Tag Archives: Voice-over

Wolf of Wall Street a never-ending bore (review)

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Layer the stylings of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas over Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and you have Scorsese’s 2013 treatise about greed in America, The Wolf of Wall Street. Unfortunately, where this should have been a wonderful blending of two great films, it was instead the mutated step-child.

Briefly, the movie follows the adventures of real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort as he rises from the ashes of Wall Street to lie and cheat his way to fame and fortune from the then despised penny stocks market. Through a haze of booze, drugs and female flesh and relying on balls the size of the tri-state area, he pulls a fleet of nobodies into the middle of the financial maelstrom, becoming everything for which Wall Street is despised. Throw in a little money laundering and he, of course, becomes the target of an FBI and SEC investigation that ultimately brings him down.

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If, from the synopsis, you don’t immediately see the influences of Wall Street and GoodFellas, you’re not really trying or you need to go back and watch them again.

I wish I could say it was just the 3-hour running time that interfered with my enjoyment of the film, but GoodFellas was 148 minutes and Wall Street was 126 minutes. Rather, I think the problem was that it felt like the movie was 6 hours long. Time seemed to drag out as though I was getting a contact high from all the Quaaludes the characters were consuming, but without the peaceful overtones.

I appreciate it was based on the life of Jordan Belfort, so perhaps the screenwriter Terrence Winter felt he had to be careful tiptoeing around the contents of Belfort’s book of the same title. But for the love of God, there was no place that Winter felt he could simply skip ahead?

When Leo DiCaprio would narrate the scenes, in some cases turning directly to the camera to do so, my mind immediately jumped to Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Never more so than when he would try to explain how Wall Street functioned, almost mimicking Liotta’s explanation of the mob, down to the vocal cadence. The two examples below show both men introducing the troops.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_6oogOJNaw

And when DiCaprio would try to rally the troops, he became a bombastic Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas), enthusiastically letting people know that greed was good…or in his case, that there was no nobility in poverty. Hell, in his narrative voice-over, he even mentions Gordon Gecko in an obvious homage that simply highlights how pale an imitator this movie is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJM3v46kllU

So I am left asking what exactly does The Wolf of Wall Street offer that the other two films didn’t.

Wealth, opulence, greed, excess? Been there, done that.

Booze, sex, drugs, violence? Watched that, saw it.

Illicit business, FBI investigations, wire taps? Old hat, nothing new.

Hubris, hedonism, idolatry? Biblical, but done and doner.

It made almost $400 million worldwide and was nominated for five Academy Awards (winning none), so people liked it.

For comparison, Wall Street earned $44 million globally in 1987 and won Douglas the Best Actor Oscar, while GoodFellas managed $47 million in the US in 1990 and won Joe Pesci the Best Supporting Actor Oscar (of six nominations).

DiCaprio has charm…and so did Liotta and Douglas.

Interestingly, I didn’t feel this one had the cinematographic snap of Scorsese’s earlier works…it didn’t feel like the camera was dancing with the actors as it did in GoodFellas.

Maybe it was simply a matter of timing. Wolf showed up just as the United States was truly starting to recover economically from the banking scandals and burst real estate bubbles, and in an almost self-abusive way, Wolf reminds Americans (and the rest of the world) of a time when money was cheap and easy. It’s definitely not a morality play, for no one is seen to suffer for their excesses.

It is the American dream seen through a tumbler of Scotch. The manifest destiny of anyone willing to gamble with the weaknesses of others. A sign that nothing has changed. That nothing ever changes.

Wall Street was a warning. GoodFellas was the rise and fall of Man. The Wolf of Wall Street is a love letter to unbridled greed.

Movie math

Not for nothing – REQUEST FOR HELP

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How do you write about nothing?

I know how to not write. In fact, I was very good at that in the past, but gratefully not writing is no longer much of an option for me.

I’m not talking about not writing, however. Instead, I am talking about writing scenes where superficially nothing happens, where a character walks through the mundane actions of life. What they are doing is unimportant to them, a robotic response to an overwhelming thought or scenario. There is an astronomic exchange of information and yet no words are spoken.

In a novel or short story, you can have an inner dialogue, revealing the character’s thoughts, but in a film, you have only silence. Sure, there’s always the trusty voiceover, but I personally think that unless the character is recalling a past statement, voiceovers are a crutch. And a voiceover weakens a scene when you compare it with silence.

Think of the last time you were faced with silence in response to something you said or did. Think of the dis-ease (yes, that’s where “disease” comes from) you experienced as you tried to figure out what the other party was thinking. In many of those situations, I bet that shouting would have been preferable to silence.

In an improv class I took—I am sorry that this is my version of “This one time, in band camp…”—we were doing a status exercise wherein one character would try to take status away from the other one, proving themselves superior through statement or action. While many student pairs would do their best to out-pompous, out-preen or out-bravado each other, I took a different tack. I went completely silent.

No matter what my partner said or did, I faced him stoically or indifferently, deigning to give him the merest glance on occasion while going about my activities. And the louder or larger he got, the less I minded or acknowledged him. The more he talked, the weaker he appeared.

Silence is powerful. And even if the silence is due to idiocy, it comes across as thoughtfulness.

Think of scenes in movies where a character has chosen to deal with a problem by thinking about it. With a good actor, you can see all the thoughts as they play out in his or her mind. The body, the face, the eyes tell you all you need to know about the emotional swells washing through the actor. A single word breaks that tension and weakens the moment. As a storyteller, why would you ever give that up?

Which brings me back to my original question: How do you write nothing?

Perhaps I am delving too far into the domains of the director and actor, but there has to be a way to ensure both those artists know what you, the writer, intend. But I’ll be damned if I know how.

So, I open the question to you, my fellow artists.

What do you do, what have you learned, what have you seen that tells you how to write nothing and yet convey a world of thought and feeling?

Please share your thoughts here as I can’t be the only one who wants to know.