There’s a common movie construct where an innocent person becomes party to an ill-gotten gain (they witness a bank robbery or find out where some dirty money is stashed, something like that). The innocent and a bad guy end up having to rely on each other to grab the stash before even badder guys can get it. Meanwhile, the bad guy becomes angst-ridden and a decision must be made. “Blood Diamond” (2006) manifests this construct in Sierra Leone, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the conflicted protagonist. A good, not great, film where the setting is more interesting than the story itself.
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The day I watched “The Revenant” (2015), the heat index in my town was something like 100 million bazillion degrees, so it was kind of nice watching Leonardo DiCaprio freeze his ass off for two and a half hours. That being said, the film is a fascinating, poetic meditation on survival, suffering and revenge in the Old West. It’s also kind of gross, what with animals (and/or people) being gutted every few minutes. Lots of bad stuff happens to Leonardo, almost to the point of absurdity. That, and the running time, make it a tough watch, but (sorta?) worth it.
I get the fact that Martin Scorsese needs to move on from the Mafia to a new generation of criminals, which explains “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). I’m just not sure what I was supposed to get out of this movie. It’s voyeuristic fun watching the decadent rise and unsurprising fall of pump-and-dump stock millionaire Jordan Belfort, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio. At several points, however, we’re fed the notion that Belfort was somehow helping everyone else while he was helping himself. That’s just typical self-serving sales bullshit, but not surprising. A salesman’s first priority is to sell himself.
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