Watch Wall Street For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Very Cool!!!

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Michael Douglas richly deserved his Academy Award for his memorable role as Gordon Gekko, the king of Wall Street. Charlie Sheen should have been nominated for his performance as Bud Fox, a young inspiring and ambitious trader. Martin Sheen played Bud's father. The cast is first rate with Daryl Hannah, Sean Young, John C. McGinley, Hal Holbrook and others in this Oliver Stone production. The director makes a cameo in there too. The film was done entirely on location in New York City and the twin towers were still at the foot of Manhattan. It's a great story to show for those interested in working in the financial industry about what and what not to do. The film was dedicated to Oliver's father, Louis, who was a stockbroker.

Young and ambitious stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) hits the big time when he ends up going under the wing of ruthless, but highly successful stockbroker Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Gekko takes Fox under his wing and helps Fox to become a wealthy and successful stockbroker, but do wealth and power ultimately come at a price? The first 15 minutes or so of this film are explosive and extremely fast-paced and Oliver Stone certainly helps to give us an insight into stockbroking and the world of commodity sales etc. On the one hand this is interesting and sets the stage well for things to come, but on the other hand (to someone like me who knows nothing about the world of stockbroking), the rapid fire dialogue and early segments of the film make it difficult to ascertain what's actually going on? Does any of this have any relevance to the story or is Stone merely showing off? I'll let you be the judge of that.Another problem with the rapid fire script is that it doesn't really allow the characters much room to breathe (both Gekko and Fox always felt a bit one-dimensional to me and the script never seemed to allow much room for development). As a result of these things I found Wall Street to be well-made but also quite an alienating experience. If this had been presented in a less 'showy' manner then this could have proved to have been an interesting character study, but as mentioned before the flashy script never manifests itself in this manner and it ultimately leaves Wall Street feeling a bit superficial at times.The performances between Douglas and Sheen are both excellent and do make the film a little bit stronger; Douglas at this point in his career almost felt born for this role. The father/son dynamic between the Sheens was OK, but again probably would have been stronger if it had been given a bit more focus. I also thought that the ending was good and from a 'moral' perspective I felt that it was probably the best way to wrap it up.Wall Street is by no means a terrible film and does offer some interesting commentary by the time the credits roll around, but Stone's presentation in the main is a little too flashy and at times the film comes across as being a bit pretentious. It's an easy film to admire, but it's a little too cold and clinical to be enjoyed from an emotional perspective.

"Wall Street" was made in 1987, by writer and director Oliver Stone and starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Martin Sheen, Darryl Hannah, and John C. McGinley. A young stockbroker after months of persistence finally bags the big fish, Gordon Gekko, a man whose presence and lifestyle he idolizes. He shuns his blue collar background in pursuit of greed and impatiently engages in illegal insider trading. The 80's was characterized by hotshot young executives looking for the quick and easy buck, and Oliver Stone portrayed that very well here. Gordon Gekko is the benchmark corporate villain, someone who one see's the world only in shades of green. The acting in this movie is first rate, especially from Michael Douglas. The long lines of dialogue, the speeches, and the emotional undertones are a challenge for any actor, and all involved here did an excellent job. I often watch "Wall Street" just for the acting.Probably an undervalued asset to this film is one of my favorites, John C. McGinley whom you'll remember as one of the Bob's from Office Space and his role of Dr. Cox on Scrubs. Always there to heckle and mock his good friend and has some of the best one-liners in the movie. Actually three of the main five lines people quote from this movie can all be attributed to this character he developed. The dealing room-scenes are some of the most exhilarating scenes in the history of cinematography. Spielberg sucked in audiences with his scenes of Normandy's beaches in '44. Stone creates the same spellbinding grip on the audience without getting anybody shot or brutally maimed. That alone is a great achievement for any director in Hollywood. Honestly, everything about this movie seems to work perfectly, in closing, I would like to praise Wall Street for being such a great film. An absolute masterpiece of 80's filmmaking and one of the best films ever made.Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

You might think Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas are the stars of "Wall Street." But Gekko is just a lizard, cold-blooded. A lizard is low, stays low, and gets even lower. If he wants to try to fly to the cold, cold moon, let him. It would be a good place for him. He doesn't have a goal: he already reached it. He's like a cat playing with a mouse he already killed to see if he can get it to move. In one brief moment Gekko catches sight of the rising sun, and it stirs him more than any artwork he could buy. But that sun was shrouded in clouds, indistinct, blurry—not enough to warm his blood. Like a vampire he cannot take the light for long. Even his exercise is in a windowless hardball court. His office is as spacious as a house, but there is no joy in it. He's dead. Notice, at lunch, he doesn't even eat; he doesn't have to. He runs as a machine and by machines–one keeps constant his blood pressure. His days are formulaic: pick one winner a day out of 100 presented to him. He's all numbers: inhuman. He might as well be a chart. He has a wife, but she is strangled by possessions, with thirty strands of silver round her neck rather than one. And who could stand their kid: He's just a possession. When he whimpers like a normal kid whimpers he gets sent to a nursemaid: get him outta here. Gekko's cold hardness is the atmosphere,echoed in the skyscrapers. Unregulated capitalism has run amok. Industry, once industriousness, is now run by greed and abstractions. Nobody makes anything but money. The premise is: we cannot be someone we are not. You cannot get away from your roots or you die. We are anchored where we come from; only then can we blossom from a bud. Sheen's name is Bud —he has not grown up yet, but he will. Gekko has no past—we do not even know where he is from. He remains true to those roots: he was and is nothing. He had "an ethical bypass at birth." He is an unchanging constant. The plot concerns the fates of the two contenders who dance upon the ground of that premise: father and son. Son wants to blossom, father wants to pass along the wisdom of the warm blooded Owl, the name of the bar. Foxes are warm blooded. Gekko is cold, like steel. Bud wants to flower; in the end he does. He flowers into a man who takes responsibility for his actions. By turning state's evidence, he does his part to bring humans back to earth, not figments of imagination who think they can fly to the moon. Bud got caught in the fever of unrestricted financial bounty, and he thought he wanted to flower into a money maker. When we saw him with a warm blooded girlfriend in the beginning, he moved right away from her nakedness to his computer screen to gaze at numbers. He wanted to go up and up and up—as up go elevators in high rises, crushing people. His work buddy said, "She has a pulse, doesn't she?" Bud joked back, "Don't bet on it." Look into the mirror, Bud: you didn't either. He made better love to Fortune Magazine. Plot point #1: Bud takes the bait of the devil. Sell your soul, become inhuman, like me. Bud looks back into the limousine and says, "Deal." The Fox was trapped by the smell of numbers. Act II is a long sandy stretch of how the rich folks, Bud a misplaced flower among them, do anything for and with money—but it's not nourishing. With trophy girlfriend Darian he cooks a meal in their opulent coop, but it's a meal too perfect to eat—and they say so. This life does not nourish. Nothing satisfies these cravings. Darian says she wants "the best of everything." "Why stop at that?" he asks. "I don't." She likes her little bud, but not enough to stop two-timing him with the lizard. The opulence suffocates the bud: after making love, he goes to the window as if to try to breathe. You can't be who you are not—you can't be a man who eats spaghetti and calls it pasta. It's spaghetti. He does not yet know that he's run by that natural law that states you have to be who you are, but that's the sneaky way natural laws operates: it operates despite our ignorance. What he really wants is to grow up and be recognized as an adult. Unlike a real father, the lizard coaches him to be ruthless, illegal, and cold: to participate with whores thinly disguised as women, to buy expensive suits to make him seem to be what he is not. To die. At plot point #2 he discovers Gekko's plan to liquidate Blue Star Airlines. He'd have to go against his flesh and blood. Of the father, Gekko says. "He'll never have to work another day in his life." But Carl Fox lives to work. With the option of fully uprooting himself and his father, Bud awakens from the stupor of money. Dignity was, in the final analysis, passed from father to son. Now we see Bud leaning against a tree in Wall Street. A tree! A tree amidst all the concrete! He returns home to sit on the floor, get grounded, and eat pizza from a box. He's back down to his roots. Out goes the girlfriend, buh bye goes the lofty apartment, and bud is ready to blossom. The tape to his chest is his umbilical cord; he tears it off when his birthing is done. The prison cell, a temporary womb, will spawn him into a new being, a human one. A father raised a son. He blossomed in the park.They both got what they wanted.