Gangster Squad worked for me.
It unreels like a tight graphic novel, short critical scenes packing poignant particles of plot into pyrotechnic proclivities, action-packed definitive melodrama fetchingly refurbishing the forensics.
Films such as these often fall apart if the writer(s) hasn't taken the extra time to ensure that her or his lines often seamlessly synthesize the kitschy and the poetic, and Will Beall's script creatively accomplishes this task, no doubt with assistance from Paul Lieberman's novel, commercially perspiring the artistic.
Gangster Squad blows Not Fade Away and The Last Stand away.
The ending, while jurisprudently brandishing a brash scarred face, wasn't as electric as that from Iron Man 2, and the Squad's supporting members would have benefitted from more screen time (throughout).
They do receive plenty of screen time (throughout) and there are a bunch of supporting characters but it's more like Star Trek: The Original Series than Voyager or The Next Generation, frequently focused on leading persons.
If Django Unchained attaches a commercial dimension to the artistic, I would argue that Gangster Squad adds an artistic dimension to the commercial.
Both are hyperviolent but I likely wouldn't have noticed Gangster Squad's if it wasn't for Django Unchained.
If Sgt. John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) and Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) were both running backs, it's tough to imagine who would pick up more yards per game.
Methinks Mr. O'Mara has the edge.
Straight up the gut.
Love how Ruben Fleischer's career is progressing.
Half way through I was hoping for some Gary Busey. Shook my head when I remembered that it co-stars Nick Nolte.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2013
The Last Stand
From what I can tell, the cast and crew of Jee-Woon Kim's The Last Stand had a great time making this film. It's permeated with a congenial sense of professional camaraderie no doubt galvanized by Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to the big screen.
I had a lot of fun watching it.
There's a scene where Luis Guzmán (Mike Figuerola) ballistically and kick-assedly asserts himself. The (former) Governator (Sheriff Ray Owens) squares off with villain Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) in hand-to-hand combat in the final moments. Johnny Knoxville's (Lewis Dinkum) eccentricities are serendipitously deputized.
And there's a cameo from film legend Harry Dean Stanton.
These components congeal to corporealize an active fast-paced frenetic yet shackled free-for-all, quaintly elevating the inclusive merits of a multicultural small town.
Fun. It's fun.
If it wasn't starring the aforementioned along with Forest Whitaker (Agent John Bannister) and Peter Stormare (Burrell) it may not have been so fun, however; it may have been painful to watch through to the end.
By had a great time making this film, I mean they didn't spend enough time on the script or even bothering to use standard editing procedures (the narrative flow is truncated and uneven [it doesn't seem to be using a truncated uneven narrative flow as a device, although I suppose when Cortez's crew arrives in Sheriff Owens's small town it does disrupt the pastoral harmony]).
The film is an interesting study of improbability nevertheless and in relation to its subject matter the myriad improbabilities do function as distinct complementary bemusements (I'm thinking mostly of the bumbling antics of Agent John Bannister's contingent. The film is meant to salute the strength and integrity of small towns so it makes sense that bureaucratic agencies with vast financial resources would bumble within, but the bumbling could have been handled differently).
It's possible that if it didn't have so much starpower The Last Stand would still be remembered as an oustandingly disorganized entertaining flop.
It might still be remembered this way, and it is fun, but I think fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger films deserve better outputs, a bit more time and care spent crafting the entire film, not just the action, especially at this stage in his career.
Thought Peter Stormare put in the best performance.
I had a lot of fun watching it.
There's a scene where Luis Guzmán (Mike Figuerola) ballistically and kick-assedly asserts himself. The (former) Governator (Sheriff Ray Owens) squares off with villain Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) in hand-to-hand combat in the final moments. Johnny Knoxville's (Lewis Dinkum) eccentricities are serendipitously deputized.
And there's a cameo from film legend Harry Dean Stanton.
These components congeal to corporealize an active fast-paced frenetic yet shackled free-for-all, quaintly elevating the inclusive merits of a multicultural small town.
Fun. It's fun.
If it wasn't starring the aforementioned along with Forest Whitaker (Agent John Bannister) and Peter Stormare (Burrell) it may not have been so fun, however; it may have been painful to watch through to the end.
By had a great time making this film, I mean they didn't spend enough time on the script or even bothering to use standard editing procedures (the narrative flow is truncated and uneven [it doesn't seem to be using a truncated uneven narrative flow as a device, although I suppose when Cortez's crew arrives in Sheriff Owens's small town it does disrupt the pastoral harmony]).
The film is an interesting study of improbability nevertheless and in relation to its subject matter the myriad improbabilities do function as distinct complementary bemusements (I'm thinking mostly of the bumbling antics of Agent John Bannister's contingent. The film is meant to salute the strength and integrity of small towns so it makes sense that bureaucratic agencies with vast financial resources would bumble within, but the bumbling could have been handled differently).
It's possible that if it didn't have so much starpower The Last Stand would still be remembered as an oustandingly disorganized entertaining flop.
It might still be remembered this way, and it is fun, but I think fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger films deserve better outputs, a bit more time and care spent crafting the entire film, not just the action, especially at this stage in his career.
Thought Peter Stormare put in the best performance.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Uncompromised unilateral implacable joy is wreathed within Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild's opening celebrations, as a small community of countercultural enthusiasts gather to revel in the gift of life.
Seen through the eyes of young Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the festivities, and the rest of the film, transmit a youthful candour.
Qualified by directly applying extinct carnivorous didactic extracts to the forthcoming unreeling upheavals, as discoveries bearing no familiar points of tectonic reference, suddenly, present themselves.
And the resilient strength of her family and friends.
Innocently yet formidably dealing with while challenging her adventurous unpredictable shifting bohemian foundations, refusing to accept ill-considered permanent demarcations, imaginatively combatting fantastical realizations, and unyieldingly embracing the cycle of birth, death and regeneration, Hushpuppy inaugurates an icon for the free-spirited impoverished soul, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a discursive feast for pensive humanistic diagnoses.
Beyond the state of nature.
Seen through the eyes of young Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the festivities, and the rest of the film, transmit a youthful candour.
Qualified by directly applying extinct carnivorous didactic extracts to the forthcoming unreeling upheavals, as discoveries bearing no familiar points of tectonic reference, suddenly, present themselves.
And the resilient strength of her family and friends.
Innocently yet formidably dealing with while challenging her adventurous unpredictable shifting bohemian foundations, refusing to accept ill-considered permanent demarcations, imaginatively combatting fantastical realizations, and unyieldingly embracing the cycle of birth, death and regeneration, Hushpuppy inaugurates an icon for the free-spirited impoverished soul, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a discursive feast for pensive humanistic diagnoses.
Beyond the state of nature.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Zero Dark Thirty
Accumulation. Asseveration. Evisceration.
Kathryn Bigelow's bureaucratically bitchin' tenaciously pitchin' Zero Dark Thirty nonpartisanly coordinates the clandestine predications of a resilient stalwart team.
In/directly lead by Maya (Jessica Chastain).
Militaristically maneuvering from the collection of data to the formulation of hypotheses to the execution of ideas, they uniformly act like the production of a covert thesis.
Perhaps this thesis asks, "can we successfully fabricate a concrete entertaining internationally provocative blueprint which periodically articulates anti-terrorist protocols which seem bona fide yet cleverly dissimulate each and every event that took place, apart from the lengthy ending, thereby functioning as overt espionage (and trumping Argo)?"
This question may be a bit much considering that what takes place seems to follow a logical asymmetrical pattern the fabric of which conceals/reveals both sides (as depicted in the film) regardless.
Nevertheless, even though its bravado is qualified by stats and potentialities, Zero Dark Thirty impresses practical unrelenting retributive necessities across its apolitical spectrum, collocating resourceful avatars with seductive sentiments, in a potent, charismatic, collection.
Kathryn Bigelow's bureaucratically bitchin' tenaciously pitchin' Zero Dark Thirty nonpartisanly coordinates the clandestine predications of a resilient stalwart team.
In/directly lead by Maya (Jessica Chastain).
Militaristically maneuvering from the collection of data to the formulation of hypotheses to the execution of ideas, they uniformly act like the production of a covert thesis.
Perhaps this thesis asks, "can we successfully fabricate a concrete entertaining internationally provocative blueprint which periodically articulates anti-terrorist protocols which seem bona fide yet cleverly dissimulate each and every event that took place, apart from the lengthy ending, thereby functioning as overt espionage (and trumping Argo)?"
This question may be a bit much considering that what takes place seems to follow a logical asymmetrical pattern the fabric of which conceals/reveals both sides (as depicted in the film) regardless.
Nevertheless, even though its bravado is qualified by stats and potentialities, Zero Dark Thirty impresses practical unrelenting retributive necessities across its apolitical spectrum, collocating resourceful avatars with seductive sentiments, in a potent, charismatic, collection.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Amour
As an elderly couple settles into their daily routine, a crass unnoticed paradigmatic indiscretion, delivered with the same engendered clarity that may have often been a past passionate progenitor of amicable conjugal rage, is adorned by the traditional romantic reversal of fortunes, but this time they're accompanied by a direct physiological collapse, which culminates in the paralysis of Anne's (Emmanuelle Riva) left side.
Emotions run deep within husband Georges's (Jean-Louis Trintignant) struggles to rationally contain his unceasing grief.
His wits remain voluble and he's brittlely yet staunchly prepared for the logical and humanistic impairments of respective relatives and infirmières.
Attempts to ascertain one's dignity resonate as appearances must be qualified by brash benevolent exceptions.
Stoically exemplifying the lifelong dedication of a loving married couple, examining the conversational results of a relationship existing without distinct verbal limits, Michael Haneke's Amour no longer seeks to loquaciously dominate, but simply to be, to reflect, to bask, semantically dishevelling the tenants of prediction with none of the bells and whistles often used to set such scenes.
Just raw quotidian patient enduring dependent classical shock.
Still feeling the affects three hours later.
Emotions run deep within husband Georges's (Jean-Louis Trintignant) struggles to rationally contain his unceasing grief.
His wits remain voluble and he's brittlely yet staunchly prepared for the logical and humanistic impairments of respective relatives and infirmières.
Attempts to ascertain one's dignity resonate as appearances must be qualified by brash benevolent exceptions.
Stoically exemplifying the lifelong dedication of a loving married couple, examining the conversational results of a relationship existing without distinct verbal limits, Michael Haneke's Amour no longer seeks to loquaciously dominate, but simply to be, to reflect, to bask, semantically dishevelling the tenants of prediction with none of the bells and whistles often used to set such scenes.
Just raw quotidian patient enduring dependent classical shock.
Still feeling the affects three hours later.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Promised Land
Similar to Django Unchained inasmuch as it doesn't hold anything back, Gus Van Sant's Promised Land provides a polemical analysis of fracking (shale gas exploration), giving ample fictionalized room for proponents and critics to have their say.
Set in a struggling small town, attendantly polarizing economic privilege and historical continuity, differing relationships with land, identity, community, the film persuasively establishes prominent competing practical ideological personalities, each competently nuancing myriad aspects of the debate.
It frankly and freely conceptualizes choice and accentuates the risks associated with maintaining principled stances in opposition to enormous reserves of capital.
And allows each individual viewer to determine their own verdict.
I like taking risks.
I'll go to a casino once a year willing to part with $200 dollars. If I lose it in twenty minutes it's quite difficult to stop playing.
But I do.
I'll try new cheeses, beers, tartares, films, expressions, novels, sauces, ideas, try and predict the outcome of playoff games . . .
But water supplies are not something I like to take risks with. They are critical features of communal environmental well being.
Profits generated from fracking do enable the construction of schools etc. while decreasing a nation's dependency on natural gas imports.
But the likely resultant carcinogenic contaminations will increase medical dependencies as well, thereby placing a further strain on the public purse.
You could get lucky and the procedure may not result in any harmful environmental side effects.
If you don't, you're completely screwed for generations.
The decision seems clear to me.
Set in a struggling small town, attendantly polarizing economic privilege and historical continuity, differing relationships with land, identity, community, the film persuasively establishes prominent competing practical ideological personalities, each competently nuancing myriad aspects of the debate.
It frankly and freely conceptualizes choice and accentuates the risks associated with maintaining principled stances in opposition to enormous reserves of capital.
And allows each individual viewer to determine their own verdict.
I like taking risks.
I'll go to a casino once a year willing to part with $200 dollars. If I lose it in twenty minutes it's quite difficult to stop playing.
But I do.
I'll try new cheeses, beers, tartares, films, expressions, novels, sauces, ideas, try and predict the outcome of playoff games . . .
But water supplies are not something I like to take risks with. They are critical features of communal environmental well being.
Profits generated from fracking do enable the construction of schools etc. while decreasing a nation's dependency on natural gas imports.
But the likely resultant carcinogenic contaminations will increase medical dependencies as well, thereby placing a further strain on the public purse.
You could get lucky and the procedure may not result in any harmful environmental side effects.
If you don't, you're completely screwed for generations.
The decision seems clear to me.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Not Fade Away
Youth for me is often characterized by spontaneity and conviction, tackling the unforeseen head-on, learning to personally adapt to shifting interrelated paradigms and opportunities, struggling to synthesize components of both the contemporary and historical real.
Not that careful planning doesn't also often play a strategic role, it's just that this aspect of youth is much less romantic, not to say that it isn't more durable, and more likely to win consistently when playing cards.
Tough to say which trajectory is more reckless.
And it's obviously relative too, the 27 year old seeming more youthful than someone in their 50s, etcetera, etcetera, wow.
David Chase's Not Fade Away concerns a number of youths and the rock and roll band they form during the '60s, as well as the familial and amorous relations of one of its members. Success is referred to within as the result of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, from a variety of socio-economic stances.
The question here is, according to this criteria, is Not Fade Away's exploration of youth a success, and if so, does it interrogate the reckless, planting a forest through the trees?
The dialogue also heavily favours the commercial side of art and it's this domain within which the film operates.
It's very calculated.
Throughout I kept thinking that this is the corporate packaged conception of what should be appealing to suburban youth without going so far as to plausibly alienate their parents, based on composite statistical data.
The only possible artistic moment (I should clarify what I mean by art in a book someday) occurs during a point where the film seems pointless, and you're thinking, good lord, corporate pointlessness, how 21st century!
But then the main couple critiques a film they're watching for its pointlessness, after which things become more bourgeois, and a more traditional plot takes shape.
Perhaps I'm too old to comprehend Not Fade Away's spontaneous conviction, but I am old enough to appreciate the skilful ways in which it condenses multidimensional intergenerational issues into a mildly entertaining fictional synopsis.
Still wasn't enough for me though, and if that 10% inspiration doesn't transmit at least the possibility of spontaneous artistic conviction to the rest of the text's perspiration, I can only state, that if packaged corporate youth is a success, with all its missionary incarnations mathematically corporealized, planned twenty years in advance (note that the Rolling Stones, whom I love, are still being used to classify youth 50 years later), and completely lacking spur of the moment improvisation, it's reckless, and therefore youthful, yet hopelessly banal (the wrong side of The Schwartz).
Gus Van Sant's Promised Land offers an escape from this predicament.
Not that this form is ever going to fade away.
Drank a busch tallboy while writing this.
Not that careful planning doesn't also often play a strategic role, it's just that this aspect of youth is much less romantic, not to say that it isn't more durable, and more likely to win consistently when playing cards.
Tough to say which trajectory is more reckless.
And it's obviously relative too, the 27 year old seeming more youthful than someone in their 50s, etcetera, etcetera, wow.
David Chase's Not Fade Away concerns a number of youths and the rock and roll band they form during the '60s, as well as the familial and amorous relations of one of its members. Success is referred to within as the result of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, from a variety of socio-economic stances.
The question here is, according to this criteria, is Not Fade Away's exploration of youth a success, and if so, does it interrogate the reckless, planting a forest through the trees?
The dialogue also heavily favours the commercial side of art and it's this domain within which the film operates.
It's very calculated.
Throughout I kept thinking that this is the corporate packaged conception of what should be appealing to suburban youth without going so far as to plausibly alienate their parents, based on composite statistical data.
The only possible artistic moment (I should clarify what I mean by art in a book someday) occurs during a point where the film seems pointless, and you're thinking, good lord, corporate pointlessness, how 21st century!
But then the main couple critiques a film they're watching for its pointlessness, after which things become more bourgeois, and a more traditional plot takes shape.
Perhaps I'm too old to comprehend Not Fade Away's spontaneous conviction, but I am old enough to appreciate the skilful ways in which it condenses multidimensional intergenerational issues into a mildly entertaining fictional synopsis.
Still wasn't enough for me though, and if that 10% inspiration doesn't transmit at least the possibility of spontaneous artistic conviction to the rest of the text's perspiration, I can only state, that if packaged corporate youth is a success, with all its missionary incarnations mathematically corporealized, planned twenty years in advance (note that the Rolling Stones, whom I love, are still being used to classify youth 50 years later), and completely lacking spur of the moment improvisation, it's reckless, and therefore youthful, yet hopelessly banal (the wrong side of The Schwartz).
Gus Van Sant's Promised Land offers an escape from this predicament.
Not that this form is ever going to fade away.
Drank a busch tallboy while writing this.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Les Misérables
And another film operating within an ethical economic matrix was released, whose focus is more generalized and critiques less gaudy, pursuing similar ends through divergent means, incorporating adherents of courage, wisdom, moderation and justice, religiously and managerially inundating the hardened prejudice of the absolute, with vibrant, comprehensive, itineraries, of conscience.
Also reducing a novel of considerable length to a lively cross-section, condensed further through the articulations of musical abbreviations, it, while lacking the artistic particularity of Anna Karenina, the meticulous style, still uses its harmonies to manufacture practical progressions, one of its most salient themes reminiscent of a concluding remark from Cloud Atlas.
The Master's logical mischievousness innkeeps, while Argo's spirit internally manifests.
Lengthy and full of purpose, Tom Hooper's Les Misérables chants out between two worlds, mercifully punishing criminal constabularies, while seeking to secure democratic law and order.
And another viewing of Lincoln.
Also reducing a novel of considerable length to a lively cross-section, condensed further through the articulations of musical abbreviations, it, while lacking the artistic particularity of Anna Karenina, the meticulous style, still uses its harmonies to manufacture practical progressions, one of its most salient themes reminiscent of a concluding remark from Cloud Atlas.
The Master's logical mischievousness innkeeps, while Argo's spirit internally manifests.
Lengthy and full of purpose, Tom Hooper's Les Misérables chants out between two worlds, mercifully punishing criminal constabularies, while seeking to secure democratic law and order.
And another viewing of Lincoln.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Django Unchained
Easy to write about this film it is not.
I heard Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) quoting Nietzsche during an episode of The Big Bang Theory the other night, and his point considered morality to be a barrier which prevents truly 'great' persons from attaining their full potential, since it requires that they conform to the standards adopted by common people. I tend not to see it that way myself. It seems to me that morality is often denied common people, depending on their financial circumstances, and, due to the significant economic advantages attained by the überwealthy, and the accompanying capitalistic social reverence, that morality is reserved for plutocrats and oligarchs, at least in terms of settling legal disputes (I don't know which thinker to attribute this idea to so I'm going with Leonard [Johnny Galecki]). There's a lot more to it than that, but this can obviously be frustrating and it's within this disenfranchised brutal frustrating ethical frame that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained cataclysmically reacts, his undeniable parageneric ingenuity once again limitlessly unleashed, although not as consistently as it has been in the past.
The same incomparable skill for creating iconic heroes and villains is at work, and since nothing is held back, both sides accumulate plenty of critical ammunition, accentuated by his requisite offbeat sensational ludicrous treacherous altruistic asymmetrical logical arsenal, although some of the (crackpot) theories, phrenology for instance, could have possibly been left out altogether.
Giving a voice to such ugly historical phenomenons and making that voice extremely detestable causes the theories themselves to come across as reprehensibly as they should, and it's not like racist lunatics don't still blindly believe in them; and applying restraints to the exhibition of ideas is anti-democratic, although such ideas themselves are extremely anti-democratic and are still being virtuosically displayed.
It's a bit unsettling.
The resultant graphic constant death also unsettles while begging a comparison to several prominent cartoons which regularly use such devices.
Organized fighting and sports are obviously going to be violent and provide a necessary supervised outlet for such tendencies.
It's the constant graphic choreographed extended hopeless brutality that sets Django Unchained (and Archer and South Park) apart from these realities, offering a sadistic carnal sick ostentatious fantasy, for those who regularly act according to social conventions, yet often feel as if or are deprived of moral compensation.
I love Quentin Tarantino's films but it's tough to watch enslaved grown men fight to the death, then see another torn apart by dogs, and another almost undergo castration.
The film's lighthearted comedic dimension complicates things further.
I heard Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) quoting Nietzsche during an episode of The Big Bang Theory the other night, and his point considered morality to be a barrier which prevents truly 'great' persons from attaining their full potential, since it requires that they conform to the standards adopted by common people. I tend not to see it that way myself. It seems to me that morality is often denied common people, depending on their financial circumstances, and, due to the significant economic advantages attained by the überwealthy, and the accompanying capitalistic social reverence, that morality is reserved for plutocrats and oligarchs, at least in terms of settling legal disputes (I don't know which thinker to attribute this idea to so I'm going with Leonard [Johnny Galecki]). There's a lot more to it than that, but this can obviously be frustrating and it's within this disenfranchised brutal frustrating ethical frame that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained cataclysmically reacts, his undeniable parageneric ingenuity once again limitlessly unleashed, although not as consistently as it has been in the past.
The same incomparable skill for creating iconic heroes and villains is at work, and since nothing is held back, both sides accumulate plenty of critical ammunition, accentuated by his requisite offbeat sensational ludicrous treacherous altruistic asymmetrical logical arsenal, although some of the (crackpot) theories, phrenology for instance, could have possibly been left out altogether.
Giving a voice to such ugly historical phenomenons and making that voice extremely detestable causes the theories themselves to come across as reprehensibly as they should, and it's not like racist lunatics don't still blindly believe in them; and applying restraints to the exhibition of ideas is anti-democratic, although such ideas themselves are extremely anti-democratic and are still being virtuosically displayed.
It's a bit unsettling.
The resultant graphic constant death also unsettles while begging a comparison to several prominent cartoons which regularly use such devices.
Organized fighting and sports are obviously going to be violent and provide a necessary supervised outlet for such tendencies.
It's the constant graphic choreographed extended hopeless brutality that sets Django Unchained (and Archer and South Park) apart from these realities, offering a sadistic carnal sick ostentatious fantasy, for those who regularly act according to social conventions, yet often feel as if or are deprived of moral compensation.
I love Quentin Tarantino's films but it's tough to watch enslaved grown men fight to the death, then see another torn apart by dogs, and another almost undergo castration.
The film's lighthearted comedic dimension complicates things further.
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