The Drop

Patience, understanding, questions, commitment, caring modest consistency, observant faithful hesitancy, towing the line, doing the right thing, balance and order, let's see what happens, Michaël R. Roskam's The Drop follows humble Bob (Tom Hardy) as he works, interacts, and serves, loyally playing by the rules, cautiously keeping to himself, never directly causing a stir or ruffling any feathers, maintaining a sense of fair play, strictly aware, of his strengths and limitations.

Hardy puts in a strong performance. Bob's character is quite different from those he dynamically brought to life in Inception and Star Trek: Nemesis. Bob doesn't show much emotion, but Hardy adeptly uses this hindrance to his advantage, notably as he gets to know potential love interest Nadia (Noomi Rapace), carefully and artfully redefining stoicism thereby, never falling out of character, reserved, peaceful, true.

Strong performances all around, causing me to wonder whether or not Roskam studied and/or worked with David O. Russell, who also excels at creating insightful entertaining high-quality sophisticatedly acted films for mass markets, thoughtfully enlightening nocturnally invested narratives, until I rediscovered that it was Roskam who directed Bullhead, after I wrote this, which can compete with Russell's best work, The Drop can as well but maybe not with American Hustle, although perhaps he still is in contact with Russell.

I thought it was odd when Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini) decides to collude with Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts) because Deeds is obviously nuts and therefore too indelicate for his scheme, but this fact does intensify Marv's desperation, highlighting that greed leading to desperation ferments bad judgement, subtly juxtaposed with Bob's decisions, both sets capable of distilling ruin.

Detective Torres (John Ortiz) rounds out the script, showing up whenever it started to occur to me that his plot thread wasn't receiving enough screen time, his comments adding a romantic quality to The Drop's final moments, his conversations, playfully examining the divide between law and order.

Solid film.

Mommy

Heartbreaking confused insurgent rage pervades Xavier Dolan's Mommy, violently exploding in fits of uncontrollable wrath, volatile and destructive, furiously limited by social, familial, educational, and economic restraints.

But these outbursts liaise with the tenderest consoling spirited charms of a thoughtful caring bold youth hoping to find a way to fit in, unable to play any role besides King.

It's a brilliant fusion, truly brilliant, the best Canadian film I've seen, on par with the best cinema the international community has to offer, Arcand, Maddin, Egoyan, and Cronenberg have a genuine inheritor in Dolan, who's cultivating new ground for Canadian film, and living up to his potential.

Undeniable oscar calibre.

I don't write this lightly.

The youth's struggles are situated within a socio(a)political legal frame successfully supported by a direct honest account of his actions, to provocatively generate cogent debate, regarding individual freedoms, or the curtailment of one's liberties.

Steve Després (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is free.

Dolan beautifully captures his freedom again and again, twirling a shopping cart, smoking while preparing a meal, synthesizing the joyous and the manic, the sincere and the coerced, to present a less sadistic Clockwork Orange, set within impoverished circumstances, reason and madness aligned to contend.

He doesn't get the basics.

He cannot serve.

It's like he has the constitution of a viking warrior, devoted to his family, requiring constant battle, too undisciplined to acquire any plunder, too wild to learn how to begin.

Contemporary ancient emergence.

If only he played sports.

What a fearsome running back he could have been.

His mother's supportive struggles and practically ideal patience gradually break your heart, as incident after incident disintegrates her resolve, the scene where she dreams of his future, still producing genuine tears.

That scene's too well done, too well timed.

Too unfair.

Discourses of the beautiful, the psychological, the political, the mad, resplendently yet carnally united in a downtrodden brazen familial peace, an illustrious rampage, so delicate, so refined.

So crushing.

So free.

Controversial scenes.

Excellent soundtrack.

Still prefer Tarantino's soundtracks, but this is a good one.

The Congress

A thought provoking hypothesis concerning the future of acting descends into dystopian banality as Ari Folman's Congress transforms its initial personal conflict into a convoluted cultural malaise, the leap from the subjective to the universal itself profound, its execution entangled in histrionic thickets.

Computer generated cults and combines engulf the narrative's characterization in a co-opted corporate/revolutionary temporally and physically unbound constraint, which dialectically plays with animation and the corporeal to enticingly comment on a general contemporary lack of concern with poverty and alienation, the individual escapes or s/he suffers, and/or escapes and suffers, with no plan in place to improve downtrodden standards of living.

The relationship between selling your character to a studio through the process of having it duplicated by a complex array of computational codes thereafter used in whatever film the studio sees fit, regardless of whether or not you approve of the role, seems to have been commercialized en masse, individuals escaping to an animated realm to avoid finding solutions to real problems, this realm, probably representing current obsessions with the internet, which can be a remarkable tool for activism and engagement, enables individuals to become their own ideal self on the upload, leaving everything behind in the construct.

Or not. I don't know. This film's a mess. I felt like I had the flu watching its second act. I like complex takes on the byzantine nature of sociopolitical dynamics, but the acts don't communicate well with one another, there's no chrysalis, they just happen.

Without this communication, the film needs to stand tall on its own thereby encouraging you to see it again, like Mulholland Dr. or Lost Highway, and The Congress, with its misplaced animation, becomes too melodramatic and opaque, its structure obfuscating its outputs.

As an obscure piece of relevant cultural commentary it succeeds.

As an enduring film, I'm not so sure.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Barren.

Gut-wrenched and jagged like bitter metallic grist.

Seductive intransitive loyal strands besmirched in brazen castor.

She's in control.

He can't be beaten.

Youth and femininity seeking independence, suffering as their gifts intend.

Manipulation.

Honesty.

Power crushing its seamless outfoxed score, insurgent violence, brutally resigned.

Limits unextinguished.

Doctored dilettante adoring.

Lessons in lesions.

Just another day.

Its consequences sear its combatants with infernal fetching flames, talk, cheap, destined knees.

Full-scrapped and infiltrating, the cold calumny collapsing, its monstrous festered grip, clenching clasped constabularies.

Reactivity.

Its suffocations.

Its distance.

(I wonder if Christopher Lloyd's [Kroenig] performance was a tribute to that of Harry Dean Stanton in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me).

Let's be Cops

Decision making is confidently yet wryly chastised throughout Let's be Cops, the story of two down-on-their-luck friends who have moved from Ohio to L.A. in search of alternative opportunities.

Chastised yet rewarded.

Alternative opportunities they have found but financial stability alludes them, and one, who is unemployed and regularly relives his youth by playing pick-up football with neighbourhood kids, remains confident it's within their reach, while the other has second thoughts about their future's sustainability.

After misunderstanding the dress code for a masquerade themed reunion, they find themselves walking-the-beat dressed-up as policepersons, and, after having been mistaken for actual policepersons, decide it's in their best interests to play along, taking on organized crime shortly thereafter.

It's kind of funny at times, I liked the characters, and it uses some solid tricks, like introducing a third, wacky member of the team when Ryan (Jake Johnson) and Justin's (Damon Wayans Jr.) chemistry wears off, but there are far too many gaping holes in its reality based plot which aren't backed up by sensationally outrageous outcomes, therefore ironically requiring the suspension of too much disbelief, the improvised situations the partners find themselves within entertaining enough, their logistics, even after they're discovered, built on far too shaky a foundation.

There's something to be said for layering ridiculous scenario after ridiculous scenario on top of a bed of ludicrous jocularity, each hiccup emphasizing courage and adaptability, boldly venturing into the unknown to make a difference, responding positively to multiple bellicose bumps in the road, like launching a petition at change.org.

This strategy works better in a film less attached to quotidian coordinates however, even if said coordinates are somewhat endearing, like a comfy, fluffy, pile-driving pillow.

This strategy works quite well at change.org.

Finsterworld

Emerging from a state of nature to historically contextualize the present, eccentricity multifariously contesting its conditions, authenticity, percolating its plight, poetic instances of curious introspective creativity contentiously enraging the callous, cruelty and innocence sociopathically and lovingly coexisting, tricks, cancellations, balanced asymmetrical genders, beetles and dress-ups and birds, the conformist's intention to ignore, in Frauke Finsterwalder's Finsterworld, a dynamic open-ended multigenerational cross-section, microscopically invested, with macroscopic instigations.

Interpretively dependent.

Spoiler alert.

World War II's legacy haunts the film and difference, while uplifting it to an aesthetic celestial syntax, in various ways, is often contemptuously reprimanded.

The ethnic school teacher who takes his students on a trip to a concentration camp, focussing on its abhorrence, ends up in jail after rescuing a student who's been brutally pranked, giving in to his perverted instincts in the process.

The African character found in the film's final moments is listless and primitive, as seen when a documentary filmmaker ironically visits Africa in search of the authentic, ironic because her visit's based on the recommendation of her policeperson partner, whom she rejects after he reveals he's a genuine furry.

The other german men who salute difference include a pedicurist who takes the dead skin from his clients and then bakes it into cookies which he eventually serves to them as a treat. When one client admits her love for him, he reveals his secret, which is naturally met with ghastliness, although they do end up together.

A school boy who poetically and comically talks to beetles and puppets made out of his hand, reminiscent of Thomas Törless, is assaulted by a wealthy SUV renting tough guy, after possibly viewing his wife relieving herself at the side of the road. The three become quite friendly, when the man who lives in the woods and has just had his dwelling vandalized and bird friend killed starts firing shots from a bridge at the passing traffic, one of them fatally wounding the boy; as if to say that this young Törless's future would unfortunately resemble that of the humble forest dweller, who has therefore spared him a life of loneliness.

The death and incarceration of these two characters (the forest dweller ends up in jail), as well as the rejection of the furry, are perhaps vindicated by the pedicurist's romance, as an elderly german matron embraces difference, perhaps paving the way for a more inclusive cultural frame.

Perhaps Germany is quite inclusive at the moment, I'm just interpreting the evidence provided by this film.

The younger generation's sociopathic rep who doesn't want to accept World War II's legacy and doesn't speak up to save the ethnic school teacher, even though he was the prankster in question, while torturing his helpless victim further in the aftermath by insulting her intelligence, casts doubt on this possibility.

Which makes for a well-rounded albeit bleak conclusion.

To a depressingly thoughtful and brilliant reflexivity.

Outstandingly controversial film.

The Captive

Generally I find ambiguity enables scripts to reflect a higher degree of realistic contemplation, for it aptly accentuates the diversity of competing/cooperating points-of-view/interpretations/motivations/. . . that compose a multidimensional cosmopolitan filmscape, internally creating open-ended multifaceted polarized exteriorizations, thereby encouraging constructive debate.

But sometimes it's nice to simply watch good versus evil, a basic opposition of hero and villain, which is why I see so many action and western films.

The best of these usually have an ambiguous dimension; while it's clear who is good and who is evil, the protagonist often has several peculiar shortcomings (quick to anger, likes drinking, is never home), and the villains often seem honourable, or at least are quite appealing.

Obviously enough.

The villains in Atom Egoyan's The Captive are not honourable or appealing.

Nor should they be.

They are revolting monstrosities to be loathed and vilified in each and every instance.

Their monstrosity causes the heroes to act violently towards one another, as historical patterns and dead-ends necessitate the investigation of particularly volatile potentialities.

There's no room for ambiguity in The Captive's case, and its greatest shortcoming could perhaps be that it didn't make its villains even more disgusting.

The controversial subject matter is perhaps too watered down to adequately reflect its wickedness, but there isn't much choice when creating works which examine these realities.

Otherwise they would be impossible to sit through.

Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood)

A poetically crafted romantically frayed conversationally reflexive vibrato, wherein loyalty and trust intellectually intermingle with opportunity's libido, eternal springs caressing the depressed, spirited infatuation inquisitively cascading, limitless potential blossoming in flux, the radiance of rapture, sorrow's devastation, Tran Anh Hung's Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood) sees young adults exploring the logistics of desire, fervidly fletched with nature's aromatic ineffability, like poignant, durable, pirouettes.

Exceptionally well-written characters enhanced via situational rationality and environmental temperamentality, exclaim raw spiritual secular synergies, and a defined sense of purpose, strengthened through relational ambiguities.

Some of the most beautiful moments I've seen in a film recently, Toru (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) and Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) romancing on a windy day in the countryside, an impromptu performance of the titular Beatles's song (one of my favourites), Proust's Captive condensed into a short much less comic rendition of suffering, every scene featuring Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), the seasons changing, a waterfall.

Hyper-reactive withdrawn contemplative driven supportive devotion.

Amorphous amorous schematics.

Billowing wisps encrust.

Integrated imagination.

Substantial.

Bai ri yan huo (Black Coal, Thin Ice)

Yi'nan Diao's Bai ri yan huo (Black Coal, Thin Ice) seems like his first shot at reimagining classic American film noir.

It's dark. Haunting. There's a sense of helplessness on both sides of the law. Wu Zhizhen (Lun Mei Gwei) necessarily seduces. The underground is diversified. Innocence liaises with crime. The investigator (Fan Liao as Zhang Zili) is committed to justice but otherwise an alcoholic sexually aggressive flake. Anxiety persists. Ambiguity laments.

But it's lacking a cultivated heightened sense of permanent desperate byzantine betrayal, the overt narrative shallow and sober when compared to The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, or Trance, too disciplined, too formulaic, to visceralize a dismal atemporal malaise.

Multiplicity's the key.

Multiple egocentric prevaricating convoluted treacherous miscreants, sardonically conceiving obfuscated cul-de-sacs, clues within clues postulating neglect, perseverance sustained, adherence, maligned.

Bai ri yan huo is a solid debut demonstrating Diao's gifts ala cheek, crass, and cluster.

Several main characters speak, but don't play direct roles in the obscurity.

There isn't much collateral damage.

Solid film nonetheless.