Merry Christmas

So, because apparently I'm a pagan, I went to see Wolf of Wall Street tonight. And yes, obviously it's not a "family film" with quality life lessons and heartfelt moments that fill your eyes with tears and your body with warm fuzzies, but it was a fucking good movie. Drugs, nudity, language, it contained all the components of what could potentially be just a trashy movie, but it wasn't. There was that element of class because, well, everyone was fucking rich. They may have been rich drug addicts addicted to porn and any form of narcotics, but they earned the right to be addicts. At least that's how the movie made you feel. Sure, maybe they earned their money illegally, but they still had drive, ambition, and love for something. They actually got up off their asses and decided to make something of themselves, unlike all the people (myself included) who were sitting on their asses in the movie theater watching them get ridiculously high, fuck whores, and strap money to people. The things they did for the love of money may have been far less than honorable, but at the end of the day, who among us is honorable, right?

Here's what I'm trying to get at. The movie was captivating and genius not because of the number of swear words they managed to cram into a sentence or the amount of distasteful nude scenes in the film, but the way Scorsese was able to manipulate the audience into somehow rooting for Leonardo DiCaprio, the Wolf of Wall Street. You end up hating the FBI, the guys you should be pulling for as an upstanding American, and hoping that somehow Leo can crawl his way to his car and drive a mile to his house completely incapacitated by twenty year old Lemmons just to stop his partner from giving himself up on the tapped phone. In the end, the Wolf of Wall Street sold me. And I think that was the whole point. The goal of Wall Street is to sell whatever story makes you richer, just like a good movie tries to sell you its story, and Leo is pretty damn good at it. Both his character, Jordan Belfort, the actual criminal, and Leo himself sell their story to the public in true stockbroker fashion, and although I'd like to think myself brighter than all those gullible idiots who trust these genius bastards over the phone lines, maybe I'm not. Jordan Belfort wrote a book upon being released from prison detailing what he did to become a millionaire, but what you'll never get from him either in a book or a movie, is an apology. The man was fucking badass and believed it wasn't criminal to take advantage of someone who was simply too stupid to fall for your lies. And you know what? I think he might be right.