Fittingly, Richard Gere's new Wall Street thriller Arbitrage had a screening this week hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Brioni, and high-end jeweler Piaget.
But the Peggy Siegal Company fete was hardly a frivolous bacchanal. Gere and his fellow stars Susan Sarandon and Brit Marling wondered out-loud why more investment bankers weren't in jail, and writer/director Nicholas Jarecki noted his goal was to turn a "paper crime into a blood crime".
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Thanks to absolutist firebrands such as Rand and Ron Paul, laissez-faire economic sentiment has been gaining momentum in the GOP for some time. But with the nomination of deficit hawk wunderkind — and notable Ayn Rand devotee — Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's running mate, movement libertarianism has officially been added to the Republican presidential platform.
Regardless of whether Romney is elected and Ryan’s controversial budget proposals are made law, the rebranding has already created two decisive effects: first, it has excited the fiscal-conservative base enough to warrant representation at the penultimate level; and second, it has convinced swaths of more marginal voters, who vaguely recall skimming through Atlas Shrugged as undergrads, that they were ardent “objectivists” all along.
In honor of the libertarian strain of Republicanism getting its RNC coronation this week, here are the top nine films that evoke a reverie for free markets and, in some cases, the dystopian nightmare that's sure to follow if we ignore Rand's literary prophecy. more »
Finally, Dr. Uwe Boll is making a movie America actually wants to see! According to The Hollywood Reporter, Boll will start filming in April on Bailout, his 27th film -- a feature-length thriller that follows an everyman New Yorker "who loses everything in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis, and who strikes back by killing investment bankers." I don't know about you, but I think this one's got a shot at gaining the cultural foothold that Ollie Stone missed with Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, nein? [THR]
"In the movie Wall Street I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real." And with that, Michael Douglas stumps for the FBI in a new public service announcement warning investors against financial misdeeds. If Gordon Gekko himself says greed is no longer good, it must be true. Fraudsters, beware!
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