Unrueh (Unrest)

I've never spent much time considering anarchy as it's peacefully presented in Cyril Schäublin's Unrueh (Unrest), which looks at the coordination of semi-autonomous towns loosely connected in 19th century Switzerland.

At the time I speculatively imagine the old world stiff upper lip still strictly predominated, and many citizens were highly critical of the unyielding nature of cold absolutes (how could such a disastrous political outlook be experiencing a necrorenaissance?). 

Important things such as healthcare and education perhaps freely benefit from mass organization, not in the sense that you teach everyone the same thing, but inasmuch as you generally apply the same provincial standards.

Global networks of hospitals and international research can ensure progressive care is universally adopted, to treat the sick and combat disease to medicinally facilitate widespread health and wellness.

The application of such organization to the arts seems counterproductive in my opinion, however, since originality and novel spectrums often emerge in isolation.

Not that there shouldn't be dialogues amongst different uncanny artistic communities, I just don't believe in the codification of molecular alternative expression.

Thus, anarchy works well for artists not in the sense that they ubiquitously rebel (some rebellion works though), but rather to promote eclectic independence amongst individuals who could probably care less.

A lot of material is released every year and no doubt trends and patterns emerge, but the overarching mass cultivation of a specific outlook seems much too totalitarian to me.

Medicine prospers with codes and procedures to guide its workers as they care for the sick, education also benefits from structure to ensure people learn to read and write and count.

But the arts benefit from spontaneity and revelation and inspiration and chance, not that those things can't influence medicine and teaching, but if they're the governing impetus, you may unleash a pandemic.

Pandemics in the arts can be good since books that are fun to read should be widely discussed, they don't necessarily have to be a dangerous thing, although there's always bound to be critical controversy.

Oddly, as I've aged I've learned to incorporate anarchy into my life, I'm not even really that disappointed with things, my love for independent cinema and literature just keeps growing and growing.

It's a right wing strategy to make politics so unappealing that people prefer to generally ignore them.

So I'm still paying attention as best I can.

Although I fear I may have outgrown journalism.

Not The Guardian though. 

Definitely not campy films.  

Time Trap

An ancient cave far off in the woods inspires archaeological reckoning, as a professor cautiously descends in search of long lost cherished loved ones (Andrew Wilson as Professor Hopper).

His students become concerned when they don't hear from him for days, and decide to locate him themselves at an inquisitive social gathering.

Unaware of germane legend or even folklore or tale or myth, they enthusiastically head out with bold wherewithal and primal bearings.

Following a handy rope, they jabber nonchalantly, intent on freely exploring their clandestine cavernous confines.

Nothing is discovered at first and they settle in to quizzical discourse, embracing feats of daring athleticism, with instinctual guttural accord.

Yet after a short time passes they discover a distressing sight, a team member who stayed with their vehicle has fallen and broken his neck.

But even more disquieting, somewhat shocking and eerie what have you, the video he's taken on his trusty cellphone reveals a rupture in space-time itself.

For Furby (Max Wright) had been waiting for days even though they entered the cave quite recently, the resultant uncanny discrepancy as unnerving as it is provocative. 

They soon learn they've entered a realm as temporally discordant as it is eternal.

The centuries rapidly pass.

Enlightening elegiac entropy.

Time Trap adventurously swells and ahistorically acculturates through inductive exhibition, high spirits and impressionable disbelief curating quandaries and quarrels encloistered.

Like a chaotic bewildering immersion in multivariable synthesized anthropologies, intergenerational mutated millennia remonstrate, reproach, and reify. 

I thought the pacing was well-suited to perplexing accidental endeavour, like uninhibited postmodern inclinations transformed into vigorous atemporal search & rescue.

Perhaps time passes too quickly, however, and some of the cave-dwellers are too inhospitable, but it does make for some riveting sci-fi, with an honest portrayal of global warming.

It's great to see North American legend entertainingly brought to life, and even if there may never have been such a thing, its hypothetical import still secretes heartfelt wonder.

Like on Twin Peaks, there must be so many Native legends to cinematically explore.

While respecting contemporary consultants.

I'm a fan of the sci-fi touch.  

The Rift: Dark Side of the Moon

North of Belgrade, a mysterious satellite crash leads an eclectic international mismatch to cautiously exhibit.

Their leader, ill at ease with working with others and known for adopting unorthodox methods, blindly yet confidently leads onwards.

A brilliant scientist, tenacious tesla, and liaising liability accompany him forthwith, illustrious classified governmental nocturnes somnambulistically elucidating their scratchy lunar distillates.

After encountering a haunting spaceperson, whose inexplicable presence seems to be immortally manipulating its surroundings, madness slowly hemorrhages their improvised intentions.

Correspondingly, a secret portal holds enigmatic clues to his or her terrestrial origins, its temporal spatial eccentricities, seductively eviscerating psychological bounds.

As well.

Is the world at large a component of an invisible computer program (requiring caring environmental stewardship) within which those designated prophetic in ages past had accidentally downloaded information regarding the future through the ether which made no sense within their contemporary sociocultural predicaments?

I'm not sure.

Even if it's true, nevertheless, it couldn't save The Rift: Dark Side of the Moon from taking itself too seriously.

I imagine it was written by someone whose first language isn't English, because its clunky clichés, hastily delivered as if they're hard-hitting extravagantly stranded bona fides, are precise yet sloppy, inasmuch as a Native speaker would likely do a better job of covering up their emotionless tact.

That's likely what I would sound like writing in another language if I overemphasized my fluency anyways.

Had everything been slown down a bit and a slight comedic element attached, with a lot more gore, this aspect would have been more appreciated.

That isn't to say the film's all bad.

The soundtrack's fantastic and it ends well.

It made me think of David Bowie's first album, upon which you'll hear the origins of unparalleled songwriter awkwardly developing his genius chops.

More time and care and perhaps Dejan Zecevic will pull it together for a Diamond Dogs or two, a Rebel Rebel, a Young Americans.

'Tis the season.

Interstellar

Times have changed, and centuries of polluting irresponsibly and unaccountably have left the Earth's soil predominantly barren, unsupportive and lifeless, the survivors carrying on, old pastimes still cherished, historical insights curiously revisited, a voice from the future, codes risen in dust, a father's love for his family, paramount, indeed to be sacrificed.

The big picture.

To do it all again, or make alternative choices.

A mission which cannot be refused.

There's no time to panic, no time, to hesitate.

It doesn't use scare tactics, Interstellar's quite reasonable, scientific.

There are options, pros and cons, we must do this, and hope there's enough time to find a solution.

Elements of the classic Western are reliably built into the script like quiescent caregiving sweet nothings, or an afterthought, a reflex, a calm level-headed proactive reflex, hindsight's compendium, temperately transitioning to science-fiction, its environments still cruel and unforgiving, and wild, with neither monsters nor civilizations, just will power and the unknown, assignments boldly navigated.

Survival.

Some wild cards are thrown into the mix which rely more heavily on the tropes of science fiction, an intergalactic clue, an explosion of self-interest, but they're skilfully intertwined, Interstellar quietly ascending in investigative baby steps, from the micro to the macro, mellowly maturing, to blow you away in the end.

I preferred Inception, and Inception's ending, but the same mix of cognitive entertaining emotive rationality still humanizes Interstellar, and its climax is as strong if not stronger, depending on which film you prefer.

Nolan suddenly creates a bucolic, like Birdman's bucolic foil, after having spent so much time in dreams and Gotham City, outstanding career move, this director is multidimensional.

It's worked into the script.

Camille Claudel 1915

Attaching a strictly temporal dimension to the passage of time, wherein a brilliant delicate artist's psychological sentence is thought to be perennially relapsing, her in/direct encampment in the Real having seared an ominous dread, intransigent incarnate interference, a burning flame shrouded in darkness, no companions, no recourse, no distinctions, hospitable exclusion, reclusively aligned.

She can't break free.

Powerful performance by Juliette Binoche (Camille Claudel).

She is provided with the chance to convalesce and her ability to reason traumatically cloisters logical probabilities whose unrequited lesions awoke excessively paranoid delusions.

Her loved ones remain condemnatory, acting in accordance with principles which they consider to be charitably Christian, imprisoning her for life in an asylum, proudly refusing to listen.

The authoritative sanctioned madness is regally revealed as two differently abled persons are rebuked for not rehearsing their play with the requisite depth of emotion.

Mme Claudel is obviously disturbed, not possessed, and may have benefitted from more suitable surroundings, pharmaceutical aids, and/or an understanding listener.

That's not to say pharmaceuticals should have definitely been administered.

If pharmaceutical companies are run like a business who seeks to see revenues increase every quarter, and they rely upon people being diagnosed with particular characteristics in order for their products to be sold, a rather disreputable culture could resultantly emerge, if specific diagnoses are not cross-referenced.

Pharmaceuticals may not have been required in Camille's case as her self-diagnosis indicates, her hypothesized cure seeming reasonable enough, affable, sane.

A different time; Camille Claudel 1915 examines a different set of historical rationalities.

A patient, helpless, conspicuous film, judiciously stark, the sound and the fury.

Hugo

Time requires maintenance. Each ticking tock must be delicately managed in order to ensure punctual consistency and historical longevity. This is no easy task, and cataclysmic events can disrupt its narrative flow, as can the resurrection of the unforeseen, the one terrorizing established norms and constructs in the maniacal hopes of strengthening their resolve (the masters of war), the other invigorating traditional forms with revitalized content which in turn can redesign them if the insertion of difference is compelling enough to transmit a reconstituted concrete variability (inception) while (eventually) finding a receptive influential audience (innovative exoteric visionaries). Time will continue to pass regardless but its acknowledgement and associated terms of reference (habitual action X producing results D reinforced by the creation of pattern H) will need a cultural catalyst, from which things can begin anew.

We see both sides of this matrix at work in Martin Scorsese's exceptional new film Hugo, which examines the relationship between an orphan and an elderly toymaker. The orphan Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls of a Parisian train station where he diligently keeps its various clocks running on time. From these walls, he eyes George Méliès's (Ben Kingsley) toyshop in the hopes of obtaining parts which will help him fix an automaton which was acquired by his father (Jude Law) before his untimely death. Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen) monitors the station's passageways with a strong desire to uphold law and order (and send orphans to the orphanage). Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee) operates a dusty bookshop from which he encourages a love of lifelong learning.

Time was disrupted within Hugo's narrative by the introduction of film making to the Parisian artistic scene. Infatuated with the medium, a magician builds his own camera in order to share the dreamscapes of his imaginings. Having cultivated an audience, he continues to create profusely thereby compartmentalizing various tenants of his vision. But World War I annihilates many markets successfully established in France and beyond, and in its aftermath his audience fails to rematerialize and his films must be sold and melted down.

Time passes and due to the serendipitous reverberations of two curious youths an historical echo increases its volume. Hugo and his friend Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) discover a mystery whose clues lead them to volumes housed in a local library. From these volumes, clues transform into probabilities and an unconscious cultural qualifier approaches remanifestation. An automaton whose ability to produce felicitous active images is brought back to life through the ingenuity of friendship, and returned to its creator.

And an innovative exoteric visionary's legacy is recognized and celebrated, having been resurrected from the ashes of the masters of war. One of time's great disruptions is rediscovered and catalogued in order to ensure its historical longevity.