For the week of April 18th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing the violent adventure drama The Revenant to Blu-ray. The Revenant is the latest feature from Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and unfortunately, it's a return to the kind of work Iñárritu was doing before his Best Picture winner Birdman. In films like Babel, 21 Grams, and Biutiful, Iñárritu's clear directorial virtuosity can't mask the overwhelming pretension and self-importance at work; his films are often monolith-thick but nowhere near as deep as they think they are, and while Birdman suffered from some of the same concerns (particularly a needlessly condescending attitude towards critics and comic-book movies), its relative fleetness and humor undercut Iñárritu's worst impulses. Not so here. The Revenant is a punishing, unpleasant, and ultimately kiddie-pool shallow venture that bullies the audience into something resembling awe. The subject matter is promising: after a brutal savaging at the claws of a grizzly bear, expert fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, doing the kind of stuff that made Johnny Knoxville famous and picking up an Academy Award for his troubles) is almost ready to die, but then duplicitous confederate John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) murders Glass's son (Forrest Goodluck), and the wounded trapper musters all his strength to make it across the frozen tundra of the Northern Plains and hunt down Fitzgerald. Sounds good, right? To quote Gertrude Stein, there's no there there. This is the kind of film that would have starred Charles Bronson and run no more than a hundred minutes if it came out in the 1960s or 1970s, and to be fair, a ruthless editor could winnow down The Revenant into a tight ninety-plus-minute thriller without doing any violence to the story. But that would mean cutting out the interminable nature shots, the whispery flashbacks (courtesy of DiCaprio's dead wife, of course), or the many scenes of Glass grunting and dragging himself towards the camera, and you can sense that Iñárritu has believes that these hollow poetic flourishes possess more resonance than they deserve. It's not that I'm against reaching for the transcendent - Terrence Malick, for example, is a master of weaving such moments into a coherent thematic whole. But Iñárritu has no sense of how to bridge the two realms he's constructed here - the ethereal and the visceral - and so The Revenant lurches unsteadily between the two, with dreamy visual meditations on the night sky, for example, slammed against a CGI-assisted horse-fall off a cliff or Glass's gut-churning attack against a rapist (compare The Revenant to, say, Malick's masterful The Thin Red Line, and the newer film seems all the more lacking). Frankly, The Revenant is at its most compelling whenever it embraces its violent, pulpy side. Iñárritu has clearly picked up a few tricks from his friend and filmmaking peer Alfonso Cuarón, given how well he's appropriately the sinuous, gliding panic of Cuarón's Gravity or Children of Men for The Revenant's terrifying CGI bear fight or the opening Arikara Indian attack against Glass's band of trappers. However, Iñárritu also can't resist scolding his audience, and he saves his most obnoxious gambit for the big conclusion. It should come as no surprise that after more than two hours of violent waiting, Glass finally reaches his quarry, but after letting the two duke it out in a savagely gruesome brawl, Iñárritu has a character literally condemn Glass - and the audience, by proxy - for staking so much of our interest in more bloodshed. It's a cheap, phony move, given that a) the movie only snaps to life during the violent scenes and b) this whole end fight was an invention of Iñárritu and screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Now, I realize I'm in the minority with my opinion, and even I have to acknowledge that some of The Revenant works. Emmanuel Lubezki contributes maybe the most stunning cinematographic effort of his career, and we get nice performances from Hardy and Will Poulter (as a young, morally conflicted Jim Bridger). Still, something about The Revenant still scans as irredeemably smug, and all the superb craftsmanship in the world can't disguise that sensation.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is...surprisingly languid...especially given some of its hyperbolic set pieces. But that very ambience is what gives the film some of its undeniable stateliness. It's certainly arguable that some of the sprawling narrative could have been efficiently trimmed to no real detriment of the film, especially in the last half hour or so, but the slow, steady unfolding of Glass' struggle to survive seems to reflect the timelessness of the environment in which it takes place. Another rather interesting element to The Revenant is its depiction of both Caucasians and Native Americans. If one tracks the general history of the western film in American cinematic history, it's not too much of a stretch to state that probably through the forties (at least) a 'Cowboys vs. Indians' ethos tended to predominate, with the 'Indians' regularly being the villains of the piece. A reassessment of sorts started occurring in later decades where the interloping (largely) white pioneers are portrayed as more scheming and duplicitous, and the Native Americans assume a decidedly more noble status. The Revenant tends to suggest that there is good and evil in any given demographic. Therefore, the film has both saintly and sinning individuals in all groups. There are heroic Caucasians and Native Americans, and characters in both collectives who almost invite hissing and booing due to their despicable actions. That said, it's not hard to see that the film's sympathies lie largely with the Native American population who even at this relatively early point are seeing their lands and livelihoods being 'stolen' (as the Arikari chief puts it) from them, and whose violent tendencies are therefore probably better understood than those of the 'intruders.'"
Far more engaging a tale of violence and death is Acorn and the BBC's newest miniseries version of And Then There Were None. Some might argue against another screen adaptation of Agatha Christie's mystery thriller, which follows ten strangers on a secluded island as they try to figure out who's killing them off one-by-one; we've had more than a few respectable versions so far, including René Clair's 1945 iteration, George Pollack's junky-but-enjoyable Ten Little Indians from 1965, and a host of outright imitators, the most notable of which is Wes Craven's 1995 horror hit Scream, which ups the gore and self-referentiality while keeping Christie's elegant construction (not least of which is her ending, which still retains the power to shock in any context). It's saying something, then, that this new And Then There Were None might be the best, most enjoyable one yet. In expanding the tale to (slightly) super-sized length (without commercials, And Then There Were None is just under three hours), director Craig Viveiros and screenwriter Sarah Phelps have provided one showcase after another for the members of their main cast. The film sports a Murderer's Row (ha ha) of British-Australian talent that includes Toby Stephens, Sam Neill, Noah Taylor, Burn Gorman, Douglas Booth, and Anna Maxwell Martin, with top honors going to Poldark's Aidan Turner as a dashing war criminal, Miranda Richardson as a brutally haughty society woman, newcomer Maeve Dermody as an anxious former governess, and Game of Thrones' Charles Dance as a coldly pragmatic judge. One of Christie's greatest conceits was how ruthlessly she undermined stereotypes in her original novel - the longer we stay on the island, the more we realize that nobody is all that innocent, especially the most affable of the group - and this new adaptation affords the actors ample space to root into the contradictions at the heart of their characters. It's almost a shame, then, when they start dropping dead, but the murder aspect heightens the proceedings in terms of both traditional thrills (besides the atmospheric lensings in and around the island, the new And Then There Were None is bloodier than I expected) and black comedy (Gorman, Stephens, and Taylor's characters score the biggest laughs in the grimmest situations). Everything culminates in a pitch-black shocker of an ending: anyone familiar with how the stage version ends or even Christie's source material might be surprised with how grim things get. Still, that darkness feels organic. These are bad people, suffering bad ends. It's a tribute to everyone involved with this miniseries that we enjoy their express elevator to Hell.
Along those lines: welcome to Scream Factory's new HD upgrade of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Director Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the most celebrated horror films of all time, and part of its power comes from Hooper's suggestive power. He creates such an uncomfortable, unpleasant horror milieu that he doesn't even need to show that much in terms of graphic violence - even though The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is only slightly more violent than Psycho, the charnelhouse atmosphere conjures up far worse in our imagination than we actually see. This 1986 sequel, on the other hand? If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shields our eyes from the worst atrocities, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 rips off our eyelids so we can't miss a thing. Hooper's work is genuinely unhinged here. Working with the great FX artist Tom Savini, he conjures up one revolting nightmare after another, from the car-chase/chainsaw-attack that opens the film to the nightmarish reappearance of a man who's been partially skinned and is still alive. Savini was on a roll in the '70s and '70s, but while Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead get all the attention, his Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is just as inspiring. Like those films, though, we can stomach the carnage because the surrounding movie is often maniacally funny. No longer are we following a group of young adults strolling blithely to the slaughter: our "hero" is former Texas Ranger Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper) as he tries to avenge the murder of his nephew in the first movie, and if the quotes weren't enough, then Hopper's presence alone should indicate that he's just as crazy as any of the chainsaw-wielding cannibals cutting a bloody swath (here played by Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley, and Bill Johnson's childlike psychotic Leatherface) through Texas. Their showdown builds and builds until by the end, they're dueling with chainsaws inside an abandoned amusement park, and through the looking glass we've gone. I get that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 rubs some people the wrong way. It's all rampaging excess and hysteria - if anything, the female lead here (Caroline Williams) is even more psychologically devastated by the end than Marilyn Burns' heroine from the first movie - and it lacks the relative precision and restraint of the first film. But it's also breathtakingly paced (this is the best Tobe Hooper film from the 1980s that wasn't directed by Steven Spielberg) and frequently, mordantly hilarious, with a savage satirical bent that recalls some lunatic conflation of Hunter Thompson and Jonathan Swift. I think it's one of the great horror films of the 1980s.
Finally, HBO Home Entertainment is bringing Silicon Valley: The Complete Second Season to Blu-ray. Series creator Mike Judge is no amateur when it comes to television sitcoms - he's made it into the pantheon of great TV on the strength of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill alone - and Silicon Valley continues this trend with its journey of a painfully awkward computer programmer (Thomas Middleditch) and his vaguely hostile group of roommates/partners (T.J. Miller, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani, and Zach Woods) as they try to beat a menacing, Google-like company (personified by a very funny Matt Ross) in the development of a revolutionary compression software. There's so much potential for failure here, in that a) David Fincher aside, computer programming isn't inherently dramatic and that b) the premise seems ripe for the kinds of easy geek bait that The Big Bang Theory peddles out on a weekly basis. But Judge is such a master of mining humor from the tiniest, most idiosyncratic forms of human behavior that none of the jokes hit us in the way we're expecting - he hews to the type of time-delay comedy that has you laughing harder two weeks later - and his own experience in the programming world (plus the suggestions of his Mountain-View-based technical consultants) gives the humor a richness the authenticity that makes it funnier and wonkier. He's also not interested in valorizing the tech lifestyle - Silicon Valley works so well because of how acutely it sees the potential for failure. Even after winning at the Tech Crunch Disrupt challenge, Middleditch and his team can't seem to catch a break, whether it's losing the support of one angel investor (the offbeat tech magnate Peter Gregory, as a result of actor Christopher Evan Welch's death due to lung-cancer-related complications) for another horrible one (Chris Diamantopoulos' wonderfully douche-y billionaire), struggling to ensure 4K streaming resolution for the least sexy of all Internet events (the hatching of a California condor), or going to court with only the help of an unflappably deadpan/depraved former lawyer (Matt McCoy, in a scene-stealing turn). So far, what we have here ranks as some of Judge's best work.