As you may know, The Family has been busily investigating the export of a few substances to China...Manuka Honey, a range of Blackmores and Swisse health supplements, etc basically because of the price of these items in China....i.e....ridiculous... and it's all ridiculous, to me anyway...especially as none of them actually work. But, that's not the point at all. We are talking about Lifestyle Health, not functional Nutritional Science. After all, what would real scientists know about anything? the best way for China to get supplies is to quickly buy up the Blackmores and Swisse companies and brands/labels.... and produce the same worthless high priced nicely packaged rubbish in China itself....then they will export it to us. Add a touch of ginseng and goji berries, and Bob's your uncle. Massive profits...no responsibility.

All up, The Review of The Revenant: Well worth watching once.

The Revenant reminded me of another film also...Legends of the Fall with Brad Pitt, Mr Bear, and the American Indian emotive lingo/gibberish. Now, that was a great and complex film. The more I think of the Revenant, the more I feel it drew its meaning, and a lot more, from other films: 1: Castaway...the lone survivor battlign against all odds. 2: Legends of the Fall....wrestling with Bears with mystical American Indian evocations. 3: Kurosawa's epic Derzu Usala...the timeless immense beauty of the REAL Far North...whether it be Russia or Canada...and the results of experience. But The Revenant is still a good film. I think in the way that Castaway is a good film...it's beautiful, brutal and is designed to get someone an Oscar to increase the number of people who will watch it.... but like Castaway, Jesus, I could only watch that once...same with The Revenant. Wondrous films like Legends of the Fall and Derzu Usala...these don't have an expiry date...they are art in film. You come back to them and enjoy the wonder of them.

a much better film than the Revenant, although the Revenant is grand.

I found it! Akira Kurosawa's breathtakingly brilliant film, 1975: Dersu Uzala (Russian: Дерсу Узала, Japanese: デルス·ウザーラ; alternate U.S. title: Dersu Uzala: The Hunter) is a 1975 Soviet-Japanese co-production film directed by Akira Kurosawa, his first non-Japanese-language film and his first and only 70mm film. The film won the Golden Prize and the Prix FIPRESCI at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival[1] and the 1976 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.[2] The film is based on the 1923 memoir Dersu Uzala (which took his name by the native trapper) by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, about his exploration of the Sikhote-Alin region of the Russian Far East over the course of multiple expeditions in the early 20th century.

The film is almost entirely shot outdoors in the Russian Far East wilderness. The film explores the theme of a native of the forests who is fully integrated into his environment, leading a style of life that will inevitably be destroyed by the advance of civilization. It is also about the growth of respect and deep friendship between two men of profoundly different backgrounds, and about the difficulty of coping with the loss of strength and ability that comes with old age.

REVIEW: The Revenant: Leonardo de Caprio et al

A nice day at work...one of those pleasant existential days where things just cruised along...not really having to be ready for anything etc...somewhat different to the film The Revenant last night. 

But you learn things from films...like, if a bear rips your throat out, to fix up the gaping tracheotomy, all you have to do is apply a sprinkle of gunpowder to the separated integumentary surfaces on your throat, and light it. 
I'll remember that neat trick. Perfect cauterisation.
Brilliant filming, so brilliant that within 20 hours you've put the gross brutality of it aside, and there's just that stunning photography of wondrous places. or maybe we have grown so accustomed to brutality that we don't register it any more.Whatever...
But still, you take care out there in the frozen forest or at work....you never know...

Sure, it owes a lot to Castawa, but probably more to Kurosawa's film about a hunter in Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century...but still, the Revenant is a good film.

Maybe we have become so 'evolved' that we can only appreciate the beauty of nature with the intercedence of gross brutality...
But in this way, in comparison, Kurosawa's film, without brutality; well, Kurosawa's real genius shows through. If I recall the name of that film, I will post it.

Things to be careful of at work after watching The Revenant:

I

China's change from a one child policy to a two child policy will mean a lot of new babies this year in China. There is a shortage of 200,000 paediatricians needed to meet the boom. Those selling baby formula powder will have a very good year world wide. As the need for good baby formula will continue, the makers of baby formula worldwide will, indeed, have a very good decade ahead...a decade at least...and well beyond that. This is one product that can't be made on a large scale in China, and even if it could be, then the bad raps from the milk powder scandal in China a few years back will ensure Chinese parents still look beyond their borders for safe substances for their kids. There's going to be a lot of new kids...the car sales are changing from small 2 door cars to ones with 4 doors and more space, the property market is changing to building 3 bedroom apartments rather than 2 bedroom as is the norm now...kids clothing, kids furniture, kids meals, schools etc these are the new boom areas.

On China

I recall talking to my father-in-law in China (who was locked up in a political prison for 10 years in China, by Mao, personally, for commenting that Mao's vision of socialism was inept and not communist enough because he failed to include trade unionism in his plan).
I told my father in-law that I had been a member of the Australian Communist Party. He laughed. He said "Gosh, I bet the two of you had such fascinating weekly meetings regarding over throwing the ruling elite and their running dogs...hahahaha."
The Han-Manchurians are very bright, astute and sarcastic in their humour.