Showing posts with label Shawn Levy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shawn Levy. Show all posts

Friday, July 12, 2013

The Internship

As versatile exploratory eclectronic dynamics instigate widespread structural changes within the American economy, two salespersons, two heroes, must reconfigure their occupational allegiances, adjusting their garrulous genuflections to an in/directly interactive domain, sticking to their guns while leaving room for error, boldly entering a new domain where Vince Vaughn (Billy McMahon) has never gone before, wherein past general approaches must swiftly absorb sundry divergent nodes and particulars to fasten new understandings to a previously non-existent fluctuating multifaceted computational interface, psychologically constructed on the fly, after which previous sustainable reflexes find themselves transfigured yet productively cogent, as youth and age contend in a transfixed multiplex.

Or Billy and Nick (Owen Wilson) compete for new jobs while working with youthful misfits initially unreceptive to the ethos of the 1980s.

I suppose Mr. Vaughn has gone here before, The Internship bearing remarkable similarities to Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, but this format fits well, and the film contains some hilarious moments.

I didn't like how Billy ditches the team near the end, just like in Dodgeball, but as the team comes together to build him back up, it becomes apparent that he was indeed a good teacher, constructively no longer feeling like a failure as the obvious beneficial affects of his wisecracking salespersonship animate his teammates, a cooperative collegial streamwise dialectic.

The Internship finds a way to interpersonalize doom and gloom forcastes hewed from theorized claims that the net is depersonalizing general social interactions, comedically encoding a face-to-face aesthetic, while incorporating competitive clashes in an asinine yet convivial flashdance.

Not Vaughn's best work, but a fun intergenerational summertime flick, worth checking out for some cheeky commentary and head shaking laughs.

Owen Wilson, also good.

What a feeling.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Real Steel

The latest Rockyesque film to hit the big screen is Shawn Levy's Real Steel, a fun and heartwarming story of how a dead-beat dad (Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton) and his feisty son (Dakota Goyo as Max Kenton) forge a strong bond through the power of fighting robots. It isn't the most original narrative although it does creatively work within an established tradition.

And Jackman's love interest Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) doesn't give up on him even though his reckless ways have proved to be remarkably unprofitable.

Whereas humans were still thought to be at the centre of various cultural dimensions in Rocky's day, in the time of Real Steel technological innovation has usurped their active role. Rather than directly taking part in ridiculous battles which regularly present themselves, proxies abound which can effectively fill in as disaffected combatants. Hence, boxing has been replaced by robot boxing and ex-boxers can continue to make a living boxing if they purchase a robot and expertly learn the subtleties of its dynamic controls.

But can such expertise generate results formidable enough to resiliently defeat the ultimate representative of technological fortitude, Real Steel's Zeus and its mastermind the bumptious Tak Mashido (Karl Yune), without continuing to maintain a multidimensional working person's perspective within the heart of its dynamic cultural trajectory, enhanced by love?

Fortunately it still cannot.

But when robots take over and start making movies for themselves will the human dimension still continue to persevere as the principal factor motivating their legendary decision making?

The answer is potentially fermenting somewhere within communist China.