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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Here’s a picture of Courtney Love and Brett Ratner last night at the premiere of Money Never Sleeps (Wall Street 2) in New York.  Gosh, she looks so elegant, I wonder where she went to finishing school.  But her and the Rat Man, that’s a match made in crotch-fondling heaven (the most fun kind of heaven).  One thing that disappointed me about it, though,  The Rat isn’t doing his trademark crotch fondle in the picture. The photographer must’ve been using some kind of high-speed film or something.  Anyway, I thought it would be fun to have both their trademark poses in the same photo, so I went ahead and had it digitally remastered.

DOUBLE CROTCH FONDLE, WHAT DOES IT MEAN!?!?

[original picture via MovieLine]

STONE: "No, no, your mistake, both drinks are for me, actually." LABEOUF: (*awkward attempt to smile*)

Today in Shocking News You’ll Never Believe, Shia Labeouf shared an Oliver Stone anecdote at the Money Never Sleeps premiere which seemed to suggest that the director can be, get this: foul-mouthed, egomaniacal, and difficult to work for.  It’s uncharacteristic behavior for a man famously rumored to have told a black screenwriter, “I bet you like Scarface. All n*ggers love Scarface.”  What a delight.

“We’re in the Adirondacks, and Josh Brolin and I are shooting this bike scene. And at one point I say to Josh a line — ‘You should look at yourself in the mirror first and see yourself. It might scare you,’” remembered LaBeouf. “I looked at the line for a couple of months and thought I’d go to Oliver and say, ‘You look at the mirror and look at yourself. It’s sort of repetitive. Why don’t we just cut one of those? Why don’t I say, Look at yourself. It might scare you.’ This is Oliver verbatim. He looks at me and goes, ‘I like mirror. I wrote Scarface. Go f*ck yourself.’” [Vulture]

I like to imagine Oliver Stone talking this way in all of his daily interactions.  “Hey buddy, I said ‘no mayo’.  I wrote Scarface.  Go f*ck yourself.”  “You call this a latte?  I wrote Scarface.”  “I wrote Scarface.  Your t*ts look stupid.  I’m just saying.”

Shia with his understudies, Mutt Williams and Shia LaRuff.

Shia Labeouf has made a career out of starring in bad movies almost exclusively, but I’ve never held it against him.  Partly because he’s young, and partly because you can’t really expect a young actor to turn down a Steven Spielberg film. That said, Indy 4 was basically a really expensive Mexican sitcom.  And to his credit, LaBeouf actually has actually admitted it. That may not seem like a big deal, but keep in mind, Hollywood is a town run by paranoid kissasses.

Nuke my fridge, LA Times:

“You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg, who directed]. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault. Simple.”

“I think if you don’t acknowledge it, then why do they trust you the next time you’re promoting a movie?” LaBeouf went on to say he wasn’t the only star on the film who felt that way. “We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn’t happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted.”

Asked whether this was difficult to say, given his deep relationship with Spielberg, LaBeouf continued with the directness. “I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.”

LaBeouf added, “We need to be able to satiate the appetite,” he said. “I think we just misinterpreted what we were trying to satiate.”

Yeah, either that or maybe you should just try to make a movie you think is good instead of trying to “satiate an appetite.”  That should be rule number one for any actor or filmmaker.  Rule number 2?  Never listen to George Lucas.  He’ll just suggest adding in a family of squirrels and demand to be fed a stray cat.

Fox just released the international trailer for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, from Oliver Stone, starring Shia LaBeouf and Michael Douglas.  The domestic version didn’t reveal much about the plot, probably because we Americans don’t care about plot, only snuggies and giant sodas.  But for the foreigners they provide a longer cut.  We find out that Gordon Gekko is out of jail and becomes some sort of celebrity.  Meanwhile Shia LaBeouf is busy trying to four-finger blast Gekko’s estranged daughter because she has boy hair. Josh Brolin is a bad guy, which you can tell because he takes Shia on a scary motorcycle ride like Jacob did with Bella.  In fact that whole time through the forest I kept expecting him to turn into a giant wolf.  That would’ve been so awesome, I’d totally be cleaning the jizz off my Taylor Lautner sex pillow right now.  Well, more jizz anyway.