@deanduncan63Saw #WolfofWallStreet. Boy. Should have checked the parents’ guide on that one.
#WoWS. Gleeful, operatic iniquity, if you like that kind of thing.
#WoWS. Irony, they’re saying, or implicit critique. But will audiences understand? …
… I’m remembering all of those young men who enthusiastically established fight clubs in ’99-00.
#WoWS. Representation doesn’t necessarily equal advocacy. But infinite representation of the thing you don’t advocate ends up being …
… de facto advocacy.
#WoWS. What, you might say, of Voltaire, Swift, Hoggarth? Absolutely—Juvenalian satire should be sharp, & it can be hard …
… But I’m not sure those old guys required dozens of actual young men & women to so degrade themselves in the service of their satire.
#WoWS. I’m thinking about Sophocles & the moral function/manner of theatrical violence: refer to it, & keep it off-stage!
#WoWS. Am I simply a prudish knucklehead? There was some of that talk when this came out: impatience & name-calling …
… mostly directed at those who dared to be offended by a film that is, after all, aggressively, outlandishly offensive …
… A smugly licentious Left-equivalent to the Right’s too-often ignoramus incivility? Maybe, often, both sides = in their intolerance …
… Never admit you’re wrong, or that the other guy may have a point. A plague on both your houses!
#WoWS: looked for a minute like it was on its way to Taxi Driver‘s direly ironical ending. Nope—it chose A Clockwork Orange instead …
… Kubrick, I mean, not Burgess. Boo!
#WoWS. I get infernal Scorsese (’73, ’76, ’82). I celebrate purgatorial Scorsese (’80, ‘87 [’99]). I am instructed by chronicler-of-male …
… psychopathology/tribal-savagery Scorsese (’02, ’06). I appreciate the Scorsese that honours sweet & inaccessible plenitudes (’97, 11/I & II) …
… that he fervently desires, but in which he evidently cannot quite believe (cf. Ingmar Bergman, 1975) …
… Also, hurray for the committed film citizen/preservationist (’95, ’99), & the surprisingly, remarkably modest documentarian (’74/I, ’05) …
… Bless the anomalous, unexpected, really convincingly charitable Scorcese (’74, ’04, ’10/I). But the decline-and-fall-of-the-Roman-Empire Scorsese …
… (’90, ’95, this one)? Nix! There’s one trilogy that didn’t need completing!
#WoWS. This isn’t Gibbon, it’s Caligula himself. It’s Rabelais, with Bosch running through its veins. It’s late Caravaggio, after the murder …
… still an utter virtuoso, & so utterly bereft of hope; it’s perditional Pasolini, ca. 1975, & even the stuff of his subsequent ignominious assassination …
… Again, if you like that kind of thing.
#WolfofWallStreet. Jesus wept …