MOVIE REVIEW OF WOLF OF WALL STREET

Something is going wrong in our society. I went to a movie, the second time in over 20 years, and was shocked by what I saw and heard in the first few minutes.  The advertisements clearly said the movie; The Wolf of Wall Street was R-rated which meant to me that there would be a few uses of a bad words or nudity. In my mind, the counter to that negative was that the movie and actors were nominated for awards, which suggested that the move had merit.

As it turns out, the movie was and will always be nothing but digitally preserved filth but it was more then that.

As a liberal, I do not consider myself a prude, nor do I have some crazy religiously motivated moral standard, but I do have a standard of human decency based on my respect for other people and for life. I understand everyone has different standards but I am here to tell you that this movie violated my loose standards—by a lot—and was shocked to find out it didn’t violate everyone’s standards; although the theater manager did say that many people have been walking out.

Self-preservation is the dominant animal instinct; we survive by having respect for each other as well as respect for our selves and our own bodies. The scenes in that movie depicted a strange, strange new world for me where there were no standards for anything; others tell me this theme got worse as the move progressed. Although there were pornographic elements based on language and explicit sex, my complaint about the movie goes beyond that. The movie producers have lowered themselves to the point where they treat life as something despicable and deserving of miss treatment just because it is life; as though “non-survival” was the driving instinct. Have we as a species reached a point where we do not respect our selves let alone each other? Has our cleverness put some of us on the road to extinction? Is that what the World of Wall Street was showing us?

We have all kinds of crazy headline grabbing things in society. TV producers will not show an accidental death that happened while being filmed. “Suicide by police” is another example of what they will not show on TV. Most of us are horrified, or at least say we are, by the idea that a “snuff movie”, one in which a person is filmed while actually being murdered, is actually made; let alone show such things on TV to make money. Why would “suicide by greed”, which is what The Wolf of Wall Street is about, be acclaimed by Hollywood as meriting awards receive an R-rating, the same rating they give a movie for using the “f’ word. It goes well beyond American greed. Do we as a society feel that life only has value because we have the power to trash and extinguish it? It reminded me of the shocking statement made by Phil Robertson on Duck Dynasty, “I like to killing things”.

Watching that movie is like being inside the mind of a person who is contemplating suicide, only it is not a person, it is the whole of society. Will we destroy our selves, as a species with our exaggerated sense of freedom to do what we please without know what it is that pleases us?      

In response to public demand, the entertainment industry devised a movie rating system. The movie rating industry responded by crating a moneymaking enterprise, which means it is a “dollar” driven self-promoting affair supported by production companies promoting their own movies by rating them to benefit their box office potential. Over the years, the industry and the rating agencies have learned to work together to manipulate ratings by including or excluding sex and violence not based on any sense of morality but rather based on making money. Supposedly, movie ratings give people the freedom to choose what moral level to expose themselves and their children. Last night, I was blindsided by believing the “R” rating when it clearly should have been XXX—they violated that trust. I felt betrayed but I also felt something much deeper; that movie gave me insight into something much deeper and darker. For all the good ratings agencies can do, they give license to movie producers to unleash unrestrained greed fed by ever increasing depraved sex and violence and, The Wolf of Wall Street shows how scary that combination can become. 

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