Dear Iceland:

You know who I am.

I am Leonardo DiCaprio.

My resume speaks for itself. I am arguably the greatest actor of my generation (sorry Christian Bale), wealthier and more powerful than many small nations and have a Klout score of 88.2. I can make it rain.

You should know that I am a HUGE fan of your work as a weird island nation and am really impressed with your buzz. You’re punching above your weight, little guy, and you’ve got some great PR people in your corner!

I think that the two of us could do some great work together and with that in mind I’d like to attend the Iceland Writer’s Retreat this year in order to research a role for a film I hope to shoot in Iceland in 2016.

What is Leo DiCaprio’s project you ask?

It is to be the blockbuster of 2017. It’s to be called Written in the Ice, and I will star as an ex-CIA operative who has made a break from the dark world of Black-Ops he mastered in his past. Having been given a new identity, Leonhard Jónsson, now a fisherman and aspiring writer, is living a humble village life in Iceland.

He is crazy talented and charismatic, but he’s suffering a form of PTSD and has writer’s block. However, this lifts when he attends the Iceland Writer’s Conference and meets a quirky, hipster Icelandic woman (hotter and younger than Bjork, but suggesting Bjork) who believes she communicates with elves. They have sex.

Through one of her nocturnal communications with the elves, (she falls into an automatic writing trance but must be naked for it to work) she is given a secret for renewable energy that will save the world from global warming, but before Leonhard and her can get the secret out and save the world, evil government forces and big oil seek to kill them and destroy the information.

It will be the best movie ever, sweep all the awards and be a “Titanic” success for the Iceland tourism, but for me to properly play all the dimensions of Leonhard Jónsson, I will have to attend the Iceland Writer’s Conference, free of all expenses for myself and my staff of 28.

A few other requests:

For the process to properly work, I need to be in the presence of lots of beauty. Please ensure that the class is populated with beautiful women. I cannot stress the importance of this enough.

I will require a beach, and if it is off-season, then I will require that it is artificially heated so it simulates the tropics.

I will need a helicopter and a yacht.

I will only attend 45 minutes of the conference each day and will not be required to “turn in” any work for grading.

Legal immunity from the laws that govern Iceland will also be required.

Nobody is permitted to look directly at my man bun.

Looking forward to working with you, and my lawyers will be in touch shortly!

Regards,

Leo

Well, it turned out to be one of those movies in which you are quickly conscious of the fact that it’s long, by which I mean you’re swiftly bored. It was impossible to penetrate through the surface of the images splashing in front of us, and instead of being immersed in the complexities of a grand narrative, we felt kind of like we were flipping through the pages of a pretty magazine while waiting for something better or more important to take place.

This might have been intentional, as it’s a relatively accurate thematic representation of the core of the source material, but it made for a pretty lousy movie. I mean, if we’d been handed a catalogue and told to go sit in the dark with earphones on– where passages of the novel were read to us–we probably would have had a deeper, more connective and personal experience.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, I think, one being that is was shot in 3D, and I’m not a big fan of this developing novelty. To me it’s a special effect that’s at it’s most useful when animating the unreal or exaggerating cataclysmic disasters.  Instead of rendering actors more real and life-like,  it reduces and flattens them into one dimension, draining all life and subtext from them.  They’re about as emotionally penetrable as robots or mannequins, and as they stand in front of you there’s absolutely nothing compelling in them.

I had no interest or attraction to anybody in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even want to go to any of the lavish parties that were being thrown. Everything was just a summoned mirage to me, perhaps like the one that drove Gatsby toward his green light, and maybe that’s the difference between experiencing a work of art as a boy, and then returning to it later, in middle age,  discovering that the fields you played in as a child were not tall stretches of eternity, but just small, scrubby accidents of geography.