The Wolf of Wall Street

[jenkins]

the "we can't stop watching the terrifying storm or the shark attack" part illustrates to me how he's attempting to generalize to a higher status. i can stop watching those things. that's me. brody also appeals to authority figures by referencing classics. forget it. i think what he did was amplify the sounds of fright and yes, if it worked for you already it must work better now. not sold

[Drenk]

Spoilers, I guess.

Yes. I could definitely stop watching. I was so distant...This Jordan Belfort, how can you follow three hours of this man? He's not Tony Soprano or Daniel Plainview. He's just there, on drugs, doing insane things, for almost three hours, then he's not, cause the FBI...People were fascinated by Jordan during his speeches. And then, me, watching people fascinated, wondering if the movie would end.

But this movie is insane. Not insanely good, though. Anyway, a lot of people love it, it's a good thing. He made it work in a way that I can't get.

[wilder]

Felt this was Scorsese's worst, but I didn't hate it. I feel apathetic toward it, really. Like ©brad said, some fun scenes, but a missed opportunity to make something much more interesting. This is key, from David Denby's New Yorker review:

As the critic Farran Smith Nehme pointed out to me, one of the filmmakers’ mistakes was to take Jordan Belfort’s claims at face value. In his memoir, Belfort presents himself as a very big deal on Wall Street. The movie presents him the same way—as a thieving Wall Street revolutionary—whereas, in fact, he was successful but relatively small time.

Telling it from that angle would have made the character so much more complex.

[Jeremy Blackman]

That's funny. I actually got that exact impression from the real-life video on the previous page. He's self-consciously speaking like a big-shot but you can hear from the constant background conversation that probably half the people on the boat are barely paying attention or ignoring him entirely.

[wilder]

Bahaha I didn't see that that's fucking hilarious

[Cloudy]

I think I'm having similar problems with this film, it's hard for me to really put my finger on how much I liked it. But what I mainly cared about from Brody's statement was that there was an element of detachment from all that was going on, where we could see humanity's progression to the point we're at now, and in those moments I felt a sense of awe.

[jenkins]

ooh yeah that's so true. he's detached from being a human, that's how he's able to persist. in a movie sense, his center is amorality. he sure cooks it. i'm glad you mentioned because i wasn't thinking about it. i still don't like the movie, but now i like thinking about it more

[Drenk]

I wanted to add that...at one point, the movie really felt long, and they were still doing insane parties and being crazy and doing drugs, and I felt the void in all this debauchery. It was the point? So Marty won? I like to think about it.

[tpfkabi]

http://www.pluggedin.com/movies/intheaters/wolf-of-wall-street.aspx

"All told, well more than 700 profanities, vulgarities and obscenities crowd every square inch of The Wolf of Wall Street. And at least 525 are f-words."

Ha. I guess Scorsese made a kid's film last, and wanted to come back swinging.
Now that I think about it, I don't know that I've seen Goodfellas or Casino unedited for TV - and I have 2 DVD copies of Goodfellas (I bought one cheap at a rental store going out of business, and then bought a Scorsese box that was really cheap).

[Kal]

You can't compare Jordan Belfort to Tony Soprano or Daniel Plainview. Jordan Belfort is a real person and all that stuff did happen.

[Drenk]

A character is a character. Based on real events or not. And I can compare characters. I don't think Sorkin's Zuckerberg is the real Zuckerberg. I don't want him to be. The character of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street doesn't seem real to me. That's the irony and why I didn't care about him. Why I didn't laugh. Why I wasn't fascinated. Why I could stop watching.

[Kal]

That's your opinion, but the fact is that the character is very real.

And Zuckerberg's story and his personality was told from someone else's point of view, with Zuck wanting zero involvement. Jesse Eisenberg didn't even meet Zuck at all. So it was harder to make it accurate if you base it on other opinions.

This story was told first hand by Jordan, and he was very involved in the script as well as spending time with Leo and Marty to make things as accurate as possible. You never see movies that are so close to the books as this one.

And once you realize that everything that happened is real, and that the character is real, and that many other stories have been inspired from real characters like him, then I believe it gets to be much more interesting. Boiler Room was inspired on Stratton Oakmont. People like that movie told from the point of view of a schmuck that supposedly worked for Jordan.

[wilder]

Scorsese and DiCaprio on Charlie Rose

[jenkins]

"Some of this actually happened."
isn't that a great way to put it (american hustle's opening title card)

[Neil]

I think it's a good time to just leave this here

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2013/12/wolf_of_wall_street_prousalis.php?