Showing posts with label The Revenent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Revenent. Show all posts

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Dear "The Revenent": No thank you.

Dear The Revenent,

I saw a little bit of what you had to offer, and while I appreciate the effort that went into making it, I'm going to politely decline.  Does Leo's character get his revenge on that crazy dude who left him for dead and that I didn't even recognize was Tom Hardy?  Does he live happily ever after?  What does the inside of a horse corpse look like?  I will never know.  I think I made it about an hour in before I realized that I didn't want to suffer through to the end of the film, and it's not that you guys didn't try.  Friends say the cinematography is beautiful, and thinking back on it?  They are right!  There were sweeping pans of hillsides that were worthy of The Sound of Music, and close-up shots that showed just how long it had been since these boys had a hot shower.  And all the brutal action, blood and suffering seemed very real.  Good on you! And I'm glad that Native Americans are getting acting gigs, thankless as those gigs may be.  But when the computerized bear... and it was truly spectacular by the way, there were only a couple of times that the ends of its fur looked like the ends of the branches on the fiber optics Christmas tree we used to plug in and display on top of the filing cabinet in my old HR office...


But when that bear attacked Leo's character, should I have been rooting for the bear?  Or shouldn't I at least have felt something other than terribly sad because in the end Leo left those two bear cubs motherless in what has already been established as an unforgiving country?  Don't get me wrong, I wanted to care about him, but I didn't know who he was!!!   He'd said about three words throughout the whole film and seemed to me just like another schmoe with a gun.  That CGI bear was a mother with two CGI cubs to feed!!!!

And to Leo;s character- yes, Tom Hardy was ruthless and horrible and deserves to get fucked up!!!  But can I completely blame him for thinking that you likely wouldn't live after that attack?  There's a reason #fuckedbyabear is trending right now.  You should have seen yourself!!  It was very bad.   If it had been me dragging you around in the freezing snow and I thought you were going to die any minute, and in the meantime you were being a real Debbie Downer and keeping us from making a speedy exit from the frozen tundra where Native Americans rightfully had it out for us?  Well, truthfully I don't know what I would have done.  There would have been some flailing and crying, that I can say for sure, and I probably wouldn't have buried you alive, but the likely fact is that we would have ALL become Otter Pops.  And yes, he literally buried you alive, and did really awful things to that mean kid from The Chronicles of Narnia, but it just wasn't enough to make me care about you.  I hear that at some point there's a scene with you and your former love, and maybe if that had come a lot sooner, I would have invested more.  At least there's that hope.

As it was, after awhile, I sadly looked into the bottom of my popcorn bag, discovering it empty.  I looked back up at the screen and there you were crawling around on the ground, a dirty mangled mess.  STILL!!  I really wanted to leave the theatre, and yet I knew there was this thing with a horse corpse.  It's all people can talk about.  They say:

"He crawled into a horse corpse!!!  He got really cold, and he looked dirty as fuck!  It is OSCAR TIME!!"

In regards to that, I don't want to negate your work.  It did look very real, but... apparently, a lot of it was real!!!  No offense, but if you were to put my Uncle Frank on-screen, throw him in a freezing river, make him eat guts and crawl into a horse corpse he would look realistically miserable, because he would be miserable!!  That's not acting!

Finally, I saw a horse come on the screen and I thought to myself "Thank God.  Let's get to this legendary horse corpse moment so I can fecking go", and yet, it was all a tease.  It was just more Native Americans.  It was then that I realized I probably didn't want to hang around for who knew how long, waiting for a moment that was just going to make me feel sad for the horse, and haunt my dreams for months to come. It was that point at which I made a speedy exit.

So thanks, truly.  It's not just you.  It's me too.  I think I'm more of a Carol guy.

My kind of movie!


Not my kind of movie.

Cursive

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