THE WOLF OF WALL STREET DEFRAUDS FILMVIEWERS
A biopic of Jordan Belfort (played by Antonio DeCaprio), The Wolf of Wall Street portrays the rise of a onetime Bronx-born Wall Street neophyte working for a firm until its demise in the 1987 stock market crash to his rise as a major stock market player, his FBI investigation, judicial sentencing for securities fraud, and a new career as a motivational speaker. The story was already vaguely the basis for the film Boiler Room (2000), but director Martin Scorsese decided to make a version much closer to the facts, as provided in two best-selling memoirs by Belfort. In the process, however, the filmviewer is subjected to three hours of the lifestyle of Wall Street millionaires—enough drugs, profanity, and sex to earn an R rating that could even achieve an X rating if that letter were used any more. The message is somewhat different from Capital, where the rich love to rob the poor. In The Wolf of Wall Street, stockbrokers working for Belfort’s Stratford Oakmont firm give fraudulent but persuasive sales pitches to those who have plenty of money to invest. The rich are then robbed by paying commissions to stockbrokers who in turn become rich, with little obvious harm to the poor. But film producers are naïve: Muslim militants who believe that the United States represents the Great Satan, where greed trumps human values, will be delighted for the opportunity to use The Wolf of Wall Street as a recruitment film. MH
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY IS REVEALED AGAIN
A short story by James Thurber has now inspired two films, the latest directed by Ben Stiller, who plays the title role. Stiller, who often plays a shy guy whose antics are intended to amuse, is aptly cast in the role of a person in charge of the archives of negatives used throughout the many pages of Life magazine over the years. The demise of Life is the background story. The main plot revolves around Mitty’s dilemma: He wants a girlfriend, so he subscribes to eHarmony.com to find a way to give a “wink” to a coworker, only to discover that she has blocked all winks. Meanwhile, a photo destined for the last cover of Life is missing, so he gets the courage to track down photographer Sean O’Connell (played by Sean Penn), which means stepping out of his humdrum life to visit Greenland, Iceland, and Afghanistan (though filming is only in Iceland) in pursuit of the photo negative. He “zones out” (daydreams) from time to time to give him that courage. What little politics there is in the film is about being held prisoner at LAX because he on a “do not fly” list for his itinerary. Instead, the second version of the classic 1947 film starring Danny Kaye is transformed from an international conspiracy into a feel-good movie for those losing their jobs in 2007. MH