Fences

Friendship, family, filaments and filibusters, Denzel Washington's Fences (based upon the play by August Wilson) encloses dreams and protests and confrontations within a patriarchal shard, not that there isn't a willingness to entertain, as long as his fam remembers who's regally legion.

Potatoes and lard.

He's sacrificed a lot to responsibly take care of things, but his personal experience blinds him to the realities facing his youngest son (Jovan Adepo as Cory), who has a shot at playing professional football, even if dad had to spend his career on the sidelines (baseball).

The answer lies within the stories he dramatically tells, stories which enthusiastically explain how the United States changed over the course of the last 40 years (the film's set in the 1950s), meaning that if America's current composition is resoundingly different from that within which he wildly grew up, the tough lessons he learned through his trials may no longer directly apply to his son's struggles, a son who may therefore have opportunities that were cruelly denied him.

He can't understand the new, he can't comprehend change.

He's hard on his wife Rose (Viola Davis) as well, delivering a devastating blow just as their lives start to become less burdensome.

No settling into old age.

No moving on to greener pastures.

It's not as sad as all that when you listen to him telling his tales, nevertheless, when you watch as he multidimensionally exhales fiction, reverie, and fact.

Denzel (Troy) delivers a brilliant performance full of love, contempt, joy, confusion, understanding, obstinacy, fear, and courage, if you ever wondered why he's been so successful for the last thirty years, Fences offers distinct evidence, as Washington proves that he's far beyond playing typecast roles, that he can indeed competently display intricate multilateral e/motions.

While playing a regular guy.

Viola Davis excels as well.

The film's reminiscent of adaptations of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee plays, an expansive, caring, sophisticated, realistically controversial examination of real people living hard lives, who aren't afraid to share extended thoughts and commentaries.

Lives being lived, power struggles crisp and bold.

Brief moments of tantalizing largesse.

Rustling through rhythms.

Struggles struck and starchy.

Electric portions.

Love & Mercy

Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy takes a touching look at gentle brilliance and the jealousy it unwittingly incites, the vindictive and the voracious perched to pounce, asserting themselves through dismissive abrasive cynicism.

Preying on the gifted.

The film romanticizes Brian Wilson's (John Cusack/Paul Dano) stealth, his steady patient creative orchestrations, the insights, the voices, the exacting yet understanding care playfully attached to his work, the fun humble spontaneous personality that nurtured love in those that could see his beauty, childlike wonder and awe maturely mastered to crystallize ecstatic movements, multifaceted maestro, coy imaginative visionary.

He faces three main challenges in his personal life, one that isn't too serious, another Beach Boy trying to (boringly) keep things simple, to move away from the experimental yet relatable path his force was cultivating (Brian writes everything so it's easy for him to ignore him although he becomes increasingly hostile), his father, who can't accept his exceptional success, who goes out of his way to brutally put him down, thinking he's regained control of the family by doing so, he can't let go, and a psychiatrist who traps him in a hellhole, controlling every aspect of his life, treating him like a spoiled two-year-old child, as opposed to a musical manifest.

There's a lot of pressure when it comes time for him to write.

A loving woman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), then enters his life and seeks to turn things around.

The legalities are daunting.

But she's full of angelic zeal.

It's a solid film, entertainingly profound, smoothly mixing the provocative and the popular, paying tribute to Wilson's legend in both form and content.

Examining his trials, his genius, his humanity, elevating the individual, critiquing the callous and the cumbersome.

He wrote everything.

He added layers upon layers of complementary sounds.

His genius still shines like seductive sweltering serenity.

And he was rewarded with contempt and isolation because of a mental illness.

That makes no sense.

None at all.

*I'm no genius, but I always did well in school when I applied myself and like what I come up with a lot of the time.

Although there's always room for improvement.

It's cheesy, but the trick to avoiding the destructive influences of jealousy is to love what you have, what you're doing, while still looking to change and grow, at different speeds, governed by circumstance, and be happy when you see that your friends like what they're doing too.

Works for me most of the time anyways.

Popsicles.

Jurassic World

The miraculous theme park envisioned by John Hammond has become a reality, and profits are steady, but their future is theoretically in jeopardy, or they at least may not continue to increase, hence, a new carnivorous force of immaculate magnetism is required, the product, the indominus rex, a creature so malevolent it makes the fearsome tyrannosaurus look like a fluffy pillow, bred to dominate, severely shackled.

But it's highly intelligent and soon tricks its creators into setting it free, proceeding to rampage thereafter, as hundreds of tourists unsuspectingly stride.

Enter one Owen (Chris Pratt), adventurous pulsar, intimately aware of danger, his knowledge essential, his strategies, ignored.

His relationship with the velociraptors he trains forges the film's ethos in relation to the ways in which it examines the phenomenon of control.

He maintains a respectful attitude, looking at their relationship symbiotically, he controls aspects of their dynamic but only because he respects the team, and treats it with corresponding assertive humility.

He's indirectly compared with Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), who also finds freedom in letting go, a constructive truth in my opinion, variations on a theme, but he made the mistake of authorizing the indominus's creation without applying either oversight or foresight, for which he pays an incendiary penalty.

Too much progress.

You see a number of the park's features throughout and wonder how its profits could ever be called into question.

It looks mind-blowingly amazing.

How driving a spherical vehicle through a field of dinosaurs could ever become boring doesn't make sense to me.

Even the petting zoo could never become boring.

But future profits are called into question and the aforementioned apex predator is the solution, treated with foolhardy disrespect, and then hunted as it threatens their very existence.

Bad decision.

Small aggressive dogs can be difficult to control.

But aside from the appealing critique of the poor decisions that can be made when obsessing about profits that are already stable, and team leaders who apply too much or too little oversight to their vitalities without taking into consideration the agencies of their networks, found in Jurassic World, it's generally a chaotic enough blockbuster, romance blooming amidst the carnage, reckless youth suddenly coming of age.

B.D. Wong (Dr. Henry Wu) makes a welcome reappearance in the franchise; I always wondered what happened to him in the original.

My favourite character was Lowery (Jake Johnson), who likes to think of his working space "as a living system, with just enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy." 

Nice line.

There are some other nice lines.

Too much oversight is provided by Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who wants to turn Owen's velociraptor team into a militaristic fighting force. 

His ideas are fast-tracked. 

Menacing progressions are critiqued, although their devastations develop character.

Those that survive anyway.