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:
