Photo via digitalpeople
My name is Jordan Belfort.
I’m a drug addicted piece of shit and a fucking loser who only gives a shit about money. I made a bunch of money last year. That really pissed me off because I’m a fucking workaholic who can’t enjoy anything in moderation and wish that I’d made more. Isn’t that cool? Blind ambition? That’s an admirable trait, right? I gamble, drink, fuck hookers, and the federal agents are looking to indict me. Isn’t that really cool man? Isn’t that how you want to live your life? Like me? A fucking slave to my vices? Oh no, it’s totally okay though. Scorsese said it’s cool, Leonardo said it’s cool, and you’re a moderately educated male between the ages of 15 and 45 and you think that this is top shit, because you live a normal life doing normal things, and fantasize about doing what you just saw me do for the last three, long, arduous, unrealistic and overacted hours of your boring life.
“Dude have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? So good man.”
“Hey how great does that new Leonardo Di Caprio movie look? The one where he wears suits and lives a life of excess. No, not Gatsby, the other one.”
“Yeah dude, he’s just like, doing shitloads of coke and Quaaludes and making like SO much money dude. He fucking like, flies this helicopter while he’s fucked up and just like pays off the co-pilot and then ends up not dying. It’s sick man. And the amount of money he makes, it’s insane. He’s twenty-four. Twenty. Four. Making Millions. Dude. It’s so sick. You should see it.”
The latter is the spiel about the movie given to me by a shitfaced friend-of-a-friend about a week before the movie came out. He’d read the book. And by read it, I mean, was halfway through it and had to tell everyone about it. Because of how sick it was. I should emphasise that this is my problem with the movie. Not Jonah Hill, whom I usually find highly enjoyable, overacting his way through his nothing of a character, nor Leonardo Di Caprio doing his classic mix of ‘exacerbated anger’ and that thing where he narrows his eyes and methodically talks through his actions to people that he’s done in pretty much everything since Romeo & Juliet. Not even however much Matthew McConaughey got paid for that absolute bullshit role that took 2 minutes of screen-time. No, the main problem with this movie, is everyone that raves about it like the main character is an idol for living his life the way he does.
“But dude, it’s based on a book. It was a true story. This stuff actually happened!”
Cool man. You know what else was based on a true story? 127 hours. You want to cut your fucking arm off now? Seem cool? James Franco is easily just as cool as Leonardo Di Caprio, why not? It seems to me like you’re really into glorifying self-destruction. Do you guys realize that Jordan Belfort committed a bunch of serious crimes, served 2 years in jail, and is $110,000,000 in debt? Oh no, I forgot, he’s a motivational speaker now. All’s well that ends well, right? “
“Bro I want to get some Lemmons. How sick would it be if we could get some ‘ludes?”
Quaaludes. Are you fucking serious? The amount of 20-somethings harping on about how ‘baller’ it would be to get some Quaaludes on my news feed is approaching unbearable, Kony-esque levels of ignorance. Apart from the fact that they do the drugs in the film, what in any way inspires you to want them? Does it actually look like a fun time? “Oh man, how great would it be if we were borderline paralytic, unintelligible, suffering severe respiratory problems and were puking everywhere?” Did you guys even watch the film or are you just obsessed with the idea of it? Either way, congratulations on being a fucking idiot who deifies an extinct narcotic you saw in a Hollywood Blockbuster. I can’t wait until some shady fucker in a long sleeved t-shirt tries to sling you some ‘ludes in the Ric’s toilets at 3am. Legit ‘ludes too. In no way is it bath salts and ketamine. Trust him. He has one of those stretchers that looks like an ivory tooth. Very cool.
I should stress that I don’t despise the movie itself. It was okay. I don’t regret watching it. I had nothing better to do with those three hours. But people seem to be forgetting that it’s just a movie, not a bible. Jordan Belfort is a scumbag in real life who swindled real people out of millions of dollars. Google a photo of his fuck-ugly face and stop using The Wolf of Wall Street as an Ikea catalogue for your fantasies of glamour, excess, chauvinism and debauchery. Maybe stick with attempting to emulate Don Draper from Mad Men rather than a dude that spent years in prison and is millions of dollars in debt. It has a little bit more class and makes you look a little bit less like a douchebag. A little bit.
Written by Mitch Exton
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