The "last movie I saw" thread

[Commando]

I saw Saving Mr. Banks. I really liked it- good night, what a script!

[MarkGrace]

I heard one guy say this movie is up there w Goodfellas. Kind of doubt it, but I bet I see it soon.

Which one? Wolf or Hustle? Hustle is getting a lot of comparisons to Goodfellas and other Scorcese works, but don't be fooled, it's Fauxcese.

[Commando]

Wolf, actually.

[UVACoug]

No Jean dujardin nudity is a bummer. Come on, I would think at least you'd have my back on this one!

Not my type. Leo is nude though, so maybe that will change your mind.

[MarkGrace]

I am not judging the activities, but the absurdity that a Wall Street employer to have numerous debaucheries occurring at the workplace made me scratch my head. You'd have one complaint and down would go the enterprise.

He wasn't just a up and comer, he analyzed perhaps the psychology of greed to steal from people. However, he knew the stocks he pushed were worthless, outright fraud. Up and comers might "bend" the truth, but they don't manufacture falsehood. That is why the portrayal was one of caricature. I suppose the lack of legitimate accent also made me feel the acting was forced. The difference for me in a strong acting performance if it feels forced, such as, "look at me, I'm acting" versus a work which makes one believe that character is real. I like anti-heroes and the like too.

To me, there was no subtlety. It so black and white debauchery. In my encounters with such worlds, it is much more nuanced, camouflaged and subject to interpretation. There was no room for misinterpretation. The SEC would likely have had everybody in handcuffs in nothing flat.

Just read an interview with Jordan Belfort, and while I haven't seen the movie yet, based on his claims of what occurred the events depicted may not be that outlandish.

Belfort was convicted of scamming more than $100 million throughout the nineties to finance a hedonistic paradise. Stratton Oakmont, the firm he started, became a kind of cult. “It should have been Sodom and Gomorrah,” Belfort would later write. “After all, it wasn’t every firm that sported hookers in the basement, drug dealers in the parking lot, exotic animals in the boardroom, and midget-tossing competitions on Fridays.”

He spent some of his fortune on megamansions, only to have the government seize them. He purchased his own helicopter, only to almost crash it on his front lawn while flying it stoned. He owned a 166-foot yacht built for Coco Chanel, only to tell the captain to steer it into a storm and nearly kill himself, his friends, and his crew before the ship sank in the Mediterranean. Even with the hundreds of prostitutes he claimed to have hired, Belfort struggled to perform. He was taking so many drugs that his penis, as he writes, had taken the form of a “No. 2 pencil eraser.”

Consider the following list of ingredients he packed inside “a brown leather Louis Vuitton shower bag” on a trip to Czechoslovakia, according to his memoir: “a half-ounce of sinsemilla, 60 pharmaceutical Quaaludes, some bootleg uppers, some bootleg downers, a sandwich bag full of cocaine, a dozen hits of ecstasy, and then the safe stuff: a vial of Xanax, a vial of morphine, some Valiums and Restorils and Somas and Vicodins, and some Ambiens and Ativans and Klonopins, as well as a half-consumed pack of Heineken and a mostly consumed bottle of *Macallan’s to wash things down.”

http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/jordan-belfort-real-wolf-of-wall-street.html

It's a pretty entertaining read. Dude goes to prison and his cellmate is Tommy Chong from the Cheech & Chong movies. He rolled on his partners and associates, and only spent just over two years in prison. The FBI agent who spent six years building the case against him was so pissed about the light sentence that he considered moving out of the white-collar crime unit.

Does The Wolf of Wall Street exalt Jordan Belfort’s excesses?
Belfort and friends do many, many terrible things over the course of the movie. They are id incarnate, seemingly incapable of saying no to any drug or car or boat or helicopter or piece of tail that crosses their paths. At film’s end, Belfort briefly attends white collar prison and is ejected back into the world as a motivational speaker, ready to sucker a new group of schmoes. There’s a belief by some critics (and presumably some audience members) that the film glorifies Belfort’s actions and doesn’t provide anything even close to a comeuppance. In the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek writes, “One hour of that boorishness would be more than enough; by the end of the second, you might be wondering if anyone, including Scorsese, is ever going to call these guys on their self-absorbed idiocy.” But as Criticwire’s Sam Adams points out in the headline to his piece, “Real life hasn’t punished Jordan Belfort. So why should The Wolf of Wall Street?”

http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/does-the-wolf-of-wall-street-exalt-excess.html

[Dwight Schr-ute]

Took the kids and saw Frozen this afternoon. No nudity. Great songs. (So I've been told.) I really enjoyed the film though. Disney is really growing up these days. I wondered if this was the first Disney film where the man didn't come save the day. But after a little thought, I guess there wasn't any love interest in Brave either. I've notice that the whole depiction of evil has also evolved from a specific being into more of an internal struggle against greed or fear.


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[Donuthole]

Took the kids and saw Frozen this afternoon. No nudity. Great songs. (So I've been told.) I really enjoyed the film though. Disney is really growing up these days. I wondered if this was the first Disney film where the man didn't come save the day. But after a little thought, I guess there wasn't any love interest in Brave either. I've notice that the whole depiction of evil has also evolved from a specific being into more of an internal struggle against greed or fear.


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Damn right you have.

[HuskyFreeNorthwest]

Just read an interview with Jordan Belfort, and while I haven't seen the movie yet, based on his claims of what occurred the events depicted may not be that outlandish.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/jordan-belfort-real-wolf-of-wall-street.html

It's a pretty entertaining read. Dude goes to prison and his cellmate is Tommy Chong from the Cheech & Chong movies. He rolled on his partners and associates, and only spent just over two years in prison. The FBI agent who spent six years building the case against him was so pissed about the light sentence that he considered moving out of the white-collar crime unit.


http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/does-...lt-excess.html

I started the book about 2-3 years ago and was really into it, then just lost the book. I found it when we moved and started over and just finishing. Very entertaining read.

[MarkGrace]

Wolf, actually.

Hmm. Just saw a Goodfellas comp here:

2. The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese
It's not unfair to note that all Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter have done is build Goodfellas around Jordan Belfort's memoir of a financial-industry douche bag. But all the unhinged glorifications of Goodfellas are played here as epic farce. The film constructs a circus around lawless clowns, the most flamboyant of them played by Leonardo DiCaprio doing his most gonzo acting ever. This is the funniest American movie of the year and the most dangerous Scorsese has been in more than two decades. The wolf isn't Belfort — it's big, bad Marty.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/95932/my-top-10-best-favorite-movies-of-2013

[Green Monstah]

I heard that Anchorman 2 was horrible, but I LOL'd several times during the movie. There was an African American family next to us that didn't laugh during the dinner scene at all, so I felt compelled to contain my laughter...not easy.

[TripletDaddy]

I heard one guy say this movie is up there w Goodfellas. Kind of doubt it, but I bet I see it soon.

Which one? Wolf or Hustle? Hustle is getting a lot of comparisons to Goodfellas and other Scorcese works, but don't be fooled, it's Fauxcese.

well this should settle any of the dime store movie critic debate. Wolf was written as a companion piece to goodfellas, according to martin scorsese.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1719638/wolf-of-wall-street-writer-disturbing-details.jhtml

[old_gregg]

anchorman was about what i expected until the last half hour or so. the gratuitous cameos were obnoxious. american hustle was awesome. bradley cooper does dislikeable pretty darn well, and louis ck was great. it needed more jennifer lawrence and less amy adams (who was looking pretty haggard), however.

[Green Monstah]

anchorman was about what i expected until the last half hour or so. the gratuitous cameos were obnoxious. american hustle was awesome. bradley cooper does dislikeable pretty darn well, and louis ck was great. it needed more jennifer lawrence and less amy adams (who was looking pretty haggard), however.

Agreed that the last 30 mins of anchorman was ridiculous, but I don't regret going.

[YOhio]

Walking with Dinosaurs is the best movie ever if you're a five-year old boy.


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[HuskyFreeNorthwest]

Walking with Dinosaurs is the best movie ever if you're a five-year old boy.


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We saw it in person so I told the kids no movie.