The Invisible Counterpoint

Jordan and his friends grew up lower-middle class, at best, in the inner suburbs of Queens and Long Island. They had been to state college, community college or no college at all; in class terms, they represented an insurrection against the Ivy-educated, third- and fourth-generation wealth that dominated the financial industries. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that they were reactionary in other ways, striving to outdo the established Wall Street firms in institutional sexism and frat-boy-style bad behavior, whether that meant spending hundreds of thousands every month on prostitutes and strippers, holding dwarf-tossing tournaments or consuming both prescription drugs and illegal street drugs by the truckload. (Jordan and his pal Donnie Azoff, Hill’s character, engage in an extended search for troves of genuine Quaaludes that yields a number of hilarious and/or horrifying developments.) So “The Wolf of Wall Street” is much funnier than most previous Scorsese films, and also a w...

The Great Gatsby 
One thing I never confused the movie for the book for, was its portrayal of Gatsby. In the book I could believe that the huge estate he had prepared was but to lure him Daisy, while in the movie it is surely his aggrandizement--I honestly thought most of the time of Orson Wells's Kane while watching puffed up Leo. He strolls his party not so much invisible, as he is in the book, but hidden master of it all. And he shows off how that special person and that special person and that special person are all there, rendered as they are into part of his ample house collections, with them trapped to not want to be anything else, owing to his hosting the biggest draw in town--Beethoven in his second act, and this just one feature. Every night he houses his parties, and every night the whole town is corralled into it -- he's master of the house and master of all. And so at the end of the evening when he strolls outside and looks across the water at the beam...