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This is my diary....what I make sense of, around me. You'll find short prose on contemporary topics that interest me. What can you expect - Best adjectives? …. hmm occasionally, tossed around flowery verbs ?…. Nope, haiku-like super-brevity? … I try to. Thanks for dropping by & hope to see you again

October 1, 2010

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Courtesy my BiL and his complimentary tickets at PVR, i saw the movie over the last weekend. The sequel to the 1987 hit was not that captivating though. Imagine ketan parikh coming out of jail, his sins pardoned, to write a book called ‘Greed is Good’ and lecturing people on how and why people like harshad mehta or ramalinga raju screwed the financial market.

Gordon gekko does something similar but with a lot of panache and polish . His daughter in the meanwhile who has grown up to hate him for not only his misdeed but her brother’s unfortunate death whom she holds him responsible for neglect, stays with her boyfriend (Jake) who incidentally also happens to be a bright upshot on the wall street. They stay in plush apartment, buy expensive gifts and drive fancy bikes courtesy the fat bonuses Jake gets from his boss who also happens to his mentor at the Investment firm.

But it so happens that Gekko’s former bête noire (Bretton James) now drives Jake’s mentor boss (Lewis Zabel) to death when the Investment firm goes belly up.

Jake wants to bring the father-daughter together much to her fiancé’s consternation, who at one point in time tells him ‘Dont go back to him, he can hurt us’. The daughter knows the father too well and he lives up to his billing. Gekko convinces Jake to get his daughter to transfer $100 Million from a trust account in Switzerland that he had stashed in her name just before he went to jail . But instead of transferring the money to some company involved in fusion technology, which Jake believes is the next big idea, he pockets the same and vanishes into thin air (the plot seemed a bit far fetched though - imagine somebody hoodwinking the attorneys and amidst all the paper work in a Swiss bank involving a huge sum of money).

In the meantime Jake has joined Bretton and after falling out with him decides to deliver a sucker punch to redeem his mentor death. He sits overnight and produces some damning piece of report that sends this billionaire Wall St. hotshot into a legal & financial tailspin. In Quick time......Haha.

Gekko who has now turned this $100 million into billions (god knows how) has a change of heart and comes back to fulfill the broken promise i.e, transfer the $100 Million to the fusion company and bring the 2 together.

A kind of family melodrama where the son-in-law redeems himself, daughter reconciles, a common enemy vanquished & the wily gecko turning a leaf for the better. Good in parts and with Oliver stone at the helm you can expect a well knit movie with brilliant texture and feel to the film. Sonny & Wifi slept through the movie though.

2 comments:

Nona said...

Yawwwn! :) Why did he have to make a sequel?

Vasant Prabhu said...

@Nona - Some characters like Gordon Gekko don't easily fade away i guess. They get resurrected but they don't quite work up the same magic each time.

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