Blimey a film reviewer who isn’t sucked in by Oscar nominations that makes a refreshing change.
That article is laughably bad. Clearly the writer has a bee in her bonnet
that’s a fate reserved for one of the two women who appear fleetingly on screen. (The other one is slaughtered. But don’t worry, you have no idea who she is so you won’t actually care.)
The “other one” was DiCaprio’s character’s wife. If she failed to understand that then she should resort to reviewing Adam Sandler films
The woman is not actually raped, of course. She’s faux raped. Because this is what we call acting. And because The Revenant is what we call entertainment. There’s a crucial difference between us and the people we are currently trying to blow to smithereens with million-pound missiles: we choose to pay to watch women being pretend raped rather than watching women being actually raped for free.
Is she somehow trying to suggest “people” (let’s face it, she’s having a dig a men here) will enjoy the seconds long rape scene? Or it will not even register with them? She fails to mention the rape victim cuts the rapists balls off with a knife just a few seconds later.
I wasn’t entertained. Can you tell? I saw it at a press screening two weeks before Christmas when the streets were filled with twinkly fairy lights and I tripped past a Salvation Army band playing Silent Night to spend what felt like several weeks in a dark room waiting – oh dear God, do you wait – for Leo to just get on and hack the other man to death so I could finally go home.
Perhaps a never ending loop of Love Actually would be more up her street with it’s faux depiction of London at Xmas.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s idea was for it to look as real as possible. Which would have been magnificent if there was something in the way of a story or any meditation on the nature of retribution or anyone – anyone – that you could give one toss about, but there’s not
I honestly think she must have fallen asleep or hasn’t seen at all. The entire revenge was driven by the murder of DiCaprio’s son. Apparently infanticide is something “you could give one toss about”
And in all probability, it will win every Oscar going. Critics have lavishly praised its “visceral” imagery, its “authentic” feel; it is, they say, “immersive” film-making at its finest. Though, arguably, not as immersive as putting a camera in a cage and then setting a man on fire. Have you seen that one? Where the man is burned alive? It’s not by González Iñárritu, but Isis. It wasn’t nominated for anything but the pain is even more real, more visceral, more – what was the word, thrilling? – than DiCaprio’s.
So we should ban films altogether because bad stuff happens, or maybe just make nice silly rom-coms. One of the key attractions of cinema is escapism.
But then, all of Isis’s video output is inspired by our own entertainments – in its subject matter, its soundtrack, its editing. Islamic State hasn’t invented new narrative tropes, it’s simply lifted them straight from Hollywood. All it’s done is to go one step further, trumped Hollywood at its own game. It has seen what we want, what we thrill to, and given it to us. If there were grizzly bears in the Syrian desert, there’s no doubt that they’d put one in a cage and let us see what it really looks like when one rips a man apart.
ISIS, ISIS, ISIS. I fail to see the connection here other than poor clickbait
You might as well wait for it to come out on Netflix and fall asleep on your own sofa
Wrong. The visual nature of it means it needs to be seen on the big screen
our choice, though perhaps we could all try and act a little less surprised by the Islamic State’s next video spectacular. Or ask ourselves why pain and suffering and brutalising women and pointless, fetishistic violence – when it’s done by Hollywood – wins awards.
Maybe some of us can differentiate between fantasy and reality. I’m assuming she would have written a similar article if, for example, Saving Private Ryan had just came out with that opening battle scene?
She just sounds like someone deliberately going against popular opinion and dropping in the current zeitgeist buzzwords in a tawdry clickbait attempt