dvd of the week The Revenant, a ruthless and bombastic tale of revenge in the cold western American frontier, is focused on a man battling nature, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass trying to survive alone while severely wounded in the cold, snowy mountains; he dreams and hallucinates memories of his dead Pawnee wife and their…
A great deal has been written, said and tweeted regarding how, for the second year in a row, each one of the 20 actors nominated for an Academy Award this year are white. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Academy is 94 percent white, 2 percent African American and less than 2 percent Latino….
Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street A couple weeks ago, a woman named Christina McDowell published a scathing essay in LA Weekly attacking The Wolf of Wall Street, its director Martin Scorsese and its star Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a three-hour orgiastic comedy about Wall Street con men, is based…
dvd of the week This is the first adaptation of a F. Scott Fitzgerald work that seems to be as in love with Fitzgerald’s writing as Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) is with Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). When Nick Caraway (a most excellent Toby Maguire) isn’t narrating the Jazz Age tragedy with Fitzgerald’s own language, director…
Even though The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel (and I’ve read it three times) I have always been left a little cold by Gatsby himself. I didn’t fall in love with him like his obsession Daisy did, and I didn’t become utterly enamored with him like the book’s narrator Nick Carraway did. This was…
dvd of the week Tarentino’s homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation films of the 1970s is his funniest movie by far and as nearly as fun to watch as Kill Bill Vol. 1. It’s also the movie that probably sets some sort of record for the use of the n-word, and it’s disconcerting, to say…
Last week, the San Diego Film Critics Society, of which I am a member, chose Argo as the best film of the year. It also won best director (Ben Affleck), best adapted screenplay (Chris Terrio), and best editing (William Goldenberg). While that movie was released more than two months ago, many of the movies that…
Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar As 20th century American politicians go, J. Edgar Hoover is tied with Richard Nixon on the evil-o-meter. Only Joe McCarthy beats them. A megalomaniacal red-baiter who destroyed countless lives and probably made the United States no less secure for the trouble, McCarthy had no redeeming qualities. Hoover and Nixon –…
The cover of this month’s GQ salutes Leonardo DiCaprio with an accompanying feature on Clint Eastwood in promotion for their new film which will feature DiCaprio playing “the despicable and probably closeted FBI legend, J. Edgar Hoover,” the men’s magazine reports. In their dual interview, Eastwood is candid about his descent from Republican ideas to…
