The celebrities are flocking to LA before a party-filled Oscar weekend including last night’s Global Green bash. Earlier, Jake Gyllenhaal planted trees to kick off the initiative to help green schools. Gavin Rossdale performed some of his hits, including “Glycerine,” while Gwen Stefani watched from the audience. He talked about bringing Kingston on tour saying, “I take Kingston for as long as he wants, so I try to drum that into him: ‘Are you ready to go on tour? Are you ready to go on tour?’ It’s going to be fun!” Later Sheryl Crow brought Gavin back on stage to sing with her as well. Also in the audience was eco-loving Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Bosworth, and Neil Patrick Harris among others. The weekend is just starting to heat up, so don’t forget to fill out your ballot before Sunday as we enjoy all the pre-Oscar celebrations.

Victoria Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio celebrate Giorgio Armani

3:00PM Thursday Feb 19, 2009
Erin Carlson

• Opening of Georgio Armani’s new 5th Avenue store

Keys praised Armani, gushing: “I love his style. I love his passion. I love how Italian he is. I love that he doesn’t speak English. … I love the way he makes a woman be a woman.”

Martin, who welcomed twin boys last summer via a surrogate mother, said sons Valentino and Matteo are “growing really fast. … They’re beautiful”.

- AP

NEW YORK - What kind of person goes coatless on a frigid February night?

Victoria Beckham, that’s who.

Beckham, fashion maven and wife of footballer David Beckham, sacrificed warmth for glamour while posing on the outdoor red carpet that led to her glitzy destination: the new Giorgio Armani store on 5th Avenue, where Armani held an oh-so-exclusive party to celebrate the opening of his latest piece of Manhattan real estate.

Braving near-freezing weather, Beckham stopped to talk to the media, showing some skin - and lots of leg - in a silvery sequinned one-strap dress and heels.

She presented new designs from her fashion collection at New York Fashion Week and said she’d love to reach Armani-level success.

“I have so much respect for Mr Armani - you know, I can dream,” she said, before heading inside.

Leonardo DiCaprio and John Mayer, looking sharp in dark suits, made late entrances at Tuesday’s event. No sign of their respective flames, Bar Refaeli and Jennifer Aniston.

Cool kids, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bar Refaeli arrived at LAX yesterday after a busy few weeks. Leo stopped by the Armani party in NYC the other night while Bar’s been promoting her hot SI swimsuit cover. Now the two are back in LA together, just in time for the Oscars where Revolutionary Road is up for a few trophies — don’t forget to fill out your ballot for a chance to win a year of free movies. We’d love to see Leo bring Bar on a red carpet, though rumor has it her parents want him to convert to Judaism before things get any more serious.

Revolutionary Road Finds Readers, If Not Viewers

First Brady reportedly proposed on Christmas Eve, which the couple denied. Then he proposed (again?) a few weeks ago, which Gisele is now denying.

Speaking to NY magazine, “I don’t know how people are so creative. First they said he proposed to me in a plane. Imagine, it was Dec. 24, Christmas, we were flying to Boston, then there was some champagne and we celebrated the date.

“Ready? Someone deduced I was getting engaged! I received more than 100 e-mails from friends commenting about the proposal. Now there’s a new rumor, that he proposed to me on last Friday [sic]. I wasn’t even there, how can that be true?”

In totally unrelated news, DListed.com posted a really interesting blind item yesterday:

I think this newly engaged NFL player would be surprised to learn that his future wife has been spending a great deal of time talking and texting her old boyfriend every chance she gets and even making plans to meet while she is alone and out of town. Of course it probably serves our NFL player right.

Will Brady and Gisele ever get hitched? Probably. The inner Britney/Justin fan in us is still hoping she’ll reunite with ex Leonardo DiCaprio one of these days, but that’s probably wishful thinking. Who do you think Gisele is a better match with, Tom or Leo?

Berlin - Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio was to receive Monday the Cinema for Peace award for his efforts in promoting peace and tolerance in the international movie business. One of Hollywood’s most prominent activists in the fight against global climate change, 34-year-old DiCaprio is to receive the award at a gala ceremony in Berlin.

In 2007 DiCaprio produced and narrated a documentary The 11th Hour about the threats to the environment. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

He has also taken various steps to highlight the risks to the environment and is planning to develop an eco-friendly resort in Belize in Central America.

DiCaprio shot to stardom in 1997 following his role as Jack Dawson in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic.

Los Angeles-born DiCaprio has played in a string of movies including Romeo and Juliet, Catch Me If You Can, Blood Diamonds as well as Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed and Body of Lies.

More recently he was reunited with his co-star from Titanic, British actress Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road about tensions in married life in 1950s suburban America.

Held as a parallel event to the Berlinale, the Cinema for Peace award has been previously given Catherine Deneuve, Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Liza Minnelli and Sir Peter Ustinov, Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere and Milla Jovovich.

Copyright, respective author or news agency

The revolutionary road to reality

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are re-educating cinemagoers about romance

‘It takes real guts to see the hopelessness’ … Michael Shannon holds court in Revolutionary Road

Titanic didn’t become the world’s biggest-ever box-office hit because people like ships or icebergs. Its trick was enlisting death to strip young love of the anguish, acne and ultimate disillusion that generally envelop it, thereby gussying up one of our most cherished fantasies.

1. Revolutionary Road
2. Release: 2008
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 119 mins
6. Directors: Sam Mendes
7. Cast: David Harbour, Kate Winslet, Kathryn Hahn, Kathy Bates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Harbour, Michael Shannon, Richard Easton
8. More on this film

Leonardo DiCaprio came fresh from taking one bite of this cherry in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, but Titanic was bolder than the Bard. Its conclusion and Celine Dion’s wailing theme song suggested that youthful romance needn’t even be transient: it could, apparently, sustain a whole life.

The exaltation of romantic love sold many a cinema ticket before Titanic and it’s sold plenty more since, so it’s understandable that the reunion of the big screen’s most successful celebrants of the cult should have provoked much excitement.

In Revolutionary Road, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet do indeed plunge once more into fateful embrace. This time, however, the outcome seems less immediately gratifying. For an apposite tagline, the publicists might reasonably have nicked one of the film’s more resonant lines: “Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” The couple’s partnership leads not to a final-scene clinch presaging a happy ever-after, but to relentless wretchedness culminating in disaster.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is pleased. Revolutionary Road is “a disappointing downer”, according to the Times. Our own Anna Pickard told us that the trailer alone had sucked all joy from her soul. Apparently, lots of people plan to give the film a wide berth: they don’t see why they should pay up to be made miserable.

It’s the cinema’s job to cheer us up, they reckon, especially in hard times. Why couldn’t Leo and Kate have given us a nice, jolly rom-com? The euphoria induced by the likes of Notting Hill or Pretty Woman may be rooted in delusion, but surely escapism is harmless enough.

Well, it may not be as harmless as it seems. We’re supposed to be able to distinguish between the silver screen’s poppycock and harsh reality, yet, when we’re eager to be deceived, we may relax our defences. Idealised representations of romantic love invite surrender to its ruthlessly beguiling logic. However, the warm glow induced at the multiplex fades. Thereafter, disappointment, discord and tribulation may lie in store for those over-intoxicated by celluloid amorous bliss.

Last year, a team at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University examining the impact of romantic films found that they instil unrealistic expectations of relationships and marriage. As team leader Kimberly Johnson put it, “Films do capture the excitement of new relationships, but they also wrongly suggest that trust and committed love exist from the moment people meet.” Apparently, rom-com fans expect, among other things, that sex will always be perfect, and that their partners will know what they want without having to be told.

Revolutionary Road, on the other hand, like the compelling book on which it is based, tries to deal in truths, however unwelcome, rather than agreeable myths. Its real hero is Oscar-nominated Michael Shannon’s inconveniently outspoken manic-depressive, who insists on laying bare the dangerous realities that everyone else is trying to ignore.

Of course, the path of true love doesn’t always lead to calamity. Yet, those navigating the tricky waters of romance need warnings of the rocks and reefs ahead more than intimations of the happy haven in which they hope to lay anchor. The movies will already have stuffed their heads with all too many of the latter.

Revolutionary Road points out the potential pitfalls in relationships and hints at ways round them. It also provides satisfactions more enduring than those offered by the rickety rapture in which so much screen romance wallows.

Tragedy transmutes catastrophe into art. In so doing, it gives it a kind of beauty, helps us come to terms with it and equips us to confront it. Just what “catharsis” is actually supposed to entail continues to be disputed. Yet if Revolutionary Road does no more than help purge cinemagoers of a surfeit of romantic nonsense, it will have done us all some service.

BY RAFER GUZMÁN

rafer.guzman@newsday.com

December 21, 2008

In “Revolutionary Road,” Leonardo DiCaprio does not play a CIA agent, a reclusive multimillionaire or a South African diamond smuggler. Instead, he plays Frank Wheeler, a suburban husband, father and office worker - a character of whom it could be said that there’s nothing unusual or extraordinary at all.

“I suppose it would be a first,” DiCaprio says of this exceedingly normal, almost banal role. “A lot of times, movies don’t get made unless it’s about something larger than life, or something people find is more interesting than” - and here he laughs - “the monotony of everyday existence.”

But “Revolutionary Road” did get made, and it’s not your everyday Hollywood product. The movie, which opens Friday, features two of today’s biggest stars, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, in their first film together since the blockbuster “Titanic” appeared more than a decade ago. But instead of grand sets and elaborate costumes, this comparatively low-budget effort focuses on character and dialogue. And its penetrating, somewhat harrowing story stands out even in a winter movie season filled with serious dramas. All of which might make “Revolutionary Road,” directed by Winslet’s husband, Sam Mendes, the “Ordinary People” of 2008.

DiCaprio, 34, says the project was spearheaded by Winslet, a longtime fan of Richard Yates’ critically praised but largely overlooked 1961 novel. The story, set in 1955, focuses on Frank Wheeler and his wife, April, an attractive, 30-ish couple whose move to a pleasant but lifeless Connecticut suburb hastens the collapse of their marriage and the evaporation of their youthful idealism.

Like John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” which preceded Yates’ book (and perhaps stole its thunder) by a year, “Revolutionary Road” looked beyond the green lawns and modern appliances that supposedly defined the postwar American dream. But while Updike found a poignant humor there, Yates found false promises and personal failures.

“This is a book that’s deeply beloved by a large number of people, but there are also people who just react to it and have to put the book down,” says Justin Haythe, who adapted Yates’ novel for the screen. “There’s that shudder of recognition as he paints people in all their flaws.”

If April (Winslet) embodies falseness - in both the book and the film, she’s first seen caked in makeup for an amateur theater production - then Frank embodies failure. Bright, clever and filled with vague dreams of greatness, Frank likes to disparage the “hopeless emptiness” of his suburban milieu. But he settles for it nevertheless. It’s the tragic flaw of nearly every character in the film, from the neighboring Campbells (Kathryn Hahn and David Harbour) to Frank’s alcoholic co-worker (Dylan Baker) to the gossipy real-estate agent ( Kathy Bates) who sold the Wheelers their adorable house on Revolutionary Road.

DiCaprio, sitting in a large suite in the Waldorf- Astoria Hotel on a recent afternoon, says Frank Wheeler marks a refreshing change from his long resumé of heroes, martyrs and icons. “I like that he just fell short of fulfilling his dreams,” he says. “He was unheroic, he was slightly cowardly. He was willing to just be a product of his environment. I liked all those things.”

The role required some research, which meant watching several documentaries about the 1950s and the birth of the American suburb. One film, DiCaprio recalls, focused wholly on Levittown. He also asked his mother about the era’s constrictive gender roles, which often reduced men to breadwinners and women to bread bakers.

“We had to look back in time and not be nostalgic about it,” he says. “This wasn’t a kitschy look at the 1950s and suburban life, and Sam was very careful about that. He wanted to make it as bleak and stark and realistic as he possibly could.” In the end, the period details - streamlined cars, weighty telephones, the omnipresent cigarettes - seem to matter less than the interaction between the Wheelers.

“It inevitably became irrelevant whatever time period this was in,” DiCaprio says. “It became about two people struggling to be happy.”

Moviegoers hoping to recapture the swooning romance between Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater, the beautiful young passengers of “Titanic,” may get a rude awakening with “Revolutionary Road,” but that’s fine by DiCaprio. Over the years, he says, he and Winslet have consciously avoided projects that would reunite them in any similar way.

“That would be absolutely silly,” he says with a laugh. “It would seem like we were somehow trying to reprise an old kindling of luuuv, or something. … So this was very much conducive to the type of movie that we would want to do together. It’s the disintegration of a relationship, and two people that are meant to be apart.”

Leo’s TITANIC-SIZED characters

The role of Frank Wheeler, average suburbanite, may be a first for Leonardo DiCaprio, who tends to play outsize characters. Here’s a short list of his larger-than-life roles:

Body of Lies (2008) - CIA man Roger Ferris hunts a Middle Eastern terrorist, courts an Iranian nurse and locks horns with his coldhearted boss ( Russell Crowe).

The Departed (2006) - Billy Costigan, a high-strung undercover cop in South Boston, infiltrates the inner circle of crime boss Frank Costello ( Jack Nicholson). The film marked DiCaprio’s third collaboration with director Martin Scorsese.

Blood Diamond (2006) - To play Danny Archer, a South African diamond smuggler, DiCaprio adopted an accent and - his favorite accoutrement when playing a tough guy - facial hair.

The Aviator (2004) - As the enigmatic, erratic multimillionaire Howard Hughes, DiCaprio goes all-out with the facial hair, sporting a Rip Van Winkle beard during one of Hughes’ weird “episodes.”

Gangs of New York (2002) - Another infiltrator: Amsterdam Vallon joins forces with Bill the Butcher ( Daniel Day-Lewis) in the hopes of murdering him in this epic tale set in 1860s New York City.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Real-life con man Frank W. Abagnale lives the high life, forging checks and successfully impersonating people (a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer) until FBI man Carl Hanratty ( Tom Hanks) picks up the trail.

The Beach (2000) - Richard, a young slacker, joins the endless parade of backpackers traveling through Thailand but winds up on an idyllic island paradise that quickly becomes a hellish prison.

Celebrity (1998) - Shortly after the megafame he gained with “Titanic,” DiCaprio played a sly parody of himself - or at least of his reputation - in this Woody Allen comedy. Here he’s Brandon Darrow, a petulant young actor who wrecks hotel rooms and throws supermodelish hissy fits.

-RAFER GUZMÁN

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