>The Revenant, the new Leonardo DiCaprio western, bids to be also the last western. That once-quintessential Hollywood genre has lost its popularity to sci-fi and comic-book flicks that trendily dramatize social tensions — along with offering escape into perpetual adolescence. The Revenant reworks the older westerns’ exploration of American history, and of the issues arising from the clash between civilization and perceived wilderness, into a spectacle replete with contemporary social distress. That makes it an Obama western.
>DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, a guide and hunter for a fur-trading expedition in the 1820s, humbly embodies the country’s humane, multicultural hopes, yet he’s stuck amid venal, weak-principled countrymen. Burdened with the racist legacy of European settlers, Glass is haunted by the killing of his Pawnee wife and guards his biracial son. Glass’s ambivalence and fortitude are tested by his trouble with John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a low-life among the government-sanctioned trappers. The unhinged, Bible-quoting carnivore Fitzgerald is a lying, killing incarnation of America’s evils.
>The epic, overlong murderous opposition between Glass and Fitzgerald reveals perfidious man in nature, and nature as alienating as it is “red in tooth and claw.” Their conflict symbolizes the war between civility and savagery, though it is not the classic sheriff-vs.-outlaw antagonism. In this End of the West western, the greed, selfishness, and brutal cynicism come straight out of our contemporary paranoid atmosphere. The Revenant portrays the U.S. as a ghost of its once idealized, rough-hewn self, a nation troubled by its treacherous past while slogging through an onerous, deadly present — thus, an Obama allegory.
Leo wins. Makes joke about getting Oscar late in career. Screencap this.
>Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn’t apologize for American history; he even avoids the Mexican–American War and the policies of European colonization that might specifically explain Manifest Destiny. Yet, by playing a Clooney–Damon–Pitt game, Iñárritu uses the western genre for a simplified critique of American temperament: Glass always physically conflicts with threatening forces, including bedrock, redneck conservatism.
>His virtue is lamely represented by romantic memories and race-conscious fatherhood. (“They don’t hear your voice, they only see your skin,” he warns his teenage son.) His struggle is epitomized in a showpiece battle with a grizzly bear. It’s like a superhero origin myth via computer-generated F/X. Glass is left nearly dead, prey to Fitzgerald’s ruthlessness. Fisheye close-ups of DiCaprio in agony recall A Clockwork Orange’s cynicism, and his snowy travails repeat that Quaalude crawl in The Wolf of Wall Street. After relentless melodramatic setbacks, phenomenal resilience wins him revenge.
>Remember how Vietnam-era westerns (Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Bite the Bullet, High Plains Drifter) expressed liberal American guilt? Well, the trendy ISIS-era politics of Iñárritu’s western fantasy prohibit cathartic heroism. This frustration and reticence add to The Revenant’s Obama aspect. DiCaprio and the prodigious Tom Hardy sink into their characters’ obstinacy to show white American moral descent (while the knowing Native Americans bide their time stereotypically — a millennial flip of their passivity in Dances with Wolves). After ear-chewing combat with Fitzgerald, similar to Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck’s mauling each other in The Boys from Brazil, Glass stares at the audience with a look of “This is not who we are” hopelessness.
>>63533375
Armond White, plsdon't go
>The Revenant is an accusatory western. Iñárritu forces the audience to judge imperialism, starting with Emmanuel Lubezki’s preening, relentless camera (just as in last year’s dreadful Birdman) weaving among the corrupt characters. Lubezki’s photography is pellucid, as always, but whereas he achieved a newly discovered, paradisiacal look for Terrence Malick’s The New World, the American wild here seems inhospitable, dangerous. Before the mano a mano brawl, a Bierstadt-worthy sun ray moves through a mountain pass. The fleeting, stunning sight suggests a dying of light, a nation’s coming eclipse.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428357/revenant-movie-review?target=author&tid=1152026
>>63533375
>>63533406
So... did he like it?
>The cinematic surprise of 2015 is Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel. Shakespeare’s intimate political intrigue is filmed as a global visionary tragedy. Kurzel depicts Scotland’s eleventh-century history while alluding to our millennial disillusionment (“I feel now the future in the instant”).
>Kurzel’s harsh, violent images link to 300: Rise of an Empire, transforming pop myth through breathtaking poetry. Both Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard look archetypal: His ruddy skin, facial scruff, scared eyes, and a smile not to be trusted complement her deep-set stare with blue eyeshadow beneath a pearl corona. Their scheming and anguish derive from deep suffering, sufficient to explain their moral fall. By literalizing “Screw your courage to the sticking post, and we’ll not fail,” Kurzel makes the play as sexual as 300, and the tragedy becomes, all the more, a human and affecting tale of ambition vs. conscience. (The mob hailing Macbeth ironically resembles the people wall-mugging in the background of today’s politicians.)
>At this moment of political division and partisan suspicion, Macbeth is a perfect vehicle to wake the biased, dehumanizing conscience, to show the worst of others in ourselves. That’s what makes Fassbender and Cotillard’s unorthodox performances so beautiful. His talent for decadent menace and her gift for wounding sorrow deliver a poetic effect even when they use contemporary cadence on the blank verse. Jed Kurzel’s shrieking, moaning strings and booming percussion — this is the year’s best music score — add tactile effect to already expressive images: The forest killings of Macduff’s family and Banquo are worthy of The Conformist, and Paddy Considine as Banquo’s ghost is unforgettable.
>>63533375
>Hugh Glass
>Justin Kurzel’s intense understanding of the play’s essence is apparent in the welts on the witches’ faces, Macbeth’s catching embers in his hand, the revelatory edit during Lady Macbeth’s monologue, and the close-up that makes Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” despair immersive. This is the most imaginative Shakespeare film in years, as we await Julie Taymor’s wonderful unreleased A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
this is why i fucking hate critics and never listen to any of the trite bullshit they write.
why can't these people just fucking watch movies?
>>63533551
then they would have to actually pay for it
>>63533375
>an Obama western
FUCKING DROPPED even lower than DiCaprio's chances at winning an Oscar
>>63533551
>dude just turn off your brain lmao!
>Don Verdean is the darkest film yet by Jared Hess, director of Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and Gentlemen Broncos. It’s not “dark” in the trendy sense that endorses nihilism but in a bright, comical sense that looks through nihilism to the other side. The title character (played by Sam Rockwell) is a religious huckster (author of Relics of God and star of the God’s Errand DVD), whose livelihood exploits seekers. He sells archaeological artifacts (Lot’s wife’s pillar of salt and the skull of Goliath) found in Holy Land expeditions. He proves the truth of Biblical miracles while plundering the modern natural world.
>This film about godlessness is a perfect companion piece to the profundity of Macbeth and an antidote to the pessimism of The Revenant. By showing the Christian ability to laugh at oneself (Danny McBride’s born-again evangelist strikes the perfect note; Will Forte’s former Satanist does not), Hess keeps the faith despite skepticism. Don Verdean’s character isn’t fully conceived. His Israeli partner-in-crime Boaz (Jemaine Clement) is a livelier conceit (“Your Lord and me have a lot in common”), while his research assistant (Amy Ryan) remains a sweet idea unfulfilled. But how many movies, even failed ones, can still be called idiosyncratic and delightful?
>5 lines about the movie
>rest of the review is about modern politics
>>63533674
>movies have nothing to do with politics
isn't his favorite film this year Furious Seven?
>>63533684
Not all movies have something to do with modern politics. This is hardly a review, more like some kind of analysis.
So it's White Guilt: The Movie?
That's a little depressing.
>>63533580
actually this makes sense. when I take this into consideration, I guess I can forgive them. I'd write pages worth of bullshit no one cares about if it guaranteed me the chance to watch movies earlier than everyone else, and for free.
>>63533585
all these reviews just read like the writer is choking their own dick. i don't care if a movie is an "Obama Western" or some social commentary on America.
that's not why i'm gonna watch the revenant
that's not why anyone is ever going to watch the revenant.
i don't even think these fucking critics like movies, it's just a job for them. they've completely lost all touch with common sense or rationality because of their careers.
people are going to watch this movie to see Leo freezing to death, struggling to survive and get shit all over by Tom Hardy. that's what the trailers showed, that's what people are going to pay to see. no one fucking cares about the moral decay of Western America or any of this shit. We just want to see man vs the elements.
but of course, no critic ever understands the idea of other people taking time out of their busy lives (where they actually have to wake up at 6am in the morning and go work a real job, something the movie critic has never experienced), to just sit down, eat popcorn and stare at a fucking screen into some bloody distraction.
these critics have no idea what people fucking like or what's entertaining to anyone.
honestly if there was any justice in this world (i know there isn't but let's fantasize for a little), these people's jobs would be reduced to picking a number from 1 to 5 to rate the movie and writing 3 sentences explaining why they did or didn't like it. That's all the public needs, that's all anyone needs to know. instead we get these English Degree dropouts to write short fucking novels about social commentary in cinema that would take more time to read than to watch a fucking movie.
>>63533758
>all these reviews just read like the writer is choking their own dick.
They are all from the same reviewer. Most critics don't write like that. You must be new here if you don't know Armond.
>>63533375
This is bad writing Armond, you are better than this t b h
>>63533788
I've read this guys reviews, and while he's more pedantic than most, he's just a part of a bigger problem. Which is critics who just stroke their own dicks instead of giving people a straightforward response to the question "should I watch this movie"?
>>63533728
All but the most absurdist movies have a political or social leaning. Be it just through the way characters act or speak, how the good guy acts in comparison to the badguy and how certain things are shot.
>>63533753
>/tv/ gets mad because they were excited for a movie that turns out to be a SJW trojan horse
>>63533753
What do you expect? Iñárritu is pretty left-wing.
>>63533838
That doesn't mean it was intentional or that it's the only important part of the movie.
>>63533375
I don't agree with the man all the time but all his reviews has at least one relevant point about the movie he is talking about.
>mad Max is just a rehash of 2 and felt like what 3 should have been
>In Bruges guys don't look threatening or look like killers
>The main actor in creed acts like a real well mannered black person instead of someone like Wesley Snipes who acts like what white people want to see how black people act
>Zack Snyder manages to create an aesthetic that makes the movie feel like a motion comic but others criticize him but praise dull looking movies like Avengers and Ironman.
>>63533931
It's always intentional at a level. Like Fincher said, even though I don't think he's a great director, "The director can do anything", control every aspect of the film.
Ignoring the politics of a film is a no-no. I agree with you that it's not the most important part of a movie, the visuals and storytelling are also a tremendous part of it. But Armond isn't the type of reviewer who looks at those aspects unless they are a tremendous part of the movie. See his Sicario review and he goes over the way it's shot. But a lot of movies don't use the visuals to help portray the themes or story well anymore. So it becomes less important to mention it.
If you want a reviewer who does a "Is it good/bad, should you see it?" I'd still be very particular in finding a reviewer who reflects your tastes. Armond White is for the vast majority not that type of reviewer.
>>63533825
If you want a should you watch it or not just go watch youtube or some shit.
Tons of faggots will of
>Holyshit that movie was so fucking awesome and it's was so well shot. The performances were all so good an the movie had me tearing up a few times. 8/10
>>63533825
>Which is critics who just stroke their own dicks instead of giving people a straightforward response to the question "should I watch this movie"?
its like you missed the entire point of being a critic
What the fuck? I read the "review" twice and I still don't understand if he liked the movie or not.
>>63534771
the word "review" does not imply a "yay" or "nay". His aim is to analyze the film, it doesn't matter if he likes it or not
Most people watched western for the shooting, riding, explosion, and stunts of falling from the roof. The very same people switched to sci fi and cape shits for these things too.
If there ever was a golden age of westerns it was an age of plebs nothing unlike us
The phrase "Obama Western" doesnt really make much sense, it seems like something he thought of and it made him giggle so he decided to spin his review around it. I get what he means by it but the phrase is so ridiculous and partisan that it distracts from a very good film review.
Having not seen the movie, it seems that White took personally what he perceived as the film's social agenda and commentary. Similar to people on this board who are (trolling or not) focusing on Boyega's casting in TFA.
I generally agree with some or most of what Armond says but I really hope I like the Revenant. I was and still am very excited for this movie, if not for the visuals alone.
>>63533375
>glass's
Nope
But what about the bear/Leo rape?
>>63534878
Most of his other reviews I just went through state his opinion quite clearly. This one I'm having trouble deciphering.
>>63534771
>not understanding based Armond
pleb detected.
>>63535096
>>63534771
>>63534878
>>63535086
i think what may be more confusing about this review is that he spends a bit too much time taking issue with what he imagines the film's political agenda to be.
>>63533758
>honestly if there was any justice in this world (i know there isn't but let's fantasize for a little), these people's jobs would be reduced to picking a number from 1 to 5 to rate the movie
you're in luck, rotten tomatoes already exists. there is already a service that frees you of the burden of having to read people's thoughts and just gives you a number so you can spend your $10 on the 83% movie instead of the 77% one. the world already perfectly caters to your needs, so i don't get why you're still frustrated.
meanwhile people will continue to talk and think and write about movies because that makes movies more fun, not less.
>>63533375
>The Revenant, the new Leonardo DiCaprio western, bids to be also the last western
Jesus christ these people get paid to write stuff like this.
>>63535158
White's a legend. He's the ultimate intellectual contrarian.
>>63533931
>this is a fun, different way to look at movie X
>whoa, stop. you have no proof that this perspective existed in the brain of the makers of movie X while they were producing movie X.
who cares? more importantly, why do you people hate fun?
>>63533453
>>63533403
>>63533375
So its just liberal/progressive trash then. Looks like ill be taking this off my list of must sees
Armond still got it
>When trendsetter Lee drops phrases like “underground economy” into his film or stages fake global-protest scenes or various harangues (Angela Bassett cussing out an insurance salesman comes the closest to vernacular brio), he enshrines the same chaos as the politicized Internet. Lee speciously endorses the meme of Cusack’s Father Corridan, “Mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow.” (And what does “mass incarceration” have to do with brothers killing brothers?) The fact is, social media are the new Jim Crow; that’s where “separate but equal” superficial social griping has created hair-raising conditions of political inutility and immature sloganeering — like “Black Lives Matter,” which turns blacks into fodder for political manipulation. Now anarchists, sex militants, and media pundits can be seen to equally indulge in civil disobedience and intimate betrayal, all contributing to social chaos. Chi-Raq is merely a symptom of this ongoing catastrophe.
>>63535018
>The phrase "Obama Western" doesnt really make much sense,
it's just a shorter way to say Modern Liberal Capitalist Western
>>63535185
>contrarian
so you don't get him then
>>63535158
Seriously when are people going to stop saying that each new Western is "the LAST WESTERN"
>>63535346
he does run a deep contrarian streak against the established film community
>>63535676
Hardly an authentic contrarian when all he does is state the facts of the matter and literally everybody else in the field is either on the take or is just plain uneducated about film. If there was a wall painted red and I named it as such, but then 99 other people came and said the wall was painted blue, would I be a contrarian despite being the one sane man?
>>63535742
Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm... no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...
>>63535742
>babbys first foray into solipsism
>>63534771
It's just a mixed review.
>>63535123
AW does this a lot, often with films that don't really seem to have any politics.
>>63535912
>often with films that don't really seem to have any politics.
That's why I like Armond. It is literally impossible for there to be a film without strong political influence, whether the film makers are aware of that themselves or not. No one else is critiquing Pixar flicks from a standpoint of ideology, even though that's a far more insightful assessment of the film than "did they tick all of the boxes and make something that conforms to the formal "meme" of "good".
>>63536009
>more insightful
no, insightful would be if he actually discussed the ''art'' of the work of art. instead he just writes as if he is analyzing a politician's speech. it's basic, it's simpleminded.
this cultural relevancy shit is the worst.
>>63533758
4/5 rant
>>63536620
What doth a good movie?
>>63533758
implying that films don't have subtext or deeper meanings
fucking pleb
