Black Rose

The Revenant (2015). A wilderness guide (Leonardo Dicaprio) left for dead after being mauled by a bear goes on a revenge quest against the trapper (Tom Hardy) who killed his son.

As suggested by that summary, this extremely whumpy, if you're into that, to a point well beyond realism. Somehow our guy Glass struggles through total wilderness for tens of miles with myriad open wounds and a broken leg, and rather than dying of deprivation, exposure, or infection, he actually gets better. By the end of the movie he's barely even hobbling anymore. Also, the people in this movie spend so much time tromping through and even immersed in barely-melted icewater that I expected them to either die of hypothermia or lose some toes to frostbite in the first twenty minutes.

This is also an incredibly linear movie. There are no surprises here, no unexpected decisions or developments. No depths of character are revealed. It's also incredibly male-centric. The only female character with lines is Glass's wife, who's dead before the movie even starts, and the only other woman on screen is a Native woman-shaped Macguffin who gets raped on screen, then rescued, but never gets to speak. Even worse than that, to me, is that we get nothing of Glass's relationship with his half-Pawnee son at all. Other than simmering resentment over unjust treatment, we don't have any sense of the kid's personality or Glass's dynamic with him, which makes for a weaker movie and also makes it hard to believe in the movie's pretensions of giving a shit about the effect of European colonization on Native peoples.

I watched this for the scenery, and I will say it was great on that front. Lots of snowy crags, excellent! I also really enjoyed Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson, who round out the cast.

Cannot believe this beat Mad Max: Fury Road for best picture.

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Stalker (1979). Wikipedia summary: a man called a stalker guides two clients through a hazardous wasteland to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where there supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires.

This is a Soviet movie by director Andrei Tarkovsky, who also did Solaris. If I'd realized that, I could have better set my expectations for this movie. I watched it because the premise gave me cosmic horror vibes and specifically because it felt like a precursor to a bunch of more recent cosmic horror that I've loved or at least loved concepts from, including Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy and movies like A Dark Song, Malefique, YellowBrickRoad, and Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made. (If you're not familiar, this a hilariously idiosyncratic list of widely varying quality, lol. There's a reason you probably haven't heard of most of those.) Maybe, I said, this is the original source of these other things I love!

Unfortunately, while this does promise many horrors, it delivers none of them. Very possibly it was an inspiration for those other things, but in the sense that other people watched this and were like, "okay but what if this were actually a horror movie."

The first hour or so is my favorite; I was genuinely shocked when the sepia filters of the real world give way to full color in the Zone, and there's some great tension as our stalker navigates the Zone using methods that hint at incomprehensible dangers. However, the longer we go without encountering any of those dangers, the harder it is to believe in them. By the time we finally arrive at the possibly magical room, I was more than half convinced that the dangers were all imagined, and the glimpse of two decaying skeletons came too late to change my mind. And then! We DON'T EVEN GO INTO THE ROOM. NO ONE GOES INTO THE ROOM. *flips over table*

Tarkovsky was not trying to make the movie I wanted to watch; he was much more interested in big philosophical questions and really long takes, and I gather this is considered an all-time classic for those reasons.

This was apparently an adaptation-in-name-only of the Strugatsky Brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, which I happen to have already have on hold at the library for unrelated reasons. I'm interested to see how it compares.

Oscar-nominated movies I've watched: Frankenstein, Sinners, Weapons, The Ugly Stepsister(!!!!), The Secret Agent, Marty Supreme.

After the nominations came out, I was like "Wow, I've seen so many of these!" Friends, I literally had only seen the four(!!) horror movies, but between Frankenstein and Sinners they were nominated for so many things that it felt like I knew more movies than I really did.

Snubs: I didn't see it until after the nominees were announced (and neither did anyone else, apparently), but man, Testament of Ann Lee should have been up for Best Score and Best Actress at the very least. Best Picture too tbh.

Who I'm rooting for: I want Sinners to pick up a bunch of hardware, most of all Best Picture, but also Delroy Lindo for Best Supporting Actor, Wunmi Mosaku for Best Supporting Actress, Best Score, and Best Original Screenplay. My second choice in any category where they're going head to head would be Marty Supreme, and Chalamet is probably my pick for Best Actor.

My favorite story of these awards: The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian-language horror film, getting nominated for Best Hair and Makeup. There's no way it's going to win, but how did it even get nominated?! I hope the nomination got some more eyes on it, especially since it pairs so well with The Substance, which was nominated last year.

Rotten tomatoes: Frankenstein just wasn't all that. It was long, obvious, and self-important, and I hated the design of the Creature, which was basically just body paint and bad hair. I wouldn't mind it winning for something like Production Design or Costuming, and but that's about it. Props to Elordi for snagging an acting nom, though.

And take this one with a grain of salt, because I haven't watched it, but every Black person whose review I've come across haaaaaaated One Battle After Another. I think FD Signifier has put out three different videos or streams at this point about how much he hated the treatment of Black women in it. I was already primed to skip it because I disliked the trailer; in particular, the father/daughter bickering about pronouns for her nonbinary friend really hit me the wrong way. So I personally am rooting for any movie but that one in every category (esp against Sean Penn for Best Supporting Actor, because fuck that dude).

Marty Supreme (2025). A sleezy little punk in the 50s exploits everyone he knows or can finagle a meeting with in order to pursue his dream of becoming the world's best ping pong player.

I reeeeeally went back and forth on whether I wanted to see this, because everyone was like "Did you like Uncut Gems, the two-hour anxiety attack? It's like Uncut Gems." In general, I would not describe entertainment that makes me anxious to be a big draw! (I'm not talking about horror, that's TOTALLY DIFFERENT lol.) This is why I will never watch The Bear or The Pitt! But I finally got myself to go to a pre-Oscar showing of this because I enjoy Timothee Chalamet a lot, and I had a good time.

This movie is a RIDE. I have a pretty severe embarassment squick, but weirdly this rarely hit it. I only had to hide under my blanket in the theater maybe twice. Marty is just the worst but in a trainwreck way, so there's this sense that it doesn't really matter what he does or what happens to him, because it'll be engaging, not least because Chalamet is phenomenal. One of the low-key funniest lines is mid-movie when his uncle who owns a shoe story tells him that he's a fantastic shoe salesman. No shit, of course he is! It also helps that this is more of a black comedy than a ~drama, and while sometimes plot developments are the natural consequences of Marty's actions, other times they're utterly batshit that no reasonable person could have predicted.

CW for an ongoing stressful situation with a dog, but as far as I understand its last appearance, the dog is fine, unlike pretty much everyone else Marty so much as speaks to in this entire movie.

In conclusion, this is very much not a movie for everyone, but I had fun.