Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant" – Bear Necessities

Let’s not spend too long wondering how The Revenant has already made it on the IMDB 250 list of the best films ever made in the history of mankind.  It is on the list and since my mission is to watch the whole list and I happened to see it recently at the cinema, here is a more up-to-date review than you may be used to expecting on my blog.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
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The Revenant has been in the news recently as it has given Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar.  And boy does he work for it.  When he’s not swimming in freezing rivers or clawing his way up snowy banks he’s fighting bears or crawling out of dead horses.  You almost expect him to emerge from the frozen horse carcass brandishing a mini Oscar statuette, croaking ‘Have I done enough to earn it yet?’

The film is spectacular and worth watching at the cinema.  It’s hard to spot the CGI cracks in the bear attack sequence.  The arrows thudding through the hapless pioneers’ bodies come in with a convincing thwack.  And the feature-long battle between Leo and his enemy John Fitzgerald (played convincingly as ever by Tom Hardy) keeps going relentlessly.

Review continues below...

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Leo’s performance is pegged back and all the more effective for that.  Perhaps the best thing about the film is how Leo convinces us that he has become just another wild beast of the woods as he ekes out a desperate survival in the wilderness.  Later when we see him sharing a hunk of raw bison liver with an Indian, the steaming offal torn out of the recently deceased beast, it’s easy to imagine the scene as a relatively convincing rendition of early hominids relieved at achieving a kill.

There are plenty of bad things about the film, however.  Most of the time it is impossible to believe a word of it, as Leo recovers from his infected bear wounds in the freezing landscape, swims and survives immersion in icy water, somehow keeps things dry while he’s doing it, etc etc.  The grim mystical sections with the Indians are unspeakably bad, matched only by an implausible westernisation of the same Indians when we go into their point of view.




My final score for it seems a bit low, so I thought I’d double-check it with a bottom-up and top-down approach.  Bottom-up, it gets a point for the bear, a point for the horse, two points for the Leo-as-hominid acting.  Top-down, I score a film over 8 if I definitely think I’ll watch it again.  The Revenant doesn’t get that, so 7 would be its highest possible score.  Take off a point for the implausible survival scenes, take off a couple of points for the bullshit mysticism.  Either way I get a 4.  Still, it was moderately entertaining.

Personal Score: 4/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" – Something for Everyone

It seems even more pointless than usual in this series of reviews to take on F.W. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, given how much has already been written about it.  So I’ll keep it brief.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
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The short version of the review is, if you haven’t seen Sunrise, do yourself a favour and go and watch it.

It’s easy to imagine that even say in the 1980s, humanity was hopelessly less capable and less sophisticated than we are today.  The ridiculous fashions and hair, the barbaric non-genetic medicine, the dodgy racial politics...  So, it’s a shock to see a 1927 film with such self-evident style and ambition.  Turns out human beings were still pretty cool even back then.

Review continues below...

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"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

The film contrasts city and country life but having a city tourist lady attempt to seduce a married farmer in the country.  All the types of animals we see in the first half have some counterpoint in the many types of vehicle we see in the subsequent city half.  The pigs that appear in the city escape from a fair and get drunk on spilled wine in an obvious perversion of nature.  Mostly it’s just cars, trams and lorries.

Perhaps Sunrise tries to cram too much into its one hour and thirty-four minutes.  You get highly symbolized scenes of the illicit lovers, scenes of domestic life, satirical contrasts between country and city ways, a murder plot, a sea journey and sea storm, slapstick sequences and a love story.  Then there are all the special effects and virtuoso tracking shots.  It’s like Murnau is trying to cram everything the cinema can offer into one film.

But who cares – go along for the ride – it’s exhilarating.

Personal Score: 8/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Martin McDonagh's "In Bruges" – Stand-up Cinema

As a writer it’s easy to despair at films when they are so often subject to indignities such as producer-imposed cuts, glued-on happy endings, hacked edits to adjust length, reshoots to address the concerns of trial audiences etc etc.  These things may be considered necessary by a studio to protect their financial investment but it doesn’t say much for the film’s status as a work of art.  A novel on the other hand is much more likely to be the creative vision of a single author – edited, yes, but not hacked about in anything like the way many films are.

In Bruges is a remarkable exception to the norm in that a writer’s vision has been allowed to remain relatively unscathed in the final cut – primarily due to the fact that the writer is the same man as the director: Martin McDonagh.  McDonagh, who is a multi-Olivier award winner for his stage plays, has gone on record to say how hard it was:

“I had to become a director to protect the scripts … In Bruges was relentless and exhausting. I had to deal with them [Focus Films, the production company] trying to change anything they could change. And Focus are supposed to be supportive, indie-filmmaker-friendly people. Scumbags. It was constant war, but they never won.”

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As a result, In Bruges is a writer’s delight.  The dialogue bristles with jokes.  Plot points and motifs resonate across the length of the film, just as they would in a well-constructed novel.  From the three attacks on Americans (one turns out to be Canadian), to the karate discussion leading to the karate slice on the dwarf, to the transformed and ironic echo of the shot child and the shot dwarf, to the false church confession and later discussion of religious paintings, there are lovely little touches scattered throughout the film.  

What stands out from In Bruges, even after repeated viewings, is just how funny it is.  There are so many great comic lines and just as many moments of beautiful comic timing.  One way of looking at the film is as an extended stand-up routine given by a foul-mouthed politically incorrect comic.  This is perhaps both a strength and a weakness since in a sense, that’s all this film is.  A film set in Bruges was always going to be pretty, after all.  The plot itself is over-elaborate, as the characters themselves admit.  The acting and characterisation is somewhat dodgy.  The one thing that works without reservation is the comedy.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks.  Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

      

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

With the acting, Colin Farrell as Ray is the worst offender.  His bag of facial tics and hunched body language is presumably supposed to be a sign of his guilt and depression.  Brendan Gleeson gives a much more measured and realistic performance as Ken.  But the Ken character is too affable to be convincing as a professional killer, even when his backstory is explained.  He is the contract killer equivalent of a tart with a heart.  Thankfully, the real prostitutes in the film are not played as tarts with hearts.  Denise has moved from Amsterdam to Bruges, hoping to ‘get a better price for my pussy here.’

Some of the comic scenes are executed so masterfully that they could be used as boilerplates for a thousand derivative jokes.  Think of the famous tower climbing sequence, for example, where the Americans tourists are first bluntly insulted by Ray and then Ken arrives and – trying to be helpful – manages to insult them in the same way.  Perfect timing and the inadvertent second insult is a superb punchline.  And in another writerly echo, this scene sets up the tower as the location of the final shoot out.

As in Christopher Buckley’s novel Thank You for Smoking, much of the drama and comedy from In Bruges comes from bad men trying to find a pragmatic solution to the obstacles that their sin has created in their lives.  An example is when Ken is on the phone and pretends to send Ray out on an errand so that crime boss Harry can explain that he wants Ken to shoot Ray.  Or the subsequent dialogue where Ken has to backtrack to Harry after letting it slip that Ray hasn’t really enjoyed being in Bruges.

This is a great format for a writer to work with since there are so many opportunities for dramatic irony and black humour, and it also gives the chance to show the human side of characters who might otherwise be thought of as wholly evil.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach



This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.