De rouille et d'os (Rust and Bone)

A principled yet free-spirited man (Matthias Schoenaerts as Alain van Versch), pugnaciously rolling with the punches, salaciously catering to his senses, daunting, brave, unconcerned, and powerful, instinctively yet rationally proceeds within economic and familial domains, until the interventions of both an unexpected expedient consequence and the structural features of the natural world, resolutely challenge.

To break through the ice.

Hedonistic and domestic conceptions of commitment and responsibility transformatively engage in Jacques Audiard's De rouille et d'os (Rust and Bone), as financial arraignments tender psychological grit, and individualistic risk conflicts with collective sustainability.

The crucial component, the displaced modifier, the missing link, is love.

The endurance of emotional pain is maximized in this regard as competing applications of fidelity, flourish.

Through sundry strategic applications.

*Kermode felt the love throughout 2012. Thanks to everyone who enjoys reading this blog. Those who don't too I suppose. All the best in 2013.

**Bears

Anna Karenina

Didn't expect to like Anna Karenina after viewing its terrible previews multiple times, but it's actually quite well done.

I usually shudder when classic novels of considerable length are reduced to a specific one-part generalized interpretative 'quintessential' crystallization, but, if I'm not mistaken, Tom Stoppard took this predicament into account when writing his screenplay, and, through sheer interdisciplinary brilliance, managed to pack more multilayered jaunty selective dramatic action into 30 seconds of his adaptation than you often see in a full 120-minute feature, perhaps pleasing devotees of the novel (which I haven't read but I did read War and Peace), while more importantly crafting a demanding entertaining brain teaser.

At least until the act of adultery is committed.

The film clearly demonstrates the oppressive nature of a patriarchal culture without hesitating to sanctify members of its elite while causing their betrayers to appear flippant yet justified.

In terms of love.

Lacking on the various stages is a prominent position for manifold markets from which working people can condition economic cultural amalgams (pulp fiction for instance) through which they can freely synthesize away.

It is perhaps symbolically suggested that the creation of a public sphere within which such operations perform an integral function would nurture a more level playing field for the matriarchically oriented, the optimal situation producing dynamics where both genders possess flexible agencies while reserving a place for the immutable non-authoritarian pink and blue.

Anna Karenina's first act is an accelerated literary cinematic conflagration whose intense inductive transformative flames generously invigorate deductive zodiacs.

Allusively aligned.

(Happy holidays!)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Back to cinematic adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's world of fantasy.

Back to the shire.

Back to where, it all, began.

Whence an heroic team of dwarves accompanied by one wizard and one hobbit depart in search of adventure, eventually discovering arboreal displacements, upon which they regroup to fend off those who have tamed wanton fury, when the leader amongst them accepts the challenge of a daunting fiend, and his subsequent missteps are gallantly regrounded.

As unity intends.

If you liked The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I can't see why you wouldn't enjoy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The Goblin King (Barry Humphries) was a bit of a let down and the same frustrating sense of resigned naive invincible epic substantial critical unwavering exactitude permeates much of the dialogue/action (it's cheesy), but I liked following the troupe throughout their travels, was happy to see many familiar faces, loved Radagast's (Sylvester McCoy) bold rabbitsledding, and found Bilbo (Martin Freeman/Ian Holm) to be a metamorphic symbol of situational alertness.

As he takes up the cause.

Differing conceptions of etiquette acrobatically contend, if you're a fan of the old cartoon there's a playful intertextual dialogue (big fan), the domain of wizardry is environmentally piquanted, philology is advantageously crescented, and the legendary takes on a robust realistic candour.

Through questing.

And check this out. Wish I spoke Russian or that it contained French or English subtitles.

Le Nord au cœur

Serge Giguère's Le Nord au cœur provides a concise synopsis of one man's passionate relationship with the Canadian North, Northern Québec in particular. Having spent his life working within and defending the North's diversity, Louis-Edmond Hamelin has been integral in establishing while deconstructing Northern semantic conceptions while working hand-in-hand with Northern Aboriginal peoples.

The sparsely populated Canadian North occupies the majority of Canada's landscape(s) and the traditions of its Aboriginal peoples, from Labrador to Yukon, can be differentiated by sundry distinct variables. Creating a terse one-dimensional definition to encapsulate the vibrant traditions of so many prominent cultures does a disservice to their integrity, and is akin to trying to attach a monosyllabic moniker to Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Louis-Edmond Hamelin's lifework takes this frame into account while striving to ensure that Canada's Aboriginal peoples have a substantial voice in regards to the ways in which their land is developed. Le Nord au cœur demonstrates how political initiatives continually apply invigorated euphemisms to Northern development strategies, transhistorically presented as the new, without first respectfully negotiating with the nations whom these initiatives will directly and perennially impact.

It also offers picturesque visual details of other multidimensional Northern nomenclatures which diversify the North's multiplicities further. Cool look at an openminded man's lifetime commitment to integrating voices which often (still) go unheard.

Thérèse Desqueyroux

And it is foretold that marriage will squander the limitless theorizations of an inquisitive maiden (Audrey Tautou as Thérèse Desqueyroux) as she attempts to redefine herself according to her husband's (Gilles Lellouche as Bernard Desqueyroux [France's Liam Neeson?]) rigid prejudice.

His prejudice and the specific roles to which it narrow-mindedly assigns meaning to every in/tangible subject/object it wields, has not incorporated the art of bilateral communication into its privileged perspective, forcing his wife to seek alternative methods of resoundingly breaking through.

The other side can be distinguished as vital but tradition and continuity prevent him from unclenching his patriarchal grip.

Oblivious and unreceptive to the simplest of his wife's unexpected ambitions, he remains ensconced in his paradigm dans les bras de Morphée.

Interring the process of subjective decay, transferring random natural acts to a domestic realm's uncharted vicissitudes, sinisterly challenging immutable contraceptions, and suggesting that related solutions exacerbate that to which their remedy is applied, in terms of the preservation of identity, Claude Miller's Thérèse Desqueyroux nocturnally invokes fluid conjugal taxonomies as a potential interpersonal strategy applicable to estranged partnerships.

Or simply states that some people shouldn't get married.

No they should not.

Ésimésac

If you like community focused films that celebrate the strength of tightly knit towns without hesitating to unabashedly and wholeheartedly melodramatize their conflicts, you'll likely enjoy Luc Picard's Émisésac. 

If you like social democratic allegories which charmingly utilize the magically real to critically examine the affects of economic risks and their associated dreams primarily through the social interactions of an innocent, unworldly, inspirational protagonist, you should check Émisésac out.

If you like romantic resolutions that emphasize the human as opposed to the mathematical factors worked into strategic financial planning, Émisésac is for you.

And if you're looking for a film to inaugurate your cinematic holiday season, it's a total must.

Thoroughly enjoyed Émisésac's ample simplified multidimensional spirit, as well as its humble humanism.

Could have used some more multicultural material.

A Late Quartet

Love listening to the fiddle or violin.

Would be nice to sit back and listen to a couple of hours of violin or fiddle music with an ample supply of grapes and unpasteurized cheese plus a nice glass of red wine.

I don't know that much about classical music but I have a couple of favourite texts (Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Rachmaninoff's Symphony no. 2) and enjoy tuning into classical radio stations when I find myself moving from one place to another in an automobile. I usually find that there are moments within many works that induce compelling impressions and others that patiently/quizzically/reflectively/demonstratively/emotively set the scene. The relationship between these elements interpreted through my subjective pluralisis can create a narrative of sorts, a story, an idiom. The same thing happens when I listen to jazz or pop music, The Rolling Stones's Let it Bleed lodged in my memory as the first album to which I suddenly applied this universal transition.

That's obvious enough.

The structural elements within Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet resemble a classical piece of music, as can every film I suppose depending on the relative position of its viewer and their own transsemantic didactic verisimilitude.

The film humanizes the performance of classical music with a subtle piquant plasticity which is simultaneously confident, energetically atonal, and furtively self-critical, perhaps theorizing/applying a classical perception of the postmodern, except when it comes to the production of the music itself.

The daring contends with the quartet's format within and the consequent side affects necessitate an harmonious etherealization (in terms of its performance).

I was more concerned with Christopher Walken's (Peter Mitchell) internal posture. It's classic Christopher Walken. One scene precociously pastiches his role in Pulp Fiction and his lines are delivered with the same characteristic bright, perspicacious, concerned yet uncommitted comfortably chilling dexterity that has made him a cinematic icon.

But he's not playing a gangster and/or someone with underlying violent explosivities, steeping, ready to erupt.

He's probably had lots of roles where he doesn't play such characters in films I unfortunately haven't seen.

But in A Late Quartet he plays the friendly, wise, avuncular rock that collegially holds a prominent sophisticated classical music quartet together.

There's one scene where he's sitting back thinking about the death of his wife after some heated social interaction. There's no dialogue, but tears are produced, and, when it's situated within the context of the film, while bearing in mind his traditional roles, which A Late Quartet seems to be doing, it transforms the classical perception of his expressions into something equally affective yet much less threatening.

As if the goal is the reconceptualization of volatility.

His performance isn't the only one that stands out.

Original music by Angelo Badalamenti, cinematography by Frederick Elmes.

Tabu

After sterilely establishing a set of sociological effects, wherein moments of personal literary expositions and devout religious expressions firmly respond to an extroverted eccentricity, capriciously gloating in the ether, following a solemn sentimental allegory, Miguel Gomes's Tabu imprioritizes their structural causes, by soberly elucidating their passionate progenitors.

Tabu's dimensions are difficult to define because it obliquely plays with narrative conventions with a jocose leavened degree of cohesive disparity, as if to say, "based upon certain doctrinalized expectations, there are specific aspects which we must include, even if throughout the process of their inclusion, we have found ways to romantically mistrust them."

I highly doubt they would have expressed themselves in such terms.

Sterile's the wrong word to be using. The film's anything but sterile. Yet it coyly employs a pervasive intermittently poppy sterility to slyly postulate its poetic position, as if it's trying to sustain sundry spontaneous combustions, like a ravenous crocodile.

By imprioritizing the structural causes, Tabu laments the ways in which events solidify points of view, as epitomized by Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) and Aurora's (Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira) relations, as Santa asserts herself.

Although I'm basing this point on a supposition drawn from a character's memory and then applied externally (by me) to a nondescript incidental circumstance (act II).

There's much more to it than that, if that even applies.

So worth seeing.

Jab Tak Hai Jaan

Love, perpetually incapacitated, melodramatically presents itself as stubborn and unyielding, daring and resourceful, maddeningly fleeced, and explosively uncompromising, in Yash Chopra's Jab Tak Hai Jaan, where dedication is ir/reverently consummated, and real emotion, subsists in ironic flux.

Samar Anand's (Shah Rukh Khan) principles cause his nonchalant ingenuity to appear as if it's overcome with resignation, yet, while comparable to Bella Swan in terms of relationships, or in regards to narrative structure, he's clearly intently focused on achieving an interstellar overdrive, as his unrelenting perspicacity diffusively ameliorates.

His subjects of desire represent reserved bourgeois integrity and irrepressible public success.

As usual, I was more interested in the moments leading up to the initial affectionate declarations, after which, although things picked up again following the intermission, things become somewhat overzealous.

However, Mr. Chopra's ability to work bracingly and heartbreakingly within Jab Tak Hai Jaan's socio-religious cross-cultural overzealatanaiety, his unbridled full-throttle unconcerned pluck, did help me to appreciate his film, as he endearingly orchestrates.  

Silver Linings Playbook

Adding two cups rehabilitation, a healthy dose of formal sanitization (some forms of behaviour are denominated sane, others are not, the film does a great job of levelling the forms by showing how their contents are socially inextricable), a dash of crisis, familial spices, and communal interstices, David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook cooks up a hearty robust sociopsychological feast, complete with ample servings of dancing, and football.

Could have used the Broncos instead of the Eagles and set the film in Denver but that's off topic.

Silver Linings Playbook is a believable, down to earth, well-scripted multilateral examination of mental illness, romantically busting through many of its stigmas (blame attached regardless of circumstances, . . . ) through the convivial art of cacophonic curtsies. 

Honesty is the key.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) proceed honestly yet lack the clean record that often rationalizes honest offbeat conversations. 

Thus, even though their dialogues make sense, it's the self-critical sense making, the acknowledgement of crucial beneficial curative aids, offensively and defensively extracted from their various social interactions, within which interconnected dialogues similarly affect their friends and family, thereby emphasizing without sentimentalizing intergenerational teamwork, that leads to a more gregarious playing field.     

In regards to where honesty becomes destructively inappropriate, the film cleverly draws several lines.

Good companion film for Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

Life of Pi

A giant freakin' tiger.

An island of meerkats.

A fluorescent whale.

And a mischievous moon bear.

Members of the animal kingdom make up portions of Life of Pi's supporting cast and fill its fictionally fortuitous filmscape with a carnally introspective constabulary.

Indicative of spiritual tribunals.

Necessity being the lover of retention, and survival, romance's wherewithal, Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) makes the case for creative license, while providing a noteworthy response to Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now.

Pi's religious curiosity leads him from Hinduism to Christ to Allah and his individualistic embrace/mix of the three is openmindedly archetypal (substitutes welcome).

It's difficult to write about Life of Pi's most compelling point without ruining the film, but, as a film, for me, although I was disappointed that more time wasn't spent directly presenting the convincing case Yann Martel makes for the existence of zoos in the novel, its 'make or break' stretch takes place in the lifeboat, where Pi and Richard Parker negotiate a pact which keeps their cross-examinations afloat.

And it works. The stretch seductively elaborates upon while subtly advancing Patel's position, building up to a moving somewhat overdone transubstantive summit, celestially washing up on shore.

I'll have to wait to respond to the rest (I'm not convinced [and can't explain what I'm not convinced about]).  

The moon bear doesn't have a big part.

There is a moon bear though.

And he or she looks mischievous.

Lincoln

Providing an in-depth warm yet demanding account of the overt and back room executive and legislative steps taken to both legally abolish slavery and end the American Civil War, even though the contemporaneous achievement of both goals seemed unattainable, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln avuncularly yet sternly examines a pivotal point in American history and the roles played by many of its leading persons.

It's very practicable.

It lays out the complicated dynamics of the Republican Party as it was structured with Abraham Lincoln at the helm during his 2nd term, and, while often employing an elevated vocabulary, patiently divides the party into collaboratively oppositional groups whose interests each need to be moderately assuaged.

Thus, differing internal ideological commitments and approaches to the same set of principles are coherently represented by sensible counterintuitive arguments.

Expediency and opportunism become necessary factors due to the inextricable contingencies of their political matrix.

I have no idea how closely the actions depicted in this film match generally agreed upon historical realities within prominent objective canonical yet malleable enclaves, but the film did remind me that back when I cared about trivia and avidly watched Jeopardy!, I could rarely knowingly answer its myriad American Civil War questions, and wanted to learn more about it.

Lincoln's (Daniel Day Lewis) exceptional gifts for finding applicable amusing pedagogical anecdotes capable of being pleasantly yet instructively presented to whomever his audience happened to be affably ties things together.

Trying to make the passage of an amendment into a dramatic film was a great idea.

Being able to vote for the people who pass such amendments is a right that was/is vehemently fought for.

If you're jaded about the results of your voting, which everyone is at some point, Spielberg's Lincoln does exemplify how difficult it can be to coordinate the passage of legislation, which will often (probably always) contain cumbersome particulars which are themselves the product of advanced democratic pluralities, who have progressed in varying degrees, over the centuries.

Here Comes the Broom

In Frank Coraci's new comedy Here Comes the Broom, writers Kevin James, Allan Loeb, and Martin Solibakke seem to be asking the question, "can we unite the domains of high school music teaching and mixed martial arts fighting while wholesomely addressing issues of immigration, dating, professionalism, health care, small business ownership, altruistic risk, male bonding, conjugal relations, etc., in order to create a constructive interdisciplinary framework, overflowing with ebullient feelgoodery, that can function as a precursor to model communal action?"

If this is indeed the question that they at one point asked themselves, I can only respond by saying that, in my opinion, "there is a strong possibility."

The film's a lot of fun.

I've never even really been that into boxing or mixed martial arts fighting but Here Comes the Broom gave me a new found respect for both sports and I'll now be more receptive to viewing 'pugilistic' events in the future.

The film lays it on super thick but I liked its relatable trial-by-fire humbly rebellious we're-goin'-for-it-no-matter-what oddball pragmatism, which offers a welcome break from a lot of the sleaze that's out there.

It also focuses on how prominent integral arts programs can be screwed over by overemphasizing sports while focusing on the ways in which those very same programs are essential to the sports that are sometimes overemphasized.

And points out that even when people have difficulties passing tests, they still often have marketable skills that can be remarkably beneficial to their community.

Liked the synthesis.

All good.

Midnight's Children

At the stroke of midnight, as India's independence lights up the sky, several children are born.

An ironic twist of fate, whereby bohemian and bourgeois babies are switched at birth, in an act of amorous solidarity, simultaneously precipitates openminded and hegemonic serializations.

One possesses the remarkable gift of being able to use his mind to create a cerebral in/corporeal clandestine commons where all of Midnight's Children can meet and discuss various subjects.

One's overwrought jealousy upholsters a ballistic desire to dominate, within.

The others, playing by a more reasonable set of hospitable synchronizations, collegially, discern.

That's a rather truncated description of what takes place in Deepa Mehta's film; it's much more complicated than that, narratively deconstructing particular parental preconceptions, touching upon complex interconnected conjugal and familial (and pre- and post-colonial) provocations, illustrating the effects of 'practical' ideological implementations on individual constituencies from jingoistically fraternal (ugh) and resurgently romantic jetties, at a frantic pace, which generally focuses on one character's brittle innocence.

The depth of potential lying within the film's itinerant confluences suggests that Salman Rushdie's novel is worth picking up, and that militaristic conflicts prevent the cultivation of prolonged endearing chill relationships.

At first, I found the film's magically real cloak to be somewhat flippant in relation to the gravity of its historical trajectory, but it's actually this light, dreamy, bewildered and baffling ambience that transcends its unavoidable puritanical devices, evoking an abstract laissez-faire conspicuous caricature.

That isn't that concerned with absolutes.

Covering a lot of interdisciplinary ground while firmly resisting attempts at classification, Midnight's Children sacrifices elaboration for stylization to divine a potential mantra.

More fitting to its humanistic features.

Skyfall

Really enjoyed Skyfall.

It's a great James Bond film, perhaps ranking in the top 3, although I'd like to rewatch my favourites, Thunder Ball, You Only Live Twice, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights, and Casino Royale, to be able to attach a more current and uniform critical perspective (more substance) to my claim. I should likely watch Skyfall again to justify this claim as well because I remember liking Die Another Day after my first viewing (no doubt due to my childhood love of the franchise) only to be seriously disappointed when I saw it again. Undaunted, Skyfall's not only a great James Bond film either, it's a great action spy movie, as opposed to a great intellectual spy flick like Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, and might also impress those who feel they're being dragged to a/nother silly James Bond extravaganza, although fans of the franchise will likely get more out of it.

Impressive points: Daniel Craig. He's become my favourite Bond and I love the ways in which he suavely handles himself with an unconcerned, explosive, gritty, incisive, everyperson's charm, more like a glacier bear than a bulldog, in my opinion. While the emotional displays made prominent in Casino Royale are limited to one brief lamentation, his character still receives more depth structurally as his personal history becomes integral to the plot.

Nice.

Origins. Skyfall sophisticatedly maintains a competent balance/conversation (overtly and covertly) between the old and the new throughout, set up by Bond's introduction to the new Quartermaster (Ben Whishaw), simultaneously seeming as if it's constantly, sigh, moving forward, while never leaving behind or disregarding its foundations.  Thus, we have an unambiguously principle gay villain, who, being the villain, reflects certain conservative stereotypes, yet, through his first conversation with Bond, it becomes apparent that Bond himself is not adverse or may have had homosexual relations, an openly unprecedented development, which should not be underestimated.

The brutal lines from the previews that made me not want to see the film are actually alright when placed in context, writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan successfully finding a balance between hackneyed clichés and hardboiled wit, which isn't easy to do.

Rather than focusing on international politics, Skyfall situates much of its action in London, no doubt, the film, if, um, James Bond films are seen as a barometer of British socio-political attitudes of sorts, recognizes, ah, a certain, role, that Britain often didn't play so heroically in 20th century history (see Argo), which functions as a bit of cultural introspection that is both welcome, and appreciated.

Which brings me to the film's most notable scene, wherein Skyfall's various dynamics reach a quasiclimax which hopefully doesn't end there.

So, basically, M (Judi Dench) screws up royal by being in charge when a hard drive containing the names of every MI6 field agent (which never should have been created) is stolen.  This leads to an internal review of her leadership which becomes public. Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-field agent who has taken on a sympathetic yet stubborn bureaucratic role (youth becomes age), diplomatically tones down the irate politician who castigates M during a public inquiry, which ends with M quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Poetry in Bond?

Nice touch!

It doesn't actually end there (don't read if you're not looking for spoilers). It ends with Silva (Javier Bardem), the principal villain, breaking in and trying to kill M whom he blames for accidentally saving his life after he was captured and his hydrocyanide tooth failed to kill him (while ravaging his insides [he vengefully seeks to ravage MI6's insides in turn]).

Silva's prowess in MI6 was comparable to Bond's and M was willing to sacrifice both for the organization's sake.

Bond holds no grudge.

Ergo, as defined by M's rousing speech, which claims that in the age of the internet individuals are becoming a serious threat, thereby covertly supporting attempts to sturdily monitor and police individual interent activities, due to the secretive nature of her operations and the life threatening consequences of details potentially leaked during public inquiries (some governmental documents should remain secret), she's somewhat taken aback by the proceedings, which are applying a similar level of oversight to that which guided her decisions to sacrifice Bond and Silva, which are then interrupted by Silva's rampage.

Obviously the activities of agencies like MI6, due to their necessarily clandestine nature, need to remain generally secret, as long as other countries continue to maintain similar outlets. At the same time, if they operate entirely in secret there's no telling what sort of methods might be utilized, meaning a minimal degree of public scrutiny, though vexatious, within logical parameters, which must take various prickly contexts into consideration, makes sense.

Don't know if that's helpful.

I find the idea of (computer savvy) individuals being some of the greatest threats to the 21st century, however, somewhat misleading, for the following reasons.

It's kind of silly to begin with, scum like Hitler and Stalin being particularly deadly individuals long before the age of the internet, but that's a different kettle of fish.

Yes, computer savvy individuals can cause a lot of damage I'm sure. These exceptions can, I don't know, hack into banks, defence systems, etc. I know someone else has my IP address because I often receive a message on my computer screen that another computer using my IP address is operating on the same network. I don't know what to do about this besides get a new IP address and I don't want to bother because someone will just do it again.

It's annoying.

But if because of these exceptions, legislation is being introduced giving law enforcement agencies the power to monitor everyone's online activity, and the majority of everyone's activity is moving online, it's like law enforcement agencies are being given the power to monitor everyone's activities all the time. What stores they go to, what newspapers they read, and so on. It's kind of totalitarian in my opinion and is at risk of being 'naturalized' for future generations without much mature parliamentary debate in some countries. I mean, shouldn't you have to get a warrant to monitor someone's online activity? Doesn't that make sense?

And, as my computer keeps indicating, someone else has my IP address and is using it online. How would I be able to prove that I'm not that person in a court of law?

Cybercrime is similar to physical crime. If someone wants to rob a bank online, I suppose they hack in. If someone wants to rob a physical bank, I suppose they find a way to go about doing it. If you're worried about someone robbing a bank in the physical world, I suppose you get a warrant and follow them around town. If you're worried about someone robbing a bank online, I think you should have to do the same thing because the principle isn't that different, it's just an alternative environment.

Yes, a Silva may arise, but there will also be a James Bond to stop him or her.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy Skyfall and think it's a great film.

I hope my analysis hasn't been too offhand and that it hasn't engaged in too much puerile speculation.

(My favourite part is Q's scrabble mug.

I'd love to play him.

Would probably end up with multiple u's, c's, and v's at key moments, but, whatevs, I'd keep playing).

Oh, and I've been getting into film noir and hardboiled detective fiction again lately. A Bond film with the edge of a Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, or Patricia Highsmith novel worked into what team Skyfall's already proved they have the creative energy to ameliorate would be amazing.

So amazing.

Chinese Take-Away (Un cuento chino)

A random gravitational incongruity crushes a soaring romance after which one partner haplessly finds himself mired in a self-inflicted mimesis.

Thus Jun (Ignacio Huang) travels from China to Argentina in search of his uncle where he meets a frigid loner (Ricardo Darín as Roberto) by chance who is firmly set in his ways.

Jun doesn't speak any Spanish and Roberto dislikes house guests but the good samaritan Roberto keeps locked within persuades his finicky craftsmanship.

But as those with whom he must interact to find Jun's uncle ironically do not posses the same level of social reflexivity, things take a lightheartedly combative turn, until fate forecasts its fortuitous frequency.  

Decisions made, gut garnished, ethos, codified.

But it's really not that cheesy, I mean, Sebastián Borensztein's Chinese Take-Away (Un cuento chino) does press the curds but if you're interested in seeing a heartwarmingly blunt piece of extroverted reticence, primarily focused on an eccentric small business owner's stubbornly withdrawn principled hardboiled tact, wherein fascists and communists alike take their comeuppances, it's fun to watch.

Sensitive, enumerative, obdurate, and tender, assuredly a go-to-option if dating and seeking to sneak in an alternative cross-cultural b/romantic comedy.

I'm assuming that's what people who date are trying to do. 

Regardless of gender.

Argo

It should be noted that Ben Affleck's Argo takes bold steps to attach the responsibility for the hostile anti-American attitudes presented by some Iranian citizens displayed within to the political activities of American and British authorities of the 1950s, and that it is these same authorities who are in/directly responsible for the subsequent rise of madpersons like Ahmadinejad.

It should also be noted that this may not be the wisest time to be releasing a film which displays passionate anti-American feelings amongst those very same citizens, due to the potentially volatile dynamics of our current historical period, although, perhaps my reluctancy to endorse its timing could be a sign of my own hesitancy in regards to taking great risks, which Mr. Affleck, in creating this film at this particular time, has certainly done.

I myself believe that an incredible secret has been kept in Iran based upon my viewings of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Maryam Keshavarz's Circumstance, common sense, and a conversation I had six years ago in passing, that being that many, perhaps even a vast majority of Iranian citizens, don't care whether or not they develop an atomic weapon, have no wish to go to war with Israel, and simply want to peacefully work, live, laugh, love, and travel in a clean environment, like citizens in every other country, without having to be afraid all the time.

Yet I have no idea what you do when a lunatic like Ahmadinejad is in power (or George W. Bush for that matter) or how to go about diffusing the situation.

There are scurrilously ambitious people who seek power and consider everyone else to be like them. They employ reprehensible tactics to achieve this power, and, thinking everyone else to be like them, seek to prevent others who aren't like them from employing the same tactics to usurp them.  This attitude is applied nationally and internationally. Seeing conspiracies everywhere and fearing violent reprisals, they conspire violently, thereby creating that which they feared in the first place, vaingloriously spreading misery.

Argo goes a long way to prevent the spread of misery in its best scene by cleverly intermingling different realities facing American and post-revolutionary Iranian citizens, a scene which shows the Americans laying the rhetorical groundwork to 'make' a fake movie while Iranians try to punish the American and British imposed Shah who butchered them for decades and managed to find sanctuary in the States afterwards, a scene which pulls its American audience into the Iranian situation, its frame reminding them to bear in mind that the events depicted took place in 1979, 33 years ago.

In one of Star Trek the Next Generation's best moments Worf (Michael Dorn) commends his son Alexander (James Sloyan/Brian Bonsall) for choosing the path of peace (Firstborn).

Yes, Worf highly honours the path of peace.

By creating a film which exoterically tackles an extremely important contemporary international political phenomenon with the goal of saving lives or preventing a war, which places the situation within a controversial militaristic, governmental, and individual historical context, Ben Affleck's created quite a film, its exoteric qualities capable of entertainingly reaching a wide audience, and perhaps having a lasting affect.

As if to say, if you thought there was anti-American sentiment flowing through Iran 33 years ago during a volatile time of historic change directly caused by the meddling of American and British authorities, imagine how much there will be if an actual war is started, for decades, centuries, to come.

It doesn't have to be like that.

Not at all.

Cloud Atlas

Reincarnating a diverse sense of individualistic multiplicity, wherein manifold acts see their transhistorical countenances ambiently 'serialized,' as circumstances determine varying degrees of personal expedients and collective commitments, the most powerful of which are preconditioned by love eternal, of the other, an ideal, Cloud Atlas draws poetic intertemporal parallels amongst 'distinct' narratives to progressively decentralize teleological discourses without sacrificing their forward thinking critical cores, thereby generating a hardwired interdisciplinary mutlivaliant transistor.

As history comes to life.

It's as if the process of taking forms with myriad malleable landscapes and inter'connected' representational layers and populating them with breathing socio-political contents is itself materially manifested, through a vivacious, ethical engagement.

It doesn't shy away from using science-fiction to situate the cannibalistic nature of shortsighted grossly counterproductive characterizations of workers as one-dimensional subservient automatons being sinisterly force fed their own collectively suicidal divisive tropes in the present, from suggesting that aesthetic realms beyond our current epistemological methods of comprehension can be artistically realized (through music), from attaching an everlasting quality to the bucolic/urban dialectic, from elevating humanistic strategies for combatting the pervasive influence of unfettered capital, or intimating the ways in which capital can profit from events which never had to take place.

At the same time, it's not that serious.

Didn't like the whole inevitability dimension, but still, there's enough diegetic material here to create/continue the development of its own subgenre and it reminded me of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

And Keith David's characters have great responses to the role he played in Crash(2004).

The Master

His personality trailing behind, obliviously, inquisitively and contendedly basking in the wake, quietly lounging in his own residual perpetual motion, with a sun he fails to see warmly beating down on his inebriated candour, Freddie Quell's (Joaquin Phoenix) proclivities for the peculiar lead to transformative miscues while the narrative which he inhabits, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, derisively lambastes its own nostalgic attachment to film's longing for nostalgic attachments (through its initial choice of music).

Mr. Quell's sense of buoyancy has been quasi-permanently kept afloat due to his wartime experience, as has his creative knack for improvisationally concocting alcoholic beverages.

He also seeks partnership.

Fortunately, he stows away on a ship by chance which has been rented by a carefree spirit (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd) and his followers, many of whom share his desire to circumvent sobriety.

They have taken things one step further, though, having devotedly conjured a flexible theoretical fundamental foundation, whose profits have secured a fantastic incorruptibility.

As these two tinkerers intersect, pseudoestablished faith-based charlatanism attempts to absorb obstinate itinerant (restrained, undirected, generally harmless) epicurean anarchy through a series of mind tricks, the confident modest inclusive yet principled performance expertly executed by Mr. Hoffman in their first obligatory interaction sophisticatedly counterbalanced by Joaquin Phoenix's focused resistant exactitude.

As Freddie is lured in, the film's structure attempts to grab hold of its audience's recalcitrance and transfer it deep within its hallucinatory consciousness, as if it's relying on the sheer conviction of its form alone, regardless of what form it takes, to transcribe potential transgressions of the post-modern through personal investments of hesitant, guilt-ridden trust, incipiently causing a cult to appear happy-go-lucky, and attempting to internally harness a distilled independent rationality.

The best American film I've seen so far this year.

Amy Adams puts in a great performance too.

Stories We Tell

Beguilingly intermingling the dubious and the customary, synthesizing various direct and interpretive recollections while modestly integrating her own position's anti-overarching take, Sarah Polley subtly (and accidentally?) mythologizes an incident from her family's past, to quaintly and indirectly interrogate memory, narrative construction, the facts, and urban legends, in a familial paragenealogical account of the origins of decentralized identity.

It's so 21st century National Film Board of Canada.*

Her investigation leads a principal participant to whimsically actualize that whose literary character was encouraged by his deceased spouse decades previously, this actualization 'stomping' through a gentle creek of sorts from which the additional commentaries reflexively break off and return (the format reminding me of Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone).

(There are various loosely interoperational domains which possess their own consequent features whose rhetorical/technological/meteorological transmissions can coalesce to fabricate distinguished conceptions of value, which, when re/acting with the complementary/contradictory features of their fellow inter/national/regional/local/individual agents, and the constant imposition of random occurrences whose unforeseen interjections conduct concrete theoretical abstractions, before and after the fact, team-up to market sundry identities, who are nonetheless reliant upon historical events, and their consequent/subsequent interactions, themselves).

There's a sly intertextual reversal built into the film's flow as well.

Impressive.

*Kermode hasn't seen enough 21st century National Film Board of Canada films to be able to objectively make this claim, but couldn't resist due to the ways in which Stories We Tell reminded him of the many NFBC films he enjoyed watching during his youth. He also lives within the 21st century.

Francine

Diagnosing a particular psychodemocratic symptom by following the release of a shy free-spirited loner from prison, Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine correlates a general disenfranchised flair for self-imposed isolation with a personal tendency to spontaneously combust in a tight examination of a private experimental individual.

Francine (Melissa Leo) has no trouble finding work after her release and has the confidence and strength to go so far as to pick and choose among jobs (all of which relate to animals).

She does lose one due to her unique approach to customer relations, but she quickly bounces back, doesn't seem phased, and finds another position.

(After stealing a puppy).

She feels more at home with the animal world and as the film unreels the number of pets within her apartment steadily increases.

She meets people within her new community and loves to go out, whether its head-banging by the roadside or a visit to a local church; but after years of not fitting in (I'm assuming) doesn't encourage the growth of either friendships or relationships.

Or maybe she never liked spending extended periods of time with others; there isn't much backstory to go on so this is just speculation.

But she loves her pets and there's a great scene which festively superimposes a frenetic degree of freeform felicity upon a dysfunctionally operative domestic diorama, which looks like so much fun.

But she eventually goes too far publicly, and her actions, although relatively slight, when aligned with her criminal history, (likely) engender harsh penalties.

Chill film considering.

Mars et Avril

A rhythmic terrestrial interplanetary concordance collegially captivates audiences of the future in Martin Villeneuve's Mars et Avril, set in Montréal.

So nice, to watch, a science-fiction film, that humbly celebrates interdisciplinary artistic creation instead of some damn war culminating in an epic battle.

Crisp cosmic cerebral clarity: another, great film, made, in Québec.

The plot concerns the solidification of an abstract feminine image which is in turn corporealized as a musical instrument which a virtuoso performer then instantaneously masters live to the delight of his devoted listeners, thereby uniting inspiration, extraction, construction, distribution, and reception, in a harmonious synthesis of artistic production.

Yet as proof of a legend's historical longevity is ambitiously sought, an unknown factor, a representative of that which was sacrificed in order to sustain a radiant resurgent reverberation, threatens the unity of the whole, by accidentally silencing its voice, while ensuring the survival of its exhalations.

As the output destabilizes, so does the artist's basic distinction between interior and external reality, as if the film itself is unaware of a subtle intoxication, until the manufacturer finds a way to unite the process's conception and etherealization, directly binding two consciousnesses in their dreamwork, and generating un noveau monde.

Now that's science-fiction.

There was an odd moment for me in said dreamwork where I was wondering why the dreamworlds within films often closely mirror those established by alert spatio-temporal objectivities, which awakened a countermemory of David Lynch and Mark Frost's Red Room from Twin Peaks, when the scene suddenly changed to one invoking a comparison between it and said Red Room, with music reminiscent of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's "Sycamore Trees."

That was weird.

The marsonautes infuse the artistic philosophical romance with a cheeky degree of comedy that rounds out the film's intellectual action.

Indeed.

Faust

And within a mendicant, mountainous, microcosm, classically constructed, Gothically germinated, and residually realized, wherein one's affluent 21st century appetites atrophy while those of its citizens starve, he who possesses bountiful knowledge is tempted by a resplendent representative of an aspect which he fails to comprehend, his fabricated yet all-encompassing desire having been serpentinely syncopated, as a bear growls in the wilderness, in Alexander Sokurov's Faust's obstinate prolonged periodical remonstrance, whose resultant subjective reconstitution, climactically dislocates an historically sustained psychodeterminancy.

Through the art of manipulation.

Its traditional themes and monumental modalities are elaborately elucidated and sensuously entwined.

Competing rational classifications are cantankerously, sinisterly, and conditionally, collated.

Notwithstanding a little joy.

The world Sokurov creates arguably situates the contemporary depersonalized alienated televisual lack of collective agency within an impoverished feudal stasis to materialize an ahistorical fabric, but that may be a bit of a stretch.

For me, it also functions as a dramatic counterpart to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings triology, the opening sequence having begged the comparison (not that Faust isn't fantastic and The Lord of the Rings undramatic).

And Faust (Johannes Zeiler), you fool, you had it in you all along.

Didn't you see "Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me?"

Bonsái

A bond, an extended period of growth, a felicitous fortuitous frequency, historically resonating.

Julio (Diego Noguera) accidentally finds love in Christián Jiménez's Bonsái and its particularized peculiar panoramic proclivities produce a prepositional poignancy.

Subjective logical adaptations to seemingly immutable biological fascinations harness the everlasting.

The simulation of a tangible incorporeality as well as the fabrication of the authentic necessitate themselves when related artistic proliferations are suddenly materialized, due to the verisimilitude encapsulating a missed opportunity.

Beginnings and canonical literary liaisons foundationally reappear.

Melancholic longing permeates each aspect as Julio's amorous recapitulations attempt to revitalize a long lost cohesive fragility.

Or the reification of a dream.

Didn't even know In Search of Lost Time played a role in this film prior to choosing to see it.

Looper

Casually steeping the intertextual typography for a poppy paranoid streetwise technovernacular, real horrorshowlike, frenetically interspersing euphoric and trepidatious tremors, bumptiously, offhandedly, and rupturously stimulating abbreviations, while synthesizing an intertemporal suicidal personalized universal, Rian Johnson's Looper ruggedly relies on standard fictionally scientific reflexivities, without deflating their zeppelinesque thermocline, to romanticize a gritty, graphic, gregarious shock, while autosuggesting, an intransitive perpetuity.

As the crow flies.

One loop sees a job well done, followed by a carefree binge, a requisite regression, and vindication through love.

In the other, to sustain and avenge said vindication, a monstrous methodology metastasizes.

Either way the outcome is inevitable.

But a third way does present itself, nurtured by a split-second revelation based upon the prior knowledge of a definitive causeway the agency of which is too much to precondition.

So, rather than embracing what seems like predetermination, the agent spontaneously disorients his 'historical' trek.

Stretching through the void.

Trouble with the Curve

Trouble with the Curve.

Trouble with the Curve is a nice story. It situates a complicated familial dynamic within a competitive professional atmosphere which is adorned with collegial and asinine interactions that polarize the continuum established between youth and age.

Relationships and ethnocentric tendencies are examined as well, and after an explanation is provided, the resultant synergies mobilize the disenfranchised.

And the multidimensional nature of experiential competencies collaboratively contends with electronically generated statistics to offer an holistic approach to the practice of forecasting.

It's presented in an easy-to-follow and understand format, potentially photosynthesizing a modest kernel of truth.

All of these things, are good.

Clint Eastwood's character could have been more diversely differentiated from that whom he played in Gran Torino however.

Not that I don't love the old curmudgeon, but not enough time has elapsed between the two films.

And it's tough to find shelter from the narrative's after-school-special-like style, which, while cultivating a strong inclusive yet combative framework, lacks the creative virtuosities needed to motivate a wide-ranging reception.

Not that it's trying to do that.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Remember being disappointed when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released in 2003. I liked it when I eventually rented it, but still couldn't shake that "I wish they'd just left it alone" feeling, which had inspired my initial hesitation.

Watched it again a couple of times last weekend and was seriously impressed. It's arguably better than T2 although it depends upon what time in your life you view it/them.

T2 was great when I was a kid (it's still good [I also watched it last weekend]). The apocalypse is averted, the future remains open, and things can reattain a level of relative normalcy if the trauma can be creatively dissimulated.

Solid sci-fi, convincing absurdity, collaborative outlook, intact.

T3 represents a sequel which strategically follows a similar pattern to its predecessor(s), revisiting familiar scenes and situations in order to socialize on the franchise's precedents, while reimagining them with enough mutated historical ingenuity to subtly transmit an evolutionary code.

Without screwing things up.  

Such revisitations are done at great risk for if the scenarios fail to entrance, the predecessor/s quickly begin/s to appear more appealing.

T3's resolution is somewhat less innocent, however (it's much less innocent), which, for those of us who saw T2 when they were 12 and T3 many years later, while still remaining in possession of the firm environmentally friendly conscious T2 shyly promotes, fictionally nurtures a degree of realistic despondency, brought about by an increasingly monolithic technocratic agency's dismissal of environmental concerns (the environmental movement, from what I remember, was stronger in Canada in 1991), by directly working its principle audience's growth into the script, bizarrely taking into account different trends and fashions, while harshly yet romantically preparing them for the post-symbolic (notably when John [Nick Stahl] resignedly yet affirmably utters a cliché when he's flying to Crystal Peak with Catherine Brewster [Claire Danes]).

Hence, within T3, a pagan dimension in touch with the eternal timeline and its intertemporal distortions (whether or not these distortions should be viewed as part of the eternal timeline is up for debate but the evidence provided by T3 suggests they should not) intervenes and ensures that two somewhat unwilling individuals are given a fighting chance to subvert an inevitable machinismo (to continue to fight for a more collaborative playing field against forces possessing incontrovertible resource rich 'class-oriented' biases)(the timeline is reconstituted to the best possible version nature can provide after which its 'unwitting' agents must generally fend for themselves).

And who has returned with updated loveable psychological subroutines? None other than the converted patriarchal killing machine who saw the light (was reprogrammed) and began using his organic metallurgic abilities to protect humanistic interests instead (himself). Much of what his counterpart from T2 learned flows within but now that Mr. Connor's older and realizes what he's up against, his counterarguments to that created by his significant other's interpretation of his childhood memories occasionally lack his youthful antagonistic conviction.

After surviving the intermediary years, he comes to understand the T-101's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) no-nonsense methods.

Mechanically, T-101's primary adversary is a younger more flexible model, but even though he's an older design, this doesn't mean he can't compete.

In regards to the dialogue established by the changing feminine gender paradigms culturalized by the gap between these two sequels, in T2 the only strong female character with knowledge that would make a significant historical difference is locked-up in a mental institution; in T3 the feminine is split, one character representing independent unyielding destructive technocratic oppression, the other, bourgeois stability transformed (consequently) into a fierce warrioress.

In regards to identity, as far as John and Catherine Brewster go, and ignoring the acute crisis the T-101 must face, T3 seems to be suggesting that if you're unclassified or professional (notably in the "you're not exactly my 'type' either" exchange), and if democratic institutions become so diluted that their impact no longer bears any teeth, or a well-funded psychological campaign produces a wide-ranging cynicism regarding their effects even when they're still capable of bearing fruit, you'll both be stuck necessarily contending with an entrenched systemic opponent who had been modestly brought to heel after the Second World War.

Try and think about what Barack Obama would have been able to do then.

Which seems to be T3's prescient message, which could explain the lacklustre reviews it received during the George W. Bush Era. I don't know. But it takes the risk of bombing due to the ways in which it relies so heavily on T2's format and manages to ironically cultivate greener pastures to the contrary, which is a sign of bold writing, and great filmmaking (directed by Jonathan Mostow, screenplay by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato).

And the Dr. Silverman (Earl Boen) scene is priceless. I'll watch it again just to see that alone.

There's more humour within too, notably the ways in which the 'asocial' terminators affect those they meet, my favourite line being "and, the coffin," subtly reflecting the difficulties the eccentric encounter on a regular basis.

Oh, and considering how much revenue Judgement Day generated, it's hard to believe that it took 12 years for them to release Rise of the Machines.

Bullhead

Symptomatically and jaggedly pluralizing the personal psychological affects of a sudden all-encompassing disillusionment, while intricately stratifying a diverse bombastic barrage, literally interjecting his film with bellicose doses of testosterone, Michaël R. Roskam takes Bullhead and cacophonically synthesizes a man with his husbandry, as he tries whatever he can to surreptitiously distend.

An event. A transformation. Perseverance. Sublimation. Shock. Disintegration.

The wind in the willows.

Or the cyclone in the spruces in this instance. Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is one volatile powder keg lacking the deflammatory passions which may have softened the blow.

But apart from scintillatingly nocturnalizing a tragic character study, Bullhead complacently, cerebrally, and chaotically economizes its 'subject matter,' potently intensifying a somewhat underrepresented particular submergence, while using it to indirectly comment upon Belgian social interactions.

If Mr. Vanmarsenille represents the local, then the local is diversified, then regionalized (the regional possessing a nationalistic nuance), and then subjectively traumatized, historicized, and atemporalized, while the film retains a selective degree of objectivity (which dissipates near the end), the catalyst of said trauma triumvirately functioning within the local, regional, and national domains, with romantic, familial, comic and veterinary issues exhaustively adorning its multiplicity.

Mr. Roskam knows how to get things done (screenplay by Michaël R. Roskam). 

It offers a potential counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one film focused primarily on a individual's parenting struggles within an environment theoretically dominated by the personal, the other's less subject-centric caricature working within one hypothetically attempting to produce a less hostile bilateral congregation, both lamenting static subjective growth.

Stress. They're both, full, of stress.

I recommend Bullhead for lovers of multidimensional cinema but be prepared cause it's rather dark.

I kind of think of it as a stubborn grouchy emasculated subdued rowdy intellectual action film to which you must pay strict attention.

Calamitizing the maintenance of an ideal.

Which blindly obscures what's beautiful.

Samsara

Ron Fricke's Samsara takes upon itself the modest task of pictorially presenting an interdimensional panoramic account of a synthesized set of (free)ranging semantic variables, a fluid rhetorically viable atemporal mosaic whose effervescent movements are acoustically interwoven according (perhaps) to the harmonics of three itinerant factotums, who practically reverberate throughout the humanistic theoretical continuum, giving birth to hope, sculpting immobility, and choreographing the infinite.

The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.

The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.

I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.

But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.

At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.

Without saying a word.

The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice?  Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?

It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).

Best film I've seen in a long time.

Elena

As a barren particular is brought into the forefront, behind which rests a model representative of flight, stationary and passive, pensive and solitary, the image's distinction begins to slowly fade, before, after a fellow aviator arrives, it is subtly and universally interiorized.

What follows is an expertly executed yet modestly matriculated morphology, wherein each member of a seemingly content couple exercises their predetermined propensities to finance a younger generation.

Hypocrisy and deception abound.

Historical preference bifurcates.

Galvanized wit is rewarded.

And opportunity will not be displaced.

Andrey Zvyagintsev adopts sparse means to inculcate a breathtaking exemplar, which suggests that the film's form undeniably upholds Elena (Nadezhda Markina), although an internal cross-examination, mischievously interjected by its music, which preliminarily tricked me into believing Elena is simply a collusively cheeky quotidian parody of your traditional blockbuster, sustainably supports the case's other systemic suitor (original music by Philip Glass).

The imaginary factor is brilliantly lubricated by Elena Lyadova's (Katerina) provocative pirouette, volatile yet absorptive, as she self-indulgently tears up the runaway. 

Melancholic film.

Teddy Bear

A tough, trusting, reserved, youthful 38 year-old bodybuilder, unfamiliar with the feminine sex and generally unable to generate first contact, spontaneously departs to an undiscovered country, having no desire to insurrect a moral nemesis, or the wrath of dawn, where, too upright to cross the final frontier, he sticks to his game plan, hits the gym, and serendipitously discovers that for which he has been searching.

In Teddy Bear, the motion picture.

The film's a calm, patient, joyful, timorous study of a caring athlete, dedicated to his calling, possessing practically no knowledge of worldly affairs, coyly proceeding from one day to the next.

If you've no interest in celebrating a strong contemplative investigation of ageless dreams or oedipal blunders, you may find that Teddy Bear lacks the flexibility continuously recycled in many a phantasmagorical flick.

But if you desire to humbly enjoy a robust quotidien reflection which elevates the passive struggles of an underexplored muscular happenstance, or any of the other things I've already mentioned, it just might work out, with multiple rep potential, without making much of a stretch.

Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on the Couch)

Felix and Percy Aldon's Mahler auf der Couch is well orchestrated.

They take a predictable story, let you know what's going to happen from the outset (the scores shown during the opening credits covered in prose), challenge you to pay attention anyways, and then provide a sombre, despondently energetic, physically and psychologically active rendition of a successful composer's troubled personal life, complete with a traditional Freudian (Proustian) resolution, minimalistically yet grandiosely conveyed.

The narrative follows a traditional artist who humbly employs a Highlander maxim both professionally and conjugally which simultaneously propels and curtails his development.

The film's form is noteworthy insofar as it biographically serenades the standard interviewing technique comedically nuanced in Mike Clattenburg's and Ricky Gervais's/Stephan Merchant's (Trailer Park Boys and The Office having been released contemporaneously) different mockumentary television shows, within an autobiographical soundscape, as Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) attempts to reestablish an I with Freud's (Karl Markovics) help while referencing data based upon the ways in which his psyche has internalized the potential praise/disdain/indifference/misgivings of his admirers/competitors/friends/family, thereby atonally harmonizing its classical unconscious rhythms with multiple indeterminate perspectives (while remaining ripe with emotion).

Barbara Romaner (Alma Mahler) impresses as 'she' attempts to break through.

If I've ever heard anything written by Mahler, I'm unaware.

Lawless

John Hillcoat's Lawless ballistically perforates a hostile approach to rapid wide-scale systemic change, polemically posturing various players within a bucolic dynamic in order to counterpoise federal and local reputations.

The year is 1931 and prohibition and the great depression are taking their toll.

But dozens of Virginian bootleggers in Franklin County have found ways to circumvent the prudish law while ensuring the availability of steamwhistlin' scratch.

Their business has its share of internal and external dangers, but if their entrepreneurial caution, confidence, and charisma is combatively backed-up, should the situation demand, it's possible for them to get by.

The film's social demographic places egalitarian commercial race relations in the underground, using its most formidable character to deconstruct Southern stereotypes without hesitating to allude to their pernicious influence.

This accomplishes the following: African American customers (unfortunately) occupy the underground but said occupation is directly (and vivaciously) displayed (bigots can spread their hate but they can't suffocate your spirit). Segregation's pernicious influence on the other hand is indirectly showcased on main street. Such an opposition realistically situates racist cultural dynamics within an historical paradigm while simultaneously suggesting that said paradigm isn't as prominent (in certain areas) as it used to be (without resorting to pointing out how bigoted things can be outside of the American South).

By making the underground activities lively and inviting, and those flourishing in the forefront antiquated and distasteful, Hillcoat subtly contemporarizes his narrative without aggrandizing it, thereby formally instituting a reversal of fortunes.

These commercial relations commence sharpening Lawless's predominant (and much more blunt) focus upon allowing local jurisdictions to settle economic matters according to their own industrious proclivities, the ways in which they particularly interpret the universal, one step at a time, or at least without dismissive, infantilizing, violent authoritative impositions.

Its narrative is quite different from Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, wherein federal authorities seek justice according to the somewhat peaceful (and necessary) application of the law only to be stymied by local thugs (after which 'authoritative impositions' are 'enacted').

Lawless is of course more concerned with underground economies and identity transformation (or solidification), and Special Agent Charlie Rakes's (Guy Pearce) psychopathic abuse of his power to 'tax' and/or crush small businesses during an economic crisis, while using his knowledge to intimidate people as they try to grow/change, is grossly counterproductive.

His exaggerated character represents both the reputation a lot of city folk have for using their 'wit' to consistently enflame the age-old urban/rural antimony, and the ways in which many federal law officers likely abused their authority when transferred to the South (can you break down an institutionalized culture of segregation by treating everyone bigotedly?).

But he bats heads with the Bondurant Boys whose (justifiably) invincible reputation and refusal to back down on certain matters of principle have garnered them considerable respect within (and outside of) their community, although Forrest's (Tom Hardy) adherence to the doctrine of fear generates problematic socio-ethical questions.

I suppose if you live in an excessively violent location you need to physically maintain a resolute persona that demonstrates that it won't take any shit.

But who the hell wants to live like that? 

It's like cultivating paranoia instead of grain and such methods will have significant detrimental longterm effects.

Nevertheless, Lawless's explosive yet clever refusal to allow the South to be characterized according to a set of generalized notions, which legitimately carry substantial historical weight but at the same time demonize those who lived within a system without operating according to their divisive rules, tenaciously operates within an incendiary critical domain whose approach to achieving social democratic objectives isn't so light and fluffy.

Although it does ironically employ the cult of the individual (an individual family) to achieve them.

Joker

Wow. There's a lot goin' on in this film.

Antiquated misunderstood terminologies are cartographically forsaken for reasons of self-preservation only to remain fluid within their own internal landscape within which a lyrical agrarian dynamic flourishes in isolation.

Until external structural constructions cut off their carnivalesque currents.

Enter Agastya/Sattu (Akshay Kumar), a community member who tackled adversity and found himself a job attempting to establish communications with radical otherness within an international setting.

His talents are extraordinary and he returns home with his adventurous wife (Sonakshi Sinha as Diva) to altruistically put them to work.

The lone village is situated along the border of three Indian states, and he hopes to negotiate a resolution (a communal pact) with one of them in order to resurrect its crops.

While doing so, he adapts to local customs out of respect for their traditions.

Finding no bureaucratic streamline, he employs his knowledge of the sensational to create a spectacle, based upon one appropriated from another domain, with the aid of compatriots, which intrigues the media.

They promptly capitalize on the reconceptualized market as the villagers begin to exchange services for currency.

But a competitive dimension seeks to expose their fantasy's reality which results in the expansion of its theatrics and the intrusion of the American military.

Meanwhile, the three states attempt to incorporate that which they previously disregarded.

But when radical otherness miraculously appears, it becomes apparent that the misunderstood antiquated terminologies that had been topographically eclipsed possess the means through which to intergalactically communicate, and a gift is presented.

The gift enables the village to refuse each of its suitors and remain independent.

Unfortunately, it will also introduce an industrial peculiarity (at the beginning of the film the village has no electricity).

It's quite the present . . .

Yet hopes remain high and Agastya's wit is unmatched, which suggests a sanitary synthesis between two polar means of production loosely intertwined by an improvised intermediary stage.

Scintillatingly scored and jocosely choreographed.

Starsky & Hutch

Starsky and Hutch.

Back at it again.

Although, this film was released 8 years ago so perhaps 'again' isn't the correct word to be using here, but, since I'm viewing it according to the dynamics of the ways in which the second decade of the 21st century is influencing my writing, the term 'again' can therefore be thought of as being applied appropriately, give or take that there's still a lot more I need to learn about globalization.

Much much more.

That being said, I still don't have much to say about Starsky & Hutch.

To literally break it down, it takes two psychological law enforcement extremes, one which is so anal retentive that it alienates everyone and is consequently regularly forced to find new partners, another with an approach that is so laissez-faire that it can smoothly make contacts and move about suavely but can't effectively get any work done, and slowly synthesizes them throughout as they grow and come to function like a strong resilient team.

Alternatively, in regards to its comedic aspects, I didn't find it as funny as I probably would have in 2004 but I may not have found it that funny back then either.

Cool car though.

Alright, I'm really not that into motorized vehicles.

Just trying to sound cool.

Fun to ride around in sometimes though.

I'm not cool.

The Dark Knight Rises

Not feelin' it for The Dark Knight Rises.

Don't get me wrong, the rapid pace and intelligent script make for an entertaining thought-provoking film, packed tight with a judicial balance of solid and cheesy lines/imagery/situations, set within an armageddonesque scenario which exemplifies the apotheosis of campy mainstream political drama basking in subtly sensational ludicrousy.

Note that it's just a movie.

Within however, the villain Bane (Roger Hardy), who works in the sewers and is backed by some of Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) excessively wealthy competitors, has been using construction workers and freelance thieves to launch a strategic attack which will incarcerate Gotham City's entire police force, set up a kangaroo court to 'judge' the wealthy, get his hands on a source of limitless energy that can be turned into a catastrophically destructive weapon, the whole time acting like a person of the people.

It's a bit much.

And the ways in which construction unions are depicted is frustrating.

Of course it's just a movie, within which Bane is a fanatical lunatic who employs absurd methods to achieve insane objectives.

I mean, what person of the people would destroy a football stadium?

But making him a 'person of the people' does cunningly vilify genuine persons of the people like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who still had to operate in a political dynamic which encountered expedient matters I'm assuming) which is problematic.

He is financed by the excessively wealthy, as mentioned earlier, which logically states that plutocrats are theoretically capable of using popular tropes to achieve despotic ends, thereby making Bane's adoption of the label 'person of the people' all the more problematic.

But this doesn't mean individuals who come from privileged backgrounds don't care about structural issues relating to poverty, individuals such as Jack Layton, and want to try to do something about them using legitimate political methods (pointing out a social democrat's rich upbringing is a divisive tactic used by the right to discredit them, from what I can tell anyway).

Having a source of limitless environmentally friendly power that can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction is also problematic, inasmuch as it indirectly vilifies alternative energy sources while propping up the nuclear/petroleum-based-product status quo.

Obviously, when your economy is seriously dependent on this status quo (see The End of Suburbia, 2004) and the ways in which its revenues fuel social programs, you can't simply change everything overnight without causing mass unemployment (perhaps I'm wrong here, I don't know, but it seems to me that if your economy is functioning with a significant deficit, large scale structural changes to its infrastructure will be disastrous unless they can definitively generate mass profits in the aftermath [which is a pretty big risk to take if you're not flush with cash]).

But at the same time, not trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives to the petroleum/nuclear power base that can't be turned into WMDs or be inexpensively integrated into the grid is equally disastrous (I suppose while searching for such power sources it's important to hire people to continuously monitor whether or not their construction can lead to the creation of WMDs [obviously enough {perhaps this isn't so obvious: it took a very long time to cap the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because they weren't prepared}]).

People often call me naive, but, whatever: "It was all the more [troublesome] because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality"(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5 [I don't think I'm like Proust, I just love reading In Search of Lost Time]).

Hence, as an escape, I did enjoy The Dark Knight Rises, but I can't support some of its structural issues inasmuch as, according to this viewing, they aren't very progressive.

There is the issue of Selina (Anne Hathaway) however who is trying to change her life around but can't due to the ways in which her criminal record prevents her from finding employment.

Just my thoughts on the subject.

Take 'em or leave 'em.

2 Days in New York

The artistic, political, familial, conjugal, critical, social, quizzical, spiritual, sexual and psychological creatively intermingle in Julie Delpy's 2 Days in New York, wherein free-spirits lackadaisically/audaciously/petulantly/mendaciously contend with both the pretentious and the vituperative, in the pursuit of playing a specific role.

These roles themselves, when abstracted, transformed into symbols, placed within a fluctuating in/determinate semantic matrix, in/determinate depending upon the rhetorical convictions of the urges to clarify (and the resultant multi/bi/lateral counter-clarifications), fluctuating inasmuch as difference guarantees the establishment of multiple points of view (many of which temporally fluctuate within themselves [unless you write this kind of thing]), can produce multilateral takes which nurture an inclusive body politic wherein manifold outlooks survey their surroundings, i.e., Web 2.0.

The film itself isn't really my style but I appreciate the dynamic complexity within which it's exoterically expressed.

Employing the spice mélange.

Magnifica Presenza (Magnificent Presence)

Radiating an offbeat, gentle, luminescent reflexivity, Magnifica Presenza's Pietro Pontechievello (Elio Germano) works in a bakery while striving to become an actor.  

After renting a house, he's visited by the ghosts of a theatre troupe (Compangia Appollonio) who worked for the resistance and were betrayed by their feature during World War II.

They strike up a friendship and their influence ameliorates his performance while imbuing his social interactions with experimental antiquated idiosyncrasies.

Awkwardly yet humanistically elevating while humorously tenderizing an artist's ambitions, subtly suggesting that blending the contemporary with the historical can lead to a broader understanding of one's self, or the surmounting of socio-cultural barriers (the stigma of homosexuality) more suited to a different time (within the film's temporal boundaries the stigma of homosexuality isn't prominent), and simultaneously warning against and romanticizing the internalization of the cult of the hero, Magnifica Presenza lovingly offers a clinical diagnosis of loneliness alongside a curative aid.

Boundlessly allusive and reticently merry.

In the mind's eye.

L'Incrédule (The Skeptic)

Two couples forge a spur-of-the-moment friendship in Federico Hidalgo's L'Incrédule (The Skeptic), after which a small business is inaugurated whose indeterminate outputs whimsically delineate the ambiguous.

The service they provide is known as the Charuflauta, which, from what I gathered, is a cure for loneliness.

None of the characters are able to definitively describe it, however, or figure out whether or not they should seek payment for their efforts.

When their first clients require a practical application of their abstraction, the comedic results lampoon the melancholic while stultifying the hyper-analytical.

Great film, mischievously mixing a broad array of sociological, personal, financial, artistic, and conjugal intersections, loosely framed within a recurring photographic motif, which establishes a reverberating ontological/epistemological dialectic, in order to clarify a sense of belonging.

Cheeky, uplifting, indecisive, self-assured.

In regards to the encapsulations of the concretely abstract.

Total Recall

Whether or not the action within the Total Recall remake takes place solely within Douglas Quaid/Hauser's (Colin Farrell) mind or in the film's objective domain is obviously up for debate.

The evidence for both sides is provided within a functional formulaic opposition between two states, one who owns the means of production (The United Federation of Britain/UFB), and another who is forced to work within them (The Colony/Australia).

The rest of the planet is uninhabitable due to prolonged chemical warfare.

In the onset, Quaid/Hauser has become bored with the status quo and decides to check out Rekall, a notorious company who can directly plant living memories within your mind. After arriving, he chooses the secret agent program (with the double agent option) and just as he's about to drift off, seconds after he's intravenously hooked up, security forces rush in.

For the rest of the film he's a pseudo-double agent (Hauser) who has had his memory erased and replaced with the persona Douglas Quaid. He instinctively remembers details of his former life, usually gut reactions which help him escape UFB traps, but cannot reconstruct the big picture.

His situation directly relates to a bewildering recurring dream he's been having, prior to visiting Rekall.

I probably should have paid more attention to the myriad chase sequences and mushy one-liners that predominate afterwards, for it's likely that within their action/delivery lie clues designed to disambiguate Total Recall's 'dreamscape.' But said sequences and one-liners are abundant and I found myself zoning out after a while.

However, before Quaid enters Rekall, the one-liners are delivered with a self-reflexive gritty disengaged realistic dexterity.

After entering Rekall and then travelling to the UFB, Hauser's first olympian flight is characterized by constantly shifting ground and split-second opportune life saving reflexes, in short, the stuff dreams are made of.

Yet, as many people find themselves looking for permanent work, often having to travel and compete to secure it, their terrain constantly shifts, working for a year here, another there, perennially stuck in a probationary period.  

And while searching one must often use brief inter/national/provincial/regional expressions while communicating.

Quaid knows who he is. There's no doubt in his mind as to his identity nor to his historical path.

Hauser has to rely on hidden messages and/or direct support/condemnation, mired in contradiction due to his supposed status as double agent, apart from the messages he's left behind for himself, and his actions, to formulate a stable I, oddly mirroring the establishment of a dream identity, albeit purely rational within the space's systemic parameters.

His sudden epic coercive confusing circumstances require a leap of faith which he makes, choosing to fight for the oppressed (the UFB has run out of land and seeks to invade the Colony to take theirs), which he does with the aid of his stunning versatile partner (Jessica Biel as Melina) while his former wife (Kate Beckingsale as Lori Quaid) does everything she can to stop them.

And an enigmatic individual whose personality reflects the end of history prevents the colonialization while enabling the creation of a social democratic state, amidst cheers and celebrations and a giant advertisement for Rekall.

Is this resolution too good to be true?

Well, in order to openly discuss the legitimate claims of oppressed workers in the post-9/11 age of austerity while working within a domain that regularly produces works designed to infantilize them, it makes sense that such a discussion would have to take place within an ambiguous framework in order for everyone involved to avoid any imperial entanglements.

At the same time, if the narrative does take place solely in Quaid's mind, it's designed to provoke critical discussions of the ways in which the military industrial complex is using pop culture to substitute images for reality in order to disrupt collective left-wing political actions by situating them within the cult of the individual, thereby making them seem unattainable (director Len Wiseman having taken control of the means of production).

Meaning that either way, Quaid is Hauser.

Take this Waltz

Disorientingly positioned between two socio-cultural persuasions (traditional vs. open marriage), one, familiar, cozy, predictable and solid, option 2, unknown, spicy, spontaneous and in inspirational flux, Take this Waltz's Margot (Michelle Williams) struggles to choose a specific gravitational counterpart, their contradictory forces amorously messin' with her mind.

Associated risks and issues of comfort are respectfully juxtaposed with daring intoxicating improvisational interest. 

As if a beautiful funny intelligent woman rediscovers that sensuous spark that unrecognizably redefined her as she let herself go in the arms of another, and it becomes increasingly difficult to dialectically distinguish her two suitors.

Until earthly realities draw attention to the responsibilities of the symbolic and the imaginary must be qualified by a degree of practicality. 

An escape, a happy place, something blissful, is required, where, perhaps, when emotionally tied to demanding conflicting relational engagements, one can reassert a transcendent sense of self while existentially weighing their details against their general affects, one which functions as a secret personalized counterpoint to that generated by the partner's enigmatic propulsive particle, from which balance can be dependently realized.   

Having interiorized and subjectively promulgated the gaze of her subjects of desire.

And negotiated a flexible impervious pact. 

Grabbers (Fantasia Fest 2012)

A peaceful island is resting quietly off the Irish coast, congenially taking care of its daily business, relaxed and chill, content and thirsty, relatively unconcerned with the partitions of the mainland, enjoying what little they have with everything they've got.

But after an austere by-the-book officious smartypants arrives from Dublin for a two week shift, strange things begin to happen.

A pod of deceased whales washes up on shore.

Residents and fisherpersons disappear.

A bizarre unclassified squidlike creature is caught in a lobster trap.

Who has given birth to young seeking to feast on human blood.

This means local constable Ciarán O'Shea (Richard Coyle) must give up drinking in order to save the village when papa comes searching for his imprisoned mate, and his by-the-book superior must tie-one-on for the first time.

In fact, since the aliens can't digest blood infused with alcohol, the entire town is invited to a local tavern, where there is a piss-up of biblical proportions, mirthfully unrestrained, at first, on the house.

Celebrating the love of stiff pints while comedically and romantically illustrating how they can effectively fight off bloodsucking monsters, Jon Wright's Grabbers jovially and collectively serves up a round of experimentally crafted filmic fermentation, torrentially tapping a traditional reservoir, to insouciantly distribute an ironic distillation.    

Brazenly brewed. 

Roller Town (Fantasia Fest 2012)

Rollin' along; roller skatin' down that road.

Bringing disco, back to life.

Haligonian comedy troupe Picnicface insert their distinct brand of hypertense laissez-faire creepy yet ingratiating socio-cultural commentary into their first full-length film, Roller Town, overflowing with the same cerebral mix of nostalgic innocence and nauseous necromancy that nauticalized their television show, ironically transmitted through a vicarious fundamental frequency, which fetishistically elevates the construction of a permanent sense of psychological well-being, localized and qualified by an irresistibly naive belief in the eternal values of pop culture, avatarized with direct access to the divine, while criminally agitating its impending neuroses.  

A lot of the jokes/situations have an immediate impact (are funny) while many of them seem like they were deliberately set up to just be as inane and I-don't-give-a-fuck as possible. But when you think about them afterwards it's these inane moments that lacked depth that make you laugh and want to see it again.

Which isn't that easy to do.

Les Aventures de Chatran (Fantasia Fest 2012)

One day Chatran's living with her mother and siblings on the farm, the next, she's floating downriver in a wooden crate, timorously preparing herself for life's unexpected verisimilitudes.

Her friend Pousquet chases after her and is always there in her time of need.

As her hesitant curiosity cautiously explores her new environment's mysterious terrain, collecting eclectic sensory stimuli as she travels through the countryside, a steady approach is diversely enacted, aided by her instinctive elasticity.

Making friends while avoiding the overbearing.

And verdantly investing in deciduous synergies.

Trishna

Aesthetics clash with socioeconomics after a brief period of romantic resignation in Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, where love is permitted to bloom if it knows its place.

Although, as it becomes increasingly clear that that place, due to the different circumstances into which the partners were born, will involve prolonged periods where the dependent lover, Trishna (Freida Pinto), must submit to whatever desire her wealthy benefactor adopts, immediately and without question, her thoughts and feelings being considered by him to have been forfeited in return for the employment and luxuries with which he provides her, said blooming soon morbidly decays.

There is no balance, no give and take, just a one-sided narcissistic vacuum taking full advantage of its power and privilege.      

Trishna's father doesn't help much either being more concerned with honour and saving face than his daughter's trauma.

And a shy, modest, beautiful impoverished woman, who was only searching for things such as respect and a voice from her partner, wanders off into the desert alone, while school children sing a song celebrating equality (it's a powerful scene in terms of strengthening the left in India).

Having symbolically used her realistic imagination to ceremoniously slice through the imaginary real.

To Rome with Love

For a summer in Rome, an office clerk finds himself thrust into the spotlight, his routine reflections hyperbolically sensationalizing influence, as an architect revisits his youth to bring back to life/cross-examine his most serendipitous subject of desire, a young communist lawyer contends with a retired opera producer when it's discovered that his humble father can sing exceptionally well, and a married couple, in town for a potentially prosperous employment opportunity, find themselves accidentally embracing exotic extramarital affairs.

Felicitously framed by a traffic cop's dissolving point of view.

The conditions of which inculcate calisthenic creativity.

Romantically mingling the celebrated with the starstruck and the ordinary with the hyper-intensive, while evoking the nimble necessity to unearth metaphorical mirth within corresponding psychoanalytic observations, Woody Allen's To Rome with Love's palpable playful pluck picturesquely procures impressionable popularizations, and salaciously serenades atemporal condensations.

Fidelity strengthened through chance, temptation tethered to testimony, regret distinguished from revelation, and dreams evanescently alighted.

A virtuosic variation on a theme.

There's a lot more to it than that.

Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) (Fantasia Fest 2012)

12 Indigenous tribes are living harmoniously amongst one another in the late-18th/early-19th century in the mountains of central Taiwan, when imperialist Japanese forces invade.

Their harmonious relations are highly aggressive inasmuch as manhood is achieved by cutting off the head of a member of a surrounding tribe.

The conquerors see things differently however and colonize said tribes in order to put them to work maximizing the economic potential of their natural resources.

Decades pass, and a once proud warrior culture is reduced to back breaking poorly paid labour, alcohol  abuse, suffocating ethnocentric taunts, and the systematic depletion of their ancestral hunting grounds.

And respect for their traditions is anathema.

Yet the knowledge that rebellion is akin to mass suicide keeps them at bay, until the situation proves too belittling to be endured forever after (no treaties whereby they could maintain their way of life were negotiated and signed).

And a revolt is launched.

The ways in which director Te-Sheng Wei depicts the revolt incontrovertibly turn one's stomach, as the legendary Mona Rudao (Da-Ching, Lin Ching-Tai) and his Mahebu people express their revenge.

Obviously I was cheering for the downtrodden Mahebu but my support was structurally challenged as they massacred every Japanese person in their village.

The challenge being the result of the generation of an internally cathartic traumatic absolutist aesthetic, which chaotically yet rationally glorifies battle while championing the enslaved, accompanied by a feminine voice singing a haunting lugubrious lament, working within and celebrating the traditions of the vanquished, without hesitating to showcase their warlike being.

A being which I'm not used to inductively digesting.

The rest of Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) practically answers Camus's cliché contention that the only properly philosophical problem is suicide.

Assuming that's a cliché by now anyways.

And its response heroically illustrates the fearless spiritual will of a fierce uncompromising people, forced to adopt extreme methods, dedicated to their way of life, refusing to passively perish.

As time goes by.