RoboCop

Didn't think they should remake RoboCop, the original being one of the best action films I've seen, up there with Die Hard and Aliens, but they did, it exists, I obviously couldn't resist seeing it, and tried not to spend too much time comparing it to the original while watching, even though my efforts proved futile.

The first RoboCop's much more gritty, a different degree of debauched desperation. Pre-internet, its world is much more local, focusing on criminal thugs, corporate power struggles, and terrorized police forces more than international paradigms and their relationship to the United States, a raw frantic highly organized pedigree, wherein RoboCop's (Peter Weller) identity and family aren't primary to the structure of the narrative.

The internet-era RoboCop deals with multiple big-picture issues. The ways in which multi-billion dollar companies agitate to infringe upon integral civil liberties. Maintaining a humanistic identity while constantly embracing eclectic electronic onslaughts. Media personalities and their institutionalized agendas. Scientific ethics, parenting, global politics, cyborgs.

Cyborgs don't really seem like far-fetched highly aggressive airy-fairy daydreams anymore.

There's a Fido-like script involving a cyborg possibly starring Matt Damon waiting to be written.

Co-starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sally Hawkins.

Like Archer, I still fear cyborgs however, and as RoboCop (Joel Kinnaman) loses his identity in the new film, fears regarding consciousness altering technocrats are rebelliously voiced, their counterparts receiving plenty of airtime as well in the movie's dialectic (the sequel's set up well).

More polished than the original, lacking its wild conditioned sense of experimental zealotry, the relationship between the two films reflects the potential maturation of the original's fan base, much like the first three Terminator films, while making me think today's youth must be hyperactively aware (Michael Keaton's [Raymond Sellars] presence perfectly establishes this transition [casting by Diane Kerbel and Francine Maisler]).

Perhaps they didn't like it.

I did meet a youngster who enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness however (co-starring Peter Weller).

Jimmy P.

Unidentified debilitating head trauma leads Blackfoot war veteran Jimmy Picard (Benicio Del Toro), his Blackfoot name meaning Everybody Talks About Him, to seek medical aid, which congenially yet professionally presents itself in the emergence of Georges Devereux (Mathieu Amalric).

Devereux's carefree ways have established himself a controversial reputation whose negative aspects are ignored by the Topeka Military Hospital's hiring committee.

His interests in Aboriginal cultures and easy going yet penetrating style endear him to Jimmy, whose living full-time at the hospital and has learned from experience to distrust people of European descent.

Jimmy's trauma runs deep, and the two establish a patient constructive healing dialogue which drives the film's therapeutic cerebral inclusivity, diagnosis didactic, arguably becoming friends.

There's still some patient/therapist distance structuring their relations, so whether or not a true friendship blossoms is up for debate.

While Devereux is devoid of prejudice, Jimmy still confronts varied systemic social dismissals.

The film convalescently analyzes and/or refers to dreams throughout, these practical surreal revelations serving to meritoriously mystify its compelling inductive rationality, extracting conversational results and applying them to the world at large, proactively deconstructing its habitually ethnocentric subconscious.

The fire in the pines.

Stigmatic catatonics.

Gloria

The world of post-divorce adult dating releases a sombre upbeat frustrated flow in Sebastián Lelio's Gloria, as risks are taken in her (Paulina García as Gloria) search for a partner, unleashing fresh currents of desire, tormented by encumbering egotistical eddies.

She ebbs.

She flows.

But deception and non-committal petulancies provoke circularities of their own, pinpointed purchased prolific paddlings, pensively oriented, destination, cued.

The film champions a vital sense of heightened self-appreciation in the face of unsolicited undeserved shame, staying afloat after having been cast adrift, eventually docking on a jaunty friendly shore.

Look at how she comports herself.

Brought back to life by the power of pop music, suppressing her instincts so she can still give it a shot.

Why not eh?

Beautifully bouncing back.

From stranger tides.

Devil's Knot

Seemingly criminal investigative buffoonery is exactingly exposed yet authoritatively dismissed in Atom Egoyan's Devil's Knot, the lives of three teens dependent on said revelations, the law more concerned with either fabricating or submitting to superstition.

The evidence which Egoyan vets cannot lucidly resolve resulting legal tensions.

Dedicated altruistic private investigator Ron Lax (Colin Firth) resolutely prowls to defend, analyzing the facts exhaustively and judiciously, earning trust where none has ever been granted, proceeding directly, from a sense of justice.

But his team is held back by insurmountable time constraints and predetermined sentences, foregone conclusions belittlingly arresting, narcoleptic networks, propagandized anew.

The film harrowingly spawns a persisted enveloping remittance, a sublime sense of optimism institutionally dismayed, helplessness, the beautiful, the dissolute, the scapegoating of difference, a purloined procedural penitentiary.

Nothing can be proven.

Fights against overwhelming odds.

The knot represents the ways in which authorities sometimes outlaw/vilify/demonize a bohemian perspective then rely on their sanctified laurels while using the strategies of that perspective to illegitimately act.

It happens in the film anyways.

And in Foucault.

Oddly, I've been wondering recently if there's ever been a documentary film made about duty counsels and/or legal aids.

Appropriately timed thought even if Lax isn't a lawyer.

I've noticed a negative stereotype associated with the work legal aids perform which a solid documentary film and accompanying book could help destabilize.

Something like Duty Counselled.

Or something else.

La Grande Bellezza

Intricate spiralling ornately orchestrated unconcerned lavish spectacular ornamentations lushly yet temperately adorn La Grande Bellezza's sensuous immersions, crystalline socially interactive penetrating steps daring the bold to convivially counter, impeccable introductory multilayered intensities, celebrating for the urge of heights, shear polished expressive intertextual presence, the slightest movement, calm overwhelming culturally accumulated propensities, days within months within years within decades within millennia, to actively exist within contemporary a/temporalities, to discuss, persuade, to pressure, the hubris, the risk, the meticulous structure, deconstructing the meticulous by agilely removing any sense of the contritely overbearing, genius and beauty united in harmony, its form/s finessing the flaneur, complete distinct exploratory vignettes lacking borders or delineations, smooth seductive sequential synergies, emotive yet provocative, the mention of Proust, if ever there was a film that made me momentarily feel the same way I do while reading Proust, it's Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza; I thought this was an impossibility; flourishing forbearance, imparted, gentle.

Cinematography by Luca Bigazzi.

Idea, conversation, melody.

Jep Gambardella's (Toni Servillo) introduction is the best introduction of a character I've ever seen.

See this one in theatres.

Like 12 Years a Slave, it demands multiple viewings.

Par excellence.

Saving Mr. Banks

Artistic visions begrudgingly meet, in a story whose timelines derail the discreet, innocent childlike paternal love, textually flexed, romantically shoved into glittery glistening bedazzled shapes, affably born through divergent tastes, differing cultural curtailed conceptions, tenacious tempests, animate tensions, the question of ownership reputedly trusts the picture's polarity's pulsating thrush to sustains which wisely and playfully stray into micro and macro cosmetic brays, the genuine article exists in flashbacks, tragic addiction, familial shellacs, heartbreaking integrity guides P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), a commitment unwavering forthrightly flatters, a confident stubborn unyielding resolve which Disney (Tom Hanks) respects, having been there installed, yet he's also a father taking care of the kids, a promise was made, indentured votives, but trifles and mercantile paraphernalia, can't loosen the grip of Ms. Travers's regalias, her steady inflexible inspiring song, betwixt the mercurial commercial throng.

Saving Mr. Banks presents a fun lively look at creative expression, uniting two revered works from different domains while managing to apply its own historical take on the narrative's competing geneses.

A poignant picturesque blush of the abrasive, empathetic yet covetous, principled, and cherished.

Whitewash

Bland mundane blunt verisimilitudes cordially plow absurd fail-safes in Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais's campy Whitewash.

It's not that it's bland.

The characters and situations are somewhat bland but the ways in which they mitigate predetermined discourses of the sympathetic hyperstylizes their cerebral forthcomings.

A down-to-earth puzzling routine pervasively co-opts its miscalculated immersions but Bruce's (Thomas Haden Church) struggle to legitimize his poorly executed attempts to avoid the truth apply a lively coat of untarnished wherewithal.

During his discussions with Paul (Marc Labrèche), and others, he tries not to be blunt, but lacks the finely tuned verbal veneers necessary to convivially cloak his to-the-point observations, although he doesn't have many alternatives when interacting with Paul, whose death may not even be as accidental as it appears.

He remains cordial while hiding-out in the wilderness but guilt and fear infiltrate his interactions, causing him to appear awkward and creepy, loneliness, indulgence, bad luck.

He has to pick up supplies from time to time.

He drives a snow removal machine.

The more I think about it, the film seems less and less absurd, as if it's trying to trick you into thinking it's absurd by exfoliating the unexceptional.

Which makes for some constructive camp.

The previews were pleasantly misleading.

I've wanted to see this since I heard Thomas Haden Church was being paired-up with Marc Labrèche.

Brilliant.

Casting by Margery Simkin.

If you're thinking, this winter's been long and harsh, go see this film.

Not only is it worth seeing, it's perfect for a long harsh winter's February.

On par with Premier Amour and Vic + Flo ont vu un ours.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Monumental shifting shocks born on the strings of unexplored imaginary rifts, celestial seasoning, rhizomatic reveries, driven by the emergence of an affective resonance, accelerated paramount experiential zeitgeists, their heights represented by the pursuit of the elusive snow leopard within the Himalayas, upon which Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) meets the legendary Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn), whose carefree incomparable precision counters Ted Hendricks's (Adam Scott) callous downsizing, impromptu communal exercise, a spirited abounding break.

This is more than just a journey of discovery.

It's a sudden apprehensive full-throttle embarkation, synthesizing the subjective, the romantic, the practical, and the abstract in a hesitantly audacious leap of faith in oneself, the amorous tenacious logic of risk, a quasi-archivist in search of a lost record, love, adventure.

The excursion assists in the development of his eHarmony profile.

Individualistic styles contrast corporate bottom-lines through the art of naturalistic photographic bewilderment, patiently awaiting the arrival of a highly sought after enigmatic boon, having meticulously yet not fastidiously set-up the shot, while remaining somewhat aloof, interruptions noted but welcome, the evidence secondary to the ensconcement, a mature modest chime hallowing the apprenticeship of bliss.

And freedom.

For a windswept mellow-set Béla Flecked rougir.

Loved the discussion of Bowie's Space Oddity.