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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I watched the film for the first time recently and was mostly disappointed. The best scenes focused on the sales tactics and the industry-specific insights, but at least twice in the film the main character starts explaining something and cuts himself of with "but you don't really care about all that". Then, on to more repetitive scenes about paying for sex and taking sedatives.

And was I supposed to like the main character? In any way, shape or form? I feel I can relate more to full-fledged anti-heroes like Walter White or The Wire's Omar than I can to this basic jackass.

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You might like the movie Boiler Room, which was inspired by Stratton Oakmont and the other penny stock shops that operated in the suburbs of NYC. Great ensemble cast and a much more grounded story.

> And was I supposed to like the main character? In any way, shape or form?

No.

And yet so many people seem to mess up this simple thing.

> And was I supposed to like the main character?

No, the whole point is that you should not like him.

However the film doesn’t do a good job at that. I see often comments about how people are missing the point of this movie.

You have this good looking guy with a Lambo, the hottest girl, a yatch, partying and all that, and then you see the downfall. But the movie focuses too much on the first part, and little on the latter, because obviously that’s where the fun is.

And IIRC the actual guy, Jordan Bedfort, spent less than two years in prison, and now gives motivational speeches and the like. Dare I say lots of guys would think it was worth it, and they aren’t really missing the point, more like they don’t agree with it?

> However the film doesn’t do a good job at that. I see often comments about how people are missing the point of this movie.

To be fair, it's very hard in cinema to have people "get" the point without spoon-feeding it to them, which could fail anyway and make it a worse movie to boot. I'm sure you can think of tons of other examples.

Who was it that said it's impossible to make an anti-war movie because you always end up making it look cool on screen [1]? I think it's the same with any movie parodying or even denouncing something, unless it's turned into a manifesto. And this also bit Scorsese with this movie.

[1] Though in my opinion Netflix's "All Quiet On The Western Front" comes pretty close. I don't think anybody watched that movie and kept thinking war is cool or full of glory.

François Truffaut expressed that sentiment, though the various quotes I've seen attributed to him were not verbatim. The closest I could find was "Every film about war ends up being pro-war[1]"

1: https://www.newspapers.com/article/chicago-tribune-it-is-imp...

The Wall https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4218696/ does for me. From what I recall, "people" largley didn't like it, probably because it's not a happy, feel-good, good-guys-win-in-the-end movie. Though who the good-guys are in that movie is obviously not obvious.

>To be fair, it's very hard in cinema to have people "get" the point without spoon-feeding it to them

And plenty of people will happily ignore any subtext you create, and most of the text you create, to just consume a portion of the imagery you put out. Neonazis LOVE all sorts of movies and characters that are supposed to be warnings about how bad Fascism is.

Yet they do NOT love Mel Brook's "The producers", because it makes Nazis look goofy. If you are trying to turn people off something, the absolute minimum bar is to demonstrate it's frank stupidity. You must eschew any and all "Coolness". This was also used to turn people away from the KKK when their stupid club rituals and limp handshake were shared without the normal framing.

You make an excellent point. Goofiness. Maybe that's the key.

A good read is "Billion Dollar Whale", which details the 1MDB scandal that actually funded the Wolf of Wall Street movie.

Jho Low scammed ~$5 Billion, and used some of the funds to befriend Leonardo DiCaprio (by throwing lavish parties), as well as fund the movie.

> And was I supposed to like the main character?

The whole point of the movie you watched was that he's a disgusting piece of human garbage. There are tons of people around him that treat him like some kind of deity, but he's like the worst human being you can possibly know. It's a societal criticism.

>>And was I supposed to like the main character?

Do you watch every film through the lens of what you're "supposed" to feel? Some people watch this film thinking he was a hero, some people think he was a scumbag, plus a million opinions everywhere in between. Feel how you want to feel, it's a story not an educational video.

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