80s Movie Challenge Week 25: Wall Street (1987)
Welcome, 80s fans! To celebrate reaching the halfway point of our Great Year Long 80s Movie Challenge (#80sMC) we’re going to do something a little different. You might like reading these frequent nostalgia trips with your lunch, but grab your headphones and turn up the volume because we’ve teamed up with YouTube channel CinemaSlice and the brilliant Chris Warrington for a video.
Except lunch is for wimps because this week we’re in 1987, feeling the Yuppie Love as we take a stroll down Wall Street.
Over to you Chris…
Wall Street and The Aesthetics of Greed
It’s a dizzying heady cocktail Wall Street: the place and the film. If you had to ask me my favourite film from the ‘80s, I’d probably say something like Near Dark. Because I love a genre film that does it right. But if you asked me which film summed up the ‘80s: it’s Wall Street. You see, the ‘80s was a time of ambition. Crazed, spiralling ambition where standing on the shoulders of giants was just a start, you had to be involving them in a leveraged buy-out at the same time. That ambition, that naked greed, came hand-in-hand with a certain kind of gauche and brash artistic style and there’s only one film, in my mind, that manages to weave that particular tapestry. Wall Street isn’t just a film about greed, it is the style guide for greed. A film that completely embeds the fabric of greed into the setting.
Having recently set up a YouTube channel we thought it was only appropriate that rather than just telling you about this. We should definitely try to show it to you. So please, enjoy Wall Street and The Aesthetics of Greed.
Chris Warrington (or Mr. W as he is branding himself these days) is the Head of Film at a Northern Comprehensive school. He has written for The Guardian, The Big Picture, Fim Stories and a few defunct publications and podcasts. He is currently the host of the CinemaSlice YouTube channel. Do him a favour and subscribe to it.
Join us again next week for a trip back to L.A. in 1984, but don’t forget to brush up on your car-polishing, deck-sanding and fence-painting skills as Andee Dee aims to become the best around with The Karate Kid.
