The Wolf of Wall Street

Rating: 9/10 (15 December 2014)

Spoiler Alert
The Wolf of Wall Street is another excellent production put together by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is well directed, telling the story of Jordan Belfort, a real life stock broker who got involved in drugs and questionable trading strategies during the 1980's and 1990's. I believe this film is one of Leonardo DiCaprio's best performances of his career.
The Wolf of Wall Street was released at the end of 2013, directed by Martin Scorsese from the Warner Brothers studio. The film was rather long totaling 180 minutes, with an R rating. The cast consists of a number of recognized actors and actresses. The main characters consist of Leonardo DiCaprio who plays Jordan Belfort, Jonah Hill who plays Donnie Azoff, and Margot Robbie who plays Naomi Lapaglia, Mr. Belfort's second wife. A few other big names with smaller roles in the film are Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, and Rob Reiner. The movie is based on a true story of Jordan Belfort, which follows his life when he starts working on Wall Street, becomes a wealthy stock broker, and finally is shut down by the federal government.
After Jordan Belfort loses his job on Wall Street after only a few weeks, he teams up with Donny Azoff and they started their own brokerage firm, called Stratford-Oakmont. The company started with a small staff and quickly grew in excess of 250 employees while Jordan trained his core group to trade penny stocks to uninformed investors, a process known as pump and dump. After Stratford-Oakmont was established, the company started filing initial public offerings. Some of the company's strategies and techniques come into question as their profits are through the roof. I was really drawn to this movie, as I'm a big Martin Scorsese fan and a bigger Leonardo DiCaprio fan. In addition to the director and big name actors I was familiar with the story of Jordan Belfort. However I never realized the lifestyle he lived during the 90's. He was comfortable selling individuals junk stocks, which he knew would not make them any money and taking that money to live a lavish life. Another movie with a similar theme is Boiler Room, a Ben Younger film which shows a similar main character, a youngster who works as a broker and makes some not legitimate moves in order to gain personal wealth. The motif of each of these films circles around greed.
I would certainly recommend this film, it's well directed with a star studded cast of actors. There are some extremely funny parts of the film and some serious moments, which make you think about greed and morale.