This is a self-impressed variation on the offscreen guiding Ray Liotta did as Henry Hill in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. A minute after the movie’s begun, one of Jordan’s sports cars whizzes by in the narration he declares the car’s color is wrong, and it changes on the spot. Winter locates the decadence in the self-aggrandizement and turns it up. But mostly it reads like a long-form hip-hop record. Belfort imagined the book to be contrite. The movie is taken from The Wolf of Wall Street, Belfort’s real-life first memoir (there are two), and the screenwriter Terence Winter seizes on the book’s braggy, “can you top this?” tone. You’re wiping off cream starting from the opening couple of montages, which are narrated by DiCaprio. Is the end nigh for Hollywood? Do You Like Prince Movies? PodcastĪlex Pappademas and Wesley Morris discuss Beyoncé, American Hustle, and R. The Top 10 Movies of 2013Ĭounting down Wesley Morris’s favorites. On American Hustle and The Desolation of Smaug. Scorsese hurls the madness at you like a pie in the face. You never lose site of the lawlessness, the reckless pleasure, the sheer lunacy and lack of regulation. For three hours the movie operates at a ridiculous comedic pitch. But Martin Scorsese turns national tragedy into farce, and rarely in a way that feels itself distasteful. The opportunity to say or do something about the predations of the banking industry would push a lot of directors into righteousness and solemnity. But this whole movie is like that imaginary baseball: hit right out of the park. It could be the controlled chaos of it all.

That song is an even better city-playground record than “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” and it gives ironic funk and Latin soul to what’s effectively a spirit-bilking exercise. Who knows why this image got to me? It could be that just as the camera does its thing the live sound drops out and Jimmy Castor’s “Hey Leroy, Your Mama Callin’ You” starts to play. It soars over the rows and rows of desks as men and women scream into their phones because their young, coked-up commander - who illegally owns a huge share of the company - has coked them up, too. When the imaginary ball flies, the camera sails with it. Belfort finishes his speech by simulating the swing and smack of a baseball. Investment banker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) stands before the scores of bankers of his scammy Stratton Oakmont brokerage and cajoles them into telling their clients to buy stock in the shoe company Steve Madden (it’s the early 1990s). But there’s one in The Wolf of Wall Street that almost made me weep. It’s rare that a tracking shot brings a tear to my eye.

The wolf of wall street movie