15 hours ago, Sugarwater said:

This was my issue with the movie as well. I understand why Leo played Ernest in the way he did wanting to get at the struggle and the duality of a human character, but it just wasn’t true to the actual Ernest.

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

 

Spoiler

I hope he died very lonely and in very much pain in his stupid trailer.

31 minutes ago, Jade Bahr said:

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 sympathies 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 yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes

 

  Hide contents

I hope he died very lonely in very much pain in his stupid trailer.

 

Hopefully people will read the book and find out the true story. Don’t get me wrong, It’s a good film, just didn’t tell the true story. Read the book!

Spoiler

I had to laugh at all the modern string lights put up at every house in the neighborhood. Scorsese knows very well electricity was not available like that back then. 

 

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

1 hour ago, Jade Bahr said:

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 not just you. The book is very dry and boring. 😄

46 minutes ago, Sugarwater said:

It’s not just you. The book is very dry and boring. 😄

Thank god 😄

 

Late to the  movie viewing party, but I wanted to wait to I had a chance to see the movie ....

 

I very much enjoyed it

 

Looking forward to seeing it be a big player in the upcoming award season that is IF there is one  

 

 

Big THANKS   to all who have kept us updated on all things KOTFM ,as well, as Leo sighting in NY    

I have a question for those who have seen the movie, but have not read the book. Were you able to understand what headrights  are and the significance of how they started the Reign of Terror? Both my niece and aunt do not think the movie explained this. I thought it did, but I also went into the movie with a good understanding of them and how they work.

26 minutes ago, Sugarwater said:

I have a question for those who have seen the movie, but have not read the book. Were you able to understand what headrights  are and the significance of how they started the Reign of Terror? Both my niece and aunt do not think the movie explained this. I thought it did, but I also went into the movie with a good understanding of them and how they work.

 

Somewhat Sugarwater, but I was already kinda familiar with headrights before seeing the film.  

 

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Former Assistant Reveals How The Actor Treats His Employees

Leonardo DiCaprio may be one of Hollywood's most famous men but he's an expert at keeping his private life hidden. We have gotten occasional peeks into his relationships through paparazzi photos and infrequent interviews but perhaps the biggest clue about what DiCaprio is really like comes from someone who worked closely with him at the height of his career — his assistant.

Leonardo DiCaprio's former assistant has opened up about working with the actor.

Kasi Brown was DiCapro’s assistant back in 2003 when he was filming for “The Aviator” and quit after the shooting wrapped up. She got the job from her friend who had been DiCaprio's assistant during the shooting of 2002's "Catch Me If You Can." Brown got the chance to bond with everyone during the shooting of "Catch Me If You Can" and became DiCaprio's assistant when her friend moved on to other projects. Since then,

Brown has had nothing but nice things to say about DiCaprio.

"Leo and I always had fun on set," Brown told Huffington Post in 2016, explaining the two would often goof around on the set while imitating accents. Their relationship was filled with humor and the two joked around often. She also revealed a joke the two had between them on numerous accounts.

"Sometimes, I would pretend that he was the stereotype of an entitled celebrity," Brown said. "And when he would ask me to do something, I would bow and in a beaten-down voice say, 'Yes, sir, anything you like sir, anything else, sir?' and he would laugh and tell me to knock it off."

She mentioned that DiCaprio is very 'down to earth.'

Brown who was an aspiring filmmaker mentioned that she learned a lot from DiCaprio on set. He was also smart and got along well with everyone on the set.

She said, “He's extremely down to earth, and he likes to share stories and life experiences with people.”

Additionally, watching him do his work with passion had been an inspiration for her. 

"On the way to set one day, I saw that he kept stepping on all the cracks and spots on the floor in our path," Brown said. "He was playing Howard Hughes, who has OCD, and I realized that he was getting into character."

 

Brown also got the chance to act in “The Aviator” when one of the stars was unable to reshoot a scene. Both Dicaprio and the director of the movie, Martin Scorsese, praised her immensely for her acting skills.

"When they cut, Marty came up to me and said, 'You’re an actress!' and Leo stepped off set and said, 'Kasi!' in an impressed voice," Brown said. "They both made me feel really good about my acting and the work that I was doing to learn everything I could on set while assisting Leo."

Even after Brown was no longer DiCaprio’s assistant, the two still kept in touch. When Brown started working on her own projects, DiCaprio encouraged her to submit work to his production company. In 2015, Brown was finally able to write and direct a comedy movie, “Gone Doggy Gone.”  She mentioned that DiCaprio was one of those people who remained supportive and helped her throughout her career.

 

DiCaprio has since set a strict NDA in place for his employees.

Brown's first-person account of working with DiCaprio may be the last we'll receive in a while, as the Los Angeles Times reported that to work with the actor, employees must sign an "aggressive" non-disclosure agreement that prevents them from talking about "the existence of the contractor's business and/or personal relationship with DiCaprio."

https://www.yourtango.com/entertainment/leonardo-dicaprio-former-assistant-reveals-what-its-work-him

37 minutes ago, SexyLeo91 said:

 

Somewhat Sugarwater, but I was already kinda familiar with headrights before seeing the film.  

 

Thanks for your response!

7 minutes ago, akatosh said:

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Former Assistant Reveals How The Actor Treats His Employees

Leonardo DiCaprio may be one of Hollywood's most famous men but he's an expert at keeping his private life hidden. We have gotten occasional peeks into his relationships through paparazzi photos and infrequent interviews but perhaps the biggest clue about what DiCaprio is really like comes from someone who worked closely with him at the height of his career — his assistant.

Leonardo DiCaprio's former assistant has opened up about working with the actor.

Kasi Brown was DiCapro’s assistant back in 2003 when he was filming for “The Aviator” and quit after the shooting wrapped up. She got the job from her friend who had been DiCaprio's assistant during the shooting of 2002's "Catch Me If You Can." Brown got the chance to bond with everyone during the shooting of "Catch Me If You Can" and became DiCaprio's assistant when her friend moved on to other projects. Since then,

Brown has had nothing but nice things to say about DiCaprio.

"Leo and I always had fun on set," Brown told Huffington Post in 2016, explaining the two would often goof around on the set while imitating accents. Their relationship was filled with humor and the two joked around often. She also revealed a joke the two had between them on numerous accounts.

"Sometimes, I would pretend that he was the stereotype of an entitled celebrity," Brown said. "And when he would ask me to do something, I would bow and in a beaten-down voice say, 'Yes, sir, anything you like sir, anything else, sir?' and he would laugh and tell me to knock it off."

She mentioned that DiCaprio is very 'down to earth.'

Brown who was an aspiring filmmaker mentioned that she learned a lot from DiCaprio on set. He was also smart and got along well with everyone on the set.

She said, “He's extremely down to earth, and he likes to share stories and life experiences with people.”

Additionally, watching him do his work with passion had been an inspiration for her. 

"On the way to set one day, I saw that he kept stepping on all the cracks and spots on the floor in our path," Brown said. "He was playing Howard Hughes, who has OCD, and I realized that he was getting into character."

 

Brown also got the chance to act in “The Aviator” when one of the stars was unable to reshoot a scene. Both Dicaprio and the director of the movie, Martin Scorsese, praised her immensely for her acting skills.

"When they cut, Marty came up to me and said, 'You’re an actress!' and Leo stepped off set and said, 'Kasi!' in an impressed voice," Brown said. "They both made me feel really good about my acting and the work that I was doing to learn everything I could on set while assisting Leo."

Even after Brown was no longer DiCaprio’s assistant, the two still kept in touch. When Brown started working on her own projects, DiCaprio encouraged her to submit work to his production company. In 2015, Brown was finally able to write and direct a comedy movie, “Gone Doggy Gone.”  She mentioned that DiCaprio was one of those people who remained supportive and helped her throughout her career.

 

DiCaprio has since set a strict NDA in place for his employees.

Brown's first-person account of working with DiCaprio may be the last we'll receive in a while, as the Los Angeles Times reported that to work with the actor, employees must sign an "aggressive" non-disclosure agreement that prevents them from talking about "the existence of the contractor's business and/or personal relationship with DiCaprio."

https://www.yourtango.com/entertainment/leonardo-dicaprio-former-assistant-reveals-what-its-work-him

Good to hear! 

1 hour ago, Sugarwater said:

I have a question for those who have seen the movie, but have not read the book. Were you able to understand what headrights  are and the significance of how they started the Reign of Terror? Both my niece and aunt do not think the movie explained this. I thought it did, but I also went into the movie with a good understanding of them and how they work.

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.

37 minutes ago, Jade Bahr said:

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.

Yes! That’s at least enough of an understanding to get why things were happening. I wish it would have covered more of how the Osage knew what was under their land (and no it wasn’t because of a gusher) and how they outsmarted the US government by creating headrights before anyone else figured out what was under their land. This of course made the white government look extremely foolish and extremely mad that the Osage outsmarted them. This is why the government started proclaiming Osage people too incompetent to handle their own money. Also, the money could not go to a white family member unless they were the only ones left. This is why all the Osage grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, children etc… had to be eliminated before a white family member could inherit it. Yes. Ernest would have had to murder his own children before he could inherit the money.

13 minutes ago, Sugarwater said:

Yes! That’s at least enough of an understanding to get why things were happening. I wish it would have covered more of how the Osage knew what was under their land (and no it wasn’t because of a gusher) and how they outsmarted the US government by creating headrights before anyone else figured out what was under their land. This of course made the white government look extremely foolish and extremely mad that the Osage outsmarted them. This is why the government started proclaiming Osage people too incompetent to handle their own money. Also, the money could not go to a white family member unless they were the only ones left. This is why all the Osage grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, children etc… had to be eliminated before a white family member could inherit it. Yes. Ernest would have had to murder his own children before he could inherit the money.

Thanks for the additional information. I think I got that much from the movie. That's also why

Spoiler

Hale wanted Ernest to sign the documents. He was planning to have Mollie, Ernest and the children killed so he would inherit everything. So sinister...

 

42 minutes ago, akatosh said:

Thanks for the additional information. I think I got that much from the movie. That's also why

  Hide contents

Hale wanted Ernest to sign the documents. He was planning to have Mollie, Ernest and the children killed so he would inherit everything. So sinister...

 

Spoiler

And why he was so angry when he learned Mollie was pregnant again.

 

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”.

Some BTS

   

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.

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

2 hours ago, Jade Bahr said:

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

 

I f****** HATED this article, seems more like a hater writing, lainey's cousin...