Wall Street: Oliver never sleeps

 

Trying to catch up to the blog in the early hours of Sunday morning, though it’s still yesterday back home. Saturday was a long day, with two movies in the morning, two at night and a full afternoon spent down the coast at at the fabled Hotel Du Cap—shivering on the seaside in cold, rainy weather doing  press junket interviews with Oliver Stone and the cast of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in an outdoor cabana. It was a weird place to get an economics lesson, from movie stars no less. And from a rambling semi-coherant Oliver Stone, who looked utterly exhausted after last night’s premiere party. According to Michael Douglas, “he burns the candle at every end.” More on that later, in the magazine.

Meanwhile,  a few words on the movie. Wall Street is the only Hollywood picture in official selection, and though it has had a mixed reception, it has attracted a lot of attention. Canadian media at the press conference were tickled to hear Oliver Stone praise the Royal Bank for opening up its doors to his crew while various American institutions refused. Ah, gotta love those Chavez-loving money men at RBC! You’ll be hearing a lot more about Wall Street in coming days and months–it doesn’t open commercially until September. But as a quick primer, I’ve compiled a list of homilies that pop up in the dialogue of the film almost as frequently as the product placements (the most blatant is Michael Douglas asking  Shia La Beouf, “Would you like a Heineken?” in a restaurant —followed by a close up of a Heineken.)

Top 10 Wall Street aphorisms:
1.  “I once said greed is good. Now it seems it’s legal.” [Huh, wasn’t it always legal?]
2. “We take a buck and we shoot it full of steroids and we call it steroid banking.”
3.  “The mother of all evil is speculation–leveraged debt.”
4.  “Money is a bitch that never sleeps, and she’s jealous.”
5.  “Money is not the prime asset in life; time is.”
6. “It’s not about the money it’s about the trade.”
7.  “Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.”
8. “You stop telling lies about me and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
9. “Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.”
10. “Green is the new bubble.”