The poster for the movie was up.
Cineplex was premiering Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street. You could consider this perfect timing considering the fact that at the beginning of the week, Leonardo DiCaprio had picked up a Golden Globe for the best actor for his role as Jordan Belfort in the movie.
Days later on the January 16, the movie, director, writer and DiCaprio’s side kick, Jonah Hill, bagged Academy awards nominations for best picture, best actor, best supporting actor, best director and best screenplay. But curiously, in Kenya, a day before the movie premiered, it was banned by the country’s Film Classification Board.
According to a post on the board’s Facebook page, watching, selling and distributing the movie is apparently a crime. The film had been banned in other conservative markets too, but curiously, it was premiering in Uganda in about 20 hours.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film has run into a roadblock outside the USA, especially in Asia and the Middle East. Unlike the usual movie premieres at Cineplex cinema, at 8:30pm, there was no signal of a possible release. The movie banners were missing; only Epic and Thor 3D were being advertised.
After many of us tried to pay for the movie in vain, after, by the way, the lady at the reception asking how old we were, we were told the film had been cancelled. Just like that. No explanations. This automatically made us even more anxious as to why a five-time Academy-nominated film was being loathed internationally.
Ashley Roberts at the premier of the wolf of wall street
The best thing was to raid the local movie vendors, to see if they too had received the memo. At the famous Papa’s Corner downtown, it was hard to find a single copy since the movie had sold out; it was at another shop where only two copies were available.
The three-hour movie follows the story of Jordan Belfort and his escapades as a stock broker on Wall Street. Belfort made millions of dollars by day and spent all of it by night on drugs and sex.
It all starts in 1987 when Belfort takes up a job as a stock broker. His boss advises him to take up the life of sex and cocaine if he is to make it. When the company crashes, Belfort is out of work and that is when he forms his own company to deal in stocks too.
Why the ban?
The film has a record 569 F-words, and that is without the various times the characters refer to women as b*tches. On a number of occasions, the F word was not used but just symbolic. In the United Arab Emirates, the movie was edited and at the end of it all, the censor had removed a remarkable 45 minutes.
But none of this comes as a surprise given the nature of the film’s content; this is biopic bound to run into interference from all conservative governments, just by the virtue of being so unapologetically amoral and ruthlessly vulgar.
A scene on Azoff (Jonah Hill) masturbating in public, then a conversation between Belfort (DiCaprio) and his boss Mark Hanna (Mathew McConaughey) encouraging each other on at least masturbating twice a day, full nudity, the gay ‘orgy’, then those graphical sex scenes are parts you definitely can’t watch with a person that credits you as credible.
Sadly, even if the movie had intended to exhibit Belfort’s prowess in stock-broking in the 80s, it comes off as a drug binge where greed, abuse of substance and sex are glorified.
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