The Covenant

A group of old world families clandestinely co-habitates with the world at large, keeping to themselves at secretive times while patiently awaiting their time of ascension.

Their families escaped the Salem Witch Hunt way back when fear drove men mad, the anxiety igniting bland social pressures to despotically embrace austere absolutism.

The children attend a local prep school lucidly administered by ye olde Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), awkwardly anticipating their spry eighteenth birthdays when their otherworldly powers will magically emerge.

Their powers aren't to be taken lightly their chaotic use has mortal consequences, and if used too often through frivolous indulgence will unnaturally age and ruin their bodies.

Difficult to share such wisdom with lads ebulliently awaiting the passionate moment, when more or less anything they put their minds to will instantaneously manifest.

Especially when it becomes distressingly evident that an unknown 5th student possesses the power, and is recklessly using it for retched misdeeds with no working foreknowledge of truth or consequence.

A showdown ominously looms within the sleepy oblivious trajectory.

Agéd chronicles proving noteworthy.

For the well-read adventurous sorcerers.

The Olympics no doubt a suitable time to celebrate unique and novel abilities, and the remarkable ways they fluidly enrich the humdrum malaise of routine existence. 

No doubt categories and hierarchies and levelling peculiarly mingle in spherical continuums, the definitive dispersal of surrealist fact gracefully lauded through festive ephemera.

In so doing, for some the cheeky sitcom may represent insouciant brilliance, while others seek romantic unions melodramatically arrayed with maladroit im/probability, still others embracing the tragic distinction absurdly characterizing incumbent banality, crime and horror schlock and mayhem, not to mention robust documentaries.

Should the people in primordial possession of rare bizarro traits and talents, not be welcome in villages and towns in order to promote less stealthy isolation?

Weren't the heroes from religious texts in commensurate possession of similar gifts?

Does not celebrating specific historical examples to the obscuring of the present not foolishly generate a stasis none of them would have tolerated? 

Kari-gurashi no Arietti (The Secret World of Arrietty)

Life proceeds as it always has within a naturalistic microcosm, a loving family nestled tucked away, eagerly searching for vivid adventure.

The adults exercise sincere caution when engaged in thrilling pursuits, age and impertinent patterns having cultivated guarded prudence.

But the world is new for their sprightly offspring who freely seek characteristic difference, and there's so much activity beyond the gates that they can't spend every day inside.

Potentially inhospitable giants reside alone unaware nevertheless, until one of their observant children happens to notice Arrietty (Mirai Shida).

Desires for friendship and nascent networking encourage them to get to know one another, but old school astute and fatalistic reckoning has classified their interactions strictly anathema.

Harrowingly so, for soon Shô's (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) caretaker is aware of the little people, and sets out with pernicious particularity as if their home's been invaded by pests.

Father (Will Arnett as Pod) is aware that they've been detected and has a plan to swiftly escape, but not before dire search and rescue is trepidatiously necessitated.

Unfortunately, the interrelations thus proceed upon austere lines. 

But aren't the affects so much more disconcerting?

When environments cast contemporaneous loci?

Or perhaps there's some harmonies at least resulting from a harmless family that's forced to move, more so than those which would have also resulted from the relocation of deer or wildebeests (thus the harmful impacts of having to relocate any person or animal are maximized)? 

Isn't it an honourable feature of global sociocultural relations, that those possessing enormous wealth use some of it to help care for their fellow citizens?

Perhaps by keeping the factory open while providing a decent wage, so people can squabble about abstract phenomena as opposed to requisite needs.

Heartfelt thanks in turn reciprocated at times for the sustainable way of life, notwithstanding essential arguments which inevitably develop through social interaction.

Perhaps it's just that episode of Heartbeat that I saw so many years ago that keeps such an innocent idea alive, but when it works don't you have more prosperous communities with less crime and more exciting pastimes?

A tragic loss as Arrietty's family is forced to abandon their heartfelt home, and find somewhere else to creatively envision august romance and practical tools.

Ghibli's coveted sense of honest wonder endearingly guides peaceful thoughts throughout.

Communal comfort cozy quarters. 

Interspecial import.

Incumbent fair play.  

Captive State

Chaos descends as aliens invade and overwhelm Earth's defences.

Possessing unassailable strength and intergalactically advanced technology, the planet succumbs to their rule, and must dismally embrace monstrous will.

Only a scant few escape extreme poverty, and they're self-destructively tasked with brainstorming their own ruin.

The aliens seek to extract everything the Earth has to offer, every last microbe they can voraciously steal, and what happens to its inhabitants in the meantime, is indeed of little concern.

In the opening moments, a family seeks escape, but is cut down immediately after breaking through local improvised defences.

Captive State unreels years later, the children having grown up meanwhile, each day a struggle to survive, every moment despairing combat.

The police manage relations between organic and extraterrestrial life and find themselves in a miserable position.

But William Mulligan (John Goodman) does his best to look out for troubled Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), whose father was once his partner, before everything drastically changed.

The result is first rate sci-fi, with an ending that brought me to tears.

How do you make cutting edge realistic science-fiction that doesn't heavily rely on special effects?

You contact Rupert Wyatt and his crew after synthesizing Captive State's distillations.

There are no moments in its present where you feel at ease, where there's a break from the rotting tension.

And without the visual effects, the aesthetic acrimony, knowledge of interstellar hubris, a focus on messianic maestros, the film tills biodiverse grassroots, and produces authentic desperation.

Not without hope.

Nothing utopian or grotesque or supernatural, just hope that the aliens can be defeated, or at least held in check or at bay.

Strictly confined.

It's unclear what happens in the end.

Even without the special effects, the budget's bigger than a lot of independent sci-fi, but the money was well spent on realistic settings, which augment the film's resourceless ambience.

The ending's brilliant and heartbreaking, a masterstroke of revelatory storytelling.

Takes Cloverfield up a notch.

A couple of notches.

A bunch of notches.

With Vera Farmiga (Jane Doe).

And Mr. Alan Ruck (Charles Rittenhouse).

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

A self-sacrificing angel emerges from the voluminous depths of contempt and disregard to unite two trouble making misfits in her overflowing celestial bounteous embrace.

Bucolic style.

Yet cruellest fate seismically disillusions their blossoming intimacy and the two are left unsheltered and forsaken as child services demands young Ricky's (Julian Dennison) return, and he would rather dwell in the forest than suffer neverending urban severance.

So to the forest they go, where Hec's (Sam Neill) scrappy knowledge cantankerously ensures they avoid capture, until what begins as a minor local disturbance becomes a nationwide media sensation, every detail wildly blown out of proportion, unknown contingencies, flexibly furbishing controversy.

Endured.

Respiration.

With neither plans nor provisions they prosper in plight.

Tangential tandem.

The film's hilarious.

Taika Waitit's Hunt for the Wilderpeople slowly and patiently ruffles fecund empiric feathers, the kind of film which might have flounced in less capable hands, but, rather, continuously stylizes lighthearted yet hard-hitting situations which leave you eagerly anticipating the next fundamental improbability, interest compactly impacting, like a tumbledown tapestry with auriferous attitude.

Two people who can't fit in anywhere are hunted down like British fox as they begin to forge a friendship which the Man instinctively seeks to tear asunder, the irony a profound critique of the system hoping to otherwise civilize them.

The soundtrack backs this up.

Some cool Terminator references.

A film the whole family can watch, even family members who dislike watching films the whole family can watch.

Lol!

Music by Lukasz Pawel Buda, Samuel Scott, and Conrad Wedde.

Evidently.