The Hours

Three timelines incorporeally corresponding through the art of independent abstraction, drawing clever coherent parallels, as applied to married life.

Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) struggles to find peace as she compellingly writes away, always desiring what she doesn't have even when possessing an idyllic life.

Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) looks after her husband (John C. Reilly as Dan Brown) who's just returned from World War II, but she's ill-suited to the lofty role traditionally assigned her gender.

Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) cares for a contemporary poet (Ed Harris as Richard Brown) who expresses gratitude with verbose criticism, their lives provocatively intertwined inasmuch as they seek individual expression.

Family provides creature comforts but they can't find solace in routine.

One husband admires his wife's gifts and provides everything to establish calm comforts, and desperately critiques itinerancy in declarations of hopeless l'amour.

Another remains unassuming in his picture perfect suburban life, blissfully unaware of her struggles to find something more compelling.

The third can't believe someone would love him and does everything he can to push her away.

Even after the awestruck age where desire imaginatively fades then vanishes.

A different world wherein which mobility is something less economically prohibitive, may have surmised novel alternatives to distract people from bland consistency.

If that's what they sought to escape, through inspiring enlivening motion.

I rather like public transit myself, and libraries and bookstores host so many wonders.

A strong network interconnecting dozens of cities and neighbourhoods provides all kinds of cultural know how, to be curiously explored at times without pattern or brochure or transcript.

But I don't know many people like me.

And there's often no relevant answer.

Sometimes honesty isn't an option if there's no outlet for resounding difference, and some people don't pick up on the signs if everything's going well for them.

Marriage is a wonderful institution that creates joys for sundry families, but it by no means works for everyone, and is perhaps too highly elevated at times.

Constant motion, always travelling, could perhaps provide a working remedy, you've just gotta find that job that facilitates working life.

The Hours presents strong heroines oppressed by guidelines demanding role play, who approach immersion from varying perspectives to express wholesome particularity.

Sometimes questions are more important than answers beyond practical working life.

Language learning can be invaluable.

If you're looking for instructive distraction.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

An imaginative inquisitive highly organized youth sets out into the unknown to find someone who can help him solve a mystery left behind after his father dies in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. A small envelope is discovered in his father's room after the fact containing both a key and the word "black" written upon it. Having no knowledge in regards to what/whom the word "black" refers nor the lock to which the key corresponds, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) looks up everyone with the last name Black in New York City and systematically sets out to question them. During his information search, he befriends an elderly man renting a room in his grandmother's apartment who can't speak and communicates through writing (Max von Sydow as The Renter). The two become friends as they travel throughout New York meeting new people, emboldened by purpose.

Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close humanizes research while providing a matrix through which one can rationally seek solutions to seemingly interminable problems.

As long as you stick to the plan.

By populating his thesis with living breathing representatives of New York's undeniable particularity, Oskar indirectly creates a community while simultaneously emphasizing the tragedy of 9/11, thereby universalizing his personal loss.

The research process itself is romanticized as it becomes apparent that sometimes elucidating sought after truths is secondary to the divergent revelations of the quest wherein they are potentially sequestered, as new avenues of inquiry are brought to life.

If the actual question indeed finds an answer the secondary/tertiary/. . . tributaries can still be categorically synthesized through the production of a multidimensional social democratic topography, modestly celebrating the new (the collection of letters Oskar sends out in the end).

The degree of ease with which such a topography is manifested directly corresponds to the intensity of the author's desire to illuminate his or her original inquiry.