The latest Wolf of Wall Street complication is that despite the feverish, super-ecstatic, Marty-firing-on-all-cylinders quality, the soft-minded farts are going to go “no, no…too cold, too vulgar…the new Casino…doesn’t make us feel good.” Every year Academy deadwood types pooh-pooh brilliance and vote for the soft consensus alternative. A filmmaker friend saw it Monday evening and posted the following on his Facebook page: “Wolf is everything you’d expected it to be and everything you’d hope it would be. It’s got Tom Wolfe on the brain and Hunter S. Thompson in its veins. You get the sense as you’re watching it that Marty Scorsese has never been happier in his career making a movie. It’s got verve and energy and there isn’t a split second that is not somehow engaging you and daring you. It seems to be the work of a man much younger than the maestro in question.”

In an interview with HitFix/In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, dp Emmanuel Lubezski praises Gravity‘s Alfonso Curaon and To The Wonder‘s Terrence Malick as directors who “don’t use cinematography as an illustration to text,” Lubezki says. “I would say 99 percent of the directors don’t know the value or don’t know the power of visual storytelling,” he explains. “[But] for Alfonso and Terry, cinematography and visuals are not a branch, are not a part of the movie, but are the movie — as important as the actor, as important as the location, as important as the music.”

And yet any honest person who’s kept up with Malick since his return to filmmaking 15 years ago (and who has contemplated the three Malick films shot by Lubezki — The New World, The Tree of Life and Into The Wonder) would have to admit that Malick has all but destroyed his once-potent mystique because he’s placed too much emphasis on the purely visual. He doesn’t give enough consideration to script and dialogue matters, and seems to have more or less abandoned conventional narrative. This plus his now-customary prolonged fiddle-faddling in post-production has fed a growing notion that Malick is a gifted but flaky eccentric — i.e., Mr. Wackadoodle.

If the members of the New York Film Critics Circle have any balls at all (which of course they don’t), they’ll follow the lead of the Gotham Awards and give their Best Film of the Year trophy to Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, a desaturated, somewhat morose but note-perfect, chiselled-to-perfection masterpiece that people will be savoring 25 or 50 years from now, which is more than you can say for…I don’t want to go there right now.

The NYFCC will convene tomorrow morning at 10 am, and should be finished voting by 1 or 2 pm, I’m guessing.

If the NYFCC doesn’t give their top award to Davis they should at least consider giving it to Spike Jonze‘s Her or Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street. Then again this is a group that gave their Best Picture award two years ago to that minor curio known as The Artist, and in so doing joined hands with the BFCA, SAG and HFPA. The NYFCC used to be a tough outfit with backbone, but they’ve turned mushy in recent years. How did Crocker Jarmon put it? “Gone soft as an old banana.”

The Gothams’ Best Actor and Best Actress awards went to Dallas Buyers’ Club‘s Matthew McConaughey and Short Term 12‘s Brie Larsen. The Best Documentary award went to The Act of Killing….what? The Breakthrough director award was won by Fruitvale Station‘s Ryan Coogler, and Michael B. Jordan, star of Fruitvale, took the Breakthrough Actor award.

If I don’t fall for Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street when I see it this Friday I’ll be flabbergasted, so let’s just assume it’ll have some prominent position among HE’s revised Best Films of 2013 (features and docs, merit alone, in this order, forget award season for now), and probably among the top five: 1. Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave; 2. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis; 3. Spike Jonze‘s Her; 4. Jean Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club; 5. J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost; 6. Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color; 7. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity; 8. Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past; 9. Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight; 10. Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha; 11. Morgan Neville‘s 20 Feet From Stardom; 12. Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station; 13. Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra; 14. Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips; 15. Jeff Nichols‘ Mud; 16. Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska; 17. Nicole Holfocener‘s Enough Said; 18. Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack; 19. Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Short Term 12; 20. Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color; 21. Gabriela Cowperthwaite‘s Blackfish; 22. John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks; 23. Ron Howard‘s Rush; 24. Henry Alex Rubin‘s Disconnect; 25. Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals; 26. Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers.

I was a little bit suspicious of the euphoric SAG reactions to last weekend’s Wolf of Wall Street screenings. The emotional nature of actors makes them easy lays, for one thing, and like most people they tend to deeply appreciate being shown a hot film before anyone else. So to get an idea of how Martin Scorsese‘s film really plays I spoke today to a discriminating New York critic who caught the three-hour-long film at 3 pm Eastern. And guess what? He was seriously impressed (“Really strong…an amazing piece of moviemaking“) and felt the high-octane quality of the performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, among others, but he had moral-ethical problems with watching a film about “such a scumbag” as Jordan Belfort, the real-life former Wall Street trader whom DiCaprio reportedly brings to flamboyant life.

(l.) Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street; (r.) Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas.

“This guy is worse than Henry Hill,” the critic said, referring to the gangster played by Ray Liotta in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, which the critic says is similar but “more primal” than Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort is “not killing people, but he’s a thief helping to kill people’s dreams.” Is he as bad as Tony Montana?, I asked. He thought about it for eight or ten seconds and said, “He’s in the same ballpark.”

“I not only didn’t care about this guy,” he said. “I was asking myself, why am I watching this guy’s story? And why should I tell people to go see [this film]?.” He described Belfort/DiCaprio as an obnoxious, drug-cranked, completely un-self-aware guy “with no soul, no vision, no wisdom…I was just repelled by him.”

France Ha‘s Greta Gerwig (what’s with the brown hair?), Afternoon Delight‘s Kathryn Hahn and Drinking Buddies‘ Olivia Wilde are the most intriguing conversationalists in this, The Hollywood Reporter‘s first-ever Breakthrough Performers Panel. The others include Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips), Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color) and David Oyelowo (Lee Daniels’ The Butler). THR‘s Scott Feinberg moderated.

I don’t fret or rant or point fingers when a relationship ends. I just say, “Okay, that happened and it was wonderful while it lasted.” Because I’ve been ready for the demise all along. We all know how to read the tea leaves after two or three weeks. The default assumption is that most relationships won’t last more than a few weeks or months. We tell ourselves the latest hook-up might be an X-factor thing that will somehow defy the odds, but we know deep down that probably won’t happen. And that’s cool. Unlike some women I don’t feel a need to rewrite and revise the history of the relationship. Some women definitely do this. All is bliss and serenity when a relationship begins, but when it winds down they have to go into their angry revisionist mode and say “oh, my God, what was I thinking?…I must have been out of my mind to fall for this guy!” and so on. Everything that was good and alpha-smooth has to be re-written as a moment of weakness or blindness or self-delusion. I always turn that around and ask, “So you were dumb or desperate or foolish enough to fall in love six months ago, but you’re a different person now?”

My first reaction to this video was, of course, “Oh, God…look at that.” It happened in the vicinity of 28300 Rye Canyon Loop, Santa Clarita, or more precisely on Hercules Street. The guy shooting the video wants to see the horror (a common instinct) but he doesn’t want to be in the vicinity if the car explodes. Shards from the Porsche Carrera are all over the place. “Whoa, whoa…not too close, bro!….it might explode!…doooood!” Right away the voice tells you this is an under-educated young guy who probably has some lowly job. The bright blue color of their somewhat inexpensive-looking car…forget it, not important.

In a 12.1 N.Y. Times piece Maria Bello has announced that (a) she’s more or less bisexual these days, but that (b) currently she’s in a same-sex relationship with a woman she deeply cares for. Terrific. I can’t imagine anyone not saying or thinking the same thing. I can’t imagine any director or casting director for any film or TV-cable show letting this influence whether or not to cast Bello in any kind of role. Nobody cares. It’s all cool like Jodie Foster (or an approximation thereof). But I think that Bello skirts the definition of “partner” in her article.

My understanding (and please be civil if you don’t agree) is that “partner” is basically a gay term for a live-in lover and trusted lifemate — a person with whom you have merged (or are in the process of merging with) in all the usual profound ways but generally outside the legal sanction of marriage. Emotionally, domestically, family-wise, financially, strategically, etc. The real thing. (Married gay guys tend to use “husband” instead of “partner,” right? I don’t know about married lesbians.) Straight domestic home-sharers can use the term also, but they tend to prefer “boyfriend whom I’m now living with” or “girlfriend whom I’m now living with.” The term “partner” might be used by heteros, yes, but this hasn’t appeared on my radar screen too much. Whatever your orientation a pair can be partnered without being sexual (passion wanes, people slow down, the old D.H. Lawrentian current dries up) but “partner” does tend to mean sharing a bed, no?

Joe Leydon has written again about his admiration for the late Paul Walker‘s performance in Eric Heisserer‘s Hours (Pantelion, 12.13), a baby-survival drama which Leydon reviewed for Variety at South by Southwest last March. But the trailer strongly suggests that Hours has issues. The biggest “tell” is when the hospital waiting-room window shatters and everyone reacts except Walker, who doesn’t even look up. Hollywood bunk. On top of which Hollywood Reporter critic John DeFore found Hours unconvincing.

If Quentin Tarantino is calling Big Bad Wolves the best film of the year, I’m automatically suspicious if not dreading the experience. I know I’m going to partly hate it, at the very least. Tarantino’s taste in movies can be ludicrous. The man lives for B-level cheese, for crap-dump exploitation, for the lurid and the squalid. How else can I put it? How about a simple “he occasionally flips out for movies that an emotionally balanced film buff would never consider renting”? Have you ever seen the original The Inglorious Bastards?

To hear it from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (which was screened three times yesterday at 10 am, 12:30 pm and 6:30 pm) is a double-definite Best Picture contender — uncorked, operatic, bacchanalian, Goodfellas-like, flagrantly and very accurately un-p.c. in its depiction of how financial finagler Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his homies enjoyed women, and basically an adrenalized bitch of a toboggan ride. It’s qualudian madness, giddy euphoria, high-wire unicycle daredevilry…and then the Feds and the fall. Is it really a “comedy”? Yes, apparently — the diseased, dark and unzipped-pants kind. But at the same time no more of a comedy than Goodfellas was so you tell me.

It would seem, also, that DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are cast-iron locks for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor noms, respectively. Which means that one of the five current Best Actor favorites is going to get bumped. Two or three weeks ago I would have said the bumpee would be Nebraska‘s Bruce Dern but his campaign has been too brilliant (“Vote for where I am now as a 77 year-old actor experiencing a major resurgence first, and…uhhm, vote for my performance also”) to deny. So my spitball presumption is that the Best Actor bumpee will be Captain Phillips‘ Tom Hanks. The Phillips acclaim will now transfer down to his already likely shot of a Best Supporting Actor nom for his Walt Disney performance in Saving Mr. Banks.