Some of my generation follow media groupthink on WOLF OF WALL STREET.

This morning, I awoke to KTLA Morning News reporting about the number of times the f-word is used in Martin Scorsese's THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.

And this kind of media chatter found its way to Texas, where a woman I went to high school with posted  the following to  Facebook:

"So "Wolf Of Wall Street" has broken the record for the number of times the 'F-bomb' is said in a movie.  506 times in 180 minutes.  Really?  I just don't get it.  Guess I won't be watching this one either."

One could say this is an example of someone who grew more socially conservative in middle-age.

I was tempted to respond to her Facebook post with:
Yes, there is a lot of profanity, drug use and sexual activity--plus one scene where a child is endangered by her father's behavior.  But it's a film about amoral/immoral people who made millions stealing money from hard-working people like yourself, and, like it or not, the behavior needs to be shown without censorship.

If I had done that, it's quite likely her reply would be:
"I don't want to hear that language!"
followed by blocking me from her Facebook feed forever.

And she would go on with the remaining hours of her day shielded from more unpleasantness and opposing ideas.

Film critic Glenn Kenny on THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.

Glenn Kenny, former film critic for PREMIERE and MSN.com, offers a comprehensive analysis of the latest Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration in these two blog columns:
somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/12/the-wolf-of-wall-street.html …
somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/12/more-wolf-of-wall-street.html …

A couple of excerpts from the above links:
I suppose that in certain quarters, the only thing interesting about a movie, or the launching pad for anything interesting about a conversation or consideration about a  movie, is how the moviemakers feel about their characters. Golly, the Coen brothers sure hate their characters don't they? But that David O. Russell [director/co-writer of the current AMERICAN HUSTLE], he LOVES his characters —characters who, like those in Wolf of Wall Street, are criminals—but they're NICE criminals, they're passionate they're in love, they're cuddly, and Jennifer Lawrence is AWESOME. Gosh, when did the critical class become so a) filled with flowery feeling and b), for lack of a better world, thick? Buñuel wouldn't do well with this crowd at all. "Hey—he's...he's...he's making FUN of us!"

There is a structural similarity to Scorsese's 1990 Goodfellas, but there are crucial differences too. While Goodfellas maintained a nearly breakneck pace throughout, Wolf of Wall Street has a start-stop rhythm. There are breakneck fast-forward voice-over led sequences that give way to long scenes, scenes which a lot of critics have called pointless. For instance, once finance tyro Belfort is making ridiculous money heading up his fake-respectable firm of Stratton Oakmont, the viewer learns that Belfort's father (played brilliantly by Rob Reiner) has a prodigiously bad temper, and was hired to oversee Stratton Oakmont's books. What follows is a conference room scene in which Belfort and his senior staffers are sitting around very earnestly discussing the dwarves that they are looking to hire for some in-house revelry. Because they now inhabit a world in which everything is commodified, their talk is half earnest, half "can't believe we're getting away with this shit" shitty awe, trading observations about how you should never look a dwarf in the eye and how the wee folk gossip among themselves. It's only after several minutes of this that Reiner's character bursts in, fit to pop a blood vessel over a corporate American Express bill just shy of half a million dollars. Can one genuinely not see the point of this scene, or would one just rather not? In any event, from where I sat the banter among these young capitalists was Ionesco out of early Python—and by early Python I mean Swiftian Rage Python. It's important to remember that it's at the very beginning of the movie that a character played by Matthew McConaughey explains that the entire edifice of investment banking is built on a "fugazi," or "fairy dust." Think of all the people who got incredibly angry and genuinely outraged when the current head of the Catholic Church said "How can it not be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

For a change, some bite-sized film reviews.

Saw one of the stupidest films ever on DVD Friday night--LAW ABIDING CITIZEN. Starts out as a DEATH WISH ripoff and turns into a war-on-terror polemic that makes 24 (at its most extreme) look rather progressive by comparison. Not much logic, certain actors either ham it up (that's you, Gerard Butler) or walk through their performances (stand up and wave, Jamie Foxx and Colm Meaney) and Kurt Wimmer's script is anything-for-an-immediate-effect. Surprised that it became a moderate hit last year.

SHUTTER ISLAND may be getting some obtuse treatment by current mass-market critics/reviewers (A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips looked down their noses and uttered "Skip It"
on AT THE MOVIES), but it will stand the test of time; better than the two previous Scorsese/Di Caprio collaborations--the good-not-great THE DEPARTED and THE AVIATOR.

GETTING THE KNACK (available for DVD rent or TV/PC streaming on Netflix) is a worth-watching 80-minute summary of the rise and fall of the L.A. power pop group.
Prior to GET THE KNACK,
The Knack was a hot ticket on the L.A. club scene and musicians as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Stephen Stills were eager to jam with them onstage. By 1981, ego trips, drug abuse and faltering post-GET THE KNACK record sales caused the band's first demise. The Knack later regrouped; ironically, 1979's "My Sharona" became a hit all over again in the 1990s when used in Ben Stiller's REALITY BITES (surprisingly, this isn't covered in GETTING....). Engrossing and sometimes sad to watch in the wake of frontman Doug Fieger's death from cancer a week ago at the age of 57.