Really short movie reviews: Wolf of Wall Street and Noah

wolf-of-wall-streetLast night, I finally watched last year’s 3-hour-long The Wolf of Wall Street, which purports to tell the true story of Jordan Belfort, a guy who got rich beyond his wildest dreams of avarice thanks to the empire he built by fraudulently selling worthless penny stocks.  The film garnered a great deal of attention when it opened because it showed the debauchery of Jordan’s life, as well as the life his fellow get-rich-quick traders lived.  There were beaches full of cocaine (apparently the actors sniffed up powered Vitamin B), mountains of Quaaludes, oceans of alcohol, and swarms of naked prostitutes, as well as few tossed dwarfs.  It wasn’t titillating, it was mind-numbing.

As I commented to my husband, the movie was too much debauchery and too little plot.  By the beginning of the third hour, I was desperate for the FBI to move in and just arrest the guy so that we could all be put out of our misery.  Unless you are a glutton for punishment, I recommend that you skip the whole movie and just watch the first and last half hours, which will tell you everything you need to know about one crook’s rise and fall.

Noah-2014-Movie-Poster-650x962Also last night, my son saw Noah, a movie that has aroused the ire of traditional believers because of the way it turns God’s message and moral on its head.  While my son couldn’t care less about whether the movie twisted the Bible, he does care about good entertainment.  This was not, in his estimation, good entertainment.  Or as he said, and I quote, “Noah was a terrible movie.  It was really stupid and boring.  It was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”

When I pressed him for details, I got a garbled recital about Noah’s stupid belief that he had to kill all of humankind, about his plan to murder his grandchildren, about unbelievable bad guys and animated rocks, and generally about a frenetic, yet boring, mess of a movie.  This was a two thumbs down and then some.