I saw The Wolf of Wall Street earlier this week, and have been wanting to blog about it since. I’ve not read any other reviews of it, but anecdotally, the people whom I know that have seen it felt it to be over the top and ostentatious.  I have to agree with them after seeing it myself, but also point out that that’s the point of the film. Jordan Belfort (played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio) lived a life of excess. In fact, he took excess to excess. He drank way too much alcohol, took way too many drugs, slept with way too many women, and had way too much money. And  his mission was to keep pushing beyond the boundaries of excess in order to maintain his excessive lifestyle.

When I was in film school, one of the common mantras of all of the instructors was to push something as far as you think it can go, and then push it farther. It didn’t matter how crazy something seemed, if you think you’ve pushed an idea far enough, you probably haven’t. I’m not inside his head, but I believe that was the mantra that Martin Scorsese was going for with The Wolf of Wall Street. Every time you thought this story couldn’t get any wackier, it would. When you think they’ve taken the drug motif as far as it can go, Donnie Azof (played by Jonah Hill as only could play the role) finds an old set of ludes that are so powerful, they turn Jordan into jelly so that he literally has to crawl into his Lamborghini  in order to get home to keep Azof from giving away incriminating information over the phone. When you think they’ve taken the sex as far as it can go, we see Jordan with a dominatrix who has stuck a lit candle up his ass and then proceeds to drop hot wax on his back. Just when you think that Jordan is going to do the right thing and walk away, maintaining his wealth, his family and his dignity, his addiction to the adrenaline of what he’s doing prevents him from doing so, and continues him on down the path of self destruction.

Thematically speaking, this is a very powerful film.

This is also a highly entertaining film. It has a wit and an energy that you wouldn’t suspect to come from a director who has been making films for more than 40 years. I fact, it might be the funniest film that Scorsese has ever made. There was wit in The Departed and in Goodfellas and in Casino, but to the best of my knowledge, Scorsese has never made a film that was such a romp as The Wolf of Wall Street, which is another example of why Martin Scorsese has to be considered one of the, if not the, seminal film director of our time. Going backwards his last five films are The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo, Shutter Island, The Departed, and The Aviator. Aside from the fact that DiCaprio starred in four of them, you’re not going to find four more different films, and three of them were nominated for Best Picture and The Departed took home the award. Anyway, I’ve gotten off track a little bit, but my original point was that the over-the-top nature of this film and the story helped make it the most entertaining film of 2013 that I’ve seen.

From a screenwriting and storytelling perspective, I feel that there is a lot for aspiring screenwriters to learn. It’s a long film, coming in at exactly 3 hours, but the structure of the story is still there. In fact, there is a very clear Hero’s Journey motif in this film, and all of the stages are represented. What is even more interesting is what they did with the characters. One thing that Scorsese’s films always seem to have are characters that are unlikable, but you’re still compelled to root for them. Jordan Belfort is not a hero. Other than Bernie Madoff, no one can relate to him. He’s a criminal who built an obscene amount of wealth by manipulating ordinary people out of their money. Yet, in the third act, when he has that opportunity to do the right thing and walk away, you’re really hoping he will. You root for Jordan, even though you don’t like him and can’t relate to him.

Part of that has to do with DiCaprio. Here is a man who is a really fine actor. I haven’t seen all of the performances for Best Actor, but DiCaprio at least deserves the nomination he received. He does some amazing work in this picture, and it is his performance, along with Scorsese’s direction, that make this film what it is.

Overall, I highly recommend seeing The Wolf of Wall Street. You have to be in the right mood, and you have to prepare yourself to be in the theater for 3 hours. It doesn’t drag, however, and it didn’t feel like that long of a film to me. If you’re an aspiring screenwriter, watch it for it’s character depth, thematic motifs and overall story structure, and you will learn valuable lessons on crafting an entertaining and compelling story.

I finally saw Frozen last night and I found it to be entertaining with magnificent art direction, a stunning production design and beautiful animation. As they always do, even when the story isn’t great, the artists at Disney produced work that is really second to none.

While this film has a good story, however, I didn’t feel it reached its full potential. It’s a well constructed story, and the emotional highs and lows all occur at the appropriate times. It has good dramatic structure and it follows the classic Hero’s Journey formula. In those regards, the story is actually well done. The problem with the story in Frozen is that it’s shallow. They didn’t do a good enough job of getting deep inside the characters and developing relationships that had real meaning and emotional impact. That was accomplished much better in Tangled and to this day, even after multiple viewings, Tangled gets a much greater emotional response from me than Frozen did last night.

I think the main reason for the lack of depth in the story is that there are too many songs. With five songs, Tangled had it just right. The songs in Tangled, as well as all of the best Disney films, served to introduce characters and/or advance the story. There are no fewer than nine songs in Frozen, and even though some of them are very short, there are still nine of them. In the first act especially, it seems like the characters are constantly breaking into song. Now, the songs are all good, so I can see why the filmmakers wanted to keep them in the film, but they did so at the expense of adding depth to the story. For while the songs are good, most of them do very little to advance the story or to develop the characters. If they had taken out 2-3 of the songs, they would have had an extra 7-10 minutes of story time to add depth to the story and give the audience more of an emotional impact.

Now, is Frozen devoid of emotion? Of course not. Overall it’s a terrific film, and worthy of the Golden Globe that it won over the weekend and the Academy Award that it will probably win next month. It’s not a perfect film, however, and I don’t think that it meets the standard that they set with Tangled. I cared about the characters, but I could have cared for them more if the story were made to be deeper. For example, why was Else born with this power? Her father wanted her to learn to control it, but instead they just took steps to conceal it. Instead of hiding from the world, why didn’t Else try to learn how to control her power? She probably would have been a much more interesting and likable of a character if she had spent the years between the death of her parents and her coronation attempting and failing to learn to harness her power instead of locking herself away.

Something like that also would have allowed for a deeper relationship between Else and Anna, who wants nothing more than to be in a sisterly relationship with Else, but Else will not let her get close. At different spots in the film, it seems like they’re going to move Anna in the direction of getting back lost memories from the beginning of the film when Else accidentally hurt her using her powers, but they never quite get there. That’s an example of what, to me, was frustrating about Frozen. They scratched the surface of a lot of issues, but never fully explored any of them.

Overall, though, the characters are quite likable. Anna is decent as the heroin of the story, but like the story overall, she lacks the depth needed to make her a truly great character. Certainly, she doesn’t have the depth that Rapunzel had in Tangled. Else is one of the more interesting characters, and skirts the line between hero and villain. Again, it would have been nice of the filmmakers had explored her inner conflict in a way that wasn’t so superficial. She spends the first half of the movie just walking around  and looking sad, and that’s how the filmmakers expected to gain sympathy for her. As an audience, we really needed to see her do more in order to more fully relate to her. I expected that Olaf, the enchanted snowman, would be something akin to JarJar Binks, but he was actually a very sympathetic character that offered more than an attempt at cheap laughs. His comic relief was genuine and his character offered emotional depth that JarJar Binks never came close to offering. Kristoff is a solid love interest, and they gave him a nice twist where it looks like he’s going to save the day in the formulaic Disney way, but the filmmakers cleverly flipped the script in what an act of true love really is. I’ll let you see the film to find out what that twist really is.

All of that said, this is a film worth seeing, especially from a storytelling perspective. It offers examples of how to do things right in terms of solid 3-Act structure, and a well-developed plot to how things can be improved in terms of lack of story depth. And as always with Disney’s animated films, it’s beautiful to look at.