"Wall Street" The Movie and Its Sequel

One of the greatest movies of the 1980's was made in 1987 and it was called "Wall Street". Written and directed by Oliver Stone, it stars a young Charlie Sheen as a burgeoning stock broker trying to make it rich by getting into the good graces of a slimy, ruthless power broker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Sheen's character is named Bud Fox and his father is named Carl Fox (played by Charlie Sheen's real-life father, Martin Sheen). Carl Fox works for an airline called Blue Star Airlines. In order for Bud to get in good with Gekko, he gets a tip from his father about the airline which ends up panning out, making Gekko a lot of money, and in turn makes Gekko take Bud under his wing. The tagline of the movie is "Every dream has its price".
Now Bud is living in the fast lane. He has nice cars, fancy ladies, and lots and lots of money. He gets corrupted and starts to get involved in questionable trading activities which end up being illegal and that is where I will stop in case there is actually someone reading this who hasn't seen the movie....or if there is anyone actually reading this.
Gekko has some great lines throughout the movie and they only work because Michael Douglas is such a great slimy, white collar, "King of All Capitalism" asshole. One of the best lines he has is: "Greed is good". Another is: "Its all about bucks kid. The rest is conversation". There are some other great lines in the movie that aren't yelled by Michael Douglas as Gekko. At one point when Bud Fox (Sheen) realizes that he has to face the facts, he says "Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them". Another character in the movie whose name is Lou says a line that I love: "Man looks into the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss".
This past year, they made a sequel to "Wall Street" 22 or 23 years after the first one was made. It is going to be released in September and I can't wait to see it. The original was made in '87 when we were in a pretty terrible recession. In October of '87 the Dow lost 22.6% on what they called "Black Monday". The crash of '29 wasn't even as bad as the one in '87. The Dow went from like 2500.00 down to close to 1500.00 in almost one day. But our big companies handled it better than they did in the 20s. Capitalism was in rough shape when the original "Wall Street" came out. Its interesting that they were making a movie about market projections in the middle of that. Now, in the midst of our economic crisis, hopefully "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" will be just as good if not better.