Boy Movies #6
Election Day issue! jk... it's a horny post
This is Boy Movies, the first newsletter to be written by someone who has been sick for four weeks. If you like it, subscribe and send it to a friend because everyone keeps saying Twitter is dead and I’d like for this to take off for me before I have to start promoting via carrier pigeon.
During the height of Covid, I decided to make my way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography. (That project is still ongoing, but so is the pandemic.) Call it an early Boy Movies venture; Scorsese is a peak boy movies director, and no one is better at telling stories of men who destroy themselves in their quests for power. Scorsese is always right, always eating the girls up on Instagram, and should maybe host the Oscars. I love the man. I can’t not uplift an old Italian guy with strong eyebrows.
Something I think about a lot is what Scorsese and his muse Leonardo DiCaprio talk about. Like, the art of cinema? I guess? That seems like something Leo theoretically cares about, despite spending so much time hanging out with E from Entourage. (Allison lore: I’ve seen every episode of Entourage, plus the movie, which I paid money to watch in a theater and served as inspiration behind my most esoteric Letterboxd list.) I wonder if Scorsese knows about Leo’s elderly new girlfriend Gigi Hadid. I wonder if Scorsese sends Leo gifts for his birthday, which happens to be on Friday. He’s a Scorpio, and I’m sure that means something to some of you.
I’m what can colloquially be referred to as Leo agnostic. I mourn his immaculately sculpted twink visage, but I find his little accents grating and I think everyone who made a big stink about him winning an Oscar would’ve been better off reserving that energy for Amy Adams, who continues to go down a path none of us can follow, but that’s a digression for another newsletter. Leo is a perfect example of someone who started out as a girl actor and turned into a boy actor when it came time to get serious. I call this McConaughey Disease.
With that in mind, I wanted to talk about Leo for his special day (you don’t turn 48 every year!), so I decided to kill two birds and fill in a pretty glaring Scorsese gap by watching The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese’s (kinda) biopic of lunatic stockbroker Jordan Belfort, for the first time. People can never believe it when I tell them I haven’t seen this one, probably because everyone knows that I would relate to it so strongly: I am constantly fielding phone calls from Wall Street due to the fact that I run such a successful business.
The movie is good1! It’s a shameless spectacle that examines male arrogance with a microscope and it highlights many of Scorsese’s strengths — he’s the best at making an audience believe they’re watching a rowdy story about dudes rocking before revealing that they’re actually watching a cautionary tale of men undone by their own hubris — but it’s not my favorite of his by any means. It’s relentless and unsubtle. I think people who are quick to call the film itself, and Scorsese, misogynistic are willfully missing the point, but I also didn’t, like, enjoy watching Margot Robbie get punched in the stomach. It was funny (“funny”) to watch at this particular moment, as we’re inundated with news about the insane rich guy who every day finds a new way to run Twitter deeper into the ground. Anyway, I’m not here to analyze. Let’s instead discuss the elephant in the room. Or at least the elephant in my room.
“The only hot person in [The Wolf of Wall Street] is Margot Robbie,” Rachel Handler once wrote. Well, what if I don’t feel that way? What if I found Leo kind of hot in The Wolf of Wall Street? What are we all supposed to do with that? It wasn’t the whole time, but the feeling arose more than once. I typically celebrate finding horniness in unlikely places, but I was taken aback, as any version of post-90s Leo generally doesn’t do it for me, also he behaves so abhorrently in this movie and not even in a cute way. Beyond my appreciation for men in crisis, I haven’t arrived at any explanation. I’m on day 27 of a mysterious on-and-off illness (the plague, I’m pretty sure), so I refuse to look into it. I’ll just drag you all down with me.
Happy birthday, Leo. I apologize for saying that you haven’t been hot since Catch Me If You Can. All I can be is sorry, and that is all I am.
Five times I regrettably found Leonardo DiCaprio hot during The Wolf of Wall Street
5.
The problem is that when movies let present-day Leo play a younger version of himself I’m always like, “No, the real young Leo was a phenomenal twink with a face carved from marble.” But I’ll suspend my disbelief because here, as he watches Jonah Hill (who is wearing what I can only describe as a tooth wig) quit his job and declare allegiance to the cult of Jordan Belfort, Leo looks very much like a movie star, which is one of the best ways Leo can look. Handsome!
4.
Here, Jordan is belligerently high on expired quaaludes and looks borderline repulsive. To me, it is sexy.
3.
Why does he look younger in this scene than he did when he was supposed to be in his 20s? Here, Jordan is contemplating how he almost got himself, his wife, and Jonah Hill killed, and it’s making him want to change. Who cares. I like how messy his hair is and how sad his eyes are.
2.
Jordan is high on quaaludes. Jordan is always high on quaaludes. But Leo has a great smile, and even when you consider the gross circumstances of the scene (he’s about to start cheating on poor jilted Cristin Milioti with Margot Robbie), I’m more interested in how the costume designer, the icon Sandy Powell, calls back to Romeo + Juliet (my favorite Leo) by dressing him in a too big, mostly unbuttoned shirt. Hot.
1.
This is where I could no longer deny how hot I was finding him. The best Leo looks in the whole movie is during a scene where Jordan tries to wink-wink bribe an FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler (ACAB). Is it just a case of gorgeous lighting accenting his cheekbones? Is it the smarmy confidence he’s radiating? Is it the quiet electricity of the exchange between him and Chandler? Maybe all of the above. He looks amazing. Sorry! Sorry for being fearlessly real!
My weekend at the theatah: Triangle of Sadness (gender nonconforming movie), Ticket to Paradise (girl movie), and Aftersun (girl movie that made me feel so overcome with emotion that my chest hurt and I almost burst into tears on the street afterwards! People with dead dads, beware, Paul Mescal is coming for you!!!)
Again, I know Twitter is on death’s door (me vibes!), but I was recently alerted to this account that tweets a still of every second from Elvis (2022) dir. Baz Luhrmann, so it’s not all bad.
Genuine question: Is everyone sick right now and has everyone been sick for like, a while? Why does my sore throat keep going away and coming back? I don’t know what’s going on! It’s still not Covid but at this point I kind of wish it was because at least that would explain something. If I die of this, please make sure they put “accomplished CEO” on my tombstone.
Despite the fact that I felt very “guy who’s only ever seen The Boss Baby” but with HBO’s Industry (getting a lot of HBO’s Industry vibes from The Wolf of Wall Street…) the whole time.