October 19, 20231 yr At least my local cinema has some faith in the movie. It shows KOTFM twice as much as the Taylor concert movie ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Tracking at $20-$25 Million Opening Apple and Paramount are giving Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” a wide theatrical release in over 3600 theaters this weekend and, according to Deadline, the tracking has it at around $20M-$25M. This would be impressive for a 3 hour, 26-minute western drama, with no actors promoting it during the strike, but I sure as hell hope it’ll gross more. May the cinematic Gods grace ‘Killers’ with a $30 million weekend. Apple spent $200 million on ‘Killers,’ mostly for the prestige, Oscar noms and the fact that it could bring in more subscribers on their streaming platform. Breaking even is just an added bonus. But for the sake of cinema’s survival? I sure would like to see a 206 minute, R-rated, non-IP film pull better numbers. Scorsese’s last two films barely made any money. 2016’s “Silence” grossed $22 million, on a $50 million budget, and 2019’s “The Irishman,” which was produced by Netflix, had only been granted a brief, and limited, 2-week theatrical release by the streamer.
October 19, 20231 yr Never underestimate Leo is all I'm saying here Taylor Swift Has No Plans To Shake Off No. 1 As Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Eyes $20M+ Opening The AMC-distributed Taylor Swift concert movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which paused weekday play from Monday-Thursday, is looking at a 60%-70% dive in its second weekend with $27M-$37M off its first weekend of $92.3M. Those industry projections are based on the front-loaded nature of female-skewing pics, per sources. (...) Apple Original Films’ big splash into a wide theatrical release with Paramount on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon has been looking at a $20M-$25M opening with tracking for a while. That would be mind-blowing for a 3 hour, 26-minute western drama that’s getting released in the midst of the actors strike, which has prevented stars from tubthumping their pics. Such conceived tentpoles as New Regency/20th Century Studios/Disney’s $80M The Creator were impacted greatly by the strike; that pic’s promotion was hamstrung sans an awesome San Diego Comic-Con and fall film festival launch, ultimately opening to $14M and currently at a running cume of $33.4M. Another adult-skewing title, 20th/Disney’s A Haunting in Venice, also took a hit with a $14.2M opening. Why so optimistic on Killers of the Flower Moon? Analysts are bullish on the DiCaprio factor of it all in regards to the draw in a marketing campaign that’s been everywhere in TV spots and outdoor. A $20M+ opening here also would be a notable start for Apple’s foray into wide theatrical releases, its next being the Sony-distributed and Ridley Scott-directed Napoleon on November 22. The DiCaprio-Robert De Niro-Lily Gladstone movie has been on fire with critics since its world premiere at Cannes (which was where the stars previously did press back in May before the strike) with a current Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 96% certified fresh. Adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the David Grann book, Killers of the Flower Moon follows the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) against the suspicious murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight after oil was discovered underneath their land during the 1920s. Given the length of this movie, previews will start as early as 2 p.m. on Thursday. Killers of the Flower Moon is booked in 3,621 theaters and looks to pull in men and women over 25. Working in the Scorsese pic’s advantage is the fact that it will have all the Imax and PLF screens, with little overlap with Eras Tour. In regards to this Apple-financed property, the streamer is handling the marketing and publicity, while Paramount has overseen the distribution and booking of theaters. Overall, the good news between Killers of the Flower Moon and Eras Tour is that neither is cannibalizing the other’s coveted demos. No Apple TV+ streaming date has been set for Killers of the Flower Moon as a guaranteed long theatrical window is being planned due to awards season. DiCaprio’s highest openings with Scorsese are, in order: Shutter Island ($41M in 2010), The Departed ($27M, 2006), The Wolf of Wall Street ($18M, 2013), Gangs of New York ($9.1M, 2002) and The Aviator ($858K first weekend at 40 theaters with a second weekend wide break of $9.1M, 2004). A $20M+ opening for Killers of the Flower Moon would rep the best domestic start for De Niro in a Scorsese film — Cape Fear being the duo’s biggest opening together with $10.2M back in 1991. Cape Fear on a global basis is De Niro’s highest-grossing movie with Scorsese at $182M, while DiCaprio’s is Wolf of Wall Street at $407M.
October 19, 20231 yr THIS ARTICLE CONTAIN MAJOR SPOILER OF THE STORY + MOVIE The horrifying, nearly forgotten history behind Killers of the Flower Moon A century later, we still don’t know the full, stomach-churning extent of the Osage murders. The neighborhood dogs had all begun to die, and that was why Rita Smith’s husband was sure they’d be next. Rita was one of the few remaining members of the Osage Nation following nearly a century of brutal displacement. Throughout the 19th century, the government repeatedly forced the Osage to relocate from their current lands in Kansas to, finally, a much smaller, desolate reservation in northern Oklahoma. With the discovery of oil on Osage land in the late 1890s, however, the 2,229 tribe members who were left suddenly came into tremendous amounts of personal wealth, and prosperity finally seemed to be once more within the community’s grasp. But now, a ring of unknown murderers had begun to target members of the tribe — including Rita’s family. Between 1921 and 1923, Rita’s sister Anna Brown, her cousin, and possibly even her mother, Lizzie Kyle, had all died suspiciously alongside a string of other deaths — at least 24 Osage Nation members and several of their allies. Some, like Anna, had been killed with a bullet to the back of the head; others, like Lizzie, had apparently died from strychnine or other more obscure poisons. There were even rumors that Rita’s white husband, Bill, had killed his first wife, Rita’s sister Minnie, a few years earlier. He had married Rita shortly after. Rita’s other sister, Mollie, had also married a white man, Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of a rich and influential rancher, William Hale. Under Hale’s patronage, the family had prospered — but now they were dying, one by one. Four women of the Kyle family all died suspicious deaths, from left to right: Minnie Smith (d. 1921); Anna Kyle Brown (d. 1921); Rita Smith (d. 1923); their mother, Lizzie Q. Kyle (d. 1921). The surviving sister, Mollie, narrowly escaped a similar fate. Bettmann Archive Rita and Bill had become so spooked by the possibility that they were next on the list of vigilante killings that after hearing intruders on their property, they’d moved to a safer part of town. Not long after they settled in, however, the neighborhood’s ever-vigilant dogs began to die, and Bill grew increasingly paranoid. He saw their silencing as akin to disabling an alarm system — and a sign that despite their best efforts, the anonymous death-dealers were inching closer to them. He was right. In the early morning hours of March 10, 1923, Bill, Rita, and their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire all died when a bomb that had been planted beneath their house exploded — yet another tragedy of what became known as the Osage Reign of Terror. All of these events, and the harrowing FBI investigation that followed, form the subject of Killers of the Flower Moon, journalist David Grann’s meticulously researched 2017 book about the murders, as well as its highly anticipated upcoming film adaptation by Martin Scorsese. The film boasts many Indigenous actors, including breakout star Lily Gladstone, alongside an A-list ensemble including familiar Scorsese collaborators like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro — and a somewhat quizzical range of famous singer-songwriters. The formidable cast size reflects just how far-reaching and convoluted the real murders and the efforts to solve them were. As with all true crime, the ethics of discussing Killers of the Flower Moon as a narrative are tricky. Grann constructs his nonfiction account like a classic murder mystery, with a series of grim “twists” that may or may not be genuinely shocking, depending on how cynical you are. As the trailers make clear, Scorsese upends this narrative, with the “who” behind the Osage murders being not nearly as compelling as the why and the how. Still, if you’d like to avoid spoilers, proceed with caution (and maybe tap out before the last section). While Scorsese takes the “who” as a given, the deep irony remains that the only reason the “why” might still shock viewers is that the Osage Reign of Terror simply isn’t well enough known. The systematic murders of an Indigenous community — the rare case to warrant a federal investigation from the then-nascent bureau that would become the FBI — may have been an undeniable media sensation in their day. Yet nearly 100 years later, the Osage murders wound up being little more than a 20th-century history footnote. (A date-stamped search for the murders returns less than 100 results on Google prior to 2016, the year before Flower Moon was published.) The Smiths’ house in 1923, before and after the bombing. Bettmann Archive Erased alongside the murders, arguably a 20th-century genocide on American soil, were the appalling circumstances that enabled them. Not only were the investigations into the murders hampered by systemic indifference, but the murders could arguably only have happened because of decades of blatant system-wide racism that forced the Osage people to fight for their autonomy. At the time the murders began, they were even fighting for control of their own finances and assets, thanks to a Britney-style conservatorship that robbed them of access to their newfound oil wealth amid an environment of galling corruption. This story, the true American horror story of a community enduring a death wave for over a decade, makes for harrowing drama. But the full truth of the Osage murders, and the dehumanization at their root, makes it almost more unbelievable that they were ever solved at all — if, indeed, they actually were. How the Osage got unfathomably rich — and the exploitative conservatorships that came with that money For thousands of years, the Osage Nation resided on a vast stretch of territory that extended from the Ohio River across the Mississippi and into Oklahoma and across southern Kansas. In the 19th century, however, as white settlers encroached on their territory and anti-Indigenous sentiment flourished, the US government began a series of forced relocations, resettling the Osage repeatedly until finally, by the 1870s, the government forced the Osage to relocate to northern Oklahoma. The government had intentionally resettled the Osage to some of the worst farmland in Oklahoma — only to accidentally relocate them to the richest oil deposits in the country. In the late 1890s, the oil reserves were discovered, and the Osage people suddenly came into possession of confounding amounts of wealth, abruptly becoming the richest community on the planet. And then, as they had so often before, the vultures began circling. The massive land rush that followed the discovery of the oil swelled the prairie with grifters, grafters, scammers, and quick-buck seekers, all of whom arrived with the goal of exploiting the Indigenous people and their newfound wealth. Tribal allotments established between 1905 and 1907 meant that all of the existing Osage land was legally reserved to the remaining tribal members. But outsiders could still obtain leases to mine and drill the land in exchange for a share of the profits. At the peak of the oil rush in the 1920s, auctions for oil leases regularly generated millions of dollars. Outsiders could also marry into Osage families, which would allow them to access Osage money. This tree became known in the region as the “Million-Dollar Elm” because of the millions of dollars in oil and natural gas leases that were regularly auctioned beneath it. Courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum As white fortune hunters flocked to the countryside hoping to secure deals and access to the land, the government, via the Bureau of Indian Affairs, mandated that nearly all members of the Osage be appointed a white “guardian” who would manage (control) their money for them. Members of the tribe had to get permission to access their own bank accounts, have their purchases approved, withdraw their own money — nearly always with entirely racist assumptions embedded in the judgments about which Osage “deserved” to have access to their own money. It was in effect exactly like a modern-day conservatorship, with all of the built-in potential for exploitation that has given the legal structure its still-terrible reputation. The system often resulted in guardians simply withholding or stealing the money completely from the Osage, who rarely had a means of redress within the US legal system because of the conscious indifference or racism of local, state, and federal authorities. “I have a diploma from Lawrence, and they’ve put a guardian over me,” an Osage tribe member named John Goodskin told Harper’s Monthly in November 1920. “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks ... I’m a prisoner in this place.” To understand how the eventual string of murders could have gone unchecked for so long, it’s vital to understand both how exploitative the guardianship system was and how the community revolved around it. White community members sought oil leases and then through guardianship gained further control over the Osage. In order to make this system work, you needed people who were willing to exploit the Osage as their guardians and people who were willing to look the other way while they did it, often in exchange for bribes or access of their own. This meant you needed people within every part of the social and legal system. “They have all the law and all the machinery on their side,” Goodskin told Harper’s. Thus an entire ecosystem of greed and graft quickly arose around the Osage capital of Pawhuska and neighboring Osage city of Fairfax, keeping the money flowing and keeping the white locals, including the newcomers, in control of it. “Many of the county courts are influenced by political considerations, and … Indian guardianships are the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls,” wrote Indigenous activist Zitkala-S̈a in 1924. Once established, the entire white community became incentivized to participate in this system of greed. And once the Osage citizens began dying, it was in the white locals’ best economic interests to let them keep dying. That’s because of how the law concerning the Osage Nation’s shares in the oil fields, known as their headrights, worked. It was illegal for the headrights, the Osages’ most valuable asset, to be sold or given away. But if any member of the Osage Nation died, their headright would pass to their legal heir. This person might be their white spouse, who was often conveniently also their guardian. Or the headright might go to a relative or heir whose guardian already had complete control over their accounts — so that the money would effectively go straight to them. In other words, marrying an Osage who then died, or being appointed guardian over an Osage who suddenly came into an inheritance after someone else died, was the only way for a white man to gain more access to the profits from all that oil. The law concerning the inviolability of Osage headrights, intended to make them less vulnerable to exploitation, instead meant that to their corrupt guardians, the Osage were more valuable dead than alive. President Calvin Coolidge poses with an Osage delegation in front of the White House on January 20, 1924. Bettmann Archive And thanks to the lure of the oil fields, corruption was everywhere. It ran so rampant in the region that, according to FBI records accessed by Grann in Flower Moon, when one of the killers was finally apprehended, he referred to the murders as simply “the state of the game.” It became so unchecked that in 1923, the Osage Nation formally requested that the federal government take over the investigation into the Reign of Terror because there seemed to be no hope for justice from anywhere else. The Osage murders became so prolific that the nation’s first federal investigative agency had to get involved Until that point, the state’s attempts to investigate had gone completely off the rails. Local law enforcement had been, at best, thoroughly intimidated into totally halting their investigations. The best efforts at solving the crimes had been waged by cadres of private investigators working for the families of the victims. Thus far, however, leads had gone nowhere, evidence had mysteriously vanished, plausible theories turned out to be rumors without substance, the region’s unbridled corruption tainted the available case information, witnesses abruptly vanished or stopped talking, and everyone who seemed to be getting somewhere turned up dead. As alarm and hysteria about the deaths spread, a white man named Barney McBride traveled to Washington, DC, to seek federal help in solving the murders. While there, he was attacked, beaten, and fatally stabbed more than 20 times. Three other investigators similarly died by foul play just as they seemed to be getting close to the truth: One was drugged and pushed down a flight of stairs; another was gunned down; the third, a local prosecutor, was thrown from a train while reportedly on his way to reveal the killers’ identities. The bombing of the Smith house, however, brought about a turning point in the murder investigation. The high death toll, as well as the sheer menace involved in a triple-homicide house bombing, finally garnered the attention of national media and prompted the intervention of the federal government and the Bureau of Investigation, the fledgling organization that would ultimately become the FBI. The bureau detectives, led by Tom White, a former Texas Ranger turned bureau veteran, had the herculean task of sorting through a landscape of rumors and misinformation and finding people — anyone — who was a) willing to tell the truth and b) not already dead. No sooner would one lead appear than it would turn out that the lead had already been killed, often under awfully convenient circumstances. Yet working mostly undercover, White and his detectives quickly gained a hypothesis of the murders — a truly chilling conspiracy to kill that led back to the family at the heart of it all. Note: From here on, we will discuss the real-life criminals behind the Osage murders, whose identities constitute major spoilers for both the book and the film Killers of the Flower Moon. If you want to remain unspoiled for either, you should stop reading now. The “who” of this whodunnit is almost as shocking as the “why” It’s a testament to how unproductive the local justice system had been in its efforts to bring the Osage killers to rights that when the FBI took over in the summer of 1925, it only took White and his men three months to find real answers. Those three months, however, were spent unearthing a devastatingly large community plot to orchestrate the murders of Osage tribe members. This plot was either enacted, enabled, or silently complied with by apparently dozens of members of Fairfax’s white society — everyone from judges to pastors to coroners to private detectives to a range of henchmen. At the center of all of it was a single man: William K. Hale, a self-made Fairfax cattle rancher who spent decades steadily amassing power and land in a There Will Be Blood-style saga of bribes, intimidation, murder, and ruthlessness. Hale did all of this while cloaking himself in a public disguise of gentility and charity; he called himself “the Reverend” and was known for lavishly donating to charity and constantly working on behalf of the Osage people. But Hale also steadily took control over nearly every part of the social and legal systems of the region: He gained an appointment as a deputy sheriff, which meant he could come and go in jails at will and could easily manipulate criminals to work for him from behind bars. He had local officials in his pocket, openly terrified to disobey him. Even doctors in the area apparently aided him in discreetly poisoning their patients on his behalf. Hale “had everything fixed from the road-overseer to the governor,” Hale’s nephew stated in a deposition. His ultimate goal, carried out via a string of brazen insurance scams, murder plots, for-hire killings, and fraud, was to amass his fortune by taking it from the Osage people. (This revelation comes as a shock in Grann’s retelling of the murder investigation; one might argue that Scorsese’s choice to cast Robert DeNiro as Hale in the film adaptation gives away the game upfront.) What Tom White and his agents were able to prove centers around the Osage family that Bill Smith married into, which is also the family that Hale’s nephew, Ernest Burkhart, married into. It’s unclear how early Hale’s grand design took form, but what it ultimately coalesced into was this: systematically killing off all of Burkhart’s in-laws until all of their inheritances had passed on to Burkhart’s wife, Mollie. (In Scorsese’s film, Mollie is played by breakout star Gladstone, with DiCaprio in the role of Ernest.) Mollie had outlived her three sisters, several cousins, and her mother. By the time White finally arrested Hale, she was being slowly poisoned — allegedly via injections directly from her doctor under the guise of administering insulin — with the apparent expectation that when she died, her family’s entire fortune would pass to Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart was fully aware of and assisted in the plot to kill his in-laws, including helping facilitate the bombing of the Smiths. It’s unclear when Burkhart learned about his uncle’s plot. It’s a horrifying possibility that he married Mollie with the intent to orchestrate her murder. It’s also possible he learned of the plot to kill Mollie afterward and went along with it, or perhaps learned of it but then proved reluctant to carry it out; after all, this was a woman he’d been married to for decades and had three children with. The possibility he had no knowledge she was being poisoned seems remote. In the final chapters of Flower Moon, Grann offers the chilling possibility that Burkhart not only had full complicity, but had even intended for his wife Mollie and two of their children to die alongside her sister Rita in the bombing of the Smith house. Equally unclear is whether Hale’s plot stopped with Mollie or ultimately included killing off Burkhart as well. Burkhart seemed genuinely remorseful and pleaded guilty to his role in the killing of Mollie’s sister Rita Smith, her husband Bill Smith, and their servant Nettie Brookshire. (The man who allegedly planted the bomb had died under suspicious circumstances that implicated Hale as the mastermind.) After this, Hale allegedly attempted to get one witness to kidnap and kill his nephew before Burkhart could testify against him. Ultimately, despite multiple hung juries (whose members had been bribed by Hale’s attorney), Hale and another man, a career criminal named John Ramsey, were convicted of killing Mollie’s cousin Roan Horse, also known as Henry Roan, in an insurance scam. They were each given life imprisonment. Hale’s other nephew, Bryan Burkhart, helped facilitate the murder of Mollie’s other sister Anna Brown, but after his own trial resulted in a hung jury, he was given immunity in order to testify against the man who pulled the trigger. That man, Kelsie Morrison (whom Grann implicates in a similar plot to murder his wife and her entire family), was also convicted. Although Hale was implicated in dozens of deaths, he was only convicted for one. Both he and Burkhart were eventually paroled, and Burkhart applied for and received a pardon from the state of Oklahoma over the objections of outraged Osage. For her part, Mollie initially supported her husband and believed in Ernest’s innocence, but after learning the full scope of his involvement in the murders, and comprehending just how much death he actively took part in, she divorced him. In 1931, she successfully sued for an end to her own guardianship and finally gained full control over the family fortune others had tried so hard to take. It’s impossible to know the full range of crimes that Hale and his coconspirators committed. That’s due to a range of reasons. For one, records have been lost and might not have been kept well at the time. For another, Hale wasn’t the only white man in the area trying to attain access to Osage wealth via force, violence, coercion, and murder. For another, since at one point local law enforcement simply stopped investigating the murders, the total number of people murdered in the Osage Reign of Terror might never be known. In Flower Moon, Grann cites estimates in the hundreds of victims — and that’s just within the Osage community. Hale also seems to have ruthlessly orchestrated the murders of dozens of people who either investigated the murders, helped him commit them, or had knowledge of them. In this panorama of the Osage Nation taken in the early 1920s, William Hale can be seen standing among the Osage on the left (in a golf cap and glasses). Courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum The specter of death seems to have been all but expected during this period. Even a cursory look into the murders leads immediately to unexpectedly dark places — like the time Hale somehow legally acquired the inheritance of a 12-year-old boy, Charles Bigheart, who suddenly passed away under unknown circumstances, just five years before his father George was suspiciously poisoned to death, allegedly by Hale. Grann, in researching his book, seemed unable to help but stumble across more murders committed by more people — one, a banker in league with Hale, was suspected by FBI agents but never prosecuted; another woman likely murdered her husband for his headright and later narrowly escaped being murdered herself. The earliest victim Grann encountered was bludgeoned to death in 1918 by friends who later posed as her family members in order to access her accounts. The most recent victim he learned about was allegedly poisoned in 1931. Once Grann began looking at specific white men who had multiple guardianships entrusted to them, he realized that many of them seemed to be systematically offing their charges without an apparent second thought. Some simply denied their wards access to health care and let them die. One wealthy woman was held captive and tortured by her husband until the government interceded, as part of yet another alleged town conspiracy to take her wealth. Many guardians seemed to have no qualms about killing children in order to knock off potential obstacles to the prize. And countless members of white society were engaged in helping the guardians make such deaths appear nominally unsuspicious. “Virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system,” Grann ultimately concludes after taking in the sheer scope of the killings, “a vast criminal operation that was reaping millions and millions of dollars.” The social system that had begun as an ecosystem of greed had evolved into an ecosystem of death, reaping tragedy and trauma that still haunts the Osage and their descendants. The laws around headrights have changed, but they are still fraught legal subjects, though the Osage wealth has long since dried up, literally, alongside the depleted oil fields. And although the deaths of Indigenous peoples living in the US may not be organized by the steady hand of a single man like William Hale, they still face far higher death rates with lower rates of criminal investigations and prosecutions than white Americans. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women has become a grim acronym in the annals of criminal justice due to the need for increased awareness of such cases. The Osage murders illustrate something profoundly dark about the lie of American identity. The trope is that anyone can find success and happiness — that there’s something mythic and magical about “American” ambition and success. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the government’s approach to Indigenous Americans was to mold them into docile citizens via forced boarding school attendance (Roan Horse, later killed by Hale, was forced to change his name at one such school), forced religious conversions, and the systematic destruction of Indigenous American cultures. The lie that Indigenous peoples were fed as they were forced to assimilate into white culture was that once they had done so successfully, they would be rewarded with greater freedom and autonomy; they would receive their chance to participate in the American dream. Yet as Goodskin pointed out to Harper’s in 1920, that promise, always hollow, completely vanished as soon as actual independence and autonomy were within reach. “In the old days, before we had money, it was easy enough,” he said, describing the plight of the Osage who had a guardian. “All you had to do was not get drunk. But now your good behavior has nothing at all to do with it. Your money draws ’em and you’re absolutely helpless.” In other words, after having fully disenfranchised Indigenous Americans, there was never going to be a version of the “model” Indigenous American that white society could actually tolerate. The discovery of oil on Osage land is what the American dream is supposedly all about. It should have afforded the Osage power, freedom, and agency alongside all that cash. Instead, at the very moment they should have attained everything they were promised, they had less control over their own lives — and deaths — than ever.
October 19, 20231 yr @BarbieErin Even if I'm still not convinced about the PTA project (plainly because I don't like his movies at all LOL) I guess the more working Leo the better? Haha Leo. Love him and his little perfectionist ass when it comes to work Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese “rolled eyes” at Leonardo DiCaprio on set Martin Scorsese’s new movie Killers of the Flower Moon is clearly a picture that’s taken some time to get right – and thanks to Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio found this out the hard way. Scorsese has dropped yet another historical epic that’s set to make cinematic history – including its colossal 3 hour and 26 minute runtime. The story follows the atrocities committed against the Osage Nation in the 1920s, when it was first discovered that their supposedly “bad” land harbored a wealth of oil underneath it. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro play the main antagonists in Killers of the Flower Moon, but the journey to perfection wasn’t always straightforward for De Niro and Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese “rolled eyes” at Leonardo DiCaprio’s improvisation According to a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Leonardo DiCaprio’s initial improvisation in scenes caused more than a few eye rolls from Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Scorsese reflected on how Killers of the Flower Moon is the first film to bring his two muses, De Niro and DiCaprio, together. In the Wall Street profile, Scorsese explains how the two actors are the complete opposites of each other, citing that DiCaprio’s improvisations and discussions on set were “endless, endless, endless.” “Then Bob didn’t want to talk,” Scorsese explained. “Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we’d tell [Leo], ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’” For Scorsese and De Niro fans, the instance has painted a vivid picture in their heads.
October 19, 20231 yr Marty telling the cute story of the handsome devil improv and Leo and Lily becoming a unit in that moment.
October 19, 20231 yr 2 hours ago, Jade Bahr said: @BarbieErin Even if I'm still not convinced about the PTA project (plainly because I don't like his movies at all LOL) I guess the more working Leo the better? Yeah certainly, the more Leo works better for us, but I'm not a fan of PTA movies as well, at least the ones I saw.
October 20, 20231 yr ^A bit more detailed. No spoiler (expect the ones hidden). Coming just out of the movie. My brain is still working because damn that was a lot to take in. So here just some quick thoughts. It's very different to all pre Marty/Leo projects. Leo is just... wow. I have no words. He blew me away I now understand why he choosed the role of Ernest over Tom White (who was minimized into less than 30 minutes and hadn't much to do). Is it Leos career best? It's definitely less showy than for example Jordan Belfort or Howard Hughes. He's much more subtle here. More quiet. Even if he talks (or mumbles) a lot. Maybe it's just my imagination after the article but I could see how Marty said to him "take a step back, you don't need all the extra drama." He also looks dead ass weird in this movie. Ears, nose, hair, teeths, mouth constantly pulled down. I almost bursted into laughter when Mollie called him "good looking". Uhm no girl that's not good looking Leo this is Leo giving his best Marlon Brando imitation lol The only dreamy thing Marty left us are his eyes. I had a hard time to understand why she felt in love with him actually. She even admitted right in the beginning he's "not the brightest" and was "after her money". Spoiler Yet she never really suspected him what I also found weird. Maybe because the movie made him guilty so obvious for the audience or maybe because it's too grotesque to think your own husband could do something utterly horrible like that. I think he's the ugliest character Leo ever played. Not just by the outside but inside because he's hiding his malignancy pretending to be the loving caring husband otherwise than for example Candie and Louis who were just evil and showed their evilness. Lily is intense and heartbreaking (and in my humble opinion very much a leading role). She and Leo have some "cute" moments. Also many not so much cute moments like expected. I really was about to pray for that poor soul. If she's winning the oscar I'm here for it. Robert DeNiro is subtle but amazing and the evil in person His character is so dark it's comical sometimes. He isn't a supporting character at all. Overall I think the movie is more "lighter" than I thought. Not exactly funny but with moments where I had to laugh. Sometimes because of pure disbelieve. Sometimes I wanted to scream. Sometimes I really wanted to shake dumb Ernest (and all the other white old douchebags good lord). Great dialogs. Many many dialogs. Slow pace. Sometimes I was thinking too slow honestly. This movie isn't a crime triller or something like that. It's a character study where we know from the beginning who are the perpetrators and who are the victims. Because of that the movie isn't really... thrilling. I mean you're not sitting there waiting in pure excitement what happens next because you already know what happens next. Gripping and accumulating are maybe the better words to describe the whole thing, yes. But did I LIKE the movie? Woah hard to tell. I admired many parts of it. It's a movie that made you think for sure but nothing you just watch for entertainment (what isn't the intention of the movie anyway). So watching and enjoying it on a big screen is probably just the right way. It's a beautiful craftful movie to look at. Quite the opposite to the ugly rotten shameful story it tells. It's a strenuous movie and so it's def not a movie for the crowd. My cinema was half packed at best. When the credits started the group behind me was gasping over the lengths of the movie and the lack of events. Indeed two people left the cinema WHILE the movie. I don't think I ever witnessed that during a Leo movie. The soundtrack is quite... memorable. The steady hammering (or drumming) drove me nuts, almost gave me a headache. LOVED the creative ending. Special indeed.
October 20, 20231 yr 4 minutes ago, akatosh said: Thanks for the review. My screening will start in 5 hours. I'm really curious what you will say It's a quite complex experience. At least it was for me.
October 20, 20231 yr Also want to add Tatanka Means is the one to drool about in this movie. He's really gorgeous His role is rather small but he drawd my attention because of his beauty and charisma. He's one of the investigator of the FBI. Would have loved to know more about this character. Not from KOTFM but who cares Love his hair and stuff
October 20, 20231 yr I just got back from watching KOTFM. Oscars please for Leo and Lily!!! Just wow. 🥰🥹 Marty, too. What a great film. 3.5 hours never went by this fast. All the actors were great. Leo was very different from his other roles. Very interesting. Loved the chemistry between him and Lily. I'm going to watch it again on sunday in english (today I saw the dubbed german version).
October 21, 20231 yr Beautiful article about the Spoiler heartbreaking love between Ernest and Mollie. Beware Spoilers! Spoiler Leonardo DiCaprio's Most Devlishly Charming Moment In Killers Of The Flower Moon Was Improvised This article contains spoilers for "Killers of the Flower Moon." Martin Scorsese's new movie "Killers of the Flower Moon" delivers another stirring teardown of the myth of American greatness. Behind many of the greatest success stories in America lie tragedy and cruelty, whether it's being inflicted by those rising to the top or eventually upon them after reality settles in. "Mean Streets," "GoodFellas," "Gangs of New York," "The Wolf of Wall Street," and many more have featured this theme in a variety of ways. However, what makes "Killers of the Flower Moon" different than the rest is that there's a genuine love story spoiled by all the manipulation, betrayal, extortion, and murder. In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a soldier who has recently returned from World War I and seeks out employment in the oil fields of Osage County in Oklahoma. Here, the land given to the Osage people runs rich with black gold, making them some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and providing an opportunity for scheming white men to cheat them out of what is rightfully their land and fortune, as is the American way. Rather than working in the oil fields, Burkhart is recruited by his uncle, a wealthy rancher named William King Hale (Robert De Niro), who has gained the trust and friendship of the Osage people, to help him keep the lucrative land of Osage County within the Native American family by marrying into one of them. But what Hale is really trying to do is take the land out from under the Osage people, as Burkhart isn't the only young white man he's encouraging to marry into the Osage line. However, there's an extra layer of tragedy in the case of Ernest Burkhart's deception and betrayal, because before he was ever recruited by Hale, Burkhart had already taken a genuine liking to an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), the same woman that his uncle would eventually encourage him to betroth and betray. When Ernest meets Mollie, he's trying to make some cash by being a taxi drive around Osage County. He catches her walking through town and offers her a ride. Mollie is quiet and calm, she let's her face express more than her words ever might. Ernest shows some of his more rascally tendencies, as he takes an interest in a sudden drag race through downtown, which distracts him from driving Mollie home for a moment. But as soon as they're on the road, he puts on the charm, but only slowly at first. However, that natural attraction Ernest has for Mollie is thrown into overdrive when Hale reveals that he thinks it would be a good idea to "help the Osage people" by marrying into their family and ensuring that the recent rash of mysterious deaths of Osage people doesn't result in their land being taken away from them. At least that's what Hale tells Burkhart, who is more than a bit gullible and easily manipulated. That's when Burkhart pulls out all the stops and makes it clear that he's interested in Mollie romantically. Acting as her regular driver around town, he's much more direct about pursuing her. When he questions her about another potential romantic interest in her life, he mentions just wanting to know who else is in this horse race. Mollie responds with words in the Osage language, which Ernest doesn't understand. Mollie repeats it, and Ernest responds, with a flirtatious grin on his face, "Well, I don't know what that was, but it must've been Indian for handsome devil," which prompts Mollie to laugh in amusement. During a recent press conference in support of "Killers of the Flower Moon," director Martin Scorsese revealed that this was an improvised moment. In fact, Lily Gladstone's laugh in response to the line is genuine. As Scorsese said, "So that moment you have the actual relationship, it's actually between the two actors." And that was a key moment that resonates throughout the entire film, because even as Ernest continually lies and betrays Mollie, he still genuinely loves her and believes what he's doing is for their own good. The press conference with Scorsese also revealed what the filmmaker learned when he visited Osage County. All these years later, descendants of both the Osage people and the Burkharts still live there. Scorsese explained: "What I didn't really understand in the first couple of meetings [with the Osage people and descendants of the story] was that this is an ongoing situation, an ongoing story out in Oklahoma. In other words, these are things that really weren't talked about in the generation I was talking to and the generation above them. Before them, I should say. It was the generation before them that this happened to. So they didn't talk about it much. The people involved are still there, meaning the families are still there, the descendants are still there. So what I learned from meeting with them, having dinners with them — Margie Burkhart, she was the relative of Ernest Burkhart. She pointed out, and a number of other people pointed out, that you have to understand, a lot of the white guys there, a lot of the European Americans, particularly Bill Hale, they were good friends." It's that relationship that allowed the Osage people to be so easily manipulated without their knowledge, and the romance between Ernest and Mollie is just another casualty of that. However, Scorsese said that Margie Burkhart emphasized the real romance that was there between Ernest and Mollie: "She said, 'One has to remember that Ernest,' her ancestor, 'loved Mollie. And Mollie loved Ernest. It's a love story." Ultimately, what happened is that the script shifted that way, and that's when Leo decided to play Ernest instead of Tom White." 'Why don't we just show that's how it could happen?' Initially, Leonardo DiCaprio was going to play Tom White, the agent from the Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI) who is sent to solve the murders in Osage County. But that was when the script was more focused on the birth of the FBI rather than the story as it unfolds from within the Osage community. As Scorsese uncovered the heart of the story within the Osage people, he found a new approach, one that allowed him to cut to the core of their plight and show people how these Native American people were destroyed from within by greedy coyotes. So DiCaprio became Ernest, and Jesse Plemons stepped into the role of Tom White, a character who now doesn't roll into the story until about halfway through the movie. What makes the story all the more heartbreaking is that many of the Osage people were aware that plenty of white men in their community were looking for money, but they didn't let that keep them from pursuing what still felt like true love. Scorsese discussed how scenes depicting the evolution of this terrible deception came about. During one scene where Lily and Ernest have dinner by themselves for the first time, Mollie laughs to herself and comments, "Coyote wants money," and Ernest surprisingly confirms, "That's right, I love money." Scorsese explained: "So she knows. This is the other thing, she knows what she's getting into. Even her sisters later, which is also a scene that we put in with the Osage, with the Native American actors. They said, 'What if we're talking about the guys while they're playing that game, and we're talking about my husband and talking about that guy with the blue eyes likes you. And, well, I don't think he just wants money. Well, it doesn't matter, he's nice. He wants to settle down.' Why don't we just show that's how it could happen? That's the way the script was ultimately created by these moments." This is America Killers of the Flower Moon Leonardo DiCaprio Lily Gladstone Apple This is why the romance between Ernest and Mollie became the backbone of the story rather than focusing on the formation of the FBI. If Scorsese had put the focus on the crimes themselves and the investigation, it might not have felt much different from your average crime thriller. But with a doomed romance at its core, one brought to life by the beautiful chemistry between Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio, there's even more suffering than what's on the surface. Using a charming actor like DiCaprio in this kind of role is the ultimate deception for the audience. But it's Gladstone who delivers the most crushing blow, as the end of the film finds Mollie walking out on Ernest when he refuses to admit to her face that he kept her incapacitated for a time by poisoning her insulin doses. Even knowing what happened with her murdered sisters and other Osage deaths, that personal betrayal may sting even more for Mollie, because the love between her and Ernest was real. So on top of the murders of many Osage people by a group of scheming white men just trying to make a buck, you have this love story that might have been something to cherish if it wasn't tainted by greed and death. Similarly, like many of Scorsese's other movies, "Killers of the Flower Moon" gives us a microcosm of America, a country that has been given a grand portrait that paints it as a shining example of freedom, greatness, and success, but in reality, it will always be stained by the blood of those who have been killed in the wake of our own hubris. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is playing in select theaters now. https://www.slashfilm.com/587717/the-best-westerns-of-all-time/
October 21, 20231 yr Ladies I'm watching the movie tomorrow. Where you able to make it through the movie with no bathroom breaks? I downloaded an app that's let's you know when you can take bathroom breaks during a movie. 😅
October 21, 20231 yr I did have a break but I didn't need it. Just don't drink anything an hour before and at the start of the film then you'll be fine.
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