Knee-jerk review: "The Wolf of Wall Street"

1. Maybe you like to spend 165 minutes with despicable, amoral, drug-addicted thieves.  Turns out we do not.
2. You may have heard about all of the f-bombs.  It's true.  This is one supremely foul-mouthed movie
3. There's no denying Leonardo DiCaprio's charisma.  He's magnetic, even when playing someone this unlikable. 
4. It's all just a little... much.  There's no reason this movie should run longer than two hours.  Some scenes go on too long, others serve no clear purpose.  The same beats get hit again and again and again.  One critic argued that director Martin Scorsese was making the movie excessive to echo the movie's theme of excess.  Yeah... we don't buy that.  There's an arrogant indulgence to the movie, a mistaken belief that every little moment is gold.
5. There's a definite GoodFellas vibe here.  You have the period costumes and music, the extravagant rise and fall of a criminal, the R-rated vice, the documentary element of learning about a strange subculture.  You even have the hero thwarted by a dimwitted sidekick to whom he feels a foolish loyalty.  Casino used the same template.  A kind of trilogy, maybe?
6. The better movie may have been the crackling 10-minute scene with (a very gaunt) Matthew McConaughey shamelessly explaining the cruel truth of the stockbroker business to DiCaprio...
7. ...or the darkly comic sequence involving FBI wiretaps and "lemon" quaaludes.  That's a great bit full of twists and outrageous imagery, though the film ruins the fun - probably intentionally - with an uncomfortable shot of a little girl watching her father stumble around high on drugs.  Not cool.
8. You ever hear of something called penny stocks before?
9. Strange how the many many supporting characters make so little impact.  They're mostly interchangeable.
10.  This is becoming a real pet peeve of ours: movies that hold all of the titles until the end.  This seems pretentious somehow, like the movie is so urgent and important and special that it can't waste any time on something so common as titles.  Here, you get the Paramount logo and then the movie just starts.  It's not until after the last fade-out that we get "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Directed by Martin Scorsese" and all the rest.  Stop it, Hollywood.  Just stop.  Quit trying to be cute and different.
11. It's an interesting moment when the camera shows an audience of "regular people" paying rapt attention to DiCaprio's instructional bluster about how to sell.  This may be the film's most subtle moment, a suggestion that as awful as that world of lying, stealing stockbrokers may be, we all want the secrets to wealth.  We want to be just like them.  And, perhaps, if given the chance, we would be.  Not sure if we agree with that or not.
12. It didn't win any Academy Awards.  It didn't deserve any.  Too harsh?
13. A disappointment.

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