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.
Showing posts with label THE WOLF OF WALL STREET. Show all posts
Showing posts with label THE WOLF OF WALL STREET. Show all posts
Friday, January 3, 2014
Thursday, December 26, 2013
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?"
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?"
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