Just how overrated is Dicaprio ? and his parallels with Chris Nolan

Again, that's your claim. Who am I supposed to believe here, the creators who experienced an unnecessarily troubled production and a massive increase in budget or the YouTube regular with an axe to grind against the star? In any case, it makes more sense for the man-against-nature prestige drama set entirely in the snowy wilderness to bring up the change than the superhero blockbuster that spends most of its runtime in a temperate city anyway. Climate change already screwed over their original plans so I can't imagine they hurt the planet's feelings a whole lot more with their production.

So being authentic is okay as long as you don't make a big enough deal about it. That makes sense. Having done a search on it, it seems like the kind of thing that should have been a bigger deal.

You do realise this contradicts your initial claim that DiCaprio just gets handed opportunities for no good reason and thus has no reason to fight for any of his roles, right? Besides, he's been active about this stuff for a long time now (Before the Flood has footage of him talking about Earth Hour way back in 2000) so if people are only just realising his stance then that's their problem. You keep trying to presume about his true motivations for doing this, but I do question how much a person can commit to creating something like Before the Flood without at least some genuine belief in it.

Funny you say that since the person who originally got considered for Revenant was Samuel L. Jackson (and honestly, I'd find that a more interesting casting choice than even Christian Bale because if Bale or DDL did the exact same role it would just be business as usual for hardened method actors like them). That being said, Django doesn't require Calvin Candie to be old - he was born into a family of rich white slave-owners and thus would have spent his entire life being brought up to believe in the racist pseudoscience he spouts at the dinner table (the air of recitation about his monologue would support this), to say nothing of how his flamboyant behaviour fits with his concept of himself as an untouchable master (which is why it ultimately results in his comeuppance re: forcing Schultz to shake his hand). Conversely (and I say this as someone who infamously gave The Departed a 1/5 rating a few years ago), consider that the chances he gets to scream in that movie come through when he is either venting to his therapist or simply pushed too far by the strain of trying to maintain a straight face around some seriously reprehensible and even louder villains (and he does spend much more of his screen-time keeping his emotions under wraps), I understand it.

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Thats irresponsible and this kind of slack shouldn't be given if you loved the movie.That tend to happen a lot."Oh Tarantino supported child rapist aka Polanski? well since he made awesome movies and I get adrenaline rush watching his movies lets just forgive him already and move on"
People always think that the rightwing conspiracy theorists are all wrong and nuts which they are for the most part but during some instances especially about Hollywood they are true for the most part.Its the systems that are set up to keep an industry alive.

He bought wolf of wall street book rights on a bidding war with Brad Pitt.There is some competition to that. I for one think given all thats been going on with plan b production of brad Pitt.His wolf of wall street could have been a much more complex and nuanced
take than make Lead character a demigod for teenagers and sleaze bags who know nothing better.Misogyny sells big time with younger male demographic.His moves are more for developing relations and getting foothold as a producer in industry. But I choose not to be so guillable to fall for "aww Leo loves green and he is a vegan" crap.

John hillcoat the director of the road was attached to direct it when bale was attached and I can see it being this artsy 50-60 million budget movie like road and not what we got.So I can see that part of the reason DiCaprio has won for that movie is because he was the sole reason the movie got made with incredible results.I just hope it would be made at that budget but with a non Dicaprio actor and Samuel l Jackson would have been goofy I think.

To each his own I guess....when I think of great actors I always think of this video from Jake Gyllenhaal where is explains what he thinks is a great actor.
key word is Real potential for failure when you have opportunities to got the safety route. But DiCaprio's got a village of marketing executives and agents that have to go through the script and okay it so I could check all the boxes in order to be liked by younger male demographic(mainly of course). Its just not possible that his role choices are impulsive. There's gotta be carefully drawn pie diagrams and bar charts draws on boards somewhere to see which country likes what type of movies and marketability potential for the movie for Oscars and all that . I just can't imagine him just reading the script and having an interesting conversation with director and okaying the script.

I'm not a huge fan. He's not bad, but he works with two of my least favourite popular filmmakers; Nolan and Scorsese. I especially hate Scorsese, and DiCaprio doesn't help his case for me any.

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Thanks again, Mr Portridge.

Can I ask what it is about Scorsese's work that you don' like? I'm just curious, as most people highly regard him. It's cool that you don't like his work, I'm just asking.

I will tell you why I feel he is overrated and why he deserved to wait till the departed and even thats an embarrassment Oscar because its a frickin remake.

He is a director who obviously brought something new to Hollywood in terms of Italian mob cinema. Gangster genre is obviously his baby along with Coppola...but where he fails and coppola succeeds is in the depth of the movie. Scorsese movies are kinetic in pace and very well shot but his movie are all surface level.Academy doesn't have anything against gangster movies they gave godfather oscars but they didn't give goodfellas Oscar because it was so surface level. These kind of movies appeal to mass public with all the macho stuff. But in reality they are just surface stuff. His movies have this elaborate plot and you keep waiting for someone to get killed or loose their ****e.

Obviously he is not an amateur and his vision is unique but surface level for the most part.I was shocked that people felt American hustle felt like a Scorsese movie , yeah right all 80s period pieces are Scorsese movies.Thats just wannabe macho fanboys being jealous because their macho wolf of wall street is not getting awards attention as much as American hustle. But in reality American hustle was a much more ambitious project where in he is using abscam as a back drop to study these characters that are reinventing themselves and the threads of the movie are so many.He balances it so well and obviously academy thought so.

Scorsese is a great director but he is still overrated as he is treated as the best director by some. Academy treated him exactly as he deserved. A single Oscar director with good number of nominations.

There is something fascinating about the way Scorsese and Tarantino are treated as these great auteurs by film nerd community and have huge fan followings.But most of the following is because their movies contains excessive masculinity. Something like silence doesn't appeal to their fanboys because its not masculine after all but they will jump up and down because of wolf of wall street or departed.

I don't think a production can help it if something like natural disaster interferes with its completion - is Apocalypse Now any lesser because shooting was interrupted by a typhoon? Comparing that kind of happenstance to people willfully sticking up for child molesters is an extreme comparison and you know it.

The hell are you on about now?

For all we know, it couldn't have worked anyway. The book is a tell-all autobiography by Belfort himself so creators have to work with that by depicting his life story while also trying to make sure that the audience understands that he and his actions are bad (but that's all kind of pointless if you're already paying the guy to let you make a movie based on his life so even Pitt would be complicit in that anyway). Hell, Pitt was in Fight Club, another movie where you're ultimately supposed to realise that the charismatic leader is a vile douchebag and yet people will still disregard the actual criticism. How much of that is the movie's fault and how much of that is the audience's?

It was supposed to get made for about that budget anyway before the aforementioned production problems forced the budget to double anyway. Also, are you saying that what we got wasn't artsy?

You keep going back and forth on how worthwhile risk and authenticity are, especially when it comes to the notion of DiCaprio and his associated projects compared to those of his contemporaries. Somehow, you've argued that The Revenant is at once both an incredibly safe and inauthentic movie to make and also reckless and irresponsible in its attempts to be as authentic as possible. Going off on all these elaborate imagination tangents about what he does or doesn't do with his projects is empty conjecture on your part and have sounded just as empty and repetitive as you think all his roles are.

The funny thing is that he's done maybe a handful of movies where the mob is a major part of the plot (not counting stuff like Raging Bull where it's a background detail). He's had a varied enough career full of films like character studies, black comedies, religious pictures, psychological thrillers, and period romances - are you really going to argue for all of them being surface-level? Also, an important thing to consider is which films his Best Picture-nominated ones always lost to - safe choices with mass appeal. Taxi Driver lost to Rocky, Raging Bull lost to Ordinary People, Goodfellas lost to Dances with Wolves, etc. Seeing a pattern yet? It would certainly explain why his only Best Picture winner was for something as broadly appealing as The Departed.

Or Scorsese is just that much of an influential master filmmaker that people can't help but borrow from him when making their own such pictures, especially when they are both true-crime dramas set in 1970s New York - I mean, you try watching Goodfellas and American Hustle back to back without picking up on how similar the stylistic touches are. Slick camerawork, swift editing, precise use of soundtrack, elaborate voice-over, etc. It's not surprising that people would prefer the original master (past or present) over a pale imitation that uses the style to paper over the same dysfunctional-family bullsh*t that Russell's gone over in virtually all his other movies (and it's not like Hustle was actually good enough to win any Oscars anyway).

Yeah, well, dumb teenage boys are always going to exist and either like all the wrong movies or like the right movies for the wrong reasons. Like I said before, how much of that can you really pin on the movies themselves?

Its just went off a tangent.With out sounding like a conspiracy nut...from what I know..industry preserves its movie stars unless they are caught red handed like Mel Gibson.So the climate change advocacy part of DiCaprio gets much more attention because its an industry approved project for Leo. As I said its just more about his self satisfaction and improving his legacy and less about actually caring. If he did something like wolf of wall street and he felt bad about the experience of debauchery to take his mind off he does this environmental stuff.
There is lot of excess in the movie which I am sure is not in the book and it almost felt like Scorsese and DiCaprio are enjoying themselves and I do see your point in audience willingness to look at it as inspiration or leads as a leader figure.American psycho is one of the most popular character of christian bale and that guy is a complete narcissist.So it almost feels like if you can make a movie that hits younger male demographic bullseye then the movie is bound to be a classic like goodfellas.Same can't be said for other demographics.

I think when the movie is close to finishing production marketing department of 20th century fox saw the movie and realized that the only way to make it viable at oscars is by upping the hardships and tough productions of the movie.So to some extent the production problems of the movie are exaggerated and even the budget is inflated. It artsy but not in traditional sense. When you spend 10 million on a scene with bear attack that to me more blockbuster filmmaking. It was so interesting to see how much thought went into the movie. I clearly remember November of 2015 where all of a sudden its screenings happened and people were all about that scene. I firmly believe that this bear scene was shot using CG because they want to use it as a selling point to both audience and oscars.But I for one believe that Oscar voters saw through their bull crap and gave it the only bare minimum deserved oscars that its worth. That was the oscars when I realized that it was easy to get a nomination if your movie is a flag ship movie by a major studio.Win involves votes from people who has nothing to do with the profiting of the movie unless you are a filmmaker then in that case if you help more people make money through your movies then you get a shot.

All I say is that there is something unnatural with the kind of success he is getting.Its safe interns of acting choices made by actors and the choice of director picked to achieve the goal(Oscar attention).Reckless comes from the fact that there is inconsistency in what the star of the movie believes and how he acts. As far as Celebrities are concerned always see what they do and not listen what they say. Even during awards campaigns. They say their movie is meant to something but it is something else completely.Either shoot on locations and shut up about environment while campaigning or don't shoot in locations and push the environmental narrative.

Everything. I can't stand his style of film. Plus, most of his films are about horrible people being horrible to each other. I hated Mean Streets and Goodfellas, and I couldn't stand the bits I've seen of Casino. He mostly assembles scenes, and calls them a story. Blech.

I agree with most of what you said as well. But if we go a little deep you can even discover the reason why he is overrated. His fans mainly are men and his movies are about men doing horrible things and they are criminal activities and highly macho in their content. People don't seem to understand that machismo is one of the most powerful bond there is. If you find something that makes you feel like a man(for men) you tend to do it more often.These are the people who not just watch the movies and move on but they revere the creator of those movie and want others to applaud him. They show up to his movies again and again. They become nerds for these particular film makers. The people who have this kind of following are scorsese,Tarantino,Leonardo DiCaprio and Chris Nolan. Even Spielberg has a fan following but what makes him so great is that he switches genres and so his fans are attached to him not because his movies make them feel like a man but for the movies themselves. That's what i love about Spielberg..he isn't gaining fans for giving them what they expect. Sorry for going on a tangent but this is psychology class 101. This is how brands develop...as long as they get what they crave , no one will complain and look at these artists objectively.

Everyone has their own point of view, we can't help it for that. The audience decides which actor or actress is best according to their view.

OK, thanks. Yes it's true that "most of his films are about horrible people being horrible to each other". That's why he's probably so popular, as many people love those kinds of films, though I'm more like you in that I don't like those kinds of films.

I've often wondered if people would be singing his praises if the subject matter of his films were different, say like his film Hugo. Not saying he's a bad director, BTW, just wondering how much of his praise comes from the films subjects.

So why do you watch them?

Sorry, but that still sounds like conspiracy theory with all its talk of how his advocacy is "industry-approved" and whatnot. Is it really that hard to believe that he does care?

Well, apparently neither of us have read the book so I guess that's not too relevant - in any case, I wouldn't automatically assert that the film made up stuff because it serves the film better if it takes an over-the-top true story and depicts it as it actually happened (see also Pain and Gain saying "yes, this is still based on a true story" over the hand-barbecue scene). American Psycho is a deliberately satirical work of fiction both in book form and movie form in ways that aren't exactly hard to miss, and I daresay that it's a little easier for audiences to distance themselves from a detached serial killer like Patrick Bateman.

It's already a project with an Oscar-nominated actor and an Oscar-winning director, it hardly needs to make up a "really hard to make" narrative to justify awards attention - besides, how else do you expect them to do a bear mauling without CG? In any case, you do realise that, by saying that the Academy "gave it the only bare minimum deserved oscars that its worth", you are in fact including DiCaprio himself winning, right?


His success seems pretty natural by Hollywood standards - capitalise on commercial and/or critical popularity and use that as leverage to do whatever projects you want. Besides, I'm not sure how you can do a movie set entirely in the great outdoors without shooting it on location.

Oh, please - Spielberg is the ultimate "brand" filmmaker. He's been pulling the same blockbuster-prestige-blockbuster routine for at least 30 years now - he may switch up the specifics from film to film, but he's long since established a constant standard in his output (and one can definitely make the criticism that his blockbuster work is infantilising while his prestige work is emotionally manipulative and didactic). This isn't necessarily to say that he's a bad director, but if you're going to complain about Scorsese or Nolan because their filmmaking styles are effectively brands to be consumed then you need to pick a better counter-example. Anyway, as my previous post said, this is still doing a major disservice to the variety of Scorsese's career anyway.

Does that mean marketing has no influence on audience ? I agree that most of the times when studios try and push an actor to be movie star by putting him in blockbusters it backfires.But what about unexpected surprise hits like Titanic or the dark knight ? those movies are not watched for the stars of those movies..they are watched for spectacles and audience remembered those stars and then if those stars are smart enough then they will try and not spoil that goodwill and work on it. Its called riding the coattails.

Titanic is one of my favorite films. I love it for the story and for the chance to see Titanic 'come to life'. I liked DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their roles. Could other actors done just as well? Maybe. At least it wasn't stoic Matt Damon in the male lead.

I avoided that film for a long time, and then caught it on tv. I kind of disliked everything except one line and the sinking of the Titanic (the reason to watch the movie, in my opinion, that was deftly done.)

I don't think I'd have enjoyed it any more with someone other than DiCaprio as male lead even though back then I was in high "can't stand his face" mode. Love stories aren't really my thing.

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We can only dream of the alternate universe where it’s Matthew McConaughey as Jack...

Alright, Rose. Alright, alright alright.

His success is natural for the most part but whats unnatural is the directors he is working with. No other actor is working with all those directors in the span of their careers. Scorsese,Spielberg,Tarantino,Mendes,Nolan,Innaritu,Eastwood,Ridley Scott...everyone of these directors is A-List and even more than that they are Auteurs..thats not natural....even someone like De Niro didnt work with Spielberg and Pacino didnt work with scorsese until now. That is nuts. No other actor has worked with half of these directors in their career let alone everyone of them. That to me is not some miracle or he is some lonestar that everyone wants to work with. We all know he hasn't yet displayed range. He couldnt play older men as proved in j.edgar. He can't do even a southern accent or african accent. So whats making these directors to line up for him ? Its not his intentions that are unnatural...its the things he is able to get done...everyone wants Tarantino or Scorsese to work with Johnny Depp(atleast they did when Depp made good movies) and even they want to work with Johnny depp but why don't they ? everyone wants Dicaprio to work with the above directors and he did work with them. So he is making the wet dreams of his fans a reality which is very rare. To be honest I can easily see him working with Nolan again and David fincher on some serial killer movie because they are right in his wheelhouse in terms of mainstream appeal. I can't say the same for any other actor. Its like fans wanting wolverine and batman to fight which in reality isnt possible because both of them belong to different sudios but dicaprio could make it a reality (its an analogy).

Only reason I could think of is that directors especially auteurs do not want investors breathing down their neck and interfering in their creative choices while making the money and from what I see Leonardo DiCaprio can provide them with that. He can stop investors from interfering in the creative decision of directors because of his bankability. If Quentin Tarantino wants to make a period movie he don't wanna have to worry about which investor is not gonna spend of building a set for 10 million if he says "I want this" the only response he is looking for is "yes sir". All Dicaprio asks in return is to hype his performance in the movie come awards season and he doesnt have to ask because he made their dream a reality by spending millions of dollars.

Spielberg's brand covers all genres...which to me is impressive in of itself. Scorsese other movies vanished into thin air except may be among movie buffs...no one remembers kun dun or last temptation or bringing out the dead or silence or hugo...but they do remember close encounters, Jaws, Schindlers list, saving private ryan, Catch me if you can..all are from different genres..that to me is impressive...Scorsese is good with camera work and direction but his story telling abilities are surface level ..they don't cut deep...they are shock values..can you believe how this guy killed him....can you believe how many f words he used...and also I noticed that once he attained a certain legend status people start praising him with out being objective...this is from a guy who made goodfellas ..so even though its a lot like goodfellas and he didnt really take an chances since it made me feel like the first time I watched goodfellas..that alone is worthy...its a very weird culture..where a few hundred critics whose nostalgia is invoked can react in very predictable way...the reason why they are critical of spielberg with post or bridge of spies is because spielberg isnt making movies like ET or Jaws...if he makes something that reminds of those earlier work that made them love him..then they are more than happy to applaud him. Irishman is the same thing. Spielberg takes chances in weird ways. Ready player one is nostalgia based and it used 70s-80s movie setting in the movie.Can't say the same. In the end critics are never objective except red letter media. They just review their experience and they like sameness as long as its repackaged and re-branded and sold. MCU movies critical reception proves. Its so fun and entertaining and so we give it 95 %. The weird part is people don't think of the same thing with someone like Scorsese. Its just that since his movies are good , people are willing to look the other side in terms of the director evolving.Obviously I am talking at the level of scorsese. He is a great director but just not the kind of director people make him out to be.