Andrei Rublev

An alternative cultural construction with manifest differences delineating structure, long before the global economy had secured widespread sustenance and reasonable lodging.

The Medieval world as intricately depicted sees religious endeavour faithfully grounded, at animate odds with pagans and artists who stray from the obedient path.

Without a market to sell his work and talent too imposing for traditional canvases, Andrei Rublev is avidly tasked with painting houses of religious worship.

Difficult to gain his trust or even convince him to take the commission, the fear of failure much too threatening in a climate of ruthless disciplinary punishment. 

So exacting so austere that even the most gifted refute prestige, and desperately fear their inspiration will fail to placate despotic envy. 

More difficult to meticulously nurture the aesthetic glory of a large cathedral, where your complex loyal design will be swiftly scrutinized by so many.

Individual texts may pass unnoticed or only interest a select few, but a public building will indeed be visited by a vast a/critical audience.

Where the devout artist's loyalty and faith will also be self-critically disposed.

Innocently answering their unique calling.

While conflict annihilates soulful reckoning.

It would be intriguing to learn more about the production and reception of Andrei Rublev, which bravely challenged the Soviet people not to overlook their religious heritage.

At a time when censorship was keen although not as orthodox as Stalin's tenure, the release of a 3 hour tome that lives up to its image and reveres religion suggests wild daring.

It's original monumental filmmaking that gathers thousands to collectively recreate, complex varied compelling shots of industrious impeti boldly undertaken.

To directly challenge a hostile regime with such innate overwhelming brilliance, no doubt recasts artistic conceptions through previously unimagined codes of conduct.

I even searched to see if they had actually cast the bell.

So realistic. So sincere. So inherently dangerous. So artistic. 

The apotheosis of religious filmmaking, crafted in communist Russia.

Museum Hours

The active mind having aged to reimagine engagement through interpretive fluid rapt multivariable impression.

A rambunctious youth clad in melodic calculi (managing and touring with bands), then ruminative middle-age embracing quiet illustration (monitoring different rooms in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum).

Living a thoughtful solitary life well-attuned to simple pleasures (Bobby Sommer as Johann), he meets a curious tourist one day visiting from Montréal (Mary Margaret O'Hara as Anne).

She's in town to watch over her cousin who's fallen into a coma, and would love to see the sights but doesn't know where to begin.

The film loosely follows their interactions as they travel in and about town, different features brought to life through historical exposition. It's not just the Kunsthistorisches that shines, Vienna's contemporary spirit enlivens as well, evocatively situated in past and present, replete with urban wildlife.

As Anne and Johann converse reflections on art evanescently materialize, not as if they're searching for essentials, more like chill jazzy random observation.

In fact it's like Museum Hours aesthetically cherishes the chill and random, as various images are freely showcased without a particular focus.

It's not presenting a specific thesis arguing for a point of view, but rather sharing different images to let Vienna thrive on through.

According to individual tastes, a clever seminar in artistic analysis attempts to lead visitors away from cocktail clichés, to more expansive literary compositions, as they observe different paintings, like there isn't an essence to be extracted but rather a variety of compelling interpretive exports.

Johann looks on in studious wonder as a guide imaginatively elucidates, her insights applicable to Jem Cohen's style which doesn't seek to blandly distill.

He observes that the right has made things much more serious, and made casual conversation much less prevalent, if the left loses sight of lighthearted argument, don't you wind up with The Lobster?

If the emphasis is on the correct interpretation of a shifting multivariable phenomenon, aren't such aggressive and violent evaluations highly dubious and irrational?

Taking absurd comedic outputs that clearly lack exhaustive scope, and treating them with biblical import, can lead to an unwillingness for people to participate in sustained and vigorous debate.

If they aren't treated with biblical import but rather as just another form of expression, then you have something much less frightening, and more amenable to inclusive discourse.

Little Women

Sisters living together in old school bucolic surroundings, lively animate reckonings overshadowing speechless gloom.

A cross-section of formative events congenially pitched and harmonized, love and care guiding inquisitive actions, a mother providing lucid instruction.

Not necessarily gloomy, it just seems like it must have been that way, so locked down in one specific set of circumstances, without the internet lying in wait.

But Little Women emphasizes grassroots creativity, or wholesome bonds forged through familial endeavour, the theatre as tantalizing as postmodern film, perhaps predating phrases like the art of conversation.

If people had no technological distractions to prevent them from directly interacting with one another (I'm reinterpreting the phrase), and dialogue flourished throughout the course of the day, conversation may have seemed less like an art form, and more like something freeflowing and natural.

Discussing topics at length may not have been reserved just for soirées and seminars, and sundry nuances may have been eagerly explored, by loquacious lackadaisical candlelight.

Perhaps with less of an emphasis on making weak arguments appear strong, and more of a desire to encourage prosperous articulation, people actually making their own nightly narratives, and debating while casually observing.

I was monitoring the activity of a relative the other day, who overflowed with tenacious curiosity, and I was somewhat relieved when The Last Jedi caught his attention, and I could then worry less about inspired destruction.

But I checked myself for having such thoughts, and took to heart accusations of entropy, for I should have been eagerly engaged, and ready for every distinct counteraction.

As parents prior to television no doubt must have rigorously been, how much tighter family bonds perhaps were back then, how much more available people were to please, how much more time there might have been for tasks at hand.

I'd like to read essays and/or books comparing 21st and 19th century pastimes, and Little Women as well, to learn more from its compelling story.

Greta Gerwig's film's exciting to watch, and kept me captivated from beginning to end.

It focuses on goodwill and charity at times which pleasantly caught my attention, not just because I saw it during the Holiday Season, but also since I rarely encounter self-sacrifice in contemporary film.

Or conversation.

Good things happen when people commit to reducing poverty and make healthier green alternatives more accessible.

It seems like the cast had a lot of fun while making it, but still worked hard to create a good film, the kind of vigorous reliable teamwork that can be facilitated by an emphasis on cool.

Having fun off screen while sincerely delivering when it's time to work, Little Women's most impressive, like working in Montréal.

And I've found a fictional companion for Ethan Hawke in my personal filmic pantheon (in my head), the one and only Laura Dern (Marmee March), they both keep showing up in so many cool films.

They've been around a while too.

Sort of like Harry Dean Stanton but not the same.

Not that the rest of Gerwig's cast didn't impress.

Left the cinema feeling happy.

At Eternity's Gate

Light streaming through the window, dreamy reckoning, exotic pause, patient nimble expression sparrow soaring eyes adoring, vortex, texture, blends, illuminated unconscious spiritually orchestrated canvas, brush strokes, supernatural brevity denoted enchantingly, floral vigour, spellbound charm, relaxed contemplative feeling, emotion, embrasure, less concerned with exacting aesthetics, less enamoured with splayed bedazzle, shyly swaddling landscapes in waves, in vivid undulating coy windswept waves.

Unaccustomed to traditional lifestyles, he struggles to say the right thing.

Unaware of what he's done, he rests for brief periods at times.

It can be very dark, how you have to think to understand what drives some people, sometimes, not everyone by any means, but some people care about such meaningless things, and seem to find motivation through ill-willed spite.

At times.

Many people don't fit roles that suggest they should act a specific way.

Many people which advocate for these roles don't fit them well either.

The roles exist to avoid confusion, I suppose, although I imagine broadening them, expanding them to include more spice, more variability, would make both spice and variability seem just as natural as rigid structure, and communities would correspondingly benefit from the increased diversity, teaching those whom it frightens to have no fear, regardless of whether or not everyone liked the same things.

Vincent van Gogh's (Willem Dafoe) actions are out of line at times and he doesn't realize it. But the violence he encounters doesn't teach him anything, in fact only makes things much much worse.

In the film.

His style, like intuitive observations of incorporeal intangible invisible imperceptible resonances, carefully balancing the sincere and the awkward with realistically composed imagination, perhaps mistaken for humorous representatives of inarticulate blooms in his time, clearly synthesizing wonder with amazement through recourse to the mundane to me, tasks hesitant poetic lucidity, the unobserved omnipresent joys that pass unnoticed as one ages, as dismissals of innocence replace innate fascinations, they never did with Vincent van Gogh, and, according to the two films I've seen about him, he remained unassuming till the end.

Perhaps touched, ingenious, perspicacious, naive, he had a vision anyways and worked hard to clarify it, as if he could never quite realize what it was, but sought to enliven it nonetheless.

The film's a carefully crafted thoughtful investigation of Van Gogh the artist, rich with performances from great actors, the dialogue perhaps too lofty and condensed at times but poignant and revealing at others, Julian Schnabel presenting his own artistic gifts most prominently perhaps when nothing's being said at all.

A gifted filmmaker.

A wonderful film.

Gauguin: Voyage de Tahiti

Irrevocably restless, never satisfied, constantly searching for sober novel inspiration with inexhaustible molten severance, erupting in fits of doubt and displeasure, encamped in violable abandon, glacial patience laboriously un/restrained, deep freezes and heat waves embryonically articulated, searching for radical bewilderment, impecuniously torn and strained, ambidextrous ambitions quotidianly qualified, seaside simplicity, inconspicuous nebula.

There wasn't anything else Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) could have done, although realizing this he likely should have embraced celibacy.

He seems to have been responsible inasmuch as he constantly worked to improve his art, dedicated to his personal tasks, resolved to carry on, but his wives and children were left destitute, as was he for much of his life, I suppose his family could have gone with him to Tahiti, although if I had several children and my partner was an artist who had never sold anything and was approaching 40 I likely would have moved on even if it would have crushed me.

Details.

Gauguin: Voyage de Tahiti doesn't present many details from his life, apart from the fact that he left his family behind in France to find inspiration in Tahiti where he met another woman whom he treated brutishly while painting.

The film condenses various aspects of his life into short scenes that depict him working, loving, playing, breaking down, scenes which infantilize his social relations while romanticizing his artistic stagger, the scene where a doctor notices that he isn't painting anymore adding sympathy and concern, the scene where he locks his wife Tehura (Tuheï Adams) up while he goes to work accentuating his callous desperation, as he realizes he has nothing else left, and is aware that must seem unappealing.

A bit of a scoundrel I suppose, base instincts overpowering free spirits at times as nagging hopelessness engendered cantankerous decay.

You still have to imagine you're Gauguin, you're a struggling dismissed talented artist with nothing to hold on to later in life besides works that aren't selling and intense stubborn commitment, no one recognizing your talents besides yourself, students prospering while you struggle, you have to situate yourself within his rugged composure, while remembering that you may have been less lascivious had you no steady income in the age before birth control, to take something enduring away from the film.

You could probably learn more about him from reading 5 pages of a biography.

But would you be able to imagine you were there, struggling as he struggled, toiling as he toiled, watching as everything he risked and loved slipped away, with as much doting dour devotion?

Voyage de Tahiti presents vivid impressions lacking in substance but full of rich emotion.

The other side of the world.

Lost in love at play.

Final Portrait

"What was that?"

"No, that was months ago."

"What happened to, yes, no, hold on, it was, underneath this!"

"Damn it."

"Oh wait, that's it, I moved it over, here, haha, hey, whatever, got it, alright, focus, what was your question?"

"Oh, minutia."

"You expect me to remember precise details that I didn't even care about at the time or about people I never met or subjects I never studied?"

"I'm like a big freckle."

"I found this last week, try it, it's delicious and only costs $2.99."

"Have you ever had a readymade store bought sandwich with or without meat that tastes this good?"

"There's no one around, you don't have to pretend, you can lie and say you were humouring me later. If word gets out."

"Come on, it's sunny and +23."

"Nah, it's blends, mixes, swamp water, iridescence."

"I like that cats have whiskers."

"He was a golden-haired Adonis. A conversation with him was like going to a play. Logical too, a natural stream of unedited fact-checked sense, like you imagine a conversation with your favourite artist might be like except that he was less random."

"Look, I couldn't say anything, he knew everything I was going to say before I said it. To stand out I had to be vulgar and that doesn't work."

"'Fair weather frisk', no, 'gilded gambit'? Not quite. What about, 'jaded orchid'?"

"Impartial?"

"You don't like swimming?"

"Milk and sugar, no lemon."

"No."

"I've been meaning to do that."

"With an S."

"I always like that they played even when it was raining or snowing or foggy or freezing."

"It's not like that here, the same categories exist but they're less rigid, less determinate."

"It lasts a long time. Everything's blurry late-March early April."

"It's the little birds. That's where you find nature's best colouring."

"Well, a huge section of downtown is opened-up for free shows from local and international artists for two months in the Summer."

"I met one guy who could do a crazy Chewbacca."

"Learn a bit everyday, try to apply it."

"If you spend too much time worrying about negatives, you might never do anything. Just don't leap too quickly."

Peter Rabbit

A daring ingenious mischievous rabscallion meets his earnest stuffy fastidious match in Will Gluck's Peter Rabbit, as the new Mr. McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson) grumpily takes up residence in the country, and young Peter (James Corden) still covets his family's stock victuals.

Nepotism has brought about McGregor's downfall, for after a decade of meticulous loyal service at Harrod's toy store, his sought after promotion was given to another.

A layabout relative of the owners in fact.

Yet after suffering a frantic breakdown, communal sympathy for his fellow untitled Brits doesn't take root in his furious consciousness, and rather than sharing his overflowing bounty with Peter and his hungry friends and family, he does everything he can, to keep them locked out.

But Peter is clever.

An intuitive understanding of electricity helps him to paternalistically galvanize McGregor's temper, although the desired therapeutic benefits are overwhelmed by fits of rage.

Nevertheless, McGregor conceals his antipathy for Peter from love interest Bea (Rose Byrne), who cherishes every moment she spends with the bunnies, and paints them adoringly when unconcerned with abstraction.

She likes McGregor.

And Peter knows it.

So after their mutually destructive shenanigans, many of which are excessively violent for children (McGregor has to stab himself with an epipen at one point), explosively fell a tree, which comes crashing through Bea's studio, Peter must decide if his selfish jealousy is worth more than a friend's happiness, after McGregor gives up, and quietly heads back to London.

By coming to terms with his former adversary, Peter outshines the vast majority of his much older contemporaries, and McGregor learns to share his bourgeois abundance, and embrace serendipitous succulence.

Thus, Peter Rabbit sticks it to ultraconservative Brit oligarchs who would still rather see the brightest most advanced commoners flailing in obscurity, than have their years of devoted service justly rewarded.

I suppose it's less confusing than seeing Peter hook up with Bea, even if it metaphorically suggests the British still frown upon bohemian romantic couplings.

Audacious artistry?

There's still work to be done.

The number of jabs delivered at France's expense suggest some French rabbits might show up for the sequel.

Une portée de lapins français?

If there is a sequel.

Who let Peter's allergy tirade into the film?

Bit of a shocker.

In serious bad taste.

Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend)

Playful deceit with murderous intent wickedly tricks resigned desperation into committing uncharacteristic crimes in Wim Wenders's Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend), the lucrative potential payoff producing imaginative cures for dissembled diagnoses, beforehand, while innocence still tenderizes, while conscience remains impenitent, while a child acknowledges fraternity, while a wife willingly confides, the sudden possibility, the imposing tactile ease, inherent obscurities coaxing refined obsolescence, disappearing into the fold, in possession of purist panacea.

Concurrently, a fraudulent easel facilitates brushstrokes which comfortably pay the bills for both facsimilator and procurer, a man of the world always eager to make new friends, his kaleidoscopic contacts adroitly brimming with opportunistic fervour.

Begrudged meetings of minds.

Corruption classed exclusive.

The film's mix of grizzled despondent frightened action and curious childlike malevolent pause maliciously meows with tantalizing solemnity, like you've been dating a cool partner for a while and have run out of ideas, your whiskers rustling with uncertainty as you acquiesce to their control.

Cat style, things are still rather loose knit and unconcerned but the spontaneous bursts of profound inspiration startlingly ignite uncharted expeditionary crazes.

Visceral emotions.

Subconscious realization.

Like the ingredients for grandma's seductive shepherd's pie, Der Amerikanische Freund reflexively socializes with clandestine variability, each mouthful uniquely pronounced, the devouring of morsels plain yet sublime.

Taken in its entirety, it timorously yet nonchalantly plays dangerous games as it heuristically high jumps, surprisingly settled with enterprising leaps and bounds, intuitively melding cautious authenticity with bold improvisation, it angelically clasps demons, in cloaks of aspen rue.

Mr. Turner

Summits submerged then skewered sequestered, holland holistic immersed treasured method, polished in grizzled and gruff pirouettes, subsiding colliding opining subtexts, vertigo, vertiginous, response grounded encompassing consumed, independent refuge, disabled domestic docility, specialization, a willingness to extemporaneously compose candour spawn candlelight, candelabras, regenerative concessions superseding convalescent impecunity, harnessed tempestuous incidental asseveration, gravitational in flux, fluttering foundational finessed fossilized fulcrum, heavyweight prehensile sturgeon, immaculately dispersing, paramount proof of life.

Mr. Turner examines one J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall), a brilliant British painter from the 19th century.

Shackled to nothing besides his intuition's visceral duty, he devotedly worked to theorize imagination.

People like this can't live within bourgeois constraints, or can perhaps, with loose reigns.

I suppose such partners, due to the extraordinary success of their coveted loved ones, have difficulty sharing them with horns of plenty, jealousy maddeningly provoking feuds to compensate for feelings of worthlessness.

Outspoken.

Perhaps not, not really sure, that seems to happen in books and films and songs sometimes though, and from what I gather, you're supposed to unequivocally disavow such yearnings, if in a bohemian relationship.

Burnished in bedlam.

It's a great film, intelligently written, good thing I started reading Dickens again recently.

It covers neither too much nor too little, rather presenting finely crafted intellectual biospec sequences which blend the tragic and the critical, the penetrating and the porous.

Probably would have cut the last half hour.

There's a tendency in biographical films to elevate the principal character while reducing his contemporaries to trite one-dimensional cheerios.

The greeting.

Mr. Turner doesn't do this, but watch for it because it takes generally complex interconnected diverse personal/professional/romantic/. . . relationships and counterpointingly disembowels them, which, if you're trying to film something swift, leaves your viewer soberly cocktailed.

Mr. Turner's quite rough.

In sympathy.

The Danish Girl

For a terse, inadequate, understated, rushed synopsis of Foucault's Madness & Civilization, one might write that qualitative evaluations, at any given moment, have specific psychological preferences, stereotypically spiritualized in what they consider to be rational, enticing, praiseworthy, while alternative dispositions which don't snuggly fit the definitions must still attempt to forthrightly applaud them, or fall prey to a legion of mental health authorities who make a living cultivating them, using various methods to diagnose and cure the afflicted who can't help but stand out in sharp contrast.

These definitions change, In Search of Lost Time's examination of the Dreyfus Affair highlighting malleable pretensions to culture, the Affair not relating to definitive mindsets particularly, but Proust's compellingly interminable investigation of its protagonists and arch-villains, themselves changing their positions depending on their analysis of the popular, thereby behaving politically, to parlour, antiquate, and esteem, demonstrates how madness and civilization dialectically contend, embrace, synthesize, in rhetorical applications of epistemological virtue.

There are people who seem to be lacking in reason, people who adamantly believe their pet guinea pigs are reincarnated Julio-Claudians for example, but The Danish Girl's Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) is clearly sane, kind, gentle, yet has no means through which to access inadmissible components of his personality, and is therefore labelled undesirable.

He escapes curative clutches however, enduring minor experimental encumbrances but still maintaining his freedom, and, with the aid of his idyllic wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), eventually finds a doctor who recognizes his sanity and wholeheartedly assists.

Before discovering this doctor you seem him struggling to animate, as he seeks out the compassion of the civil who misguidedly think him mad.

The film is a quiet timid exploratory illustration of gender identification which focuses more on Lili/Einar and Gerda's brilliant relationship, effervescently brought to life by Redmayne and Vikander, true compassion and understanding, than the horrors Einar/Lili faces as he transforms.

Illumination.

Trying to find markets for art complements Lili/Einar's discoveries, selling paintings like trying to invigorate public opinion, open up new worlds, and encourage sociocultural inclusivity.

Gerda's paintings are quite beautiful.

As is a world where difference is an integral strength.

Intimately unrecognized.

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.