Sell! Buy! Scam! Betray!: "Boiler Room"

You may have heard about the Media Play retail stores going out of business. I wasn't really thinking about it when I stopped by the grocery store the other night, but lo, there was a Media Play in the same shopping center. About $70 later, I was carrying out an armload of marked-down DVDs.

While I was disappointed not to see "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" among the hot deals, my biggest prize may have been "Boiler Room." Sure, I scored "Sin City" for only $16 and "Rocky" for something like $8, but "Boiler Room" was a measly $4. Four dollars! That's a steal for "Wall Street" meets "The Outsiders."

Released in 2000, after the Millennium Bug had been safely dispatched, the movie has young Giovanni Ribisi as a college dropout running a casino in his apartment when a boyhood friend introduces him to the world of trading stocks. Well, trading may not be the right word. Turns out this brokerage, way out on Long Island, really just tries to hook "whales" who will pour a lot of money into an IPO. Can't say I recall any of the guys at J.T. Marlin advising clients to sell.

At first, our man Ribisi loves the life, and it's fun to watch him and other guys lay the high-pressure pitch on these hapless would-be investors, i.e. "Take me off your list." "OK, I'll take you off my list of successful people today." Hey, I've never been in the life; the closest I came was telemarketing, and it's not the same thing to pitch an extended car warranty or dating service. But I could see these twentysomething punks feeling invincible on the phone and doing whatever it takes to land a commission and get that Ferrari.

The other guys are all right, too. We get Vin Diesel as the tough-guy stockbroker, right around the same time he made "Pitch Black." Nicky Katt is a senior broker and Ribisi's rival for the affections of the firm's secretary, Nia Long. And finally, we have Sir Ben Affleck, playing the Alec Baldwin Lite role as the stud broker who tries to weed out the losers with a lot of swearing. Actually, he's not bad, mainly because he doesn't have much screen time and is easy to accept as a strutting dick.

All in all, this isn't a great movie, but it's entertaining to see the rise and fall of Ribisi as he realizes the firm isn't doing such great work. There's a nice parallel story line with one of Ribisi's clients getting hooked, then watching his life go down the toilet. I feel ya, man. But I just know this Enron company is going to bounce back. Trust me.