I'm amazed to say that I've seen 6 out of the 8 best picture nominees this year, probably because I live two mins walk downhill from the Embassy, and can get those cheap spark tickets (so I'm complicit with those awful ads where they ask you to tweet your last twit, etc. Sorry).
Yesterday we saw The Revenant, which is really best described as very long, very beautiful wildlife documentary about Leonardo DiCaprio. He crawls around, hurts himself, falls off things, grunts, finds it hard to get up, hurts himself again... I'd like to see the version with David Attenborough narration. It'd help. DiCaprio has about as many lines as the bear.
It's so relentlessly grim and grimy, I've decided that The Revenant is actually a comedy. We saw the Peanuts movie a few nights before, which is another story about a guy to whom bad things happen and continue to happen. Charlie Brown is meant to be a comic character. When Charlie Brown wishes on a star (as the only dependable thing in the universe) and the star responds by falling out of the sky, that's funny. When Hugh Glass (after an hour of escalating misfortunes) rides his horse over a cliff, then cuts it open and makes a sleeping bag out of it, that's got to be comedy too, right? In any case, I had to laugh.
Ralph
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