Jade Bahr

Screaming over the Jack/evil twin Ernest/Titanic part Interesting summary altogether. I agree with almost everything. Especially that we young (mainly female) fans played a significant part in where he is today and the only thing he ever did was not taken us seriously. But yeah Leo after all those years I'm still here watching your movies. You're welcome. Commentary: ‘Titanic’ made Leonardo DiCaprio a Hollywood heartthrob. He’s been avoiding it ever since “Leonardo DiCaprio is the most riveting and sought-after new actor in Hollywood. From the moment he appeared on the big screen, the camera loved him. With his piercing blue-green eyes and his shock of blond hair, Leonardo is breaking hearts and box-office records around the globe.” — from “Leonardo DiCaprio, Modern-Day Romeo” by Grace Catalano To be alive in 1998 was to be acutely aware that a man named Leonardo DiCaprio roamed the Earth — and that seemingly wherever he went, screaming girls and clamoring paparazzi were sure to follow. In the 12 months that followed the release of “Titanic” in December 1997, the world was gripped by a case of celebrity fervor that rivaled the heyday of the Beatles and — with all due respect to Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet — has not been replicated since. “Titanic” reigned at the top of the box office for 15 weeks, becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, a title it would hold for 12 years. The success of the movie, the subject of much skeptical pre-release coverage about its then unprecedented $200-million budget, was anything but guaranteed. It was fueled largely by the passion of young women and teenage girls who swooned over DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jack Dawson, the vagabond artist who stole the heart of rich girl Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), then saved her life by sacrificing himself to the icy depths of the North Atlantic (even though we all know there was room for two people on that door). These young admirers, many of whom had fallen for DiCaprio’s sensitive performances in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “This Boy’s Life” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” went to see the movie half a dozen times or more. Their curiosity turned quickie, unauthorized biographies like “Leonardo DiCaprio: Modern-Day Romeo” into bestsellers and compelled them to fire up their modems and head to GeoCities to make rudimentary websites that functioned like virtual bedroom walls. The media couldn’t get enough of Leomania, publishing breathless accounts of his romantic conquests and chronicling the late-night exploits of the actor’s infamous posse, a tight-knit circle of friends that included Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly. DiCaprio was so ubiquitous that the Taliban reportedly arrested barbers for giving men haircuts modeled after Jack Dawson’s floppy ’do. “Titanic” would go on to win 11 Oscars, including best picture, though DiCaprio was not even nominated — a snub that inspired fans to flood the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with angry phone calls. His exclusion looks even more egregious with the benefit of hindsight. (The category that year was dominated by veterans like Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, with the “cute young guy” slot going to Matt Damon for “Good Will Hunting.”) It was clear that academy voters didn’t take DiCaprio seriously when he was in matinee idol mode — and that his “limp, lovesick” teenage fans were not considered trustworthy arbiters of taste. Even DiCaprio was, at times, openly disdainful of his adolescent admirers; members of his entourage were known to dump water on fans loitering outside his apartment building. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in “Titanic.” (Paramount Pictures) DiCaprio, who skipped the Oscars that year, could barely mask his ambivalence about “Titanic” and the way it launched him from misfit roles into leading-man territory. “After the whole experience, I know it’s really not my cup of tea,” he told Vanity Fair. The period after “Titanic” “was a very empty existence,” DiCaprio said in a New York Times profile — a rare solo sit-down for the actor — in 2002, as he was staging what was then viewed as a “comeback.” “I’d get headaches from dealing with pure unadulterated garbage. But you can’t help it. It becomes who you are. You’re suddenly defined in the media as a cutie-pie.” DiCaprio has spent the last quarter century doing everything in his power to make audiences forget he could ever be considered a “cutie-pie” — or anything less than a Very Serious Actor. His transformation culminates this week with the release of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese. Based on David Grann’s engrossing nonfiction bestseller, the epic dramatizes the Osage Reign of Terror, a period in the 1920s when dozens of oil-rich Osage people were systematically murdered by white people attempting to gain control of their fortune — a spree of greed-fueled, racist violence that has received scant attention in the history books, or from Hollywood. With tobacco-stained teeth and a protruding underbite reminiscent of Marlon Brando in “The Godfather,” DiCaprio stars as Ernest Burkart, a dim-witted World War I veteran roped into a sinister plot devised by his uncle, William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), a self-proclaimed friend of the Osage who, it soon becomes clear, is anything but. At Hale’s behest, Ernest marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (a mesmerizing Lily Gladstone), whose relatives begin to die off, one by one, under mysterious circumstances. Eventually, Tom White (Jesse Plemons), an agent with the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, rolls into town to find out who is behind the crimes — something the audience knows from the opening minutes of the film. Though DiCaprio plays him as more of a tragic rube than a cold-blooded killer, Ernest is, arguably, his most villainous character to date — Jack Dawson’s evil, boneheaded twin — and easily his most despicable since Calvin Candie, the sadistic plantation owner in “Django Unchained.” Let’s put it this way: if Ernest had been on the Titanic, he would have taken the whole door for himself. And probably pushed Rose into the ocean while he was at it. DiCaprio was originally attached to star as White, who is a much more significant figure in Grann’s book. Early drafts of the script by Scorsese and Eric Roth focused on the investigation into the murders, but several years into the development process, the project was drastically overhauled, reportedly at the insistence of DiCaprio, who was recast as Ernest. Instead of a white savior narrative about valiant law enforcement officials cracking the case, “Killers of the Flower Moon” now centers on the twisted relationship between Mollie and Ernest. While the impulse to re-frame the story and foreground the Osage perspective is understandable, even laudable, the end result is a movie that spends more than three hours following two white men as they enact a slow-rolling genocide of their own extended family. The pickings may have been slim in 1920s Oklahoma, but it’s also difficult to comprehend why Mollie, who is stoic but shrewd, would fall for someone as transparently sleazy as Ernest. Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” (Apple TV+) With a running time of three hours and 26 minutes (12 minutes longer than “Titanic”) and a reported budget of $200 million, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is exactly the kind of Big, Important Movie that DiCaprio has been making, almost exclusively, since he became the king of the world. He has not starred in a feature film under two hours since “The Beach” in 2000, which clocked in at one hour and 59 minutes. After that picture, a critical disappointment that did middling box office, he took several years off, before returning to film by pairing with two of our greatest living auteurs: Steven Spielberg, whose breezy “Catch Me if You Can” starred DiCaprio as a charming con artist, and Scorsese, whose gritty 19th century epic about American identity, “Gangs of New York,” began a long and fruitful collaboration. Since then, DiCaprio has worked almost exclusively with well-established (read: male) directors — Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Christopher Nolan — on films with obvious awards aspirations. He’s donned an array of regrettable facial hair, old-age makeup and greasy wigs to transform into vile plantation owners, shameless financial criminals, rumpled astronomy professors, washed-up actors and legendary real-world paranoiacs. He is not so much Hollywood’s biggest movie star as its best-paid character actor. DiCaprio, who turns 50 next year, has generally done everything he can to dim his still boyish good looks, except in “The Great Gatsby,” an adaptation of perhaps the most celebrated American novel of the 20th century that he was initially reluctant to join because he remembered it as a “ traditional love story.” In 2016, he finally won an Oscar, after four previous nominations, for his performance as a vengeance-hungry frontiersman in “The Revenant.” His characters often die, but since “Titanic,” they rarely do so for love. DiCaprio in “The Revenant.” (Kimberley French / 20th Century Fox) DiCaprio has taken physical risks, famously eating raw bison liver and filming in the freezing cold for months on end in “The Revenant,” for instance, but creatively he has taken a safer approach. (He has also taken fewer at-bats, only appearing in four feature films since 2014.) And though he hasn’t made an abject stinker in decades, the rebelliousness and messy experimentation that marked his pre-”Titanic” films, like “The Basketball Diaries” or “Total Eclipse,” have long since given way to the caution of someone afraid of not being taken seriously. (“Total Eclipse,” released in 1995 and centering on the relationship between French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, is also the last time DiCaprio starred in a narrative feature directed by a woman.) He has also strictly guarded his privacy, rarely granting extensive solo interviews or making routine chit-chat on late night TV, and he has assiduously cultivated his image as a serious climate change activist by producing documentaries and launching an environmental foundation. In the early years of his fame, DiCaprio was candid with journalists, coming off as a charming prankster and precocious cut-up. He spoke of wanting to get married and have children, even telling Interview’s Ingrid Sischy that Pauly Shore taught him all about sex and girls (in retrospect, a major red flag). Nowadays, when he does do press, he tends to rehash the same colorful anecdotes that delight talk show viewers but ultimately reveal almost nothing about his life, like the time he was flying to Russia and the engine on the plane failed. The internet has filled the resulting void by caricaturing DiCaprio — who wears an average bro uniform of T-shirts, cargo shorts, baseball caps and sunglasses when off-duty — as an aging Lothario who dumps his girlfriends the minute they turn 25. When he (or, more likely, his social media team) posts earnestly on Instagram about endangered frogs, the comments inevitably turn to jokes about how old the frog is. The irony is that DiCaprio’s young female fans appreciated his talents before many others in Hollywood. They knew he was way better than he needed to be as a homeless teenager in the final season of “Growing Pains,” where, in a textbook example of “Cousin Oliver Syndrome,” he was brought in to revive a flagging sitcom. They felt his anguish in “This Boy’s Life,” his first movie with Robert De Niro, who was so impressed with his young co-star that he called up his old pal Scorsese to tell him about it. And they propelled “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-ified take on the classic tragedy, to become a surprise box office hit. For teenage girls who considered themselves too edgy for Jonathan Taylor Thomas, DiCaprio represented a different kind of heartthrob, and an heir apparent to River Phoenix, whom DiCaprio also idolized. Even his name — Leonardo DiCaprio — seemed romantic. It’s instructive to look at how Winslet, his co-star in “Titanic” and, later, “Revolutionary Road,” has approached her post-”Titanic” career. Though she has also won an Oscar and cemented her status as one of the finest actors of her generation, she has experimented wildly. She’s played prickly and unlikable characters, starred in cozy romantic comedies, big-budget thrillers and queer period pieces. She’s worked with legendary directors and up-and-comers and has even — gasp! — done TV. Several times. This may be why the teenage girls who once memorized every piece of Leo trivia like it was sacred scripture — Did you know an agent once tried to get him to change his name to Lenny Williams? — are now middle-age women who have long since shut down their fan sites and eagerly await a possible second season of “Mare of Easttown.” It may have been a cash grab, but the very existence of “Leonardo DiCaprio, Modern-Day Romeo” acknowledged, as perhaps even DiCaprio himself has not, that the actor’s female fans were central to making him the sort of hero James Cameron or Martin Scorsese could hang a film on. And though he’s since run away from the persona they loved, there would be no Leomania, or Leonardo DiCaprio as we know him, if those fans hadn’t supported him first. Not that young women alive in 2023 are terribly bothered about it. According to most projections, they’ll be too busy keeping another star-driven epic atop the box office this weekend: “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.” Source

This is pure gold Nobody Plays An Idiot Like Leonardo DiCaprio In his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, the megastar provides another moronic masterclass Killers of the Flower Moon spoilers below Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is exactly the kind of movie that everyone wants to take very seriously. The boys – Bobby De Niro and Marty – are back in town, with a very long film about an under-explored time and place in American history. It’s blessed with a Lily Gladstone performance full of quiet grace and fury as Mollie. It’s a film that lets its story take its time. And we absolutely should take Killers of the Flower Moon seriously for all those reasons. It’s really good. There is one thing which is going to be overlooked though. Killers of the Flower Moon is a platform for one of the finest sights in all of modern cinema: Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be incredibly stupid. I have an ongoing theory that DiCaprio is in the stage of his career where he alternates between very, very clever characters and very, very stupid ones. There was, of course, Floppy Haired Heartthrob Leo. It’s your Romeo + Juliets, your Titanics, your Man in the Iron Masks of this world. Then between Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street, he specialised in morally ambiguous types: thieves and swindlers who dared you not to admire them a little bit, or lawmen who knew they were doing the wrong thing in the name of getting the right result. He evolved from teen idol to middlebrow thriller guy in the time-honoured fashion, but with the extra sprinkling of stardust which his collabs with Scorsese brought. Then a couple of things happened. DiCaprio stopped making as many movies, and he started alternating between geniuses and idiots. In The Revenant, Hugh Glass was smart enough to Ray Mears his way to survival. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gave us the bewildered and sinking Rick Dalton. Don’t Look Up’s Dr Randall Mindy was an astrophysicist. In Killers of the Flower Moon he plays Ernest, who has the critical faculties of the average clump of moss. And, let’s be honest, Leo’s idiots are a whole lot more fun than his smart alecs. Nobody does stupidity like Leo DiCaprio. His idiot characters are always intensely watchable. Brad Pitt’s torso and the flamethrower stick in the memory, but the finest moments in Once Upon a Time… came when a hungover Rick Dalton berates himself in his trailer after drying up on set. “Eight goddamn whiskey sours,” he spits. “Fuckin’ bullshit!” His thick characters aren’t your common or garden morons. They’re operatically, heroically dumb. Every misapprehension is an enormous effort. You can see the physical exertion it takes to mobilise the few grey cells he has at his disposal, and to heave himself onto a course which will, ultimately, fuck him over. You see it in Killers of the Flower Moon every time his Ernest Burkhart talks things over with Robert De Niro’s William King Hale. Hale sighs, clucks his tongue and sadly shakes his head, intoning with solemn sorrow that events have forced him into a terrible position which only he can remedy. Truly, Ernest is his own particular flavour of dim. OUATIH's Rick is aware that he has intellectual limits, and gets frustrated by them; Ernest can catch a drift and read between the lines, but he doesn't realise until it’s too late that he can’t reason beyond what other people set out for him. You might see Ernest as a stand-in for the willing self-deception of white Americans who thought their treatment of Native Americans was only what was right and fair, and gave up responsibility for thinking about it to men like Hale who snatched things for themselves. Ernest lives up to his name: he sincerely commits to whatever it is the last person he spoke to told him, even if it’s fairly obviously going to end in tears. Hale’s suggestion that Mollie should be treated with a medicine personally administered by his doctors is very obviously a bad idea. Even when she’s near-comatose, Ernest is none the wiser. By the time he caught on I was wondering if Jesse Plemons was going to have to explain the whole thing to him with finger-puppets. DiCaprio isn’t the only megastar to have had some fun playing idiots. That’s how the Coen Brothers like to deploy George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Hail Caesar and Burn After Reading respectively, and Chris Hemsworth’s himbo secretary in the 2016 Ghostbusters was a lot of fun. It seems like it might be a generational thing, though. The Gen Z heartthrob equivalent might be playing a pretentious dickhead, as Timothee Chalamet did in Lady Bird and The French Dispatch. Playing stupid isn’t something that’s going to win you an Oscar. It’s seen as being more like schtick than proper acting; it’s something comedians do, not serious artists. It looks easy because you have to communicate a lack of thought rather than too much of it. That’s why it’s never been something which has won prizes, and yet portrayals of The Difficult Genius – A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Darkest Hour, Steve Jobs, etc. etc. etc. – are an Oscars Best Actor shoo-in. That, though, is where DiCaprio’s work in the lower registers of the IQ scale is quietly revolutionary. What separates his screen idiots from other heavyweights’ dumbbells is that he uses stupidity to disarm you before hitting you with big emotions. Think of Rick Dalton, telling his reflection: “If you don’t get your lines right, I’m gonna blow your brains out.” It’s funny, and it’s desperate, and it’s sad. Flashes of comprehension in Ernest make his bad decisions that bit more tragic while keeping him sympathetic. Rick got him an Oscar nomination, the first few-sandwiches-short part I can see on a Best Actor or Actress shortlist since Meryl Streep’s turn in Florence Foster Jenkins. Should he get another, come February playing dumb will look pretty smart.

Some scary moments but that's about it.

Some BTS

Studios Threaten That If There’s No Deal By This Week Then No More Negotiating Until January The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman is reporting that the studios (AMPTP) are telling the actors (SAG-AFTRA) that if no deal is made by the end of this week then they will be halting all negotiations until January. Yikes. According to an insider Waxman spoke to, If that is the case, then the fall TV season is lost and new movies won’t be coming out until next summer. The studios are ready to pack it up for the year, they couldn’t care less about the losses. Early November would be the drop-dead date to salvage any ability to put television or movies into production. Once the calendar hits Thanksgiving, it is unlikely any project would begin production, pushing off everything to the new year, this individual said, and killing the studios’ incentive to push for a deal. The actors have been on strike since July 14. The negotiations restarted this week, on Tuesday, a mere two weeks after CEOs walked away from the negotiating table “over a new demand that SAG-AFTRA receive a $1-per-subscription fee from streaming divisions”.

I never heard of it before and I'm pretty sure it's not mentioned in the parts of the book I've read so far. However I couldn't explain the whole procedure but I remember especially Hale talking a lot about it in the movie and I think at several points he tried to explain it dumb Ernest. I understand how it was kinda the key point of Hales plot against Mollies family and I also understand with killing her family one after one made Mollie having more of this rights by each dead what put her own life at high risk because money loving Ernest was her husband meaning everything goes into his greedy hands after no one is left. It was practically the invitation for killing.

Thank god 😄

I'm still somewhere in the middle of the book 😆 Now I ordered the Britney book so maybe Killers have to wait yet again. So far the book hasn't really "grabbed" me. All this talking about Tom White and his past and the FBI and how he went from here to there just to not solve the case like all the others before him. I don't have the patient for it. It's like reading a circle. It kinda bores me. Maybe it's just me - again LOL

It's halloween season so I torturing myself (not the biggest horror fan) LOL The 2nd one was much better.

Even worse. Now everyone who saw the movie thinks "better" of him than that prick ever deserved. God lord I thought he's just disgusting from beginning to end and I have no clue how someone can have any empathy or pity with him or thinks he really loved that poor woman for one second in his miserable life 🤣 If this is how "love" looks like then yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes

^this baby doesn't look happy at all so close to the devil 🤣 for the sake of Leos mostly hidden gorgeous hair

It's a risk I agree but people do more risky/stupid things for love every day. For me it's the contradiction of Dannys body: beautiful and seductive (with all his scars) from the outside but deathly (literally) from the inside not only just for himself but also the woman he loves. It's the ultimate dilemma/tragecy.

^since it's a true story and she's fine till today I think the med worked for her.

Sad and much better than I expected 💔

@AnatasiaSteele82 Glad you liked it.

I also never got the feeling the movie really loudly mentioned the hundreds of deaths of osage members or did I just miss that part? I think at one point someone said "we can't count the deaths anymore". That's at least a hint. Personally I think Marty should have mentioned every single fuckin known name in the credits not just to honor them but to get a clear terrifying feeling of how many osages lost their lifes.

Since he's a man I think it's hard to switch perspectives. Some writers/directors (male and/or female) can it better than others I guess. Nolan is even worse. Cameron ist pretty good at it. Still there are possibilities. Marty could have consulted a female co writer for the script (maybe even a female osage writer). Maybe I'm desillusional. But this book was written by a white man mostly about white evil men probably for a mostly white audience (and per se there is nothing bad about it). However there were certain osage characters I found MUCH more interesting than anything fuckin Ernest or Hale did in that almost 4 hours LOL Like Mollie, her sisters, her mom (what happened to her dad was it ever mentioned?), the osage FBI investigator etc just to name a few. I actually think the movie left more questions unanswered than answered. At least I felt a bit... unsatisfied like Marty didn't really hit the point of the story. But it made me think a lot. Like days after I still think about it lol I clearly have to watch it again. On the other hand it's also pretty impossible to fulfill everyone's expectation and I think lastly Marty took great care in crafting a film in a way that was respectful and did so to the best of his ability.

Said it from the very beginning and now after watching the movie I'm saying it again. I would have liked the movie much better from Mollies perspective to learn everything about her and her family/childhood/background etc. It would have been quite historical if Leo and Marty had decided to let her tell the story instead of putting the focus on the evil white men. We knew already they were evil so nothing really new or surprising. Such a missed oppurtunity. I honestly didn't care one bit about Ernest, his so called stupidity (like it's an excuse for anything, just fuck you dude you're awful and disgusting) and his "feelings". All I cared about was Mollie, her faith, her people. I also still think Leo was actually too old to play Ernest but since no one is better than Leo I can overlook this rather small issue.

Unless it's animated. The 200 million dollar budget must have gone somewhere no? 🤣 Thx so much for the respond I really wondered how this movie effects people who are kinda closer/or more connected to the whole real life tragic if you know what I mean. Or if it's just like Christopher Cote said you need an Osage to really tell the Osage story. Simple as that even Marty tried to give his best to honor the Osage.

#parallel universe 💫😭

credit to Zoey Grossman

All I thought during the movie in his 2 or 3 scenes was what the hell is he doing??? He was so bad it was hilarious 😄 Brendan Fraser’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Performance Polarizes Does this count as movie trivia? Also pls give me an AMEN to this!! I'm pretty shocked there are still people outside who think the reason for Marty gettin a 200 million dollar budget is something other than Leos star power LMAO

Leo is in NY. NY Like the Old Days: Leonardo and Tobey Show Up, Mary J. Blige Performs, Mayor Adams Gives Rousing Speech at Star Studded Angel Ball Of all people, Leonardo DiCaprio — baseball cap tightly affixed to his head — showed up with Tobey Maguire to support their pal, restaurateur and nightlife promoter Richie Akiva, one of the honorees. I had a nice chat with them but began it like this: “We can’t talk about movies.” Yes, they both laughed. (...) Oh yeah, so what about Leo and Tobey? Why were they there? “Richie is our friend and we came to support him,” Leo said before security people starting eyeing me like I was Ghostface from the next “Scream” movie. I said, “We can’t discuss movies, and you know this from Cannes, but ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is phenomenal.” Tobey interjected; “But I can say it, can’t I?” Leo laughed and we both said simultaneously: “No!”

Maybe they are but just didn't make it into this list. Simple as that.

lol