The Wolf of Wall Street

In short: go watch this. It's great. Unless you are some born-again Superchristian, in that case you better watch BAMBI or something that doesn't offend your fragile little mind. For everybody else it's a bonfire of great actors doing great jobs within an interesting story of excess. Jonah Hill earns his Oscar nomination here and Leo Di Caprio totally nails it. He was born for roles like this one. He's playing it like CATCH ME IF YOU CAN on steroids.

I have a really hard time picking out problems with the movie. After some deliberation I found three:

• It's a little too long. Trim 20 minutes and it's perfect. It's never boring but a little fat could get trimmed.
• The timeline is screwed up and sets some late 90s stuff in the early 90s. Which is kind of annoying when it comes to things like internet stock. Also, neither hairdos nor clothes change as time passes. I don't know if that's deliberate but I just can't find an interpretation. It's not a movie for interpreting anyway. It's kind of very much in your face.
• There are no storms in the Mediterranean that can get a modern 50-meter-yacht in serious trouble. I know it's more symbolic but still.

8.5/10. One of Scorsese's best.

I went into it thinking I might hate it.

But it was almost a remake of Goodfellas/Casino with stockbrokers instead of the Mafia. As such I thought that Belfort and co. are portrayed as criminal, degenerate scum. They have a lot of fun, but I wouldn't say it's glamorised. Some of it is so OTT that it's almost satire. And the good guy is very clearly the FBI agent who takes them down.

Fairly funny too.

Of course, Belfort deserved the fucking electric chair, but it's not Scorsese's fault he didn't get it.

Too many uses of the F word if you asked me. Like about 515 too many.

At the time I saw it I liked it, but thought it was way too over the top in its excess. But what proved to me that it was truly a great movie is how it stayed with me weeks after I saw it. It's funny as hell, and really shines a light on the insanely hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle these guys led. They literally thought they were on top of the world and no one could touch them, and they reveled in their excess. I understand the criticism towards the movie in that it really didn't focus on Belfort's victims and how he destroyed their lives, yet I can't fault Scorsese for showing what scumbags these guys were even while they laughed their way to jail.

But then I can also see the appeal in working for Belfort over working for a company like Google. At Google you get to play ping pong. With Belfort you get to bang hookers on your desk while doing blow. It's a no-brainer.

The fuck you say?

Well, I worked on the Street in the early 1990s and can fucking tell you that's exactly how people in the business fucking talked.

We were also allowed to smoke and drink in the office. The guy who ran our pensions department usually went for a liquid lunch so he was useless after about 2:00 pm.

That's fucking insane!

OP, third sentence. There's a reason I wrote it. You weren't offended by the liberal use of full frontal nudity? Surprising!

I imagine that people in the business also defecated once or twice a day.

Doesn't mean it's worth showing in a movie.

Don't be such a fucking prude

Desire for decent language is not prudish.

It is called having standards.

Play nice in Media Central, people.

Prudish: having or revealing a tendency to be easily shocked especially by matters relating to sex or nudity; excessively concerned with sexual propriety.

So, yeah. You are.

Or, it just gets bloody damned boring to hear the work fuck over and over and over and over and over and over ....
Shows folks are getting pretty lazy when it comes to using expletives

To keep in the spirit of the thread can i say 'fuck that'??

I'm not shocked. I'm disgusted and repulsed.

I'm also constantly irritated by the excuse that "people really sound like that or do that" as a reason to put it in a movie.

One reason being that ALL movies and television shows in terms of dialogue are IDEALIZED versions of how real people speak. Ever record a real life conversation between two or three people? Most real life conversations seem damn near incomprehensible when you have to listen to them replayed verbatim rather than the edited versions our memories provide. Lots and lots of meaningless terms tucked into conversation, people starting and restarting the very same line THREE OR FOUR times before completing their thoughts.

So don't pretend or excuse vulgarity because "that is the way people talk" when nothing else in movie dialogue is the way people express themselves in real life anyway.

There's nothing to excuse, Dayton. Whether people talk like that or not. Your values are backwards, as always.

My values are fine. Outstanding in fact.

I doubt your wife thinks that...

your opinion. you're entitled to it.

If you want to discuss Dayton and/or his values, go make a thread in the Red Room.

Since no one's talking about the original topic, this thread is closed.