October 29, 20231 yr Shredded by Freddy. Oh boy. But it's a beloved horror franchise just like Scream, Halloween and Friday The 13th 🎃 Box Office: ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Heads for Monstrous $78M-Plus Opening (...) Martin Scorsese‘s adult-skewing Killers of the Flower Moon, now in its second weekend, is looking at a third-place finish behind Freddy’s and Eras Tour with an estimated $10 million (a 57 percent drop). Apple Original Films produced and financed the $200 million film, with Paramount handling distribution duties. The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro, is counting on being a slow burn as Oscar season unfolds. Source
October 30, 20231 yr At least it's doing better overseas. My local cinema is still showing it in their biggest hall. Maybe I get my parents to watch it again with me tomorrow. Desperate times need desperate moves. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Only Makes $9 Million in its Second Weekend It's a real bummer to hear that Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” had a 61% dip this weekend, only grossing $9 million domestically. Its cumulative global intake now stands at around $88 million — on a $200 million budget (not counting marketing costs). It’s doing better business overseas where DiCaprio and Scorsese are big draws. Regardless, I don’t think Apple cares that much about these disappointing numbers (the company makes an average of $1 billion in profits every day). They greenlit ‘Killers’ for prestige and awards, but having a major star like DiCaprio in your film, not to mention great reviews, and barely making a dent at the box-office can only mean something went horribly wrong here.
October 30, 20231 yr Leonardo DiCaprio is 2023's Most Promising New Character Actor At 48, the King of the World has found a compelling new lane playing men knocked around by life. Leonardo DiCaprio became a phenomenon in 1997 screaming, "I'm the king of the world." That oft-mocked line from Titanic followed DiCaprio throughout much of his subsequent career. Sure, when Jack (via James Cameron) coined that phrase, he was just a carefree youngster marveling at the good luck that landed him on the ship of dreams. But in the years to come, DiCaprio would play many men who actually do achieve something like king-of-the-world status, even if it’s a prelude to their (usually) catastrophic downfalls. Things have changed, though. Recently—and especially in Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio’s sixth collaboration with Martin Scorsese—he’s moved away from these kinds of roles. And, frankly, it's an exciting time. Leo is doing some of the finest work of his career playing fools and schmucks, the kind of guys no one would ever mistake for being genuinely awesome. The age of Leo-as-loser started in earnest with his work in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Following his biggest professional success to date—a Best Actor Oscar win for 2015’s The Revenant—DiCaprio took a four-year break, then re-emerged to tell a story about failure. DiCaprio’s character Rick Dalton worries that he’s a has-been, but he’s really an almost-was. Sure, he was the star of a Western TV series called Bounty Law for five years, but he’s more defined by the parts he didn’t get—like the lead in The Great Escape, which he lost to Steve McQueen. Dalton keeps telling himself he's "Rick fuckin' Dalton," but he lives with rejection hanging over his head. In what’s arguably the best scene in the movie, he berates himself in his dressing room after repeatedly blowing his lines on the set of the TV show where he's playing a villain-of-the-week. The tantrum is pitiful. He calls himself a "fucking miserable drunk," and bemoans the "eight goddamn fucking whiskey sours" he had the night before. It's a man at his absolute lowest who knows he's a piece of shit. The moment also felt like a turn for DiCaprio. His characters have reached low points before, typically from hubris, but they’ve never been quite so aware of their failures. The promise of returning to their former glory always sustained them. Rick Dalton's glory was always minor. Even the last act– in which Dalton, now a spaghetti-Western star, returns home to Los Angeles, and dispatches the Manson family before being invited up to Sharon Tate's house—offers an uncertain picture of Rick's triumph. Maybe he goes on to get cast in a Polanski movie, and maybe that night is as good as his life will ever get. Before his solemn turn in The Revenant, DiCaprio had been on a run of playing doomed titans. In 2013, he starred in both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, respectively playing literary icon Jay Gatsby and disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Gatsby and Belfort are, if nothing else, smooth operators, and DiCaprio tackles them with a twinkle in his eye. While Gatsby is mysterious and Belfort is a little stinker, DiCaprio leans hard into their charm. Both characters throw the sickest parties ever and lord over them like bacchanalian gods. The biggest criticism of The Wolf of Wall Street was that Scorsese and DiCaprio weren't hard enough on Belfort, that an uncritical eye could still read him, despite it all, as a Dude Who Rocks. Both Gatsby and Belfort obtain their wealth and status through nefarious means, but they’re also cool. And this is a mode in which DiCaprio is extremely comfortable. It's one he deploys in Catch Me If You Can, way back in 2002—the first post-Titanic movie to really test what he could do. There he plays con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., who uses his boyish good looks and gift for sweet-talk to cash forged checks and pose as a doctor or an airline pilot. Time and time again, DiCaprio has played guys who experience monumental highs and even greater lows. The lows were what made the work dramatically stirring, but having been one of the most-desired celebrities who ever lived, he could also channel the feeling of having the world at your feet, only to lose it all. As Howard Hughes in 2004’s The Aviator, his second collaboration with Scorsese, he starts out palling around with movie stars and ends up an emaciated recluse peeing into jars in his screening room. Frank is finally caught, the feds catch up to Belfort, and Gatsby is shot by his pool. And yet at certain points in all of these films, these guys are living out some sort of dream. Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon never does that. From the outset, it's clear he's pretty dumb, and people around him treat him as such. In the very first scene they share, Ernest's uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), repeats questions to emphasize how slow on the uptake Ernest is. This is a grim movie about the systematic genocide of the Osage people, but there’s a pitch-black humor to the way Hale and his lackeys berate Ernest throughout the film. The character has all the greed and ambition of a Gatsby or a Belfort, but none of the savvy, and DiCaprio, with his mouth near-permanently downturned, leans into Ernest’s confusion and his worthlessness. He plays the fool extremely well, and it's to the movie's benefit—for this story to work, you have to believe that Ernest is dim enough to convince himself he still loves his wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) even as he orchestrates the murder of her family members. In turn, Mollie seems to love him because of his naivete. Ernest and Rick feel like echoes of one another. They’re both trying to emulate others they perceive as successes; they’re both their own worst enemies. (In between these movies, DiCaprio played an astronomer in Adam McKay's Don't Look Up, channeling his earnest passion for the environment into a self-deprecating performance as a nerd who everyone ignores.) In both parts, you can see DiCaprio wrestling with the limits of being Leonardo DiCaprio. For years, no matter how hard he tried to subvert it in his work, DiCaprio was defined by his beauty—as tragic as they are, Gatsby and Belfort are still desirable. Now, at 48– past the point where he can play with a Super Soaker in public without looking goofy—he’s embracing the character actor he’s clearly always longed to be, exploring what it feels like to get older and feel unwanted, allowing himself to be a punching bag, fully debasing himself and his image to the needs of the film he’s in. It's utterly captivating. In ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Is Leonardo DiCaprio Playing a Dumb Hick, a Pitiless Sociopath…or a Muddle? A movie’s central character needn’t be someone we admire, but he should probably be someone we’re drawn to, someone we vibe with in sympathetic fascination, who we feel we know and understand even as he crosses over to the dark side. Few movies have lived out that dynamic more cathartically than the underworld dramas of Martin Scorsese. “Mean Streets,” the tale of low-rung Little Italy mobsters that Scorsese made 50 years ago (I think it’s still his greatest film), is about Harvey Keitel’s ladder-climbing numbers runner, but the most explosive character is Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy, a self-destructive firecracker who doesn’t “give two shits about you, or nobody else,” a quality that would make him repellent if he weren’t so hypnotic. In “Taxi Driver,” De Niro’s Travis Bickle is a loner who can’t connect, but he connects with the audience in every frame. “GoodFellas” inserts us into the hungry soul of Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, who craves being a gangster so much that he, along with the audience, spends the entire movie discovering how brutal the stakes are. De Niro’s “Ace” Rothstein in “Casino” is a Vegas power player whose broken marriage to Sharon Stone’s Ginger leaves us desolate, gutted, on the rocks. And in “The Irishman,” De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is a Mob soldier who is given the staggering order to execute Jimmy Hoffa, the man to whom he’s been a loyal bodyguard for years. But then there’s Ernest Burkhart, the lunkish hick Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Ernest, a veteran of World War I, shows up at the door of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), saying that he loves money. He’s soon involved in all sorts of dirty business: stealing, arranging the murders of innocents, keeping his downcast grimace of a mouth shut in order to cover up a vast criminal conspiracy. Ernest’s actions, in their way, are Mob-like, yet Ernest isn’t presented as a violent man. He’s closer to a moral-idiot manchild who will do whatever his boss uncle tells him to do, because that’s the limits of his thinking. Beneath his terrible actions, though, who is Ernest Burkhart? As we watch “Killers of the Flower Moon,” what is it in him we’re being asked to identify with? What’s his desire, his journey, his relationship to the darkness? I’ve seen the film twice, and I’m still trying to suss that one out. DiCaprio, an actor of skillful precision, makes Ernest, on the surface, a genial yokel who lacks the imagination to think for himself. Early on, De Niro’s King Hale asks Ernest if he likes “red” (i.e., Native American women), and Ernest says sure, he likes all women. King wants to set Ernest up with Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of several sisters in the Osage Nation who are sitting on the headrights of powerful oil-rich land. Ernest is a step ahead of him; he’s been chauffeuring Lily around and flirting with her. So when the two get married, is it part of an unconscionable scheme? Or do they really love each other? The movie says both, but that’s a tricky one to wrap your head around, especially when Ernest starts participating, with the nonchalance of a handyman, in the brutal murder of Mollie’s sisters. The rationale — or, rather, the explanation — for all the homicide, apart from the naked greed that motivates it, is that the men committing the murders are racists. They don’t regard the Osage as full human beings; thus they can kill them as if they were swatting flies. Organized racial murder has often conformed to this pattern (think of the Holocaust), but Ernest, the hayseed who’s just following orders, has a shifting, eccentric relationship to the crimes chronicled in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film presents him as rock-stupid…except for the moments when he’s wily and street-smart. (It takes the Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White, played by Jesse Plemons, quite a while to crack Ernest open.) The film presents him as a money-grubbing varmint…except that he’s also a devoted husband who cherishes his family. Great movie characters, of course, can be rippled with contradiction; that’s what makes their stories rich and ambiguous. Just think of Scorsese’s Mob dramas, the “Godfather” films or “The Sopranos,” where ruthless killers are devoted to their families. But in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Ernest feels less like a character of dark or even tragic impulses than like a man who, in any given scene, is what the film needs him to be. When he’s asked to do the ultimate dark deed — to add poison to the insulin shots his wife is taking — he carries out the task with such methodical thoughtlessness that instead of the heart of darkness opening up before us, we may feel like we’re seeing the heart of darkness closed off. Our connection to Ernest as a character should be deepening, but instead we’re on the outside looking in. Can a man slow-kill the wife he loves, without a shrug, all because he’s a dunce yokel following orders? “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been hailed by many critics as a masterpiece, but I would say it’s a divisive movie. I wouldn’t call it love-it-or-hate-it. More like love-it vs. it’s-too-long-and-is-somehow-missing-something.” “Killers” isn’t the first Scorsese movie adapted from a work of nonfiction (“GoodFellas” was too, and “Raging Bull” was a brutal biopic). But it’s the first one to feel less like a drama than like an extended act of journalism. This happened, then this happened, and then this happened. Yet for a film rooted in the density of history, there’s a disorienting lack of background to much of what takes place in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” As presented, the rural Oklahoma community it’s set in is a vicious snakepit, up to its neck in the murder and exploitation of the Osage; it’s as if we’re watching a toxic local industry. That’s all real, but how did it get that way? In “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” Scorsese anatomized how the Mob worked. Here, we watch the movie with essential questions nagging at us — like how the guardian system operates (the Osage don’t control their money, except that some of them kind of do) or how William Hale brought this scheme of organized murder into being. How Hale himself, a public friend and benefactor of the Osage, evolved into a genocidal terrorist is never even addressed — his terse heartlessness is presented as a fait accompli. (That’s why De Niro’s very good performance of jaunty evil never spooks you; it lacks a layer.) And Ernest Burkhart’s compliance in the scheme is presented with the same quality of rote objectivity. It’s as if they’ve all been doing this their whole lives. Everything “Killers of the Flower Moon” shows us really happened, of course. The film is scrupulously true to the terrible facts of the Osage murders. Yet the answer to the “Why?” of how the Reign of Terror happened — that these men were heartless racists — is an accurate answer that still doesn’t always feel like a dramatically full answer. As we watch Mollie waste away, Lily Gladstone acts with a sorrowful bewilderment that haunts us, but the fact is that “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a movie that asks us to spend three-and-a-half hours in the shoes of her affectless deceptive scoundrel of a husband, who by the end we may feel we understand less than we did at the beginning. If the movie seems too long to you, maybe that’s because it’s like sharing space with a ghost.
October 30, 20231 yr 2 hours ago, Jade Bahr said: At least it's doing better overseas. My local cinema is still showing it in their biggest hall. Maybe I get my parents to watch it again with me tomorrow. Desperate times need desperate moves. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Only Makes $9 Million in its Second Weekend It's a real bummer to hear that Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” had a 61% dip this weekend, only grossing $9 million domestically. Its cumulative global intake now stands at around $88 million — on a $200 million budget (not counting marketing costs). It’s doing better business overseas where DiCaprio and Scorsese are big draws. Regardless, I don’t think Apple cares that much about these disappointing numbers (the company makes an average of $1 billion in profits every day). They greenlit ‘Killers’ for prestige and awards, but having a major star like DiCaprio in your film, not to mention great reviews, and barely making a dent at the box-office can only mean something went horribly wrong here. I wonder if this is somewhat due to the long run time. My oldest sister refuses to see it at the theater because of this. She says she will wait for it to stream and be able to enjoy it in the comfort of her own home.
October 30, 20231 yr 23 minutes ago, Sugarwater said: I wonder if this is somewhat due to the long run time. My oldest sister refuses to see it at the theater because of this. She says she will wait for it to stream and be able to enjoy it in the comfort of her own home. I bet it's going to be a hit on stream
October 30, 20231 yr However I will watch the movie again friday with my parents 🤩🍿 Can't believe my dad said yes to such a long movie. But he's a western fan especially critical/historical western so KOTFM will probably his new favorite Leo movie 😄
October 31, 20231 yr 22 hours ago, Sugarwater said: I wonder if this is somewhat due to the long run time. My oldest sister refuses to see it at the theater because of this. She says she will wait for it to stream and be able to enjoy it in the comfort of her own home. I remember back in DJANGO times Tarantino stated in a german interview americans are highly unwilling to deal with their dark past not only in real life terms but also in making/and watching movies about such unpleasant events (unlike for example the germans who make movies about the nazis all the freakin time and apologize to the jewish community at any cruel anniversary). Maybe he was right. I mean did any of your goverments ever apologized to the indigenous people for what they did to them? By the way the predicted numbers for NAPOLEON are even worse. I wonder if apple decide after two massive bombs going back to streaming exclusive. ‘Napoleon’ Long-Range Tracking $16-$21M Opening
October 31, 20231 yr Also looks like the strike is finally coming to an end SAG-AMPTP Deal Might Finally Be Reached Soon The actors at SAG-AFTRA are holding steadfast, negotiations are ongoing, but rumor has it that we might be very close to a deal. A source tells Deadline that the 100+ day strike might finally come to an end. The senior studio source stated, “There is a feeling of optimism. Looks like we’re in the final stretch.” Talks are off for today, but both parties will be back at the negotiating table tomorrow. The AMPTP has threatened that, if a deal cannot be reached by this week, they will not continue any negotiations until the beginning of next year in January.
November 1, 20231 yr The book got a new cover (german edition) Grace Dove (The Revenant) being supportive
November 1, 20231 yr Even though I wanted to wait I now pre ordered OPPENHEIMER via amazon because I'm just too curious which movie I like better. A friend of mine (also a big Leo nerd) who already watched both movies thinks KOTFM is the better one. Thoughts (for those who watched both)? Also oscar voters calling Oppenheimer "overpraised" because of Barbenheimer makes me lol Nolan is constantly overpraised but that's just my opinion. Oscars: Is Best Picture A Race Between ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’? I agree with the Gold Derby experts’ latest consensus, that “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Poor Things” are the frontrunners in the Best Picture race. The narrative that’s been all the buzz of late is that it’s going to be a fight between “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” That’s probably what you’ve been reading as well— pundits are desperately trying to make this happen. Wouldn’t it be something if it came down to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese’s 3+ hour epics? Question for our readers: if you had to choose between both of their films, which would you have winning Best Picture? I don’t believe “Killers of the Flower Moon” will win Best Picture. Maybe Scorsese gets Best Director, but Nolan does have the better narrative. The problem for ‘Killers’ is that it has its fair share of detractors and that 3.5 hour runtime has been the cause of much-heated debate. Then again, “Oppenheimer” isn’t a walk in the park either. The last section of the film, primarily focused on Robert J. Oppenheimer’s battle with Senator Strauss, didn’t win everyone over. I’ve even spoken to a few Oscar voters who believe the film was massively overpraised amidst the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon this past summer. Of course, Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” is going to be a major player in a slew of categories. It’s the best reviewed movie of the year and has some real passionate fans backing it up. “Poor Things,” which I’ll be posting a review of next week, is basically a much more deranged and artful version of Gerwig’s “Barbie.” So, we have those three titles as the main frontrunners, but don’t be surprised if another film comes out of nowhere to dethrone them. The one I would be keeping an eye on is Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” — an absolute crowdpleaser, set during Christmas, that will feel like cozy comfort viewing, for many voters, this holiday season. It’ll also take some more convincing for me to include “The Color Purple” into my predictions. It still hasn’t screened yet and the latest trailer wasn’t that impressive — test reactions were fairly positive, but with attendees citing that the supporting players outshine lead actress Fantasia Barrino. The rest of the “experts” list is fairly predictable and has all of the contenders, so it’s looking like a fairly easy season to predict. From #4-10 you have “Barbie,” “The Holdovers,” “Maestro,” “Past Lives,” “The Color Purple,” “American Fiction” and “Anatomy of a Fall.” I like how “The Zone of Interest” has fallen out of the top 10, because I’ve been saying ever since May that Jonathan Glazer’s film is absolutely not an Oscar movie. It’s for acquired tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, but its austere, stone-cold arthouse style is going to be a very hard sell for Academy voters. Also outside the top 10 (#11-15) are “Across the Spider-Verse,” “Saltburn,” “Air,” “Napoleon,” “Rustin,” “All of Us Strangers,” “Origin,” and “The Boys in the Boat.” Still left to be screened are next month’s Ridley Scott-directed “Napoleon” and Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple,” which comes out in December. Unless one of these titles two makes a dent in the Oscar race, then we most likely are going to have a three-way race for Picture and Director between Nolan, Scorsese and Lanthimos.
November 1, 20231 yr Complete KOTFM Soundtrack: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/music-from-killers-of-the-flower-moon/pl.efdacb18367c4de4b912150247ef98ff
November 2, 20231 yr On 10/30/2023 at 3:42 PM, Sugarwater said: I wonder if this is somewhat due to the long run time. My oldest sister refuses to see it at the theater because of this. She says she will wait for it to stream and be able to enjoy it in the comfort of her own home. Not only the long runtime also because paramount has announced that they will donate 1 million dollars from the profits to Isareal and all the people in the middle east might boycott the movie, in my country many people said they wouldn’t go see it due to this
November 2, 20231 yr Seems like every tabloid is obsessed now with Leos "eras" as an actor: from hearthrob to scumbag. Here's VF latest. One thing for sure: It's never getting boring with Leo Leonardo DiCaprio Cements a Thrilling New Era in Killers of the Flower Moon The Oscar winner’s insidious portrayal of a bystander to genocide fits the recent theme of his filmography—and marks perhaps his most interesting stretch as an actor. A few years after Titanic made Leonardo DiCaprio one of the biggest stars in the world, Ethan Hawke expressed some concern about the record-breaking blockbuster’s impact on his peer’s career. “I’m a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, and one of the worst things to happen to any Leo fan was Titanic, because now it becomes much more difficult for him to do the kind of work he so excelled at,” Hawke told Vanity Fair in 2000. “Like This Boy’s Life and Romeo + Juliet, even The Basketball Diaries, edgy out-there stuff, because everybody would be trying to milk him.” Romeo & Julliette, Titanic, This Boy's Life. from Everett Collection. At that point, DiCaprio was coming off poorly reviewed but commercially successful titles like The Man in the Iron Mask and The Beach, and he’d recently exited the thrillingly risky American Psycho due to creative differences. The director behind that eventual Christian Bale vehicle, Mary Harron, later commented on that decision: “[DiCaprio] brought way too much baggage with him—I did not want to deal with someone who had a 13-year-old fan base.” But if we look at DiCaprio now, 20-plus years later, megastardom has not stifled his growth into a more complex, surprising actor. By the mid-2000s, he had swiftly crossed to the other side of that “baggage” problem Harron had fairly identified, one of an A-lister vying to maintain his career amid financial pressures and industry shifts. The Man in the Iron Mask, The Beach. From Everett Collection. Then the physically torturous, nakedly campaign-driven survival drama The Revenant marked another turning point, as it finally won DiCaprio his Oscar in 2016. He’d already built a varied and impressive filmography, but since then, he’s only acted in three movies—Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, and Martin Scorsese’s just-released Killers of the Flower Moon; each contains a revelatory performance. They play like moving portraits of Hollywood’s golden boy grappling with age, ambivalence, and even despondency. These roles are neither heroic nor antiheroic—not righteous or monstrous, not inspiring or punishing. They are instead mostly sad, that magical movie-star gleam in his eyes dimmed down to give off a reflective, almost mournful quality, facing down what feels like—or in the case of Don’t Look Up, actually is—the end of the world. The Revenant. From Everett Collection. When you get to be as famous as DiCaprio, at a certain point, you can do what you want. His collaborations with Scorsese neatly chart that evolution. During DiCaprio’s early-2000s period of creative drought, he and the director met on Gangs of New York, a fraught production overseen by Harvey Weinstein, before thriving on the studio-backed dramas The Aviator (Miramax), The Departed (Warner Bros.), and Shutter Island (Paramount). However corporate the machines were—something Scorsese has expressed regret about on his latest press run, from Weinstein’s Gangs meddling to the artistic limitations of Shutter Island—this was still Scorsese, and so DiCaprio operated in fresh shades of gray, tough morality dramas that challenged his sparkly persona. It’s no coincidence that his first Oscar nod since being recognized for the 1993 breakout What’s Eating Gilbert Grape came over a decade later, for his intense portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. In that era, DiCaprio also dabbled in transformative villainy, whether with the heavy prosthetics of Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar or the nasty twang of Tarantino’s Django Unchained. But Scorsese’s first independently financed production starring DiCaprio officially turned the actor’s appeal inside out. His very presence in The Wolf of Wall Street, as the sleazy stockbroker Jordan Belfort, presented a brilliant challenge. For three full hours, viewers were stuck in his manically depraved world, which DiCaprio embodies fearlessly and, at times, grotesquely—trading his limitless audience goodwill for a discomfiting repulsion. It’s why critics at the time often considered the film to be in conflict with itself, on the brink of valorizing its despicable protagonist. Of course, Scorsese’s intention was exactly the opposite. DiCaprio was almost too good. Perhaps some weren’t ready. Don't Look Up, Killers of the Flower Moon, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. From Everett Collection. A decade later, Scorsese and DiCaprio meet again in Killers of the Flower Moon, with the latter in a fresh career phase—one less burdened by the peak of fame, perhaps, and thus less in need of subversion. How quickly things can change: The pathetic, weaselly skin of Ernest Burkhart, a dopey war veteran unwittingly entangled in a horrific conspiracy to extort and murder the Osage community in 1920s Oklahoma, fits him like a glove. The film begins as a kind of sweeping love story between Ernest and an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), then develops into a searing horror movie about his involvement in the deadly poisoning of her and her family. His mob-boss-esque uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), pulls the strings, but it’s Ernest’s utter indifference toward stopping him, and protecting those he’s destroying, that marks the film’s most insidious and tragic form of evil. Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, The Departed. From Everett Collection. Scorsese and cowriter Eric Roth had been developing this adaptation of David Grann’s book for years, and it took a while for the director to realize that his initial way into the story, through the FBI’s investigation of what happened, underserved the Osage perspective. In that initial plan, DiCaprio was to play the script’s original lead, agent Tom White (ultimately a supporting character in the final cut, portrayed by Jesse Plemons). As he and Scorsese explored the limitations of that frame, the actor presented an alternate plan. “[DiCaprio] looked at me and sat down and said, ‘Now, don’t get upset,’” Scorsese recently told The New Yorker. “He said, ‘But what if I play Ernest?’” The Aviator. From Everett Collection. The idea of DiCaprio throwing himself at this kind of part, a feeble bystander to genocide, is less shocking than it would have seemed even a decade ago. His turn in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, as an astronomy professor desperate to get the world to believe him about the planet’s looming crisis, deftly intermixed impassioned speechifying with a wimpy physicality. He took those geeky glasses and baggy clothes to heart, his star power shriveled down to the spark of an ordinary guy who lets a little media attention get to his head. His Howard Beale–esque monologue about waking up to impending doom inevitably generated the most attention, but he’s arguably at his most impressive—and, paradoxically, at his lowliest—when caught in an affair with a soulless news anchor (Cate Blanchett), or when quietly sitting with his family for what’s likely the last meal they’ll ever have. The Wolf of Wall Street. From Everett Collection. And while it’s surely because of the Western backdrop, I thought a great deal about Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood while watching DiCaprio in Killers. In that movie, his first post-Oscar acting project, he ceded the Hollywood-hunk ground to Brad Pitt while taking on the decidedly unsexy Rick Dalton, a washed-up ’50s TV leading man with a handlebar mustache who’s clinging on to any semblance of relevance. He cries alone in his trailer. He chides himself as “a fucking miserable drunk.” He confides in his eight-year-old costar, implying to her that he’s “not the best anymore”—and is “coming to terms with what it’s like to be slightly more useless each day.” There’s no swagger left in this man. Though DiCaprio still very much leads a glamorous celebrity life in private (and occasionally in the tabloids), what he wants to be onscreen is vulnerable, contemptible, about as far away from the glow of stardom as one can get. He’s got nothing left to prove—which means he’s got something new to show us.
November 2, 20231 yr I came acrosss this video from the premiere in Cannes. Look at the cute Leo and Lily holding hands moment at 6:35.🥰 So sad we didn't get more premieres.Let's hope the strike will finally end so they can campaign for awards and maybe there will be some Q&As or interviews...🙏
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