Saw the new Wall Street movie this weekend, Oliver Stone’s follow up to his 1987 film of the same name. Prepared by watching the first movie on Netflix (Watch Instantly) earlier in the week. I’m not sure that I would have understood the new film as much without having seen the first. Several characters from the first film make fun cameos.

It’s entertaining, but I wouldn’t call it a great film. The character of Gordon Gekko doesn’t entirely hang together and neither does the plot. Perhaps one of these aspects causes the other. I don’t know. There’s a good story there, but it gets lost. The ending is a complete disappointment. As my husband put it, it’s like those stories that you write when you’re in grade school – the ones where you run out of time, ideas, or both. You end the piece: “And then I woke up. It was just a dream.”

I think the movie is supposed to make viewers wish they had all that money and were living this glamorous Manhattan lifestyle. Some people might feel that way, but it makes me grateful that I have a far simpler life. In fact, there’s one scene – very brief – in the movie that definitely evokes this. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), sort of a Wall Street upstart, goes to meet Bretton James (Josh Brolin) at the mansion he calls home. James is one of the masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe might put it. When Moore arrives, James is shown hosting a private concert in his home. The camera pans the audience, not unlike Wolfe’s description of the women at a similar party in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities. The women are parodies of themselves: stretched, tucked, plumped beyond recognition. That scene alone was enough to make me not desire the lifestyle that Stone tries to make appealing and sexy.