Well it certainly didn’t take long to get “Black Skinhead” into a movie trailer. That track is supposedly one of Kanye West’s “minimalist” new songs, but this ridiculously entertaining trailer, for Martin Scorsese’s latest movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, is all about excess.
Based on the memoir of the same name, The Wolf of Wall Street is, incredibly and despicably, a true story, “dwarf tossing” and all. DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, the man who presided over a brokerage firm that cheated investors for $200 million, before he confessed to money-laundering and securities fraud. In the meantime he managed to sink his 167 foot yacht, marry a beer commercial model, and idolize Gordon Gekko.
It seems safe to expect that Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos) will make use of all that rich material in the film adaptation, but under Scorsese’s direction the movie seems to have become the Goodfellas of Wall Street, complete with snap zooms, whip tilts, freeze frames, and a narrator confessing his crimes directly to the camera. (You can almost hear the “Gimme Shelter” already.)
Belfort once said that to play him DiCaprio would “just have to get stoned, stumble around like a moron, and drool,” but he and co-stars Matthew McConaughey and Jonah Hill seem to be doing a lot more here, walking the line between devilish and buffoonish with plenty of scenery chewing and broad physical acting. DiCaprio alone shows at least a couple GIFs worth, dancing like a nut and tossing lobsters at his enemies—all while wearing those broad-shouldered late ’90s suits.
Ultimately there’s too much packed in here to even take it all in one viewing. Or, as the trailer puts it, using progressively larger fonts spliced in to the song’s rhythms, “More, more, more, more, more, more is never enough.” It’s the fourth, fifth, and sixth “mores” that make it.
Previously from the Trailer Critic
Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity
Ender’s Game
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
Only God Forgives
Kick-Ass 2
Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha
Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited
The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis
The Lone Ranger
