Oliver Stone Criticized For All White, Straight Cast

by Jerome Cleary

westhollywood.patch.com

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA -- During this mighty heat wave the past week I had the opportunity to see some films. I went on opening day to see: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It's the sequel to the 1987 Wall Street movie with Michael Douglas. While I love Oliver Stone's films and his work as a director, I had trouble with their supposed 2010 story line.

In this film no one is gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender and it's a double white world too. In this sequel everyone is white, has white friends and hangs out with more white people. It's 23 years later in the sequel and everyone is still white and heterosexual. Haven't these film characters learned anything over the past 23 years on TV from Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Queer As Folk and the winners of the Amazing Race?

As I was watching one of the important scenes between Shia LaBeouf's character meeting Josh Brolin for the first time, I suddenly began to think how much more interesting this scene would have been if Brolin's character had taken a flirtatious romp with LaBeouf. Brolin has played a bisexual character before, so it's not so far fetched.

If LaBeouf's character had of been a female, I would say hands down Brolin's character would have made the flirty pass too. LaBeouf is the young lean untamed buck character and Brolin is the older sexy more muscular experienced guy.

I would be interested to see if the screenwriters, Bryan Burrough, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff are heterosexual cause it's a mundane paint by the numbers story. With today's films, it's a real bore to watch a straight woman fall for a straight man, or a straight man fall for a straight woman. Straight man has an affair with another straight woman, bla, bla, bla . . .

I also started to wonder if the present day screenplay writing software has a generic prompt that says, "When you get to page 20, insert typical heterosexual character here."