'The name of the game, moving the money form the client's pocket to your pocket.'

Rating: 1/10 (28 March 2014)

Martin Scorsese must have had a very bad dream when he decided to translate Jordan Belfort's book 'The Wolf of Wall Street' to the screen. This is one of the loudest, crudest, foul- mouthed, misguided messes ever put on film – and it stretches to three hours (for those with a strong enough stomach to last through that much lying, stealing, crime, debauchery, all manner of substance abuse, and worse yet, the mean-spirited manner of treating gullible people who cannot afford to be scammed into poverty.
Wikipedia has a bit a different stance: 'Jordan Ross Belfort is an American motivational speaker and former stockbroker. He was convicted of fraud crimes related to stock market manipulation and running a penny stock boiler room, for which he spent 22 months in prison.' In The Wolf of Wall Street Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort, a Long Island penny stockbroker who served 36 months in prison for defrauding investors in a massive 1990s securities scam that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including shoe designer Steve Madden. But neither of those capsules prepares us for the outrageously humiliating debauchery of this film's presentation. It is noisy, unremittingly loud and crude, has a script that basically consists of expletives, and in the end makes us feel embarrassed to be a member of the human species. That the film won such acclaim and placed DiCaprio as an Oscar candidate and did so well financially tells us a lot about our current state of mind and taste. To this we've come?