“The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you.”

This was my first reaction, posted 32 days ago, to Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s immersive masterpiece. The word is out on this puppy — great but no day at the beach — so I wonder how many will be going to see it today. It’s certainly no Christmas heartwarmer. But cineastes will go, of course, especially those who have as little affection for Christmas as I do. Please share your reactions and report about how crowded the room was, and what the vibe felt like on the way out.

From Alan Scherstuhl’s Village Voice review: “What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of computers and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself, rather than just standing against a digitized mock-up of one.

I’m not coughing as much today — that’s something. And I don’t feel as achey. But it’s still a struggle to get up and get some water out of the fridge. I’ll try to eat something but then I’ll lose interest. A friend told me to order a couple of quarts of chicken soup, but I haven’t touched it since it was delivered last night. I slept for 12 hours straight, if you want to call it that. Illness is a jailer. It’s incredibly boring to just lie here, but at the same time I can’t seem to make myself do anything else. Even watching a film seems too demanding.

On top of everything else the thought of not posting anything is terrifying. My whole life rests upon this daily endeavor.

The last time I felt this weak and poisoned was when I caught a fever during Sundance ’08, and it took a major Herculean effort to force myself to sit up and write something about the death of poor Heath Ledger, whom I knew very slightly. 

“So sorry you’re ill,” a friend has written. “Drink gallons of water. Try and get high alkaline water. It kills bacteria in the system. Whole Foods will have Essence water 9.5 or Essentia water 10. Pavilions has Alkaline water 8.5. And in the mainstream Fiji is the best high alkaline at about 7.5. It will cleanse, purify and clean out your entire system. Gallons! (At least buy distilled water if you can’t get alkaline.)

I tried to watch Orson Welles‘ Chimes at Midnight in a Manhattan repertory cinema (the Carnegie Hall Cinema? The Thalia?) in the late ’70s. But the black-and-white photography looked like shit, and the sound — poorly recorded and not even synched at times — drove me crazy. And Welles’ performance as Falstaff struck me as overly boisterous and taken with largeness (cackly voice, exaggerated gestures). This plus the fast, crazy-quilt cutting and the feeling of this splotchy, under-budgeted film having been stuck together with chewing gum…it was just too much.

About 30 minutes in I decided Chimes at Midnight was the second most unpleasant Shakespearean film I’d ever sat through (the champion being Peter Brook‘s black-and-white King Lear with Paul Scofield), and so I bailed. “Good riddance,” I told myself.

But I’m certainly willing to give it another go when a restored, properly sound-synched version, courtesy of Janus Film and the Criterion guys, appears on Bluray sometime in ’16. On second thought I can’t see buying the Bluray (my initial experience was too irritating) but I’d go if Chimes plays at a niche venue in Los Angeles. The film will screen at NYC’s Film Forum January 1st through 12th.