Something Meta This Way Comes

Leonard DiCaprio is a fine actor, and Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese are fine directors. Still, I'm not sure it's good for any of their careers that DiCaprio is starring in two psychological thrillers with questionably flashy special effects, directed by the two men, coming out at similar times. Neither Shutter Island nor Inception look terribly good to me. In the former case, just because Dennis Lehane wrote the novel doesn't mean you need Michelle Williams to act spectral in it and have a separate budget line item for fog:


And in the case of the latter, I'm feeling somewhat dubious about a movie with a premise involving fluctuations in gravity:


The truth is, when I think about it, I haven't seen a DiCaprio movie since 2002, when I watched both Catch Me If You Can, and Gangs of New York. I do feel that I should see The Aviator and The Departed's in my Netflix queue if only because I'm trying to work out a couple of things in my head about Mark Wahlberg. And I think that's because of something that seems abundantly clear in the trailers for both Shutter Island and Inception: DiCaprio's evolved, I think with more than a little unfortunate assistance from Scorsese, into an incredibly humorless leading man. Like every girl on Planet Earth in 1996, I fell blindly in love with him in Romeo+Juliet, (though my affair with Harold Perrineau's been the one that lasted, and Strictly Ballroom is my favorite Baz movie) so it's a shame that he feels like a real drag to watch now.