The show ends. People nearby chatter and laugh about the movie. Zooming on their chatters, I inspect that it wasn't about the movie. It was on the movie. This movie sets a new record of the usage of the F word (507 times as per a friend), tries to redefine cinema and drills a Hollywood-ish panorama of retro and new-age genres to a single, boring saga.
Meet Leonardo DiCaprio, AKA the protagonist, hell-of-a-kind, "wanna-be-rich" stock broker in the name of Jordan Belfort. The story is inspired from the original person's real life messes, his scandals, his personal life and later, the crimes of financial complexity he creates. How he later screws himself up, screws others on screen (and on their balance sheets) and how a deep drug-addict that stock broker can be. How he could fight literally on the screen, how can he swoosh money into Swiss Banks, how can he end up kissing his wife's aunt. You name it.
Cutting from the bizarre on-goings that the academy-award winning director Martin Scorsese tries to portray in the film, it has a very regular, sagged and extremely usual story line. The dialogues were unnecessarily F'ed, the F word being used after every single word in a line, in between words, dreams, talks, financial meetings..., I began to wonder if his house, bank account and his private yacht and chopper were also named with a F word in between. That impression that turns off movie watching experience from a theatrical perspective and quickly jumps into your laptop. The cast is good, but has pathetic drag lines that makes your head ache after you get out of the show (it did in my case!). I really fear if that's what the life of a stock broker is, if it is what being shown in "The Wolf..".
Jordan Belfort is a simple man with extra-ordinary dreams - to capture the financial capital of the world, the Wall Street. Having selected into a firm, his boss calls him for a meeting at a deluxe restaurant and orders six martinis (or until he dies out to sleep) and pops in cocaine dose-after-dose. Reason? It makes you sharp. For the first time, masturbation was directly used, as a health advice. Surprised to see a peer ordering his junior about tips none has even dared to, on his first visit. Why can't you try to tell this in simple language? Do you need to be vulgar from the beginning to look cool?
Jordan then gets thrown out of stock market due to a market crash leading to huge layoffs of traders. He's in dire need of a job, ends up in a petty investment company dealing in petty stocks in petty amounts. He then connects the dots. Starts to market these stocks into an extremely profitable venture and ends up dealing a 50% commission in every one of them. Crashes into his to-be-buddy Donnie and hooks up six more jerks into the business. Opens his own stock trading firm and employs more idiots (stock brokers finally shown as dimwits) with the formula for the wealthy - Invest in blue-chip stocks first, then lure them into petty company stocks and ends up having a ball as his success rate is dependable. Throws a big party on a beach-house, crashes into his love (he is already married, by the way) and plays ping-pong right on the screen. Divorces his wife, marries his love and keeps his mad hunt-for-being-more-rich running. Stock market manipulation, for the didn't-getters.
Screws up on a major financial fraud, money laundering. FBI is closely watching the company ever since inception but he gets to know later. Tries to buy the officials off, ends up in a racket. Tries to transfer his funds to Switzerland in forged names (Actually, in the name of his aunt, whom he kisses and cuts the deal. I was wondering if Scorsese would now show him humping her on screen too which, for I thank my stars, didn't happen.) Finds his aunt ends up dead due to a heart attack. (The part of how he retrieves his money from Swiss banks was broken owing to a large storm that crashes his yacht right in the middle of the sea. Duh! Please connect these yourselves. I failed to do so.) He tries more drugs, ends up having Celebral Palsy (to lay in the humor content), ends up in jail due to his minor crashes, and then FBI hooks up straight down (after everything that appeared funny and glamorous, started to bore the audience down.) Gets charged for all his deals, jailed for 36 months and ends up divorcing his love. Totally, a single man, all over again. A full circle.
Now, after all of the bad things I hated, there's more. I had to literally close my eyes for the "spreading" and the "humping with clothes on" ones. I couldn't imagine that watching in front of other people. Scorsese might have set a new definition to cinematic "rules". Too many wolves out there. Specially you can see 500 of them during Belfort's mammoth F-mixed speech punchline drag. And during his show-off exit again. Some scenes were cut (was evident due to the broken screenplay). I'd rather not see the uncut version.
And to end, "Sell me this pen." No way, man. I'd rather not get into that. I hated The Departed, and now this.