One of the craziest movies I have ever seen was "Wolf of Wall Street." I had seen movies about the greed of Wall Street brokers before."Wall Street" with Charlie Sheen, and "Boiler Room" with Giovanni Ribisi, but they never quite captured the ridiculousness of greed as well as Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort. Jordan Belfort was a real person. He embodied the mentality of an overgrown spoiled 13 year old who stole the keys to Daddy's new Mercedes – impulsive, out-of-control and dangerous. He had no regard for human life, how many life savings he conned people out of or the lives he ruined.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" is based on a true story just as "Boiler Room" was based on the story of a brokerage firm in Syosset, Long Island. The name Adam sticks in my mind, as the head of the brokerage firm who was selling stock for non-existent companies. I knew people that worked there, who said it was exactly like the movie portrayed it. The top brokers would dare the new brokers to do bizarre things for money as a test to see how far they would go for money.
You can see the personality change in Jordan as he earns more money. He dumps his average looking wife, who stood by him and encouraged him to succeed, for a hot blonde that he meets at one of his parties in the Hamptons. His bizarre office shenanigans become more bizarre. They start with dwarf tossing to hit the bulls eye for $25,000 to a platoon of naked hookers parading around the office and getting tackled by enthusiastic brokers because they had a good week. Everything is fueled by drugs. Cocaine is the drug of choice to improve your "sell" and Quaaludes for coming down off all of the coke.You can't help but laugh at Jordan's stupidity, insisting they sail through a terrible storm in his 167 foot yacht after the captain warned him that it might sink. It does!
The satire of the movie is the actual events that took place in 2008 when Wall Street crashed the U.S economy when they went unregulated by the U.S government, wrote "balloon mortgages" causing the middle class to go into foreclosure and then were bailed out by taxpayers.
Greed is funny until you are a victim of it!
