Yearning

 *Spolier Alert

A dedicated daughter-in-law spends her life managing her new family's business, her intricate savvy and reflexive know-how having saved it from ruin during World War II.

Her husband passed in the war though and she sadly never married again, although she honourably cherishes his memory with devout respect and wholesome dignity. 

A new supermarket opens in town and starts undercutting their trusted prices, leaving her in-laws in a difficult spot which they need to manage with nimble moxy. 

It's decided to expand the business and boldly open a much larger store, but the loyal intuitive multifaceted manager is initially denied a leading role. 

It's thought that she should remarry and a suitable candidate is wisely chosen, 17.5 years having gone by since her husband passed, the idea perhaps not that socially awkward.

But she refuses out of heartfelt devotion and eventually decides to return to her home.

But not before she distressingly discovers.

That her deceased husband's younger brother is madly in love with her.

The ending's a brilliant illustration of the conflicting post-war attitudes in volatile Japan, the younger less rigid experimental viewpoints and the older more orthodox sociocultural rules. 

Reiko has to admit that she has feelings for Koji and that she's felt amazing since she learned of his passion, yet still feels determinably duty bound to her old husband's stately ultimate sacrifice. 

She's also much older than Koji and it's a bit weird marrying two brothers from the same family, but that doesn't mean she isn't tempted to continue living in the world she's created.

Unfortunately, while travelling home Koji follows her upon the train, and in their confusion they depart somewhat early and get a hotel just to think for the night.

Koji goes for a walk after another heated argument morosely breaks down, and gets too close to a haunting cliff's edge and earth-shatteringly falls to his unrequited end.

But is the film condemning Koji for having tried to break with the old conservative ways?

Or modest Reiko for not having embraced the newfound less severe liberal ideology?

It's classic obscured ambiguity which likely still generates debate amongst film fans.

A genuine tragedy embroiled in conflict.

Much too serious or excessively light. 

Scrooge

Events traditionally unfold in the 1970 version of Scrooge, known perhaps for its musical flourishes and alternative takes on narrative contentions.

Scrooge remains as thoroughly miserly as one would expect if even vaguely familiar, and greedily refuses to grant the slightest clemency to any of his festive hard-working debtors.

To be expected, he also treats Bob Cratchit with cold and calculated avaricious disdain, and once again denies his humble nephew as he pleasantly invites him to Christmas dinner.

Many of the lines no doubt are almost identical to the 1951 classic, as it proceeds with temperate respect to the ageless wonder miraculously crafted.

It does struggle somewhat at times when the story isn't enriched through upbeat song, the less melodious dramatic scenes lacking convincing qualities effectively managed.

I did rather like the songs however and their exuberant convivial ecstatic fortitude, the fitting emphasis on play and fun mellifluously denoting communal cohesion.

Some of them are quite elaborate as well with dozens of extras performing in unison, the intricate nature of the ebullient dancing considerably impressive in stride and swoon. 

In this version, more attention is paid to Scrooge's apprenticeship with ye olde Fezziwig, and Alice is presented as Fezzi's daughter who Scrooge freely falls for even though he can't dance.

An extended scene romancing in the countryside adds much more romantic and amorous depth, Scrooge's inevitable inestimable turn all the more cruel and dishearteningly tempered. 

I always love the Fezziwig scene and it is rather short in some of the versions, I often think all of that effort for such a short time but at a younger age it did seem much longer.

Another notable difference looks at Scrooge's imagined descent into Hell, where he encounters Jacob Marley again and finds himself enlisted as Satan's clerk. 

The final song the purchase of the toys is rather well done Scrooge's generosity unsurpassed.

Not in keeping with the season to state overzealous!

How could it be!

Merry Christmas, everyone. 🎄🎅🤶🌟⛄𐂂👼

Night after Night

Having achieved everything he could have hoped for from his prestigious local nightclub, a determined renaissance gangster seeks to improve his diction and grammar (George Raft as Joe Anton).

He's had enough of the high-life and wants to sell and settle-down, while perhaps impressing an elegant socialite who frequents his club from time to time (Constance Cummings as Miss Jerry Healy). 

His headstrong critical MC presents well-reasoned practical counterpoints (Roscoe Karns as Leo), with ambitious crafty reckoning which seeks not to retire.

He's rather down to earth and not inclined to embrace change, unless it corresponds to how he's been duly raised.

Trouble comes a' brewin' a potential clash with a rival gang, if they decide to stay in business they'll have to find ways to paunch and placate.

While light of heart romantic daydreaming keeps the mood upbeat and comic, as if nothing could ever go wrong while everything crashes down around them.

The fair-minded touch and ironic innocence distinguishes Night after Night from Godfather III, and many other gangster films which recklessly embrace chaotic pedagogy.

Perhaps love can win out in the end as competing interests jive and juke, the daring couple courageously coaxing wholesome pasteurized down home subsistence.

It's easy to suddenly give up what you never had in the first place, but how do you switch from constant activity to a much more sedate way of life?

In your athletic prime at the communal heights of your insurgence, how do you leave everything behind to emphatically embrace holistic chillin'?

The pandemic gave a crash course in blatant dull nerve-racking meaninglessness, where the majority of the world had to embrace stasis like a misanthropic maelstrom.

Day after day distressing thoughts intensifying this could go on forever, bleak things were as they found a way to mischievously finagle mass conjecture.

Hopefully, while embracing lockdown many people adopted Mr. Raft's approach, and took the time to learn new things while creating song and tech and recipes.

Perhaps he was able to change and learn the rudiments of discursive intrigue, he certainly would have had a tale to tell ala Dashiell Hammett or even Joseph Conrad.

Perhaps she would have eased him through the difficult humbling light transition, with patience and resilient accord free-flowing effervescent livelihood.

The secret's to have animal sightings and to never indeed grow tired of them (I never will).

Perhaps even buying a dog or cat.

If possible, heading out on safari.

Dabba (The Lunchbox)

The hearty provision of delicious nourishment slowly melts Saajan's (Irrfan Khan) frozen exterior in Ritesh Batra's Dabba (The Lunchbox), Ila (Nimrat Kaur) enraptured as someone finally takes note, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) benefitting from the frosty fallout.

As depicted in the film, Indian lunch delivery is a complicated procedure, providing employment for many, their services applauded by Harvard.

Lunch, potentially homemade, is cooked, picked-up, dropped-off at a central location, then distributed to hungry workers, as the day's labour approaches its extended period of rest.

In Ila's case, the lunch she prepares for her husband is delivered to the wrong person.

Curmudgeony Saajan revels in his good fortune even if his bouncy inquisitive replacement (he's retiring) Shaikh continuously annoys him with his enthusiastic go-getting.

Ila discovers that her husband isn't receiving his lunch and begins sending Saajan letters, the two slowly developing a fledgling romance thereafter, Saajan gently mending her broken heart.

Hesitantly yet tenderly unreeling, Dabba quotidianly explores the thoughts of two modest upstanding hard working subjects, their difficulties with the im/moral dimension of their love lettering, or the joys/hardships associated with transgressing cultural codes.

The film required something else to hold it together, and Shaikh's presence, youth contending with age, adds flavourful ingredients to its recipe, rounding out its amorous intentions with related thoughts concerning integrity, friendship, and saturated job markets.

Ila's relationship with her Auntie (Bharati Achrekar) achieves similar ends albeit from a domestic standpoint.

The lotus.

Miraculum

Flight plans, guilt-ridden, felicitous, miserable, and emancipating flight plans, desperately intermingle differing degrees of shock, immersed in Daniel Grou's Miraculum, as risks deteriorate familial stabilities, and the concept of vice, is multifariously de/moralized.

Synoptic suffering.

A weary outcast attempts to make amends through profits earned from drug smuggling.

An affair crushes and/or enlivens the members of two elderly couples.

Distant addictive empty partners seek to rejuvenate their marriage.

A struggling Jehovah's Witness is tempted by secular advancements (blood transfusions).

The four stories downtroddenly unfurl within and without (like Babel or Tian zhu ding), lucidly pinpointing vectorized vertices, occasionally peaking ensemble, dedicating a despondent deconstructive density to open-minded conscientious plights, which resists clear and distinct binding generalizations, to materially matriculate the mundanely divine.

Although communal belonging is fluidly challenged as unforgiving bulwarks fortify their positions.

Wherein resistance is rather futile.

Miraculum isn't like pastis, milk, and honey, more like a caressing melancholic ideological tempest, compelling in its whirlwinds, tight, multifaceted, challenging.

Editing by Valérie Héroux.

Written by Gabriel Sabourin (Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne consulting).

It breathes difficult distinct tetralectics into profound ethical quotients, corrugating crisp conceptions of the beautiful, rationally masterminded, exacting, composed.

Keeping you focused at full attention.

Built to multilaterally stimulate.

The Butler

Periodically piecing together various volatile historical tracts, intergenerationally sketching a people's hard beaten path, sustained successful service slowly evidencing sophistication and ingenuity, facets which for some archaic reason required proof, proof that wasn't that easy to come by due to multileveled systemic oppressions, which persist, and committed confrontational activism, manifesting different variations on a theme, familially questioning particular forms of engagement, Lee Daniels's The Butler functioning as a practical ideological switchboard, easy to follow yet deep and hard hitting, well suited to wide audiences, proper.

Considering the potent surge of what's being described as the new racism, this is an important film.

The Butler's a good starting point for young secondary students interested in learning more about 20th century American history as well, since it broadly condenses many important developments and personalities, thereby making them accessible, while setting them up with oppositions to avoid having things appear too simplistic, these elements serving to encourage further study.

It also demonstrates that your occupation or income doesn't necessarily limit your ability to play a role in the world at large.

Imagine what could have been done with web 2.0 back then.

Out of sight.

En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair)

A gifted enlightened town doctor (Mads Mikkelsen as Johann Friedrich Struensee) fortuitously finds himself suddenly reshaping his country's (Denmark) feudal character in Nikolaj Arcel's En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair), relying heavily upon his lucid acumen to enact social democratic reforms. 

But a misguided sense of permanency and an affectionate indiscretion result in his ignominious downfall.

King Christian VII (Mikkel Følsgaard) wants little to do with ruling and prefers to revel in unconditioned debauchery.

Doctor Struensee does little to disuade his ambition and the two strike up an amiable friendship, prominently acting for the good of the people.

As opportunity strikes, freedom materializes, yet its nascent state fails to consider history's quotidien counterbalance.

As dinner is served, a competitive course of cultural compositions is collusively seared, and the foundations of a revolving polemic picturesquely present themselves.

Too picturesquely perhaps.

One of En kongelig affære's principal problems is that there aren't any proactive plebeian representatives. A film boldly illustrating a crucial moment in Danish social democratic development should have likely included characters to whom said developments directly apply.

Instead they're stereotypically depicted as a mob.

It may have been too maudlin to include proactive plebeian reps but it also lacks a healthy contingent of subtle continuous economically disadvantaged background personnages which could have diversified its filmscape.

Obviously doing this continuously throughout a film is expensive and time consuming, and since En kongelig affære highlights the dangers of proceeding too quickly with social democratic reforms, perhaps this is an example of form working hand-in-hand with content.

The economic dangers are obviously real but so are the dangers of a right wing government that constantly pleads poverty (or creates an inexhaustible debt) when there is in fact of abundance of wealth, and the film examines a period which inaugurated social democratic reforms, not one where they already hold partial institutional prominence in some countries.

The King is at least cognizant of his faults and logically prefers friendship to fidelity considering his own predilections.

The film also concerns a love affair.

Don't know if I've ever seen a better example of the ridiculousness of the absolute application of ideology than when the Queen (Alicia Vikander [Denmark's Keira Knightley or Natalie Portman?]) is told to be more ladylike while giving birth.

Outstanding.

Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) (Fantasia Fest 2012)

Presenting a comic romantic over-the-top ultraviolent musical, wherein bourgeois values resolutely seek to pacify a versatile tumultuous rogue, the undying and overpowering intensity of love unwaveringly guiding their reformative resolve, streetwise unconditional consistent combative tenacity governing his, Takashi Miike's Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) does not refrain from elaborately executing every consummate class cliché ever created, sensationally synthesizing quixotic and hardboiled extremes, relentlessly reproducing unerringly awkward amorously explosive motifs, in the implacable pursuit, of emancipated co-dependence.

Group dynamics repetitively insist that young Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) obediently pay his respects, but as their challenges are uniformly discombobulated, his limitless disenfranchised individuality, and consequent unwittingly seductive magnetism, remain intact.

Attaching a monetary value to the ability to maintain specific ideological viewpoints, while catastrophically choreographing their constructive affects, Ai to Makoto pugnaciously parodies the domain of rehabilitative reckoning, while chaotically kitschifying the practice of revenge.

For love's sake.

Moneyball

Brad Pitt must have loved Moneyball's script at first glance. He's given the majority of screen-time and only one other actor is provided with the lines to contend a memorable performance. The film's about a baseball general manager's (Pitt as Oakland's Billy Beane) struggles to introduce a new style of management/recruitment/strategizing in order to field a playoff contender with a limited budget, the style being based on sabermetrics, the specialized objective analysis of baseball statistics gathered from actual game-time activities, notably a player's on-base percentage. Pitt lectures, wheels, trades, demotes, admonishes and deals while throwing things around and confidently battling formidable egos. The film effectively demonstrates what it's like to champion the new within a set of firmly established guidelines that have been unquestionably governing the order of things since they were set in place and consequently naturalized through the act of unconscious repetition. Risks must be taken. It all must be laid on the line. A number of unanticipated factors and potential points of diversification must be calmly and patiently ignored/incorporated as their rational characteristics challenge or correspond to the plan in question.

The film's a lot easier to watch if you're a baseball fan whose interested in the trials of an innovative general manager. Lotta baseball goin' on and your response to the predictable trajectories may be more enthusiastic if following a team's condensed unheralded controversial season interests you.

Or maybe it won't, I don't know.

The relationship between Beane and his daughter (Kerris Dorsey as Casey Beane) offers a distraction and adds a familial dimension to his professional predicaments. Apart from his relationship with his daughter, he definitely lives and breathes baseball 24/7 each and every day always. Was impressed with Jonah Hill's reticent yet incisive performance, exemplifying the possibilities which occasionally exist for recent graduates who aren't afraid to challenge the establishment.