jonah hill | Esoteric Fish - Shallow and Pedantic

The Wolf of Wall Street is sure to be a divisive film. There will be those who say it’s glorifying terrible people responsible for defrauding thousands of customers, while others will portray it as an indictment of the system that allows such things to happen. I fall into the second category. The film doesn’t glorify these people in the same way that Casino doesn’t glorify organised crime; Scorsese recognises that the audience needs to see exactly how crazy Jordan Belfort’s lifestyle actually was in order to understand him and his motivations.

In a time where we’ve seen how flimsy the worldwide banking system really is, The Wolf of Wall Street is more pertinent than ever. We live in a world where money talks, and where (Spoiler Alert) the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them. The brilliance of this film is that it shows us the human behind the stories and all of his flaws, without compromising the important message that Jordan Belfort is a very bad man. The movie is crammed with fantastic performances, making it even more impressive that Leonardo DiCaprio manages to steal the show. This is a must see.

This is the End is a moderately funny movie that thinks it’s a lot more clever than it actually is. It’s a movie for Hollywood, by Hollywood. Film stars are popping in left and right to make fun of their public personas, some more successfully than others. The cameos littered throughout the early portion of the film provide a few laughs here and there, but it begins to establish the film’s major flaw of feeling self-indulgent.

As anyone who has seen the trailer knows, the main conceit of the film is a bunch of movie stars left behind on earth during the biblical apocalypse. The plot doesn’t really get more complicated than that. This is primarily a film with six actors saying: ‘Look at me! Isn’t it cool how I can poke fun at myself and my movie roles?’

There are some genuinely funny moments throughout the film, but they only really serve to highlight how dull and predictable the rest of the film is. I wanted to like the movie, and kept hoping it would get better, but it never managed to rise above ‘meh’.