The Revenant!!!
Yes, there’s a lot of anguish and pain on screen, and I had questions about how they might have enriched the story more, but as filmmaking, it’s fantastic. Gripping, poetic, beautiful and utterly transporting… You will see things you haven’t seen before.
Winter is coming, upper Missouri River 1823 (Montana, the Dakotas) and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company is paying good prices for pelts. The French are camped to the north. The Pawnee still control parts of the land, and a rival Native American tribe roams others (referred to as the Sioux or the “Ree” in the film)
The movie captures both the savage beauty of the land, and its collision with humanity’s depravity — our suffering, and occasional moments of grace. Retribution is the theme.
You will remember the name of cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki after this film; he could potentially win his THIRD consecutive Academy Award (after Birdman and Gravity), which will bring more attention to the poetic uses of today’s cinema technology (and not just the “cool factor”). I won’t praise the specifics of lenses and long-shots and invisible stitching and CGI precisely because they are used so well they achieve a wholeness, a rapture; if you are truly a “film person,” then you must see this.
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Sean Penn: “I don’t think I’ve had an experience in a movie theater as a kind of stepping cinema forward like that since I saw ‘Apocalypse Now.’ To see what happens when bold producers support a bold director who is such an artist on that level with great actors like that.” [DiCaprio and Tom Hardy and the cast deserve a lot of credit.]
“I put [director] Alejandro Iñarritu with the master painters. There’s been a lot of technical steps forward and people who have done extraordinary work. But I’ve never seen something that’s basic premise is naturalism — realism in terms of its visuals — that has quite this poetry with the use of newer technologies….I’d like to think we’re a culture that values its art enough to recognize we need this,” Penn said.
– Bicoastal writer Daniel Housman works hard and enjoys the very best of both Los Angeles and New York.
