Basic Plot in the Form of a Haiku:
            Twenty-something males
            Yell into their telephones
            To make gobs o'dough.

My Basic Ramblings: I have been remiss in my movie-watching duties.  Between The Sims and other various house-type stuff and my general laziness, it's a wonder I get anything done.  This is probably why I had to wait until I visited my sister to see this movie.

In seeing previews and reading other reviews of it, this movie kind of struck me as a Junior Wall Street or Glengarry Glen Ross (both of which I want to see and both of which I forget I want to see when I am thinking of movies I want to see, though I do have Wall Street on laser disc).  Guys venting their frustrations and inner angst by getting big gobs of money any way they see fit (and beating up the occasional guy who gives them grief).  Whatever happened to getting drunk, sitting in an empty bathtub and listening to Pearl Jam's Ten?  Oh, wait, that's how I used to vent my frustrations and inner angst.  Never mind.

From the looks of the movie, the director had to hire every white male twentysomething actor in Hollywood to fill out the ranks.  So that's why we get the guy from That Thing You Do! as the head of the firm.  He didn't strike me as the "Head of an Evil Money-Stealing Brokerage Firm" type, though.  I saw him and kept thinking "It's that That Thing You Do! Guy!" (I've never seen the movie, but when VH-1 was showing it every twenty minutes for a while there, I would catch glimpses of him.)  Erin saw him as the "Last Days of Disco Guy", so I guess it depends on where you're coming from.  He seemed too much of a weenie to be unscrupulous enough to run a place like that.

I would last about fifteen seconds at a place like the firm in the movie, even if what they were doing was 100% legit and I didn't have to worry about being arrested.  I don't handle cold calling well.  I had a job that seemed okay at first but then dissolved into cold calling people to have them complete a survey because of a printer they'd bought three, four, five years ago.  I lasted a day and a half.  (Helpful Bit of Advice from Whitney: When you arrive at home from your first day of work and fantasize about shooting up all the equipment in the place, it might be a good idea for you to look elsewhere for employment.)

Ben Affleck decorates his house the same way I decorate mine in The Sims - big tanning bed randomly stuck in the middle of the living room.  (Actually, my new thing with The Sims is to create houses that are replicas of the places where I've lived.  There's something very weird about having a SimWhitney and a SimChris living in a SimHouse that looks exactly like the one I'm in now.  I did have to kill off SimWhitney's live-in lesbian lover, though, to achieve this postmodern eerieness.  Don't ask.)

In the same scene, the guys recite lines of Wall Street along with the characters on the screen.  I have to admit I have done this on occasion, usually with movies like The Breakfast Club.  A friend of mine from high school and I would sit in the back of the bus and just recite whole chunks of the movie.  It's hard to do in an adult-type world, though.  I can't really sit at my job and go through the whole "Hey, son!/Yeah, Dad?/How's your day, pal?/Great Dad, how was yours?/Super!  Say, son, how'd you like to go fishing this weekend?/Great Dad, but (sad) I've got homework to do!/That's okay, son, you can do it on the boat!/Gee!/Dear, isn't our son swell?/Yes, dear, isn't life swell?/Oh! (kissy noise) Oh! (kissy noise, followed by a punch to the imaginary person Judd Nelson is kissing)" thing.  That would just be wrong and I'd get fired or something.

The part of the movie that hit closest to home for me was when Seth talks the guy out of his life's savings, the money this guy was going to save for a house.  I just bought a house.  I know how difficult it is to save money for a house.  If, back in April, my husband told me he dumped our entire house savings fund into a stock I'd never heard of, to have it tank days later, you would find his beaten corpse at the bottom of Lake Ontario, along with Giovanni Ribisi, Jamie Kennedy (glad to see he got work after Scream 2, though he doesn't look as good), the That Thing You Do! Guy, Nia Long, and Vin Diesel.  (Ben Affleck you'd find there anyway.)  You laugh, but I'm serious.

So this was a good movie and I'm a sucker for a guy in a suit.  Pathetic, yes, but true.