The Screengrab : wall street

Morning Deal Report: Shia LeBeouf Goes to Wall Street

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone has agreed to direct the sequel to Wall Street, so insert your own “greed is good” joke here. Shia LaBeouf “is negotiating to join Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the original pic. The sequel will once again involve a young Wall Street trader, and the recent economic meltdown spurred by rampant greed and corruption will fit prominently into the plot,” per Variety.

The Flanimals are coming! The Ricky Gervais children’s book series Flanimals, that is. Universal will adapt the series into a 3D animated feature, and Gervais will voice the lead character. “The four-volume series, illustrated by Rob Steen, encompasses a world inhabited by 50 species of creatures so ugly and misshapen they become cute and endearing. Gervais' character, a pudgy, perspiring purple creature, goes on a mission to change the world. ‘It will be great to play a short, fat, sweaty loser for a change,’ Gervais said. ‘A real stretch.’”

And finally on the Morning Deal Report…I’m looking for a new deal! As you read here earlier this morning, the Screengrab is shutting down production on movie related news, reviews and snark in about a month. So if you’re in the market for a timely and talented purveyor of such things, contact me through my blog. My new landlord thanks you.

Related:
Michael Douglas Eyes "Wall Street" Return
Shia LaBeouf...Why?

Morning Deal Report: Michael Douglas Eyes “Wall Street” Return

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As we noted yesterday, Americans by the millions are looking to a talking dog to take their minds off their problems for a couple of hours. But what about those of us who want to wallow in the current economic crisis? Good news! Twentieth Century Fox is moving forward with a sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. And while there’s no word that Stone himself will return, the original Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas, appears to be on board. Allan Loeb (21) will pen the return of Gekko, “who has recently been sprung from prison and re-emerges into a much more tumultuous financial world than the one he once lorded over.” Bad news, Two and a Half Men fans: Per Variety, “The Bud Fox character, played by Charlie Sheen in the original, will not appear in the latest incarnation.”

In comic book movie news, there’s been a major casting change over at Iron Man 2. Don’t worry, you’ll still get your Downey on. But fans of Terrence Howard, who was lined up to become War Machine in the sequel, prepare to get Cheadled. Yes, The Hollywood Reporter has the word that Don Cheadle will take over the role. “Marvel had no comment, but sources close to the deal said negotiations with Howard fell through over financial differences, among other reasons.” Maybe he just didn’t like the suit.

Rat Bastard is coming to a theater near you. Charlotte’s Web director Gary Winick will helm the tale of “a conman who plots revenge when his old partner steals the loot from their latest grift and hides out by posing as a chef for a family on New York's Upper East Side,” according to Variety.

Related:
Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify
Adams vs. Marvel: Iron Man Turns to Crime?

Red Suspension of Disbelief: Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Stanley Weiser, Oliver Stone's co-writer on the 1987 Wall Street, has just published his apologia for his part in the creation of the popular image of the morally shifty, massive-balled financial insider as American hero. (Weiser also wrote Stone's forthcoming W. as well as other politically crusading movies and TV films such as Murder in Mississippi, Freedom Song, Rudy: The Rudy Guiliani Story, and 1987's Project X, in which Matthew Broderick fearlessly rescued monkeys from The Man.) Wall Street, which starred Michael Douglas as maverick financier Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen, who had already done time as Stone's youthful fantasy alter ego in Platoon, as his corruptible protege. Douglas, playing a role designed to click with moviegoers' memories of the kind of charismatic heel role that his father had all but taken out a copyright on decades earlier, had his star heightened by the movie, for which he won an Academy Award. (As for Sheen, he can now be seen rotting before the viewer's very eyes on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The other representatives of the show's title are played by Jon Cryer and some kid. I think somebody's math is off.) Meanwhile, Gekko's showboat moment, the "'Greed is good' speech", has become not just a one-scene highlight reel of Douglas's career but a signpost moment in 1980s culture, a phenomenon that's been challenging the 60's status as The Decade That Refused to Leave. (Oliver Stone, of course, has a foot solidly in both.) A recent critics' symposium on the possible effects of the Wall Street crash pointed to that speech as a choice example of satire that was adopted by people who steadfastly refused to get the joke.

With the current financial meltdown, Gekko's name has been coming up a lot lately, always with the understanding that to cite the character by name is to use a form of shorthand to conjure up images of predatory jackals in power suspenders. What isn't always apparent is that the people citing Wall Street as some kind of dire prophecy remember that the movie started out as stale news and then had the great good fortune to become an unplanned comment on breaking news, circa 1987. Stone had decided to do a movie about Wall Street around the time that the hammer started coming down on insider traders, including Ivan Boesky, who was arrested and started selling out his fellow street rats in 1986, the same year that he had delivered a "greed-is-good"-type speech ("I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself") at the University of California. (Weiser says that Gekko was partly based on Boesky and partly based on other high rollers. He was also partly based on Stone; Weisner writes that the director's "rants" and "unpublishable barbs proved to be the precise varnish with which I needed to coat Gekko.") The movie was treated as a big deal leading up to its release--Stone had won the Oscar for Platoon earlier in the year--but there was also a feeling reported in the trade press that nobody really had huge box office hopes for what amounted to "two hours of people talking about money." Then the 1987 Wall Street crash hit, and audiences who knew that something important was happening but were having trouble figuring out just what it was from reading the business section crowded into theaters to see if they could better make sense of the big news story of the day if it had Darryl Hannah in it. At the time, the 1987 Wall Street freak-out was widely reported as the death knell of the go-go-80s/Reagan era, but it turned out that greed had been, if not necessarily good, then sorely misunderestimated.

According to Weisner, Stone conceived of the idea of "a movie about Wall Street" pretty much on the spot, veering away from the idea of a movie that he had ordered Weisner to research about the 1950's quiz show scandals, and casting it in ambitious literary terms before either he or his collaborator had any idea of what it might entail in terms of a story or characters. "Read Crime and Punishment over the weekend," he told Weisner, "and we'll talk Monday." Weisner, to his credit, admits to having made do with the Cliff's Notes. When he reported back that he didn't see anything in there that they could apply to Wall Street, Stone, who may very well not have been clear about anything about Crime and Punishment except that he liked the title, told him to go read The Great Gatsby instead. (Weisner rented the movie.) After this unpromising beginning, things went on to work out okay, but Weisner marvels at the fact that in the last twenty years he's "run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons...A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: 'The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.'" If he had it all to do over again, he says, he would rewrite Gekko's big line to read: "Greed is Good. But I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery." This would certainly have had a different effect on audiences, assuming that, like me, they would have had no earthly idea just what it's supposed to mean.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.

DVD Digest for February 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: some recent favorites premiere on DVD, numerous classic films arrive in new editions, and I double back to cover a new release we overlooked last week.

DVD Ripoff of the Week: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the best-reviewed films of 2007 and garnered Oscar nominations for Casey Affleck and cinematographer Roger Deakins. However, the film performed well below expectations at the box office, due in no small part to Warner Brothers completely bumbling its theatrical rollout. Due to its low gross and artsy rep, the brainiacs at Warner Home Video will release the film this week in a bare-bones edition. How bare-bones are we talking? Try these features on for size: widescreen, subtitle and language options, and 5.1 audio. And that's all, folks.

Not.

Even.

A.

Trailer.

You know, seems to me the DVD companies have it all backwards. It's mainly the hits that get splashy, extras-packed special editions, when it's the ambitious flops that could really benefit from them. Honestly, does a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean really need a boatload of bonus features to sell more DVDs? I don't think so. But The Assassination of Jesse James might attract more buyers if the DVD had commentary, some interesting featurettes, and so forth. At least the Blu-Ray edition has a documentary. How hard would it have been to put that on the regular DVD as well?

Of course, we know what this release really means: Warner is trying to make some quick bucks from opening-week impulse buyers, with the possibility of a super-sweet edition later on, possibly with Andrew Dominik's cut of the film included as well. Really, it's like they're not even trying to disguise it anymore. It's as though we're back in VHS days, when the studios would release tapes at higher prices to be sold primarily for rental, then lower the prices later on for buyers. The difference is that DVD is much more of a buyers' medium, thus collectors would piss and moan if they had to spend $100 on a new DVD. It's a money-grubbing ploy, but it must be working or else the studios wouldn't keep doing it, right?

Other new releases coming to DVD include: Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan's The Brave One (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Julie Taymor's Beatles-scored folly Across the Universe (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Cate Blanchett-starring disaster Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal, also HD-DVD [!]), the Julie Delpy-directed 2 Days in Paris (Fox), Robert Benton's Feast of Love (MGM), and The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Because when I think of the folks who own Blu-Ray players, I think Jane Austen.

No noteworthy classic films coming to DVD for the first time this week, but quite a few new editions of previously released films, including: Midnight Express: 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony), The Apartment Collector's Edition (Universal), The Aristocats Special Edition (Disney), The Wiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Universal), Tootsie: 25th Anniversary Edition (Sony), and You've Got Mail: The Deluxe Edition (Warner). Fox is also releasing a two-disc set featuring both versions of Imitations of Life, for those of you who crave a Stahl vs. Sirk showdown. In addition, this week sees Blu-Ray only releases of Crimson Tide (Buena Vista), Me, Myself & Irene and Wall Street (both Fox).

Finally, I can't believe I neglected to mention in last week's column the second DVD release from our friends at Benten Films, Quiet City and Dance Party USA: Two Films By Aaron Katz. Founded last year, Benten is a decidedly small operation specializing in non-mainstream fare. Katz's work is a good match for the Benten label- a DIY filmmaker, Katz has been acclaimed by many as the most talented of the director comprising the movement that's usually labeled "mumblecore." With DVD mastering becoming cheaper and more widespread, there are many mom'n'pop DVD operations that have popped up on the scene, but Benten feels special to me, not least because founders Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis are online cinephiles of long standing. Here's hoping for many successful years for the Benten team.

Bush Gets Stoned

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone, who as a Hollywood director has largely turned away from a string on movies on recent American history and contemporary political themes during the last decade, and who mostly has a handful of noisy bombs (U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, Alexander) to show for it, seems to have decided to get back to his plow. He spent part of last year preparing a movie about the My Lai massacre, Pinkville, but now that project has been cancelled by its studio. Now Stone has gone way topical with plans to make a biographical picture about the current White House resident to be called, simply, Bush. The film will be written by Stanley Weiser, who worked on the script for Stone's 1987 Wall Street. (More recently, he was responsible for the hagiographic 2003 cable-TV film Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story.) Bush will be played by the very hot-at-this-moment John Brolin, of whom Stone says, "Josh is actually better looking than Bush but has the same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush, who has some of that old-time movie-star swagger."

As for the idea that political movies are Stone's thing, the director dismisses it as a "cliche": "I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great." To have empathy for any one of these fellows is certainly some kind of feat; maybe anyone who actually has empathy for all of them should be the Dalai Lama or something. But Stone just seems to mean that he's looking at Bush's life in terms of its dramatic potential, rather than plotting to film a political cartoon. "I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It's like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I'll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors." In one way at least, he may prove to be the well equipped to understand Bush on one level: anyone who's read Stone's interviews about his early life — or for that matter has seen Wall Street — knows that the guy is no stranger to father issues.