Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Larry R. thinks this is great film-making, and I suppose it is if one considers great film-making to be the successful sale of an illusion based on the suspension of disbelief.  The illusion here, of course, is that Gekko is the voice of capitalism.  Stone lures us into this illusion with the deft portrayal of Gekko as the stereotypical “master of the universe,” only to transform him into a cynical practitioner of some Marxian version of economics as a conspiratorial zero-sum game.  Gekko calls that capitalism, too, and audience is expected to buy it.  And most of them did.