Nice Shirt at The Movies:Wolf of Wall Street

Another post with some more yakking about movies.

It's a curious film, made more curious by fact of who it was made by. Watching the film, there's more then a whiff of all that Scorsese is doing here is just updating his 'Goodfellas' recipe - which is timely, as 24 years on from the release, other people are still trying to make their own version of 'Goodfellas' themselves ('American Hustle', ahem). It's a canny update - in 1990, Scorsese portrayed mobsters central figures of no-good: loud-mouthed, aggressive New Jerseyites in sweatsuits, rising up through the ranks of the mafia, doing unspeakable, often quite evil things ("dance, you little prick!”). Where as now, in a modern revision, it's financiers acting as figures of pure evil - this time the loud-mouthed, aggressive New Jerseyites in sweatsuits are rising up through the ranks of financial institutions doing upspeakable/unintelligible and quite often evil things. It's funny now that this is what “the arch criminal” is to us now. The dissection of the Mafia through things like 'The Sopranos' means we don't find these hoods scary anymore. It’s like the scariest most psychotic deviant we can now imagine is a guy who can sell you a stakeholder pension.  

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to sell sub-prime derivatives"

The kudos shadow that Scorsese casts over this film is interesting. The sheer bawdiness of some of the action is sometimes bewildering, to the point where it's not much of a stretch to describe this film a gross-out movie. The Tao of Scorsese, somehow seeming to separate the movie from other gross-outs like 'Dumb and Dumber' or 'There's Something About Mary'. You might snort at these comparisons but you only need look at the casting of Judd Apatow farts 'n smarts regular Jonah Hill as one of the main characters to see what's what. Still not sure? The scene where his character openly masterbates (whilst high) at a pool party over a sexy woman might persuade you (Question: is this the first masterbating character to have gotten nominated for a Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards at the Oscars?). At least in 'There's Something About Mary' they kept most things inside their shorts.

Scorsese directing Leonardo DiCaprio on how to really nail 'lude behavior'

Appropriately enough, the film’s title forms the acronym 'WOWS'(LOLZ!). It’s wild, shocking film that has a dangerous air running throughout. But do you ultimately care? Unfortunately not, unfortunately. And the movie, in its very knowing way, even recognises this. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', L.D.C. explains to us, the audience, directly to camera, the intricate ways in which the phoney stock company he created is making a boat-load of money illegally. Only he stops explaining the scheme halfway through, correctly predicting that the scheme is actually quite boring and we, the audience, are not going to care. It's a clever move on behalf of the script, but also a very telling one. You're left wondering as the film ends what does it actually matter they got caught? You kind of know by this point, actually, no one's really going to get their ultimate comeuppance, and that perhaps that this isn't the point of the movie, so all you're left wondering is where all that money they sent to Switzerland went. Is it still there?

Put it this way, the film's about as good as this L.D.C. GIF from the movie. Which is great! But it's a GIF. If you like that, you'll like the film. 'WOWS' bangs and crashes, snorts and spurts its way through three hours (THREE HOURS! The excess of excess in the film becomes wearisome) with the last hour (THE LAST HOUR!) suffering having numerous opportunities to wrap things up, but unfortunately never taking one.  

One thing worthy of praise in the film was its attention to detail. Things like the way the production team got the exact stonewash denim colour for jeans, the way characters’ Rolexes (Rolexi?) got progressively gaudier and bling the more money they earned, the brilliant way in which the film blends all forms of media throughout the film, as we see TV shows, fake adverts for phoney banks and episodes of 'Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous' weave and overlap each other, heightening the film’s excessive tendencies. 

It’s weird: being released in the “Awards Season” almost works against it. It’s almost as if that if it were released in the summer, outside of the Awards Season kerfuffle, I’m sure I would really like it. It's like 'The Hangover IV: Platinum Amex' But in being swept up in the Awards Season tide, it doesn’t quite measure up as a great film ('Gangs of New York', much?). When it's good, it's really good. It’s just a shame there’s not enough of the good to make it great.  

Nice Shirt at The Movies

This past weekend saw the release of the hot new Alfonso Cuarón space film 'Gravity'. The following are a few thoughts after seeing the movie. 

The movie seemed to have the perfect ingredients for 'a great film'  - cult director, great cast, dreamy subject. It all added up to a rare thing at the cinema these days - an adult blockbuster. It was released in the US a month earlier than over here (we'll save the rant about why that still happens all the time for another blogpost) to one of the biggest October box office openings ever and to rave reviews.

The trailer looked amazing - A-MAZ-ING - not least because of the highly-illogical 2K resolution version of it you could watch on YouTube. 

If Gravity is as good a representation of space exploration as we're led to believe, it's amazing how everything looks a bit rubbish in space and breaks really easily.  

It surely had to deliver on the stratospheric hype behind it - we trust in Alfonso! Unfortunately though... it didn't quite manage it. 

Hate to say it, but the trailer is a big problem. Call it flogging the same dead horse that bolted a long long time ago, but again this is another case of trailer spoiling things by showing too much of the final film. If you've happened to have seen the trailer, you've probably seen a good third of the admittedly very tense action in the film. There's three big set pieces in the film, so by watching the trailer you've already knocked out one of them. 

(Having said that, there might be a vague whiff of ¡SPOILERS! in this review if you haven't seen it.)

This problem is amplified in this film particularly, as all the action is actually all very a bit... well, samey. The film is basically about bobbing about in space in varying degrees of peril, so once you've already been exposed to a good degree of it, there's not going to be too much else on offer.

"Bobbing about"

It's easy after a while to be desensitised to the peril, partly due to the trailer experience, but also due to the fact that by the time you've got quite a good way into the film, it's very obvious that the main character is going to survive, no matter what is thrown at her. By the time the film's big climax comes around, you're actually more exasperated by the inevitability of it all rather then left gasping at a miraculous space escape.

The most interesting scene is one where there's an unlikely reunion between the two main characters after you're lead to assume that one of them must have died. You sit up straight at this point at the possibility that finally, maybe, the film could go anywhere other then the increasingly obvious conclusion. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they be somewhere between the two, between the heaven(s) and the earth?

 No, actually, they're not. It just turns out that the scene is actually just a dream one of characters is having (paging Bobby Ewing in Dallas), so any intrigue is washed away like a bit of old seaweed at low tide, leaving you instead watching a boring and quite distracting backstory unfold further.

This backstory felt shoehorned in, feeling almost as though it had been shot afterwards and slotted into the film to give it that sense of meaning, life and spontaneity that is lacking from the film in general, tying back to the central conceit of the film that it is just a couple of people bobbing about in space a bit.

It's a real visual, visceral treat this film -  the scene with a deconstructing International Space Station is expletive-inducing and alone is worth going to see in IMAX. Even the relatively mundane-seeming spacewalk in the opening scene is enough to induce clammy palms, long before the intense drama fully kicks off. 

There has been lots of discussion about Gravity's scientific inaccuracies, so we've posted this diagram to hopefully help clear things up. 

It would have been amazing if the film could have maintained this tension and intrigue all the way  but unfortunately it doesn't, leaving the film a few stars short of a full constellation.