Film · Prime Video · 2006

The Secret

No. Desire is not a metaphysics. Work and your neighbor are not optional.

The law of attraction flatters the comfortable and indicts the suffering, because if the thought makes the world, the sick have been thinking badly. That is a cruel doctrine in a soft voice. It is also a denial of labor, of other people's freedom, and of any God who is not your mood. The production is a sermon for a market.

Do not put it on as harmlessly motivational. Motivation that blames the poor for their thoughts is a lie with a chandelier. If someone in the house has been handed this as medicine, take it out of their hands and give them a real errand and a real friend.

The eight

Industry
2/10
It replaces work with a mood.
Household
2/10
Other people become props in your visualization.
Piety
1/10
A counterfeit providence.
Courage
2/10
No risk. A wish.
Republic
1/10
No duty to a neighbor who did not attract your plan.
Temperance
2/10
Appetite baptized.
Truth
1/10
The central claim is false.
Stewardship
1/10
It stewards nothing but the self.

Live historicallyDo one good that nobody wished into being.

Film · Film · 2013

The Wolf of Wall Street

Scorsese shows the bill. The camera throws the party anyway. Leave it.

Jordan Belfort robbed people over the phone and the film is three hours of how good the robbery felt. Defenders say the excess is the indictment. Sometimes a frame is an indictment. More often, in a crowded room, this frame is a recruitment poster, and the people being recruited are not subtle about it.

The standard does not require you to be humorless about sin. It requires you to notice who the humor serves. Here it serves the man with the yacht, not the person who lost the mortgage. You have limited evenings. Do not spend three of their hours apprenticing to a thief because the editing is superb. The editing is superb. That is not a defense.

The eight

Industry
3/10
Hustle without a product. The labor is separating a fool from his savings.
Household
1/10
A wife is a prop that gets replaced. Children are scenery.
Piety
1/10
The only liturgy is the sales floor chant.
Courage
3/10
Nerve in the service of a theft is not courage.
Republic
1/10
The law is a mark. The public is a mark.
Temperance
1/10
This is a catechism of appetite. Three hours of it.
Truth
2/10
The narrator is a liar telling you he is a liar, and daring you to enjoy it.
Stewardship
1/10
What it leaves a young man is a script for his worst decade.

Live historicallyIf money is a live temptation, read one straight account of a fraud from the victim's side. Not the memoir of the fraud.