Screen Shrapnel Never Sleeps

screen shrapnel never sleeps

If you can remember the 80s, you weren’t there, man. Believe it or not, both Graham and Granddad Dunn are too young to recall the decade that fashion forgot, save for hazy half remembered visions of Scooby-Do cartoons, dancing to Jive Bunny at birthday parties and a scary old witch in a blue shoulder-padded blazer and sensible shoes who stole our milk. But if we ever need reminded of those dark days we flip on the DVD of Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street, a film which condenses the years of Reaganomics, bad clothes and big hair into a 100 minute faustian tale where a young Charlie Sheen sells his soul to Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko, a slick haired shark with a mobile phone the size of a toaster and a talent for spouting zeitgeisty slogans. Will youngsters growing up in the 00s be looking back to Oliver Stone’s sequel to understand the insanity of our current financial institutions? Have a listen to find out.

As well as the crooks of Wall Street we also discuss the more loveable blue-collar thieves of Ben Affleck’s The Town. After his impressive directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, he’s back in Boston and back in front of the camera for a muscular heist film in the Heat vein, with some added romance.

Finally, Graham delves into the back of his DVD collection to reveals a Dirty Little Secret: he loves Ocean’s Twelve, the unwanted ginger-haired bastard child of Steven Soderberg’s Ocean’s trilogy. But can he convince Jamie, a card-carrying Sorderberg-sceptic, that it’s more than just a glorified holiday video for Clooney, Pitt, Roberts et al.

Posted at 17:24, 9th October 2010