American Psycho is excellent though, if someone walks out of that film thinking Bateman is a cool guy then there’s probably not much hope for them
Of course drive had a point.
“There’s no good sharks?”
Scorpion and the frog. Dude literally wearing a scorpion on his back.
I don’t think people who watch the Wolf of Wall Street and want to be Jordan Belfort are missing the point of the movie. Maybe Scorsese thinks otherwise, but the film he actually made is one of the greatest ever aspirational capitalist fantasies. To blame the audience for his purported message getting “misinterpreted” is a cowardly dodging of responsibility.
As depicted, Jordan Belfort’s life is pretty fucking awesome. He is unimaginably wealthy, is deified by his underlings, has a hot wife, and can do virtually anything he wants. The movie almost ends with a brief scene of Jordan going to prison and seemingly suffering some consequences for his action, but then shows that his sentence was a lavish life at Club Fed and he went right back to being a rich and worship capitalist after getting out. Sure his wife hated him and he had a huge drug problem, but those problems are hardly enough to even the scales against the total male power fantasy that his life is shown to be.
Much like you can’t make a truly anti-war movie if its protagonists are a bunch of macho army men instead of war’s civilian victims (ie: Come and See), you can’t make an anti-capitalist movie if its heroes are the rich and powerful instead of those they impoverish and oppress.
True. Just look at all of the character images in the screenshot above. See all of those classic low angles giving a sense of power and confidence to these characters. The camerawork in most of these films is constantly fawning over these villainous characters. Yes there’s a critical subtext in there that hopefully most people can see, but it’s buried underneath thick layers of power fantasies and flattering aesthetics. It’s no wonder that so many average young teenagers who want to be cool get distracted and miss the critique hiding beneath it all, particularly when media literacy is so poorly taught in schools because it’s not STEM.
The movie almost ends with a brief scene of Jordan going to prison and seemingly suffering some consequences for his action, but then shows that his sentence was a lavish life at Club Fed and he went right back to being a rich and worship capitalist after getting out
This was 100% intentional because near the end of the movie there’s a shot of the FBI Agent who got him riding home on a run-down bus and looking kind of miserable. Like, Bellfort ultimately is still living a great life while this agent who won isn’t doing too great.
Drive is such a good movie and definitely my favorite in the genre, but yeah I can see how if you fuck up reading American Psycho you’d easily fuck up on that one too.
