Steve Jobs is the worst kind of bad movie.

Starring Kate Winslet and Michael Fassbender, Danny Boyle’s three-act play is competent enough to have fooled most of the critics, who generally gave it positive reviews, but it didn’t fool many of the American people, who stayed away in droves. As Variety Magazine points out, Steve Jobs, which cost 30 million dollars to make – a pretty modest budget for a mainstream Hollywood film – will be lucky to get back its initial investment. It’s not only a crushing bore. It’s a crushing bore that makes it even more boring to figure out why it’s so boring.

I guess the most frustrating thing about Steve Jobs is that it hints at an interesting story it refuses to tell. In the mid-1980s, when I was a student at Rutgers, I used an original Mac to write most of my term papers. The University owned hundreds of them, and they were all over the library and the main study lounges, but I had no idea just how expensive they were. In the 1980s, the United States was a country where any 21-year-old could graduate from college without much debt, but couldn’t afford his own computer. In the 2010s, any 21-year-old can buy a MacBook, but a debt-free college education is a far-off utopian dream that Hillary Clinton tells us all will never, ever happen.

The story of Apple and Steve Jobs is the story of neoliberalism. Sadly, it’s not the story Danny Boyle, and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, chose to tell. To be more accurate, the story of Apple is entombed inside a moralistic soap opera, buried underneath piles and piles of ponderous West Wing style patter. Steve Jobs makes is clear not only how overrated Aaron Sorkin is as a screenwriter, but how much of a pompous bore he probably is in real life.

It’s not that Aaron Sorkin hasn’t been associated with good movies. The Social Network was fun to watch, certainly more deserving of the Best Picture award than The King’s Speech, but the Social Network was about people in their early 20s, and Sorkin, who was in his late-40s at the time, had to at least make an effort to let the characters live on their own. In Steve Jobs, he goes full West Wing, giving us set piece after set piece full of self-important soul searching dialogue that doesn’t even do a very good job of explaining the plot. To give one example, the middle section of Steve Jobs focuses on the marketing campaign for the NeXT workstation. It tells us all about how the reason Job’s founded the NeXT corporation in the first place was the operating system. Apple, which fired Jobs in 1985, would eventually need a more sophisticated operating system than the one inside the Apple II, so they would be compelled to hire him back. Then Sorkin forgets to tell us, not only that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT work station, but even the name of the operating system that’s supposed to be the hinge for the second act of the film. It’s NeXTSTEP. I Googled it.

Aaron Sorkin isn’t interested in the history of personal computing, and it shows. What does interest him is deconstructing the legend of Steve Jobs the man, demonstrating that he was basically just an asshole who abused his employees and wouldn’t pay child-support. Like the history of Apple, it’s another potentially interesting story, but Sorkin fucks this one up too. Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet are both pretty good actors, but they’re also badly miscast as President Josiah Bartlet and his Press Secretary C. J. Cregg. I’m not sure why Boyle simply didn’t cast Martin Sheen and Allison Janney.

Oh wait no, I’m sorry, Fassbender and Winslet aren’t playing Josiah Bartlet and C. J. Cregg. They’re playing Steve Jobs and his faithful assistant Joanna Hoffman. They still suck. While I’m not usually one to complain about the ethnicity of any particular actor who plays any particular role, Fassbender is entirely too WASPY to play the half-Syrian-American Jobs. Steve Jobs had a big nose. Fassbender is a chiseled Anglo Saxon. Noah Wyle, who’s half Jewish, nailed the character, and look, of Jobs, in the 1999 TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. Fassbender just reminds me of yet another Ivy League, Wall Street investment banker. Kate Winslet is even worse. Judging by what I can find on my Google image search, the real Joanna Hoffman was sort of cute. Winslet not only gets the Polish accent all wrong. She plays Hoffman as uglier than she really was.

That Kate Winslet, who’s an attractive A-list Hollywood actress, goes out of her way portray a computer executive as plain can give us some clues as to just why this movie was so dreadful. Steve Jobs may have been just another asshole corporate CEO, but he was also a master showman. He not only managed to convince the American public to buy overpriced computer hardware, he did it in his own, eccentric way. Aaron Sorkin, a boring Hollywood liberal who’s probably already working on a hagiographic film about Hillary Clinton, will never be half the showman Jobs was, and he knows it. So he has to cut him down to size. The choice of the chisled WASPY Fassbender as the Syrian American Jobs, and the very severe Winslet as the sort of cute Joanna Hoffman, sends a clear message. The real problem is not that Jobs was an asshole who didn’t pay his child-support. It’s that he made the rest of corporate America look boring. As portrayed by Fassbender, Jobs is a responsible Wall Street banker locked inside a childish Silicon Valley hippie. Winslet is basically his mom trying to help him get out. Grow up Steve, pay your child support, stop show boating, and act like a man.

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, in other words, is IBM’s long delayed counter attack against Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad. It’s the revenge of the boring capitalist against the entertaining capitalist. That this flaming turd failed at the box office almost restores my faith in the United States of America.

It takes a lot of money and a lot of talent to make a film as bad as The Revenant.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who won Best Actor, and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won his second consecutive Best Director award, The Revenant cost 135 million dollars. I suppose a hefty chunk of it went to pay for DiCaprio’s salary. A lot more probably paid for travel expenses. The Revenant was filmed in four countries, Canada, the United States, Mexico and Argentina. That makes it the most expensive photo expedition in history. Just about the only thing worthwhile about this 156 minute long pile of crap is Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, which is, it must be admitted, at least competent. Whether or not Lubezki deserved the Oscar for Best Cinematography is hard to judge. Like just about everything else in The Revenant, there’s simply too much of it. This is a film that goes on, and on, and on, and then it goes on some more. By the end, when the barely existent plot finally gets resolved, the viewer is simply too overwhelmed by all the sound and fury to have much an ability left to criticize what he, or she, has just seen.

I would like to call The Revenant a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, but it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a lot of sound and fury signifying very little. Once you hack through all the distractions, it’s basically a superhero movie disguised as a western. Hugh Glass, DiCaprio, is a civilian guide for a United States Army expedition in the old Northwest territories. In the Winter of 1823, near the forks of the Grand River in what is now South Dakota, the expedition is attacked by a group of Arikara Indians. Initially, Iñárritu gives us very little context for the attack. Later we learn that the chief of the Arikara is looking for his daughter, who’s been kidnapped, and held as a sex slave by the French. It would have been an interesting plot line for a more stripped down, disciplined film, a kind of “The Searchers” in reverse, but Iñárritu isn’t particularly concerned with developing it. It’s just one more distraction in a hale storm of distractions. What Iñárritu has brought us all the way into the deep wilderness to witness, aside from arrow after arrow killing hunter after hunter, is Hugh Glass being mauled by gigantic, and incredibly fast, grizzly bear. I’m honestly not sure if it‘s CGI or Jesse Owens in a bear suit, but whatever it is, it can almost certainly run the 100-yard dash in less than 10 seconds.

DiCaprio – I can’t keep calling DiCaprio Hugh Glass when he’s obviously playing DiCaprio – is clawed and bitten and stomped and bear butt fucked until he’s almost dead. At this point, his superhero powers are developed to the point where he can survive an attack by a gigantic grizzly bear with a huge, throbbing erection, but not quite wrestle him off. I’d say the sex was consensual, but if I did I’d piss off a lot of feminists and besides, I don’t think it was. With DiCaprio near death, the expedition’s commander, Captain Hugh Henry – a complete moron played by the same actor who got rejected by the lovely Saoirse Ronan in the film Brooklyn – does what any good officer does. He leaves a dying man in the care of his mortal enemy.

DiCaprio won Best Actor for playing DiCaprio in The Revenant. It’s absurd. In this film, he’s not even very good at playing DiCaprio. All he does is grunt a lot and occasionally hand off a scene to his stunt double. The only person in The Revenant who does any acting at all is Tom Hardy, who plays John Fitzgerald, a hunter with a special grudge against the Indians, and against DiCaprio for marrying an Indian woman and having a half Indian son. Hardy’s performance isn’t anywhere near Oscar quality, but at least he tries, or, to be more specific, at least he works up a credible imitation of the kind of western stock villain we’ve seen in 1000 other movies.

Most superheros have an origin story. Peter Parker, for example, gets bit by a radioactive spider. For Hugh Glass, it’s lying half dead and watching the evil John Fitzgerald stab his son. After that his body seems capable of regenerating dead tissue. He digs his way out of a shallow grave. He escapes the same band of Indians that attacked the original expedition by swimming through a thundering stretch of rapids. He kills a Frenchmen raping an Indian woman, then kills two more for good measure, and steals a horse. Later in the movie, he rides the horse over a cliff to escape yet another band of Indians, falls what looks to be over 100 feet, then slices open the horse, which died, and shelters himself inside its guts against an oncoming blizzard.

By the time DiCaprio makes it back to Fort Kiowa and his old commanding officer Hugh Henry, John Fitzgerald is in full panic mode, not necessarily because he knows that Henry will try to charge him with murder – Henry is so dumb that he goes out alone to try to bring Fitzgerald to justice and of course gets himself killed – but because the now superhuman DiCaprio is coming to take his revenge. Of course Fitzgerald dies in the end. Whether or not it’s at the hands of DiCaprio you’ll have to find out for yourself since I don’t want to spoil the movie. Oh never mind. I don’t care about spoiling the movie. The Indians do it. By this time you really don’t care about The Revenant’s plot anyway. You just want it to be over.

You leave the theater feeling as if you’ve just been raped by a bear.

Update: According to a press release by 20th Century Fox, the bear is female and what appears to be bear on DiCaprio rape is merely very rough bear on DiCaprio foreplay.