In a Leonardo DiCaprio profile that went up on 9.10, L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara conveyed that unlike the vast majority of entertainment journalists thus far, she’s actually seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6), in which DiCaprio costars with Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.
The film “burrows into the Boston underworld [and] is vintage Scorsese, rife with grit and gore and more expletives than Snakes on a Plane,” McNamara writes. “As a cop who infiltrates a mob run by Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio stands fully baptized into the Scorsese canon, smashing gangsters in the head with beer mugs, holding fellow officers at gunpoint and going mano a mano with Nicholson in all his maniacal glory while trying to decipher the code of true loyalty.”
The Departed‘s press junket will happen in Manhattan later this week. I’ve been asking for the last two or three days about attending a local press screening of The Departed in Toronto, but the responses have been vague. Last night a visiting publicist told me that a journalist told him that a local screening had been slated for either yesterday or today. These developments on top of the weeks-old decision not to show The Departed at the Toronto Film Festival obviously sends out a certain type of smoke signal that I don’t have to decipher for anyone.