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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Shia tried to disguise his disgust as Douglas boorishly flaunted a five-fingered hand right in front of his face

Not surprisingly, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (finance verb)ed it’s way to the top this week, earning an estimated $19 mil from 3500 theaters for the top spot.  It was good not great.  By comparison, The Town earned $23.8 mil from 2800 theater last weekend (how you like them apples, gritty pafahmence, etc.).

Legend of the Guardians took the number two spot (heh heh…) with $16.3 million, which is disappointing given that kids are stupid and will watch whatever crap is playing in front of the seat you chain them to.  If the exact same film had been a Dreamworks picture called “Owl Fight Club”, I guarantee it would’ve made $50 million.  For better or worse, no one knows what the f*ck a guardian of ga’hoole is, and it sounds like some kind of gay fetish.

Elsewhere, The Town held well in its second weekend (though as Box Office Mojo points out, not as well as The Departed), as did Easy A, falling off 32 and 39 percent from their opening weekend, respectively.  The big flops of the weekend were You Again, which looked like one of Jamie Lee Curtis’ massive, steaming, Activia dumps, your mom’s titteez, and The Virginity Hit, the Will Ferrell and Adam McKay-produced indie sex comedy… thing.

The other new nationwide release, The Virginity Hit, bagged an estimated $300,000 at 700 locations, which was one of the worst openings of all time, ranking as the fourth lowest-grossing for a nationwide release on record. [BOMojo]

Huh.  I guess the “nationwide” part is key to that stat, because that opening is still 15,000 times the entire run of Katherine Heigl’s Zyzzyx Road.

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"I hate your box, it's dark and smelly!"

Opening this Weekend

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
I’m guessing this is going to be the weekend’s big money winner.  It certainly looks Oliver Stone-y, and not necessarily in a bad way.  But it’s also an Allan Loeb script.  I try not to bash screenwriters too much, because they get blamed for a lot things that aren’t their fault, but having seen a few Allan Loeb movies now, the common thread seems to be “painfully formulaic.”  He has like 10 projects in development, and they all sound like Awesom-O pitches.  Including one in which Kevin James literally saves the rec center through MMA fighting (okay, it was the music program, but still).  Oliver Stone is the kind of director who could make formulaic work, but… without Kevin James’ pants falling down, where’s the drama?

Buried
You can read my review here.  I honestly want as many people to see this as possible so I can prove that I’m not crazy.  Everyone seems to like this film.  Granted, I was a little drunk when I saw it at Sundance (it was a midnight screening), but my honest, non-contrarian reaction was that I hated it.   Not in a haha-bad kind of way, either, but in a this-feels-sleazy-and-manipulative kind of way where it actually made me angry (like Crash, or the end of Million Dollar Baby).  The people I went to the screening with hated it too.  Most of the tension relied on preposterous plot points, and the protagonist kept doing such stupid things that I just wanted him to die.  Not to mention it didn’t seem to have a point other than “look at me, I can create tension.” (which isn’t tense if you’re rooting for the protagonist to die). So please, go see this terrible movie, help me validate that I’m not out of my mind.  …For the record, Ryan Reynolds is still a sweet boy.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole
I’ll be honest, I’m probably not going to see the Australian warrior owls movie.  But it is a Zack Snyder movie, and I’m going to keep on believing that Zack Snyder is a badass until proven otherwise.  He choreographed the fight scenes using stunt men in owl suits, for Christ sake!  I like the idea of that being someone’s job more than I’ve liked any of my jobs.

You Again
Haha, Betty White is horny and on Twitter.  It’s hilarious, because she’s old and old people don’t do that stuff.   Kristen Bell plays a character who used to be ugly. Seriously.  Like with glasses and pony tails and fake acne and everything.  So embarrassing!

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