THE WOLF OF WALL STREET: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at a multiplex near you:



THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

(Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2013)

While last year’s Oscar winning ARGO summoned the ‘70s in its opening moments by using the old bright red Warner Brothers logo, and the recent release of AMERICAN HUSTLE did the same by way of a vintage Columbia Studios logo, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, just goes with the current Paramount Pictures silver mountain design, proving upfront that it doesn’t need any help bringing the retro.



Martin Scorsese’s 23rd film, and fifth with Leonardo DiCaprio, nails the rampant excess of the ‘80s greed era with such a fearlessly funny, and raunchy as Hell glee that it makes Oliver Stone’s 1988 insider trading spectacle WALL STREET look like Sesame Street.



DiCaprio portrays Jordan Belfort, an ambitious Bronx-born stockbroker (or more accurately Stock swindler), who hit it rich in his ‘20s by founding the Long Island firm Stratton Oakmont. As our protagonist puts it in voice-over narration (and at times breaking the fourth wall asides to the audience): “The year I turned 26, I made 49 million dollars as the head of my own brokerage firm…which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.”



DiCaprio’s Belfort also tells us that he gambles “like a degenerate,” screws scores of hookers, has three different federal agencies looking to indict him, and, as if it’s the most important part of his personality, that he really loves drugs (a large mix of Quaaludes, Xanax, pot, and cocaine make up his daily regimen).



As DiCaprio’s partner in white collar crime and coke, Jonah Hill plays Donny Azoff (name changed to protect the guilty Danny Porush). Hill, with blindingly white capped teeth and funnier than he’s ever been, could be seen as the Joe Pesci to DiCaprio’s Ray Liotta if we were going to go down the GOODFELLAS goes to Wall Street route that many critics will no doubt take.



We witness DiCaprio’s corrupt character’s rise and fall by way of a furious pace provided by Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker which never lets up until the end. It’s such an electrifying ride that it never drags or feels like it’s anywhere close to its actual length (it’s just under 3 hours at 179 minutes). In fact, I’m seriously hoping the Blu ray/DVD release features the four hour cut that’s been reported).



Everybody in the cast shines especially Matthew McConaughey in a short but sweet role as a mentor to DiCaprio who extols the virtues of jerking off, Kyle Chandler as a hard-nosed FBI agent looking to bust DiCaprio, Rob Reiner in an amusing performance as DiCaprio’s father who affects a fake British accent when speaking on the phone, THE ARTIST’s Jean Dujardin suavely playing a Swiss banker, The Walking Dead's Jon Bernthal as a tough guy cronie, and newcomer blonde bombshell Margot Robbie as DiCaprio’s former model wife.



Terence Winter’s Screenplay, based on Belfort’s book of the same name, is full of sharp dialogue (except when the characters are all coked up then it’s appropriately sloppy), plus obvious but inevitable references to Gordon Gekko, THE GODFATHER, and Thomas Wolfe’s 1987 novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (let's just forget the awful movie version) because Belfort, of course, considers himself a “Master of the Universe.”



The amped-up soundtrack is dead on as well with classic blues by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James rubbing up alongside Devo, Cypress Hill, and Sir Mix-A-lot (Scorsese restrained himself this time and included no Stones tracks), all under the supervision of another longtime Scorsese collaborator, The Band’s Robbie Robertson, who serves as executive music producer.



New to the Scorsese team is cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ARGO) who captures in stunning tracking shots the swaggering sweep of its subject’s debauched lifestyle.



A stand-out sequence involving an DiCaprio, f-ed up beyond belief on a massive amount of Quaaludes having to crawl back to his car parked right outside at a country club reaches surreal heights of hilarity due in no small part to Prieto’s keen camera eye.



While I liked how David O’ Russell’s AMERICAN HUSTLE does a great job scamming folks into thinking they’re watching a Scorsese film, it’s so much more intoxicating to see the real thing.



At 71, Scorsese proves that he can still make master class cinema as THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is the director and DiCaprio’s finest film together, one that's much more deserving of a Best Picture Oscar than 2005’s THE DEPARTED, and I say that having really loved that movie.



Sure, WOLF covers similar ground to Scorsese's GOODFELLAS and CASINO in its wild depiction of money being the ultimate aphrodisiac, but its outlandish verve and gutsy-as-all-get-out attitude make it yet another major Marty masterpiece – a feast of a film that I can’t wait to go back to for a second helping.



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The Apocalypse Hilariously Hits Seth Rogen & Gang In THIS IS THE END

Opening this evening at a multiplex near you:

THIS IS THE END (Dirs. Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen, 2013)

In a scenario that was no doubt conceived between bong hits, Seth Rogen and his gang of Hollywood player pals - James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, and Jay Baruchel - all play themselves facing the end of times when the Apocalypse hilariously hits Los Angeles during a wild party at Franco’s house.



After the nearly laughless endeavors that were THE HANGOVER PART III and THE INTERNSHIP, comedy lovers have reason to rejoice this season, because the directorial debut of Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS) is surely the funniest film of the summer.



I laughed more than I remember laughing at a screening in a long time, and with the lines and sight gags coming so quickly, I feel like I may have laughed over and missed a whole other movie’s worth of jokes.

It starts off amusingly on an easy going meta level of these people being relatable guys despite having been in hit movies, with Baruchel, who starred with Rogen in Judd Apatow’s short-lived Fox series Undeclared (2001-02) before going on to be in films like SHE’S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE, and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, flying out to hang with his best pal Rogen in L.A.



Baruchel doesn’t feel comfortable around Rogen’s other buddies - i.e. the rest of the cast - so he doesn’t want to go to a party at Franco’s fortress of a house in the Hollywood hills, but Rogen talks him into it.



The party that the full of himself Franco is hosting is filled with other celebrities playing exaggerated comic versions of themselves including Michael Cera (one of the funniest as he portrays himself as a coked-up bisexual douche), Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna, Emma Watson, Jason Segel, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (you know, McLovin!). When firestorms and sinkholes start appearing, some of the famous folks present are immediately goners, but the core crew of the six above-the-title stars hole up in Franco’s mansion, divvy up supplies, and try to figure out how to survive the Biblical rapture.

But Baruchel is the only one who actually believes it’s the rapture, the others stupidly dismiss that idea as much as they do him, as Hill and Franco seem to see themselves as rival BFFs to Rogen, while Robinson and McBride, who shows up uninvited and unwanted, are only thinking of themselves.

The film puts the same amount of energy into jabs at the silliness surrounding friendships, and the selfishness of stardom, as it does the scads of gross-out humor involving a severed head being kicked around the room, drinking one’s own urine (how Robinson is able to sell this with charm is a gag to behold), and, via some not bad special effects, a 60-foot Satan with a swinging penis (that’s right). This non-cynical approach to this ridiculous material reveals over and over that these guys’ only concern is pure comedy, and they go all out trying to give the audience as much as they can take.

Things that made me laugh: the makeshift sequel to PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (virally released as a fake trailer on April Fool’s Day earlier this year) that the gang produces to amuse themselves (Rogen: “We should make sequels to more of our movies.” Franco: “How about we not do ‘Your Highness’”), how Hill identified himself when praying (“It’s me, Jonah Hill, the guy from ‘Money Ball’”), McBride’s arrogant and obnoxious behavior (funnier here than on Eastbound & Down) that lead to him getting kicked out of the house, and how the film wraps up in a pop culture-fied heaven (don’t think that’s really a Spoiler!).

Looks like former mentors and collaborators Apatow (whose name is surprisingly absent from the credits here), David Gordon Green (PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, MY HIGHNESS), and SUPERBAD director Greg Mottola weren't needed by Rogen, Evanberg, and crew to help bring the funny this time.

Practically everything that was supposed to be funny in THIS IS THE END was, though I’m sure in a film with such a high volume of jokes, one-liner, sight gags, and scatological silliness in it had some misfired groaners here and there. I was just laughing too hard at the stuff that hit to notice them.

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A Few DVD Reviews & More Awards Season Whatnot

As it's Awards season, there's no lack of lists and polls, or bitchin' about the results of said lists and polls going on. 



So I thought I'd mention that I voted in the 2012 Muriel Awards, the results of which are being posted starting today. Check them out here. Be sure to keep checking back as they will be trickled out over the next few weeks.

I just submitted my 2012 movie rankings to The LAMB (the Large Association of Movie Blogs). I'll let you know when those are posted.



And I wrote about the Oscar nominated shorts in last Friday's Raleigh N & O: “Oscar short film nominees offer a lot of entertainment” (Feb. 1st, 2013)

Now for a few reviews of movies from last year I'm catching up with:

THE WATCH (Dir. Akiva Schaffer, 2012)

There are more CGI effects than there are laughs, or even attempts at laughs, in last summer’s flop comedy THE WATCH, which I just watched on DVD. Ben Stiller, in his standard uptight goody two shoes role, stars as a Costco manager who starts a neighborhood watch with Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade to get to the bottom of the mysterious murder of one of Stiller's Costco security guards (Joseph A. Nunez).

For a while it doesn’t even feel like the movie has a screenplay as it largely consist of the four leads riffing on top of the flimsy material, and once it gets to its major set pieces involving invading aliens, the gags are almost non-existent.

Schaffer, one-third of the SNL Digital Shorts masterminds/musical satirists The Lonely Island (the other members, Adam Sanberg and Jorma Taccone put in a cameo in an orgy scene), competently stitches together what Jared Stern, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg supposedly wrote down, but it never amounts to anything more than half-assed humor. Schaffer’s previous film, HOT ROD, was actually laugh out loud funny, you're lucky to get a few mild chuckles out of this.

Rosemarie DeWitt, a familiar face from quite a few recent indie films, plays Stiller's wife in what's mainly a sideline role, but she gets to run around with the guys during the Costco-set climatic battle, so at least she gets out of the house. Vaughn's wife (Erinn Hayes) isn't so lucky as she's only in one scene and doesn't even have a line.

I almost snickered a little when Will Forte (SNL, MACGRUBER) as a snarky cop who ridicules Stiller and crew would pop up, and some of Vaughn’s motor-mouthed character’s banter who see himself as a “cool dad” made me come close to smiling, and occasionally got close to giggling at Ayoade, who though strongly underutilized, is a welcome fresh face among the other’s overly familiar shtick, but I just couldn’t get down with the dick joke mentality and the sloppy plotting. So another less than stellar Ben Stiller vehicle that wasn’t a smash, what else is new?

COMPLIANCE (Dir. Craig Zobel, 2012)

There are parts of this film that made me so uncomfortable I felt like leaving the room, but I knew I’d still be looking back at the screen through the doorway if I did. Screenwriter/director Zobel based his film, his second after GREAT WORLD OF SOUND, on a real life scenario that’s has surprisingly happened many times - a prank call that leads to sexual assault.

At a fictional Chickwich fast food restaurant, in Ohio (Ohio again!), the manager (Ann Dowd) gets a call from a man claiming to be a police officer who has been in touch with the chain’s regional manager. The man, who we only hear as a disembodied voice for the first third of the film, tells Dowd that one of her employees, a 19-year old blonde cashier, has stolen money from a customer, and that this is part of a larger investigation.

Dowd brings the girl (Dreama Walker) to the backroom office and questions her about the theft following the man’s instructions. Walker denies taking the money, and Dowd can’t find it in her pockets or purse. The man then instructs Dowd to perform a strip search. With another supervisor (Ashlie Atkinson) present, Walker takes off all her clothes, including her underwear, and we know that phony voice of authority is going to take this twisted gag as far as he can go.

By this time, we have gotten random shots of the man, played by Pat Healy, who is obviously not a cop, at his home with a bunch of store bought calling cards. Healy lounges around as he gives orders on the phone, makes a sandwich, waters plants, etc. all the while putting these poor people through humiliating sexual situations of his own devising. 

A co-worker of comparable age to Walker, who spends most of her role naked with only a Chickwich apron covering her, Philip Ettinger, refuses to go along with what Healy tells him to do, but Dowd’s boyfriend (Bill Camp), called in from a night drinking, is more susceptible. The restaurant is slammed while this is all going on, so Dowd is torn away to serve customers up front and is majorly oblivious to how crazy-go-nuts it gets.

As if to remind us that it's an art film, Zobel intersperses close-ups of fries sizzling in grease, grimy floors, and other mundane bits of the restaurant’s unappealing décor throughout the film, so you fully get the closed-in vibe of this messed-up material. What I couldn’t stop thinking was, are these people really that stupid to not question that anybody could just call and identify themselves as police? Then I had to remind myself that this has happened, and that, yes, people can get that horribly manipulated.

Although it can come across as exploitive speculation on the premise of the strip search prank call scam, COMPLIANCE is cringe-inducing cinema at is most involving. It falters in its last 10-15 minutes when it becomes a procedural crack down on the caller, and then gives us an un-insightful scene of Dowd being interviewed on a magazine style news show about the ordeal, but for a large compelling chunk of its running time, it’s one of 2012’s best, and oddest, thrillers.

More later...

Mostly funny 21 JUMP STREET riffs on cop movie conventions

21 JUMP STREET (Dirs. Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2012)

 

At one point in this reboot/re-imagining/re-whatever of the ‘80s show 21 Jump Street (the Fox TV show that made Johnny Depp a household name), undercover cop heroes (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) are in the middle of a high speed ‘don’t let the bad guy get away!’ chase, and they commandeer a Student Driver car from their high school parking lot.

A driving instructor tries to stop them from taking the vehicle, but instead of running after them yelling expletives, and/or shaking his fist at them like in so many other movies, the hapless guy just shrugs and says “Aw, who cares?” then walks out of the shot.

In that, and many other amusing moments, 21 JUMP STREET shows its hand - it’s not here to viciously satirize cop movie conventions, it just wants to riff on them playfully.

Take the chase that follows - in all chaos of gas truck collisions they side-swipe, Hill and Tatum keep expecting huge explosions, because, you know, there are always explosions in these sequences – but the film toys with that scenario with a ‘wait for it’ type teasing.

As a couple of young immature policemen named Schmidt and Jenko who think they can party while fighting crime, Hill and Tatum are assigned to Jump Street under the lead of Captain Dickson (a hilariously harsh Ice Cube perfectly parodying the clichéd angry black police chief role) who complains of the program: “All they can do is recycle old ideas from the ‘80s” Get it?

So the doofus duo gets a do over of their unhappy high school years while trying to take down a synthetic drug ring and proving themselves as law enforcers, but nobody is going to see this for its plot – it’s all about the silly scatalogical shenanigans these guys get into. However, Hill and Tatum get more laughs from their frantic one-liner exchanges than the gross-out stuff.

The supporting cast doesn’t really stand out around their schtick – Brie Larson as Hill’s unlikely love interest is just a popular yet insecure high school blonde archetype, James Franco’s younger brother Dave doesn’t register either – only Rob Riggle, who seems to be having a lot of fun with his beefy high school coach character, makes an impression.

Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the guys who made CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS), and written by Hill and Michael Bacall (co-writer of SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD) 21 JUMP STREET falls into the tradition of making a movie out of a beloved TV show (See: Dragnet, The Brady Bunch, Starsky and Hutch, etc.) that’s as much a satire of its subject series as it is an self-consciously hip update.

It also falls into the category of movies that are just funny enough to get by (See: PAUL, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, HORRIBLE BOSSES).

Obviously, It’s not shooting to be a comedy classic (or even an action comedy classic), it seems alright with being a lowbrow lark for teenagers or for folks that want to recall their teenage memories of old campy TV shows, in a comical light.

I want to say I wish it were just a tad funnier and a little less in-jokey, but…aw, who cares?

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MONEYBALL: The Film Babble Blog Review

MONEYBALL (Dir. Bennett Miller, 2011)

 

Some of the best camaraderie I’ve seen on the big screen lately is in the exchanges between Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill throughout this unorthodox take on the traditional inspirational sports story.

Pitt plays the real-life Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who recruits Hill, as a Yale economy major based on Paul DePodesta, to help him think outside the box in putting together a baseball team on an extremely low budget.

There’s a delicious deadpan thing happening with Pitt and Hill as they employ a statistical approach to scouting for new players, no doubt due to the thoroughy witty screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian. It’s a pleasure to see Pitt as basically a regular relatable guy - a divorced dad who is driven to shake things up in his career - trading ideas with Hill, in one of his most likable and believable roles.

A dour Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the field manager of the team, doesn’t quite get what Pitt and Hill are up to so there are some flare-ups, but a rag tag roster of players is assembled (including Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Casey Bond, and Royce Clayton) that pulls off a 20-game winning streak.

Despite such factors as Pitt’s overly precocious daughter (Kerris Dorsey) and his ex-wife (a barely registering Robin Wright), there’s not much of an emotional impact to this material, but the backroom break-downs which make up the bulk of this film are engaging enough to draw one in.

Subdued yet extremely sharp, MONEYBALL isn’t a movie just for baseball fanatics, it’s for anybody who enjoys character driven drama about people experimenting with new methods with compelling determination. Pitt provides one of his most down to earth performances that carries the film superbly, and the inventive pairing of him with Hill works way better than one would think.

Not being a baseball guy, or a sports guy at all for that matter, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this film. It has the drive of the best docudramas – the ones that educate as much as they entertain – and folks should walk away with a good sense of how a couple of everyday guys can really be gamechangers.



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CYRUS: The Film Babble Blog Review

CYRUS (Dirs. Jay Duplass & Mark Duplass, 2010)

“I’m like Shrek! What are you doing here in the forest with Shrek?” John C. Reilly jokingly asks Marisa Tomei after successfully determining that she’s flirting with him at a party. Although, or maybe because, she walked up on him taking a leak in the bushes it’s definitely a “meet cute.” * 

Reilly almost jeopardizes the moment by running back in the house when he hears Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” come on the stereo, drunkenly yelling “dance party!” Using his beer bottle as a microphone he sings along and tries to get others to join him.

When nobody does, Tomei saves the scene by entering the room singing and dancing along. Before you know it their previously embarrassed and snickering fellow party goers are right there with the couple singing and dancing along with them to the classic ‘80s synth pop song.

See? A meet cute.

Reilly is a divorced lovable lug of a guy who is still close to his ex wife (Catherine Keener) although she is about to get re-married. Reilly hasn’t dated in ages and it’s easy to see why he is instantly smitten with Tomei. The woman of his dreams though has a secret. Thinking she’s married he follows her one night and finds out what it is – she has a grown son (Jonah Hill) who still lives at home. 

Their first encounter Hill is polite and though he makes odd awkward jokes (“it’s great to finally have a new dad”) he seems to be cool with Reilly dating his mother. However clues start to form that that’s not the case like when Reilly wakes up the next morning and can’t find his shoes.

Over time more clashing occurs when Hill has panic attacks that Reilly suspects are faked. When Hill moves out then wants to move back in, Reilly confronts him and it’s obvious that the weirdness between them has now become war. 

Director brothers Jay and Mark Duplass take another step away from the “mumblecore” movement they helped found (their last one was their entertaining indie thriller “Baghead”) here by using name actors and a more conventional structure. Unfortunately they haven’t left behind sloppy camera work – the zoom ins and outs are overdone and the staging of many shots is shakier than shaky cam should be.

CYRUS has comic moments, but can’t really be considered a comedy.

Reilly and Hill may be Judd Apatow repertory players, but here they’re servicing a story that tries more for tears than laughs. Although it rarely gets either it’s a quirky diversion that may be worth a film goers’ time depending on whether they are a fan of the actors.

* Roger Ebert, who popularized the term, describes a "meet cute" as when "somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another."

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GET HIM TO THE GREEK: The Film Babble Blog Review

GET HIM TO THE GREEK
(Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2010)











In FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL Russell Brand, as a tawdry British pop star named Aldous Snow, stood out in a strong ensemble of heavy comedy hitters enough so that his character has been granted a very rare entity - a spin-off vehicle of his own. Joining him is Jonah Hill in a different role than the possibly gay hotel employee he embodied in the previous film. 




Here Hill is an ambitious record company intern who wants to stage a concert celebrating the 10th anniversary of Brand's band Infant Sorrow's best selling live album recorded at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. 




Hill's boss, played to the hilt by Sean "Diddy" Combs, at first vetoes the idea, but comes around and declares that this is Hill's moment to shine. It's a tall order - Brand has recently fallen off the wagon after 7 years because his girlfriend Jackie Q (Rose Byrne) has just left him and his last record, the oh-so-wrong "African Child", was a huge highly derided flop. 




Hill has 3 days to transport the famously decadent and destructive rocker from London to L.A. with a stop in New York for an appearance on the Today Show. Of course, the premise is that none of this goes smoothly and, ahem, wackiness ensues. 




To muddy the water, Hill leaves for the trip thinking he's broken up with his live-in-girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men) after a fight about her wanting them to move to Seattle. He arrives to an already wasted Brand who thinks the concert isn't for a couple of months. With a clock countdown alerting us to their stressful schedule we then go through a series of party set-pieces in which Brand predictably side-tracks Hill with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll at every turn. 




Because this is a Judd Apatow production we can't just have an excess of crude in-your-face comedy, we have to get to the heart of these guys in the last reel. Emotional confessions have to be made and tears have to be cried, but since the volume of laughs leading to that has been well over the limit of, say, THE HANGOVER's, I'm not going to complain. 




Brand's timing and chemistry along with Hill's dependable awkward schtick is impeccable. He's "on" even, or especially, when his character is off in his own whacked out world; the king of his own little adolescent fantasy land he's built up around him, as Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith would put it.





Combs, or "Diddy" or whatever he goes by today, undoubtedly steals the movie every time he's on the screen. At first recalling Tom Cruise's turn as profane movie exec Len Grossman in TROPIC THUNDER, Combs goes further bringing a kind of gangsta gravitas to every word he speaks. His speechifying about the power of "mindfucking" to Hill is one of the funniest bits of the movie. 




As comedies go this year GET HIM TO THE GREEK is a much better than average romp with only a few scenes I could do without. I think most folks will know exactly what they're getting when they go in and will be fine with that. Under Apatow's tutelage director Stoller has assembled a sturdy comic farce with all the trimmings - tons of celebrity cameos, funny freak-outs, and rapid fire one-liners.




It may not single handedly save this summer from its overriding suckiness, but it's an extremely amusing 90 minute reprieve.





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