A King in New York

The freedom to think whatever remains universally appealing, assuming you aren't infringing upon the rights of others to freely work and actively play.

It makes for a robust globe overflowing with novel ideas, abounding with compelling variety as productively showcased at bookstores and libraries.

It's the inherent multivariability that makes democracies so enriching, eclectically attuned to collective vigour through individualistic endeavour.

The groups demographically ebb and flow as constructive fluidity naturally composes, stability and routine still widely cherished the reliable economic expenditures.

It's easy to write about the benefits of inclusive sociocultural initiatives, you just have to entertain heartfelt vitality as judiciously applied to peaceful life.

It's a shame such tolerant impulses have lost public ground in recent years, as childish imprudent brash extremists have refused to embrace versatile community.

Or even frustratingly bewildered it with sundry ineffective rules, stilting suffocating melodious free verse by rashly promoting social regulation.

I'm not as familiar with the era as I should be, but from what I've heard Chaplin once ruled incarnate, artistically evidencing his cultivated resonance with practical imaginative enticing foresight. 

But as times changed and new trends and fashions provocatively prospered in old school cinema, a revolution rigorously challenged his exceptionality with fluent discord.

Thus, in the opening moments of A King in New York the King of Estonia (Charlie Chaplin) is forced to flee, and take up residence in the Big Apple where he eventually has to work in advertising.

After having been banned himself from the United States where he had entertained millions for decades, extremist thugs having coercively arisen to stifle the chill cooperative left.

To think that someone so genuinely concerned with innocent goodwill and characteristic savvy, couldn't return to the American heartland fills one with loathing for McCarthyism. 

Chaplin got them back in this film with a funny scene near the lively end, where he douses the brigands down with extensive literal saturated import.

He was just exercising his rights to pursue non-violent modes of communication.

A bold statement by cinematic royalty.

No doubt a friend.

To athletic accords.

Wonder Woman 1984

Strange how 1984 was chosen for the title of the new Wonder Woman film, since Orwell's novel doesn't influence the plot, which has more to do with one man's unhinged megalomania. 

Indeed a somewhat bland artifact is found and brought to the Smithsonian in the 1980s, its legendary origins unknown at first as steadfast workers research and classify. 

But it turns out a television personality has been seeking its mythic prowess (Pedro Pascal as Mr. Lord), for it's reputed to grant a wish to whomever holds it in their possession. 

Diana (Gal Gadot) and co-worker Minerva (Kristen Wiig) were accidentally granted wishes, and didn't realize there was a penalty for unwittingly coaxing the treacherous stone.

Pedro wishes to become the stone itself and sets about granting elaborate wishes, his wish granting growing more and more outrageous as his prestigious worth ameliorates. 

Diana realizes he must be stopped and has to renounce her wish to do so, for even though she's ecstatic her love interest's returned (Chris Pine as Steve Trevor), his existence is taking away her powers. 

Minerva refuses to give up hers having grown accustomed to superheroic strength. 

The two face off near the chaotic climax.

As Pedro uses satellite technology to grant wishes throughout the world.

Satellites were huge when I was a kid not just in popularity but in size as well, now they're certainly much smaller yet possessed by a much larger number of people.

Does Wonder Woman 1984's use of the Orwellian date relate to contemporary global interconnectivity, or the ways in which satellites and other devices have linked billions of people across the globe?

The technology does seem essential and undeniably facilitates rapid communication, it's still fascinating how quickly one can converse with someone residing on a far off continent. 

But freedom lies with disconnection with a less engaged absorption of worldwide data. It's important to stay generally informed. But I feel so much better when I shut off the news.

I spent years finding cool articles to share with people and advertise my favourite news sources, and to contradict prevalent one-dimensional narratives which ignored the integrity of working people.

Perhaps some people did start paying attention and found some new news sources they liked.

Working class integrity goes without saying.

And used to be a focus in the media year round. 

Incredibles 2

A family of adorable lovingly unique superheroes flexibly recommences its eternal struggle against evil, judiciously reimagining traditional gender roles along the way, as the older kids age, and the youngest multidimensionally explodes.

In Brad Bird's Incredibles 2.

Superheroics having been outlawed, a clever plan is hatched to see them jurisprudently reevaluated.

And as Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) steps up to bravely duel the wicked Screenslaver (Bill Wise), Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) learns that raising young is quite demanding indeed.

Violet (Sarah Vowell) hopes to date schoolmate Tony Rydinger (Michael Bird) for instance, yet said love interest's amorous memories have dis/enchantingly disappeared.

Little Dash (Huck Milner) is struggling with math in school, and the methodologies once used to solve standard problems have bewilderingly mutated, or so it seems, as Mr. Incredible digs deep to decode them.

And it's discovered that baby Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile) has more gifts than the entire family combined, and doesn't know how to cautiously control them, meaning that at any moment their roof might cave in, if order is not improvisationally substantiated.

As Elastigirl (is there anyone like her in Marvel?) spontaneously adjusts to Screenslaver's mesmerizing theatrics, balance reestablishes itself on the eccentric homefront.

Yet petty grudges against superhero kind continue to frustratingly manifest themselves, and an even more diabolical plan is revealed, one so insidious it maliciously promotes fastidious spectacular ruin.

Forever and ever.

Till the end of time.

Thus, extremist uncompromising villainy once again attempts to delegitimize the genuine, fantastic forces independently existing beyond its limits fuelling it as a matter of uptight principle.

Technology is employed to overcome naturalistic endowments as entrenched ne'er-do-wells continue to malign the do-gooding.

The Incredibles just want to modestly raise a family while thwarting genius crime, that's it, and since they're in possession of what it takes to lock down the ignominiously inclined, why not enable their enviable goals, while simultaneously encouraging a healthy bourgeoisie?

A middle-class?

An everglade?

An engine?

Conan.

A long time ago, when I was obsessed with the films I had been forbidden to view in my youth, one night I saw this cool looking cartoon called The Incredibles, and I rented it, and thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

I'm therefore happy to see Incredibles 2 released so many years later, and find that it fits well with postmodern superheroism.

It distinguishes itself by realistically yet humorously introducing a relatable familial dimension, thereby functioning like a Maverick doubling down within the heavens.

Like Switzerland.

Or the Toronto Blue Jays once they start winning.

Blue Jays.

Chirp chirp.

The Square

Contemporary art clashes with civilization as the repercussions of spontaneous decisions made plague The Square's timid curator.

The square itself is a beautifully conceived space wherein which those who enter should feel free to honestly engage with one another.

Crafted according to egalitarian guidelines, it promotes goodwill and kindhearted understanding.

The supersaturated sensation prone advertisers tasked to promote it can't think of a complementary way to proceed, however, their resultant ad generating the critical controversy they seek, but, nevertheless, it's unceremoniously steeped in just bitter outrage.

By bellicosely blending explosive guilt with tender innocence, the ad reflects mainstream media obsessions with death and violence, the ways in which news outlets focus intently on the abominable in order to generate higher ratings, the unsuspecting public perhaps functioning like the innocent child blown to bits within.

But recognizing such a purpose and detaching it from its grotesque depiction, as it's applied to a subject of the public sphere (a museum), isn't exactly something you can expect from all and sundry, since they're more likely to see an explosion killing a young child within a zone dedicated to peace, and wonder why someone chose such a disastrous advertising method.

Here, intellectual pasteurization confronts working realities wherein which it's reduced to sheer idiocy in a matter of viral nanoseconds, accumulating high ratings meanwhile.

This happens elsewhere in the film too.

Not the ratings.

Explanations making things much much worse.

Means and ends.

The Square brilliantly comments on detached postmodern peculiarities, the universal accessibility immediately granted by YouTube and Facebook seeing old world sociopolitical boundaries disappear in radiant flux.

But the film's also concerned with hapless Christian (Claes Bang), who has a good heart but is somewhat of a fool, who tries to live according to the square's ethics but doesn't really get it, and consistently generates fury as he tries to take part and must eventually defend his poorly thought out decisions.

Being a public figure responsible for promoting a cultural institution, he has to constantly answer questions that don't follow an adoring script, with discursive agility and multifaceted ease, but he often can't formulate the simplest of sympathetic responses, can't flexibly b(l)end with inherent political realities.

Christian's ineptitude is chaotically brought to life both publicly and privately after one of his performance exhibits goes psycho at a formal dinner (the embodiment of disenfranchisement playing a role it naturally wouldn't if elites didn't reflexively assume its rage [or a role played by the disenfranchised who wrongly assume the elites assume they're malevolent {best to take each action on a case by case basis/plus watch the ending of The Dark Knight\}]) and his oblivious attempts to get his stolen wallet back cause trouble for a young immigrant boy (Elijandro Edouard).

This review just looks at a small cross-section of what's reflected upon in The Square and offers hasty interpretations.

An international extravaganza that not so subtly uses contemporary psycho comedy to question paths the arts are following, and the constitution required to manage the synthesis of everything, it interrogates the act of questioning with dry satirical responses, and leaves one man floundering while he assumes existential parlay.

Vivacious vortexts.

Decay in bloom.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Martin McDonagh cranks up Sympathy for the Devil and holds nothing back in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, as an abusive bigoted homophobic policeperson does the right thing for once after a lifetime of gross civil indecency.

The schematics.

A grieving mother (Frances McDormand as Mildred), whose daughter was brutally murdered, rents three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, to boldly call out the local police chief (Woody Harrelson as Chief Willoughby) for having made no progress on the case months later.

Her fury is justified and her disobedience sincere, even if members of the local constabulary don't see it that way, members who no longer take the case seriously.

An individual's reasonable observations therefore conflict with statistics and precedents, the police having handled similar cases before, and done relatively little after their initial investigation led nowhere.

Did complacency brought about by years of cold routine cause them to simply ignore the case?

Possibly.

Spoiler.

The police chief, who is dying of cancer, does commit suicide not long after the billboards go up.

This isn't Mississippi Burning.

Even if Ebbing's blunt righteous inspirational indignation generates hardboiled perdition, wherein which everyone is scorched in the flames, including James (Peter Dinklage), unwittingly, who's introduced to critique Mildred, or to reflect upon a culture so saturated with stereotypical thinking that no one's done anything genuine for decades, until the three billboards go up, after which people who don't have much experience feeling suddenly find themselves culturally enraged, unprecedented emotions wildly seeking semantic clarification, it's no Mississippi Burning, a film that doesn't present the racist pretensions of the local police force so lightly.

But the Feds aren't called in in this one, and even though I'm a forgiving man, and love a story that sees the hardboiled ethical transformation of a character like Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a grizzly tale that doesn't shy away from gruesome cultural codes, he still brutally assaults people and the law doesn't hold him to account, apart from taking his badge away, and I don't see why the metamorphosis of the brutally violent police officer is being celebrated with awards, when Wind River, another dark film that examines stark polarized realities, which is also well-written and compelling, was released in 2017, and ignored by the Golden Globes.

That's called white privilege, I believe.

Was The Revenant too soon?

You're Soaking in It

I suppose advertisements often work.

That people see them on television or online and then buy the products they witness after having unconditionally embraced ecstatic desires to shop, or at least, do something.

Every so often I see a really good ad (Heineken had some great ones a couple years ago and there was that cool one with the hamster or gerbil escaping from a hospital last Summer), and I can appreciate the creativity that goes into crafting them, but actually buying something that they mention, or feeling compelled to buy something they mention, that's something I don't understand, even if I appreciate the variety of goods available at various shops/. . . throughout town and I may use Wix to create a website at some point.

Then again, craft beer, wine, indie music, fictional and non-fictional books, knickknack boutiques, juice purveyors, speciality cheeses, and items from antipasto bars don't really show up in televised ads that often, and I don't watch television, and if they do, I then instinctually don't want to buy them if I happen to see them because it seems as if they've lost something genuine in the marketing.

I don't hold it against companies who decide to go this route (Molson and Labatt were likely craft breweries long ago). If they desire to expand to larger markets, good for them, just don't change the original recipe!

Film trailers, I do watch a lot of film trailers, I love watching film trailers, but I go to the cinema often enough and like to keep abreast of what's coming to town and usually won't see a film if I don't like the trailer unless it's been hewn by a director I like or just seems unapologetically incorrigible and/or ridiculous.

Does Ricard advertise in France?

Does Simons advertise in Québec?

I love the collective nature of STM advertisements and check out artists advertised in métro stations on iTunes later on if they have a catchy name or their album sounds cool.

Or they're holding a violin or standing next to a piano.

There are a preponderance of little ads that pop-up online (pop-up ads [😉]) that are somewhat irritating, and I thought You're Soaking in It was going to condemn them with more passionate argumentation, was going to create an all-encompassing death-defying theory or two to conspiratorially define things, even if they bluntly recognize the inherent impossibilities of pursuing such objectives, as people have been stating for centuries, that's where you find the most sincerely odd novelties, ludicrously presented with cold hard immaculate ephemeral tact.

I was hoping it would take me a stage past Fast Food Nation or game change like Cowspiracy or Blackfish but I didn't really get there, although I did like considering facts presented, the promotion of AdBlockers, and having the chance to listen to contemporary internet gurus in their own words.

Maybe it wasn't trying to seem like an ad so it ignored filmic conventions and decided to boldly wing it?

Although it seems like even if you spend millions on market research, if you never wing it, you may find yourself struggling to sell.

Some relevant postmodern analyses of a reality that's been (relatively) uncritically pontificating nevertheless, You're Soaking in It offers some thoughtful commentaries without strikingly conditioning, like a late afternoon novel that coyly resists immersive seduction.

Not bad.

Das große Museum (The Great Museum)

Times change, tastes, values, preferences, the integrity of the historical, timeless traditional structural dialogues, infused with contemporary stakes, striking artistic aggregates, emboldened through the maintenance of legacies.

Jockeying for position.

The decisions, the finances, the personnel, Johannes Holzhausen's Das große Museum (The Great Museum) blending various aspects of the Kunsthistorisches's management, its daily operations, linoleum, labour, preservation, advertising, executive inputs, some of which I would have found ridiculous if I didn't find myself having similar thoughts from time to time, through toil, mango, to converse, to generate dialogues with distinct publics, discourses of origins architecturally articulated, the thought, the detail, the work, meticulously cultivated to instruct and impress, with so many objects to enrich and tantalize, aesthetics of merit and truth bask in transitory permanence.

Intellectually gifted.

Delicately crafted.

The film illuminates a broad compelling practical yet highly abstract organism, budgeting its lucrative life blood with issues of power and control, while capturing moments of leisure and play, as a transformation strides and breathes.

In terms of mischievously yet respectfully examining the inner workings of a museum's perpetual motion, Holzhausen succeeds, but the sense of refined innocent yet aloofly didactic exuberance transports it to another level, Das große Museum wisely reflecting its subject matter.

You don't have to like museums to love this film.

There's also a tie covered in bears.

Wrong

Small talk.

Having the time.

Honestly expressing oneself.

A hard day's work.

The first film that I've seen that takes banal quotidian frustrations and places them generally within a framework resembling something like a bourgeois displacement of Twin Peak's Black/White Lodge, wherein neuroses and hyperanalytic tendencies proceed, full-speed-ahead, even as corporeal and material structures inexplicably change shape and regenerate, the insignificant theoretically becomes essential, and declarations of counterproductive antisocial lassitudes bifurcate, with explanations required and clarifications sought after, a face burned by acid, a formula for hard wiring permanent love, detectives hired to figure out what's already known to have taken place, figure 13-d, it (Wrong) could be qualified as Kafkaesque but the transitions, the hilarious transitions, director Quentin Dupieux isn't only a master of framing confused asymmetrical curious yet despondent facial expressions, again and again and again, it keeps working, he does the same thing when transitioning from scene to scene, meaning that something ornery takes place, the mood becomes anxious, and then we're back to a comfortable pastoral cheery suburban image, overflowing with stability and integrity, happiness and relaxation, there's no job but the bills are paid, let's start again fresh, like you're having a picnic in a meadow, lakeside, surrounded by elk wearing glasses, before hero Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick) must once again attempt to socially interact, and everyone's notable lack of expertise, or bizarre exhaustive supernatural comprehensions, violently yet sweetly cover things up, like a thunder storm bombarding an idyllic mountain stream.

Pets are important.

Routines are important.

It's important to ask questions.

Scientific exploration has no limits.

Caught somewhere between the anal retentive and the blissfully vacant, Wrong appreciates the ways in which the extroverted ideal (see Susan Cain's informative Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking [I love this book!]) has been adopted by oh so many people who were not born to embrace it, but still adamantly attempt to do so.

The key seems to be to buy a pet.

Love it.

End up crushed when it disappears.

And revel in ecstasy when it returns.

Magic: the magic.

Best comedy I've seen in awhile. Stand Up Guys is just as good, but Wrong does it without star power.

Accept for William Fichtner.

Who is now one of my favourite actors.

Almost forgot about the final song.

Still laughing. I'll be thinking about this film and laughing for months.

Dependability.

Wrong defines dependability.

It does.

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie

Enjoyed Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.

Some of the jokes aren't the greatest and one situation almost made me retch, but these guys are undeniably flexible in terms of producing sustained awkward oblivious carefree traumatically endearing comedy, nostalgically nuanced with a 1980s commercial naivety, and overflowing with nimble bad judgment.    

In search of a billion dollars.

Chef Goldblum's (Jeff Goldblum) transitional introduction sets the stage.

The hysterically fruitful job interview where Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell) devotedly demands that Top Gun be played a second time keeps things flowing.

Taquito's (John C. Reilly) epic battle with the mall wolf invokes tragedy.

And Katie's (Twink Caplan) indiscretion cannot tear Tim and Eric apart.

They've been taught what to expect from life and how to approach it from television and the movies, and, as a consequence, haplessly proceed with limitless confidence.

No matter what situation they face.

Ignoring the ways in which everything around them is crumbling and decaying, they manage to not let a little financial instability get them down.

While forging a strategic plan.

And unerringly living the dream.

The Hunger Games

Suppose most people are familiar with what happens in The Hunger Games so I won't spend too much time expanding upon the plot.

An uprising was launched by 12 impoverished districts which was crushed by the powers-that-be. In the aftermath, in order to brutally humiliate their subjects even further, they then created the Hunger Games, a competition wherein a youthful male and female representative from each district is selected to take part in a vicious fight to the death.

24 combatants are chosen and by the end only one remains.

The combatants, referred to as tributes, travel to the capital where they're elaborately decked out and paraded in front of the well-to-do in an ancient romanesque spectacle that's designed to showcase the oppressed and impress potential sponsors. These sponsors can provide you with assistance during the Games thereby enhancing your chances of survival. Ratings are provided to each contestant and they have their chance to prove their worth in front of a select group of interested parties and on television as well.

President Snow (Donald Sutherland) makes it clear that the Games were designed to instil a sense of hope within his destitute subjects, a sense that even though your chances of survival are slim, you still might win and be showered with riches forever after.

Obviously the hope he intends to cultivate isn't seen quite so romantically by the citizens of the districts.

Or the participants of the Hunger Games.

But those who have lucratively profited by the current composition of the state cheer and laugh at the hopeless in a disgusting exercise of affluent vanity.

Refusing to participate in the Hunger Games ensures your death.

Participating in the Hunger Games almost assuredly ensures your death.

So you have an extremist government that castigates the poor and suppresses any form of rational descent, demanding strict obedience to its self-serving whims and designs. Its supporters revel in the bloodthirsty celebration and the families of the participants forlornly sit back and watch.

But sponsors can assist you, give you critical support if you put on a good show.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) put on the best show they possibly can.

By falling in love.

Love in its true form enables them to change the rules of the game to the vouchsafed delight of their begrudgingly suppliant benefactors.

Thereby suggesting that true love saturated with sacrifice can momentarily defeat the agents of tyranny.

Or that true love fictions are at the heart of the tyrannical enterprise.

Working within a sensationalist frame to provoke a tear jerking deconstructive critical strike disseminating subliminal democratic aftershocks.

Perhaps I expanded upon the plot ad nauseum.

I can't figure out if the end justifies the means.

The Death of Alice Blue: Part 1, The Bloodsucking Vampires of Advertising

Really enjoyed Park Bench's The Death of Alice Blue: Part 1, The Bloodsucking Vampires of Advertising. It's creative, self-reflexive, energetic, well written, consistently comfortably awkward, intertextual, and hilarious. Several scenes exist as part of the general narrative while hovering above and developing an existential life of their own. Studying the innovative ways in which Bench comedically uses repetition should be high on the list of every up and coming filmmaker. Parts of the film even reminded me of David Lynch (particularly not generally). Bench's uniform and self-indulgently irresistible aesthetic effectively works with classics such as Re-Animator while moving beyond them in terms of depth and style. Overtly, it's as if we're watching an extremely low budget film with a terrible script, questionable performances, and "I don't give a shit writing." But Bench is well aware of these dimensions and he plays with and molds them into a scintillating, dark, jaunty cocked eyebrow, continually progressing and self-effacing from start to finish. It gets to the point where many of the myriad plot twists go nowhere but you don't care because what's happening in the moment is so compelling. There's no need for things to make sense or for there to be closure or an explanation or an explanation that makes sense. While the set is generally stark, particular scenes and random devices are meticulously and originally crafted, like a structural tribute to an engaging and unpredictable individuality, creating a wild, evenly paced, ridiculously sublime crescendo. Its desolate and superficial depiction of the general advertising world (and Raven Advertising's 12 cabals) boldly yet modestly calls into question mainstream post-modern cultural coordinates, while redesigning and elevating them in a productively haphazard and unconcerned manner. It's really well done and I was glad to have the chance to see it in Toronto theatres considering that it's Canadian and situated and shot in Toronto. Wish there had been more than two people other than me in the theatre but what can you do. Alex Appel performs exceptionally well, her multidimensional talent showcased in the same manner as the production design (long evocatively mundane stretches broken up by momentary flashes of brilliance [until the last twenty minutes where their powers are unleashed]), and my favourite scenes were those she shared with Detective McGregor (Conrad Coates). Production design by Anthony Morassutti.