The Wolf of Wall Street 2013
This movie got great reviews and was nominated for Best Picture, but I never got around to seeing it. About a year ago I bought the Blu-ray and kept putting off watching it, partly because some real people had said it wasn’t really that great, and also it is incredibly long at three hours. The movie starts out well depicting Wall Street (really kind of “off Wall Street”) excesses as stock brokers driven by greed pump and dump penny stocks for insanely high commissions. This story has been done before, but the main character here, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, is particularly flagrant and is a complete drug and sex addict on top of it all. Leo makes him charming, which tells you how a guy like this could pull this off, but he is still someone who you really hope will lose everything. There is a lot to like at first, but the story is fairly simple and does not need to be this long. Martin Scorsese lets his actors improv a lot which provides some amount of comedy, but it comes at the cost of telling the story. If you want to see some good actors really letting go, you will love it (the improvy parts would have made great deleted scenes extras on the Blu-ray). But I was ready for things to wind up and the movie was only halfway done. That said, it is still a good movie and it is even entertaining for the entire length, but it often finds itself in the weeds.
My other complaint is these are not the real Wall Street guys; these people are charlatans acting like Wall Streeters in order to cheat people out of money, which they do from day one. So it isn’t an indictment of big guys like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, etc., even though you can argue that these guys are similar to those others. I kept wondering why anyone would keep these guys as their brokers and how they can keep finding new business.
Written: 26 May 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital