The scene on the yacht where Belfort tries to bribe the FBI had me rolling. Chandler's reaction when he realizes the point of the meeting is hilarious. And for Friday Night Lights fans, he says "Let me tell you something", which was like a gift from the gods.
last four:
black widow - 8
zero dark thirty - 9
the muse - 7
freaky - 7
now reading:
lonesome dove - larry mcmurtry
Letterboxd
The Harrison Marathon - A Podcast About Harrison Ford
The comments section on this article destroyed my capacity for thought.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Why did you make me do this to myself?
fuck everything
This is a signature, I assume.
Impressive insanity. I loved Dicaprio in this film... and normally I HATE him, but he really, really owned this shit. Bravo.
The thing is, I don't even remember most of the use in the film. I do think a script (especially a dramatic one) can be considered poor if all the memorable lines are memorable because of the profanity. A lot of the Tarantino wannabe crime films tend to be like this with dialogue. But for this film, they explicitly tell you at the beginning that it's how stockbrokers talk, and yes, it's meant to be shocking. It was to young Belfort until he became one of those guys.
It reminds me of what Bill Cosby said about Richard Pryor, that Pryor used profanity a lot in his set, but what made Pryor a great comedian to Cosby was that he could get booked on TV, eliminate or substitute all the profanities from his material, and the jokes would still work. So the F word wasn't the punchline or a crutch, but a way to relate to people when you're in a comedy club trying to connect with a mature audience. I feel the same way about screenplays. Profanity's a great way to put you in the mindset or environment of the characters, but when your script is cool because of the swearing, you probably need another pass at your dialogue.
(I make an exception for Peter Capaldi, of course)
Movie Theater Diary
What's the name of that blues/rock song that's used a lot in the first half of this? It's not "Smokestack Lighting" or "Dust My Broom" I don't think.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Nevermind I figured it out. Apparently these guys are contemporary.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
I hated every second of this fucking trash.
The Princess and the Pilot - B-
Playtime (rewatch) - A
The Hobbit - C-
The Comedy - D+
Kings of the Road - C+
The Odd Couple - B
Red Rock West - C-
The Hunger Games - D-
Prometheus - C
Tangled - C+
Guys, Qrazy doesn't like movies anymore.
Burn him!
The Princess and the Pilot - B-
Playtime (rewatch) - A
The Hobbit - C-
The Comedy - D+
Kings of the Road - C+
The Odd Couple - B
Red Rock West - C-
The Hunger Games - D-
Prometheus - C
Tangled - C+
This was fun. I support it. And that DiCaprio guy. Think we should keep an eye on him.
It's fun, but also quite bleak.
Do you want to elaborate? I wasn't a huge fan of this either, so I'm interested in reading other dissenting opinions.
Here are some of my thoughts on this:
There are times when the film reaches great heights, exhilaratingly sweeping us up into scenes that are heaving with a kind of frenzied, bacchanalian chaos. While this ostensibly offers viewers a kind of vicarious thrill, this is inevitably tempered by the fact that these goings-on are also contemptible examples of abject indifference and indulgence, etc. This is obvious enough, I think, and it's hardly a novel or unfamiliar tension in the case of cinema or any other art form. I guess some critics see this differently as, from what I gather, certain people are claiming something like the following: Scorsese has assembled a film that is decidedly nonjudgmental of Belfort and, ipso facto, the film seems to endorse the protagonist's behaviour. This criticism seems dubious to me, but there are certainly other problems with the film.
In terms of 'great heights,' (which might be too strong a phrase), I'm thinking particularly of the employee shaving her head, and how this dehumanizing moment is given extravagant punctuation with the arrival of the marching band. At such moments, Scorsese successfully achieves an atmosphere of blithe, raucous fervour. He does a great job at marshalling his visuals and narrative so that they seem commensurate with his aggressively manic, grasping, and obnoxious protagonist. However, the marching band moment occurs when the film, formally and narratively, still seems to be burning on all cylinders.
After a while, the film becomes less exhilarating and more enervating. Sooner than later, the principal idea of Belfort being an enormously odious and self-indulgent asshole is communicated beyond redundancy and interest. While Scorsese offers us distinct and occasionally amusing variations on Belfort's wanton excess, these ultimately seem to coalesce into one giant and uninteresting scream (greed! want! lust! rapacity! other synonyms!). What's more, it's never clear why this idea warrants the film's considerable running time. It was like the cinematic equivalent of a huge and, in retrospect, vaguely unsatisfying milkshake. It tastes great at first, but then the tasty chocolate flavour gets monotonous and you start to wonder why you decided to down an interminable amount of chocolate and sugar.
The Quaalude sequence, for instance, while slightly funny, also seems trivial and never really justifies itself beyond its ostensible humour. Again, it's yet one more variation on Belfort's excess, and such scenes seem to amount to little more than unessential expressions of an idea that has already been made expressly clear. DiCaprio's performance is generally tremendous, and his bodily contortions are amusing, sure, but at this point, Scorsese et al are gesturing toward a theme that has already been writ large.
There is little nuance to the film, or Belfort. I prefer my cinematic wolves to be people of gradations and shades, rather than one-note forces of nature. Paul Thomas Anderson, for example, was careful to place Daniel Plainview's greed within a much more fascinating context in the case of There Will Be Blood. Plainview was substantial because he was so much more than a symbol for greed. He was a supremely interesting, moving, and credible character, whose shades of greed, impotence, familial longing (and the way he compensates for his inability to satisfy this longing in any sustained manner through acts of enormous aggression and acquisition) were never presented in a monotonous or schematic way but always felt authentic, dynamic, complex, etc.
Belfort doesn't have as many shades, of course, and he really doesn't vacillate at all. He amplifies. Decisions like cutting to Belfort's child's reaction during the fight with Naomi near the end help to edge the film toward more thoughtful territory. At the very least, this invites us to consider something other than another crazy episode of greed, indulgence and idiocy (in this case, the collateral damage of Belfort's lifestyle). Such moments are seldom and brief, though. As noted earlier in this thread, most of Belfort's victims are abstracted from the film to make way for a very pronounced expression of one man's obnoxious lifestyle.
As I mentioned earlier, the contention that Scorsese "fails" to offer the audience a didactic and moralizing angle seems poor. A more legitimate and salient problem, I think, is that this is a distended expression of an idea without much in the way of variation, nuance, or substantial depth.
Yes, epic, but I thought this was entirely so-so. Certainly Scorsese has been more virtuosic before. Some enjoyable set pieces, and DiCaprio surely deserves some sort of medal for this performance.
The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer 13) - A
Stranger by the Lake (Giraudie 12) - B
American Hustle (Russell 13) - C+
The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese 13) - C+
Passion (De Palma 12) - B
Qrazy isn't one of those dogmatic critics that thinks a film needs to moralize to be good, but rather Qrazy thinks it's repetitive and doesn't offer any substance beyond its depictions of excess. If it's a critique of capitalism or its subject merely on grounds of displaying his addiction and absurd lifestyle (insofar as it even is a critique), then it's a rather obvious and repetitive thesis that doesn't offer much in the way of insight. It doesn't do any real heavy lifting dramatically and/or psychologically. It doesn't probe or investigate it. It presents a superficial lifestyle but fails to rise above the superficiality it depicts.
Am I right Qrazy? AM I RIGHT AM I RIGHT??!?!?!
See my latest blog entry: The Wolf of Wall Street and The New Cinema of Excess
I appreciate this more after seeing American Hustle.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
My feelings about Wolf of Wall Street in a chronological manner:
- Wow, this feels way too similar to Goodfellas. I'm not sure I'm going to like it.
- Di Caprio is so great. I can't believe I used to hate him when I was in school because of Titanic.
- Is that Rob Reiner?
- Man, this movie is FUN.
- Quaaludes / Popeye scene. This is the best goddamn film in history. I wonder how people who don't do drugs react to it.
- Scorsese's use of music is heavenly. He's basically sending Tarantino back to film school.
- He's done this movie three times already and it's still awesome.
- That ending... Just perfect. Thank you, Marty. Thank you.
No reaction to Margot Robbie?
In my pants.
DiCaprio was great and Hill had some good laughs ("I'm never eating at Benihana's again. I don't care whose birthday it is."), but would it have killed this film to be about something or explore its characters or themes at all? I mean, it's a fun ride, but it's about as shallow as the layer of whitener on Jonah Hill's teeth.
Yeah, you and Mitty covered it well enough. Aside from the lack of psychological and political depth in the film I also had some thoughts as to why Goodfellas is effective and this is not. The unravelling of the protag's life that occurs in Goodfellas and the extreme violence effectively demonstrate how truly ugly and sociopathic these characters are. There may be humor to the film but when Pesci's character tells him he didn't want to get blood on his floor it's more disconcerting than it is funny. You see victims in that film and the tone shifts. Here as you note you basically never see the victims. In fact the film even goes so far as to make him seem semi-decent when he's finally in a bind. A bind which doesn't occur until near the end of the film. He shows the note about not incriminating, the money he gave that woman, etc. This is a man that still owes people hundreds of millions of dollars in real life. I'm sure he's bankrupted and destroyed the lives of many.
Now obviously you don't have that built in violence that Goodfellas has to expose your characters for the frauds they are. The problem is Scorsese focuses way too much on broad comedy. The cut away to humping on the plane for instance. Stylistically it becomes a gag rather than an apt depiction of inappropriate behaviour. So I guess ultimately I don't think Scorsese has the appropriate degree of control over tone in this film to pull off the tight rope walk between excess and analysis that he wishes to pull off. He instead becomes a crass comedian finding hilarity in a world that perhaps should be examined with a little more rigorousness given the degree to which it destroys lives.
The Princess and the Pilot - B-
Playtime (rewatch) - A
The Hobbit - C-
The Comedy - D+
Kings of the Road - C+
The Odd Couple - B
Red Rock West - C-
The Hunger Games - D-
Prometheus - C
Tangled - C+
Exactly.
This is not true. While you never see the economic targets of the frauds, you see plenty of victims of other aspects of Belfort's life. The shoe guy who is humiliated, the midgets, even her infant daughter.
I think the slice of the audience that agrees with you is suffering from PC-itis. And this film is definitively not PC.
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