The Wolf Of Wall Street

The film starts with a short montage giving a taster of the life of excesses, luxuries, sex and drugs of stockbroker Jordan Belfort (played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio). We then wind back to him starting out on Wall Street as a trainee for an established firm. What he experienced in that first day shapes the rest of his entire career. He loves the buzz of the office, the disrespectful and foul-mouthed culture, and when his boss meets him for lunch he is eager to be guided: “Move the money from your client’s pocket into your pocket”. He takes Jordan’s desire for wealth, points him I’m the right direction and gives him a kick up the ass.

However, shortly afterwards there is a stock market crash and Jordan finds himself jobless almost before his career has started. He manages to find a job for a small firm selling penny stocks, taking advantage of the desperate and making a 50% cut. His gift of the gab salesmanship has the office enthralled from the first day and Jordan is on the rise again, shortly setting up his own firm with his new right hand man Donnie (also excellently played by Jonah Hill) and a band of old mates who he can mould into his form, speaking from the office floor to his acolytes into a microphone with the crazed fever of a cult preacher. It is this arc that sustains most of the film’s running time.

Along the way Jordan hires his father, Mad Max, to stifle the worst of his excesses and that of the management team, but this is a futile role as the parties, drugs, prostitutes and spending goes through the roof. He is introduced to us in a hilarious scene at home in just one of the very funny moments in the film. It has a fast-paced, dynamic, darkly comic, sometimes slapstick feel as the protagonists lurch from one caper to the next. It’s not a film to watch with your parents though – swearing, naked flesh, drug taking in every scene – and it does lack strong female representation (perhaps a little inevitably as it is based on the true story of a male stockbroker in the late 80s) but Margot Robbie and Joanna Lumley do play female characters who have strength and self respect.

Entirely without morals, Jordan is only motivated by greed and the adulation of his workers and the interesting thing is that there is no progression in his character at all from the moment he picks up the phone at his first job to the last shot of the film. He is a train wreck waiting to happen for a long time, but he can’t resist standing on top of the carriage and whooping as it flies along the tracks. The only person who appears to have a moment of self-reflection (and regret almost) is the FBI agent investigating Jordan after the whole affair is over.

Rather than being a critique or glamorisation of Jordan’s life, it is more a comment on the industry and society that is allowing this sort of situation to occur, but it’s a fun ride!

4 on 5

Info

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Jean Dujardin, Joanna Lumley
UK Release: 17th January 2014

Chico And Rita

This animated film opens in modern day Havana, Cuba, but we are soon transported back to the beautifully drawn cityscape in 1948 where Chico is a confident pianist out on a night dancing who is captivated by the beautiful singer Rita, although she is not so keen.

The film follows the story of Chico and Rita, which mainly consists of laborious cycles of Chico stalking Rita, who plays hard to get but relents and is then heartbroken by Chico’s stupid actions. Away from the main characters and about midway through the film a man called Chano Pozo appears. He is fantastic and brings a bit of comedy and a change of style, but sadly he is no more than a cameo.

The background drawings and cityscapes are beautiful. The foreground people are not quite as good: still nice but they are very strangely animated and appear to be disconnected with the backgrounds, floating around quite oddly. It’s a style that might look unique for the dancing scenes, but looks lacking elsewhere.

It’s alright.

2 on 5

Info
Directed by: Tono Errando, Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal Starring: Lenny Mandel, Limara Meneses
UK release: 19th November 2010

The Switch

Starring Jason Bateman and co-starting Jennifer Aniston, this film from 2010 is sold as a rom-com, but there honestly isn’t a single laugh in the film, nor even an attempt to get one really. No, this is a romantic drama. Jennifer Aniston plays Kassie Larson, an early-40s single woman in New York who decides she wants to have a baby and despite the protestations of her friend and repressed-admirer Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) opts to use a sperm donor. She throws an ‘insemination party’ to celebrate, where the donor provides his sample and the insemination takes place. If that wasn’t weird enough, Wally manages to spill the sample and decides to secretly provide a replacement.

Now, this film has all the hallmarks of an idea in a meeting which was green-lighted that has then proved difficult to pad-out to a feature film. It seems they lost interest and didn’t spend more than 5 minutes on the terrible poster and a few of the key scenes seem to be going to incredible lengths to make the conceit seem perfectly believable and normal, but it doesn’t work. Switching sperm samples without the woman knowing is disgustingly creepy and no amount of theatre can disguise that.

Wally is painted as such a feeble man that it takes him about 7 years to finish sentences, and he’s a upstaged by a child. He’s a very frustrating character to spend the vast majority of the screen time with.

Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum supply the only light relief in an otherwise tedious, creepy trudge.

2 on 5

Info
Directors: Josh Gordon, Will Speck
Starring: Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, Patrick Wilson, Juliette Lewis, Jeff Goldblum, Thomas Robinson UK Release: 1st September 2012

Liberal Arts

Josh Radnor wrote, directed and starred in this film where a 35 year old Jesse (Josh) working in New York has a reason to return to his leafy University campus in Ohio and realises he has never really moved on from his Uni days. He returns to see the retirement party of his favourite professor Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins) and the Prof. is clearly not quite ready for that either, whilst at the same time 19 year old student Elizabeth/Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen) is feeling more mature than her co-students.

So it’s an exploration on age-appropriateness and that’s a nice subject to be tackling. There are some funny sequences at the start – Jesse leaping on to the grass when he returns to campus and engaging with some of the strange characters.

It’s very quickly quite annoying though. The first annoying conversation comes when Zibby tries to explain one of the exercises she has to do in drama class called ‘the yes game’. I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but it’s something like this:
Zibby: So in the yes game you just have to say yes.
Jesse: Okay, give me a scenario.
Zibby: Okay……. So…… I’m in the desert and gasping for a drink. I ask you for a lemonade. Say yes.
Jesse: Yes.
Zibby: (drinks Jesse’s glass of lemonade)
Jesse: Okay, I’m quite good at this!
Seriously, what was that about? The highly irritating Zibby character starts leaping down the path in a really irritating excited way just after that. It gets progressively more annoying as well. Perhaps it’s funnier or more endearing with an American upbringing, but probably not.

There are some nice observations along the way and a high points includes a discussion on reading a book in a vampire trilogy and a music-induced sequence with passers-by in New York City, but more often than not it just gets annoying or dull again. Zac Efron plays a very hippy character who appears once as a sage-type spirit to help Jesse on his journey, but then he appears later in the film and it’s taken too far. Jesse makes some quite ridiculous decisions when it comes to bedtime and some of the dialogue is wincingly bad.

Jesse: I’ve got this welling up inside me that I can only call a growth.

Eurgh! But the worst has got to be when the tacked-on final relationship throws up this:

Ana: I love books, almost too much. I love trees because they give us books.
Jesse: I know, it’s super cool of the trees to do that isn’t it.

Oh please.

It’s all rather bland and dull.

2 on 5

Info
Director: Josh Radnor
Starring: Josh Radnor, Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney
UK Release: 5th October 2012

Kick-Ass

A Superhero film which is rooted in contemporary life, the premise here is a schoolkid in New York (but aged about 17/18) wonders why no-one ever aspires to be a Superhero rather than a Paris Hilton, so sets about it himself. It’s a British film, based on a British comic, but with a very Blockbuster feel about it.

It turns out to be a quite violent action comedy, fusing together Superman, Batman, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Superbad. A lot of familiar comic book storylines and devices with a few changes here and there (one of the superheroes actually gets a girl for a change!) it is actually quite funny and enjoyable to watch. The narrative is not one you see entirely from the start and the characters are engaging, especially Hit Girl who is hilarious and deadly at the same time.

The music is also very good and a number of familiar songs are used well in the film rather than just stuck over the top (Prodigy’s Omen and the Banana Splits themes are two examples) and as the story becomes more gritty and menacing the soundtrack becomes a combination of ‘In the House In a Heartbeat’ versions (by John Murphy for ’28 Days Later’ originally).

But it’s visually that the film is most impressive. There’s no cutting every half a second, or shaking the camera to shorthand action or ridiculous lens flare. What there is are action scenes shot at a distance you can get an idea of what’s actually going on and see some of the action, there’s an animated comic book sequence for a back story that’s moving and 3d, there’s a fantastic scene with Nicholas Cage (or his stunt double) dispatching numerous people around a big warehouse following the character as a tracking shot.

It begins to sag a little in the final quarter and the plot device to usher in the last set-piece is a trifle awkwark, but that’s a minor criticism of a very good and enjoyable film.

4 on 5

Info
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Chloë Grace Moretz, Mark Strong, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lyndsy Fonseca
UK Release: 26th March 2010