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Bad fellas

The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street, explodes in your face like a mortar full of deranged bliss. Leonardo DiCaprio, in the performance of the year, plays slimeball stockbroker and convicted felon Jordan Belfort, a real life scumbag who made millions selling penny stocks at a Long Island, N.Y., brokerage. The movie, based on Belfort’s own autobiography, takes people doing bad, bad things to such an extreme that the film doesn’t just stand as one of the best overall of 2013, but also one of the year’s best and most deranged comedies. The film begins with a rosy cheeked Belfort starting work at a big Manhattan brokerage where a brash, coke-addicted broker played by Matthew McConaughey, capping off an incredible year, is his mentor. Belfort is ready to take the world by storm in the late ’80s, but Black Monday strikes, destroying his new employer and putting him out of work. He winds up in a Long Island boiler room shilling penny stocks for 50 percent commission. No problem really, because the boy can sell, and people are writing checks. Belfort, with the assistance of new friend Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill, bedazzled with impossibly white caps on his teeth) opens a shiny new brokerage to give his business that first class appearance, but he’s still just slinging penny stocks. This time, he’s slinging them at people with big money under the guise that the stocks are going to explode into major market players. They probably won’t. Still, rich people like and trust Belfort, so they throw money at him. Where there’s money, there are decadent shenanigans, and this is where Scorsese takes the movie party to crazed extremes. Midget

tossing, goldfish eating, hookers and halfnaked marching bands are the order of the day, with all of these activities enhanced by massive drug and alcohol consumption. Like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, DiCaprio talks to the camera on occasion, often during the sort of highly elaborate tracking shots that have become a Scorsese mainstay. It’s in these by Bob Grimm moments, and during Belfort’s drug-fueled, rouse-the-troops, fire-breathing speeches to his bgrimm@ crew, where DiCaprio does his most exhilaratnewsreview.com ing, bona fide nuts acting to date. He is a formidable competitor for a Best Actor Oscar. 5 He’s certainly my pick. It’s not just the verbal pyrotechnics that qualify DiCaprio’s performance as the year’s best. With this film, he proves he’s a physical actor of phenomenal talent. In a scene where Belfort and Azoff consume 15 year-old Quaaludes with a delayed trigger, DiCaprio rivals the likes of Steve Martin and Charlie Chaplin in his ability to pull off physical comedy. What he does with a Ferrari car door and his leg must be seen to be believed. It got to the point where I couldn’t believe it was DiCaprio, and figured they put his face on a stunt man’s body via CGI. Nope. It’s him. Hill continues to prove that he possesses good dramatic chops to go with his comedy pedigree. Kyle Chandler provides the film’s moral core—if it actually has one—as an FBI agent looking to take down Belfort. Margot Robbie is especially impressive as Belfort’s alternately commanding and befuddled wife. Does The Wolf of Wall Street lack certain emotional warmth for its nearly 3 hour running time? Yep, and that’s precisely the point of this movie. Scorsese and DiCaprio are showing us the travesties of an emotionally void, tragically selfish group of people living life through a chemically enhanced haze. Hey, if these guys weren’t pure bastards when they were committing their crimes, this stuff never would’ve happened, right? No, I wasn’t expecting warm hugs at the end of this pic. These people are terrible—comically terrible—and Scorsese holds nothing back in portraying them this way. The Wolf of Wall Street is a full blast cinematic assault commandeered by a general masterfully displaying that he’s in no way ready to slow down just yet. It’s not only good—it’s Goodfellas good. Ω

It’s all a party til somebody rams an iceberg.

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4American Hustle David O. Russell continues his impressive directorial roll with this semi-comedic look at the notorious ’70s Abscam scandal. This is basically Russell shooting for Scorsese glory here, and while the style of the movie seems copied at times, there’s no denying the power of the ensemble cast. Bradley Cooper scores laughs as a pathetic FBI agent looking to make a name for himself, and Christian Bale looks great in a comb-over as the conman forced into an alliance with the law. Amy Adams gets one of the strangest roles of the year as a con artist pretending to be British, and she pulls it off quite nicely, while Jennifer Lawrence steals her every scene as a seemingly dim Long Island housewife. You also get stand up comic Louis C.K. as Cooper’s field boss. (C.K. canceled a show I had tickets for to make this movie. I was pissed but, after seeing how good he is here, I’m OK with it now.) The film falls a little short of greatness due to its sometimes carbon copy feel, but the cast pulls it out of the fire. It also has the best use of Robert De Niro as a bad guy in many years.

4Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues After nearly a decade of being absent from our movie screens, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), the world’s greatest newscaster, has returned. This time, it’s the ‘80s, and a new media craze called 24 Hour News has Ron and the boys (Paul Rudd’s Brian Fantana, Steve Carell’s Brick Tamland and David Koechner’s Champ Kind) working the late night shift in New York. The plot is basically just a place setter for weird, random humor involving bats, sharks, shadows, scorpions in RVs, and hair. Ferrell and the crew manage to sell the dumbest of things, and they make so much of it funny. Even the stuff that’s just strange has its own humorous appeal. Carell goes super dopey with Brick as he finds a love interest (Kristen Wiig), Champ still loves Ron in a dangerous way, and Brian has a new condom cabinet. I laughed my face off, with this being a sequel that continues the comedic legacy of the brilliant original, and even ups the ante when it comes to anchor-on-anchor battles in the park (the battle scene in this one is one for the ages, and involves fighter jets). The last time they made one of these, they had enough on the cutting room floor to release an entire other movie. I hope that happened here as well, because I don’t want to wait 10 years for more.

4Dallas Buyers Club Matthew McConaughey continues his career resurgence in this film based on the life of Ron Woodroof, a man who tested HIV positive in the ’80s, and had to battle the FDA while smuggling non-approved drugs into the country for himself and fellow sufferers. McConaughey lost many pounds to look the part, and it’s a frightening transformation. He also delivers an incredible performance. This, combined with his work earlier this year in Mud, easily establishes 2013 as the best year of his career. Jared Leto does incredible work as Rayon, a cross-dresser who helps Woodroof distribute the drugs to those needing some sort of treatment. Director Jean-Marc Vallee does a good job of capturing a time where HIV was a death sentence, and the terror that surrounded those who were fighting for their lives. This is a very good movie with great performances.

3Frozen I have to admit I was more into the strange Mickey Mouse short that precedes this musical adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen” than the actual feature. It features retro Mickey busting out of a black and white film and becoming 3-D as he battles a bad guy kidnapping Minnie. It’s worth the price of admission. As for the actual feature movie, Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel have wonderful voices, and the visuals are fun to behold in this middle-of-the-road Disney fare. It has a lot of music—some of it quite good, some of it, well, not—and a beautiful look to it. For recent Disney animation, my vote goes to Tangled for best, but that’s not to say this one is a letdown. It’s OK. Just OK. It’s about on par with Pixar’s latest, Monster’s University. It’s fun to watch, but not altogether memorable.

1The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Peter Jackson’s decision to shoot his latest Tolkien trilogy in High Frame Rate 3-D is a tragic, disastrous choice. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, like its predecessor, An Unexpected Journey, is a task to watch. The look of the movie simply doesn’t jibe with the technology, resulting in a visual nightmare. As a middle chapter in The Hobbit saga, Smaug is guilty of the same flaws that marred the first film. It’s overstuffed, the dwarves are severely uninteresting, and the action scenes lack any kind of urgency. It’s just a big, boring stunt film with people looking silly in their getups. As Bilbo, Martin Freeman labors to make things interesting during action scenes that feel redundant. (Hey, it’s another giant icky spider attack!) He definitely stands out among a cast of bland actors playing bland dwarves. Oh Gimli, how you are missed! Jackson finds a way to bring back Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Bloom’s scenes are a bunch of sorry minutes that could be cut from the film’s running time. Too many scenes in this movie feel padded and bloated. With each passing minute, Jackson is doing further damage to his directing legacy. His original Lord of the Rings trilogy was a major triumph. These Hobbit films feel and look like parody. Smaug the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) finally shows up, and he is easily the best thing in the Hobbit films thus far. He should’ve arrived in the second half of the first film, and the whole damned thing should’ve been over in three hours.

4The Hunger Games: Catching Fire After a sloppy start, The Hunger Games franchise kicks into high gear with this solid, darker chapter. Jennifer Lawrence, looking a little more haggard and embittered, makes for a far more convincing war-torn survivor this time out. Her performance is great, as are the contributions of a bunch of new cast members including Jena Malone, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sam Claflin. The new look and feel of the series can mostly be attributed to new director Francis Lawrence and his cinematographer Jo Willems, who get rid of that dopey, baroque look of the first movie in favor of something darker. The plot involves Katniss and fellow survivor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) being forced into another Hunger Games where former victors must compete against each other. This installment has a lot more meat on the bone, and the action is easier to follow thanks to a much less frantic editing style. Francis Lawrence will direct the final two Hunger Games movies, and that’s good news for fans.

4Saving Mr. Banks Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson are charming as Walt Disney and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers in this obviously whitewashed look at Disney’s attempts at getting Travers’ approval to make a movie out of her book. Of course, most of us know he succeeded, but many don’t know that Travers was quite the holdout. The movie splits time between the Disney/Travers business and Travers’ childhood, where we find out much of Mary Poppins was based on her troubled father (Colin Farrell) and actual nanny. B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman are wonderful as the Sherman brothers, who made Poppins into a musical, much to the chagrin of Travers. The movie takes a lot of artistic license with the situation. Even though Travers is depicted as difficult here, she was far more adversarial in real life and never approved of the movie (those animated penguins!). Still, the film is fun to watch, with Hanks and Thompson making it all very worthwhile and heartwarming.

3Thor: The Dark World This latest installment is a step back from Kenneth Branagh’s goofy and grand first franchise installment, Thor. While not likely to piss off superhero film fans, this sequel from director Alan Taylor is not going to blow many minds away, either. It’s a semi-efficient placeholder flick moving us towards the next Avengers movie, due in 2015. Chris Hemsworth returns as that incredibly handsome man with long hair, a big hammer and impossibly silly dialogue. The film takes place after The Avengers, with a dark ancient force threatening the universe, and only Thor and his imprisoned brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston, stealing the movie) can save us. The movie is OK, but somewhat of a comedown considering how fun the first Thor and The Avengers were. It’s merely a placeholder until Thor’s next appearance in an Avengers movie, with some decent action and special effects to tide us over until the next Marvel fix.

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