{"id":1196,"date":"2013-12-30T12:26:02","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T12:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/30\/wolves-on-wall-street-martin-scorcese-and-where-we-are-now\/"},"modified":"2014-03-15T19:49:17","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T19:49:17","slug":"wolves-on-wall-street-martin-scorcese-and-where-we-are-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/30\/wolves-on-wall-street-martin-scorcese-and-where-we-are-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wolf of Wall Street: Greed, Sex, Cruelty and Martin Scorsese"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">I understand about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0000217\/?ref_=nv_sr_2\" target=\"_blank\">Martin Scorsese<\/a>. \u00a0I really do. \u00a0From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=4&amp;ved=0CE0QFjAD&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rogerebert.com%2Freviews%2Fgreat-movie-mean-streets-1973&amp;ei=Asm_UqjyF8v2oATcz4H4BQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNFV_jZkfjWbWR8PXoWpE8IsHZQXaQ&amp;bvm=bv.58187178,d.cGU\" target=\"_blank\">Mean Streets <\/a>to <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0075314\/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_44\">Taxi Driver<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerebert.com\/reviews\/great-movie-raging-bull-1980\" target=\"_self\">Raging Bull<\/a> to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0099685\/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_31\" target=\"_self\">Goodfellas<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0979432\/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_8\">Boardwalk Empire<\/a><\/strong>, much of his work has been dark and violent. \u00a0Decent people don&#8217;t show up very often and when they do, they seldom prevail, so when we went to see <a href=\"www.thewolfofwallstreet.com\" target=\"_blank\">The Wolf of Wall Street <\/a>this weekend, I wasn&#8217;t expecting a pleasant experience. \u00a0I was not expecting what I got, either.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking. \u00a0After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something. \u00a0<\/span> <\/p>\n<p><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iszwuX1AK6A\" height=\"420\" width=\"480\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">It was excess beyond anything that words could describe; images, sadly, are more successful. \u00a0There&#8217;s nowhere to hide and there are so many moments where we wish we could.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">I was a broadcast producer in the and 80&#8217;s and covered the excesses of that time. \u00a0I knew that, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/2666.The_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities\" target=\"_self\">Bonfire of Vanities<\/a>, Tom Wolfe was demonstrating his skills as a reporter as well as a novelist. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">Even so, the rank, brittle ugliness of this film, of these people and of the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/entertainment.time.com\/2013\/12\/26\/wolf-wall-street-true-story\/\" target=\"_self\">much of the story really<\/a> happened turned what we know into what we wish we didn&#8217;t. \u00a0The criticism by <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.laweekly.com\/informer\/2013\/12\/wolf_of_wall_street_prousalis.php?\" target=\"_self\">the daughter of one of its main characters<\/a>, that it glamorizes the Belfort universe and makes them some sorts of rakish sweetie pies wasn&#8217;t what I saw. The are all reprehensible from first to last.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 11pt;\">Of course the film wouldn&#8217;t have had the impact it did if it hadn&#8217;t been so well-made. \u00a0Its impact is indisputable. \u00a0Even so &#8211; maybe his next undertaking, after all this darkness, will bring us the Scorsese behind <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0077838\/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_42\" target=\"_blank\">The Last Waltz<\/a>\u00a0and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0298810\/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_20\" target=\"_blank\">Concert for New York City<\/a>. \u00a0After all, they say music tames the savage beast, and in this film, he certainly unleashed a hell of a creature.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking.  After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something.  The Wolf of Wall Street<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5,6,27,28,7,29],"tags":[38,36,41,33,32,30,37,34,39,35,40,31],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-boom","category-books","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-film","category-life","category-women","tag-boardwalk-empire","tag-bonfire-of-the-vanities","tag-greed","tag-jordan-belfort","tag-leonardo-di-caprio","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-mean-streets","tag-penny-stocks","tag-raging-bull","tag-the-80s","tag-the-last-waltz","tag-the-wolf-of-wall-street"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-ji","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1869,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/1869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}