it was illegal because he pushed other people to make traders based on false information, so Jacob realizes that the two are alike. How can a Wall Street rainmaker such as Jacob not realize that he manipulated the markets, which is illegal?
Other problems: Gekko's London hedge fund growing from $100 mil to $1.1 bil during Winney's pregnancy? At one point, we saw workers dismantling the fusion plant, would it have been too little too late to give the $100m to an empty factory site?
To conclude, this is a revenge and redemption movie with Wall Street and market crash as a backdrop. If they had cut down the crying-girl scenes, to improve pacing, maybe it could have turned out better. This way, it's just plain bad.
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Didn't enjoy it, don't believe the hype
After seeing glowing reviews and being referenced in the Boiler Room I decided to see this movie. I didn't enjoy the experience, which makes me wish I saw the play instead.
Overall, the movie was balancing on the borderline of boredom the whole time. The plot (if there is one to be found) is rather difficult to follow, as everything is scripted into the dialog, which itself is unbelievably repetitive ("we can't work with these leads," "yes we can't," "we need the good leads" and again again). I even resorted to read a wikipedia transcript of the plot in order to see whether I was missing something.
-MINOR SPOILERS- Actually, the movie felt like it was deliberately made with the intent to throw the viewer into the movie and expect him/her to pick up details from the dialog. I appreciate the fact that it is based on a Broadway play, but as a movie, some background to the characters and main plot points would have made it easier to digest. For instance, how was I supposed to know the property they were selling was worthless? I wasn't mentioned anywhere, so how was I supposed to feel sympathetic to the buyers? No, I don't need a narrator to walk me through the problem holding my hand, no just one line somewhere would have done the trick.
Also, I didn't understand the hostility of the salesman towards their branch manager. If they were such good salesmen, and hated their branch/manager/product/leads so much, why didn't they just pack their stuff and move on to another company? Their constant nagging and complaining made up 80% of the screen time.
On the upside, the acting was really good and intense, and as a result it represents three out of my four stars. Check it out, if you feel like watching a handful of angry men argue for two hours, you won't miss out much if you don't.