The Whiskey Vault

The Whiskey Vault
This year's Whiskey Vault outing with Texas Auto Writer Association buddies in Austin for the Texas Truck Rodeo.

Monday, April 7, 2014

OMG! Three Hours of My Life Lost Watching "The Wolf of Wall Street."

I'm not the kind of guy who hides his eyes during nude scenes in movies. Despite the accent being on “guy,” I don't watch a movie because it's reported to contain some nudity, but I don't avert my eyes when it crops up either. Remember: guy!


Having said that; I lost three precious hours of my life on Saturday night suffering through Martin Scorsese's self-indulgent ode to Wall Street excess “The Wolf of Wall Street.” If I did watch movies solely for the nudity, I would have felt like I hit the six-number Powerball with “Wolf.”

Lots of nudity? You betcha! And some of it was of the “full monty” variety.

Toss in the use of the F-bomb every 15 seconds or so and I was so numbed that by the beginning of hour three, I hardly even noticed when a woman suddenly began prancing around in her birthday suit.

Of course by hour three, I was fast forwarding through huge swaths of the film.

Yes, the film is three – count them, 3 – hours long!

Apparently, Scorsese no longer feels comfortable making a film without DiCaprio. Of the five films on which they have collaborated, I actually like the first four: “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator,” “The Departed” and to a lesser extent “Shutter Island.” 

"Yes, you'll love it! You get to drop the F-bomb here, here, here, here and here...."
 “Wolf,” though, was a bridge too far.

Here's the plot 4-1-1: Real-life trader Jordan Belfort – played by DiCaprio – wants to be rich and gets himself hired by a well-established Wall Street brokerage company as some sort of boiler-room phone jockey. Mentored by a low-moral broker – played by Matthew McConaughey in an over-the-top, caricature-like performance – Belfort sets off on the road to drugs and fraud. Belfort finds himself out of work when the brokerage closes and eventually starts his own firm where drugs, sex and fraud are its staples. Belfort and his buddies all get filthy rich, and ever further out of control. Eventually Belfort is indicted, goes to prison and winds up back where he began. Yawn.

Here's the highlight reel: dwarf tossing, snorting coke off a woman's bosom, gay orgy, several straight orgies and two car wrecks. Now that's entertainment!

DiCaprio as Belfort.

Beyond McConaughey, other supporting cast members of note include Jonah Hill, Rob Reiner and Jon Favreau. The list of hotties decorating the screen includes never-heard-ofs Margot Robbie and Katarina Cas, both of whom are drop-dead gorgeous, and we see in their full glory at least once in the film. It was the only thing making this film watchable. Remember: guy!

Margot Robbie.
This would have been a much better two-hour film or an even better 90-minute film. There are excruciatingly long scenes of pure dialog that don't really advance the plot, but do provide the DVD viewer with plenty of opportunity to take a bathroom or snack-fetching break without pausing the movie.

After the third or fourth sex or coke-sniffing scene, the audience probably grasped the whole-decadence thing. Anything beyond was simply overkill. Another half-dozen such scenes was a lot of overkill.

It was as though Scorsese simply couldn't bring himself to edit his own film. “I am a genius and this three-minute scene – one of several three minute scenes of dialog or sex or drugs – is simply too wonderful to cut. Let's leave it in!”

For the love of God, cut the scene!

When the end credits actually started to roll, I heaved a sigh of relief. Thank-you, Jesus, it's over.

I'm so glad I didn't pony up 12 bucks to see this turkey in the theater. The $1.59 it cost me at Red Box was bad enough.

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