Have you ever turned on tv on a Saturday or Sunday and just randomly started to watch a movie or show that you never even wanted to see? This happens to me from time.Mike Wilmington « Movie City News. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Four Stars)U. S.: Martin Scorsese, 2. An idea came to me. The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, to write a movie containing only villains and bawds.
I would not have to tell any lies then.” —Ben Hecht, describing the genesis of his classic 1. Underworld. Greed: The Director’s Cut The brouhaha over Martin Scorsese. It’s exaggerated, of course, perhaps because Scorsese is so much admired by so many film writers, that a few of the commentators who dislike Wolf on Wall Street (about a fourth of the major critics, it seems) feel they have to bash it twice as hard as usual, as if they had to all but destroy the show, and bury it with contempt, to make their point — all the better to open the way for some other worthier contender, like ay, one of the other Best Picture nominees: Gravity, American Hustle, 1. Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Nebraska, Her, Philomena, or Dallas Buyer’s Club. So, probably, can his movie. Scorsese is 7. 1 years old — but you’d probably never guess it from watching the rousing, furious Wolf of Wall Street. By rights, the one- time angry young cineaste of 1. Taxi Driver and 1. Raging Bull should have graduated to a less contentious role as universally respected elder movie statesman, or grand old man of the cinema. But maybe he’s just not ready. It’s also a brilliant, unsparing look at a deviant underworld: stripping bare not just part of the cast but also the corrupt stock deals and jaw- droppingly self- destructive life- styles that Belfort, and others in his company and elsewhere, were involved in: mass misbehavior that apparently ran rampant in those years (and may still) — and that also may have helped bring on the 2. Bush era bank crash. Now, coming sixteen years after Wall Street, that blistering Oliver Stone expose’ in which Michael Douglas’s natty corporate raider Gordon Gekko coined the mantra, “Greed is good,” and three years after Stone’s and Douglas’s somewhat disappointing 2. The actor has had intestinal issues. Repin if you are a Clato fan.,YOU CAN ALSO BE A FINNICK FAN OR TEAM PEETA. Find Hilarious Hungergames Funny Peeta Mellark Funny Peeta Funny. Lemon Juice If your hair is.,Josh Hutcherson(Peeta Mellark),Stanley Tucci(Caesar Flickerman) and a lot of other. 89 questions and answers about 'H' in our 'Alphabetics. Lime juice, lemon juice, coconut. Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark and. The Boiler Room (also inspired by Belfort’s shenanigans) and Margin Call and Arbitrage — The Wolf of Wall Street, like many another Scorsese movie, manages to top them all. It goes the furthest and it’s the most entertaining and damning. It’s a movie that seemingly embraces the darkness, the better to expose and eviscerate the rot underneath it. Crammed with character and incident, and boiling with life and energy, The Wolf of Wall Street is top- level Scorsese: a first- class modern neo- noir, a killer comedy, a terrific piece of social drama (and social criticism), and an actor’s dream with a dream of a cast. An Unsentimental Education. Wolf of Wall Street’s knowing screenplay –which, at its best, recalls the wit, style and ferocious candor of the Ben Hecht of “A Child of the Century” and “The Front Page” — was written by Terence Winter, whose TV credentials include both “Boardwalk Empire“ and “The Sopranos.” Winter knows how to humanize criminals without glossing over their crimes, and that. Changing names and fictionalizing some of the story from Belfort. It’s an almost defiantly provocative film, but not really a non- judgmental one — though it isn. Scorsese and Winter show these financial outlaws having a high old time and debauching to the max because that’s the story. And they tell us that Belfort got an over- light punishment in a country club prison, because that’s the story too. They stick to Belfort’s point of view, because he’s the primary witness, and because they want us to be trapped with him, in his life of addiction and swindling and greed and paranoia, surrounded by the forces that will bring him down. In the movie, Belfort only seems to be “free“ during his stormy rise in the financial world — as, with obscene gusto and uncensored dirty- mouth profanity, he and his buddies proceed to con their investors and the government and the regulators. Then they have huge parties, jam- packed with hookers and strippers and sex and booze and a blizzard of drugs (cocaine, quaaludes, xanax, morphine, et. But it’s also sad and horrifying and sometimes infuriating. There are scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street that are classics of comedy: I’d include Belfort’s zonked- out vintage quaalude attack at the country club, with blitzed crony/lieutenant Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill, superb too) on the phone. Rothschild mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew Mc. Conaughey, also superb); and the split personality antics of Jordan’s volatile accountant dad “Mad Max” Belfort, played by Meathead- turned- auteur Rob Reiner (yeah, superb). There are other comic or partly comic scenes — like the wild parties, and Jordan’s morale- boosting super- sell speeches to his troops — that are so filled with smart writing, cinematic bravura and wonderful acting that they stay with you long after the movie is over, though I can understand why some people don’t want them to. Still, if it happened — if a tenth of it happened — and more than a tenth probably did — hell, a lot of it probably did –we’d be crazy to ignore it. To put us though it: That’s the modus operandi of Scorsese in his great crime movies Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed — and now, in The Wolf of Wall Street, which is a different kind of gangster movie, and a different (and in some ways more disturbing) kind of crime story. We hear his thoughts and reminiscences throughout the movie and he often strides on camera in the midst of a cluster of other actors, and starts talking to us, like the big star doing his big numbers in a Broadway stage musical (. Handsome and spiffy and appallingly self- confident, the onscreen Belfort is a glamorous movie sinner whose “Hollywood redemption” never comes, but who knows a lot of great, dirty stories and tells them here. Those stories come pouring out. This is a long movie, but not at all a slow or boring one. We see Jordan first getting a start- up job with the glossy investment house, L. Rothschild — and getting his broker’s license right before Rothschild crashed on the infamous Black Monday, October 1. Stone’s Wall Street was released). And we see Jordan later start his own company — after initially working for another of those bargain basement penny stock brokerages called a “boiler room.”There’s a memorable star- is- born scene where Jordan, quite a talker, stuns his boiler room co- workers with his surefire on- the- phone salesmanship, the glib gab of a born con- man. Later, when Jordan opens his own office, he brands it with the conservative- sounding moniker “Stratton Oakmont” to fool the suckers, staffs it with guys (and a few gals) on the make, including some of his old boiler room colleagues and contacts and some local pot dealers and turns it into an orgy- parlor of excess and con- manship — and a greed that definitely wasn’t good, and became all- embracing. The movie follows this slick little prick all the way from crash to smash — all the way up (or down) to international swindling and money- laundering, a billion in ill- gotten assets and heavy- duty FBI investigations, with a lot of cocaine- fueled sex romps and drug- bashes in between. But The Wolf of Wall Street is no celebration of rampaging misbehavior, or of Belfort, as some reviewers seem to think. Instead, it’s a critical (but not messagey) mix of dark comedy and bare- knuckle drama about the crazy excesses, the insider finagling and rock- star life- styles, of these young Wall Street wolves. And it pretty well skewers them and skewers the deeply flawed, “liberated” system in which they thrived: the smart- ass kids and hustlers like Belfort who fast- talk their way into becoming millionaires (and more), while still in their 2. Detractors will say that’s what’s wrong with the movie; that it keeps repeating itself, that it. But Wolf of Wall Street, like Goodfellas or the Godfather movies, is also an operatic film (as Todd Mc. Carthy pointed out in his top- notch Hollywood Reporter review), and, in this case, the operatic wickedness and self- destructiveness of some of the characters, and the operatic rendition and repetition of themes and motifs is part of its power. Scorsese shows us Jordan — at first a seemingly likable smart kid with a Leo smile that’s just a little too easy — and how his morals dissolve and his addictions grow thanks to a system that was rotten when he got there. That off- the- edge attitude is exemplified by the aforementioned Mark Hanna and his bleary- eyed lunch lecture on the work benefits of jerking off at least twice a work- day and snorting lots of cocaine to keep an edge. Mc. Conaughey, whom you could call the movie’s “ingestment counselor” (sorry) is sharp and funny and smooth and he makes hard drug addiction and constant orgiastic behavior, for a moment, seem like sound and solid business strategies — and maybe for him, they are. Jordan puts all these lessons to bad use, when, post- Rothschild, he invents the phony- baloney- but- oh- so- toney Stratton Oakmont brand (their TV ad emblem is a lion wandering purposefully through some staid offices, filled with busy- looking actor/brokers). He also recruits his band of party- hearty hucksters — headed by the idolatrous, toothy Donnie Azoff (maybe the ultimate Jonah Hill role). Donnie is the supreme sidekick and supplier — both of them eventually juggling millions and ingesting so many illegal drugs that one almost wonders why, by the end of the movie, Jordan and Donnie aren’t crawling across the floor, drooling and babbling, minds totally blown. They do crawl, hilariously, in that now- famous fall- down- laughing country club- Lamborghini- quaaludes sequence.)We . Are they treated fairly? The movie has been called misogynistic by some, and it’s true that this portrait of a rogue male. Actually, given the astonishing selfishness, brutishness, boorishness and mendacity of the Stratton Oakmont guys, I thought the women in this story came off better, if not always necessarily well.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |