Episode 214: the Wolf of Wall Street with Benjamin P. Dixon

Forrest, J. Andrew World, Conan Neutron and Kristina Oakes are joined by Ben Dixon of the Benjamin Dixon Show to talk about Martin Scorsese’s the Wolf of Wall Street #wolfofwallstreet #wallstreet #martinscorsese #margotrobbie #leonardodicaprio #jonahhill

This whole month we are doing movies about money!

Money Night Extravaganza continues to roll on, and this time we are covering the debauched, amoral and degenerate 2013 Scorsese film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Forrest Miller, Conan Neutron, J. Andrew World and Kristina Oakes are joined by by Ben Dixon to talk about this 3 hour drug and needle drop fueled spectacle.

Wolf of Wall Street is pretty much Bottled ID, and in a way that only Scorsese could pull off.
Once more we have a film where the main characters NOT cool guys to be emulated, but a bunch of people (mostly guys) missed the point anyway.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Scorsese give Jordan Belfort a much cooler biopic than he deserves, the whole thing is electric. This film is toxic masculinity and greed run amok, and there’s no denying the character of Jordan Belfort by the end.
 
His story perfectly encapsulates the similarities (and intermingling between substances) between Greed and Drug Addiction. Greed as an addiction itself.

Out of all of the stories that Scorsese has told that go like this: Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Casino.. with the rise and fall of Toxic Masculinity Wolf of Wall Street is the hardest not to get a bit lost in.

The highs really are highs, and because of the way our legal system is designed, even his lows.. it is not as low as for bit players in his story.

But, when you see the real Jordan Belfort on Fox Business or CNBC desperately trying to cling to the shred of relevancy, like say trying to co-opt the Gamestop/Wallstreetbets movement outlined by Dumb Money later this month, it brings you down to Earth.

As far as the movie, it is a shot of pure adrenaline covering an awful person leading a pack (yes, pack) of other awful people stripmining a resource that happens to be the American People.

It also gave us the first super-high profile A-list appearance of Margot Robbie who some people incorrectly dismissed as eye-candy.

Jonah Hill is also great here as an incestuous drug addicted creep, channeling Joe Pesci to DiCaprio’s DeNiro and constant reminder that 99.99% of people who tried to live that lifestyle would look like that rather than Leonardo DiCaprio.

It is deeply hilarious, sardonic, intense, cynical and Scorsese manages to play with expectations in relation to his own previous movies and filmmaking language to make something that shocks the viewer into paying attention to this kind of financial malfeasance in a way we haven’t quite seen before. A bent telling as a pseudo aspirational farce, and a great repeated example of interpretation vs. reality. Just don’t miss the end or you’ll go away thinking it is a completely different movie.