Helloooooooooooooooo sweeties!

It's been ages since we talked!! How's life?hehe

I'm sooo waiting to have my connection back....it's sad I cant come on everyday...

But I read some articles and I saw some pics and Leo looks damn gorgeous!!!

And regarding SNL...I dont think Leo will ever do it,really girls! J.Edgar....this is the time!!!

Oscar....we are waiting for you!!!

Kisses!!!

So the Sinatra project...hummm.....I wonder if this will ever happen. Like clint says I think Leo really wants to play sinatra is just having a hard time getting a director, financing, ect. I wouldn't mind seeing leo as Sinatra. Be kinda weird to see Leo singing though

I don't think he felt bad about it per se. But he always tries to be very respectful and polite to anyone interviewing him and I've never seen him lose his cool with anyone and he even seems to not want to go off subject of the movie because he's all in his mindset of not wanting to allow people into his ~~true self~~ because he wants them to see the movie first - as if he's a ~vessel~ for the movie and that's all he wants people to see him as so I always feel that in most interviews he's rehearsed and ready and doesn't like going off topic a lot. But in this interview with the guy asking a lame question he started slightly making fun of him and becoming too jokey and laid back so he seemed to be like: get that in check, son (to himself) and went on back to his usual somewhat serious but nice face answering questions about the movie and the movie only - trying not to show the different aspects of his personality because he wants people to see the characters personality and not his own.

AND OMG. THAT WAS A LOT OF STUPID BABBLE JUST ABOUT A 2 SECOND MOMENT THAT PROBABLY MEANT NOTHING. I need to shut up. BUT LEO IS FUN TO DISSECT~ AND TALK ABOUT.

^LOL that was actually a good point

Helloooooooooooooooo sweeties!

It's been ages since we talked!! How's life?hehe

I'm sooo waiting to have my connection back....it's sad I cant come on everyday...

But I read some articles and I saw some pics and Leo looks damn gorgeous!!!

And regarding SNL...I dont think Leo will ever do it,really girls! J.Edgar....this is the time!!!

Oscar....we are waiting for you!!!

Kisses!!!

Hiiiiii Pami hugs and kisses back to you!

Good Day LA interview

http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/good_day_la/dor..._medium=twitter

The entire Leo & Clint Nightline interview from last night

http://abcnews.go.com/watch/nightline/SH55...oc-found-guilty

Solange

Thanks for all the various pix and video clips

By Princess

Thanks for all the various articles & clips

Yes, I got the 'message' , and the oven is already preheating as I type

Wijn

Thanks for assorted articles

Personally I would rather see Leo doing Wolf or Gambler with Scorsese rather than Sinatra .

As to Oscar /BA talk, as I mentioned earlier, for sure it's nice to hear, but until I hear his name called for BFCA & SAG nods, I won't buy my party dress.

Kat

Thanks for comment from fellow Gatsby actor

Fash

Thanks for Good Day L.A. interview

If you look back on the board, we posted the tweet from the blonde cohost when she first saw the film.

Wow thank you both for the interviews! I really liked how the Fox girl asked why J.Edgar wasn't in 3-d for an annoying question

NPR audio interview with Leo about J Edgar

I like what the interviewer states about Leo preferring to play complex characters versus romantic characters that he could easily play

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.h...amp;m=142145516

As Clint would say "This made my day ! "

A wonderfully thoughtout review with a 'thumbs up' by the highly regarded NY Times critic Mahola Dargis

Already and in the days ahead there will be tons of reviews appearing , but , as with all things, some reviews matter more than others , and a review by Ms Dargis is one of them !

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: November 8, 2011

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.

Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.

Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.

Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.

That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).

The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

“J. Edgar” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and language.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/movie...rio-review.html

As Clint would say "This made my day ! "

A wonderfully thoughtout review with a 'thumbs up' by the highly regarded NY Times critic Mahola Dargis

Already and in the days ahead there will be tons of reviews appearing , but , as with all things, some reviews matter more than others , and a review by Ms Dargis is one of them !

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: November 8, 2011

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.

Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.

Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.

Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.

That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).

The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

“J. Edgar” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and language.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/movie...rio-review.html

oxford - a great review from the NY Times - I think we will see smiles on the faces of the execs at Warner Bros, not to mention Eastwood/DiCaprio.

Apparently Leo was at a Christie's auction in NY tonight and we can see Lukas is with him.

Below is link to video of him leaving the event

I think besides art he was bidding on my green bracelets

Also , is funny to watch the blonde haired lady watching Leo : )

http://yfrog.com/jl5mhz

Tweet that went with video. The tweeter is art critic for Wall Street Journal

Reading her tweets is so interesting; some jeweler just paid 14.5 million for a painting.

KellyCrowWSJKelly Crow

Leo DiCaprio (chatting on cell in the ballcap) has officially left @ChristiesInc

11 minutes ago

KellyCrowWSJKelly Crow

Who's @ChristiesInc for tonite's sale? Leonardo DiCaprio, Lucas Haas, David Ganek, Eli Broad, Dakis Joannou, Len Riggio -- and you?

2 hours ago

Winterborne

A very BIG smile for sure :hell yea!: :hell yea!: :hell yea!:

Pami

Yes, we want your connection to work , so you can be with us at all times, after all, we can't let By Princess be the only naughty one

Bit of deja vu before I remembered those two were there last May.

Well good for him that while very busy he can still mix in the things he likes doing... (hip hop concerts, art auctions, parties etc)

Great comments from NY times (Y)

Roger Ebert gives J Edgar 3.5 stars

BY ROGER EBERT / November 8, 2011

J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until he died in 1972; he added the word "Federal" to its title in 1935. Under the administrations of Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, he was, many believed, the second most powerful man in government. Now he has been dead for 39 years, and what most people probably think they know about him is that he liked to dress up like a woman. This snippet of gossip, which has never been verified, is joined by the details that he never married, lived with his mother until she died, and had a close, lifelong friendship with Clyde Tolson, the tall and handsome bachelor who inherited his estate.

It is therefore flatly stated that Hoover was gay, which would have been ironic since he gathered secret files on the sex lives of everyone prominent in public life and used that leverage to hold onto his job for 47 years and increase the FBI's power during every one of them. He was outspoken against homosexuality, and refused to allow gays (or many blacks, or any women) to become FBI agents. He was sure enough of his power that he sometimes held hands with Tolson in restaurants and shared rooms with him on vacations. There wasn't a president who could touch him.

Given these matters, and the additional fact that the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" was written by Dustin Lance Black, who wrote "Milk," you would assume the film was the portrait of a gay man. It is not. That makes it more fascinating. It is the portrait of the public image that J. Edgar Hoover maintained all his life, even in private. The chilling possibility is that with Hoover, what you saw was what you got. He was an unbending moralist who surrounded himself with FBI straight arrows. Those assigned closest to him tended to be good looking. Agents wore suits and ties at all times. He inspected their shoeshines. He liked to look but not touch.

In such famous cases as the capture of John Dillinger and the manhunt for the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, Hoover's publicity machine depicted him as acting virtually alone. He was not present when Dillinger was shot down outside the Biograph theater, but America got the impression that he was, and he never forgave the star agent, Melvin Purvis, for actually cornering the Most Wanted poster boy. Doubt persisted that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty in the Lindbergh case — but not in Hoover's mind. The fight against domestic communism in the years after World War II provided an ideal occasion for him to fan the Red Scare and work with the unsavory Joe McCarthy. Two of the reasons Hoover hated beatniks and hippies were their haircuts and shoeshines.

This man was closed down, his face a slab of petulance. He was so uncharismatic that it's possible to miss the brilliance of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in "J. Edgar." It is a fully realized, subtle, persuasive performance, not least in his scenes with Armie Hammer as Tolson. In my reading of the film, they were both repressed homosexuals, Hoover more than Tolson, but after love at first sight and a short but heady early courtship, they veered away from sex and began their lives as Longtime Companions. The rewards for arguably not being gay were too tempting for both men, who were wined and dined by Hollywood, Broadway, Washington and Wall Street. It was Hoover's militant anti-gay position that served as their beard.

Two women figured importantly in Hoover's life. One was his domineering mother, Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), who makes clear her scorn for men who are "daffodils." The other was a young woman named Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts). In an extraordinary moment of self-image control, Hoover concludes that it would be beneficial for him to have a wife. He asks Helen, an FBI secretary, out on one of the more unusual first dates in movie history; he demonstrates the workings of a card file system with great pride. It must have been clear to her that nothing was stirring in his netherlands. Their budding relationship segued smoothly into her becoming his confidential secretary for the rest of his life — the woman entrusted with the secret files.

Eastwood's film is firm in its refusal to cheapen and tarnish by inventing salacious scenes. I don't get the impression from "J. Edgar" that Eastwood particularly respected Hoover, but I do believe he respected his unyielding public facade. It is possibly Hoover's lifelong performance that fascinated him. There's a theme running through most of his films since "Bird" (1988): the man unshakably committed to his own idea of himself.

As a period biopic, "J. Edgar" is masterful. Few films span seven decades this comfortably. The sets, the props, the clothes, and details, look effortlessly right, and note how Eastwood handles the many supporting roles (some of them depicting famous people). These minor characters are all to some degree relating to Hoover's formidable public image. As a person or as a character, he was a star of stage, screen, radio and print; he was said to have the goods on everyone. People tip-toed around him as they might have with Stalin. It's a nice touch, the way Eastwood and DiCaprio create a character who seems to be a dead zone and make him electrifying in other actors' reaction shots.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...VIEWS/111109973

Fash

Yes, I, also, remember the duo being at art auction not too long ago.

And, just think, if we all pool our money together we can buy something for a mere million or more

Another major critic Ken Turan of L.A. Times gives J Edgar a thumbs up

Posting his print review , as well as, his video clip , since I love his final statement on the video review :

" It's hard to be the combination of Eastwood, DiCaprio , and Hoover"

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

November 9, 2011

"J. Edgar" is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?

This brooding, shadow-drenched melodrama with strong political overtones examines the public and private lives of a strange, tortured man who had a phenomenal will to power. A man with the keenest instincts for manipulating the levers of government, he headed the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Though in theory he served eight presidents, in practice J. Edgar Hoover served only himself.

Starring an impressive Leonardo DiCaprio and crafted with Clint Eastwood's usual impeccable professionalism, "J. Edgar" gets its power from the way the director's traditional filmmaking style interacts with the revisionist thrust of Dustin Lance Black's script.

This film's J. Edgar is not the patriotic anti-Communist stalwart Hoover considered himself to be, but rather someone who only imagined he was the hero of the story, someone who went from outcast to oppressor by not hesitating to ride roughshod over and even blackmail whoever got in his way. Absolute power truly corrupted him absolutely. The overriding irony of this situation was that this man, as rigid and self-righteous as any of the Soviet commissars he feared and fought against, apparently had an unacknowledged private life that gives his story unexpected poignancy but would have made him a target of his own investigations had it been lived by someone else.

Shot in a Stygian gloom by veteran Eastwood collaborator Tom Stern, "J. Edgar" uses a news-behind-the-news structure reminiscent of "Citizen Kane" as it goes back and forth between Hoover's earliest days and the law unto himself he eventually became. Packed with information, the film does more than ask the Shakespearean question, "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?" It takes its two-hour, 17-minute length to show us in detail how it all came down.

In this "J. Edgar" benefits from the convincing acting of key cast members, including Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, the great man's confidential secretary, and Armie Hammer (the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network") as Hoover's soul mate, Clyde Tolson. Most of all it benefits from DiCaprio, who spent hours on set being aged from 24 to 77, had almost 80 costume changes, and has the presence and force to make this American gargoyle believable.

It's the graying Hoover we meet first, dictating his somewhat suspect memoir to a series of young agent-stenographers because he feels that "it's time this generation learned my side of the story."

That story begins with a rarely examined event in American history, the 1919 Palmer raids against anarchists and other supposed radicals. In response to a series of bombings, U.S. Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer in effect took the law into his own hands, collaborating with the 24-year-old Hoover and the newly formed FBI to attack people for their ideas without evidence of crimes. It's the first of several examples we see in the film of what can happen when unchecked governmental power falls into the hands of the ruthless and the self-righteous, when influential people believe, as Hoover did, that "sometimes you need to bend the rules a little to keep our country safe."

According to the film, Hoover's character was influenced as much by his part in the raids as it was by the personality of Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), his dragon-lady mother. Dominant, smothering and oddly reminiscent of Tony Perkins' mother in "Psycho," Mrs. Hoover's homophobic insistence that "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil" had a stifling effect on the other major relationship in J. Edgar's life, his close friendship with FBI colleague Tolson.

A smooth fashion plate with the manners and attitude of the born courtier, the handsome Tolson catches Hoover's eye and before you can say "constant companion," the two men are having lunch together every day and even taking joint vacations.

The exact nature of this relationship, as well as Hoover's sexuality — did he wear dresses, as has been claimed, or didn't he? — have been the source of near-endless speculation; at this point in time, the truth is unknowable. Black's persuasive script posits that the men definitely had strong feelings for each other but that Hoover, at least, could not even acknowledge, let alone act on them because of his mother's inflexible attitude. This was literally the love that dared not speak its name.

"J. Edgar" carefully takes us through the stages of Hoover's career, including his realizing the publicity value of going toe-to-toe with gangsters and the way he used the distinctly outré circumstances of the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg's infant son to advance the bureau's status.

We see the good things about Hoover, for instance his championing of scientific crime-scene analysis and the use of fingerprints, but we see much more of the dark pathological side, his mania for collecting incriminating evidence on people such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., whom he considered the most dangerous man in America.

"We must never forget our history," Hoover was fond of saying. "We must never lower our guard." But "J. Edgar" is best taken as a warning that in focusing too heavily on outside subversive agitators, we run the risk of ignoring the depredations of people very much like Hoover himself.

[email protected]

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Ken Turan's L.A. Times video review

wow, soooooooooooo many articles and reviews talking amazing things about Leo's performance. I'am really happy and proud of him. You deserve my dear Leo!!!

thanks ox.

Article about last night's Jay Z & Kayne performance at MSG that Leo attended

Whenever the row of girls in front of me stands up, shrieking, with their camera phones out, it means a new celebrity has arrived. Trey Songz appears. Kevin Liles follows, to less fanfare. Russell Simmons marches past, preceded by an entourage member carrying a gallon of Tropicana orange juice with, like, eight plastic cups stacked on top of the lid. There’s an extended scrum, and the woman in front of me explains that it’s “Puffy. Or whatever they’re calling him now.” Diddy comes out in a quasi-Drive-ish jacket, his rumored lady friend Cassie a few bodyguards back (half her head is still shaved, in case you were wondering). Lukas Haas lopes out, daps up a seventeen-year-old, and then his buddy Leonardo DiCaprio follows behind (Why do I know that Lukas Hass is friends with Leonardo Dicaprio? Why do I know who Lukas Haas is?) Even in his seventh-grade attire — baseball cap, puffy winter jacket — Leo still makes ladies screech his name.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-pr...n-square-garden

Barbie

Yes, it is wonderful to see so many of the top USA criitics speak so highly of Leo's performance .

Or shall we say they are only confirming what we Ladies of Bellazon have always known

NY Post weighs in with two thumbs up

Will post just some of the excerpts that mention Leo, and if you want to read more , click on link below

It's lust at first sight when young FBI director John Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a daring and astonishing performance) gets hot and bothered while interviewing hunky recent college graduate Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), who he’s told “shows no particular interest in women.’’

DiCaprio may well receive a Best Actor Oscar for his tour de force as the conflicted FBI director -- greatly abetted by Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network’’) in his first major role as the flamboyant but frustrated Tolson.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movi...L#ixzz1dAzL1t9l

All the aces reviews. (Y) YAY Leo! :dance:

Lol.

I wonder if Leo will go to the VS Fashion Show tomorrow or any of the after parties.