The Money Eaters

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A young stockbroker pursues an alliegience with a notoriously ruthless colleague in 1987's Wall Street. Director and co-writer Oliver Stone dives into the world of stock trading to tell a surprisingly simplistic moral tale. Other than a couple clever one liners, this movie's mainly entertaining for its '80s cheese value.

Charlie Sheen plays Budd Fox, a lowlife stockbroker working in a vast, noisy office of cold callers, and his father, Carl, is played by Charlie Sheen's real life father, Martin Sheen. While Budd aspires to be the deadliest shark in the tank, his father is a salt-of-the-earth union leader who don't truck with his boy's uptown dreams. The two Sheens together ham it up and make you say, "Hey, that's Martin Sheen with Charlie Sheen."

But Budd meets another father figure, a slimy bigshot named Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas, who has the film's two immortal lines; "Money never sleeps" and "Greed is good," which perhaps best sums up '80s right wing philosophy. It's that absolute faith in the idea that somehow everyone relentlessly gourging on all they can grab will all work out for the best, despite what you might think. However, things turn out exactly as you might think, if you have a halfway decent moral compass.

Now Oliver Stone's friends with Vladimir Putin. That tracks. Wall Street could almost be Soviet propaganda.

Wall Street is available on The Criterion Channel.