Wall Street

Bud Fox (CHARLIE SHEEN) is a Wall Street stockbroker with a burning desire to be a player.

He works all day selling shares as a broker for a firm, but is bent on finding a way to meet ruthless stockbroker guru Gordon Gekko (MICHAEL DOUGLAS).

By delivering a box of Gekko's favorite Cuban cigars on his birthday, he finally manages to meet with the financial legend, who admires the kid's persistence, dazzles him with $$$ and pulls the young buck into his ranks.

Now working for Gekko, Bud finds himself in the corrupt world of insider information and fickle women like Darien Taylor (DARYL HANNAH). Soon Bud is spiralling out of control, he is breaking the law, pushing away his family and even betraying his father's job with inside info about the airline he works for.

His father (MARTIN SHEEN) is always in the background acting as the voice of his conscience. His father is a solid and honest blue-collar worker who rightly believes that Bud's life and method of making money is tantamount to selling his soul to the devil.

When Bud's activites are discovered by the authorities and it all comes tumbling down, as a last desperate act, the young buck calls on Gekko's nemesis Sir Larry Wildman (TERENCE STAMP) to break Gekko before he is thrown in jail.

Showing the extent of greed and the 'yuppie' stockbroker culture of the 1980's, Gekko's 'Greed is good, Greed is right, Greed works' speech made cinematic history and Oscar nominations soon followed.

The amusing thing, as noted in the documentary about the making of "American Psycho" is that not a lot has changed since the 80's.

In fact financial people are now earning a lot MORE money than in that era. It is movies like "Wall Street" that lead people to believe that the 80's was a decade of greed, because they are making social comment on what were new and outrageous practices of the financial institutions and brokers -whereas now, these practices and massive earnings are simply accepted as a fact of life.

Rather than greed having subsided, it has continued to reach new, interstellar heights and characters like Gordon Gekko are no longer the shocking exception...