The Wolf of Wall Street [DVD] [2013]

Good film

This is a Fantastic Blu Ray disc . I have wanted to own this Movie , which is wonderfully scripted with a perfectly Chosen cast . So many Hilariously FUNNY Scenes , dealing with a hitherto perceived , serious Financial PILAR of World Markets/Stock exchanges.

This is such a great film.....funny, engaging and another one for the Di Caprio scrapbook. He's become quite an actor as you really get into and believe his character in this film. Lost count on how many times I've watched it. Recommended.

An adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir chronicling his rise and fall on Wall Street and his hard-partying, addiction-fuelled personal life.Welcome to Martin Scorsese’s 22nd feature film, another of his examinations of the rites and rituals of a particular sect, be it the wiseguys of ‘70s Little Italy ( Mean Streets ) or the society scions of late 19th-Century New York ( The Age Of Innocence ).With its rise-and-fall arc, its hedonism and hubris, its gleeful exploration of the dark side of the America Dream, its money, crime and narcs, its sex, drugs and rock’n’roll (though the soundtrack also takes in Madness, Simon & Garfunkel and a fair bit of Euro pop), The Wolf Of Wall Street forms a loose trilogy with GoodFellas and Casino. And if it can’t quite match the energy and quality of those classics, it nonetheless stands as Scorsese’s finest for 15 years. When we first meet Jordan Belfort, he’s more pup than wolf, his lowest-rung job at L.F. Rothschild requiring him only to “smile and dial”. A first-day lunch with big boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, hilarious) sows the seeds of the chaos to come, though: Hanna advises him that the stock market is “all fugazi” while preaching the worthlessness of morals and the necessity of greed, cocaine and, to stay relaxed, jerking off twice daily. Then, on 19 October, 1987, the very day Jordan becomes a licensed broker, the market crashes and Rothschild goes under. Jordan joins a penny-stocks firm in Long Island, employing a bunch of expert salesmen (mainly weed) from his old Queens neighbourhood and making Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill, terrific) VP despite his phosphorescent teeth and shoulder-slung pastel sweaters.The triumphant result is named Stratton Oakmont, and if there’s one thing these guys know how to do, besides sell, it’s party – Jordan blows $26,000 on a lunch, is married to a model, shags prostitutes five, six times a week, and hoovers Quaaludes, Xanax, cocaine and morphine. It’s only a matter of time before the FBI (in the form of Kyle Chandler) come calling…Perhaps deciding the crazed behaviour is enough, perhaps thinking he took stylistic verve as far as it could go in GoodFellas , Scorsese shoots largely with a static camera. His use of whip pans, crash zooms, freeze frames and tracking shots proves so infrequent that Spielberg, visiting the set, suggested he might want to move the camera. But TWOWS is far from muzzled. It is, of course, all part of Scorsese’s plan to charm viewers into accepting Belfort’s outrageously selfish, unthinkingly cruel behaviour. It works, too – more so because Terence Winter’s ( Boardwalk Empire , The Sopranos ) screenplay cleaves to our anti-hero, refusing to investigate the fallout of his misdeeds as he steals from rich and poor alike to line his own pockets (and mirror). It’s a decision some will take issue with, just as some, justifiably, accuse Scorsese of being in thrall to his gangsters.But this is Jordan’s tale, and it’s sold by a magnetic, never-better DiCaprio.A touch too long, yet never slack, at three hours, TWOWS benefits from independent funding, Scorsese’s brass balls and an A-grade cast’s turbulent improvisations to emerge as an epic, boldly broad screwball comedy about the state of America, then and now.Despite the US censors trimming back the screwing and swearing, this is an audacious, riotous epic. Scorsese and DiCaprio’s fifth and best pairing, it’s liable to give the Academy a heart attack.

Not the best Scorsese movie you'll ever see, but it's still worth the risk. We've seen Glen Gary Glen Ross, we've seen Boiler Room, we've seen Rogue Trader, and of course, we've seen Wall Street. How does this compare? How does this hold up? It does just fine, but is fine enough for Scorsese? No....Goodfellas did it a lot better. Cape Fear did it somewhat better. Raging Bull did it much better. i read somewhere this being a 'return to form' after the mediocre Shutter Island, that's a plausible evaluation....I don't have to tell you the truth do I? I just tell you what you want to hear, right? That means anything I tell you will make you and me a whole bunch of cash. But I don't care if I'm lying about it. I'll tell you anything to get your money off you. Why? Because you don't say no to me....loss of gain is greater than the fear of rejection. Get them so they feel guilty about saying no. Classic sales techniques. 'I could sell artificial snow to the eskimos, and they'd still come back for more'We hear lots of speeches, to justify his ostentation, his totally hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle and when, at the end of the movie we see the FBI guy look at the ordinary people on the subway, he doesn't look down on them, why? because they didn't get what they've got illegally. Other people have the same lifestyle - footballers, F1 drivers, musicians, etc. so why pick on a stock-broker? What's the big deal? 9 out of ten US bank notes are said to have traces on cocaine on them...how did they get there? Money makes the world go around right?Wrong. It will cost you your marriage and kids and, eventually, like one Nick Leason found out, six years in jail. Belfort did 22 months in real life - yes he is a real person and yes people actually think the way he does in real life. But he still got his comeuppance. It wasn't that big because the scale of what he was doing wasn't that huge.... Leeson did far worse. But the movie Rogue Trader was already made...was DiCaprio aware of that?The underlying message of this movie is about the justification for wanting to make money - anyway possible to enable one to lead such a hedonistic lifestyle, But it also tries to tell us about risk, about selling, about financial ethics. Does it succeed? Not really. Those speeches are minor quips and how he whips up the adrenalin and testosterone of the 'shop floor' to try harder, to not give up... that money can make a difference in people's lives. It can improve the quality of them.... But at the end of the day our mr Belfort is just, sadly, another womanising, drugged-up sex addict, who wants everything right now... and he mostly gets it - all be it illegally.The film is a bit long, the soundtrack is no where near as good as Goodfellas, there are numerous naked scenes and lots of drug taking scenes... are they all necessary. No. And in my view that's where the movie fails... we see too much of that, and not enough of how it actually went about it...it his a biopic, yes, and we see what Belfort does - but we don't really get to see much of his underlying character... the film is as superficial as the subject matter, the black humour comedy elements get in the way too much...even if the movie is essentially a black comedy.... either do one or the other... Capitalism itself is never that interesting or funny.You could say Joe Pesci should have been in this movie, as should Alec Baldwin as the FBI guy too, the rest of the cast weren't that well known... But Margot Robbie is a stunner as his wife though, and holds her own, despite being much younger in real life.Overall, this is every enjoyable to watch, and I would recommend it, DiCaprio is very convincing as usual, but don't expect too much. ps. The best scene for my money (no pun intended) was when he threw lobsters at the FBI when they first saw him on his boat.

Good film, base on a true story.

I really enjoyed a rewatch of this film. The characters are pretty awful but I had forgotten how funny it is.

Star studded ,brilliance

Esta pelicula es utilizada incluso en seminariso de ventas adeas de divertida exelentes actuaciones.

Film meraviglioso, la migliore interpretazione di Leonardo DiCaprio. Martin Scorsese genio assoluto.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is a perfect companion to GOODFELLAS, Martin Scorsese’s other masterpiece, as both films are based on memoirs of morally dubious men who fell in love with a criminal culture, and lived the lifestyle to the fullest while they could before the inevitable reckoning, one that included ratting out their compatriots in crime. While Henry Hill’s story concerned life in the small time Mafia, Jordan Belfort, the protagonist of WOLF, was determined to be a high rolling stockbroker on Wall Street, where he could enjoy all the vices too much money could buy. While few have rated WOLF on the level of GOODFELLAS, I think it is one of Scorsese’s most entertaining films, one with a tremendous rewatch factor. Some chided Scorsese for using his tried and true (and by implication, over used) bag of tricks to tell the story, from showy tracking shots, a soundtrack full of oldies (Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” in Italian), to having Jordan break the fourth wall and directly address the audience at pertinent moments. I think the director’s signature moves were perfect for this story, especially when it came to the fourth wall, as it allowed for some exposition concerning the hows and wheres of stock manipulation that the audience needs to understand in order to make sense of Jordan’s actions.At a three hour running time, WOLF tells the story of Jordan Belfort from his early days as a junior stock broker just before the Crash of ’87, an event that nearly ended his career before it had gotten started proper, to his landing on his feet hawking penny stocks in a Long Island boiler room, a position from which he rose to build Stratton Oakmont, a seemingly respectable brokerage firm, that was in reality just a pump and dump operation, which fraudulently over valued cheap stocks to the firm’s benefit. It was all a scam built on Jordan’s undeniable talent at the “hard sell.” While clients were fleeced, Jordan and his associates made hundreds of millions, which of course they didn’t report and pay taxes on. Ultimately, this house of cards collapsed under the scrutiny of an FBI and an SEC investigation, but Jordan and his friends lived it up while they could in a haze of women, booze, and drugs. What our Woke betters might call “toxic masculinity.” Some viewers were put off by scene after scene of bad boys living it up in one debauched bacchanal after another, but I think that was the point Scorsese and screenwriter, Terrence Winter, were trying to make: the wages of sin can look pretty attractive, that’s why so many buy in.There is much to take away from WOLF depending on your point of view, and one of the things I got out of Scorsese’s film is that Jordan Belfort, masterfully played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is the poster boy for much of what has gone wrong in America in the last four decades, as we have become a country that no longer produces things so much as make deals that profit some at the expense of others. Where there are always winners and losers, where the only success that matters is material success, specifically material success in excess; where the winners are entitled to more…and more…and more. Jordan is like so many who came to believe that the rules were for losers, and that he was clever enough to get away with it where so many others got caught.Yet, while many consider Jordan Belfort trash, I found qualities in him, at least as he is presented in the film, that I grudgingly admired, specifically in the way he landed on his feet after losing his high paying Wall Street job by going to work in a strip mall boiler room. The scene where DiCaprio walks in and shows the other poor fools there how to cold call a client and get his money is one of my favorites. The way he was loyal to his shlubby crew – Donny, Chester, Rugrat – a group of doughy mediocrities that are as about as far from the Cool Kids and Golden Boys as one could get, all of whom he took with him to the top, never cheating them, making them part of his success. In the end, he would give up their names to the FBI only because the Bureau had his back to the wall and he was looking at many years in prison. I was struck by the scene where, at real risk to himself, Jordan warns Donny he is wearing a wire: that is something Henry Hill would never have done. Though he is not in any way husband material, I do think Jordan genuinely cared for both of his wives.And as far as I’m concerned, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is one of the funniest films of the 2010s. I laughed harder at it than almost any “official” comedy of the past ten years. The sequence of Jordan and Donny under the influence of the Lemon 714 Quaaludes is a masterpiece of physical comedy, hilarious and horrifying at the same time, and played to perfection by DiCaprio and Jonah Hill. The entire cast is pitch perfect, including the aforementioned Hill, but also Rob Reiner (though in no universe do I believe he is the father of Leonardo DiCaprio), Kyle Chandler, Jon Bernthal, Ethan Suplee, Joanna Lumley, Kenneth Choi, Shea Whigham, and Jon Favreau. Matthew McConaughey has a mic drop of a cameo early in the film as Jordan’s mentor, and then walks out of the film. For me, this is the movie that put Margot Robbie on my radar; she is the epitome of drop dead gorgeous as Naomi, Jordan’s second wife. Scorsese makes better use of Jean Dujardin than THE ARTIST did, casting him as a shady Swiss banker, happy to take Jordan’s money, not so pleased to return it. That is Bo Dietl as himself; he’s become part of Scorsese’s stock company. And this is the movie that I will always believe DiCaprio should have won the Best Actor Oscar for. It is an utterly fearless performance from beginning to end, and I’m not just talking about his dance moves at Jordan’s wedding reception. Too bad he had to go up against McConaughey’s work in THE DALLAS BUYERS CLUB.I think the final scene, where the real life Jordan Belfort introduces DiCaprio to a packed room at a sales seminar, resonates more now than it did when the movie was released. This is where Scorsese turns the camera around and it glides over the seminar’s participants sitting in rows, their rapt attention focused on DiCaprio, who after prison is reinventing himself as a motivational speaker. I think it is Scorsese’s way of saying that some of the problem, and responsibility, here rests with the audience. That guys like Jordan would never have gotten away with so much if there had not been for people who confused conniving and deviousness with smarts. Who fell for glib hucksters who had no moral qualms about telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. Looking back today, we should have paid better attention.

Product came in as expected

Very nice brilliant movie just enjoyed thoroughly