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IN TRODUÇÃO STORY L I N E DETA I LS T ECH N IC A L SPECS

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OPI N I ÃO R ECOM EN DAÇ ÃO I M PORTÂ NCI A

2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick

Mulholland Drive David Lynch

The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson

EN/US Inglês

C O N T E N T S

Pages 1,2 - 2001 Space odyssey

Pages 3,4 - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Pages 4,5 - Mullholand Drive

Pages 7,8 - Metropolis

Pages 9,10 - The Wolf of Wall Street

Pages 11 - Sherlock

1

Storyline 2001 is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well).

Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon’s surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far.

Now a race begins between computers (HAL) and human (Bowman) to reach the monolith placers. The winner will achieve the next step in evolution, whatever that may be.

Summary 1: A black monolith has an affect on humans, the monolith’s effects focusing on two specific time periods. The first period is four million years ago, at the dawn of man. After the appearance of the monolith, the ape men begin to display behavior unknown before then. The second period is the near future, in the year 2001. There are five astronauts aboard Discovery One, which is on a mission to Jupiter.

At the beginning of the mission, the reason for it is unknown to the five astronauts. Three of the astronauts are in hibernation at the start of the mission to preserve the manpower over its entire course, leaving mission commander Dr. Dave Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole as the two manning the spacecraft. There is another what is often considered “sixth” astronaut on board, HAL 9000 - referred to simply as Hal - the artificial intelligent computer which controls all of the craft’s functions, including the systems keeping the three hibernating astronauts alive. Hal is made all the more astronaut-like as it is given an artificial voice, Hal and the astronauts often having conversations.

A 9000 series computer is considered infallible, any error one has ever made being human caused. Ultimately, Bowman and Poole believe that Hal is malfunctioning, they are unaware that Hal’s behavior is due to knowledge of classified information it has about events at Clavius, a lunar outpost, eighteen months earlier.

However, the issue between the astronauts and Hal becomes a fight for survival. The mission in its entirety has profound consequences for the human race. —Huggo Summary 2: This movie is concerned with intelligence as the division between animal and human, then asks a question: what is the next division?

Technology is treated as irrelevant to the quest--literally serving as mere vehicles for the human crew and as a shell for the immature HAL entity.

Story told as a montage of impressions, music, and impressive and careful attention to subliminal detail.

A very influential film and still a class act, even after 25 years. —Robin K.

Did you know?

Character error 1: Bowman inhales deeply before attempting to re-enter the ship from the pod. Arthur C. Clarke in an interview later noted that this is incorrect. Bowman should have exhaled, as the vacuum of space would have damaged his lungs had they been full of air.

Character error 2: HAL’s verbal description of his chess move (Q-B3), given what he shows on the screen, are from Frank’s point of view. This is often regarded as an error, since in descriptive chess notation, the rank is described from the point of view of the player making the move. It should be Q-B6. HAL’s errors can be considered either script goofs or clues revealing his internal conflict, since he is supposed to be infallible.

Character error 3: HAL knows that Dave and Frank were planning to disconnect him because, “... although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move...” but moments before discussing the plan, when Dave and Frank were directing HAL to rotate the pod, their lips clearly visible to HAL, HAL did not comply with their request. This is not a goof as HAL anticipated that Dave and Frank were planning something and didn’t want HAL to hear them talking by switching off the communications in the pod. HAL deliberately rotated the POD so he could read their lips to find out what Dave and Frank were planning. HAL didn’t rotate the pod to make Dave and Frank believe that HAL wouldn’t be able to determine what they were saying.

Errors in geography: 1. Earth should appear closer to the horizon at Clavius than at Tycho, not vice versa.

2. The Earth hangs in the sky near the horizon at Tycho in long shots of the monolith pit, but Tycho is at 43 degrees south latitude on the Moon, so Earth would appear in the sky halfway between the horizon and zenith.

3. The Moon changes phase several times (backwards and forwards) in the long shots during the trip from the Space Station to Clavius Base on the Moon.

4. The quadrupeds shown coexisting peacefully with the apes in the early scenes are tapirs, Tapirus bairdii.

They live in tropical forests in Central America and northwest South America. You’d never see them in Africa (outside of a zoo), nor in the very dry habitat shown in the film.

But tapirs that are accustomed to humans can be quite docile (though obstinate), and they look exotic to most viewers, so they were a reasonable choice for the film.

5. The sun in space is pure white - not orange or yellow.

Review For all those bewildered by the length and pace of this film (“like, why does he show spaceships docking for, like, 15 minutes?”), here’s a word you might want to think about: Beauty.

Beauty is an under-rated concept.

Sure, you’ll often see nice photography and so on in films. But when did you last see a film that contains beauty purely for the sake of it? There is a weird belief among cinemagoers that anything which is not plot or character related must be removed.

This is depressing hogwash. There is nothing wrong with creating a beautiful sequence that has nothing to do with the film’s plot. A director can show 15 minutes of spaceships for no reason than that they are beautiful, and it is neither illegal nor evil to do so.

‘2001’ requires you to watch in a different way than you normally watch films. It requires you to relax.

It requires you to experience strange and beautiful images without feeling guilty that there is no complex plot or detailed characterization. Don’t get me wrong, plots and characters are good, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of everything. There are different KINDS of film, and to enjoy ‘2001’ you must tune your brain to a different wavelength and succumb to the pleasure of beauty, PURE beauty, unfettered by the banal conventions of everyday films.

“All art is quite useless” - Oscar Wilde.

This movie is certainly one of the greatest films ever made. It is a story told in a steady pace, told mostly not by words but by cinematic means of expression. Perfect blend of spectacular special effects and classical music bring to life creations of human imagination in both realistic and poetical way. The story itself is quite simple at a first glance. As the title implies, there is an archetypal journey, a motive repeated for thousands of years. This motive was always used not only to depict a trip in space and time, and beyond, but also had rich philosophic meaning.

The film is a poetical contemplation of most exciting eternal questions.

It is not just an odyssey of a person; it is an odyssey of our species. The film is great by itself, yet, in my case, the impression from it will always be mingled with that from the book.

I’ve read it at the age of 10, really not thinking about problems like ‘what is the relationship between evolution of humankind and development of human morality’. But the impression was great enough to make me fall for entire genre of science fiction.

The day I learned ‘2001’ got only special effects Oscar and was not even nominated for the Best Picture was the day when ‘Academy Award’ completely became two words meaning nothing to me.

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Analysis Storyline Did you know?

Review

Storyline: GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.

The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting and the battle for an enormous family fortune -- all against the back-drop of a suddenly and dramatically changing Continent.

Dimitri, the bequeathing of a valuable painting called “Boy with Apple” to Gustave, the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death which is initially pinned on Gustave, and the attempts of Zero, his girlfriend - a baker’s assistant named Agatha - and others to clear Gustave’s name while Dimitri does whatever he needs to get what he believes is rightfully his, namely the painting. —Huggo

A teenage girl visits the monument of the writer who penned the book, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. In 1968, that author was inspired to write the book when he visited that hotel, located in the European mountainous country formerly known as Zubrowka. Once a luxurious hotel, it, in 1968, has fallen on hard times. The author meets the then current owner, M. Zero Moustafa, who recounts the story of how he became the hotel’s owner and why he holds onto it and keeps it open despite it obviously making him no money. Zero’s story begins in 1932, when the hotel was in its golden era. Zero was the novice immigrant lobby boy, who, like all the other hotel staff, was under the guidance of M. Gustave H., the devoted concierge. Gustave aimed to please, he giving the guests whatever they wanted, especially the wealthy blonde women. The story largely revolves around one of those women, the wealthy Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis - better known as Mme. D. - her opportunistic son

Did you know? In the beginning of the movie, during the author’s conversation with the concierge, Monsieur Jean runs to a guest who is choking and uses the Heimlich maneuver, squeezing the guest’s chest from behind. Dr. Henry Heimlich first described the Heimlich Maneuver in Journal of the American Medical Association in 1974.

When deputy Kovacs is trying to escape Jopling, he boards a bus and draws the shade down, revealing the reflection of Jopling on his motorcycle. When Kovacs raises the shade, the bike is still reflected, but when the bus begins to move forward, the reflection of the parked bike moves along at the same speed of the bus. It should remain in one place while the bus moves out of the frame.

After the reading of Madame D.’s second will, articles in the Trans-Alpine Yodel newspaper are shown. The second, “Son of Murdered Countess Disappears Without Trace”, has two paragraphs - which read the same, word for word.

Review: I would consider myself a Wes Anderson fan, however in saying that, I have only seen a handful of his movies. I was very excited for The Grand Budapest Hotel, because of its excellent cast, the fact it’s directed

by Wes Anderson and just by how unique it looked. After watching The Grand Budapest Hotel, I can confidently say that it’s my new favourite Wes Anderson film, and probably his best. As I was hoping, the story to The Grand Budapest Hotel is very original and unique, some may even say strange. And as the movie goes on, the story only gets wilder and wilder.

The film is often very hilarious, with some seriously funny dark humour thrown in there as well. Characters are extremely well written, with the bond between Gustave and Zero being the backbone of the whole movie as it’s so well written. The Grand Budapest Hotel features an odd narrative structure that works very well for the film, again adding to the uniqueness and freshness of it. I wasn’t exactly sure how the story would play out, as I purposely avoided all promotional materiel so I would know as little as possible before watching. This was a great benefit to my viewing experience as I loved everything I saw, and felt as though nothing was spoiled from watching too many trailers. I haven’t been a huge fan of most of Ralph Fiennes’ work since his phenomenal performance in 1993`s “Schindler’s List”, but this is easily his best performance since then. He proves he can do comedy just as well as he can do drama, providing a perfect balance of both.

Newcomer Tony Revolori is excellent as well. I won’t get into the whole supporting cast because there’s so many who were all so great, but I was particularly impressed by Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law and Saoirse Ronan.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is definitely a Wes Anderson film, down to its very core. If you know his style, then you known what to expect, as this movie is full of it. Thankfully though, it’s not a case of style over substance, with a great story to accompany the gorgeous visuals. The colour palette is beautiful; it’s nice to see lot’s of bright colours when so many other films are so dark and dreary. The set design and costumes are perfect, and there’s so much attention to detail within the sets.

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Storyline A bright-eyed young actress travels to Hollywood, only to be ensnared in a dark conspiracy involving a woman who was nearly murdered, and now has amnesia because of a car crash.

Eventually, both women are pulled into a psychotic illusion involving a dangerous blue box, a director named Adam Kesher, and the mysterious night club Silencio. —Antony E. After a brutal car accident in Los Angeles, California, Rita is the sole survivor but suffers mass amnesia.

Wandering into a strangers apartment downtown, her story strangely intertwines with Betty Elms, a perky young woman in search of stardom.

However, Betty is intrigued by Rita’s situation and is willing to put aside her dreams to pursue this mystery.

The two women soon discover that nothing is as it seems in the city of dreams. —TXTard After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesiac, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality. —William Nixon Synopsis: As the film begins, a surreal image of people doing the jitterbug is shown. The sound of a cheering crowd accompanies a ghostly image of a young blonde woman and an old couple, all of whom are smiling (apparently before said crowd). The final image of the blonde woman waving dissolves into a point-of-view shot, with the camera panning over a bed and moving into a pillow. The scene then fades black and switches to a street sign”MULHOLLAND DR.”illuminated by headlights. A young, dark-haired woman (played

by Laura Harring) is being driven up Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles late at night. She is threatened by two men inside the car with a gun.

Before they can kill her, however, their limousine is smashed into by a carload of drag racing teenagers. The nameless, dark-haired woman suffers from a head injury and subsequent amnesia. As the sole survivor of the crash, she wanders down the hillside into L.A., finds refuge behind some bushes, and falls asleep. The next morning she awakes and sneaks into a vacant apartment. A young and perky aspiring actress named Betty Elms (played by Naomi Watts), who has just arrived in Hollywood from Deep River, Ontario, moves in and discovers her in the shower. It is revealed that the apartment, which is part of a complex managed by a feisty older woman named Coco (played by Ann Miller), belongs to Betty’s Aunt Ruth, who is away making a movie in Canada. The dark-haired woman sees a poster for the movie Gilda starring Rita Hayworth and decides to call herself “Rita”. She tearfully admits to Betty that she has amnesia, and together the two of them try to piece together her identity.

Did you know?

Character errors 1: When Betty enters her Aunt’s apartment for the first time, she leaves her suitcase out in the courtyard, and never goes back for it.

2: The Sony-brand telephone that Betty and Rita use to call Diane Selwyn has separate buttons for ‘on’ and ‘off’ functions. However, Betty presses the ‘on’ button to turn the phone off following the call.

3: When the detectives talk about finding the gun in the back of the limo, they call the limo a “Caddy” when in fact the limo is actually a late 1980’s Lincoln Town Car Stretch Limo.

Continuity: 1. When Rita is walking to after from the accident the cut on the right side of her head disappears and reappears. Also, even though the blood is obviously dry, the blood pattern is completely different each time.

2. The golf club is missing from Adam’s Boxster when he is on the phone and driving home. It reappears as he arrives at his driveway.

3. When the Castigliane brothers enter the room and sit down at the table (at 0:28), Vincenzo Castigliane (Dan Hedaya) opens the briefcase, takes out an envelope and slides it across the table to Mr. Darby. The opening of the envelope is on the upper side, but when it arrives to Mr. Darby, he turns it to open it, so the opening is on the bottom side.

4. Director Adam Kesher’s frenzied attack on the Castigliane brother’s limousine immediately scatters pigeons in the far distance, but only when he finally knocks out a headlight (a relatively minor impact) do the pigeons directly behind the car fly up.

Crew or equipment visible: 1. During the long tracking shot of the mob goon (Kenny) entering the director’s house, a crew member is reflected in the window.

2. When Adam Kesher leaves the meeting to smash the limo’s windows, the crew is reflected in the window across the street, pushing the cameraman and dolly.

3. In the shot of the dark colored car with the two men in suits driving by the apartment complex right before Betty Elms leaves for her audition (1:13:23), for a moment the top of the camera is reflected in the bottom part of the car’s rear window.

Factual error: When Betty arrives at LA she is walking out from the top level of LAX. Arrivals are at the bottom level, Departures are at the top.

Miscellaneous: At the moment of impact in the opening car crash, an explosion reveals that the white car is devoid of its three joyriding occupants.

Review “Mulholland Dr.” is something else.

It is a film that will make you question your own sanity in many ways.

Naomi Watts is the young, starry-eyed Canadian that wants to make it big in Hollywood. She is naive and thinks that dreams can come true if you want them bad enough. Watts discovers a very beautiful woman with amnesia (Laura Harring in a sizzling performance) in her aunt’s house in L.A. and she becomes determined to help Harring out. Harring is mysterious and her near-fatal car crash occurred on the dark and winding Mulholland Dr. Throughout several oddball and very dark scenes take place. A young director (Justin Theroux) learns that Hollywood is run by strange underworld figures that are quiet, but ruthless. Another strange side-story is the mysterious man behind the diner that is seen in another character’s dreams. An inept assassin also runs around causing unwanted trouble for himself and others. Then of course there are cameos by Robert Forster and Billy Ray Cyrus. The film twists into darkness as it progresses as Watts’ and Harring’s relationship turns sexual.

A fine line between reality and fantasy is skewered and it comes down to a strange Pandora’s box that holds the true secrets to “Mulholland Dr.”.

Oscar-nominated director David Lynch also shows that not all you see and hear is real, even though one’s mind might think so. The film seems artificial at times, showing Hollywood as a nice place where dreams can come true. But then the dreams are turned into vivid nightmares of what could possibly be the true reality.

David Lynch somehow makes this whole thing work and he makes it work beautifully in this reviewer’s opinion. The film is a trumped-up version of “The Twilight Zone” and it adds many techniques that made Alfred Hitchcock the true master of suspense. Many wonder what this film is truly about. I am not sure. I am not sure Lynch even knows, but I am going to give it a shot. “Mulholland Dr.” is the dark side of the human condition. It is a film that shows how easy one can lose one’s soul if bad elements are let in. There are figures that seem somewhat supernatural to me in this movie. It seems that many of the characters are “messengers” that are all after one thing: Naomi Watts’ soul. Watts lets the elements in and in the end she cannot overcome them. What she thinks she wants seems attractive on the outside, but there are cobras on the inside that will be too strong to fight off. In short, “Mulholland Dr.” is a brilliant piece of film-making and it is brilliant due to its unique aspects and the fact that it is what one thinks it is. There is no right or wrong answer and it is a film that makes you think.“Mulholland Dr.” is a complicated puzzle for the minds of cinema fanatics.

5 stars out of 5. —tfrizzell

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Analysis Storyline Did you know?

Review

Storyline: Sometime in the future, the city of Metropolis is home to a Utopian society where its wealthy residents live a carefree life. One of those is Freder Fredersen. One day, he spots a beautiful woman with a group of children, she and the children quickly disappear. Trying to follow her, he is horrified to find an underground world of workers who apparently run the machinery that keeps the Utopian world above ground functioning.

Goebbels met with Lang and told him that he could be made an honorary Aryan despite his Jewish background.

Goebbels told him “Mr. Lang, we decide who is Jewish and who is not.”

Lang left for Paris that very night.

2. Film included more than 37,000 extras including 25,000 men, 11,000 women, 1,100 bald men, 750 children, 100 dark-skinned people and 25 Asians. 310 shooting days were required.

One of the few people above ground who knows about the world below is Freder’s father, John Fredersen, who is the founder and master of Metropolis. Freder learns that the woman is called Maria, who espouses the need to join the “hands” - the workers - to the “head” - those in power above - by a mediator who will act as the “heart”. Freder wants to help the plight of the workers in their struggle for a better life. But when John learns of what Maria is advocating and that Freder has joined their cause, with the assistance of an old colleague. an inventor called Rotwang, who turns out to be But their nemesis goes to works towards quashing a proposed uprising, with Maria at the centre of their plan. John, unaware that Rotwang has his own agenda., makes plans that include shutting down the machines, with the prospect of unleashing total anarchy both above and below ground. —Huggo Did you know? 1. Much to Fritz Lang’s dismay, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were big fans of the film.

3. Unemployment and inflation were so bad in Germany at the time that the producers had no trouble finding 500 malnourished children to film the flooding sequences.

4. Was so influential on Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that they named their character’s city after it.

5. Brigitte Helm’s robot costume was extremely uncomfortable to wear.

Helm suffered greatly underneath it as it cut and bruised her though Fritz Lang insisted that she had to wear it.

6. No optical printing system existed at the time, so to create a matte effect, a large mirror was placed at an angle to reflect a piece of artwork while live footage was projected onto the reverse. To expose the projected footage, the silvering on the back of the mirror had to be scraped off in strategically appropriate places. One mistake would ruin the whole mirror. This was done for each separate shot that had to be composited in this manner.

Who ever heard of an epic science fiction film? Especially in the 1920s?

Sure, some science fiction movies are huge today, such as George Lucas’ latest goofy Star Wars movie, but in 1926, Fritz Lang came out with a brilliant film about what the future would be like if people went on living the way they were living back then.

And sure enough, we went right ahead living the way we were living, the population got bigger and more crowded, and now modern society is not a whole lot different from what was presented in Metropolis.

The story is about a young rich kid without a care in the world who becomes concerned about the way that society (Metropolis) was run by his father, John Frederson, the master of Metropolis. He lives in a Pleasure Garden’ high above the level of the workers’, and he worries about what would happen if the huge number of workers were to turn against his father, given the terrible conditions under which they live and work. Some of the best scenes in the film take place in the underground mines, showing the workers portrayed as little more than components on a gigantic, sinister looking machine. The scene where the machine overheated even contained some impressive stunts, as well as interesting cinematography as the machine transforms into a giant devil-looking monster. After countless workers are consumed by it (no wonder this was Hitler’s favorite film), they are immediately replaced by other workers, who go right to the same spots that the previous men left and resume their robotic movements.

If some of these scenes, men can be seen being carried away on stretchers after having been injured, and the rest of the workers keep right on working, hardly even noticing.

The way that the workers are portrayed as lifeless machines is one of the more potent elements of this film, as well as the most revealing about the directors intentions. When his son complains about the tragic things that go on in the mines, Frederson replies that such accidents are unavoidable, but his son still insists that they deserve credit for building the city. This is the kind of content that foreshadows some serious mutiny, and at the same time it shows what may very well happen when large groups of people feel mistreated.

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Storyline The movie opens with a TV advertisement for Stratton Oakmont, Inc. It discusses the nature of Wall Street brokers, describing them as bulls or lions. A lion walks through one of the floors of the company.

We next see a large group of brokers playing a game where they throw little people onto a board with a dollar sign for a bulls-eye. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) then introduces himself among those playing this game. He tells us that he is the son of two accountants living in Bayside, Queens. Ever since he started working on Wall Street, Jordan has enjoyed a life of endless drugs and countless hookers of his choosing.

He is seen blowing cocaine into a hooker’s butt, and then later flying a helicopter while hopped up on quaaludes. We also see him driving his Ferrari and getting a blowjob from a woman revealed to be his wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie). According to Jordan, he does enough drugs to sedate the majority of New York’s population. The one drug he loves the most, however, is the one that can make man conquer the world: money.

He snorts a line of coke with a $100 bill, crumples it up, and then tosses it in a wastebasket.

When he was 22 years old, Jordan began working on Wall Street while married to a woman named Teresa Petrillo (Cristin Milioti). He starts working as a broker and he meets his smooth-talking, easygoing boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), along with another abrasive and foul-mouthed co-boss, Peter DeBlasio (Barry Rothbart). Jordan is astonished at how everybody talks and works.

He has lunch with Mark, who is doing a rhythmic chant while pounding his chest. Mark orders enough martinis for them to “pass the fuck out”. He asks Jordan how many times he jerks off: Jordan says about three or four times a week. Mark says those are rookie numbers and that he does it at least twice a day. He starts babbling to Jordan about how nobody knows if the stocks will go up, down, sideways, or whatever, and that it’s all a “fugazi”. Mark’s primary reason for going into stocks was pretty much just for hookers and blow. He gets Jordan to join in the “Money Chant”.

Jordan starts his first day with his broker’s license on what happens to be October 19, 1987 - aka, Black Monday. The stocks around the world plummet, and Jordan loses his job. At home, Teresa suggests they pawn her engagement ring as he looks through the jobs section in the paper. He comes across one place in Long Island: “Investor Center” located in a small mini-shopping center.

Jordan shows up to Investor Center in a suit. The place is merely a small establishment that hardly looks professional, with most of the brokers.

Did you know?

1. Matthew McConaughey’s scenes were shot on the second week of filming. The chest beating and humming performed by him was improvised and actually a warm-up rite that he performs before acting.

When Leonardo DiCaprio saw it while filming, the brief shot of him looking away uneasily from the camera was actually him looking at Martin Scorsese for approval. DiCaprio encouraged them to include it in their scene and later claimed it “set the tone” for the rest of the film.

2. The actors snorted crushed B vitamins for scenes that involved cocaine. Jonah Hill claimed that he eventually became sick with bronchitis after so much inhaling and had to be hospitalized.

3. Martin Scorsese claimed that the sequence of Jordan attempting to get in his car while extremely impaired on Lemmons was improvised on the day of filming, and that it was Leonardo DiCaprio’s idea to open the car door with his foot. DiCaprio strained his back during the scene, and was only able to perform the stunt once.

4. On a routine visit, Steven Spielberg spent a day on the set, watching the shoot of the Steve Madden speech.

Martin Scorsese claims that Spielberg essentially codirected the scene, giving advice to actors and suggesting camera angles.

5. Originally, Martin Scorsese offered Margot Robbie to appear wearing a bath-robe during the seduction scene between her and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Robbie refused and insisted on doing the scene fully nude; her first in her career. According to Robbie: “The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world...She has to be naked. She’s laying her cards on the table.” Robbie said she had three shots of tequila in succession before shooting the scene to relax. After shooting was complete, Robbie initially fibbed to her family and friends about actually doing the nude scene in order to delay any personal repercussions; claiming C.G.I. was used to superimpose her head on a body-double. She eventually changed her mind and confessed when the film was released.

6. Margot Robbie claimed that her sex scene with Leonardo DiCaprio on a bed full of cash was extremely uncomfortable, as the fake paper bills had sharp edges resulting in multiple paper cuts to her back.

7. Jordan Belfort coached Leonardo DiCaprio on his behavior, especially instructing him in the various ways he had reacted to the Quaaludes he abused as well as his dope-induced confrontation with Danny Porush.

8. In one of Jordan Belfort’s speeches he mentioned the phrase “there is no nobility in poverty”. He was quoting Charlie Sheen from the movie Wall Street (1987)

Review In the mid-1990s, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of his associates from brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont became the very definition of excess and debauchery, their offices a boiler room fueled by cocaine and greed. High pressure sales tactic and less-than-legal behind-the-scenes manipulation bred plenty of twenty-something millionaires, and Belfort built himself an empire at the top of the heap. His rise and fall is chronicled in The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the memoir of the same name.

Under most circumstances, the actions of Belfort and his cronies (including Jonah Hill in a howlingly funny turn as Belfort’s business partner) would be viewed as disgustingly abhorrent, but Martin Scorsese frames this tale of greed with a comedic lens that allows us to laugh at things we probably shouldn’t find humorous. Whether it’s a clumsy attempt at fisticuffs between two characters overdosing on Quaaludes, or the categorization of prostitutes using stock market terminology (“blue chip” hookers make you wear a condom and typically accept credit cards), the film is outrageous from start to finish, and rarely falters in its quest to entertain the audience for three hours.

Belfort manages to delude himself and his pals into thinking they can live like this forever, but the audience knows better, and Belfort’s eventual comeuppance is hardly surprising.

But the path is paved with hilarity, especially in a scene aboard the mogul’s luxury yacht, where he surreptitiously offers a pair of FBI agents everything from booze to girls to cold hard cash in exchange for their silence. And let’s not forget his punishment for drunkenly piloting a helicopter into the backyard of his estate at 3am, raising the ire of his trophy wife (Margot Robbie).

Scorsese has always managed to elicit astounding performances from his actors, and his fifth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio results in one of the most charismatic, despicable, offensive and captivating characters to ever appear on screen. As financial bad boy Belfort, DiCaprio swaggers from scene to scene ingesting eye-popping amounts of narcotics, groping and fondling nearly every female within reach, and spouting more profanity in three hours than an entire season of The Sopranos.

Belfort is the kind of person that any sane person would detest in real life, but thanks to Scorses and DiCaprio, we can’t take our eyes off him.

-- Brent Hankins

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Storyline Wounded Afghan veteran Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman) meets brilliant consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and moves into a flat on 221B Baker Street with him. Their landlady, Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs), acts as a de facto housekeeper for them. Sherlock’s first case, “A Study in Pink”, sees him apprehend cabbi-turned-serial killer Jeff Hope (Phil Davis). Their confrontation escalates to the point that John, who’s followed Sherlock unnoticed to the scene, shoots the cabbie out of fear for Sherlock’s life. However, Sherlock manages to extract from the dying cabbie that he was being sponsored in his crimes by a figure called Moriarty, who is apparently a “fan” of Sherlock’s.

The case seals Sherlock and John’s friendship. In their next case, “The Blind Banker”, they uncover a Chinese smuggling ring, which is again implied to have been linked to Moriarty.

“The Great Game” sees Sherlock being baited into solving a series of “puzzles” by Moriarty, who is as yet unseen. Each puzzle involves solving an undetected crime, with the additional incentive being that failure to solve the crime within a set time will lead to the death of an innocent bystander. Simultaneously, Sherlock works on recovering the missing Bruce-Partington Plans for his older brother Mycroft (Mark Gatiss), who is a powerful figure in the British government.

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Did you know?

1. The character of Greg Lestrade is a combination of Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade. In the books, the latter character’s first name is said to begin with the letter G, but is never revealed. This is why Sherlock is always forgetting Lestrade’s name.

2. Amanda Abbington, who plays Mary Morstan, John Watson’s fiancé/ wife in the series, was the real-life longtime partner of Martin Freeman before they split in 2016. They have two children together.

3. In this series, Watson was wounded in the shoulder but has psychosomatic/psychogenic pain in his leg. This is a sly reference to the original stories in which Arthur Conan Doyle was inconsistent about the location of Watson’s war wound.

4. As part of his preparation after being cast as Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch read every original Conan Doyle story.

5. Many versions of the coat that Sherlock wears are used in filming, but the original, used in the pilot, was bought by Mark Gatiss who later gave it to Benedict Cumberbatch as a birthday present.

6. In Conan Doyle’s original stories, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson addressed each other by their last names, which was common during Victorian times. Since nowadays it is more common for people to address each other with the first name.

Review Knowledge of the original isn’t at all necessary, but it does change the viewpoint. While some were congratulating themselves on beating Holmes to the punch in spotting the profession of the murderer, readers of the original were being conned into believing that his next victim was going to be the American he was driving (the victims in the original are all American). In the original, the word ‘Rache’ appears at the crime scene, also in an empty house in Lauriston Gardens, written in blood.

The police jump to the conclusion that the victim was trying to write the word ‘Rachel’. Holmes knows that ‘Rache’ is German for revenge.

Moffat turns it neatly and humorously around. In the original it’s a red herring, in the new version, it’s a vital clue. These riffs on the original abound and are almost always imaginative and amusing and often more than that. Mycroft as Sherlock’s Big Brother, for example.

Moffat and Gatiss treat the characters with all the loving respect that an author could wish for and serve up an adaptation which re-imagines everything that Conan Doyle put into his plots and yet delivers something very close to to their original purpose and effect. Holmes and Watson are products of their time, as they should be, but they are recognisably the descendants and inheritors of the originals.