Leonardo DiCaprio - (Please Read First Post Prior to Posting)

[SicK As mY SecReTs]

thanks!

more

Leo arriving at GMA studios this morning

[lola7]

Here is the video

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/leonardo-d...laylist=2898870

[oxford25]

Lola

Thanks for video clip; they were slower putting it up than they ususally are

[oxford25]

The Yahoo J Edgar review . He gives it 3 out of 4 stars

..

Review: Eastwood's Hoover biopic 'J. Edgar'

By JAKE COYLE - AP Entertainment Writer

..Clint Eastwood's new film, "J. Edgar," a 1930 movie theater audience makes its preference clear. Whereas J. Edgar Hoover's pre-movie promotion reel about G-men and the FBI draws impatient boos, a trailer for the upcoming James Cagney flick "The Public Enemy" inspires hoots and applause.

Though Hoover was exceptionally popular with the American public throughout his nearly four decade reign as FBI director, his opponents — the gangsters, the radicals, the Kennedys — have always been the chosen subjects of movies.

"J. Edgar," too, may not draw cheers, but it remains a riveting, noble attempt by Eastwood, now 81, to wrestle with big American questions, many of which have obvious relevance to today's politics. It's another largely fascinating, if disappointingly flawed chapter in Eastwood's fantastic late period.

"J. Edgar" is a biopic framed around Hoover (a thoroughly committed, engaging but ultimately still removed Leonardo DiCaprio) dictating his life story to various typists. This is Hoover's story, mainly told through his perspective — and therefore a somewhat claustrophobic view of history.

The film, from an ambitious script by Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the Harvey Milk biopic, "Milk"), opens with a lot of switches in time as the narrative rushes to pack in the rise of Hoover as a Justice Department upstart and eager riser at the nascent Bureau of Investigation. It's a grimly propulsive first hour, pushed forward by the relentless, paranoid patter of the fast-talking Hoover (nicknamed "Speed").

Hoover is fully formed from the start: A meticulous, obsessive defender of America (or what he conceives as America). He tries to make typist Helen Gandy (the wonderful Naomi Watts, here underused, looking too bright for a somber tale) his wife, but when she declines, he makes her his lifelong, trusted secretary instead.

"Edgar, can you keep a secret?" Gandy, explaining her career goals, asks — and somewhere, five decades of American politicians chortle.

Eastwood makes an effort to show the post-World War I political climate by which Hoover was formed — the bombings and assassination attempts that would ignite his long "war against the Bolsheviks." The point, perhaps, is that the threat was not just paranoia — but was still far from the "end of times" warnings that echoed, not unlike they have in contemporary times.

Hoover will continue this fight throughout, eventually mistaking other movements (such as the civil rights movement — Hoover, a racist, would call Martin Luther King Jr. "the most notorious liar in the country") for extensions of communism. Whereas many biopics chart a person's arc across history, "J. Edgar" follows history's arc across Hoover's bullheaded steadiness.

Eastwood explores Hoover's increasing megalomania, his illegal surveillance, his secret files. By the time Nixon is elected president, Hoover ironically recognizes him as a "menace" who will do anything to keep power. But Eastwood also reminds us of Hoover's accomplishments.

Hoover built a centralized collection of fingerprints in Washington, and was an early advocate of forensics. He brought professionalism to FBI agents, but also presided over them like a dictator, insisting they shave any facial hair and wear suits to his liking (Hoover, almost dandyish, kept to his Brooks Brothers). He was an early publicity innovator, creating a mythologized "G-Man" — not to mention an exaggerated Hoover.

Still, the most affecting parts of "J. Edgar" are Hoover's two most important personal relationships: That with his mother (Judi Dench) and with his No. 2 and close friend Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, who after being digitally doubled for "The Social Network" has been restored to a singular being).

Hoover was an emphatic mama's boy, and Dench plays her as a kind of Lady Macbeth, fostering her son's repression. When a grown Hoover gets worked up and begins stuttering, we're cast back into the "The King's Speech": She tells him, like she did when he was a child, to talk to himself in the mirror and "Be my little Speedy."

The exact nature of Hoover's relationship with Tolson isn't known. They ate together nearly every day and took vacations together, but the gay and cross-dressing rumors about Hoover aren't established.

In "J. Edgar," the relationship is entirely convincing. Hoover and Tolson (Hammer plays him as totally subservient to Hoover) are inseparable partners, but their sexual desires — while not spelled out — appear to be unsatisfied. Black's interest in Hoover's story is that of a closeted gay man, as opposed to the outed Milk. DiCaprio and Hammer have an excellent chemistry, full of slight, homoerotic gestures.

It can and surely will be argued how accurate it is to portray Hoover this way. The politics of the film will also be debated, given that Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, is sympathetic to Hoover (felt most in his loving, mediocre piano score).

But just as the director so caringly switched sides of a World War II battlefield for "Letters from Iwo Jima" after "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood's "J. Edgar" shows just as much empathy for the power broker as "Changeling" did for the aggrieved.

In "J. Edgar," Eastwood and cinematographer Tom Stern fill the interiors with deep shadows and desaturated colors. That adds to the weighty feel of a biopic, which remains — when conventional — a problematic form for movies: not enough time to fit a life, and too much material to find a narrative. "J. Edgar" struggles to put forth a full picture of Hoover, a failure Black's screenplay attempts to shroud in the contrived flashbacks.

DiCaprio has no hesitation about the biopic, and he does a great deal to make "J. Edgar" a compelling one. Thanks to Deborah Hopper's excellent costumes, he plays the character across decades (as Hammer and Watts do as well). He's most striking, almost Orson Welles-ish, as the elderly Hoover.

And, really, it's the experience of aging — a subject of many of Eastwood's recent films — that comes across best with "J. Edgar." The resonating images of Hoover are of a man increasingly and tragically out of step with time. Thankfully, it's been quite the opposite for Eastwood.

"J. Edgar," a Warner Bros. Pictures release, is rated R for brief strong language. Running time: 137 minutes. Three stars out of four.

___

[SicK As mY SecReTs]

seems Leo was wearing Gucci at LACMA also Clint

from Gucci's fb

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=101...e=1&theater

[SicK As mY SecReTs]

more pics from Good Morning America

JustJared

[by_princess]

The police's investigator from Bellazon Forum presents once again "the Mystery of the Bracelet"

Here he's wearing it again

Thanks everyone for everything you have posted!

[katchitup]

Wow thank you all SOO much for the pics, tweets, and vids!

Nice interview, and looked dapper once again.So I guess hes gonna be back in Sydney for his b-day. Wonder what he'll do?

Hes got a luckey b-day also. 11-11-11

LOL at the green bracelete mystery! I'm thinking hes wearing it because someone gave it to him, maybe someone special?

[benny95]

Leo is so so so cute at this pics from GMA

Thank you all for these pics, videos and articles! You're great!

[Lkjh]

He looks so BADASS in that pics

Clint Eastwood praises Leonardo DiCaprio

CLINT Eastwood has described Leonardo DiCaprio as the hardest working actor in Hollywood.

The screen legend has just directed Leo in his big screen biopic of J Edgar Hoover and was amazed by his leading man.

“He really is a fine actor,” says Clint. “He works hard and is on call for as long as you need him.

“He never stops unless you ask him to. And on this movie he had to play a character from at 22 and at 77 so it was a huge challenge but one he met.”

[SicK As mY SecReTs]

I even love old Leonsito

[SicK As mY SecReTs]

aw so sweet word of Clint thanks wijn!

loved that:

He never stops unless you ask him to.

[lola7]

Here is a video of Leo introducing Clint on saturday ceremony. Very nice words from Clint.

http://www.thegreengirls.com/blog/post/201...wood-LACMA.aspx

[oxford25]

Sic

Thanks for more pix from GMA and Gucci information regarding his suits.

By Princess or should I start addressing our assembled team as Detective Princess

I see that you have joined our team of bracelet detectives

How very fitting with Leo portraying the nation's top investigator =J Edgar Hoover that his loyal fans would be honing their own investigative skills !

And , like J Edgar Hoover would say, " We must not stop to we get our man, or in this case, our bracelet !! "

Kat

As to bracelet , I've considered '3' choices :

One, like Barilace mentioned = it is connected to some worthwhile 'cause' that Leo supports, but, if that were true, it would seem he would have alluded to the bracelet

in one of his recent interviews, to give the 'cause' more attention , so, I've scratched that off my list

Second I thought ,maybe, it was some type of lucky charm he wore for big events , like release of a movie he's worked hard on, and I just never noticed it.

So I went back and scoured the pix from last year's Shutter Island & Inception premieres and couldn't find any where he was wearing the bracelet, so I scratched that off my list

Third, I had thought, like you, that it might be a token from someone special .

But if so, it has to be a 'special token' he was just recently given.

As that is why I re posted the recent pap pix of his two visits to Bondi beach, as well as, pix of him on balcony with Ghena, and he's not wearing it. Infact I could find no Sydney pix of him wearing it .

So , if it is a special token from someone special, then he just received it last week

[oxford25]

Love this review by well regarded critic David Denby of New Yorker

The Man in Charge

“J. Edgar.”

by David Denby November 14, 2011 .

Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is, of all things, a portrait of a soul. The movie is a nuanced account of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a sympathetic monster, a compound of intelligence, repression, and misery—a man whose inner turmoil, tamed and sharpened, irrupts in authoritarian fervor. Eastwood and the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have re-created that period in the nineteen-twenties and thirties when a righteous young man with a stentorian style could electrify a nation. Outraged by scattered bomb plots and shifting values—what seems to him the moral chaos of modern life—Hoover senses that Americans need safety, or, at least, the illusion of safety, and he becomes the vessel of their protection, exercising and justifying, with ironclad rhetoric, his own dominance. [/n]

The movie has the structure of a conventional bio-pic. It begins in 1919, when the twenty-four-year-old Hoover, employed by the Justice Department to track “alien subversives,” shows up on his bicycle at the Washington house of his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, after it has been bombed by anarchists. The film traces Hoover’s rise from that shocking moment: his creation of the F.B.I., within the Justice Department; his corrupt and intimidating hold on the directorship; his successes, failures, and phobias; and his shaky last days. Yet “J. Edgar” is saved from the usual stiffness of the bio-pic form by the emotionally unsettled nature of its hero, a man vamped and controlled by his mother (Judi Dench), and afraid of his own sexuality, yet desperate for companionship. For decades, Hoover works at the Bureau with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) and carries on a chaste love affair with him. The two natty gents go to clubs and the races together, and spend weekends chaffing, quarrelling, and pledging their affections. This Hoover is a tyrant, a liar, and a prig, but he is also, in his impacted way, capable of love.

“J. Edgar”—a collaboration with the activist gay screenwriter of “Milk”—represents another remarkable turn in Clint Eastwood’s career. Remarkable, but not altogether surprising. Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar, working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry. As the filmmakers tell it, the roots of Hoover’s manias lie in his nature. The movie bears a thematic resemblance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), in which a repressed homosexual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the nineteen-thirties, longing for “normality,” joins the Italian Fascist Party and operates as an amoral bullyboy. “J. Edgar” is the story of how a similarly repressed personality might operate in a democracy. The answer is privately, by accumulating secrets and blackmailing anyone who is even remotely a threat to his standing; and publicly, by making himself and his outfit pop-culture icons and then bending the government to his whim. The frame for the movie is the Director, in old age, dictating the story of his career to a series of young men from the Bureau. Black and Eastwood use this plot device ironically: Hoover is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, and the way Eastwood stages the actual events suggests that Hoover is pumping up his own role and stretching the truth.

The dark-toned cinematography, by Tom Stern, is as redolent of the past as old leather and walnut. The images are heavily shadowed, with faces often seen half in darkness, a visual hint that these people do not know themselves very well. Hoover’s ethics and his style are traditionalist in tone but radical in application. He flourishes at a time when powerful men are perfectly groomed and dressed—and cloaked in secrecy. Fanatically dedicated to appearances, they are fooling themselves, perhaps, as much as others. In the movie’s portrait of pre-electronic America, Hoover pierces those appearances with wiretaps, bugs, and the lowly file card, an early database that, aided by his longtime secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he wields to devastating effect. Nonetheless, Hoover is fixated on his own image and on that of the Bureau. Outraged that the public is enjoying the panache of Jimmy Cagney as a gangster, in such early-thirties pictures as “The Public Enemy,” Hoover lends his name and his support to Hollywood films, and, by the middle of the decade, Cagney is firing a gun on behalf of the government.

Hoover may be treated semi-satirically, but neither Black nor Eastwood suggests that the dangers and the national weaknesses he combatted early in his career were illusory. In 1920, crime detection was primitive. Hoover insists that the country needs an armed national police force and modern forensic methods—a fingerprint bank, up-to-date labs, and the like. Bursting into rooms at the Justice Department, and shouting down objections, he orders equipment, space, and training, and holds everyone to account. His new scientific methods lead, in 1934, to the capture of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. The complicated story of the Bureau is dramatized in flashes, as an emanation of Hoover’s will. This technique is inadequate as history but almost inevitable in a movie. What interests Black and Eastwood more than institutional lore is what Hoover did with the power he accumulated.

Again and again, he goes too far, treating Communist rhetorical bluster as the first stages of revolution, assembling lists of people whose opinions he considers suspect, fabricating documents, planting stories in the newspapers, bludgeoning potential enemies with his file drawers of sexual gossip. A single scene with Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan)—in the early sixties, when, as Attorney General, he was Hoover’s boss—stands in for Hoover’s relations with the various Presidents who longed to be rid of him but didn’t dare show him the door. Hoover tells Kennedy that he has evidence of his brother’s sexual escapades with dubious women, and his job remains intact. His smarmy prurience becomes a factor in national policy. He and Tolson giggle over an intercepted letter to Eleanor Roosevelt from Lorena Hickok, the reporter who became Roosevelt’s close friend and, possibly, her lover. As an old man, he holes up in a room to listen to tape recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr., having sex with a woman in a hotel. Eastwood stages the sexual scene as shadows on a wall. Hoover’s immobile, fascinated face is the obscene element in the episode.

The film moves fast, but Eastwood’s touch is light and sure, his judgment sound, the moments of pathos held just long enough. And he cast the right star as his equivocal hero-fool. In the past, such beetle-browed heavyweights as Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, and Bob Hoskins have played Hoover. By using DiCaprio, and then aging him with prosthetic makeup, Eastwood lets us see how a slender, good-looking young man might thicken and coarsen with years and power. DiCaprio, extending his vowels into a Washington drawl (Hoover was a local boy), focusses energy in his bulldog forehead; the body, increasingly sausage-packed into tight-fitting suits as Hoover gets older, is immobile, unused, mere weight. DiCaprio never burlesques Hoover, but when he meets Armie Hammer’s Tolson in his office for the first time he breaks into a sweat. Hammer—tall, handsome, suave yet gentle, with a sweet smile—gives a charming, soft-shoe performance that, in a memorable scene, explodes into jealous rage.

Hoover was in power for almost fifty years, and the filmmakers leave out many particulars of his reign. Despite frequent references to Hoover’s loathing of Communism (which he convinces himself is poisoning the civil-rights movement), Eastwood and Black omit his active role in the rise of the Red-baiting pols Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The filmmakers concentrate on the Bureau’s successes in capturing or killing the tommy-gun bank robbers of the thirties but overlook Hoover’s odd, and possibly corrupt, unwillingness to take organized crime seriously, even as, in the forties and fifties, the Mafia was draining millions from the economy. Liberals will find much in the movie that condemns Hoover’s trampling of civil liberties, but may be dismayed by the insistence that an emerging national power needed a secret police force. Gay activists may be disappointed by the filmmakers’ restrained assumptions about Hoover’s sexuality, though the destructive effects of self-denial have rarely been dramatized in such withering detail. Hoover, we realize, is obsessed with keeping America safe because he feels unsafe himself. Internal subversion is a personal, not just a political, threat to him. No stranger man—not even Nixon—has ever been at the center of an American epic.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cine...y#ixzz1d33mtD6T

[Lkjh]

http://www.splashnewsonline.com/2011-11-07...orning-america/

This one is my favorite, look how friendly he's looking

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Leonardo DiCaprio was Armie Hammer’s first man-on-man screen kiss, but the experience was hardly romantic. “It just felt like kissing,” says Hammer, who plays Clyde Tolson, the real-life right-hand man and purported paramour of DiCaprio’s J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s film about the founder of the modern FBI. “I also had to shoot a machine gun in the movie, but nobody asks about that.”

[BarbieErin]

OMG, he looks so cute and adorable in all this pics.

[Lkjh]

Leo talking about/with Mobli

http://www.mobli.com/redcarpetroxy/797541/...th-leo-dicaprio

[Lkjh]

edit

[by_princess]

OMG Wijn in the last pics he really looks

Also Thanks for the video

Oxford

By Princess

I see that you have joined our team of bracelet detectives

I HAD to join it... It’s so much fun. Now… With my pics as evidences, your investigative skills (I scratched that off my list) LOL, and the Barilace 's imagination (I wonder if the green bracelet on his arm has any environmental significance, I want to go google "ugly green bracelets that look like key chains" but...that wouldn't give me anything) Double LOL … We can easily build a case and definitely renamed as “the mystery of the ugly green bracelet”