The Wolf of Wall Street (new Scorsese)

imho the mode dr strangelove was made is quite different than this movie

Why should there be a tender scene of Donnie painting to suggest an inner life worth exploring

man have u ever considered writing scripts

I can think of lots of great films where the main characters shut themselves off from the world to the point of willfully killing off whatever inner life they might have--Shoot the Piano Player and The Conversation are the first two I think of--but I don't think that's what Ryan means by a panicked avoidance of any inner life at all...I'm not quite sure what that means.

None of your business

Xpost

Is it the same mode as king of comedy? Can I compare those movies?

No

please proceed governor

i totally get that if you aren't laughing 3 hours of this movie is murder, but exploring the "humanity" of these characters just feels beside the point

yes it isn't fair to the people it villainizes. it's a mean comedy.

maybe humanity was the wrong word, how about "characterness" they were not great characters, very 2d and not in a good purposeful way

more in a this world is not fully realized sort of way

It's been too long to give specific examples, but what I meant is that I got a sense from the movie of an inner life being suppressed at certain points--something the characters themselves seem unaware of. If nothing else that sense put the flatness into relief.

i mean, yeah, if you're not laughing you want more anything. but if you're laughing and accepting the thesis this is like someone saying frank drebin could use more detail

xpost

it's not willful, I don't think. It's just the stimulus-response pattern of addiction shorn of romantic/existential overtones.

i dont think the movie succeeds on its own terms, which fwiw i also dont think are the same terms as the naked gun movies

what's a movie you think succeeds on the terms of wolf of wall street

Same point as lag∞n. I didn't want these characters to be humanized in a Lifetime movie sense--god, no--any more that I'd want that of Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta or Tommy DeVito. I just wanted them to be interesting movie characters, not schematic blanks.

i enjoyed a lot when i saw it in the movie theater but it didnt really grab me when i watched on the plane, it still had a lot of great moments but its a little bit samey as far as the plot, like its mostly them living the highlife and nothing really dynamic happens plotwise or tonewise for most of the movie, i dont think its gonna have the endless tv rewatchablity everyone was predicting

what's a movie you think succeeds on the terms of wolf of wall street

― da croupier, Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:15 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boiler room lol jk

i dunno man i can rewatch a chunk of that Beach Boys tv biopic anytime its on I can rewatch a chunk of this

but what will you do when the commercial break

quaaludes

change the channel or look at my phone, the world is mine

maybe post here about how you are wrong

http://i.imgur.com/gr0wwZX.jpg

tbf i would probably not endlessly rewatch this outside of paycable tv-wise, like most scorsese it would get a little

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-rGnI9XNo

so ive always suspected croup prefers chunks to films

what's a movie you think succeeds on the terms of wolf of wall street

― da croupier, Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:15 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

scarface

i do not wish wows was more like scarface

wows did not need speeches about america written by oliver stone

its kind of unfair and pointless to compare the wows to a stone cold classic like scarface imo but they are p similar in what they're trying to do

the original Scarface, of course

yeah see scarface is a movie i'd say has great bits but is not a stone cold classic mostly cuz it bogs down in stone speeches

like, if you're saying you wish there'd been more of a balls-out action climax in wows fine

xpost assuming yr talking about depalma/stone's

ya the more recent one

but wait you were saying you needed more character detail - is that what you think scarface had and wows lacked?

the climax of wows where leo changes his mind in the middle of his retirement speech is prob the best in the whole movie except maybe when theyre wrestling over the phone on ludes imho

yeah both those are great

idk abt character detail just good compelling characters that are meaningful within the movie their personalities affect how things play out instead of just being window dressing, i mean one thing abt wows is maybe the actors were not so great which compounds things, obvs the scarface cast has a lot more natural charisma, also w movies like scarface and goodfellas u have at the end a real sense of the journey these people took through their criminal ambition but wows just rushes through the rise and fall and is kinda static in that sense

I liked well enough a few sequences but the movie's too damn long and w/out having read book I wonder if the characters' venality couldn't sustain a three-hours-plus production because unlike Goodfellas they didn't do much day to day that was all that different? At least in Goodfellas Scorsese could show the guys ripping off truckers, feeding finks to the lions, play card games, shoot Spider's foot, Henry cooking veal cutlets, etc. After a couple sequences showing how the scams work and how they spend their dough, what else is there? I don't care about character depth here because, yeah, it's the wrong point to raise -- I just don't think dudes in an office on phones are interesting.

i get why you're like "no this is trying to be scarface not dr strangelove" in terms of story, but i think scorsese's tone is way more dismissive re: belfort etc than he was with mafia folks or stone was with tony (depalma was mostly taking a paycheck). he doesn't WANT you to get a "real sense of journey" and feel for them, he wants to keep you at a remove even as he chronicles their madness and follies. because they're young little world-wrecking shits even if he too knows that quaaludes were the best

if you weren't laughing fine, 3 hours is 3 hours, but man oh man am i glad he didn't try to treat belfort the way he treated jake lamotta, travis bickle, etc

I had a better time watching Belfort than LaMotta tbh

I can see if someone sees it disappointedly as goodfellas minus sympathy but its also king of comedy with more understanding for what the rabble is seen lapping up at the end of the film

American friend of mine living in japan saw this in the theater there and said he was the only one who laughed the entire time. Idk how anyone would not find this funny.

Alfred p otm tho

My boss had a real "uh I was around guys like that at the time, didn't want to laugh and didnt need another three hours with them" - I totally am not demanding people laugh about the jerks wrecking the economic system any more than I would demand they laugh about nuclear war.

That said if someone says "I wish dr strangelove was more like fail-safe" my response is "I don't"

Said boss was way more into American Hustle

american hustle is desperately eager to please and oppressively flattering of its audience and god help me your boss OTM