* Christmas Day–Chinese Food & A Movie
* Christmas Day–Chinese Food & A Movie.
During her June 29, 2010 confirmation hearing, future Supreme Court Justice-Elena Kagan was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham (with reference to the Christmas Day Bomber)-“Where were you on Christmas Day.”–Kagan replied, “You know, like all Jews, I was probably in a Chinese restaurant.”
As Sinatra use to croon, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage…”
With the “above” in mind, Jeff Eats, Mrs. Jeff Eats and another couple will be dining -Christmas Day at China Dumpling, 1899/5 North Congress Avenue, Boynton Beach (see review-6/23/08)…the meal to be followed by the 6:40pm showing of “The Wolf of Wall Street” at the Cinemark Palace 20 in Boca Raton.
For those who don’t get Christmas Day–Chinese Food & A Movie…where you been?
A happy and safe holiday to all of you guys…
Jeff
We are doing it a drop different this year. Instead of doing Chinese at Pine Garden we are doing good old New York Kosher Style a Deli at Zinger’s in Boca Raton. Just checked and Zinger’s will be open Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
No ifs and buts in my mind that Zinger’s is the best deli in south Florida.
So that’s our story for this year with us passing on the movie part of the equation.
Manny
We are sticking to tradition by doing the Chinese thing. Just wanted to mention that Zinger’s is really good. I recently did a pastrami with chopped liver on rye and it was delicious. Throw in an order of hand cut French fries and I was like pig in sheeeet? By the way not sure on which Chinese joint we’ll hit but one thing I do know is that Wong Kee in NY’s Chinatown can never ever be beaten.
We ate in Zingers last night and the food was terrific.
Very busy but every thing came out just right.
Gotta check to see if my favorite sushi joint, Masa Hibachi and Sushi, Linton & Military in Delray is going to be open…. if not, it’s off to China Garden, Delray for dinner. The movie will be a DVD when we get home.
Some traditions just seem right – that’s how they became traditions!
Jeff
So right on the money.
We are doing Uncle Joe’s and are then calling it Christmas Day.
Explain to me how Christmas Day is a national holiday?
Doing Uncle Zhang’s in Palm Beach Gardens.
Does anyone remember growing up where our parents said they were going when they went for Chinese food? They went to the Ch_ _ _s.
Of course we remember.
The problem today is everybody is too politically correct.
Those guys in Jersey who shot and killed that 30 year old lawyer in a carjacking are nothing but n—ers. But who wants Al Sharpton and Tswana Brawley On your ass.
Time we started calling things the way they are instead of worrying what some SOB on tv thinks you should be saying.
America of the 50s sure was a much more civilized time.
For sure we use to go out for Chinks on Sunday night. We still do.
Thank you for your wisdom, Phil Robertson.
Look what you started.
Maybe I’ll go to Zingers or Ben’s for some Kike food. Assholes!
Time we started calling things the way they are instead of worrying what some SOB on tv thinks you should be saying.
I guess “Chink” is OK but “Kike” isn’t? Thanks for deleting my message. Hypocrite.
Never mind.
You are an idiot. Can you please move to Nazi Germany with your scum bag comments….
My point was using a racial epithet like “Chink” is no different than using the epithet “Kike” and then using the CCFs own words in the followup. I don’t approve of ever using a disparaging name for any group, all of whom deserve their dignity and our respect. There is NEVER an appropriate time to use them. But I guess that makes me a Nazi. I don’t know what it makes you…
American,
I’d like to see what you would call those 4 animals who shot that poor boy in the head for nothing if that boy just happened to be your son.
Get real.
American, I am sure you were never taught right from wrong. Being a racist bigot like you takes little thought and I hope you get sterilized. G-d forbid you have children to carry froward your demon seed of hatred and “American” destruction…..
American is responding in kind to the comments to CCF said. To spell it out, he’s basically mocking him for his douchebag comments by using Jewish slurs instead.
Frankie Lee
You got it right.
Guaranteed if that was American’s boy who was killed he wouldn’t be calling those 4 thugs Afro Americans.
Some of the comments here is why Jeff Eats is a great site.
Jeff obviously believes in free speech and allows all comers and all opinions. You don’t see that in the SunSentinel etc.
Nice to see y’all are filled with holiday spirit.
Hey Jeff
Another great column.
No question about it Chinese Food and Movies on Christmas Day for many of us. All I know is that’s been tradition in my family since I was a kid and I’ve been around since 1947.
Never could figure out how Christmas became a national holiday in the first place. But I guess what is is!
For us this year we are doing Red Lantern in Boca Raton and then we’ll catch Wolf of Wall Street at Cinemark. What makes this Christmas movie even more fun this year is the fact that it’s based partly on the life of a guy who use to live in our country club, Dan Porush. He did 39 months in Federal pen. If you readers could meet him and the rest of the characters he use to associate with you would just shake your heads in wonderment at how buffoonish the whole bunch of them are.
Anyway, once again great blog.
Looking forward to your next pick.
Tye
I also knew of that guy. What a loser. His whole crowd was the laughing stock of the club. You knew they were up to no good and it was just a matter of time to Uncle Sam caught up with them.
This Christmas we are catching Sarge at a local temple and doing Zinger’s Deli.
And when Uncle Sam came a knocking they became pigs as in squealing pigs on each other.
If you want to be a crook then you got to know the code of ethics. No ratting anybody out to save yourself.
One day one of the rat’s is gonna meet one of folks that they robbed and it ain’t going to be pretty.
TYE
lived down the street from porush. what a loser. a little drug user. what a bs guy.
was the laughing stock of the woodfield country club.
Jeff
Rotflmfao
Only food blog I know that can actually stir up controversy among its readers.
I guess that’s why Burger Beast http://www.burgerbeast.com called Jeff Eats one of the most provocative blogs in Florida.
By the way, back then saying we were going out for chinks didn’t mean anything negative or derogatory.
Great going.
I don’t know about you guys but I and the little lady are going out for Chinks tonight at Silver Pond in Tamarac.
One other comment, my cousin Ronnie died in Nam in 1967 and No matter what you say and do, those red bastards will always be gooks to me.
CHINKS on Sunday night is the tradition –
Also tastes better than Chinese food –
We are doing Chinese cuisine on Christmas Day. Then going to the theatre.
Wtf has gotten into this world!!??
I’ve been trying to remember what a good old friend used to say when the conversation would head in this direction. I’ll quote
“F*ck them if they can’t take a joke”
we are going to our daughter in law’s parents’ house for Christmas day. they are Italian.
Jeff,
getting a good laugh about this Wolf of Wall Street movie. PR is all over the place.
let’s just say, I knew the principals of this scam brokerage. do you know what little punk pussies are? well that’s what they were. when the government showed up, you never saw so many “rats” in your life. they squealed and turned on each other in desperate bids to stay out of jail. what a bunch of sissies.
now they make a movie like these guys were powerful etc. all they were two bit thieves that didn’t know how to behave. and when push came to shoved, that were just little rats.
Brean,
The problem with our judicial system is that it’s too easy on guys like Wolf of Wall Street.
These guys are just punks who figured out a great money scam.
What should happen to guys like this who become government informants to save themselves is that when caught they are sentenced to 25 year prison terms.
Trust me, if these guys knew that they were going to be in prison for 25 years minimum they wouldn’t be so tough doing what they did.
all I know is I wouldn’t want to hang around with any of these guys.
there are always people who just wait awhile and then pay you back.
when you least expect it!
Jeff on this Wolf of Wall Street one of leaders of the crooked scam Dam Porush did it again right after he got out of prison. This time it was a phony coin scam. I think they locked him up for that one also. These guys never learned.
I forgot his name but one of his buddies in the coin scam who did jail time came out and became a religious Jew. The whole Friday night thing and kosher business. I’ll be looking to see how he somehow cons south Florida’s orthodox Jewish community in the future. A zebra can never really change is stripes.
He’s at it again with some bs mail order diabetes medical company. One day one of his victims is going to meet up with this loser and it ain’t gonna be a pleasant meet up.
Danny time for the witness protection program.
Jeff
We just picked up food at Bamboo Wok in Boca.,there must have been at least 10 others waiting for takeout.
Tomorrow we are staying home wondering how Christmas became a legal holiday in the US.
Hi Jeff:
Two Points,, how was China Dumpling. I gave up on them a couple of years ago when there was a change of management and a very noticeable decline in the quality. Used to love their week end dim sum.
Re Wolf of Wall Street, I am in the financial business and i wouldn’t go to the movies or buy the book. That lowlife should be using the royalties to pay back his victims, but to the best of my knowledge he isn’t so he’s making another round of money off his scam. Not with any help from me.
Shelly H:
Just had a chance to read your comments.
On China Dumpling, change of plans had us picking up Chinese food from Bamboo Wok in Boca Raton and eating at home. The food was delicious. Bamboo Wok is definitely one of the best Chinese takeouts in south Florida.
Thanks for reading…
Good move. The reviews of China Dumpling on Trip Advisor are terrible. This used to be a great restaurant but apparently has gone way down hill. What a shame.
Shelly,
I know many of the folks portrayed in the movie. Suffice it to say, that are just bad guys. They have no moral compass and couldn’t give a crap about anyone but themselves.
What is even more amazing is that even after getting caught with their stock scam, one of them then got involved in a phony baloney coin scam. Then after getting caught in that got into a phony baloney medical device company.
These guys never stop scamming.
The beautiful thing about these type of guys is that for the rest of their lives they got to keep a close eye on their backs, because you never know who is going to comeup from behind.
Saw the ‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ and really enjoyed it.
A couple of the characters actually live/lived where I do.
No question about it that these people have no ethics whatsoever.
For years I and many of my neighbors watched these clowns in action as they bated many people into their scam.
I remember one of them telling me about a public company they were pushing that had a UNIQUE film that when you took a picture it would label the picture, like Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary etc. Now guaranteed Kodak or Polaroid could have figured that one out. The point is that the companies they were pushing were nonsensical ipos.
At Club events they drank to excess and their behavior was buffoonish.
By the way, unlike the film the women and men aren’t as good looking in real life as portrayed. The DiCaprio real guy is a short guy with big ears and a big nose.
Despite all of the above I enjoyed the film although it was about 20 minutes too long.
I know these guys.
BAD NEWS!
Here’s a good review of Wolf Of Wall Street.
I saw it yesterday and it’s a drop too long but very entertaining.
Not friends with but I do several of the main characters and the movie has them pegged just right.
A bunch of BS artists who robbed people.
There is an old saying, what goes around comes around.
They’ll get theirs.
The Wolf of Wall Street
The Wolf of Wall Street Movie Review
The Wolf of Wall Street Movie Poster
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Cast
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort
Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff
Matthew McConaughey as Mark Hanna
Jon Bernthal as Brad
Jon Favreau as Manny Riskin
Cristin Milioti as Teresa Petrillo
Kyle Chandler as Patrick Denham
Ethan Suplee as Toby Welch
Spike Jonze as Dwayne
Rob Reiner as Max Belfort
Jean Dujardin as Jean-Jacques Handali
Margot Robbie as Naomi Lapaglia
Director
Martin Scorsese
Screenplay
Terence Winter
Comedy, Crime, Drama
Rated R
179 minutes
Watch This Movie
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★★★☇ | Matt Zoller Seitz
December 25, 2013 | ☄ 0 Print Pag
Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is abashedand shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it’s one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men. Its star Leonard DiCaprio has compared it to the story of the Roman emperor Caligula, and he’s not far off the mark.
Adapted by Terence Winter from the memoir by stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who oozed his way into a fortune in the 1980s and ’90s, this is an excessive film about excess, and a movie about appetites whose own appetite for compulsive pleasures seems bottomless. It runs three hours, and was reportedly cut down from four by Scorsese’s regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It’s a testament to Scorsese and Winter and their collaborators that one could imagine watching these cackling swine for five hours, or ten, while still finding them fascinating, and our own fascination with them disturbing. This is a reptilian brain movie. Every frame has scales.
The middle-class, Queens-raised Belfort tried and failed to establish himself on Wall Street in a more traditional way—we see his tutelage in the late ’80s at a blue chip firm, under the wing of a grinning sleazeball played by Matthew McConaughey—but got laid off in the market crash of 1987. He reinvented himself on Long Island by taking over a penny stock boiler room and giving it an old money name, Stratton Oakmont, to gain the confidence of middle- and working-class investors. Per Wikipedia, at its peak, “the firm employed over 1000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion, including an equity raising for footwear company Steve Madden Ltd.” Belfort and his company specialized in “pump and dump” operations: artificially blowing up the value of a nearly worthless stock, then selling it at a big profit, after which point the value drops and the investors lose their money. Belfort was indicted in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, spent nearly two years in federal prison and was ordered to pay back $110 million to investors he’d deceived.
Taking its cues from gangster pictures, “Wolf” shows how Belfort rose from humble origins, becoming rich and notorious (the title comes from an unflattering magazine profile that caught the attention of federal prosecutors). This Robin Hood-in-reverse builds himself a team of merry men drawn from various sundry corners of his life. All have both given names and Damon Runyon-esque nicknames: Robbie Feinberg, aka “Pinhead” (Brian Sacca), Alden Kupferberg, aka “Sea Otter” (Henry Zebrowski), the dreadfully-toupeed “Rugrat” Nicky Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), “The Depraved Chinaman” Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), and Brad Bodnick (Shane Bernthal of “The Walking Dead”), a DeNiro-esque neighborhood hothead who’s known as the Quaalude King of Bayside. His office enforcer is his volcanic dad (Rob Reiner), who screams about expenditures and workplace sleaze, but often seems to live vicariously through the excesses of the young wolves of the trading floor.
Belfort’s right hand man Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) is perhaps even more conscienceless than Belfort: a hefty wiseass with gleaming fake choppers who quits his job at a diner after one conversation with the hero, joins his scheme, helps him launder money, and introduces him to crack—as if Belfort didn’t already have enough intoxicants in his system, on top of the adrenaline he generates by making deals and bedding every halfway attractive woman who crosses his path. As McConaughey’s character tells Belfort early on, this subset of investing is so scummy that drugs are mandatory: “How the f— else would you do this job?” At one point a broker declares that they’re doing all that coke and all those Quaaludes and guzzling all that booze “in order to stimulate our freethinking ideas.”
Belfort is married when the tale begins, to a good and respectable woman who doesn’t approve of his financial shenanigans or chronic infidelity, but he soon throws her over for a blond and curvy trophy named Naomi LaPaglia (Australian actress Margot Robbie, managing a Queens accent more convincingly than DiCaprio), then marries her and starts supporting her in the style to which they’ve both become accustomed. After a few years, Belfort is living in a mansion that another DiCaprio character, Jay Gatsby, might find gaudy, and buying a yacht, and helicoptering to and from meetings and parties, sometimes piloting under the influence and nearly crashing. Then a federal prosecutor named Greg Coleman (Kyle Chandler) enters the picture, sweating Belfort in the most satisfying way imaginable, by confronting him on his own turf (including Belfort’s yacht) and letting him brag on own awesomeness until he hangs himself.
Imagine the last thirty minutes of “GoodFellas” stretched out to three hours. That’s the pace of this movie, and the feel of it. It’s one damned thing after another: stock fraud and money laundering; trips to and from Switzerland to deposit cash in banks (and give the increasingly drugged-out Belfort a chance to flirt with his wife’s British aunt, played by “Absolutely Fabulous” costar Joanna Lumley); rock-and-pop driven montages with ostentatious film speed shifts (including a super-slow motion Quaalude binge); and some daringly protracted and seemingly half-improvised dialogue scenes that feel like tiny one-act plays. The best of these is McConaughey’s only long scene as Belfort’s mentor Mark Hanna, who at one point thumps a drum pattern on his chest while rumble-singing a la Bobby McFerrin; this eventually becomes the anthem of Belfort’s firm, and it’s weirdly right, as it suggests a tribal war song for barbarians on permanent rampage.
As is often the case in Scorsese’s films, “Wolf” gives alpha male posturing the attraction-repulsion treatment, serving up the drugging and whoring and getting-over as both spectacle and cautionary tale. In his most exuberant performance since “Titanic,” DiCaprio plays Belfort as a pipsqueak Mussolini of the trading floor, a swaggering jock who pumps his guys up by calling them “killers” and “warriors” and attracts hungry, self-destructive women, partly via brashness and baby-faced good looks, but mostly by flashing green. The film lacks the mild distancing that Scorsese brought to “GoodFellas” and “Casino.” The former contrasted Henry Hill’s matter-of-fact narration with occasionally shocked reactions to bloodshed; “Casino” adopted a Stanley Kubrick-like chilly detachment, as if everyone involved were narrating from a cloud in Heaven or a pit in Hell. “Wolf” is in the thick of things at all times, to suffocating effect, depriving the viewer of moral anchors.
This is not the same thing as saying that the film is amoral, though. It’s not. It’s disgusted by this story and these people and finds them grotesque, often filming them from distorted angles or in static wide shots that make them seem like well-dressed animals in lushly decorated terrariums. You can tell how much Belfort cares about his people by the way his narration segues from an anecdote about a broker who fell into a spiral of misery and shame: “He got depressed and killed himself three years later,” Belfort says over a photo of a corpse in a bathtub trailing blood from slit wrists. Then, without missing a beat, he says, “Anyway…” The brokers classify prostitutes by cost and attractiveness, referring to them as “blue chips, “NASDAQs” and “pink sheets” (or “skanks”); they’re warm-blooded receptacles to be screwed and sent on their way, much like the firm’s clients, including shoe mogul Steve Madden, whose deal Belfort describes as an oral rape. The directorial high point is a Belfort-Azoff Quaalude binge that spirals into comic madness, with Azoff blubbering and freaking out and stuffing his face and collapsing, and Belfort suffering paralysis during a panicked phone call about his money and then crawling towards his car like a nearly-roadkilled animal, one agonizing inch at a time.
These images of censure and humiliation—and there are a lot of them, including a gif-worthy moment of Belfort paying a prostitute to stick a lit candle in his bum—coexist with moments that get off on the men’s howling and profit-making and chest-thumping. We’re supposed to figure out how we feel about the mix of modes, and accept that if there were no appeal whatsoever to this kind of behavior, no one would indulge in it. This isn’t wishy-washy. It’s honest.
Scorsese and Winter never lose track of the bigger picture. In theory, the movie’s subject is the Wall Street mentality, which is just a clean-scrubbed version of the gangster mentality showcased in Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas” and “Casino” (one could make a case that guys like Belfort are the ones who pushed the Vegas mob out of Vegas). “Wolf” starts with a Fellini-like party on the floor of Belfort’s firm, then freeze-frames on Belfort tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. The traders get away with their abuse because most people don’t see themselves as little guys, but as little guys who might some day become the big guy doing the tossing. “Socialism never took root in America,” John Steinbeck wrote, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Belfort chides the prosecutor Coleman for living what Henry Hill would have called the goody-two-shoes life, and in a scene near the end, as Coleman rides the subway home, we can see that the taunt stuck in his craw. Everyone at Belfort’s firm seems to have the same title: “senior vice-president.” Everybody wants to rule the world.
But the film’s vision goes beyond cultural anthropology and antihero worship. When people ask me what the film is about, I tell them that like a good many films by Scorsese—who overcame a cocaine problem in the early ’80s—at its root, it’s about addiction: a disease or condition that seizes hold of one’s emotions and imagination, and makes it hard to picture any life but the one you’re already in. Many people get a contact high from following the exploits of entrepreneurs, financiers, bankers, CEO and the like, and when such men (they’re nearly always men) get busted for skirting or breaking laws, they root for them as if they were disreputable folk heroes, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns—guys who, for all their selfishness and cruelty, are above the petty rules that constrict the rest of us. Such men are addicts, egged on by a cheering section of little guys who fantasize of being big. We enable them by reveling in their exploits or not paying close enough attention to their misdeeds, much less demanding reform of the laws they bend or ignore—laws that might have teeth if we hadn’t allowed guys like Belfort (and his far more powerful role models) to legally bribe the United States legislative branch via the nonsensical “system” of campaign financing. After a certain number of decades, we should ask if the nonstop enabling of addicts like Belfort doesn’t mean that, in some sense, their enablers are addicted, too—that they (we) are part of a perpetual-motion wheel that just keeps turning and turning. In the end “Wolf” is not so much about one addict as it is about America’s addiction to capitalist excess and the “He who dies with the most toys wins” mindset, which has proved as durable as the image of the snarling gangster taking what he likes when he feels like taking it.
Scorsese and Winter aren’t shy about drawing connections between Belfort’s crew and the thugs in Scorsese’s mob pictures. Those mob films are addiction stories, too. “Wolf of Wall Street” showcases Belfort Henry Hill-style, as if he were an addict touring the wreckage of his life in order to confess and seek forgiveness; but like a lot of addicts, as Belfort recounts the disasters he narrowly escaped, the lies he told and the lives he ruined, you can feel the buzz in his voice and the adrenaline burning in his veins. You can tell he misses his old life of big deals and money laundering and decadent parties, just as Hill missed busting heads, jacking trucks, and doing enough cocaine to make Scarface’s head explode.
There will be a few points during “Wolf” when you think, “These people are revolting, why am I tolerating this, much less getting a vicarious thrill from it?” At those moments, think about what the “it” refers to. It’s not just these characters, and this setting, and this particular story. It’s the world we live in. Men like Belfort represent us, even as they’re robbing us blind. They’re America, and on some level we must be OK with them representing America, otherwise we would have seen reforms in the late ’80s or ’90s or ’00s that made it harder for men like Belfort to amass a fortune, or that at least quickly detected and harshly punished their sins. Belfort was never punished on a level befitting the magnitude of pain he inflicted. According to federal prosecutors, he failed to abide by the terms of his 2003 restitution agreement. He’s a motivational speaker now, and if you read interviews with him, or his memoir, it’s obvious that he’s not really sorry about anything but getting caught. We laugh at the movie, but guys like Belfort will never stop laughing at us.
saw the movie this afternoon. it’s a good one. i dont know the guy personally who still lives in the wcc but i see him around the club every so often and he isnt as chlubby looking as they make him look in the movie. i will tell you that he has a piss poor rep around here.
Ate at Dumpling. Just fair.