Movie Review:
09-30-10 Movie Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Four noncommercials movies, five nights, between now and Wednesday. Tonight and tomorrow at 8pm, The Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway, is showing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for those who need the background story for The Girl Who Played with Fire, which is in its commercial run at least for tonight; that’s tonight and tomorrow, 8pm, Murdock Theatre, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Saturday night is a very special night, with the Wichita Theatre Organ society having Clark Wilson playing the Wurlitzer organ to accompany the silent superclassic Metropolis, commonly considered the granddaddy of science fiction movies, at 7pm in Century II Exhibition Hall.
And there are two programs next week in the Big Read program about Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Monday at the downtown library will show a documentary on Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun, at 4 pm, and Tuesday the movie Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry, will show at the Derby Public Library at 1600 East Walnut Grove, Derby, at 5:30.
Or you could go see Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 1987 Wall Street, called Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
The Eagle’s review liked Wall Street better than I did, giving it 3 stars; Entertainment Weekly gave it a C+ and I give it 2 ½ stars, favoring its serious intentions but finding it weak on drama.
The problem is largely that the financial wriggling of big money-shufflers don’t add up to much action and involve too much mathematical finagling for me. There’s no denying the current importance of the subject matter, and the acting is first-rate throughout, including Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella, and Eli Wallach, among others less known to me. There’s quite a lot of exposition of financial matters that may help you more than it could me, which might help you distinguish between the good guys and the bad ones better than I could. And there are no irrelevant subplots; everything ties together plotwise and themewise.
Entertainment Weekly seemed to object that Douglas’ character is a little unclear, but I found his ambiguity fascinating. Eight years in prison has not necessarily made him repent and convert, but it has taught him a bit of prudence and denied him some opportunities; his lectures on the evils of financial speculation are a source of cash, whether they are sincere or not, and I doubt that he knows whether they are. We’re supposed to have equal doubts about Shia LaBeouf, but the love story involving Carey Mulligan and LaBeouf is routinely handled and predictable too much of the time.
And I missed the real victims of the Wall Street shenanigans, the people lower down on the social-financial scale who lost everything in a battle they didn’t even know was going on; I found it difficult to empathize with top dogs who inhabit the Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous, in corporate offices and restaurants you and I would be lucky to get jobs as waitpersons in; I found it difficult to believe that any of them knew so little of what was going on that they shouldn’t have been able to protect themselves to the extent of living on levels you and I can only dream of. The lower classes are mentioned, but never shown, and the business people who inhabit the screen are not humanized enough to draw my sympathy.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps must be appreciated as an attempt to deal with a difficult and socially important problem, but it never hit me where I live.
