nibbling at the oscar bait

i went to see the the revenant. it delivers as expected: the scenery is amazing, the cinematography is nifty, and the brutality is brutal. watching hugh glass (dicaprio's character) get mauled by a bear was viscerally disturbing. i think, though, that tom hardy had a stronger performance as john fitzgerald than dicaprio did as glass.

if you like scenery and have a high tolerance for violence, see it in a theater. otherwise, it may simply not be worth seeing.


the short film collections my local art house theater gets (live action and animation, but not documentaries) weren't bad, but i don't think they're worth the full price of admission. only two of the live action films, day one and stutterer really stood out in my mind. the other three are clearly well-made, but didn't grab me.

ditto for the animation. i really like bear story -- it's a cleverly done story within a story. prologue is a tour de force of hand-drawn animation, but it's so violent, it was played at the end of the collection, after the filler and a pair of title-card warnings that it really wasn't suitable for children.

the filler struck me as more interesting: there's a comedy piece called something like catch it and a fable(?) called the short story of fox and mouse. both are computer animation. the former is entertaining slapstick and the latter simply looks good. they may not be great cinema™, but unlike the short animations i didn't name, they don't seem to be striving overly hard to be it.

unless you're really excited by short films, wait for these collections to be available on DVD or streaming video.