Scorsese Still has his touch

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2014)

Sometime I wonder if an author, writer, or director, can continue to produce quality material long after they have produced their masterpieces, and what this movie tells me is that Martin Scorsese still has it. I have always admired the films that have come out of the mind of Scorsese, and this film is no exception. What surprised me though is that there were actually quite a few laugh out loud moments in this film, which is a first for me when it comes to Scorsese, because most of the films that I have seen of his tend to be deadly serious. While this film is itself serious, there is quite a lot of light hearted moments, and I must say that DiCaprio has certainly come a long way since the days of his want to puke teenage characters. However, if you do take a look at most of the films that DiCaprio has been in it is quite clear that he is interested in taking the decent rolls in the decent films.
This is the story of Jordan Belfort, a kid that pretty much took Wall Street by storm, and it exposes the true nature of the greed that dominates the financial industry. I read an article in the Australian Financial Review where a number of stock brokers were incredibly offended at this movie because they thought that what it did was really stain the name of their profession (as if their profession wasn't stained anyway). However, what I suspect is that what Scorsese has done is lifted the veil on the industry to expose it, and the industry has reacted in the way that would be expected.
I am not surprised that the industry is full of sex and drugs, that is what happens when you end up making more money than you know what to do with, but also what happens in a lot of cases is that when you fly high, you crash hard. While the brokers may be crying foul and unfair, we must remember that a lot of this cowboy money making attitude was occurring even in 2007 before the global financial crisis. However, what is clear is that the people who end up being busted and convicted, end up being little more than scape goats. The real crooks are the ones that sit in the board rooms running companies that are exploiting the resources of the Earth and polluting the land in which we live, while living comfortably in their gated communities.
Much of what went on here was still going on in 2007. In Australia we enacted laws in response to pretty much ban commissions for selling stock because what that would do would interfere with the ability of the broker to be looking out for the best interests of their clients. It is clear, and we are told from the beginning, that the job of the broker is not to make money for their clients, but to make money for themselves. In fact, as is also clear, the big money is in the so called penny stocks, the stocks that are too low to be listed on the major indices, and as such find it very hard to raise capital from investors, so they offer brokers large commissions to brokers to flog it off to unsuspecting investors, but the reason that they are so low is because they are high risk stocks that are more likely than not to not actually pay off.