Movies…with a little bit of obscure culture and sports mixed in
“Members of the Osage tribe in the United States are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s, sparking a major F.B.I. investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.” Director: Martin ScorceseWriters: Eric […]
“Members of the Osage tribe in the United States are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s, sparking a major F.B.I. investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.”
Director: Martin Scorcese
Writers: Eric Roth, Martin Scorcese, David Grann
Staring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brandan Fraiser, Scott Shepherd
Release Date: October 20, 2023
IMDB
I know I am very late on this, but I am writing it to educate myself on the movie. Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023) is one of the most anticipated movies of the year and has been rumored about for years. Now we finally have a trailer and many have already seen the movie. Anticipation is growing, as are expectations.
Martin Scorcese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon is based off of American journalist and writer David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction novel Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book investigates various murders of notable individuals in Osage County, Oklahoma. The underlying ripple effect that stirs up even more controversy is that vats of big oil deposits were discovered under the land of Osage Nation. That means big money. That means jealousy.
There are individuals who do not want members of Osage Nation to inherit the wealth they are set to receive. The white man is coming. The big, mean, egotistical world of entitlement is coming.
In this trailer for Killers Of The Flower Moon, the evil white folk are described as wolves. The trailer ends with a bunch of white people in a low lit room and Ernest Burkhart’s voiceover asking “Can you find the wolves in this picture?”
Who is Ernest Burkhart? He is the point of view character in the story played by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. In the opening moments of the trailer we see him hop off a train and enter new land that he doesn’t know anything about. Ernest seems to find his way with a loving relationship with a member of Osage Nation, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). She is Ernest’s lens into a different world. She teaches him to see the world from different viewpoints, where the threat of evil is not always what one would assume.
Where is the evil coming from? Well it’s the great white father, William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Hale is the alpha of the greed hungry wolf pack, and his horde of mongrels is willing to grow and expand at any cost. Killers Of The Flower Moon is the eleventh movie working with Scorsese. It is safe to say that their relationship has been strong throughout the years. It began with Mean Streets (1973) and quickly ventured into legendary stuff.
With many Scorcese objects, the lead character is a faulted man. It is usually a man. Scorcese likes to put a man in a story and have him fall into the depths of depravity. Both Leo and De Niro have played this role before; think back to The Wolf On Wall Street (2013), Shutter Island (2010), The Departed (2006), The Irishman (2019), Taxi Driver (1976). In these stories the character gets sucked into the world they are dropped in and there there becomes a point where said character must make a choice. Do I stay, or do I go?
In Killers Of The Flower Moon, I don’t think we are going to follow that same concept. At least in this trailer, we don’t see Ernest talking to Hale and becoming infatuated with the wolves. We rather see Ernest shepherding Mollie, the figurative sheep in this story, through hordes of wolves. And Hale, the alpha money predator, is immediately illustrated as the big bad wolf trying blow his enemies house down. These characters seem incredibly defined, so color me curious on how Scorcese is going to go deeper into the psyches of these characters.
So we have Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser. Looking at the cast list there is also Tantoo Cardinal, a well-traveled Aboriginal artist who was just in a movie I just watched, The Last Manhunt (2022). Just a weird coincidence there. Oh, and Gladstone was also in The Last Manhunt.
One random person I am excited to see in Killers Of The Flower Moon is Scott Shepherd. He is playing the part of Bryan Burkhart, and I have no idea what that entails for this story. What I hope it becomes is an evil part because I would love nothing more than for Shepherd to bring back his work as David in The Last Of Us. He played the part of a cult, community leading cannibal with outstanding malevolence. That role made me a fan of his, so happy to see hm working in a project like Killers Of The Flower Moon.
One more odd coincidence, the log line for Killers Of The Flower Moon includes the name of J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo DiCaprio played J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar (2011). There isn’t necessarily a reason I point this out, only that I remembered it.
Killers Of The Flowers Moon is slated to release on Apple TV+ on October 20, 2023. Oh, and before you press play, you should know the movie is three hours and twenty-six minutes long.
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