The Wolf of Wall Street

Scorsese’s latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street is a three hour, fast paced wild ride through a lifestyle filled with gratuitous amounts of sex, drugs, and of course, money.  How lucky we are to be along for the ride!  It’s fun, hilarious and mixes well between all the very dark moments throughout the film.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a real life Wall Street broker turned tycoon.  His beginnings are humble enough, especially after a set back early in his career, but it actually turns into a silver lining where he learns to sell “pink sheet” penny stocks to suckers and make a killing on the commission.  He assembles a team of brokers, who are basically ambitiously greedy men who can sell anybody anything, and starts a company.  It grows from working in an old auto body shop to a big time office building quickly.

The business is mainly a background to all the debauchery and fast living Jordan and his gang get into.  With all their money they seem invincible.  They are able to get and take a copious amount of drugs and drink the finest booze at the nicest beach houses or biggest yachts.  And everywhere these guys go, office, home, parties, you name it, they have women ready and waiting.  There are crazy scenes that make the office look more like a drunken bacchanal than a place of work.  And it’s all laid out with dialogue that would make a sailor cover his ears (through no N-word, though it is referred to as the N-word, it is not said).

So just a small word of caution to those who are a little squeamish about too much sex, drugs or profanity in movies, you might want to sit this one out.  It’s a lot of everything, and tops the charts for the most uses of the F-word.  Some things were edited out to bring the film down from NC-17 to a hard R rating.  It took some slick editing just to make a quick trailer fit for television.

But oh my God, it’s so f–king great!  DiCaprio leads the gang with gusto, lets us into Jordan’s crazy lifestyle and all the ups and downs wonderfully.  I especially love the way he breaks the fourth wall throughout the film.  The style reminds me a bit of Goodfellas.  He gives Jordan so much charisma, despite all his devastating flaws.

Steering the film with DiCaprio is Jonah Hill, as Jordan’s second in command, Donnie Azoff.  Between the look of his character (chubby with dorky glasses and goofy teeth), his body language and everything he says, he is a perfect riot.  He steals so many scenes in the most outrageous ways and always has some witty line to deliver perfectly.  I walked out of the theater convinced that Hill would get an Oscar nomination, and I was right.

The Wolf of Wall Street earned a total of five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and best adapted screenplay.  Martin Scorsese earned his eighth nomination for best director.  Along with Hill’s nomination for best supporting actor, Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for lead actor.

One unforgettable scene is when Jordan and Donnie take an old drug, called lemons.  Since they’re pretty old, they take more than they should, attempting to reach a new high.  Once they kick in, it’s an awful, terrible riot.  No, I don’t find drug abuse funny, but the way DiCaprio and Hill portray such an intense hit is hard not to laugh at, even when Donnie nearly chokes on lunch meat.  And now I can never look at Popeye the same way again

“The year I turned 26 is the head of my own brokerage firm I made 49 million dollars, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.  No, no, no.  My Ferrari was white like Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice, not red.”

Django Unchained

Remember being a little kid waiting for Christmas?  There was a big anticipation for the wonderful gifts you may receive and from a few suspicious packages under the tree, you guessed it would be all you wanted and more.  That’s kind of how I was waiting for Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Django Unchained, to release on Christmas.  Thing is, instead of unwrapping a remote control helicopter, new bike or whatever would make your head explode into instant joy, Django was like finding an odd kind of gift your lovably weird uncle picked up at a mystical thrift store.  It’s still so unique and undeniably cool, but I’m not sure I know what to do with it yet.  I genuinely like the film and am thankful for it, but I’m not sure if I love it or if I will grow to do so.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave in the American south about two years before the Civil War.  You know, the height of southern arrogance, or elegance, depending on your point of view.  Anyways, he is freed by a German dentist turned bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz).  He asks Django to help him find and kill the Brittle brothers and earn a share of the profits.  The two become a team and as Django puts it, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?”  When they get word that Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), is on a large plantation owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation, they concoct a plan to buy her and save her from the slave life.

While they are only supporting, Waltz and DiCaprio are the biggest forces driving this film forward.  We clearly see that Django would be nowhere without his quirky German friend, his silver tongue and charismatic reasoning brings them in and out of danger as smooth as the tide.  And DiCaprio is a perfectly evil southern gentleman that we love to hate.  During the dinner scene, his unexpected burst of anger is amazing and made me jump.  He can just seethe that intangible arrogance and disregard for his slaves that we can’t even imagine a real person possessing.  Best of all, he can drink out of a coconut chalice like it’s not a joke.  I wish both men had the Oscar nomination, but I’m happy Waltz is in the game.

Django Unchained is nominated for five Oscars total.  Beside’s Waltz’s Supporting Actor nomination, the film also holds Cinematography, Original Screenplay, Sound Editing and most importantly a Best Picture nomination.  I was surprised Tarantino was not up for best director, but there have been greater tragedies.

The scene featuring early clan members is one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever seen in a Tarantino film.  The band of about thirty half-wit white men on horses has met out in the middle of nowhere to ambush Dr. Schultz and Django’s camp, but there’s one problem: their masks suck.  An argument brews about them, “I can’t see shit!”  Jonah Hill has a fun part here trying to make his eye holes bigger only to make it worse.  Best of all, the man who supplied the masks gets all huffy about their ingratitude and rides off.  The whole scene works wonders to poke some fun at the KKK and allege that their beginnings were just born out of pure stupidity.

In fact, the way Tarantino treats most of the white southerners feels like such fun and sweet revenge.  They are all either hilariously stupid or so evil that you love to hate them.  That may sound like his treatment of the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, but it feels much different here.  It’s kind of like how Spielberg treats the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but cranked up to eleven.

Django has all your basic Tarantino elements and keeps them fresh.  There is plenty of blood splashing, gun slinging, slave whipping violence that could be a bit much for the casual film fan.  There is plenty of flowing dialogue, led mostly by Waltz and DiCaprio while Django is a badass hero of few words.  The soundtrack is nowhere near the 1850s, but the selections give such a perfect tone to the film that we shouldn’t care.  Let’s see, there’s also a Mexican standoff, a few fun explosions, and enough use of the N-word to burn the ears off the most politically correct.  It’s a very Tarantino film.

Like I said, I really liked Django Unchained, but I think I need more time and more viewings to find out if I love it.  To be fair, I didn’t love Pulp Fiction at first viewing, and I didn’t even like Kill Bill the first time I saw it, (blasphemy, I know).  But I do know I like Django, this weird Spaghetti Western/Blaxploitation inspired revenge film full of blood, quirky characters and unexpected hilarity.

“I’m just a little more used to Americans than he is.”

Moneyball

I don’t get very excited about baseball, unless I’m in the stands and a foul ball is heading my way.  And statistics confuse me, even if you put them in an animated graph with bright colors.  So while Moneyball held a lot of baseball talk and ideas on choosing affordable players solely by their statistics, my attention was turned to the human elements of  Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the plot and tension created by the idea of approaching building a baseball team from a different angle.  While the Yankees seem to have unlimited money to spend on the most sought after players, the Oakland A’s have a much, much smaller budget.  The playing field created by money is not at all fair, but it seems that only Billy understands that the A’s must adapt to survive.  Then he finds Peter Brand, working with the Cleveland Indians.  What he sees is in baseball is breaking down all baseball players into detailed statistics and builds a team that is able to make the most runs.  Keeping that goal in mind, Billy hires Peter to help build a worthy and affordable team for the A’s.

Of course, there is opposition to the idea of building a baseball team straight off the numbers.  The experienced scouts, depicted as old men eating donuts, cannot wrap their heads around finding new talent this way.  They get hung up on oddities and personality defects that sometimes have nothing to do with playing ability; age, behavior, how attractive their girlfriends are.  Even once the team is assembled, Billy and Peter have to fight with the hardheaded coach, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to get him to play the players as they were designed.

While on the surface, Brad Pitt’s Oscar nominated performance makes Billy seem mostly concerned with baseball, he has an intriguing personal life and back story.  We get flashbacks to him being recruited into professional baseball straight out of high school and having to choose between that and his scholarship to Stanford.  It is clear that he did not understand all the opportunities he gave up for a baseball career, that sadly did not pan out.  Now, as a struggling manager, we see him deal with a lot of frustration in physical ways, from working out, to driving his truck like a maniac in an empty parking lot.  On top of all that, he is divorced and struggles to make time to visit his twelve year old daughter.  I think she lovingly describes Billy best in her song, “You’re such a loser, dad.  Just enjoy the show.”

I was happily surprised with Jonah Hill’s Oscar nominated portrayal of Peter.  With an economics degree from Yale, and looking like the kid picked last on the playground, Peter feels like an unlikely person to find his first job in professional baseball. I imagined him more likely to have a fantasy baseball team, or a Dungeons and Dragons guild, but I loved how one of his favorite players was one of the most undervalued players, nicknamed The Waddler.  Thing is, Peter is so quiet, shy and insecure through most of the film that we never learn much about him outside of the job, and that’s okay, he’s only a supporting character.  Hill and Pitt work well off together to lift each other’s character up.  Hill depicts Peter perfectly, from all his mild, thoughtfully quiet moments to achievements that slowly build up his confidence.  And that is such a refreshing change of pace from his usual foul mouthed comedies.  I hope to see him in more serious roles.

Along with the two acting nominations, Moneyball earned six total Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Film Editing, Sound Mixing and Adapted Screenplay.

While Moneyball is a movie centered around sports and sports talk, and it helps to enjoy and understand baseball, it does not cater only to sports fans.  It is a kind of underdog story that values brains over brawn, and money.  We understand how much is at stake with this new way of thinking and we can’t help but hope that it works out.  Surprisingly, the film does not cop out into the typical big win ending, but that does not mean the experiment has failed.  The focus is on the people behind the players, their struggles and how they changed how the game is played.

“Baseball thinking is medieval.  They are asking all the wrong questions.  And if I say it to anybody, I’m-I’m ostracized.  I’m-I’m-I’m a leper.”

If the Academy wants to award a thoughtful, unconventional underdog movie, Moneyball will win the Oscar for Best Picture.