Walk into your bathroom and turn on the shower. When it’s a comfortable temperature, go in. Once your body is covered in water, turn the shower off, and exit into the bathroom. Grab a paper clip, and without drying off, walk to the nearest electrical outlet. Unwind the paper clip, and with a firm grip around its metallic coating, jam it into the electrical outlet. BBZHZHZZHZZBZBZZ!

This is the closest you’ll come to experiencing The Wolf of Wallstreet without paying the price of a ticket, but you’d be losing more than ample skin tissue and brain cells. The Wolf of Wallstreet is one of the best in Marty Scorsese’s long and classic career, and it’s one of the must-see pictures of 2013. It’s like getting shocked by electricity for three hours, and it’s gunna be a classic. Maybe because it’s so stylistically similar to Goodfellas, I don’t know, but Scorsese hasn’t seemed this comfortable and confident in 20 years. His agile camera whips around offices and restaurants, often with perfectly punctuated cuts that give the film a writhing kinetic energy that sustains itself ‘till the credits roll. The film is bolstered by a brilliantly buzzy cast, lead by Dicaprio and with supporting players Jonah Hill (the best he’s ever been), Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, and newcomer Margot Robbie, who gives a surprisingly dynamic performance. We’ve never seen Dicaprio more energized or magnetic; it’s easy to call his the best performance of the year. It’s as though he’s had years of training, with each picture subsequently getting farther and farther from his comfort zone so he could unleash the full range of his talent. It’s surprisingly physically demanding, particularly in a scene involving lem(m)ons. You’ll see. The Wolf of Wallstreet is hilarious, heart-accelerating fun with well-struck emotional depth, and half of all the credit is to Leo. If there’s any justice, he’ll walk away with his long-coming statue, but there isn’t.





So, Wolf follows Jordan Belfort, a crooked stock market guru who, after the historic stock market crash on Black Monday, started out in penny stock pink slips and slowly built a mega empire. Like The Social Network did in constructing a web (no pun intended) of complex data algorithms and code, Wolf makes stock market parlay about the why rather than the how, and the consequences that follow. This is smart, and helps give Wolf a razor sharp focus on the film’s real content, which happens to be three hours of wild debauchery that has incited theater walk outs, pans by major critics, and even the heckling of Scorsese at a WGA screening by an Academy Member. Pornographic, they call it. Offensive to the senses. Others label it as indulgent, referring to the thick three hour running time. It’s inarguable that Wolf is designed as uproarious fun, unapologetic entertainment at the expense of the wolf-eaten prey. Unapologetic, they say, is the problem. A guest piece in LA Weekly condemns Wolf for not sufficiently demonizing Jordan Belfort as the crook he really was, giving a personal testimony to how his actions have had heartbreaking consequences. In real life, as well as in the film, Belfort galloped so furiously towards endless riches, riches that allowed for a lifestyle of hedonistic mayhem to continue unhindered for years, that he left a multitude of victims in his wake. A similar controversy arose earlier this year with Michael Bay’s real-world based Pain and Gain, which was similarly accused white-washing.