udayin - Tumblr blog

udayin · 5 years ago

Text

The wolf of wall Street

The movie begins in medias res, with Belfort and his devoted minions blowing off steam in an office dwarf-tossing competition, before flashing back to give us a brief glimpse of the young and relatively innocent Jordan, who arrives on Wall Street in the fall of 1987 as a “connector” — basically a glorified phone dialer — for the old-money trading firm of L.F. Rothschild. It’s there that the eager rookie gets his first sense of the wild life to come when a mad-hatter senior broker (Matthew McConaughey) takes him out for a three-martini lunch that also includes enough white powder for a killer day at Big Bear. And even though he’s no longer quite boyish enough to play someone in his early 20s, DiCaprio is convincingly green here, like a wide-eyed Candide lunching with McConaughey’s debauched Dr. Pangloss.

But no sooner has Jordan settled in than Black Monday arrives and the bottom falls out, of the market and L.F. Rothschild, sending him back to the help-wanted ads at a time when nobody seems to be looking for stockbrokers. Nobody, that is, save for a storefront brokerage in a Long Island strip mall, where the slovenly staff unloads worthless penny stocks on cold-called clients for 50% commissions, and where Belfort sticks out like a Savile Row suit on a Kmart clearance rack. But the genial proprietor (an uncredited Spike Jonze) agrees to give him a shot, not quite realizing he’s just let a wolf in the door.

It isn’t long before Belfort branches out on his own, starting the tony-sounding Stratton Oakmont in a declasse former gas station, resolving to go from “selling garbage to garbagemen” to targeting the deep-pocketed one percent. He assembles a merry band of brokers comprised of petty thugs, drug dealers and high-school dropouts who, when trained in Belfort’s precision-scripted tactics, prove to be remarkably effective salesmen. Riding herd on them all is Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a buffoonish caricature of a Jew in WASP Land, decked out in garish bleached teeth, clear-lens horn-rims and a sweater tied ever so carefully around his neck. (Belfort’s own Jewishness and WASP aspirations, a running theme in the book, have been omitted from the film.) After offering his services to Belfort out of the blue in a local diner, Donnie becomes the Wolf’s most trusted associate, and it’s Hill who gives the movie’s most flamboyant (if slightly one-note) comic performance, unzipping his schlong, swallowing a live goldfish, and otherwise boldly exploring the gray area between mankind and our nearest relatives on the evolutionary scale.

Clocking in at 179 minutes, “Wolf” sets a record as Scorsese’s longest fiction film (one minute longer than “Casino”), but that doesn’t make it his most ambitious or deeply felt. It lacks the dynamic emotional range of a “Mean Streets” or “Goodfellas,” or the intricate plotting of a “Casino,” and for all its amusing guest stars (Rob Reiner as Belfort’s combustible dad, Jean Dujardin as a pompous Swiss banker) and caper-like episodes, almost everything unfolds in the same manic register. Even when the movie is really cooking (which is often), there’s a feeling that scenes are being held for a few beats too many, that Scorsese and his ace editor Thelma Schoonmaker simply didn’t have enough time to do the elegant fine-tuning they’re accustomed to (an impression reinforced by several conspicuous continuity gaffes and badly matched cuts throughout the film).

Still, considering how familiar this milieu of fast-talking, hard-selling hucksters is from the likes of “Wall Street,” “American Psycho,” “Boiler Room” (which was also inspired by the Belfort case) and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” it’s surprising how lively Scorsese manages to keep things throughout. In terms of style, the movie is almost self-consciously Scorsesean — even more than “The Departed” — with d.p. Rodrigo Prieto’s camera tracking elaborately, freeze-framing, dollying in fast and whip-panning even faster, while a quadruple album’s worth of classic rock and blues fill up the soundtrack (veteran Scorsese collaborator Robbie Robertson more than earns his “executive music producer” credit) alongside DiCaprio’s running first-person narration. This is very much iconic, old-school Scorsese in full bloom, but what’s missing is the marvelous empathy the filmmaker managed to conjure for even those films’ most reprehensible characters — the sense that this former seminarian could see the good and ill in the souls of troubled men, even finding some kind of tormented nobility in the psychopath Travis Bickle.

In “Wolf,” that empathy has been replaced by an overarching cynicism — cynicism for the swindlers who do the swindling and the schmucks who get snookered, cynicism for the empty allure of the good life, and cynicism for a system that allows for so many clean getaways. (Belfort’s nominal downfall notwithstanding, those wishing to see the character get his real comeuppance will still be waiting after the end credits have rolled and the lights have come back up.) Make no mistake: “Wolf” is as much a gangster movie as any Scorsese has made, with Belfort as a Bill the Butcher who slices and dices people’s bank accounts, a Nicky Santoro who puts your savings in a vise. But on some basic level, he’s a cipher whose drug-fueled binges regularly put others (including, in one harrowing scene, his own young daughter) in harm’s way, and who thinks nothing of recruiting his wife’s British aunt (an excellent Joanna Lumley) as a front — or, in the movie’s distinctive patois, “rathole” — for his offshore accounts. As dramatis personae go, Belfort lacks a tragic dimension: This latter-day Gatsby stares out from his own extravagant Long Island enclave and sees only a blinking green dollar sign.

But a talented performer can do much to camouflage such shortcomings, and that’s precisely what DiCaprio does here. A reliably good actor who too often shows you all the hard, technical work he’s put into creating a character, the DiCaprio of “Wolf” seems loose and uninhibited and freed of premeditated mannerisms. In his fifth collaboration with Scorsese, he’s a constant joy to watch, whether crawling across the floor like a baby while his bombshell second wife (appealing Australian newcomer Margot Robbie, who deserves more screen time) engages in a particularly cruel form of cock-blocking, or rallying his disciples with an impassioned variation on Gekko’s “Greed Is Good” speech. DiCaprio doesn’t just play this part; he inhales it, along with everything else that goes up Belfort’s nose and into his bloodstream.

For anything resembling gravitas, though, one must instead look to the dogged FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who sets Belfort in his sights early on and gradually closes in. In one of the movie’s best scenes, a cocksure Jordan goes so far as to invite the G-man on to his yacht and comes within a hairsbreadth of bribing him. And Chandler, who projects the effortless, middle-class virtue of a 1950s leading man (a Robert Stack type), plays the scene with a wonderfully sly poker face, leading Belfort the egomaniac to believe he’s actually buying what he’s selling. But the sting of “Wolf” comes in Denham’s realization that, while he may have gotten his man, it’s Belfort who may well have the last laugh.

Moments like those keep “Wolf” buoyant and lithe in spite of its redundancies and excesses. But if there’s one scene here that is sure to end up in future Scorsese career-achievement montages, it’s the epic drugged-out setpiece in which Jordan and Donnie experience a delayed reaction to decades-old Quaaludes, obliterating their motor skills and culminating in an explosively funny battle for control of a kitchen telephone. This live-action variation on the old Looney Tunes cartoon in which Bugs Bunny and the mad scientist get high on ether fumes reveals heretofore unknown reserves of physical comedy in DiCaprio. But more than being just a great gag, it’s a representative image: Call it infantile capitalism.

Despite its high price tag, the pic’s physical production is more modestly scaled than the likes of “The Aviator,” “Gangs of New York” and “Hugo,” save for one elaborate, CG-intensive sequence in which Belfort’s yacht nearly capsizes in a violent Mediterranean storm. Otherwise, most of the movie is confined to trading floors, boardrooms and suburban McMansions, rendered by Prieto and production designer Bob Shaw (“Boardwalk Empire,” “The Sopranos”) with the bright, Windexed sheen of strip-mall, office-park America. The redoubtable costume designer Sandy Powell has everyone looking suitably snazzy, in keeping with Stratton Oakmont’s policy of inhouse custom tailoring for its employees.

0 notes

udayin · 5 years ago

Text

The Code of The Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani (Book Summary)

Go Beyond Society’s Conditionings

You don’t need to go to college. You don’t need to eat breakfast. You don’t need to treat rich people, or old people, or homeless people any differently from each other. You don’t need to work 9 to 5. You don’t need to take work off on weekends. You don’t need a “job”.

Frankly, you don’t need to follow society’s rules. You don’t need to follow the “shoulds” of our conditionings. You can decide yourself. You can choose your own path, create your own rules, and live your own destiny.

In other words, you can transcend the culturescape (a word Vishen Lakhiani invented to describe all the rules, and best practices, and shoulds of a society or culture):

Start questioning all the different rules and practices you may have taken for granted in your life so far.

Make a Dent in the Universe

“Our culturescape is filled with many ideas that are powerful because of the sheer number of people who believe in them. Think of ideas like nation-states, money, transportation, our education system, and more. But every now and then a rebel comes along and decides that some of these colossal constructs are nothing more than Brules*. Most of these rebels talk about changing this and are labeled idealists at best, or nut jobs at worst, but once in a while, a rebel grabs reality by the horns and, slowly yet decisively, shifts things. The drawing below illustrates this point. The circle is the culturescape. The mass of dots in the middle represents most folks. At first a certain person, perhaps you, decides to move away from viewing the world like everyone else. You get labeled a misfit, a rebel, a troublemaker.”

Start challenging society’s rules, create your own, and live life on your own terms… who knows, you might just be able to make a dent in the universe.

Update Your Models of Reality and Your Systems for Living

The growth of your life depends on two things:

Your models of reality (which is another word for beliefs)

Your systems for living (which is another word for habits and daily activities)

If you want to grow as a person – maybe you want to become more confident, better-looking, more successful, financially richer, etc. – you need to regularly update your beliefs and your habits and daily activities.

Vishen Lakhiani calls the process of changing your habits and beliefs consciousness engineering. You can check out the video below to learn more about this entire process and philosophy:

Bend Reality

“BENDING REALITY. This is the ideal state where you’re happy in the now, and you have a vision for the future that drives you. Your vision pulls you forward, but you’re happy now – despite not having yet attained that vision. When you’re in this state, there’s a feeling of growth and enjoyment. It’s about the journey as well as the destination. An interesting observation about this state is that it often seems as if the universe has your back. Call it what you want – but it starts to feel as if you’re lucky. The right opportunities, ideas, and people seem to gravitate to you. It’s as if your happiness is rocket fuel moving you toward your vision.”

How to Be Happy Now: Live in Blissipline

In this chapter, I’ll introduce a simple system for mastering happiness in the now. It goes beyond feeling peaceful to feeling truly joyous. It combines spiritual mastery with the real-world desire to meet your goals and make your intentions come true. I call it Blissipline: the discipline of daily bliss.

Blissipline is about practicing your skills of being happy in the now on a daily basis.

Vishen uses three strategies to create feelings of happiness:

Gratitude (more on the benefits of gratitude here.) Forgiveness The Practice of Giving

How to Create a Compelling Vision for Your Future: The Three Most Important Questions

1. What experiences do you want to have in this lifetime? 2. How do you want to grow? 3. How do you want to contribute?

Do you have a goal of graduating from high school with a good GPA? Or a goal of qualifying for the right college? Or of securing a great internship? Or of getting a raise at your job? Or of getting rich? Or of becoming famous? Or of earning some price or reward?

These are all means goals. They are a means to getting what you actually want.

To skip the means goal trap and go straight for end goals, Vishen has created his own goal-setting process which he calls The Three Most Important Questions. Doing this exercise can help you figure out and jump straight to the end goals that really matter in your life.

Bringing it All Together

This state requires two things:

Being happy in the now

Having a compelling vision for the future

To access this state on a daily basis, Vishen has created what he calls the 6-Phase Meditation:

“The Six-Phase is a mental hack to get you to the level of extraordinary faster than ever before. Each phase of the Six-Phase is designed to enhance one of six key skills. The first three contribute to happiness in the now. The next three contribute to your vision for the future.”

0 notes