I'm not usually attracted to films about unscrupulous salespersons, like the stock-brokers in "Wall St." or the real estate agents in "Glengarry Glen Ross." However, I did like those two, and "Boiler Room" captures elements of both of them. It's a cautionary, informative, and frightening tale of an illegal "chop shop," where young stock-brokers-in-training sell non-existent stocks to unsuspecting clients, making millions in the process, while the clients lose everything. Playing Faust in this awfully good movie is Giovanni Ribisi(so good in "The Other Sister,") who steals this movie single-handedly. His Mephistopheles is played by Ben Affleck, replicating the Alec Baldwin role in "Glengarry Glen Ross." He does a respectable job...but it's already been done perfectly. Nia Long and Ron Rivkin are also excellent playing the kind of roles that they've done before. The annoying rap on the sound track is just that, and it sets the mood for these street sharks perfectly. If you're the kind of person who goes to the zoo and doesn't like to look at the snakes in the reptile house, you might not enjoy this one.

Giovanni Rabisi stars as a college dropout who find himself working in a fraudulant brokerage firm in this hip-hop/generation-X version of the film Wall Street. Loud, brash and very politically incorrect, the film delivers laughs as well as an insider's look at a very real threat to the general public. As much fiun and as true as it all feels, however, the film has a problem tying up all of its loose threads at the end. As my friend Mike put it, it went from 4.5 stars to 3 stars on the editing room floor. I liked it a little more than that though and I know that this is one I'll be quoting for a while (great dialogue) so I'm giving it...