Basic Reviews of Potential Oscar Contenders part 1: Western Torture and Gore
Oscar Shmoscar, the best picture of 2015 is Mad Max: Fury Road.
We think of these three as the Western Torture Porn Trilogy of 2015.
The Revenant. Leonardo DiCaprio crawls through the spectacular wilderness in terrible torment for two hours and 36 minutes, periodically interrupted by mumbling Tom Hardy. Para n’yo nang awa, bigyan n’yo na yan ng Oscar, baka ano pa’ng gawin niyan. Wasn’t it enough that he crawled on his face in The Wolf of Wall Street? Hardy is continuing his experiments with unintelligible speech that began with Bane in Dark Knight Rises (or even earlier). Was that rampaging bear a film critic?
Bone Tomahawk addresses the crying need for westerns with cannibals that we thought had been filled by Ravenous. Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox saddle up in pursuit of troglodyte Native Americans who have abducted some white people. For dinner. When we were not laughing out loud we were wincing with disgust. Of the rivers of blood and guts shed in this movie, the image we cannot unsee is that of someone chopped in half. Oh and Patrick Wilson limps across the dry and scraggly wilderness in terrible torment for half an hour.
The Hateful Eight. It’s The Bad, The Ugly, and The Very Ugly. In his previous films Quentin Tarantino set the bar for gore, violence and offensive language very high, and here he vaults over it with ease. Is it worth it? Set in post-Civil War USA, it’s a clever commentary on race relations in contemporary America. Structurally it’s very similar to one of Tarantino’s early films, Reservoir Dogs. It’s often hilarious, but we felt guilty for laughing. Kurt Russell has cornered the market on western roles; he is joined by Samuel L. Jackson, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh who should be compelled to appear in more movies, Walton Goggins from Justified, and Channing Tatum, whose arrival we greeted with “Ay! May artista!”
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 6th, 2016 at 00:14
Yes! Mad Max is my favourite too for 2015. Runner-up is Tangerine.
January 6th, 2016 at 00:24
Yours truly attended the 70mm Roadshow presentation of The Hateful Eight yesterday. Thank goodness for intermissions–at least Tarantino had mercy on this movie-goer’s bladder (it was a problem I had seeing The Force Awakens the week before, and not wanting to miss a single frame of footage). It was also nice to receive a souvenir programme as I entered the screening room.
I totally enjoyed the dialogue and the exchanges between characters. I now realize that the movie poster kind of gave a clue about an important part of the story.
January 6th, 2016 at 06:35
Sana ibigay na nila kay Leonardo DiCaprio ang best actor? Bigay na bigay na ang acting nya sa The Revenant. Or baka ma Annette Bening na naman sya.
January 7th, 2016 at 19:11
If Ennio Morricone will not win Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight, I will shoplift all his availabe CDs at Odyssey and AstroPlus!
January 7th, 2016 at 21:54
lean: They still have Ennio Morricone CDs?!
His competition will be John Williams and Ryuichi Sakamoto (whose score is an hommage to Morricone).
January 8th, 2016 at 18:06
Surprisingly, our barely-surviving record stores have stocks of Ennio Morricone CDs ( a best-of compilation and Yo-yo Ma’s recordings of his film scores).
More surprisingly, Ennio Morricone HAS NOT WON an Academy award for this category ( although he was nominated five times already). It is a criminal offense akin to Bjork not winning any Grammys after being nominated 13 times!
January 9th, 2016 at 11:51
lean: Roger Deakins, 0 for 12.
January 9th, 2016 at 12:31
Yes…Deakins. I love his work on “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” but how can he win versus the work of a man who did “Bride of Chucky”?