The Curious Filmography of The Real-Life Wolf of Wall Street: ‘Santa with Muscles,’ and other films

Written by Vince Mancini / 06.18.13


Jordan-Belfort-santa-with-muscles-09

I’m a little bit torn about Martin Scorsese’s new film The Wolf of Wall Street. I can’t deny that it looks entertaining as hell, and any time you get Matthew McConaughey chewing scenery with a silly haircut it would take at least a strapping bouncer or two to keep me out of that theater. The book the film’s based on sounds pretty entertaining too:

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called… (The Wolf of Wall Street). [Amazon]

The problem is, the book was written by the subject himself, Jordan Belfort, and I have a hard time listening to a story narrating to anyone who refers to himself as “an ill-fated genius.” Not to mention, giving this guy even more money to self-mythologize and tell me about how awesome it was when he screwed a bunch of people out of money leaves a bad taste in my mouth, no matter how much I want to hear about those chimps on rollerblades.

But as some of my astute commenters pointed out, Belfort actually financed a handful of movies himself in the mid 90s. While we may not be able to buy his memoir guilt-free, one thing we can do is to explore some of the crappy movies this self-described genius executive produced. For instance, did you know he bankrolled two separate films directed by the guy who did A Talking Cat?! It’s true. And it appears as if he discovered, like so many before him, that financing movies isn’t the easiest way to make money.

But first, Leo would like this dance:

Leo-Dancing-Wolf-of-Wall-street

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Your Mid-Week Guide To DVD And Streaming: Jack, Stoker, And A Bunch Of Numeric Titles

Written by Morton Salt / 06.18.13
"I should have stayed home with the gerbil."

He’s looking at the list of this week’s new DVDs.

Your Mid-Week Guide To DVD And Streaming is back, and just in time to run down one of the worst weeks for DVD releases in recent memory.  We’ve got big-budget box-office duds like Jack The Giant Slayer, moderately-budgeted duds like Stoker, and just plain embarrassing films like Movie 43 (pictured above).  This week’s not so great selections run the gamut from giants to G-strings, with everything from opera singers to exorcists in between.  It’s June -who really wants to be stuck in front of the TV anyways?

The DVDs:
Jack The Giant Slayer
Stoker
Movie 43
Quartet
21 & Over
The Last Exorcism Part II
The Brass Teapot
Summoned
Divorce Invitation
The Ghastly Love Of Johnny X
Zero Killed
The G-String Horror

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

If I’m being honest, one or two of these films do actually look watchable: it really is amazing what they can do with picture and sound quality on home video these days.  If you want to know which films you shouldn’t skip, continue reading on the next page.  On the other hand, if you’ve already seen The Brass Teapot, feel free to hop on over to the Netflix Instant suggestions by clicking the link above, but if you do you’ll never know which film I think might hold some promise. Read the rest of this entry »

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James Franco Is Crowdsourcing Three Movies

Written by Evan Harold / 06.18.13

Look at all my lit.

Good news, people with too much disposable income: James Franco wants your money. He’s got an Indiegogo project to make three movies out of stories from his book Palo Alto, which I own and can say is Hot Garbage. Lots of brazen-faces-reflecting-a-kaleidoscope of fireworks/carnival lights/pool lamps kind of scenes. $500,000 for three movies isn’t too bad considering all the profits go to the Art of Elysium charity, and Franco seems more interested in promoting the careers of four NYU directors than anything. So maybe this dicknosing is a little softer than our asses are used to. Plus a $450 backing gets you a voicemail!

James will record a 15 second personalized cell phone greeting of your choice (James retains the right to edit the script if he deems the content inappropriate).

I don’t know what could possibly offend James Franco (unless it’s a sick diss on Marina Abromovic), but if I had the money I’d make him say “Would you rather see three James Franco movies or three Hobbit movies?”

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Comments of the Week: Leo Pops, Locks and Drops

Written by Evan Harold / 06.18.13
Velma-and-Daphne-in-Bed-scooby-doo-32575831-940-704

“I mean I couldn’t have a lesbian at my party.”

Before we start, I need to give a big Thank You to the commenters for the lack of Jaden Smith material. I’d rather write 2000 words about a glass of water than Google that kid’s name again. Onward and upward.

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Taylor Lautner To Enter The ‘Dangerous World Of Parkour’ In ‘Tracers’

Written by Ashley Burns / 06.17.13
Taylor Lautner and a cow's ass

It’s a metaphor.

Life after Twilight hasn’t been exactly a huge success for Taylor Lautner, as his first non-werewolf role was a big, ol’ bomb at the domestic box office. The “thriller” Abduction had a budget of about $35 million but only made $28 million in the U.S., but since foreign kids have bad taste on a broader scale, the film ended up making $82 million. That and a relationship based on heaping piles of crying teenager allowances are all Twilight producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey needed to cast Lautner in their upcoming action/thriller, Tracers.

Deadline reported today that Lautner will be joined by third place winner in a Yasmine Bleeth lookalike contest, Marie Avgeropolous, but the real story here is the amazing, mind-blowing and, most of all, relevant plot that these two will deliver.

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WATCH: 11-year-old Natalie Portman’s audition for The Professional

Written by Vince Mancini / 06.17.13

These days, it’s easy to imagine Natalie Portman as some kind of rich girl nepotism case or the beneficiary of a certain kind of cool – sort of a proto-Zooey, or the kind actress/intellectual that Scarlett Johansson is trying to be. But I vividly remember seeing Portman in The Professional for the first time and thinking what a force of nature she was. Here she is in her Professional audition, an 11-year-old trying out for what would become her first film role. She has that quality of being composed and adult-like enough while still looking like a child that it’s simultaneously intriguing and sort of off-putting. When I was 11, I had frogs in my pockets and dried snot on my arm.

If you watch the original French cut of The Professional (*fluffs scarf, blows on soy chai*), it delves even further into the the pseudo-romantic relationship between Léon and Mathilda, which was always an intriguing aspect of that film, the child-like man and the precocious little girl and their latent attraction. Then Portman played a similar attraction in an even more overt way two years later in Beautiful Girls, as the human manifestation of the arrested development of Timothy Hutton’s sad pianist. Ha, “sad pianist.” Thus far I see Chloe Moretz following a similar career path, which is good for everyone because she seems like another capable actress. Oh hey, could you guys hold on a minute? I think I hear Chris Hansen at my door. No one touch my stuff.

Natalie-Portman-Professional-Audition

I’m still waiting for Megan Fox’s audition tape, where she soaps up Michael Bay’s Ferrari and he shoots extreme closeups of her boobs jiggling as she fires his t-shirt cannon.

[Filmmaker IQ via ThePlaylist]

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