Wall Street (DVD)

Being a cold-hearted cynic is certainly a useful way of keeping insanity from the door - especially in these tedious days of hugginess and hysteria - but cynicism can be tiring work and every so often I need to wallow in nostalgia for a while in order to allow my venom sacs to refill. Just lately I was musing over my love / hate relationship with the world of finance, and in particular about how clever it was of our banks to lend stupendous amounts of money to stupendous amounts of people who could never pay it back. It was almost as clever an idea as that one back in the 80s which declared that if people kept investing in companies that didn't actually do anything then ...

The director Oliver Stone has become one of Hollywoods bravest exponents of the film attacking corporate America and the conspiracys which lie within it. However in attacking the very foundation and basis on which America is founded in Wall Street he produced a surprisingly lethargic and stilted story distracted too much by family honour. The film was made in 1987 and it does capture the greed ethic which was prevalent in the 1980s. This was the age of Reagan and Thatcher and the creation of wealth by asset stripping and corporate takeover was considered more important than capital investment. The methods of the asset strippers was considered unscrupulous purely ...

"Lunch is for wimps." No, not an exhortation to Mrs D to get her weight down, but one of a clutch of memorable one liners from Wall Street, the 1987 smash hit movie which personified the grab it all and hang tomorrow attitude of the Thatcher and Reagan shaped 80's. These twin disciples of Evil and Market Forces begat Gordon Gekko, the despicable epitome of self seeking ambition, who elsewhere emphasises that "Greed is good". Gekko, played with chilling sincerity and spite by Michael Douglas, is everything you love to hate about this particular episode in history when the money men throttled the life out of the Great American ...