Leo! Leo! Leo!

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

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In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )