What to Expect When You're Expecting

It's not the multiple storylines in Kirk Jones's What to Expect When You're Expecting aren't cleverly woven together or some of the observations presented within transferable.

It's just, well, I've never seen a film before that more closely resembles a 110 minute Hallmark card.

My apologies if you like Hallmark cards. They're not really for me but it's not like I turn my nose up if I receive one.

Like the best feature of What to Expect When You're Expecting, the group of fathers who get together to privately discuss the challenges of parenting, I'm not judging.

But this style of film is simply one that I have trouble relating to.

I was going to make an extended comparison to John Carpenter's They Live but think I'll just leave it at that.

The Dictator

Okay, let's take a big piece of autocratic shit, give him plenty of time to express himself, strip him of his privilege, place him within a formulaic situation which usually exemplifies redemption, and use his despotic voice to ambiguously promote substantial social democratic initiatives.

While satirically making light of reprehensible realities in order to suggest that disengaged nihilism can make one actively receptive to anything.

In an unrestrained salute to decadence.

Equating the structural socio-economic realities of dictatorships with those found in democratic countries makes a powerful point, representative of the Occupy Movement, perhaps attempting to speak to some who ignored it by encouraging their revulsion not only to Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) but also to the formula creatively used to try and generate knee-jerk sympathy for him.

Without the revulsion, however, a socialist/fascist dialectic presents itself wherein socialist initiatives (multiculturalism, universal healthcare, public education, freedom of speech, . . .), which progressively attempt to provide workers with agency so that their voice can play a meaningful role in the ways in which an entity (a business, corporation, parliament, school) conducts its affairs, are sadistically separated from their collective foundations by acts which attempt to convince them that since they have this agency, this voice, this individuality, they are therefore no different from your average plutocrat/monarch, and should consequently regard collective actions as being beneath them, seeing as monarchs often have more important things to concern themselves with than the impoverished concerns of their subjects (which are pervertedly generalized as being the result of morally corrupt characters).   

The relationship between Aladeen and Zoey (Anna Faris) in The Dictator examines this dialectic by having a tyrant work at a collective organic grocery (Free Earth Collective).  While working, Aladeen demonstrates his complete lack of social understanding (monarchs are not like workers) and Zoey is so naive she ignores the multiple signs indicating Aladeen's sadistic tendencies.

And after Aladeen employs a stiff upper lip to improve her business's efficiency she marries him and helps to introduce a number of ineffectual political reforms within his home country.

Hence, The Dictator rashly sanctifies a maniacal potentate to level out the Western/Middle Eastern political playing field while indicating the need for change by wickedly evidencing how disengaged things have become.

There's a lot of corruption out there but for every Stalin there's a Tommy Douglas. 

Greece is not Norway, Sweden or Finland. 

Your vote does matter.  

Battleship

Wasn't expecting to find a social democratic aesthetic at work in the latest alien invasion flick, Peter Berg's Battleship, but it's there, disguised in a maritime cloak, paying respect to multicultural nautical subjects, and demonstrating how an inclusive team excels.

As if the spirit of Battleship Potemkin is alive and well and theorizing what the Soviet Union's navy would have looked like after a century of reforms inspired by the courageous mutiny, distancing itself from its revolutionary heritage by codifying and transferring its content to 21st century American propaganda.

To battle a plutocratic blitzkrieg.

Can the aliens in Battleship be legitimately thought of as plutocrats?

Well, as environmental laws are repealed or gutted and scientific research is ignored in favour of religio-economic fanaticism (the misguided belief that the free market can do no wrong), the planet (or Canada at least) becomes more and more polluted. The 1% have the means through which to 'purify' their resources by purchasing expensive speciality ethically produced items without using credit excessively.  If fracking ruins their neighbourhood/district/region's water supply, they can move, easily, potentially beforehand after setting up the extraction.  Keeping abreast with technological advances, they can purchase or commission devices that can decontaminate their water even if they do stay while mitigating additional toxic effects.

The aliens who land in Battleship are technologically advanced, possess suits that shield them from that to which they cannot acclimatize (while protecting them from critical repercussions), are uninterested in the concerns of the citizens whom their policies disturb, and are using the military to pursue interplanetary colonialism.  

Sounds like fundamental plutocratic behaviour to me.

The international sailors who confront them however represent different ethnicities, socio-economic contingencies, genders, historical periods, and physical disabilities.

It's a well rounded group.  

They have no armour to protect them from the polluted Earth and must collegially improvise a strategic plan.

Not to naively present this social aesthetic as being ideally fine and dandy.

Before the invasion takes place egos collide and disorder persists.

Yet after a reason to work towards a collective goal presents itself, unity is restored.

The hierarchy within is troublesome yet look at how inclusive it is. Everyone has a voice regardless of rank whose logic is taken into consideration. When Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) suddenly finds himself in command and must make an immediate decision, his subordinate isn't afraid to challenge him in the pursuit of an alternative objective. Hopper even relinquishes command when it becomes clear that Japanese Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is a more suited candidate.

The fact that the confrontation takes place within a force field which separates the combatants from the world at large suggests that Battleship does indeed present a popularized plutocratic/social democratic dialectic insofar as these elements have been isolated and subjectified within an impenetrable ideological vacuum (let's find a way to represent these opposing approaches by creating a fictional polemical context within which they can aggressively interact), one which removes the concealments everyday life often necessitates.

The plutocrats through their blind ambition accidentally create a space within which their adversaries are capable of launching a constructive protest.

Because no matter how polluted things are, their adversaries are still capable of absorbing the sun.

Dark Shadows

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows revisits an American gothic soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971 and is therefore supposed to be superfluously tactless.

Not that the emancipated 18th century vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is lacking in sensitivity, it's just that he rigidly abides by a strict moral code through which he hopes to reconfigure his family's fortunes and reanimate its pseudo-aristocratic position within the town of Collinsport.

Okay, he is lacking in sensitivity, and a bit of a prick, and bloodthirsty and unforgiving and functionally clueless.

But he also embodies a raw nocturnal decisive magnetism which sanguinely yet solipsistically cultivates the melodrama (the film focuses too intently on him to the detriment of the supporting cast).

In the 1760s, his family sailed to the New World and established a successful fishery, for all intents and purposes administrating the town thereafter.  While growing up, Barnabas caught the eye of many a local  maiden including one his servants, Angelique (Eva Green). Unbeknownst to him, Angelique was a witch who proceeds to curse his family after he scorns her. She eventually turns him into a vampire and has him chained and buried deep below ground, proceeding to use her witchcraft to incant a fishing business of her own afterwards. When Barnabas is accidentally unearthed in 1972, her business has expanded significantly and the Collins family is in a state of practical ruin.

And she still desires him.

Barnabas remains uninterested however although he does reflexively entertain. His actions engender her fury in the aftermath when she discovers that he has once again fallen for another.

Another who is the spitting image of she whom Barnabas left Angelique for all those centuries ago.

Dark Shadows could have been good had its writers nonchalantly taken their uninspired subject matter more seriously (in order to concoct something terrible yet fun). Having Johnny Depp in your film, giving him the majority of the lines, and having him hypnotize characters within does not spontaneously conjure happy returns.

Further, working uncritically within kitschy commercially feudal fantastic frames serves to romanticize patriarchal socio-economic representations (which is probably the point).

Thus, noble Barnabas feasts on construction workers and itinerants and the only successful female characters used spells to achieve their goals or are punished severely for their transgressions.

There are flamboyant moments but their affects are localized and therefore don't pervasively instil the narrative's underground with a recurring thematic foil (and the film isn't much fun).

There may not be a foil, but one over-the-top scene where Angelique briefs her best and brightest, all of whom are men, seems to cast doubt on the fact that higher corporate echelons were almost uniformly masculine in the seventies, through the use of excessive exaggeration, which sinisterly places the film's manifested patriarchal focus within its subterranean realm by suggesting that male dominated boards of directors were perhaps not as permeated with testosterone as progressives would have you believe, thereby hyperbolically challenging the 21st century ideological playing field by conservatively deconstructing historical reality.

Dark shadows to be sure.

The Five-Year Engagement

A couple is in love.

Their first meeting is adorable. They are living in San Francisco. One of them finds a job in small-town Michigan. They move. The other's career is resultantly set back but this is sacrificially taken in stride.  Attempts to acclimatize to small-town life are heroically made but an undeniable despondency cannot be persuasively concealed.

A break-up is imminent, the couple goes their separate ways, and new partners are found. But a kernel of love remains which new arrangements cannot disintegrate and it's possible that the two lovers will restructure their efficient and profitable means of production. With the future and age pressing in and standards of compatibility becoming less and less idealistic, a decision must be definitively made.

According to what I know about romantic comedies anyways.

The Five-Year Engagement has some funny scenes and introduces a broad range of distracting characters. Bill's (Chris Parnell) sweaters and Vaneetha's (Mindy Kaling) toast stand out and I enjoyed listening to the ideas of both Ming (Randall Park) and Tarquin (Brian Posehn).    

Individuals working in intellectual and culinary markets are juxtaposed and members from both groups are made to appear ridiculously profound.

Rather than consistently sentimentalizing the romantic love that often results in marriage, the film introduces argumentative points of combative relational diversification during the engagement, thereby instructively applying quasi-conjugal conflicts to prenuptial amicable operations while installing a degree of collaborative critical conditionals as well.

Sweet but trashy, mildly melodramatic, and pretentiously inclusive, The Five-Year Engagement offered more insightful observations and humorous interjections than I was expecting (after the film shifts to Michigan), which helped me get over the snickering directed in my direction as I entered the theatre on my own.

And if donuts have yet to be eaten, why purchase new ones? That's wasteful.       

The Avengers

Prominent Marvel characters begrudgingly unite in Joss Whedon's The Avengers to battle the tyrannical intentions of the recently freed Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Loki travels to Earth in order to commandeer the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D for the Other (Alexis Denisof) who promises him an army of Chitauri warriors in return (with whom he can launch an invasion).

The Tesseract is an extremely powerful and seemingly limitless source of energy.

The overt film's explosive enough, as superegos convincingly clash and physically exhibit their prowess. Their introduction's are concise and pinpointed, their initial meeting contentious and energetic, their conversation's confident, inquisitive and challenging, their commitment during battle self-sacrificing and unwavering, and so on.

Approaches and tactics are intently scrutinized before the necessity to act demands a united counter assault.

Much like any given Sunday.

This business of naming the overarching villain The Other is quite troublesome, however, insofar as this can be viewed as external difference financing and supplying Loki's imperialistic ambition.

Which is xenophobic.

And sucks.

After a nation engages in imperialistic activities a degree of underlying cultural paranoia is retroactively generated which can be thought of as manufacturing a subjugating unspoken psychological incision, an example of this incision's profusion being even more excessively manifested in A Song of Ice of Fire.

The Avengers themselves are exceptions overflowing with otherness as is S.H.I.E.L.D and the film's final confrontation takes place in New York.

These are local irreplaceable others, however, produced on planet Earth, apart from Thor (Chris Hemsworth).

As these special local others combat the 'extraterrestrial' forces of the Other in a metropolitan other the military's solution (the closest possible [ludicrous] representation of the people's voice in this film) is to send in a nuke and unabashedly obliterate all forms of difference.

But the narcissistic techno-other who cannot be somnambulistically subdued by Loki's sceptre catches that nuke and directs it into space, thereby using his 'idyllic' individualistic entrepreneurial ingenuity to simultaneously crush the threat of colonization and prevent a government sponsored homeland nuclear disaster.

He is then saved by brute force as he helplessly falls back to Earth (there's a disturbing image for labour relations [corporate fiefdoms anyone?]).

Thus, not so pleased with what's going on behind the scenes in The Avengers.

Thor does chastise Loki for considering himself to be above his potential subjects.

Thor who is from another planet.

Nice to see Harry Dean Stanton nevertheless.

The Lucky One

Don't really know what to say about The Lucky One.

Lead character Logan (Zac Effron) certainly is lucky.

While fighting in Iraq, he discovers the picture of an enticing woman lying in the wreckage and keeps it close to his heart thereafter. Having safely returned to Colorado, he then decides to find her and sets out on foot, showing her picture to people he meets. He eventually finds her (Taylor Schilling as Beth Clayton) in a small town in Louisiana and she gives him a job working in her kennel.

Against her better judgement.

Her jealous manipulative ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson as Keith Clayton) is a smug policeperson, the son of a wealthy mayoral candidate, and a secure member of the local petty bourgeoise.

He takes none to kindly to Logan.

But Logan isn't afraid, and boldly refuses to play ball, trusting instead in the power of love and the genuine incorruptibility of his good intentions.

And the fact that lonely Beth starts wanting a piece.

The film would have been stronger had Logan encountered other labourers who had run afoul of Mr. Clayton's coercive tendencies and formed a resistance of sorts to counteract his abusive privilege.

Old Testament justice is thunderously administered, but a different solution, one galvanizing the resolve of mistreated workers, would have provided The Lucky One with a collective edge, thereby intensifying the fluidity of its amour.

The Raven

A mildly entertaining inconsistent romantic horror, James McTeigue's The Raven situates Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) within a demented psychotic murderous tribute to his work and demands that he creates within. As a madperson kidnaps his love interest (Alice Eve as Emily Hamilton) and uses materials from his texts in a homicidal homage, Poe assists Detective Fields (Luke Evans) in his desperate corresponding investigation.  Anticipation leads to discovery but they vexingly remain one step behind the sought after killer and his or her realistic portrait of the literary dead. The time required to psychologically digest the enormity of its impact is vindictively denied as the narrative quickly shuffles from one grizzly chapter to the next.

And the unacknowledged trauma sinks in.

Lying within this structure lies a hidden master/slave dichotomy. If you find yourself working within a environment in which your labour is continuous, giving you little time to think about anything else, and your efforts fail to result in better working conditions, as this pattern is reproduced, and your debt load continues to climb and your forbidden subject of desire becomes increasingly unattainable, an underlying current of motivated pointlessness emerges when the shape-shifting face of capital presents itself, exalting a moribund elixir.

This could explain why The Raven's dialogue possesses a timeless quality which utilizes both 19th and 21st century forms of expression.  By quasi-atemporally refusing to abide by a linear conception of verbal predictability, it subtly manifests this motivated pointlessness while elevating an unconscious ethos which revels in the disruption of contemplative leisure (the 60 hour work week).

Tezz

Two men on different sides of the law intellectually and physically face off in Priyadarshan's sensational Tezz, one seeking personal justice for having been deported to India and separated from his family, the other coming out of retirement after having spent his life foiling terrorist plots for the British government.

With a perfect record. 

A bomb is attached to a passenger train travelling to Glasgow which will explode if the train's speed decreases below 60 mph. If 10 million euros are given to Aakash Rana (Ajay Devgn), the disaster will be averted. Railway Control Specialist Sanjay Raina's (Boman Irani) daughter is on the train, adding to the melodrama. Counter Terrorism Agent Arjun Khanna (Anil Kapoor) is intent on catching Rana before he has time to explain how to dispose of the bomb. 

And egos explode. 

Within headstrong passionate personalities definitively express their emotionally charged strategic points of view, having been forced into a rationalized chaotic peculiarity. Extremes and modes of transportation abound as controversial decisions are rapidly made.

When ambiguity seems as if it may gain a foothold within the narrative's denouement, the law moves in and shuts thing down (thereby accentuating the predicament of the disenfranchised).  

You would think there would have been other ways for Aakash to be reunited with his family. 

But when taking into account the terms of Tezz's stark portrayal of the law's callous non-negotiable dismissal of Aakash's respectability, a sort of absurd understanding can be applied to his over-the-top benign all-or-nothing approach, since the rational framework to which he had devoted his productive life suddenly and unconditionally collapsed, leaving him with no constructive alternatives within the existing legal framework.