When I quit cable TV last month, I told myself I’d go see more movies with a piece of the new-found savings. Wednesday was cold out with nothing to do and a bunch of noise coming from the workers renovating the apartment above me so I went to the cineplex in Astoria and paid a symmetrically-priced 14 bucks to enter the 14-screen theatre. I saw American Hustle. There were about 14 people in attendance. The movie was just ok.

The comedian Louis CK is badly miscast as a FBI boss and I can’t believe Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for an Oscar in a supporting role. The scene where she sings along to Live and Let Die during a housecleaning session is embarrassing and cheapens the movie at about the point the movie finally gains momentum.

The film did little to move me beyond wanting to know more about Abscam. After Hustle was over, the lighted sign outside the adjacent screening room said it was twenty minutes to showtime for The Wolf of Wall Street.

I went in. Two for the price of one.

I didn’t like Wolf any better than Hustle. A much larger crowd gathered for this one. The audience laughed during the sequence when Scorcese’s go-to leading man Leo D (playing real-life fraudster Jordan Belfort) crawled out of the country club to his sports car and drove home wasted on delayed-action ludes. The subsequent scene back at Belfort’s mansion culminating with Leo administering Heimlich on Jonah Hill is vintage Scorcese but much of the movie is ridiculous. Doing a big film about 90’s pump and dump is admirable but this story is way overplayed. The film’s three-hour length didn’t bother me as much as Scorcese’s relentless pursuit of the wild and crazy angle at the work space used by traders employed by Belfort’s company. That approach appeared to push a segment of the audience’s buttons. Some giggled – or even projected admiration for the callous attributes Scorcese was trying to mock. I blame the filmmaker for making a serious piece of art that seemed to encourage more than a few of the people who saw it to walk out without a full handle on the evil Belfort perpetrated on everyone around him.

I do like how Scorcese ended the movie with a shot of the federal investigator riding the subway but if you’re allowed the extra hour, gimme a little more of Wolfie’s cooperation phase.

Jonah Hill claims he accepted just $60 K to do the movie which he says is the minimum allowed by the Screen Actor’s Guild for such work. He said there will be no back-end payments or cuts forthcoming and that he agreed to a discount deal because he wanted to work with Scorcese. Hill is funny playing DiCaprio’s sidekick but not fully convincing in the role. His Long Island accent wavers in intensity as the movie goes along.

Tuesday’s snowstorm officially dropped 11.5 inches on Central Park, 8.1 at LaGuardia and 13.0 on East Rutherford, NJ which is the Bergen County borough hosting the Super Bowl a week from tomorrow. For those watching the big game at home, the Super Bowl is being staged in East Rutherford, NJ this year, not New York City. The NFL and the TV will tell you a lot about this game’s association with New York City but the fake turf the players will compete on rests on swampland in New Jersey. The mayor of East Rutherford told the News a few days ago that he hasn’t been invited to the game and that the NFL has all but ignored his town in the run-up to the contest.