Cyclically fated to hesitantly contend, the animals of the forest aligned themselves en masse, within and without the town which they inhabited, as the habitual schematics of their natures mutated.
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Bedlambience
Thursday, November 20, 2025
To Live & Die in L.A
*Spoiler alert.
Friday, October 17, 2025
The Birds
Acute antennae belvedere bristles Solomon's mines toga extraction, copious comatose riddling rhzanythemums certifish-friar Tsk-Tusk Atticustard.
Friday, September 6, 2024
Mein liebster Fiend - Klaus Kinski (My Best Fiend)
Imagine you're deep in the South American jungle working on a film as demanding as Fitzcarraldo, and your lead actor keeps erupting in fits of rage as you fight with the rain and the heat and the bugs.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Athena
A chilling video is released depicting police violence in an unsettled town, where tensions run high and misperceptions embroil as many hardworking people just try to earn a steady living.
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Lean on Me
I must admit to knowing little about the daily operations of American schools, I've seen various films and read books presenting snapshots, but I remain largely unfamiliar with concrete details.
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
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.
Friday, November 19, 2021
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
A worst case scenario wickedly presents itself, as a wanton team chaotically pursues destructive avarice.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Zardoz
The title sounded cool and it stars Sean Connery.
I imagine John Boorman didn't like ivory towers much.
Or the politics of the left in the early '70s.
Zardoz expresses such sentiments anyways with blunt instinctual derision.
It's absurd menacing political satire.
Confrontationally conceived.
In a hypothetical future, the elite have sealed themselves off within an impenetrable exclusive zone, where they live immortal lives of plenty, or at least with everything they need.
Outer regions know only chaos in maddening woebegone conflict.
The immortals have struggled to achieve enlightenment and have compiled vast repertoires of scientific knowledge, but some of them have grown restless, bored, tired of the limits of infinite perfection.
Fortunately for them, an enforcer stows away on the giant head that travels between realms, hiding beneath the grain, intent on acquiring wisdom (Sean Connery as Zed).
He introduces a unique element.
Curious carnal contrariety.
The immortals have cast off emotion you see, and live within stoic reasonable boundaries, with no children or families or nurturing, just rarefied rational discourse.
Subversive intentions plaque somnambulistic.
Those in control have qualified everything.
Gross exaggeration pervades the rigid Zardoz, but I still wonder how it was received at the time? I've certainly never heard anyone discuss it and don't recall it ever showing up in rerun.
I imagine it was cutting edge sci-fi for the '70s, at least some of the visuals are quite impressive, not the giant head itself so scandalous, but there are noteworthy technical features.
I still wonder if it was meant to be taken seriously, on some level I don't quite comprehend, but so much of it seems like solemn farce, like barbarians inside the gates.
But what seemed like solemn farce in recent memory is trying to transform reasonable debate these days, and what used to seem absurd is taken seriously, the public sphere in free-fall flux.
If people are currently worried that desires to function self-sufficiently are threatening the proliferation of the nuclear family, perhaps they were in the '70s (and long before then) as well, although I remain to be sure uncertain, even if I'm leaning towards "they definitely were".
A future where people suddenly want to stop breeding, generally, no matter what ideology predominates, seems highly unlikely to me, however.
There's just too much comfort in relaxed recreation.
With agency attached to the conjugally bold.
Nice that the opportunity to not have a family exists though, medieval pressures must have been stifling.
Can't say I recommend Zardoz.
Although it's certainly out of this world.
Friday, September 20, 2019
The Lion King
It's no substitute for the real thing of course, and I prefer to watch nature documentaries, but that doesn't mean the visuals aren't stunning, or zoologically endearing, like a blizzard after a veggie burrito, a trip to the Planetarium, mango icing, or a macchiato with lots of whipped cream.
I can't stress how important it is to conserve Africa's remaining lions, elephants, rhinos, etc.
Their populations have decreased drastically in recent decades, and if concrete action isn't taken, they may disappear forever.
That's not an exaggeration, it's just basic math.
They have just as much of a right to exist as we do.
And don't really do anything to harm us.
It would be cool if politicians committed to shutting down Canada's ivory market during this federal election campaign, if it isn't distressingly frustrating that it hasn't been shut down already.
'Lil Simba (JD McCrary/Donald Glover).
Who's Canada's 'lil Simba?
Nurtured within the chillaxed Canadian and Québecois social sphere, one day emerging to challenge the dissolute Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor)?
If you enjoyed the first Lion King film, I can't see why you wouldn't like this one, assuming you can get over how much money the film made without changing the storyline much, when there must be original narratives floating around out there that execs are unwilling to take a chance on, I don't really mind sequels as long as they're taken seriously, but an insane number of sequels and remakes have been released in 2019 thus far, as if pirated internet viewing's deeply cutting innovative bottom lines, and no one can afford to take cinematic risks, as if we're living in the age of bland cinematic prudence, born of misguided internet freedoms, which are transforming the world into Netflix, a remarkable minimalistic paradigm shift (it's cool to watch new films at home I suppose [I don't], but the result is that studios are now even less willing to embrace alternative ideas because their profits have been hit hard, theoretically).
Skyscraper!
Where art thou, Skyscraper!
If you accept that the new Lion King exists, however, regardless of its lack of différence, note, again, that it is a fun film to watch, abounding with commensurate degrees of age old wonder.
And imaginary animals can be placed in adorable situations that real life beasties instinctually avoid.
It's adorable.
And hard-edged, chock full of potent life lessons, much of the film's downright no-nonsense, although hakuna matata still resounds with bounty and ease.
Scar takes over again. Until 'lil Simba comes of age.
But wouldn't it be nice if successive governments respected what their predecessors had done, and didn't set about radically altering what they consider to be dysfunctional, unless you replace Scar, who is clearly dysfunctional.
It seems like all successive governments in Canada and the U.S are doing is reversing the decisions their predecessors made, regardless of the fact that significant portions of their countries/provinces/states value them.
There's no progress in such a situation.
And it must be a nightmare for career civil servants.
Politics is much more of a dog fight these days than it was in my youth, and the results are quite unsettling.
I doubt the NDP would change much of what the Liberals have done.
With the wily Jagmeet Singh.
Who's indubitably Simbiotic.
Friday, March 2, 2018
The Square
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.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Knight of Cups
Plot secondary to image and impression, a dream indulgently manifests its candour, an obsession with water like soul purification, from one partner to the next, transfixed, transpiring, like he's lost but aware of his surroundings, enjoying the good times but wondering, "what's the point?"
Frolicking friendship and family.
Joyful ambivalent sorrow.
The plot submissively burdens Knight of Cups with fluttering ephemeral obscurities, a parade of seemingly relevant yet easily dismissed observations following Rick (Christian Bale) from one romance to the next.
In terms of a study of presence, of the man who characteristically captures the attention of everyone wherever he goes, whatever he does, without making any effort, without having to do anything, Knight of Cups fuels his inner-strength, electrifies his childish wonder, examines his relationships with diverse sultry invention, a sense of tragedy troubling his mind, while he never has to work, and is surrounded by voluptuous vixens.
The images are stunning and it's edited like a cinematic poem.
The images and editing distract from its somewhat shallow subject matter, however, the man who has everything and doesn't have to do anything, such grief, how tragic!, and compensate by celebrating spontaneity, the continuous illumination of the surroundings, the camaraderie, the impartiality entrancing the fluidity, depending on multiple subjective points of view.
Would watch it again.
Christian Bale must have loved filming this one.
Editing by A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, and Mark Yoshikawa.
Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.
Friday, April 3, 2015
The Riot Club
Excessive wealth descends upon an unsuspecting family restaurant in Lone Scherfig's The Riot Club, debauched plutocrats at play, members of an exclusive enclave celebrating to excess in order to excrete authoritative postulates, rancid ribald raunch, the pecking order coaxing adroitly, a vaporous shroud, puffing up the smoke.
The club, the Riot Club, has been devoted to unfettered hedonism for centuries, but in this instance their antics are viciously nuanced, thereby vilifying their freedoms and demonizing their lust.
For chaos.
A lone voice criticizes the calumny, a new member of the club, but his opponent picks up on his indignation, and instigates the reckless in turn, consequently augmenting his rank.
The bourgeoisie holds fast to its integrity, refusing to perform like enslaved sycophantic drones.
The Riot Club plays a dangerous game; it seemed to me that abuse was encouraging latent sentiments of class consciousness within in order to deride the truly wicked, but it could be seen as a festive carnal salute to elitist angst, flagitiously large and in charge, seeking to practically express itself.
The film diversifies several characters, examines responsibility from multiple perspectives, uses its characters to make side comments on issues such as ethnocentricity and belonging, before igniting an inflammatory controversy which makes a sensational yet memorable impact.
Co-existence never seemed like much of a problem to me, you learn from different perspectives, take into account alternative points of view, make related choices.
If group dynamics aggressively seek to enlarge themselves through physical and/or psychological violence, and this behaviour is culturally normalized, a different standard of social etiquette reemerges, whose focus on threats and preemptive strikes significantly pollutes social spheres.
Replacing respect with animosity burgeons tyrannical dividends.
Controversial film.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
The Wolf of Wall Street
Comparing Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street to Oliver Stone's Wall Street could generate some compelling comparative data, in regards to their historical censures.
Has this particular epoch enabled Scorsese to direct without limits, to go beyond Seth MacFarlane and Adam Reed, to freely proceed with neither caution nor complaint in an excessive wanton capitalistic cynosure, to gratuitously salute the golden age of sleaze?
He tests you within.
He bombards you with luscious images of in/accessible voluptuous beauties, interspersing tips on illegally playing the stock market, and then asks you whether or not you're capable of following the lecture, playing with the process of narrativization throughout.
Tantalizing tutelage?
He takes a group of guys who grew up together, installs one as leader after he learns how to make enormous sums of money, they all then make enormous sums of money, and they basically never leave high school for the rest of their lives, and not one of them even so much as ends up in the hospital.
There are funny moments.
But why they needed 180 minutes to retool this tale is beyond me.
There's just no Gravity in this film.
That's arguably the point, and it's presented as a best case example of raunchy sophomoric absurdity.
But there's too much exploitation for me.
It is fun getting to know smart women.
There's one female stockbroker who succeeds but her role's tacked-on, she's belittled in the end, and is initially dependent on the generosity of men.
However, like American Hustle, it's filled with tips on how to avoid being scammed.