I watched Boiler Room last night and it reminded me of a few other films about sales & greed, falling somewhere between Rogue Trader and Wall St with a hint of American Psycho. I'd say Boiler Room sneaks into the top five:

5. Boiler Room follows a trainee stock broker with a conflicted moral compass as he navigates through the murky waters of a backstreet trading firm. If you've seen Will Smith's character's noble efforts in the same role as a trainee trader in The Pursuit of Happyness (ranked 407 in the Top 1000), just imagine the absolute opposite. These trainees aspire to fast money and fast cars and quote Gordon Gecko word for word while destroying lives with their dubious stock picks.

4. Rogue Trader is based on the true story of Liam Neeson, a broker on the Nikkei index in Singapore who cooked the books to hide the big gambles, eventually resulting in catastrophic losses for his employer Barings Bank. Ewan McGregor gives a very strong and believable performance as Neeson, but the script really doesn't quite seem to live up to the legend. We're also made acutely aware that through the protagonists constant narration between scenes that this is a very one-sided story, so it comes as no surprise that it's based on Neeson's autobiography.

3. Glengarry Glen Ross follows a group of Chicago real-estate salesmen who spend their evenings cold-calling unsuspecting punters and tricking them into investments. By giving the junk property lots that they're flogging grand titles such as The Glengarry Highlands of Florida, they prey on their victims lifestyle aspirations and begin a frantic hard-sell when they pick up on even a modicum of interest. When sales are flagging, Kevin Spacey's office manager finds himself unable to motivate the sales agents, who rudely brush him off with boasts of former glory and complaints at the quality of the leads he gives them. At wits end, he calls in Alec Baldwin's hotshot executive to rip into them, imploring them to "Always Be Closing!" before laying down the gauntlet: a vicious sales contest in which he will fire the worst- performing, and buy the best earner a new car.

2.American Psycho is adaptated from Bret Easton Ellis's satirical novel, where horrific violence serves as a metaphor for the morally vacant world of 80's finance. Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman, one of several vice presidents working in mergers & acquisitions/ "murders and executions" for a large bank. By day a narcissistic Bateman sits in his office obsessing over symbols of wealth and style such as restaurant reservations and designer suits. I particularly enjoyed the oft- referenced business card scene, a particularly telling episode where Bateman panics when exchanging business cards with a colleague, realising that a collegue's card is more upscale than his "..it even has a watermark". At night, Bateman lets off steam from these episodes by brutally slaughtering prostitutes and homeless people in completely surreal episodes, complete with rambling monologues about Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis. At the end of the day, the viewer is left wondering whether or not these episodes are even "real" in the line of the plot, or merely the fantasies that overflow from Batemans's mind.

"it even has a watermark"

1. Wall Street is without a doubt the quintessential film about greed in my opinion, impressive as much for how well it has aged and stayed relevant as for the striking snapshot of 80's yuppie culture that it captures. Charlie Sheen stars as Bud Fox, a young stockbroker with a burning ambition for the top and an obsession with Gordon Gecko, a takeover mogul at the very top of the heap. Michael Douglas delivers a standout performance as the manipulative Gekko, giving Fox all the trappings of wealth that he desires: a fancy apartment, possessions and a girlfriend to match. However, nothing comes without a dear price in Fox's new life soon finds that Gekko has laid more traps for him than he can handle, jeopardising the lives of the people he loves.

"greed is good"

ok well a couple more you should see.. The Spanish Prisoner & Pi
At a tangeant plot-wise, David Manet's sleight-of-hand thriller The Spanish Prisoner tells the tale of John Ross, a Hitchcockian hero working for a large corporation. As the author of a mysterious process for influencing the stock market, Ross' believes he is due great compensation for his work. When this is not forthcoming he finds himself losing faith in his employers, instead placing his trust in some fast friends. The film is crafted as an intricate puzzle and each plot-twist is heightened by the increasingly nervous disposition of the character as his situation becomes more and more desperate.

With parallels in plot to The Spanish Prisoner and an even darker tone, Pi is a gritty, immersive story of a mathmatician who discerns patterns in the stock market using a home-made supercomputer and is subsequently hounded by a wall st trading firm.

and coming soon:
Oliver Stone brings Gekko back amid a backdrop of real-life financial crisis to be unleashed on a new generation this September with the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. This time, Michael Douglas' classic character finds himself out of prison but also out of power in the circles he once wielded control over. Luckily he's in spades with a new young upstart, this time it's his estranged daughter's fiance Jacob (played by Shia LaBeouf). Early reviews of this seem quite positive so I'm really excited to see if they manage to pull off creating a late sequel to a classic and recreating such a notorious villain.

This blog is a counterpart to The Great Movie Experiment, where we're compiling a list of the best movies of all time based on thousands of votes by users. Each vote is a head-to-head pairing of two movies... just click on the best one! As well as being good fun, each vote contributes to the rankings and brings us closer to the perfecting our list of great movies. Try it now!