Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies of all time. Casino is top ten. The scenes, the looks, the cars, the women, the drugs, the Italians, the DeNiro, the Pesci—they’re all top-notch. You don’t get bored watching these movies. You can’t.
it even made chopping garlic exciting
Each scene is a masterpiece. Lorraine Bracco tucking a gun into her granny panties after hastily flushing coke down the toilet. Frankie Valli singing to the lovestruck couple on their first date. The dead body in the meat freezer. Sharon Stone whacked out of her mind in her white fur coat. Don Rickles getting his head bashed in by Joe Pesci holding a phone. Every scene is subtly graphic and sublime and came from the wild and wonderful mind of Scorsese.
I didn’t come into Wolf of Wall Street with these expectations.
In fact, I didn’t even plan on seeing it. Leonardo DiCaprio is a middling actor, and it’s hard to envision him as anything but the smartass kid in The Quick and the Dead.
For better or for worse, I’m part of that oh-so-vital target demographic for Wolf of Wall Street, lesbian handicapped woman of color ‘assertive, up-and-coming single male age 18-31’ and it didn’t interest me. Around noon on a holiday, my friend informed me that she bought three tickets and we were going, and I really had no excuse to not say yes.
It’s hard to turn down free. In fact, if someone put a discount sign on getting punched in the nuts, I’d have to consider it.
Then there’s that whole part about how it’s three hours long.
Three hours.
I think of everything I could get done in the time it takes to watch a movie and it makes me extremely uncomfortable about taking a chunk out of my day to go see a movie (and emerge from the theatre post-daylight).
I could get two hours of work done and still have time for a 60 minute massage. Or do an hour and a half of work and get a 90 minute massage. Or get three 60 minute massages back to back to back, have shift changes in between, and stimulate our flagging economy (while increasing carpal tunnel healthcare costs to rise sharply amongst the ‘age 18-31 female Asian massage therapist’ demographic. If only there was a healthcare law that offered easy-to-order, affordable, efficient care for our nation’s struggling masseuses. THANKS OBAMA)
Three hours.
I can’t sit still that long. I don’t go and see Harry Potter and the Fellowship of the Hunger Games for precisely that reason.
STFU BRIAN WILLIAMS YOU DONT KNOW BOUT MY LIFE
We slid in right as the previews finished and I was prepared to see—well, a movie. I had no expectations, good or bad, and read no reviews beforehand.
What immediately followed is what I can easily characterize as three hours from hell.
Let me clarify: Wolf of Wall Street is not a bad movie.
It’s not an awful movie.
It’s the worst movie I’ve seen in my life.
Imagine a 20-yr-old film student and his douchebag bros set out to make their version of Goodfellas without Italians, the mob, good actors, Lincolns, Cadillacs, humor, or purpose.
Then imagine they film it on a Flip camera they placed in their shirt pocket and brought to the bad strip club by the airport (the oft-maligned Peppermint Wildebeest) every night for a week.
It’s a film with no redeeming character or quality. That was pardoned and later went on to commit first-degree murder.
Talented, enjoyable actors like Jean Dujardin and Joanna Lumley were lost in this messy, poorly-acted (if the characters were any more one dimensional, they’d be invisible on a subatomic level) hackneyed, shittily-written, self-aggrandizing, masturbatory hellhole.
Imagine a porno with worse dialogue and camera work brought to you by a toddler who just mainlined a bag of Pop Rocks.
Never have I wanted every single character to die in the end of a movie—until this. At the very least, I was hoping they all came down with a vicious case of piles.
This movie made me a desperate man in the course of three hours.
It’s brainwrackingly predictable and embarrassingly humorless, from paper-thin dialogue to ADHD scene transitions. A blind, deaf, and dumb QVC psychic could’ve seen what was coming next.
things Miss Cleo didn’t predict: 9/11
Everytime something interesting was introduced–FBI stuff! Legal twists! Prison time!–it was immediately shooed off the stage to make room for the fat lady–Jonah Hill in a wig–still singing her greasy guts out.
I’d rather pay one of the movie’s cheap hookers to film herself doing the ping pong ball trick for Justin Bieber than see this movie again.
In the end, the result would be better-filmed, more coherent, and more entertaining.
The worst part?
People will have one of two reactions from this movie:
(1) they’ll want to emulate the leads and become classless amoral slutty drug-addled playboys who drive our economy and country into the ground out of their own vanity…
OR
(2) they’ll become staunch moralists who leave the theatre anti-sex, anti-business, anti-everything.
This movie encourages the wrong kind of people (beta males who frame their self-worth in being able to make money and get bitches to make up for being a loser–as if the kid who gave you a noogie 15 years ago gives a damn that you do blow off the navels of cheap escorts) to be even worse people. This is their Citizen Kane.
If you thought this was the greatest movie you’ve ever seen, you should be forcibly castrated. Not only do I not want you reproducing, I don’t even want you fucking.
In a scene towards the end, a drugged-up DiCaprio straps his toddler daughter in the front seat of an SL and powers into reverse out of the garage in a desperate attempt to kidnap her away from his wife, crashing into a brick barrier.
The look of confused, helpless terror and loss on her face is how I felt walking out of this assault on the senses.
0/5 stars, two thumbs and every other thumb hacked off by strict Muslim governments down.
