JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

As obsessive moviegoers we take great care in choosing the first film we will see on the big screen for the calendar year. This year it was a toss-up between Blood Diamond and Eragon. Eragon was the early frontrunner because it features swords and dragons. Also I am not a fan of Blood Diamond’s director Edward Zwick—I found Legends of the Fall hilarious (Brad Pitt shed enough tears to flood the trenches in WWI), and as for The Last Samurai, I am suspicious of vehicles created for Tom Cruise’s endless Oscar-whoring (I think his best performance was as the asshole motivational speaker in Magnolia). However, Leonardo DiCaprio has become interesting to us now that we can believe him as a man. Despite his efforts in Gangs of New York and The Aviator, we always thought of him as a pretty boy; then he amazed us in The Departed (though I’ll take Mark Wahlberg, thanks). Turns out that the way to make Leo manly onscreen is to have him look like he’s about to have three nervous breakdowns at the same time. Also, Eragon’s trailer had a B-movie-ness about it and the reviews have been awful, while critics have called DiCaprio the Meryl Streep of his generation for his convincing South African accent. So off we went to Blood Diamond. My review appears on Friday in the Star. By the way, Dolphy and Van Dolph sat in front of us at the last full show, so I had to maintain a respectful silence even when I wanted to say, “Amy good gorilla!” (from Congo, which was also about a diamond).