To cleanse the palate. One of the commenters at YouTube calls this “Great Gatsby meets cocaine.” True. It’s even got the requisite shot of DiCaprio raising his glass to avaricious excess to get the “pride goeth before a fall” ball rolling. I think it’s more like “GoodFellas” meets “Wall Street,” which should clue you in to who the director is if you haven’t guessed already. As in those flicks, this one’s all about a young, brash, charismatic guy getting rich through sociopathic behavior and then being destroyed by it. In theory it’s a morality tale about greed and ruthlessness, but just as mob movies have mutated over time from treating gangsters as villains to treating them as glamorous antiheroes, you’ll probably walk out of this one thinking that Leo’s exploits, on balance, were pretty rad. The trailer’s designed to make you drool over the sets, the costumes, and of course the cast, and the dwarf-toss scene looks like it’s played strictly for laughs. Watching it, I wondered how Taxi Driver-era Scorsese would have shot it. It’s a long way from the unnerving realism of De Niro putting a bullet in Harvey Keitel’s stomach in TD to the ballet of people being hung on meat hooks to the coda of “Layla” in “GoodFellas.” But whatever. Given the ingredients, this movie can’t not be fun.
Video: "The Wolf of Wall Street" trailer
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