The Wolf of Wall Street (new Scorsese)

still think the definitive wall st movie hasn't been made yet and that margin call came closer than this

i rescreened 'margin call' a couple of days ago before seeing 'wolf of wall street' and i kinda agree - 'margin call' felt a lot more true to 'what its like to work in finance now', it had a lot of subtle details that i appreciated: the way characters would shift btw using first name and surnames to address other characters, 'how much do you think x makes', the mentalist guy telling demi moore's character 'i'm not sure i do know that' &c &c. not sure all those details added up though in the big picture, i liked margin call a lot but its not a 'good movie' in the same way 'wolf of wall street' is? ego vs id or w/e

anyway i thought this was entertaining but hard to have any thoughts about, really. music was rad though

^ Yeah the part at the beginning with the dwarves, I was like, there's no way Wall St is like this now and then I realized it was a period piece, then I thought I'm glad somebody made a movie about Liar's Poker

Movie about today's wall street is a bunch of quants sitting in a room staring intently at Black Scholes models on three widescreen monitors

Like I was thinking that man, Marty is maybe finally senile, it doesn't work like this anymore

Then I realized it was 1987, and then there was a shot of the strip mall and it was so beautiful

Loved all the period detials in this, those floppy double breasted suits and Bill Blass abstract geometric ties

they still drop 20 gs at dinner tho

Oh sorry just reading the thread through now and raelizing those points have been covered up thread

margin call was a cool movie, fwiw i dont really mean i needed lots of financial exposition or w/e just that the wolf of ws just didnt feel like it really existed anywhere there was not much revealing detail of any sort character wise or environment or w/e
it was just kinda spinning around in this wacky ass limbo, which admittedly was hilarious and fun but something about it just felt like it wouldve been more engaging w a lil more irl or something

first person to say that was the whole point i disagree and furthermore i dont like you

― lag∞n, Sunday, December 29, 2013 9:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Haha not gonna say that was the whole point but it's a nice sleight of hand to name it The Wolf of Wall Street where the Wall Street part is more like, idk, the hardwood upon which the real performers are tap dancing

The movie's also pretty explicit about setting up these boiler room guys as not having a street number on the proper white shoe Wall Street, they keep on trying to barge onto the scene with the GS and Lehmans but never quite get there

The other part where I thought Marty lost it was when he kept on playing all these Me First & The Gimme Gimme & that cottage industry of pop punk covers of all the songs he would have used if he hadn't already used them all before

i've actually developed a soft spot for marty having lil clue or curiosity about music post-1981 or so beyond shit that reminds him of the clash maybe, when 'everlong' came in i actually chuckled. can actually imagine him cornering jonah hill and playing the lemonheads' 'mrs robinson' and going 'now do you know who originally had a hit w/ this?', not realizing jonah's too young to likely even know who the fuck the lemonheads were.

'heres to you, mrs. robinson'

I always had a soft spot too for Marty's use of "what's the frequency kenneth" and "these are days" as key music cues in bringing out the dead.

Could've been worse; he could have used Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Brad.

Haha I forgot about the Everlong part. That was great xp

About concerns of glamorization, that's a valid point of criticism for sure but narratively it's just being inside the head of that guy from high school who tried to sell you weed that was really oregano, as he tells his life story at your 20th reunion

Like the part in the beginning about the Ferrari being white, not red

Of course he did the most drugs had the biggest yacht had the biggest ragers

can't believe no one's

http://i.imgur.com/vc3zv6Z.jpg

Scorsese's not in love with Belfort's wealth but he's sure in love with dramatizing it.

i wonder if buscemi gets some kind of weird residual from that equalizer episode now

i thought there were mad quants in the 90's??

this movie kinda made me want to go into finance

well thats the thing they were quants but still very angry

-_-

black scholes was created in the 70's, prob used widely throughout 80's and 90's

Yeah I think the 90s saw the rise of the quant, corresponding with the rise of increasingly sophisticated and powerful computers

But it was the era leading up to the crash where quants really began to shine

This is all based on only reading about Wall Street via Michael Lewis

I think Black Sholes was theorized in the 70s but not really put into practice until the 90s

flopson have you ever read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Long-Term_Capital_Management

i haven't! only thing i've read on this topic is justin fox myth of the rational market but it's told more from the academic side of things, super good though

You should, it's about Myron Scholes putting Black Scholes into practice and it worked splendidly until it didn't

i had to read 'when genius failed' for an undergraduate course in derivatives, its p good

this movie kinda made me want to go into finance

haha i felt the same thing but after watching 'margin call'. i think the difference btw then/now isnt about quants but like traders vs. brokers, how deregulation/securitization made it easier/more profitable for firms to trade on their accounts rather than for clients &c i mean clients are still basically getting fucked (lol two and twenty) but thats not really where the smart money is now ime

The movie's also pretty explicit about setting up these boiler room guys as not having a street number on the proper white shoe Wall Street, they keep on trying to barge onto the scene with the GS and Lehmans but never quite get there

― 乒乓, Monday, December 30, 2013 2:26 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean stratton oakmont never left long island. they were headquartered in lake success when they finally went under

乒乓 how did u feel about chester ming, felt to me like it was somehow progressive (for hwood) that him being a scumbag from long island was his primary trait

Yeah Chester Ming was alright by me

Felt that the movie drops the plot threads of all of the original crew ex Leo, Jonah, and Bernthal by the end but that's to be expected in a 3 hour movie

I liked that scene on the plane where jordan is horrified that he used the "n" word during his drug induced freakout

Walking around NYC you hear tons of azn dudes with thick Brooklyn and Queens accents, it's fun

http://i.imgur.com/tJVoFTR.png

Man I was ready to clown Leo for wearing lifts when he gets his mugshot taken

But I guess he really is 6 feet

Somehow he's a 6' irl guy who seems like he's 5'7 on screen

A small point, I suppose, but was anybody bothered by the cerebral palsy joke? I winced as I watched the film, then later on thought how one of the great things about Taxi Driver is that Schrader and Scorsese didn't censor themselves, so maybe the same thing was at work here. I don't think so, though. The racial bile in Taxi Driver is brutal, as is the way Harvey Keitel talks about Jodie Foster. But, for lack of a better word, all those words feel real. I don't question whether they should be there. They are, and they should be.

De Caprio's cerebral palsy line really does feel like the worst sort of cheap to me. I mean, they fit the character, but I think the intent is to get you to laugh along with him. I don't usually dwell on things like that. The tone of this film just loses me altogether.

My thoughts during that scene was a mental compare/contrast with how Apatow would have done it. I didn't mind the tone of this movie at all. The guy is so selfish, and shortsighted and, more than some other moral comeuppance flicks, more or less gets away with it, too, with relatively minor (for his corrupt, diseased perspective) collateral damage. Unlike, say, Scorsese's mob movies, where people get blown/chopped/shot up. He gets away with it all, and yet, he still loses, because he is a sleaze. And yet, the shot with Coach on the train pretty much underlines it: Leo "loses," but the good guy is still stuck riding the train.

xpost One of DiCaprio's secret weapons is his heft. He's apparently a pretty big, hulking dude. He was the wrong actor for "Gangs of New York," but the right size. His stature fit his menace in "Django," for sure.

De Caprio's cerebral palsy line really does feel like the worst sort of cheap to me. I mean, they fit the character, but I think the intent is to get you to laugh along with him. I don't usually dwell on things like that. The tone of this film just loses me altogether.

― clemenza, Monday, December 30, 2013 10:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i mean its consistent with "dots not feathers" and the rest of his vapid asides... you notice that the whole movie is blanketed in his cool guy with tude explaining things 2 u voiceover and yet you never actualyl laugh at the things he says, doesnt seem accidental

I thought it crossed a line into mean-spiritedness, even for that character...or on Scorsese's part. But, like I say, the movie lost me well before that, so I'm seizing on something I probably wouldn't be if it hadn't. (Sort of like how John Simon seized on the line about selling pencils outside of Bloomingdale's in his Manhattan review.)

I've been racking my brain - what was the term for stockbrokers in the '80s, "Lords of" or "Princes of" something or something like that? It's completely slipped out of my brain.

http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Masters-of-the-Universe-he-man-604211_1024_768.jpg

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

right, damn how did I forget

skeletors iirc

that was just tom wolfe and ppl copying tom wolfe

http://i.imgur.com/UZRv88N.gif

I thought it crossed a line into mean-spiritedness, even for that character

The character was nothing but mean-spirited

ha i love that guy to his right whos just around the whole movie yelling getting amped on speeches

The character was nothing but mean-spirited

And yet, as pointed out above, he's appalled by himself when told by Hill he used a racial epitaph during a drug binge--there does seem to be a line of sorts. And if not that, then the mean-spiritedness is Scorsese's.

I kept expecting the "and he wasn't even black" punchline to that scene.

Forgot what thread was which, but I posted on the Hustle thread: regarding Jordan's asshole behavior, I thought he and his crew, a la party frats, exemplified the axiom that the only people who think assholes are awesome are other assholes. This film was a closed ecosystem of nothing but assholes. Pretty much the only time in the film you get a perspective from anyone but one of the central assholes, iirc, is perhaps a sum total of 30 seconds or so from the perspective of the FBI guy.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/investors-story-left-out-of-wall-st-wolf-movie/