The Wolf Contretemps
Jan 3, 2014 19:51:14 GMT -5
Post by will on Jan 3, 2014 19:51:14 GMT -5
thanks joshuatree for the Brody article.
Here's a link to the Scorsese interview he mentions:
cinema.nouvelobs.com/articles/29024-interviews-martin-scorsese-j-etais-comme-leonardo-dicaprio-dans-le-loup-de-wall-street?page=1 (and Translated)
Also, another take from Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair:
Here's a link to the Scorsese interview he mentions:
cinema.nouvelobs.com/articles/29024-interviews-martin-scorsese-j-etais-comme-leonardo-dicaprio-dans-le-loup-de-wall-street?page=1 (and Translated)
Also, another take from Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair:
The Wolf of Hollywood: Martin Scorsese Is No Stranger To Controversy
Septugenearian filmmaker Martin Scorsese has done the one thing our culture will not allow: produce a work of mainstream art with a modicum of ambiguity. And people, unsurprisingly, are furious about it.
Scorsese and his film The Wolf of Wall Street are under attack on multiple fronts. The daughter of an associate of Jordan Belfort (the titular “Wolf” played by Leonardo DiCaprio) says that Scorsese himself has been conned. Some critics say the movie glorifies and celebrates an immoral, depraved and extremely misogynistic lifestyle . (Please let's refer to these accusations henceforth as the “bro-mides.”)
And in response, many wags on “movie Twitter” are agog that anyone could take the 'lude-rich, helicopter-smashing picture as some sort of epistle from Long Island's North Shore, and seem close to a mass suicide pact just to end the conversation. Then there's the common filmgoer, with reports of walkouts due to the high raunch content. (We've grown accustomed to watching this sort of thing on our tablets once spouses have gone to bed.)
How could a major Hollywood studio put out such a thing? Many seem shocked, shocked that the nice silverhaired man who yaps about black and white films on TCM would inflict this on an unsuspecting public. His last movie was about a saucer-eyed French ragamuffin that lives inside a magical clock! We say to these people, “whaddya, some kinda mook?” Martin Scorsese has always deliberately ridden the waves of controversy, and he has always come out the other side unscathed.
The Wolf of Wall Street's screenwriter Terence Winter had GoodFellas in mind while adapting Jordan Belfort's book. They don't just share formal elements—a breakneck pace, voice over, fluid camera work and wall-to-wall needle drops on the soundtrack&mdhash;they are all also a great deal of fun. Let's face it, none of the films have a clear crime doesn't pay message. GoodFellas' Henry Hill lives a life of sharp suits, adultery and recreational drugs but when his back's against the wall he rats out his friends and lives. Yes, he has to “live like a schnook” eating egg noodles and catsup, but he lives. Casino's Ace Rothstein is run out of Vegas, but ends up “right back where I started.” Wolf's Jordan Belfort does a little minimum security time, but finds a new revenue stream by marketing himself as a master communicator.
Scorsese may have put his adorable Italian-American mother in all of his early movies, but he came of age as a sixties radical. His student film featured a man shaving the skin off his face as a metaphor for US foreign policy. Not to bring up that old concert in the mud, but he helped shoot and edit Woodstock. He was one of the first self-described movie brats, angry young men weaned on European Art Cinema, enamored of directors like Antonioni whose entire career was about defying conventional expectations and avoiding straightforward conclusions. In other words, he's got the bonafides—and the track record from those earlier films—to speak harshly to our seemingly ingrained system, and to do so in a complex manner.
Wolf of Wall Street is proof that Scorsese still has some fire in his belly when it comes to slamming greed. And what better way to do it than to appear to be just one of the boys, laughing and drinking and planning the best way to toss dwarves, before going in for the kill and exposing how the environment of excess can change you into a lowlife jerk?
Throughout the fast-paced picture there are ethical flashes that appear on the screen for an instant before the whooshing camera and blaring rock music spins away. There's the look of exploited shame on from the female co-worker who has agreed (was coerced?) to have her head shaved for ten grand. There's the “did I do that?” morning after moment when Belfort is told he nearly raped a stewardess and called an airline pilot a racial slur. (Is it mere coincidence Steve Urkel makes an appearance during the infamous “Lemmons” drug-trip sequence?) Then there's the final shot of the picture—reminiscent of the end of Cabaret—where we in the audience see ourselves, quite literally, reflected on the screen. No, we're not Nazis, but we're eagerly lapping up the “lessons” of a master manipulator. Perhaps there's a part of us, if we're being honest, that recognizes certain moments in the party had us feeling, if only for a moment, slightly envious.
That's the way you tear the system down. By exposing just how easy it is to get so-called good people to slouch their way toward bad.
www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2014/01/the-wolf-of-wall-street-controversy-history
Septugenearian filmmaker Martin Scorsese has done the one thing our culture will not allow: produce a work of mainstream art with a modicum of ambiguity. And people, unsurprisingly, are furious about it.
Scorsese and his film The Wolf of Wall Street are under attack on multiple fronts. The daughter of an associate of Jordan Belfort (the titular “Wolf” played by Leonardo DiCaprio) says that Scorsese himself has been conned. Some critics say the movie glorifies and celebrates an immoral, depraved and extremely misogynistic lifestyle . (Please let's refer to these accusations henceforth as the “bro-mides.”)
And in response, many wags on “movie Twitter” are agog that anyone could take the 'lude-rich, helicopter-smashing picture as some sort of epistle from Long Island's North Shore, and seem close to a mass suicide pact just to end the conversation. Then there's the common filmgoer, with reports of walkouts due to the high raunch content. (We've grown accustomed to watching this sort of thing on our tablets once spouses have gone to bed.)
How could a major Hollywood studio put out such a thing? Many seem shocked, shocked that the nice silverhaired man who yaps about black and white films on TCM would inflict this on an unsuspecting public. His last movie was about a saucer-eyed French ragamuffin that lives inside a magical clock! We say to these people, “whaddya, some kinda mook?” Martin Scorsese has always deliberately ridden the waves of controversy, and he has always come out the other side unscathed.
- Taxi Driver (1976). Scorsese's masterpiece of urban loneliness may have won Cannes' Palme D'Or, but the MPAA demanded he desaturate the color in the final vigilante shootout to ensure an R rating. Taxi Driver's violence was more startling because it wasn't a B-movie splatterfest – it had the horror of a sympathetic perpetrator. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Taxi Driver's lack of a disclaimer could lead some literal-minded viewers to interpret it as advocacy for antisocial behavior. We get inside the head of a guy who eventually charges into violence and, in a still debated punchline, is then hailed as a hero. (It's the same twist ending, albeit far less bloody, as 1983's The King of Comedy.)
Ironically enough, early television airings of Taxi Driver did include a disclaimer. It read “TO OUR TELEVISION AUDIENCE: In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. TAXI DRIVER suggests that tragic errors can be made. The Filmmakers.” This addition was understandable, given that John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan was triggered by Hinckley's obsession with actress Jodie Foster. (If your memory is fuzzy, Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle first toys with assassinating a presidential candidate, possibly because he's trying to impress one of his workers, then decides instead to liberate the teen prostitute played by Foster.)
This filmmakers' statement in fact existed prior to the Hinckley shooting of March 30, 1981. It is mentioned in a newspaper clipping from January of 1979. Did television networks already feel queasy about a perceived lack of clear, moral pronouncement at the end of the film? We doubt Scorsese was the one who tacked it on, especially prior to the Hinckley incident. - The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This one created nothing less than an international uproar. The adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1953 novel is, most would agree, an affirmation of the values and struggles of history's most famous Jewish carpenter. But the image of the Son of Mam behaving in a lustful manor—even in a dream sequence—was too much for some religious groups.There were calls for protests, Scorsese went on Nightline to reiterate his Catholic upbringing (and how he considered becoming a priest) and an extremist group in France threw Molotov cocktails at a theater, severely injuring four people. (A man in Ithaca, New York also rammed a bus into a theater showing the film, but it was empty at the time) The protests kept the film out of many theater chains and Blockbuster Video. Naturally this meant the picture made a killing in Godless New York – but few other places, with an eventual box office total of $8.3 million. To be fair, it was always a bit arty for mainstream success, but now that the dust has settled most cineastes and eggheads agree it is an essential entry in Bible cinema.
- Kundun (1997). This dust-up was more to do with global economics than the Reverend Donald Wildmon frothing outside movie theaters. The 1997 film tells the story of the 14th Dalai Lama, a story that doesn't exactly make the People's Republic of China look so hot. Universal (which distributed Last Temptation) took a pass on this project, letting the Walt Disney Company deal with the headache. Despite threats of closing off their borders to exported business, Disney went ahead with the movie. (Not even the Great Wall can keep Mickey out.) Kundun wasn't exactly the barn burner people were expecting (though Philip Glass' score really is top notch) so the scuffle soon settled down. Nevertheless, stock holders were worried.
- Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). These two efforts increased not just the level of violence in his films, but also the convivial nature of bad behavior. Rarely does breaking social codes, not to mention the law, look as joyous as when Scorsese's characters do it. There's music, there's jokes, there's guys holding out their arms going “ayyyyy!” It's designed specifically to appeal to the reptilian part of your brain.
That disconnect between fun and ferociousness troubled some critics. The Washington Post admitted that “the eye-opening violence in Casino may be an integral part of the story. But there are acts of cruelty that will test the most jaded of sensibilities,” and then went on to list some of the barbarism portrayed in the film. (We all remember the head in the vise and the sound of Frank Vincent's aluminum bats.) But what would these films be if it was all neon lights and garlic sliced with a razor? Scorsese's method may be shocking, but the ramifications of immoral behavior is all the more potent as a surprise attack amidst a rollicking good time.
The Wolf of Wall Street's screenwriter Terence Winter had GoodFellas in mind while adapting Jordan Belfort's book. They don't just share formal elements—a breakneck pace, voice over, fluid camera work and wall-to-wall needle drops on the soundtrack&mdhash;they are all also a great deal of fun. Let's face it, none of the films have a clear crime doesn't pay message. GoodFellas' Henry Hill lives a life of sharp suits, adultery and recreational drugs but when his back's against the wall he rats out his friends and lives. Yes, he has to “live like a schnook” eating egg noodles and catsup, but he lives. Casino's Ace Rothstein is run out of Vegas, but ends up “right back where I started.” Wolf's Jordan Belfort does a little minimum security time, but finds a new revenue stream by marketing himself as a master communicator.
Scorsese may have put his adorable Italian-American mother in all of his early movies, but he came of age as a sixties radical. His student film featured a man shaving the skin off his face as a metaphor for US foreign policy. Not to bring up that old concert in the mud, but he helped shoot and edit Woodstock. He was one of the first self-described movie brats, angry young men weaned on European Art Cinema, enamored of directors like Antonioni whose entire career was about defying conventional expectations and avoiding straightforward conclusions. In other words, he's got the bonafides—and the track record from those earlier films—to speak harshly to our seemingly ingrained system, and to do so in a complex manner.
Wolf of Wall Street is proof that Scorsese still has some fire in his belly when it comes to slamming greed. And what better way to do it than to appear to be just one of the boys, laughing and drinking and planning the best way to toss dwarves, before going in for the kill and exposing how the environment of excess can change you into a lowlife jerk?
Throughout the fast-paced picture there are ethical flashes that appear on the screen for an instant before the whooshing camera and blaring rock music spins away. There's the look of exploited shame on from the female co-worker who has agreed (was coerced?) to have her head shaved for ten grand. There's the “did I do that?” morning after moment when Belfort is told he nearly raped a stewardess and called an airline pilot a racial slur. (Is it mere coincidence Steve Urkel makes an appearance during the infamous “Lemmons” drug-trip sequence?) Then there's the final shot of the picture—reminiscent of the end of Cabaret—where we in the audience see ourselves, quite literally, reflected on the screen. No, we're not Nazis, but we're eagerly lapping up the “lessons” of a master manipulator. Perhaps there's a part of us, if we're being honest, that recognizes certain moments in the party had us feeling, if only for a moment, slightly envious.
That's the way you tear the system down. By exposing just how easy it is to get so-called good people to slouch their way toward bad.
www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2014/01/the-wolf-of-wall-street-controversy-history