Money Weeps

So here is the plot of WS2: MoneyNeverSleepz. Shia LeBoeuf works for Lehman Brothers and is dating Michael Douglas' 10-year-old son, a Mozartian trouser role played by Carey Mulligan, whose last name translates as "an American accent, re-attempted but not counted against the player's score, in a friendly round of golf." Michael Douglas is played with flattering sincerity by well-known 1980s personality, Gordon Gekko. Josh Brolin is played by Pierce Brosnan, who sounds convincingly as if he had grown up in Dubuque, Long Island. Susan Sarandon plays your aunt, who sells real estate. Frank Langella is played by the uptown 5 train. The role of Wall Street is split between the set of the Dead Poets Society and the Apple Genius Bar. The soundtrack is by David Byrner, who does an uncanny David Byrne impersonation. After Lehman-manqué collapses, a pedestrian throws himself in front of an onrushing Frank Langella, killing everyone involved. Shia LeBoeuf vows revenge on 007. A series of things occur. There are two main sideplots. In one, Carey Mulligan's boyscout troop is mimeographing a newsletter. In the other, Shia LeBoeuf is trying to scam some money for a nuclear fusion project. Every once in a while, LeBoeuf's eyes dart from side to side and he pronounces his sincerity. Michael Douglas pretends to help him, then screws him over, then pretends to help him, then screws him over, then pretends to help him, then screws him over, then buys the love of LeBoeuf and his daughter with $100,000,000. They kiss. The camera pans. Fin.

WS2: The Wallstreetening has about as much to say about late global capitalism as a kindergartener about the collected works of Will and Ariel Durant, which is to say that it has a lot of fun stacking them up and knocking them over, but it can't read. It is the perfect Oliver Stone movie, an archetype of his own personal form, five-and-a-half hours of vaguely stylish but slightly tawdry nonsense overlayed with a filigree of dull portentousness that ultimately chickens out. If the movie had any guts, Shia LeBouef would've taken a job as the deputy assistant budget director for the administration that just bailed out his slime-ball boss; Carey Mulligan would've blown all 100 mil of his inheritance right up his nose along with the rest of his buddies at the Vienna Boys Choir, and Michael Douglas would've worn an eyepatch and demanded that everyone call him Snake. Charlie Sheen would've tackled Oliver Stone during his cameo and, standing on Stone's prone and broken body, declaimed on the 9/11 Truth Movement for ninety straight minutes. The soundtrack would've still been David Byrne, singing "People Like Us" over and over and faster and faster until the film caught fire and the theater burned to the ground.