"THE WOLF OF WALL STREET"  REVIEW

By Barry Dutter

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is about as close as we’re ever going to get to a sequel to GOODFELLAS.  It is no accident that WOLF OF WALL STREET tries as hard as it can to recreate the look, feel and tone of that 1991 gangster film. GOODFELLAS was Scorcese’s last truly great movie. It was easily the best movie of the 90s.
And its story of a cocky bad boy who is willing to do whatever it takes to get rich, and doesn’t care who he hurts along the way, is strongly echoed in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO seems to be doing his  best impression of RAY LIOTTA, the star of GOODFELLAS, even down to the way he talks directly to the camera. (Even his hairstyle is the same!) Both films involve an unrepentant womanizer who starts out with a  cute, supportive wife but then moves on to a younger, hotter bad girl who seems to never really love him.
Both films have the lead character partying hard and doing copious amounts of drugs on their road to taking advantage of innocent people and making as much money as humanly possible. I guess the main difference is that the characters in GOODFELLAS are somehow more charming, more likable. They may be hoodlums who will slit your throat if you don’t pay them on time, but they will do it with style.

GOODFELLAS was all about living “the life” and not being a regular working-class schmuck. The "life" involved going to the nicest restaurants, having front show seats to the hottest shows in town, drinking and drugging all night, etc. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET  takes “the life” to the next level, with 175-foot yachts, huge mansions, and vacation homes in spots so exotic, they can only be described by Robin Leach.
The characters in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are not murderers or robbers. Somehow, they are even worse, because they  steal your money while pretending to help you make money. At least the guys in GODFELLAS hold a gun to your face when they rob you!
In both films, the main character gets off easy. In GOODFELLAS, Henry Hill rats out his fellow gangsters so he doesn’t have to serve any time in jail. In THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, Jordan Belfort ends up serving 22 months of a three-year sentence. A quick search of Wikipedia reveals that he never paid back the $160 million in restitution he was ordered to pay his victims. He still works as a highly-paid motivational speaker.
I have to admit, I was really disappointed to learn that Belfort never really paid for his crimes. I spent three hours watching a guy commit some of the worst sins imaginable, living this decadent life, feeling secure that his downfall was inevitable, and that he would surely get what was coming to him in the end.
Instead, he gets off with a slap on the wrist. Okay, so he can never work as a stockbroker again. Big deal. He writes two best-selling novels about his crimes, and makes a ton of money as a motivational speaker today. (He even has a cameo in the friggin’ movie, for God's sake!)

The lack of punishment left me with mixed feelings about the film. In GOODFELLAS, when Henry Hill gave up his life of crime and left that world behind (seemingly) forever, it was a huge deal. Spending the rest of his life living like a schmuck in witness protection meant he could never live the high life again. That was a devastating blow to him, even worse than a long prison sentence.
But Jordan Belfort is still making tons of money, and he is still free to live how he chooses. It’s almost like the message of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is, “Do whatever it takes to make money. Rob, steal, cheat people. It doesn’t matter, because you will never have to face any real consequences.”
Setting aside those qualms, the movie is a fun ride. It’s three hours long, and unlike that other recent period “reality-based” crime drama, AMERICAN HUSTLE, it actually has enough story to sustain its length. Did THE WOLF OF WALL STREET need to be three hours? No. You could have cut an hour out of it and still kept all the important story points. Some scenes go on too long. There is a “comedy” sequence when Leonardo DiCaprio first tries explaining his new penny-stock business to his idiot friends, when they all get distracted and keep trying to change the topic. This scene could easily have been cut.
Another comedy scene where Leo and the boys discuss the finer points of dwarf-tossing, is mildly amusing,  but also would have been an easy cut. The most famous scene in GOODFELLAS, the "Do I amuse you?" scene, perhaps the single greatest movie scene of the 90s, was largely improvised by Joe Pesci. Some of these comedy scenes in TWOWS have the same "improvisatory" feel to them, but the difference is, none of the actors in the new movie has the same sense of danger that Pesci brought to his role.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET has many scenes of Leo standing with a microphone in front of his employees, trying to rouse them with an inspirational speech. We kind of get the point the first time that that his speeches are great at rallying the troops. I can definitely see why this role would appeal to any actor -- DiCario seems to spend half the movie giving speeches to his underlings. (None of my bosses ever had a microphone in the office. Maybe I would have been more motivated if they had!)
DiCaprio brings a lot of enthusiasm to his role, (It should be noted that his role involves sniffing coke off of his wife's boobs and random hookers' butts!) and his performance carries the film. You may not like the character he plays, but you definitely want to know what he's going to do next.
As a filmmaker, Scorcese remains as vital as ever, but he seems to be repeating himself more, sometimes even within the same movie. (Look at THE AVIATOR, where the story seemed to consist of: Invent a plane, bed a starlet, invent another plane, bed another starlet.)
It’s interesting to note how many movies have a hot blonde as the object of unattainable perfection, just as Hitchcock did in his best movies so long ago. Scorcese went down that road before with a never-better Sharon Stone in CASINO, and WOLF OF WALL STREET continues that tradition with the stunning Margot Robbie, an actress who I had never seen before but she has apparently been busy for years working for film and TV both here and in her native Australia.
She is quite the knock-out. She looks great in her clothes, and let’s face it, out them. This film has more nudity in it than you would expect from a 71-year-old director.
And the language! 506 F-bombs, the new record for a major Hollywood movie! (It wasn’t until I got home later and checked that I realized that someone had actually counted.)
I, for one, can’t wait till THE WOLF OF WALL STREET comes to network TV. They will either have to cut out 2 hours of cursing, or find fun, new ways of dubbing over the F-word with less offensive words. It will be the greatest editing challenge of all time, and it will be a blast to see what they come up with!
The acting in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is strong, for the most part. But I thought Jonah Hill laid it in a little thick. He was effective in a quieter role in MONEYBALL. Here, he might as well wear a sign that says, “I am a gay Jew!”
I am getting sick of Leonardo DiCaprio starring in every Scorcese movie. This Bromance needs to end. This is probably their best movie together, so it would be a great time to end their collaboration. (Maybe it’s time for Scorcese to make one last movie with Robert DiNero and Joe Pesci!)
Out of all the most acclaimed directors who came up in the 70s -- Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian Depalma -- Scorcese is the only one who still makes movies that matter.
It looks like WOLF OF WALL STREET will not be a huge hit for him, because a  lot of people are turned off by the subject matter. I can’t say I blame them. The film does glorify a contemptuous asshole who has no regard for all the people he hurts.
This movie takes place in the late 80s and early 90s, decades after the glamorous 60s and 70s era of GOODFELLAS.
The new movie makes you miss the days when if you didn’t like someone, you just whacked them. Everybody understood it was nothing personal. It was just business.
The characters in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are engaged in different kind of business, it just feels a lot dirtier. 

MY BREAKING BAD REVIEW (MAJOR SPOILERS!)

By Barry Dutter

Over the past five years, I kept hearing that BREAKING BAD was the best show in the history of television. I figured that had to be an exaggeration. There was no way it could be that good -- could it?
Finally, after much badgering from the guys at work, I decided to give BREAKING BAD a try, aided by my new best friend, Netflix!

The show got off to a great start -- I watched the first 4 episodes in one night, which, for a guy with no attention span like myself, is a testament to the show‘s quality. Right from the start, BREAKING BAD had me hooked with gripping storytelling and intriguing characters.
The pace slowed down a bit in season two, as the show seemed to lose that sense of  “Oh my God, I can’t wait to see what happens next!”
But things picked up again with season three, when Gus Fring became a regular character on the show. Gus is one of TV’s all-time greatest villains and the tension between Walt and Gus made for powerful drama.
Gus Fring never lost his temper, never raised his voice, and seemed all the more dangerous because of it.
As soon as Gus arrived on the scene, you knew that he and Walt would have to have some kind of showdown. It ended the only way it could, with Gus dead and Walt looking for new business partners.
I found the demise of Gus Fring to be a bit of a letdown, for two reasons. 1) You never got to see Walt and Gus have one last face-off, and 2) This was where Walt took on the role of Master Planner, the guy who knows what everyone is going to do before they do it,  and can create whatever complicated weapons he needs to exact his revenge.
It’s great that Walt can rig an exploding wheelchair, but wasn’t this guy just an ordinary schoolteacher just a few months prior? I know he taught chemistry, but it just seemed a bit of a stretch.
(Likewise, in the finale, when Walt rigged the remote-control machine gun, again, credibility was pushed a bit far. In order for Walt’s plans to work, so many things had to go exactly his way: the bad guys had to all be standing in the right spot, Walt’s car had to be parked in the perfect spot, oh yeah, and the jerry-rigged gun had to actually work.)
Those were the moments when I thought BREAKING BAD was going a little too over the top.
For that matter, I’m still not clear how Walt ended up getting shot by one of his own bullets in the finale. I mean, he was the one holding the remote control, and he knew exactly when the gun was going off.
I know Walt had to die at the end, but it seems strange that writer/creator Vince Gilligan had Walt gunned down by his own weapon. I guess the best way to look at it is to say that it’s hard to write a great finale for a beloved show, and the ending of BREAKING BAD was a lot more satisfying than most.
All in all, the finale touched all the bases, wrapped up all the loose ends, and left viewers feeling pretty good, as opposed to the endings of shows like the THE SOPRANOS, which left viewers feeling unfulfilled, and LOST, which left them feeling like they had just wasted the last six years of their lives.
BREAKING BAD was the story of one man’s descent into pure evil, and the corruption of another man along the way. When the series begins, Jessie is a low-level drug dealer. But by the time the show has ended, Jessie has been tortured, beaten, enslaved, forced to kill on more than one occasion -- basically, ever since Walt met Jessie, Jessie’s life was one series of horrible events after another.
Yes, Jessie made a lot of money, but by the end of the fifth season, he was willing to give away all his money just to be free of Walt. When we see Jessie driving off into the night in the finale, we are led to believe that Jessie has been redeemed. Jessie refuses to kill Walt at the end when he has a chance; this seems to indicate that yes, Jessie was once willing to stoop to Walt’s level, but never again.
We don’t know where he will go when the show is over or what he will do to make money, but one thing is certain: Jessie will never cook meth again. The show’s 62 episodes really put Jessie through the ringer.
On the last episode of BREAKING BAD, Walter White summed up his criminal career by saying, “I did it for me. And I was good at it.”
But was he really good at it? Seems to me that the only part that he was good at was cooking meth. He was almost a total failure in every other aspect of the business. He made one bad decision after another, continually forming alliances with people who were either too unpredictable or too dangerous to get involved with, and the only reason he survived as long as he did was mostly through sheer dumb luck.
(Examples: The evil drug lord Tuco was killed by Hank, not by anything that Walt did. Walt was nearly executed by the twin hitmen, but was saved from a last-minute text by Gus Fring. Pure luck.)
For a smart guy, Walt could be pretty dumb, at times. When his RV died out in the desert, it was Jessie who had the idea of creating a make-shift battery. When Walt and his cronies needed to erase a video tape that was in police custody, it was Jessie who had the idea of using a giant magnet to erase the tape. Yes, it was Walt who would have to figure out ways to make these things work, but sometimes Walt indeed to be reminded by people dumber than him just how smart he was.
Was BREAKING BAD the best TV show of all time? I would say no, because it did drag a bit in season two, and the resolution was not perfect. The one episode about the housefly was by far one of the worst episodes of any TV show I have ever seen. I would call that one a bit of self-indulgence on the part of the writers. Also, there were some subplots that worked better than others. The bit about Marie being a kleptomaniac really went nowhere and didn‘t add anything to the show.
I still question whether or not the actor who played Walt’s brother-in-law was well-cast. He seemed to me he would be more at home in a sitcom than with the heavy-hitters on BREAKING BAD.
But BB did keep you on the edge of your seat, perhaps more than any TV show in history. I’ve never really been a fan of any TV drama. I’ve always enjoyed comedies more. At one point, I might have said that M*A*S*H was the best TV show ever. At another point, I might have said THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW or ALL IN THE FAMILY.
But BREAKING BAD did get me to watch an entire drama from beginning to end, and that was something I had never done before (and probably will never do again, because, let's face it, after BREAKING BAD, any other TV drama would be a letfdown.) In terms of the way it was structured, BB was really more like a novel than a TV show.
So I have to give the makers of the show kudos for that. Thanks, Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston, for making me care about a  TV drama and for keeping me guessing all the way to the end.
Much of the credit for the show’s success has to go to Cranston, who proved on MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE that he could he funny, but he really showed his depth here. After seeing him play a goofy sitcom dad for years, who would have suspected that he could go on to play one of TV’s all-time great dramatic roles?
No one ever knew that Malcolm’s dad could be so scary. To me, the only false moment bin the entire run of the show came when Walt confronted the bully who was picking on his son. I just didn't buy ity it. Otherwise, Cranston's performance was flawless.
Aaron Paul deserves equal credit for his raw portrayal of Jessie, whose character went through quite a gauntlet as well. Right from the start, Jessie never took any crap from anyone. He started out full of youthful anger -- no one on TV will ever say “Yo bitch!” with as much venom as Jessie could spit. But by the end of the show, Jessie was a hollow shell of his old self. He had lost his spark, but still, he was happy to be alive.
Equal praise must go to Bob Odenkirk, who brought much-needed humor to the show. His fast-talking character, Saul Goodman, really injected a shot in the arm to BREAKING BAD. I’ve been a fan of Odenkirk’s ever since the late, lamented BEN STILLER SHOW, and it was fun to see him show off his semi-dramatic chops here.
Really, most of the characters on BB were memorable, even supporting players like Mike the hatchet man. Badger. Jessie’s junkie girlfriend, Jane. The only one I really didn’t like on the show was Lydia, both because of the way she was written and the way the actress played her. She came across as indecisive, desperate and weak, where all the other criminals on the show were portrayed as strong and cunning.  Something about Lydia just annoyed me from the start. I get that she was a businesswoman who was out of her element, and understandably nervous, but the weak portrayal of her character fell flat. Maybe if a different actress had played her I might have liked the her more. (Penelope Cruz, maybe?)
As for Walt’s wife -- I was not as annoyed  by Skyler as most BB fans seemed to be. I thought actress Anna Gunn did a fine job, and in many ways, her character went through as many incarnations as Walt: loving wife, betrayed spouse, faithful co-conspirator, terrified victim.
Gunn expertly conveyed all of these incarnations and more. It’s got to be tough for a woman to see her husband turn into a criminal genius. But Skyler’s journey was every bit as fascinating s Walt’s.
The only misstep in the Skyler story was the resolution to the Skyler’s tax-cheating boss storyline. For several episodes, he is a major character. Then he accidentally trips and falls, bumps his head and becomes paralyzed. That’s it?
Seems like Walt should have had more of a hand in dealing with the end of that character.
When watching BB, sometimes you got the impression that even the writers didn’t know what was going to happen next. Most of the time, this worked to the show’s benefit. But occasionally, it resulted in storylines that just didn’t seem to resolve themselves in a satisfactory way.
Like I said, when you have a show this compelling, it’s hard to come up with an ending that will satisfy everyone. In the end, Walt made sure that all the money would be passed on to his son and he killed all his enemies before he died. He even freed Jessie, which was not his primary reason for entering Jack’s lair, but once he saw the opportunity, he jumped on it. And he left behind a family that would never be the same.
Walt’s wife will forever have to live with the horror of what she did as an accomplice to a master criminal. (Not to mention that she is stuck running a car wash that I’m sure she would rather not be in charge of.) Marie is left to mourn her late husband, Hank, whose death was surely the most shocking one on the show. (After all those years of brilliant detective work, to be gunned down so ignobly…surely Hank deserved a better fate. But then, BB never promised that everyone would have a happy ending.)
Walt Jr. will forever have to live with the fact that his father was a lying, murdering drug dealer. And Jessie will have to live with all the hell that he went through as he struggles to rebuild his life.
Walt’s final year on Earth was certainly an eventful one. In the end, it was not the cancer that killed Walt. It was his own ambition and his own regret at having missed out a big business opportunity the first time around.
Who among us can’t relate to Walter White? We’ve all had opportunities in our lives that we may have passed up on. We’ve all had regrets. The difference is, most of us don’t pursue a life of crime as a way to make up for past slights. That’s why it was so much fun to watch Walt on his journey. Through him, we got to live vicariously, as we watched him make moves we would never attempt in real life. We got to see him try to recapture all the things that had eluded him in life: Wealth. Power. Success.
On the last episode of BB, the show climaxed with a song by  Badfinger called “Baby Blue.”
I’ve always loved Badfinger but I was never a big fan of that song. Now, of course, I’ve developed  new appreciation for it, and I will never listen to it the same way again. The song, about  guy who didn’t treat his woman right, and paid the price -- does not completely sum up the show, but it sure as hell worked in the context of that episode.
As Walt lay there dying in a puddle of his own blood, and the we heard the opening line of the song, “I guess I got what I deserved…” it created an indelible image that ranks as one of TV’s all-time most memorable moments.
The song had a double meaning because BB was all about Walt’s own creation -- his “baby blue” -- the crystal blue meth.
It was the thing that saved him from an unbearably boring and unsatisfying life, and in the end, it was the thing that he ended up dying over.
The writers could have had Walt simply due from cancer. But that would not have pleased anyone. That would have been a cop-out ending for the show. That’s not how we wanted to see our Walter White go out.
In the end, he went out the only way he could -- he went out fighting. He was defiant to the end, and he died as the smartest guy in the room. (Even if he was dumb enough to get hit by his own bullet!)