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I never would’ve guessed it after watching Shia LaBeouf chug a five-hour energy, down a Patron shot, drink a Heineken, and then wink at the camera, but according to a new revelation, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps got paid for product placement. I know it sounds like Star Wars, love, but it’s true.

Oliver Stone said Wednesday that his “Wall Street” sequel benefited “enormously” from product placement, which helped expand a tight budget without compromising the integrity of the film.

Of course not.  All critiques of greed should include copious advertisements.  “Sad about the bailout, Winnie?  Here, have an ice cold, triple-hops brewed Heineken.  That always cheers me up when I’m feeling down.”

“Fox is known as a tight studio,” he said. “We needed help, and we took it where we could without, I think, prostituting the movie.
“No big, big cash, no Gillette shaving cream,” he added. “There was no scene that we did out of the way specifically to accommodate.”

What could I do? I was like a monkey dancing on a razor blade. We didn’t sell our souls.  It’s not like Shia Labeouf had to cut off a fing–

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Oliver Stone has won a best picture Oscar and delivered era-defining films on more than one occasion, his work inspiring everyone from the Gekko wannabes on the real Wall Street to the N-words who he says all love Scarface (his words, allegedly).  He might be the perfect director to deliver a film about American capitalism in that in both, the big question is, are they defined by their successes or their failures?  I don’t know the answer to that, I’m not a scientist.  But I can tell you that when Stone fails, he fails spectacularly.  In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone delivers a master class in how not to make a movie and creates a film which unintentionally mirrors the causes of the financial collapse it tries to dramatize — a pile of worthless elements cleverly configured to resemble something of value, but which is ultimately just a big stack of crap.

You can sense in it an attempt to define the financial excesses and failure of personal responsibility of the early 2000s era, but the scope is so broad and the critique so unfocused that it becomes little more than a pile of buzzwords.  MORTGAGE, LASER FUSION, CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS, BLOGGING!  Only in this movie do mortgage-backed securities and alternative energy have anything to with each other.  For a project with A-list stars, a critically-acclaimed director, and a blockbuster release, it has to be one of the clumsiest screenplays ever to make it to film.  I suspect that the problem, like a 2003-era mortgage prospectus, was that NO ONE BOTHERED TO READ THE FINE PRINT.

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"You see that framed poster that says 'Gordon', kid? Talked him down to half price. That's why I'm the king."

You might imagine a film with a subtitle as cheesily nonsensical as “money never sleeps” to be pretty crappy, and you’d be right.  Oh how right you would be, if you had indeed imagined such a thing.  The only saving grace of the film was that between the financial jargon awkwardly crowbarred into “stock Hollywood drama scene part 7b”, there was some of the finest unintentional comedy on which money could be wasted.  The best part of it was that during every awful moment, you could almost see a coked-up screenwriter pumping his fist, saying to himself, “YES! THIS IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER COME UP WITH!”

So here they are, the 10 most awesomely terrible lines of dialog that I could remember.

10. “He can’t just take his ball and go home. …He has to piss on the whole game first.”[If he would've just said 'balls', this visual would be changed FOREVER. Game changer.]

9.  “Arguing with your father is like arguing with small pox.” [So... one-sided? Beset by dead Indians?]

8. “Mr. Gekko?  I was hoping you could answer a question I had.  What is a ‘moral hazard?’” [hmm, instead of Gordon Gekko's book, might I suggest a dictionary containing the words 'moral' and 'hazard?']

7. “He had an ego the size of Antarctica… and so did I.” [Gravelly!  Gravitas!  ...Gravellytas!]

6. “California?  California is over.  California has made more mistakes than Yogi Berra reciting Shakespeare.” [Oooohhh snap!  Suck it, Berra!]

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Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opens today, and all-around Hollywood awesome dude Josh Brolin plays the film’s villain, Evil Motorcycle Guy.  Brolin was also the subject of this month’s Playboy interview, in which he offered this possibly telling quote:

“The movie is more formulaic than anything Oliver’s ever attempted before [dramatic pause inserted here by the editor before Brolin tries to put a positive spin on what he just said] but in the most beautiful, Oliver-esque way.

Oliver Stone has made some great movies and some crappy ones — what makes this quote possibly telling is that Wall Street 2 was co-written by Allan Loeb, who previously wrote the puke-inducingly formulaic 21 and The Switch.  He also has like 10 projects in development, most of which sound like awesom-o pitches, including:

• Just Go With It: An Adam Sandler vehicle for Grown Ups director Dennis Dugan in which a guy rents a family to impress the girl of his dreams.

• Untitled project in which Kevin James saves the rec center with MMA.

• The Dilemma, in which Vince Vaughn catches his best friend Kevin James’ wife cheating on him with Channing Tatum, probably because he’s fat. He needs to get his groove back. You could totally combine this with Hitch.

• An untitled Ryan Reynolds project about “an injured baseball player on the mend with echoes of The Rookie.”

• A remake of the 2006 French film The Valet, “about a parking valet who is enlisted to impersonate the lover of a famous fashion model in order to deflect attention from her relationship with a married businessman.”  Aka Pretty Man.

• A Little Game Without Consequence, “based on a French play of the same title which concerns a seemingly perfect couple who realize that their friends never liked them as couple to begin with after they pretend to break up.”

I can’t tell if the guy actually thinks like a Hollywood script-generating software machine or if he’s  a genius who figured out how to turn studios into his personal ATM machine.  Meanwhile, Brolin’s quote reminds me of Adam Carolla’s interview shorthand for when celebrities get asked about people they don’t like.  If a celebrity doesn’t like someone but can’t say it, the exchange will go something like, “What’s Jeremy Piven like? …Oh, you know. Jeremy’s Jeremy.”

“Did I say Wall Street 2 was formulaic?  What I meant was that it’s Oliver-esque.  Just wonderfully, beautifully Olivery.”

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