THE WIND RISES (Four Stars)

Japan: Hayao Miyazaki (Disney)

“The wind rises; we must try to sing.”

                                 — Paul Valery

Miyazaki‘s The Wind Rises. A lovely name. A lovely film.  A poem to flight, as soaring and lyrical as  those of the sometimes heart-piercing French writer/artist/pilot Antoine de St. Exupery.

In Wind, we’re in a long-vanished Japan, in a world made of drawings, and the artist is a sort of god — a boyish god named Jiro, who wears glasses and adores biplanes and dirigibles and lovely old flying machines. Jiro’s  line, the pen in his hand, brings machines alive. And the hand of Miyazaki, his pen and line, brings a whole lost world and its lost people to life.

World War I has ended. The earth quakes. Jiro dreams of flight, but he is too near-sighted to fly. An Italian airplane designer named Caproni inspires him. His friend Honjo walks with him, joking. There is a girl who paints, named Nahoko. She bends from a balcony in the sunlight and laughs. There’s an angry goblin of  a boss named Kurokawa. There are Germans,  Nazis, obsessed with war, with mastery, with the best way to kill many people. Bad men  and bullies, says a man named Castorp — with smiling eyes and a huge hook nose.

The hills are green. The sky is blue. The clouds billow like white sails full of wind. Down below, Jiro walks in the tall grass, in the sunlight, with Nahoko. And Jiro and Honjo design planes. Jiro draws so beautifully…

The drawings come alive. The pilots fly and soar.  War breaks out. The Bombs drop. There is a drop of blood on the pillow. Love and war.  Flight. The pictures move. The wind rises. WWII.  Storms of fire lie beyond the clouds. Riders soaring in the beautiful, damned sky. The boy in the glasses become the man who draws planes, on the ground below.

All of it is Jiro’s dream, Miyazaki’s drawing: clouds piled high in the sky, masses of white, like heaps of ice cream, the planes scooping through them. The Earth far below. The ruins piled up. Death falling. A dream…of Jiro, of Caproni, of Nahoko, of the sky, of the planes and, behind that rim of clouds, of what will be Pearl Harbor, with Jiro’s Zero fighters flying far above. The Zero fighters, the A6M, designed by Jiro. The planes. The glasses.  The waves of grass. The wreckage. The clouds. The drop of blood. The Sky.

“I just wanted to make something beautiful,” said the real-life  Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical expert who designed some of those planes, the best of them maybe, so they could fly perfectly on their missions of death.  That strange and disturbing remark  of Horikoshi‘s was the thing, said Miyazaki, that made him want to make this movie — supposedly the last feature film by one of the world’s great masters of the animated film. So he wrote and drew a manga, a Japanese comic book, about Jiro — not the true story of what really happened between the two World Wars, but a poem, a romance.  And then he turned this manga, this poem, into this movie. His last movie he says and his last poem: the last animated feature of Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote, drew and brought to life Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Most of those films were stories about people and children who flew, or who explored, or who entered a dream world — adventurous little girls or boys (more often girls), or spirits or a mustachioed pig of an Italian star pilot named Porco Rosso. They were drawn and animated largely in the old-fashioned way, with lines that emphasize the paradoxical flatness and depth of Miyazaki’s tableaux and compositions, lines that make each character, however small, look like a work of art, or part of a great, beautiful drawing  — those memorable movable lines that define Miyazaki’s style, which almost eschews the rounded contours, three-dimensional depth or the quick pace and cutting that define the dominant feature cartoon style today.

Miyazaki’s cartoons are resolutely old-fashioned, unabashedly artistic, defiantly slow, often dazzlingly pictorial, heart-breaking, exciting  and whimsical. They are pictures that move, full of drawings that live. I would rather watch one of them than 90% of the cartoons, or movies, being made today. So would many other people and children, I suspect, which is probably why John Lasseter, the generous, brilliant, warm-spirited head of Pixar and Disney, is trying so determinedly to give us all the chance.   `

Lasseter has packaged The Wind Rises lovingly and given it a wonderful English-speaking cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the eternally boyish Jiro, Emily Blunt as the tragic Nahoko, John Krasinski as  the lively, witty Honjo, master musical player  Mandy Patinkin as Hattori, Martin Short as the bumptious little Kurokawa (a fuming little mad elf of a guy, so he couldn’t possibly be inspired by the six-foot-plus-tall and very anti-war Akira Kurosawa), German cineaste/wanderer  Werner Herzog as  Castorp and Stanley Tucci as the real-life designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, Jiro’s youthful idol. (I wasn’t able to see the subtitled Japanese-language version with Japanese actors, and I hope Disney includes it with their English language version in the DVD.) Miyazaki’s script, a fine sturdy one, was inspired by Horikoshi’s life (which it considerably alters) and also by the novel “The Wind Rises” by Tatsui Hori, who took his title from the French writer Paul Valery’s line quoted above and who, like the fictional Nahoko, had tuberculosis. The music, as so often for a Miyazaki film, is a poppish lyrical score by Joe Hisaishi, whose sprightly melodies  and dancing rhythms fit Miyazaki as well as Nino Rota’s fit Fellini.

.The movie’s politics have been questioned, wrongly, I believe — but understandably, considering the sympathy that Miyazaki shows to  his Japanese WWII era countrymen  who were also America‘s old WWII Japanese combatants, and especially to the man who designed the planes that struck without warning and rained down death on our boys at Pearl Harbor.  I think it’s clear that The Wind Rises is a movie made by an artist opposed to war. But just as the anti-war, anti-militarist, anti-nuclear bomb Kurosawa could find wild, brawling, breath-taking  beauty in the extraordinary battle scenes he created for war movies like Seven Samurai and  The Hidden Fortress, so Miyazaki finds disturbing  beauty and artfulness in the creation of the Zero fighter planes, the carriers of death that Jiro draws and makes possible — and he finds beauty as well in the wind that rises, in the earth that shakes, and in the people who persevere as their world falls apart. But not in the bombs that fall and kill, or the monsters who unleash them.

I hope that Miyazaki’s “retirement,“ like his retirements before, and many of Ingmar Bergman’s, proves  prematurely announced. Three of his last movies — Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises — have been very ambitious, staggering really, especially since he plans the films, writes the scripts, and does much of the drawing himself. But not every work of art has to be an epic. Miyazaki could make a little film, like his little heroines, made with large talent and a large heart, which he has shown repeatedly. We would welcome it, I think. Anyway…All our praise to Miyazaki for a film, and a life, well made. That war, thank God, is over. That drawing is done.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Four Stars)

U.S.: Martin Scorsese, 2013

“An idea came to me. The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, to write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any lies then.”

—Ben Hecht, describing the genesis of his classic 1927 gangster movie,  Underworld. in “A Child of the Century.”

Ben Hecht

I. Greed: The Director’s Cut 

The brouhaha over Martin Scorsese‘s new movie The Wolf of Wall Street — accused by its detractors not only of being a bad movie but, it seemed, of being politically  toxic and a damaging role model for the youth of America — strikes me as the usual Oscar season raging overkill. It’s exaggerated, of course, perhaps because Scorsese is so much admired by so many film writers, that a few of the commentators who dislike  Wolf on Wall Street (about a fourth of the major critics, it seems) feel they have to bash it twice as hard as usual,  as if they had to all but destroy the show, and bury it with contempt, to make their point  — all the better to open the way for some other worthier contender, like ay, one of the other Best Picture nominees: Gravity,  American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Nebraska,  Her, Philomena, or Dallas Buyer’s Club.  (All excellent films, by the way.)

But Scorsese apparently can take it. So, probably, can his movie.

Scorsese is 71 years old —  but you’d probably never guess it from watching the rousing, furious Wolf of Wall Street. By rights,  the one-time angry young  cineaste of 1976’s Taxi Driver and 1980’s Raging Bull should have graduated to a less contentious role as universally respected elder  movie statesman, or grand old man of the cinema. But maybe he’s just not ready. There‘s not a whole lot that’s conventionally grand-old-mannish  in Wolf of Wall Street. which stars Leonardo DiCaprio (superb in the role) as the notorious brokerage founder, investment counselor and ex-stock market slickster Jordan Belfort. Based on Belfort‘s tell-all memoirs about high times, crimes and high finance in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it’s packed with onscreen nudity and sex and drug use, four letter words and illegal or reprehensible behavior, and it keeps roaring along  on screen for almost three hours like an express train loaded with orgiastic clowns.

Watching Wolf, you get the feeling Scorsese hasn’t aged much or been tamed, that he’s gotten wiser, but  hasn’t  lost a  step since his 1973 breakthrough film Mean Streets — that  classic bad boys movie that began with the big-beat hammering  of The Ronettes’ ”Be My Baby” on the soundtrack and ended with gunshots and screams and chaos on the street in New York City’s Little Italy.

Mean Streets was a shocker, and so is The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s also  a brilliant, unsparing look at a deviant underworld: stripping bare not just part of the cast but also the corrupt stock deals and jaw-droppingly self-destructive life-styles that Belfort, and others in his company and elsewhere, were involved in: mass misbehavior that apparently ran  rampant  in those years (and may still) — and that also may have helped bring on the 2008 Bush era bank crash. Now, coming sixteen years after Wall Street, that blistering Oliver Stone expose’ in which Michael Douglas’s natty corporate raider Gordon Gekko coined the mantra, “Greed is good,”  and three years after Stone’s and Douglas’s somewhat disappointing 2010 sequel — and after a batch of corrupt-financial-world thrillers like The Boiler Room (also inspired by Belfort’s shenanigans) and Margin Call and Arbitrage  — The Wolf of Wall Street, like many another Scorsese movie, manages to top them all. It goes the furthest and it’s the most entertaining and damning.

It’s a movie that seemingly embraces the darkness, the better to expose and eviscerate the rot underneath it. Crammed with  character and incident, and boiling with life and energy, The Wolf of Wall Street is top-level Scorsese: a first-class modern neo-noir, a killer comedy, a terrific piece of social drama (and social criticism), and an actor’s dream with a dream of a cast.  It has its flaws — scenes that run on a bit too long, cynicism that’s sometimes overplayed.  But it’s a hell of a show, and, despite the thrashings it’s taken from some  smart critics and disgruntled audiences, it was,  I thought, the best picture of  a very good year — 2013.

II. An Unsentimental Education

Wolf of Wall Street’s knowing screenplay –which, at its best,  recalls the wit, style and ferocious candor of the Ben Hecht of “A Child of the Century” and “The Front Page”  — was written by  Terence Winter, whose  TV credentials include both “Boardwalk Empire“ and “The Sopranos.” Winter knows how to humanize criminals without glossing over their crimes, and that‘s what he does here. Changing names and fictionalizing some of the story from Belfort‘s two books, he  seamlessly weaves it all together –with DiCaprio-as-Belfort our super-inside narrator and expert guide into the financial underworld. (He functions here like Ray Liotta’s chatty mob witness Henry Hill in Goodfellas).

“Belfort” is a sham, a deceiver, a confidence man — but, in the movie, a lot of his story seems convincing because of the unfiltered-sounding way it pours out, because it’s so self-damning, and because we know that some of it is backed up by the real-life evidence. (Belfort, found guilty of securities fraud and money laundering, served 22 months in federal prison in Nevada– his cellmate was comedian Tommy Chong — and he still owes millions in victim reparations.)

Scorsese’s movie, which tells a crook’s story from a crook’s point of view (and a drug addict‘s story from a drug addict‘s), seems to me just this side of a masterpiece. It’s an almost defiantly provocative film, but not really a non-judgmental one — though it isn‘t obviously moralistic. Scorsese and Winter show these financial outlaws having a high old time and debauching to the max because that’s the story. And they tell us that Belfort got an over-light punishment in a country club prison, because that’s the story too. They stick to Belfort’s point of view, because he’s the primary witness, and  because they want us to be  trapped with him, in his life of addiction and swindling and greed and paranoia, surrounded by the forces that will bring him down.

In the movie, Belfort only seems to be “free“ during his stormy rise in the financial world — as, with obscene gusto and uncensored dirty-mouth profanity,  he and his buddies proceed to con their investors and the government and the regulators. Then they have huge parties, jam-packed with  hookers and strippers and sex and booze and a blizzard of drugs (cocaine, quaaludes, xanax, morphine, et. al.), and they crash their expensive cars, and trash their expensive rooms and fall out of their expensive helicopters and wreck their expensive yachts, and keep landing and laughing (for a while) on their expensive asses.

It’s funny, sometimes very funny. But it’s also sad and horrifying and sometimes  infuriating. There are scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street that are classics of comedy: I’d include Belfort’s zonked-out vintage quaalude attack at the country club, with blitzed crony/lieutenant Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill, superb too) on the phone. And I‘d also include the bizarre lunch seminar by Jordan’s snaky L. F. Rothschild mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, also superb); and the split personality antics of Jordan’s volatile accountant dad “Mad Max” Belfort, played by Meathead-turned-auteur Rob Reiner (yeah, superb). There are other comic or partly comic scenes — like the wild parties, and Jordan’s morale-boosting super-sell speeches to his troops — that are so filled with smart writing, cinematic bravura  and wonderful acting that they stay with you long after the movie is over, though I can understand why some people don’t want them to. Still, if it happened — if  a tenth of it happened — and more than a tenth probably did — hell, a lot of it probably did –we’d be crazy to ignore it.

To put us though it: That’s the modus operandi of  Scorsese in his great crime movies Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed — and now, in The Wolf of Wall Street, which is a different kind of gangster movie, and a different (and in some ways more disturbing) kind of crime story.  DiCaprio-as-Belfort ushers us into this  hedonist’s  world, full of greed-crazed creeps, with a conman‘s  semi-automatic congeniality — welcoming, affable. We hear his thoughts and reminiscences throughout the movie and he often strides on camera in the midst of a cluster of  other actors, and starts talking to us, like the big star doing his big numbers in a Broadway stage musical (‘Oh, we got trouble…Right here in River City…”). Handsome and spiffy and appallingly self-confident, the onscreen Belfort is a glamorous movie sinner whose “Hollywood redemption”  never comes, but who knows a lot of great, dirty stories and tells them here.

Those stories come pouring out. This is a long movie, but not at all a slow or boring one. We see Jordan first getting a start-up job with the glossy investment house,  L. F. Rothschild — and getting his broker’s license right before Rothschild crashed on the infamous Black Monday, October 19, 1987 (in the same year that Stone’s Wall Street was released). And  we see Jordan later start his own company — after initially working for another of those bargain basement penny stock brokerages called a “boiler room.”

There’s a memorable star-is-born scene where Jordan, quite a talker, stuns his boiler room co-workers with his surefire on-the-phone salesmanship, the glib gab of a born con-man. Later, when Jordan opens his own office, he brands it with the conservative-sounding moniker “Stratton Oakmont” to fool the suckers, staffs it with guys (and a few gals)  on the make, including some of his old boiler room colleagues and contacts and some local pot dealers  and turns it  into an orgy-parlor  of excess and  con-manship — and a greed that definitely wasn’t good, and became all-embracing. The movie follows this slick little prick all the way from crash to smash — all the way up (or down) to international swindling and money-laundering, a billion in ill-gotten assets and heavy-duty FBI investigations, with a lot of cocaine-fueled sex romps and drug-bashes in between.

But The Wolf of Wall Street is no celebration of rampaging misbehavior, or of Belfort, as some reviewers seem to think. Instead, it’s a critical (but not messagey) mix of dark comedy and bare-knuckle drama about the crazy excesses, the insider finagling and rock-star life-styles, of these young Wall Street wolves. And it pretty well skewers them and skewers the deeply flawed, “liberated”  system in which they thrived:  the smart-ass kids and hustlers like Belfort who fast-talk their way into becoming millionaires (and more), while still in their 20s.  It’s a cautionary tale about how money corrupts and absolutely outrageous money corrupts absolutely — and  outrageously.

Over and over, Scorsese and his actors and collaborators show us the vile behavior and comically insane consequences of untrammeled greed and money-madness. Detractors will say that’s what’s wrong with the movie; that it keeps repeating itself, that it‘s obsessed itself with money and hedonism. But Wolf of Wall Street, like Goodfellas or the Godfather movies,  is also an operatic film (as Todd McCarthy pointed out in his top-notch Hollywood Reporter review), and, in this case, the operatic wickedness and self-destructiveness of some of the characters, and the operatic rendition and repetition of themes and motifs is part of its power.

Scorsese shows us Jordan — at first a seemingly likable smart kid with a Leo smile that’s just a little too easy — and how his morals dissolve and his addictions grow thanks to a system that was rotten when he got there. That off-the-edge attitude is exemplified by the  aforementioned Mark Hanna and his  bleary-eyed lunch lecture on the work benefits of jerking off at least twice a work-day and snorting lots of cocaine to keep an edge. McConaughey, whom  you could call the movie’s  “ingestment counselor” (sorry) is sharp and funny and smooth and he makes hard drug addiction and constant orgiastic behavior, for a moment, seem like sound and solid business strategies — and maybe for him, they are.

Jordan puts all these lessons to bad use, when, post-Rothschild,  he invents the phony-baloney-but-oh-so-toney Stratton Oakmont brand (their TV ad emblem is a lion wandering purposefully through some staid offices, filled with busy-looking actor/brokers). He also recruits his band of  party-hearty hucksters  — headed by the idolatrous, toothy Donnie Azoff (maybe the ultimate Jonah Hill role). Donnie is the supreme  sidekick and supplier — both of them eventually juggling millions and ingesting so many illegal drugs  that one almost wonders why, by the end of the movie,  Jordan and Donnie aren’t crawling across the floor, drooling and babbling, minds totally blown. (Actually, of course, I’m kidding. They do crawl, hilariously, in  that now-famous fall-down-laughing country club-Lamborghini-quaaludes  sequence.)

We ‘re also privy to  the bad marriages of Jordan and his two very pretty, very cheated-on, “foxy” wives — the first,  the more likable and sympathetic (and dumped-on) Teresa Petrillo (Cristin Milioti, excellent), and then  his second, more-cold-blooded Naomi LaPaglia (played stunningly by Australian actress Margot Robbie). Are they treated fairly? The movie has been called  misogynistic by some,  and it’s true that this portrait of a rogue male‘s world could use more and better female characters. (So could lots of other movies.) But it’s also true that Wolf of Wall Street is portraying a largely misogynist world, and the onscreen piggish behavior here strikes me as not spectator sport or a sex fantasy, but savvy reportage about the behavior of assholes (male assholes) — and in any case, not something necessarily being endorsed or enjoyed by the movie.

If we cringe when one lady Stratton Oakmont employee gets her hair shaved at a wild office party, in return for enough money to get breast implants, well, we damn well should cringe. Actually, given the  astonishing selfishness, brutishness, boorishness  and mendacity of the Stratton Oakmont guys, I thought the women in this story came off better, if not always necessarily well. Teresa is one of the more sympathetic characters in the movie, and though Naomi may be cold and manipulative (like the men), by the end, she’s no doormat. She chops up Belfort pretty well in their last scene together. One of the distaff roles —Sandra Nelson in the admittedly brief part of  Forbes Magazine reporter “Aliya Farren”  — is also one of the few civilians in this movie who has Jordan‘s number.

III. New York, New York

The Wolf of Wall Street is another of Scorsese’s great, incendiary portraits of New York City (here, largely Long Island) at its worst and wildest, a city and region he de-romanticizes and de-fantasizes (but that he loves anyway), and that he recreates here with incandescent cine-realism and ravishing high style — thanks in good part to his ace collaborators Rodrigo Prieto (cinematographer), Bob Shaw (production designer), Sandy Powell (costume design), the magnificent Thelma Schoonmaker (editor) and a lot of others.

The movie is a visual-cinematic feast. It’s also a feast of the naturalistic, street-savvy New York-style acting we associate with directors like Kazan and Lumet, and with Method or Group actors like Brando and  Pacino and Lee J. Cobb and Eli Wallach, and independent actor-directors like John Cassavetes  and his company (Gena Rowlands, Gazzara, Falk, Cassel). The acting in Wolf  is mostly brilliant — and that brilliance comes not just from DiCaprio (who dominates the movie), but from the entire cast: the  many memorable speaking parts and the many pungent bits (like the seeming hundreds of Stratton Oakmont  employees, roaring and high-fiving in the movie’s boisterous crowd scenes) and the great  longer  central parts from Hill, McConaughey, Reiner, Robbie, Milioti, Jean Dujardin (as a smiling shark of  a Swiss banker), Joanna Lumley (as Jordan‘s cash-courier Aunt Emma, who wonders if he’s hitting on her), and — playing one of the few genuine good guys in this amoral world — Kyle Chandler (othe bad fathero f f The Spectacular Now) as the smart, incorruptible and underpaid FBI agent Patrick Denham. (You guessed it, superb. All of them.)

Most of these characters  are based on real people, and sometimes they even have real names — like Jordan Belfort and Mark Hanna and shoe designer Steve Madden. (The real Belfort pops up onscreen at the end as an Auckland Straight Line  seminar host.) But real or not, they’re all blazingly alive. That vitality and unbuttoned irreverence and wild humor is probably what draws Scorsese to these and the other bent or reprehensible characters in his movies (like the Mean Streets gang and the mob guys in Goodfellas) — not their overheated sex lives,  greed, brutality and  propensity for crime, but their furious energy and lack of inhibition and the gutter eloquence that makes them great characters, capable of inspiring great performances from these marvelous actors.

We can enjoy watching these crooks and opportunists  (some of us, at least ) not because we’re seduced by the deranged highs and corrosive excess of their ridiculously indulgent life-styles, or because we think “Damn! I want to get in on that action!“ but because the actors and actresses who play them are so much fun to watch — because of the soaring energy levels and heights of imagination  and invention these players hit: their fierce spontaneity, the way they tear into their roles, and all the wounding drama and outrageous humor they dig out of Belfort’s mad story and Winter’s explosive script. It’s also fun, of course, to see Belfort and the Stratton-Oakmont guys, after all their arrogant antics, get caught with their pants down..

IV. Wise Guys

After doing a splendid  job earlier this year  playing F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘s over-reaching Jazz Age romantic Jay Gatsby  in Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuously romantic  and controversial film of  Fitzgerald‘s “The Great Gatsby,“ Leonardo DiCaprio  plays his second top-notch self-made Long Island movie millionaire of 2013 in The Wolf of Wall Street — which is also brilliant, also sumptuous, also controversial, but not really romantic, even though it has DiCaprio, who can be a very romantic actor, as its star. (Titanic, anyone?),

Like De Niro, Keitel, Pesci, Ellen Burstyn, Jodie Foster and Daniel Day-Lewis in earlier days, DiCaprio has become a great acting vessel for Scorsese — as Brando and Cobb and James Dean and Jo Van Fleet were for Kazan, as Pacino and John Cazale were for Coppola and Lumet, as Rowlands and Falk and Gazzara were for Cassavetes. DiCaprio is more delicately handsome, more boyish than the other male stars on that Scorsese list. (Even though he’s near 40, you can call him “kid.”) But, like De Niro with “You talking to me?” in Taxi Driver or Pesci with “You think I’m funny? Do I amuse you?” in Goodfellas (both of which came out of rehearsal improvisations with the actors), DiCaprio can nail those big memorable eccentric scenes at which Scorsese excels. And he can nail them even when, thanks to Donnie Azoff’s quaaludes, some of Belfort’s best speeches are  incomprehensible gibberish.

Even granting the obvious similarities between the worlds of big moviemaking and of  big stock-trading, it’s not hard to figure out where Scorsese stands on these guys and on this life. He’s amused and entertained by them, stimulated by their energy and rebelliousness, and he may even like them in some divided way. (Certainly he likes them as movie characters.) But he knows that they’re mostly jerks on a road to nowhere, and that their lifestyles are madly destructive and that they’re dragging us and lots of other people and part of the economy down with them. (Other, less entertaining scoundrels are as well.) Scorsese makes that pretty obvious — especially near the end, when Belfort and his world start falling apart, just as Henry Hill‘s did in Goodfellas.

The sheer comic dynamism of the movie is a big part of  what makes a lot of it great. (For a very good analysis of The Wolf of Wall Street’s aesthetics, read Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker.) The movie, in any case, is another of Scorsese’s  explorations, and one of the best, of machismo-drenched  American subcultures (The Mob, The Law, Boxing, Show Business). And  it’s another movie filled with the kind of outrageous and sometimes hilarious four-letter-word-laced  movie dialogue that gives a psychic hernia to prudes, and rubs others the wrong way.

That usual Scorsese fusillade of  swear-words, which reaches an all-time high here (Wolf contains 506 uses of the word “fuck,“ an all-time movie record), is part of  the lexicon of Belfort’s Long Island mob: those rising young money guys who want to look and dress like movie stars, and sound (among themselves) like thugs, crooks, shysters or made guys. To that end, some of them use the foul language and fake the mean swagger and sadism  they’ve seen and heard in pictures about gangsters, often by movie-makers like Coppola and Scorsese. The proliferation of  profanity and scatology, much of it achingly funny, is a tip-off that these characters, though they’re really just glib salespeople talking tough, want to come across as wise guys who know no limits, respect no rules.

Also, pardon my language, but Scorsese’s reliance on classic Anglo-Saxon swear-words like “fuck” and “shit,“ is justifiable not  only because that’s  how these guys talk (among themselves), but also because these “bad” words , while supposedly verboten in polite society, can be two of the funniest words in the English language, on stage or on screen.  Actors, who know the electric effect of these “forbidden” words, may use them a lot (maybe too much) in improvs in rehearsals, and  Scorsese, who often puts dialogue from those improvs in his scripts, may over-use them a little too. But he salts in those cusswords so liberally not only because they’re appropriate to the characters, but also because, used judiciously, or even injudiciously, they help sting a movie to life. Drop an F-bomb into almost any sentence — any ordinary, everyday, inoffensive sentence (or even any already offensive one) — and the speech, if said in character, often becomes a potential laugh line. Screenwriters, especially on macho action or crime pictures, use them  all the fuckin’ time. (Sorry.) I’m serious. I mean, I’m (bleepin’) serious. (See?)

Here are some examples of the transformative power of George Carlin-level swear words, none drawn from The Wolf of Wall Street: “Hello; how the (bleep) are you?” “Have a nice (bleeping) day, you (bleep).“ Get the (bleep) out of here, Tommy!“ “Pass the (bleeping) clam sauce.” “A spoonful of (bleepin‘) sugar makes the (bleepin‘) medicine go down.”  Or, to abandon niceness and raise the intensity level a little: “Listen, you (bleeping) son of a (bleepin’) (bleep).. (Bleep) you!  And  (bleep) your grandmother. You can take your (bleep) and shove it up your (bleeping) (bleep),  until it comes out of your (bleeping) ears. You (bleeper-bleeper), you…”  And, to inject a little class: “To be or (bleeping) not to be, That is the question…“

See what I mean? Of course, sadistic, offensive speeches will probably still be sadistic and offensive, bleep or no bleep. And you can sure as (bleep), mess up a (bleep), even a well-planned one. But it’s not (bleepin’) easy. Remember: These Wolf half-wise guys are (bleeping) clowns as well as (bleepin’) con artists, and the fact that they can (bleepin’) make us laugh is probably one of the few (bleeping) positive things about them. .

As much as Little Italy guy Scorsese understands how these guys (bleepin’) talk — excuse me, how these guys talk — he also understands Belfort and his lifestyle, especially the drugs. As we watch, the movie  rips the “kid’s” masks off. The exposure is unsettling. You can’t deny the guy’s charm — or the charm of the actor, Leo, who‘s playing him — and DiCaprio puts on a tremendously entertaining show. But I think you’d have to be a little high yourself (maybe on outrage) to deduce that Scorsese and his actor and moviemakers here admire Belfort, or are trying to “glorify” him or his buddies. (The only time I admired Jordan, fleetingly, was when he saved Donnie’s life by artificial resuscitation and pumping his chest. And Scorsese plays that for laughs.)

If the filmmakers do dig Belfort, in some weird cranny of their noggins, they’ve certainly painted an awful portrait of him anyway. Thief, liar, con artist, swindler, self-deluded exploiter, bad husband and father, drug and sex addict, and sometimes bumbling babbling clown, he’s the guy who — however much he may make you laugh, or however many stocks or pens he sells, or however many times he saves Donnie,  or however much moola he has stashed in his Swiss bank account  (temporarily) — is the guy you don’t want to be, if you have a brain in your head and a beat in your heart. Unless, like Belfort at his nadir (he thinks it‘s a zenith, of course), you‘re so obsessed with money and power and the pursuit of pleasure, you can‘t see straight anymore.

Saying that The Wolf of Wall Street glorifies Jordan Belfort is like saying that “A Streetcar Named Desire” glorifies Stanley Kowalski or that Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” glorifies Don Giovanni. (I’m talking about the characters seen from a moral perspective, not about glorious acting or glorious singing.) The movie’s Belfort is nobody’s behavioral model. Short of having DiCaprio walk around the picture wearing a sandwich board that reads “I am a bad guy. Do not copy my bad behavior,” I don’t know how the moviemakers could make that any clearer.

V. The Last Bleep

Here’s the trickier question: Do movies like The Wolf of Wall Street  that try to expose corruption, or deal with awful situations frankly — movies that try to show us the criminal world or  some of what’s wrong with politics, business, Wall Street or other flawed power centers —  actually encourage that corruption? Are the moviemakers, intentionally or not, brilliantly or not, seducing credulous younger (or older) viewers, by casting in those movies, in  the criminal roles,  attractive or lovable or funny actors and actresses who are liked or even adored by the public and are expected to draw huge movie audiences and make the studios lots of money?

That’s been the rap on gangster movies ever since Hecht’s and von Sternberg’s  1927 Underworld: that they glamorize criminals. But, in this case, I don’t think so.  Audiences are amused and entertained by many of Alfred Hitchcock‘s villains too, but that doesn’t mean they want to go out and emulate Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train or Anthony Perkins in Psycho. I don’t think Oliver Stone’s intentions in Wall Street were invalidated because some idiots took him the wrong way and wanted to become little Gordon Gekkos. And I don’t think that Wolf of Wall Street is on the side of the devils either — just because it’s a movie that  knows that the devils can make us laugh. For the record, neither is Underworld — nor Ben Hecht’s other gangster masterpiece, the 1932 Howard Hawks Scarface.

(Spoiler Alert, but you probably know it already)

Scorsese has been attacked as well for “trivializing” or even excusing Belfort’s crimes by not showing his victims. But do we really have to see the victims of Belfort’s chicanery to realize that what he was doing was destructive and corrupt and wrong and probably ruined some lives? Are audiences that obtuse? We do see shots of “ordinary people” at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, on the subway car with FBI agent Peckham, and those few shots of simple, weary-looking everyday citizens returning joylessly home from work — after all the crazy hedonism and epic waste and hard-core lunacy we’ve seen — are devastating.

(End of Alert)

We’re in the middle right now of a great or near-great run of  American crime movies,  though I hesitate to call it an era,  and Scorsese is the undeniable leader. (I wish Coppola were back back in the thick of things too.) Just this year, in addition to The Wolf of Wall Street,  we’ve had American Hustle,  The Great Gatsby, The Iceman, Captain Phillips, Spring Breakers, Kill Your Darlings, Mud, Oldboy, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Out of the Furnace, Dallas Buyer’s Club  and 12 Years a Slave (which is about a massive, institutional crime and a whole outlaw society, the slave-trading Old South). Like most of  these films at their best, Wolf of Wall Street creates (or recreates) a teeming, dangerous, richly populated  world around the  outlawry. Like most of them, it’s an essentially moral work.

Scorsese didn’t make The Wolf of Wall Street because he loves Jordan Belfort and wants us to drool over his money and drugs and women. He made it because he loves making movies, and Belfort’s story  is great movie material. At its best, which is often, Wolf of Wall Street  reminds you not just of the glories of movies, and the sometimes false splendor and inner tawdriness of life itself , but the glories of other arts as well. I’m hyperbolizing, I guess. But for me the  best of Wolf of Wall Street is not some glossy men’s magazine orgy but an attempt (mostly successful, I think) at a  true work of art — a work visually dense and full of  life, like a painting by a Brueghel or a Bosch, rocking and propulsive like  a big beat classic by the Rolling Stones (or the Ronettes), crammed with humanity like a novel by Balzac or Dickens, literate and street-smart like a play or a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur, tough and snazzy and  stylish as a classic gangster movie or film noir by Hawks, Curtiz or Walsh. It killed me.

We see (or I see) in Scorsese’s movie, at its best and even at its worst, a great chronicle of darkness and madness, of (big) crime and (little) punishment, of evil and not-quite-as-evil and sort-of-good  — a movie pungently real and stylishly exaggerated, raw and unsparing, feverishly emotional, loaded with theatricality and artifice and also burningly alive. And though the Wolf of Wall Street’s  detractors may claim that the life it shows is spurious or tasteless or too dark and brutal, or that they just don’t want to see it or be battered by it, the sheer uninhibited nerviness and brilliance of what Scorsese puts on screen, overpowers, I think, many of those objections. Marty’s movie is so uncompromisingly, ferociously  candid  and so artistically powerful that, after you’ve seen it,  it’s hard to process or shake all the wild threatening images and ideas and emotions from your head. And maybe you shouldn’t even want to or try to. Isn’t knowing what’s wrong the first step to maybe making it right? Fuck if I know.

‘I want to point out to you that in a novel  a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for  a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anyone he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.”

Herman Mankiewicz, describing the Rules of Hollywood‘s Golden Age Games to his friend, Ben Hecht.  Quoted in “A Child of the Century.”

RIDE ALONG (Two Stars)

U.S.: Tim Story (2014)

Ride Along, which grossed over 40 million dollars in its opening  week,  is  a big, glossy, ultra-predictable  buddy cop movie in which costars Ice Cube (Boyz n the Hood) and Kevin Hart (Think Like a Man) and director Tim Story (Barbershop) pull a comedy variation, or try to, on the 2001 Denzel Washington–Ethan Hawke cop thriller Training Day. One of those movies that a big part of the public apparently likes and that most critics (understandably) don’t, Ride Along is better acted and shot than it is written or directed.  The  jokes aren‘t very funny; the cast is mostly wasted.

That cast though, is a pretty damned good one.  The costars and the rest  of them (Cube, Hart, Tika Sumpter, John Leguizamo, Bruce McGill, and Laurence Fishburne) are amiable company, and they could all be funnier, of course, if only somebody gave them  a script, or let them improvise an entirely new one — or maybe brought in Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke to act as advisors and buddy cops emeritus. (To be fair to the writers, a lot of the movie does have a semi-improvised feel.)

Anyway, in this shameless cliché’-fest, Ice Cube plays James Payton, a surly but super-competent veteran Atlanta cop,  and Kevin Hart is Ben Barber, a motormouth prospective rookie who’s given a ride-along (a day in a cop car, with a cop) conducted by James. Ben is  also, not coincidentally,  the boyfriend and prospective husband of James’ glamorous sister Angela (Tika Sumpter, of “Gossip Girl” ). When Ben —  a 5’ 2” high school security guard who spends much of his days playing video war and shoot-out games —  is chosen as a cop trainee-candidate, he falls into the clutches of James, who doesn’t want him for a brother-in-law, and means him no good, and picked for  the day-long ride-along in which Ben is supposed to prove himself as would-be cop and brother-in-law — and ultimately as ride-along buddy. Ben  is deliriously confident that he’ll make it. James, whose scowl is his umbrella, is pragmatically confident that he won‘t.

Anyway, on this particular ride-along,  you can be fairly sure — make that damn sure — that…

Spoiler Alert

1: …James will do everything possible to mess Ben up, including sending the poor gabby little schmo up against  a posse of sullen Hell‘s-Angels-looking bikers, a chopper-gang so tough that one of their mamas  has a goatee.

2. Ben will repeatedly make a complete fool of himself , but later redeem himself in some stellar way.

3. The higher ups in the Atlanta police department, notably Bruce McGill (Animal House)  as unhappy Lt. Brooks, will become increasingly perturbed at the comical mayhem following  in the wake of the ride-along duo, though James and Ben’s misadventures will bring grins to the faces of their fellow cops — especially James’s jocular partners Santiago (Leguizamo of Romeo and Juliet) and Miggs (Bryan Callen  of The Hangover).

4.. , While Ben flounders ever more haplessly, James will pull ever more fiendish jests, such as brining in a nude, berserk  cop-in-disguise to run amok in a grocery market.

5.  Armed criminals will somehow threaten or discombobulate Angela,  to their eventual regret.

6. James and Ben will become involved in some high-profile police case that will give them both opportunities to brilliantly distinguish themselves or foul up atrociously. In this case, that case of cases is  an investigation into the doings of  a band of Serbian gun-runners and local Atlanta outlaws, led by the mysterious Omar — a nefarious Atlanta czar of crime whom James has been pursuing for years, and who has apparently never been seen by anybody, possibly since his birth.  The mysterious Omar is played, mysteriously, by that excellent actor Laurence Fishburne (of Apocalypse Now). Ah, Apocalypse Now, now there was a movie… Not that anyone involved here, including director Story  and four writers, working in three shifts  (Greg Coolidge, Jason Mantzoukas,  Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi), were trying to match Francis Coppola’s great Vietnam War Epic, or, for that matter, Training Day. Or for that matter, Barbershop.

7. In  the grand finale of all grand finales, Jonah Hill, as General George Sherman, marches through Atlanta, and burns it to the ground, using incendiaries purchased from The Mysterious Omar by Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and James Franco: Kevin Hart’s cast-mates  in This is the End, all of whom arrive by flying saucer and flee with Angela to the still ongoing wrap party for Spring Breakers.

Well, that last one is a joke (sorry). But none of the others are. Or should I say they try to be jokes, but something keeps getting in the way, perhaps the script. If there was a script.

End of Spoiler

Let me explain. Kevin Hart (Scary Movie 4) seems to have been in about seventy or eighty movies recently, and  though this one may be among the most lucrative, it’s not the best. He’s a comedian of formidable energy and fiery wit, but his character doesn‘t make much sense. What about Ben, we wonder, beyond his allegedly spectacular natural endowments, attracts  Angela to this video game junkie and high school security guard? Wouldn’t it have been better to make him, instead of a nerdy pipsqueak, someone more obviously brainy with an equally good reason for getting a ride-along:  a teacher or a crime reporter or even a stand-up comedian who wants to be a cop? Of course, Ben  winds up as the hero of the movie, or co-hero, but nobody knew that unless they read the screenplay.

As for Ice —  whom many critics seem to like to call Cube (although I prefer Ice or even, as the New York Times might have it,  Mr. Cube) — the one-time gangsta rapper, even though he has a more plausible character as a tough street cop, too often gets shoved to the side. Not that movies like this should be models of real life and verisimilitude, but they ought to at least make some sense within their own sensibility.  Meanwhile, the plans are already in motion for Ride Along 2, in which one hopes that we see more of The Mysterious Omar . Who says that crime doesn’t’ pay?

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Three and a Half Stars)
801U.S.: Francis Lawrence, 2013

Books were my first love, movies my second. Yet, though some day, I may get around to reading Suzanne Collins’ mega-selling young adult novel “Catching Fire,” for the moment the big-money  blockbuster movie adapted from it — called The Hunger Games: Catching Fire — will have to suffice. I liked T. H. G.: C. F. well enough, even though it’s not the kind of movie on which I like to see so much money being spent and so much effort expended. It would have been just as good, I bet — better maybe — at a half, or even a third of the price it cost and the effort expended. But that’s the way the game is played these days, “Hungry” or not. (For an entirely different attitude on adaptation, see my review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug — from J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” a book I have read, and treasure.)

The first Hunger Games movie was released in 2012, directed by Gary Ross (replaced here by Francis Lawrence of the futuristic horror movie, I Am Legend) and co-produced by Collins and others with much of the same cast and crew, notably co-stars Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson as young game-players Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark and supporting players Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland and Stanley Tucci as some of the various adults, meanies and hungry gamesters  swirling around them. Like that movie, this one is built around an action-adventure show that’s also a political allegory and a coming-of-age fable. In it, the so-called “Hunger Game” (a mass media event which combines the plot knock-‘em-off theme of And Then There were None” with the trappings of The Super Bowl), functions as  a social pressure valve to pacify the masses in an Orwellian dictatorship of the future. And,  and in this “Nineteen Eighty-Four” variation, the downtrodden masses are kept in their social slots by a set of media games and deadly sports, in which chosen members of the underclass (including Katniss, our heroine)  battle it out to the last man or woman standing, thereby providing bloody TV diversion and satisfying the rest of the underclass.

In the last movie, Katniss, the representative of impoverished District 12, poorest of the competing communities in the 74^th annual games, won the final battle and then spared the other last survivor Peeta, because they were supposedly in love — to the discomfiture of Kat’s longtime friend Dale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth).  Now she‘s back and so is Peeta, and so are a flock of other past champions, all of whom have been recruited for the 75^th games, rejiggered by President Snow (Donald Sutherland at his most unctuous and nastily narcissistic and Sutherlandian) and gamesman/planner Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymour Hoffman at his most Hoffmanesque) to become an all-star champions-of-champions combat. The obvious intention is to prevent Kat or her fellow champs from lending any popularity or credence to the brewing revolution, just about to break.

This seems pretty unfair, since one of the rewards of winning the other games was supposed to be survival. But whoever said that Orwellian dictatorships play by the rules? Even their own? Catching Fire is a long movie with dozens of characters, and it takes its own sweet time getting to the 75^th Games. But when it does, it roars and explodes and erupts in what seems to be a CGI-laden science fiction jungle-forest, in a manner that suggests the Cooper-Schoedsack ”Most Dangerous Game” filtered through half a century of science fiction epics and video games. There’s not that much suspense, of course, where Kat is concerned. We know (or some of us know) that there are two more sequels coming, both of whom need their heroine. But we can muster some concern about the others contestants.

Everything about this fable about a future dystopia (that’s “utopia” turned inside out) suggests high quality, a young adult-derived show with class. The cast is headed by newly anointed Oscar winner Lawrence (that’s Jennifer, not Francis, nor Lawrence of Arabia, R.I. P. the Great Peter O’Toole, for that matter), and it’s top-notch. She’s  abetted or thwarted by an expensive and talented ensemble that includes her kind of boyfriends Peeta (Hutcherson) and Dale ( Hemsworth), along with Kat’s shaggy mentor-at-arms Haymitch Abernathy (Harrelson, giving it the Full Woody), her hyper fashion maven Effie Trinket (Banks)  plus a roster of fellow game-players that includes non-mad scientist Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) and his companion Wiress (Amanda Plummer), angry punk siren Johanna Mason (Jena Malone) and dashing Finnick O’Dair (Sam Claflin), from whom we will obviously hear more later.

There’s also a fine set of villains or maybe-villains headed by the evil, half-lisping President Snow (Sutherland), and including the smirking games planner Heavensbee (Hoffman, than whom no one smirks better), and a sadistic bastard of a militarist swine named Commander Thread (Patrick St. Esprit). And we haven’t gotten to the wickedest and most supportive of supporting players, not-really-a-villain-or-contestant, but one hell of an emcee, the incandescent rouser and ultra-flam showman Caesar Flickerman, as played by Stanley Tucci with no inhibitions and a smile that could devour Liberace.

It would be  shame to ignore The Flick since Tucci is, as Billy Wilder might say,  a little bit of terrific in this part, and since he gives the best performance in the movie: a delightfully barmy, hammy turn (the character is the ham, not the actor), seething with twisted wit and high jinks, as if Jay Leno  had turned into Lucifer on the way to imitating Professor Harold Hill. I just had one thing to say while watching Tucci prance and sneer and ogle, eyes a-glitter, and that was “More!’  Hs fellow actors were a formidable consort, especially Harrelson and Hoffman, But Tucci’s was a supporting performance truly, uh, supportive. Caesar is at the opposite extreme from Katniss, who is the strong, quiet, gorgeous  type, and who is played by Lawrence with the kind of presence that suits a new-style movie or young-adult heroine. But if there were more humor in Catching Fire, more of the Flick Stuff, it would be a better movie.

Speaking of Lawrences, Francis Lawrence here is a slicker director that Ross was, though I don’t agree with the quibbles about Ross’s more verite’ camera style. Ross was good enough for the first movie (he’s better with more sentimental pieces like Seabiscuit and Pleasantville) but Lawrence makes this film a bit more pretty, tense and violent — and even, when Tucci is around, hilarious.

If you look at the art of moviemaking as a branch of higher economics — and a lot of people do — then The Hunger Game: Catching Fire is just the kind of show that the cinema industry is most geared up to make these days. It’s pre-sold, third in the tetrology, or quartet, of films adapted from the trilogy of young adult novels written to thunderous response by Collins (and filmed to an even more thunderous response) It’s a  big, expensive, pictorially lavish and star-filled show full of action and attractive young actors (or their magnetic and highly skilled elders), all doing violent or sexy things, while music roars and  the audience, pre-sold and almost pre-entertained, pours into the theatres like lemmings heading over a cliff.

Every beautiful and gifted young actress should have a few years like Jennifer Lawrence just did: the  critical raves that greeted her appearance in Winter’s Bone, a 2012 Best Actress Oscar for her saucy star role in Silver Linings Playbook, and two enormous box-office hits in the Hunger Games movies:  a double (or triple) whammy if there ever was one. I’m not trying to rain on any of this parade when I suggest that this latter achievement — the big-budget movie of The Hunger Games; Catching Fire — is being a little over-rated, and that the last five or ten minutes are a little abrupt and confusing. Nevertheless, it’s  a better than good movie, and one that does almost exactly what was so obviously intended and expected of it.

Who could ask for more? The other night I saw the other current pre-Hobbit box-office titan, the Disney animated feature, Frozen, based on a literary classic (Hans Christian Andersen‘s The Snow Queen) or inspired by it — and, while enjoying the movie (and enjoying the El Capitan Theatre stage show that accompanied it),  I wondered all over again why so much effort and care and money is spent on movies that seem primarily geared for children or teenagers (grownups are the secondary audience) compared with so-called adult movies. As long as they’re  as good as either Catching Fire and Frozen, I guess, it doesn’t matter.   But it would be nice to see some older-than-young-adult movies catch fire too.