Roller Town (Fantasia Fest 2012)

Rollin' along; roller skatin' down that road.

Bringing disco, back to life.

Haligonian comedy troupe Picnicface insert their distinct brand of hypertense laissez-faire creepy yet ingratiating socio-cultural commentary into their first full-length film, Roller Town, overflowing with the same cerebral mix of nostalgic innocence and nauseous necromancy that nauticalized their television show, ironically transmitted through a vicarious fundamental frequency, which fetishistically elevates the construction of a permanent sense of psychological well-being, localized and qualified by an irresistibly naive belief in the eternal values of pop culture, avatarized with direct access to the divine, while criminally agitating its impending neuroses.  

A lot of the jokes/situations have an immediate impact (are funny) while many of them seem like they were deliberately set up to just be as inane and I-don't-give-a-fuck as possible. But when you think about them afterwards it's these inane moments that lacked depth that make you laugh and want to see it again.

Which isn't that easy to do.

Les Aventures de Chatran (Fantasia Fest 2012)

One day Chatran's living with her mother and siblings on the farm, the next, she's floating downriver in a wooden crate, timorously preparing herself for life's unexpected verisimilitudes.

Her friend Pousquet chases after her and is always there in her time of need.

As her hesitant curiosity cautiously explores her new environment's mysterious terrain, collecting eclectic sensory stimuli as she travels through the countryside, a steady approach is diversely enacted, aided by her instinctive elasticity.

Making friends while avoiding the overbearing.

And verdantly investing in deciduous synergies.

Trishna

Aesthetics clash with socioeconomics after a brief period of romantic resignation in Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, where love is permitted to bloom if it knows its place.

Although, as it becomes increasingly clear that that place, due to the different circumstances into which the partners were born, will involve prolonged periods where the dependent lover, Trishna (Freida Pinto), must submit to whatever desire her wealthy benefactor adopts, immediately and without question, her thoughts and feelings being considered by him to have been forfeited in return for the employment and luxuries with which he provides her, said blooming soon morbidly decays.

There is no balance, no give and take, just a one-sided narcissistic vacuum taking full advantage of its power and privilege.      

Trishna's father doesn't help much either being more concerned with honour and saving face than his daughter's trauma.

And a shy, modest, beautiful impoverished woman, who was only searching for things such as respect and a voice from her partner, wanders off into the desert alone, while school children sing a song celebrating equality (it's a powerful scene in terms of strengthening the left in India).

Having symbolically used her realistic imagination to ceremoniously slice through the imaginary real.

To Rome with Love

For a summer in Rome, an office clerk finds himself thrust into the spotlight, his routine reflections hyperbolically sensationalizing influence, as an architect revisits his youth to bring back to life/cross-examine his most serendipitous subject of desire, a young communist lawyer contends with a retired opera producer when it's discovered that his humble father can sing exceptionally well, and a married couple, in town for a potentially prosperous employment opportunity, find themselves accidentally embracing exotic extramarital affairs.

Felicitously framed by a traffic cop's dissolving point of view.

The conditions of which inculcate calisthenic creativity.

Romantically mingling the celebrated with the starstruck and the ordinary with the hyper-intensive, while evoking the nimble necessity to unearth metaphorical mirth within corresponding psychoanalytic observations, Woody Allen's To Rome with Love's palpable playful pluck picturesquely procures impressionable popularizations, and salaciously serenades atemporal condensations.

Fidelity strengthened through chance, temptation tethered to testimony, regret distinguished from revelation, and dreams evanescently alighted.

A virtuosic variation on a theme.

There's a lot more to it than that.

Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) (Fantasia Fest 2012)

12 Indigenous tribes are living harmoniously amongst one another in the late-18th/early-19th century in the mountains of central Taiwan, when imperialist Japanese forces invade.

Their harmonious relations are highly aggressive inasmuch as manhood is achieved by cutting off the head of a member of a surrounding tribe.

The conquerors see things differently however and colonize said tribes in order to put them to work maximizing the economic potential of their natural resources.

Decades pass, and a once proud warrior culture is reduced to back breaking poorly paid labour, alcohol  abuse, suffocating ethnocentric taunts, and the systematic depletion of their ancestral hunting grounds.

And respect for their traditions is anathema.

Yet the knowledge that rebellion is akin to mass suicide keeps them at bay, until the situation proves too belittling to be endured forever after (no treaties whereby they could maintain their way of life were negotiated and signed).

And a revolt is launched.

The ways in which director Te-Sheng Wei depicts the revolt incontrovertibly turn one's stomach, as the legendary Mona Rudao (Da-Ching, Lin Ching-Tai) and his Mahebu people express their revenge.

Obviously I was cheering for the downtrodden Mahebu but my support was structurally challenged as they massacred every Japanese person in their village.

The challenge being the result of the generation of an internally cathartic traumatic absolutist aesthetic, which chaotically yet rationally glorifies battle while championing the enslaved, accompanied by a feminine voice singing a haunting lugubrious lament, working within and celebrating the traditions of the vanquished, without hesitating to showcase their warlike being.

A being which I'm not used to inductively digesting.

The rest of Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) practically answers Camus's cliché contention that the only properly philosophical problem is suicide.

Assuming that's a cliché by now anyways.

And its response heroically illustrates the fearless spiritual will of a fierce uncompromising people, forced to adopt extreme methods, dedicated to their way of life, refusing to passively perish.

As time goes by.

Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) (Fantasia Fest 2012)

Presenting a comic romantic over-the-top ultraviolent musical, wherein bourgeois values resolutely seek to pacify a versatile tumultuous rogue, the undying and overpowering intensity of love unwaveringly guiding their reformative resolve, streetwise unconditional consistent combative tenacity governing his, Takashi Miike's Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) does not refrain from elaborately executing every consummate class cliché ever created, sensationally synthesizing quixotic and hardboiled extremes, relentlessly reproducing unerringly awkward amorously explosive motifs, in the implacable pursuit, of emancipated co-dependence.

Group dynamics repetitively insist that young Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) obediently pay his respects, but as their challenges are uniformly discombobulated, his limitless disenfranchised individuality, and consequent unwittingly seductive magnetism, remain intact.

Attaching a monetary value to the ability to maintain specific ideological viewpoints, while catastrophically choreographing their constructive affects, Ai to Makoto pugnaciously parodies the domain of rehabilitative reckoning, while chaotically kitschifying the practice of revenge.

For love's sake.

Cosmopolis

A brilliant young billionaire, having maintained his fortune by grammatically applying the mathematical rhythms of nature to the metaphorical constructs of his social interactions, something like that, philosophically travels throughout New York in his cork-lined limo, calmly discussing various subjects with his astute personnel, occasionally stopping to chat with his literary wife, protests pulsating outside, historical echoes allusively gyrating, definitive risks annihilating his wealth, the pursuit of pleasure conjugally detected, security forces requiring guidance, meaning, substantially, trying to break its way through.

On his way to have his hair cut.

Operating within a conscious surrealistic intellectual structure spatially adorned with sudden startlingly ephemeral enactments (momentary dreamlike logical displacements), wherein questions of tangibility become remarkably fluid before alternatively reverting to their previous states, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis examines an individual's steady response to a shockingly increasing barrage of multilayered financial, cultural, and, derivatively, psychological derailments, whose consequent disruptions cannot be experientially sublimated.

Mr. Packer's (Robert Pattinson) unaffected emancipated solution attaches a horrific qualification to the concept of freedom.

Even when Cronenberg zeroes in on the cerebral, he can still find other ways of exemplifying his roots.

Et maintenant on va où? (Where Do We Go Now?)

A remote village in Lebanon remains technologically isolated from its surrounding politico-cultural environment which erupts in a religious war. Seeking to ensure that no more of their children are needlessly slaughtered, its Christian and Muslim female inhabitants unite to distract their masculine counterparts. However, regardless of the fact that they know nothing of the war, tensions between these men have been increasing due to sacrilegious activities that have inspired retribution.

Trying to covertly manage the vindictive violence proves challenging.

A challenge to which these heroic women stalwartly, respond.

Exercising a seductive mix of the expedient, the temperamental, and the divine, Nadine Labaki's Et maintenant on va où? (Where Do We Go Now?) fictionally verifies how destructive overtures can be pacified within pressurized time constraints.

Certain aspects of the solution they facilitate may have practical applications beyond said constraints, although reflecting upon whether or not their means justifies their ends pasteurizes acute ethical dilemmas.

Nevertheless, a powerful film with a progressive message, Et maintenant on va où suggests that a rural dynamic can play an influential role in the byzantine global mosaic, as a matter of perseverance as opposed to pride, or acceptance as the foundations of transcendence.

Moonrise Kingdom

Stoic particular oddities are seamlessly intertwined with a general reconceptualization of a stilted romantic American summer vacation, framed through recourse to a revitalized instructional capacity, championing the ingenuity of two young outcasts, demanding that those who neglected them altruistically unite, with the aid of Bruce Willis, as the peculiar becomes the pertinent and vice versa, discussion engenders understanding, the resulting text overtly incarnates visceral dialectics, melodramatically idealized by the pursuit of love.

Regardless of the structural impediments firmly bulwarking a sustained historical social reverberation, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) courageously escape to the wilderness which created it, only to find their commitment to one another strengthened all the more, after having been discovered.

Underground authorities are then enlisted to creatively sanctify that which has been forbidden.

And as the heavens thunderously strike back, only s/he whose bravery eclipses his/her intellect can function as saviour.

And the Moonrise Kingdom shines forth.

Having been integrated into the system.

Intouchables

Improvised confident agile productivity meets frustrated restrained routine continuity in the heartwarming new odd couple film, Intouchables, the two dimensions elastically forging an incorporeal amicable trust.

Or friendship. Friendship is another way of describing that which they forge.

Philippe (François Cluzet) is a wealthy aristocratic quadriplegic who requires the aid of a live-in attendant. Driss (Omar Sy) comes from the projects and only applied for the position to demonstrate to social assistance that he's looking for work.

It quickly becomes apparent that Driss's honest, easy going, cheeky camaraderie is precisely that for which Philippe has been searching, having grown tired of fawning, hesitant, by-the-book cookie cutters.     

And the result is mutually cathartic.

The mix of different attitudes regarding artistic modes of expression is invaluable.

Oddly enough, it seems that there are still a lot of people who don't mix the classical with the popular.

Which is just simply weird.

Illustrating the rewards of embracing alternative therapeutic methodologies in order to rediscover innocuously rebellious invigorating affects, Intouchables acrobatically and celestially displays its inclusive joie de vivre without losing its practical edge.

Worth checking out.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln.

Vampire hunter.

His chosen weapon: an axe.

His cause: the abolition of slavery.

His purpose: just.

His approach: universal.

During his set of historical circumstances, piecemeal strategies simply don't cut it.

And alternative methods must be idealized.

Fighting an age-old evil whose tyrannical agenda is constantly seeking to revitalize its divisive malignant incredulity, Mr. Lincoln, with the help of an incredible woman who believes in the strength of common persons, and many other friends, including Christian Slater, decisively acts by any-means-necessary, his initial youthful personal vendetta evolving into a prolonged politico-cultural crusade.

Guided by wisdom.

And driven by faith.

Timur Bekmambetov's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is poignantly pulpy and genuinely clear.

Incisively laying a lucid altruistic track upon a dismantled phantasmagorical transcendence, he uses the tools prominent within his own set of historical circumstances to popularly reconstruct its influential engine.

Working within the system without preaching to the converted.

Or worrying about critical repercussions.

Great film.

Ted

Magic and a child's dream of having a friend brings a cuddly teddy bear to life in Seth MacFarlane's Ted, thereby transforming little John Bennett's (Mark Wahlberg, Bretton Manley) existence from one dominated by loneliness to one permeated with joy.

With neither responsibility nor consequences.

And an inexhaustible supply of the kind.

But the introduction of John's steady love interest Lori Collins (Mila Kunis) and their 4 year relationship threatens to end John and Ted's (Seth MacFarlane) non-stop binge, and a hitherto unimaginable strain threatens their impregnable friendship.

Obviously things need to change, and Lori is exceptionally relaxed and understanding, but after Ted moves out and John continues to haplessly disregard his social and economic obligations, things fall apart, and he finds himself back on his own.

Struggling to get by.

Mr. MacFarlane's undeniable gift for packing his scripts full of nostalgic pop cultural references does not struggle, however, and Ted's narrative is jam packed with witty intertextual memorabilia (also written by Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild).

Johnny Quest is mentioned.

Ted Danson makes light of his more successful Cheers co-star Woody Harrelson in a bit of playful bad taste.

And Ted's answer to The Wedding Singer's use of Billy Idol impresses at first.      

A lot of the jokes are funny, but the consistent barrage of cheap shots loses its appeal as the film unreels.

While some movies use repetitive jokes effectively (Paul's three boobs for instance), the devices Ted borrows from Office Space grow tiresome and the second half doesn't hold together well.

The subplot involving Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) is taken way too far.

As is the use of Ted's Billy Idol.

And the nauseating Rex (Joel McHale).

Too much reliance on knee-jerk reactions and not enough on strong character development, Ted flounders where it could have flourished and applies the brakes when requiring acceleration.

I've seen Adam Sandler movies that were better.

Seriously.

Brave

Traditional gender roles are set ablaze in Disney Pixar's Brave, the magical tale of young Princess Merida's (Kelly MacDonald) coming of age.

Disillusioned by her culture's tradition of demanding that a mate be selected from a tiny prestigious feudal stock, and the rather strict regimen of feminine codes of conduct to which she must adhere, while the men train for battle, the feisty Princess shelves her mother's (Emma Thompson as Queen Elinor) strategic plans and rides off into a forested nexus.

Wherein resides her destiny.

And a witch who provides her with a treacherous tasty treat which turns her mother into a bear upon her return home. 

August insurmountable accumulative wisdom having been startlingly transformed into the wild unknown, little Merida must find a way to relax the resulting tensions and restore order throughout the land. 

As a product of adrenaline.  

The film's piecemeal approach to socio-cultural structural modifications presents a practical framework within which transfigurations can be cunningly concocted, considering the myriad factors which need to be balanced when tempering historic-ideological architectures.

Wasn't impressed by its top-down approach however.

The bears are pretty cool though. 

Not the ferocious bear.

Suppose the other bears aren't really bears either.

There are moments of playful grumpy bearness nevertheless.  

Bears.