Grumpy Old Men

The interminable rivalry delicately strewn with intermittent trust, effectively laidback with chaotic eruptions effacing moments of inspired tranquility. 

They grew up together as envious children and both lived their lives in the same small town, never venturing forth across the land but rather obsessing about local change.

One grew up to teach history and had a steady job for many a year, the other fixing broken down televisions at a time when that was still quite profitable.

In retirement, they quarrel and fish and keep a close eye on the slumbering block, their children stopping by to visit at times with vivid success stories and marital dilemmas.

Compulsively nickling and diming they dynamically forge economic blockades, the intricate precise observant conversation correspondingly generated with grouchy gusto.

When a beautiful belle aging in years suddenly moves in across the street.

With new ideas and jaunty bold reckonings.

Seeking companionship. 

Vehement magnitude.

I wonder how Grumpy Old Men has viscerally aged for the last thirty years, is it still talked about in film-loving circles or has it faded with the passage of time?

It was incredibly popular in the early '90s when it first came out, since it showcased well-known cantankerous belovéd old school household names.

Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had brilliantly dazzled for many a year, especially in a well-regarded film my father loved known as The Odd Couple.

It's younger audience had aged since then and was in their twilight years when Grumpy Old Men came out, a brilliant bit of industrious casting also to be found in the Terminator films.

They deliver the curmudgeony goods and directly excel at provoking one another, with agile learnéd indelicate remonstrance wildly engaging in diligent bemusement. 

Are these films really just the subject of history choosing which films to watch is different these days?, with Netflix etc. eclipsing television the old school references may be somewhat archaic.

But information is available online for the curious film buff looking to learn more.

We didn't have Wikipedia thirty years ago.

Academically complemented with online encyclopedias. 

Diqiu zuihou de yewan (Long Day's Journey into Night)

Anxieties of the inconsequential reimagine derelict desires, as guilt and a lack of purpose approach disdained oblivion.

Time to recollect, take stock, rediscover, make amends, recapture to crisply qualify, invigorate verbose loose ends.

Down the line, burlap breadcrumbs, wayward whispers coaxed, reclassified, far more questions than awkward answers, far more mystery than concrete clues, a fountainhead dissembling rations, the tracks followed arresting news.

What things were like when it seemed invincible, when life thrilled with chaotic refrain, as if freedom were nimbly tangible, disseminating secreted exclaim.

Ironclad substantial remonstrance disrupting carefree joys, bittersweet and bumptious longing, thick glacial abeyance.

Luo Hongwu (Jue Huang) navigates vague memories to adjust and define a feeling he can't recall, as if there's something ecstatically slumbering within exhaled mnemonic mists.

But the path isn't viscid or binding, there's still room for alternative flair, perhaps since the shoreline's receding, he's finally found something there.

Labyrinthine waking dream.

Not as unconscious as Bergman or Lynch, but still more surreal than shocked or cerebral, Gan Bi's Diqiu zuihou de yewan (Long Day's Journey into Night) reminisces to invoke cheer, without revealing aims or objectives.

There's a narrative, a story, but it's broken up like a cryptic jigsaw, with striking flashbacks that emerge unbidden, which winds clarify with mortal gravity.

Like a series of vignettes prevailingly bizarre, you can agilely pick and choose your favourites, then comatosely piece them together, with variable enlightening savour.

It approaches the macabre but never loses sight of the real, or at least what I've come to associate with logic, keeping rooted yet ready to blast off, like scaled traditional tracks mutating.

Search for the lost kernel.

Diversify breadth lengthwise.

Keep your mind active and open.

Feel free to lose sight of your goal.

*Not if you're playing professional sports.

There are shades of Inception artistically interwoven within, to keep you dislodged and uncertain, without structured definitive gains.

Have to start somewhere though, it's verifiable, at some point you have to write those first words, phrases, sentences, with some sort of goal in mind perhaps, that's bound to conjure innumerable alternatives.

Endemically.

Good companion film for Inception or Lost Highway.

I stand by my use of the word "cheer".

Lucy in the Sky

The mind-blowing levitations of supersonic space travel leave go-getting astronaut Lucy (Natalie Portman) high and dry.

Overwhelmed by joyous reckoning astronomically substantiated, she can't readjust to terrestrial tremens and slips up where she once shone.

Asked to join a prestigious club well-attuned to astral planes, she spares time she's never had for spontaneous acts forbidden.

Coaxed on by hulking brawn, which opportunistically sways euphoric, she soon embraces chance, deception, caught up with gracious praise.

Ill-equipped to negotiate raw emotion, while making snap judgments which make things worse, psychosis dawns and fiercely beckons, she's never lost, can't let go, recede.

He is a huge tool (Jon Hamm as Mark Goodwin) who must haven known something like this would happen.

Eventually.

A lot of people live this way though.

If it's not your style, best leave it alone.

Especially if you're prone to obsession.

Lucy's prone in Lucy in the Sky and the results are grim yet fascinating, the whole world innovating unaware, a moment's slack mind-melded menace.

It's like the film's critiquing drug abuse in a way, but rather than deride narcotics, it looks at post-ecstatic stress, if that's a thing, I've never heard of it.

Adulterous sensations reinvigorate the high, but then lead to stark addiction, that's destructive, by and by.

If the other's unresponsive.

Natalie Portman's revitalizing her career by portraying elite achievement recklessly abandoned, her roles rich with intense emotion as they wildly yearn and contemplate.

There's a mystical element in Lucy in the Sky that could have been explored with more depth, as if travelling in space gives Lucy superhuman power, its unknown effects increasing the tension, but it's left behind with vengeful cause.

Perhaps watching as she slowly developed superpowers would have been cheesier than seeing loss drive her mad, although not necessarily so, depending on narrative finesse (even an idea that seems fated to be incredibly cheesy may not turn out so if crafted with thought and care).

Sad to see such an accomplished woman self-destruct so, nevertheless.

A warning to stick to the path you've chosen.

And beware of sedate sensation.

*Of course, who knows, who knows what path to follow, perhaps best not to even consider it, honestly. I find that when change gradually occurs it's less disruptive in terms of serious things like relationships, unlike choosing a restaurant, or a film to go see.

**Bananas.

***Grapes.

L'Avventura

An artistic heritage so vast and imposing its contemporary admirers can't help but compose themselves with awe.

Quotidian cheek materialistically tethered exchanging observations with speculative mobilization possessing unimaginative magnetism (wry jealousy).

Small towns with no work wherein which the male inhabitants collectively contemplate aesthetics casually passing by.

Playful luxury illusively inconvenienced slumbers with impoverished free speech which differentiates not between beauty and brutality, a life spent with no feminine contact (it's odd when people seek answers and the answers are brutal and you try not to respond but they demand that answer, and if you respond they despise you even more than they would have if you had said nothing, and then treat you brutally).

A culture laments the disappearance of a siren whose mischievous independent preference for theoretical possibility created a sensation which his desire dismissively ignored.

Patriarchically philandering, L'Avventura presents a bored successful man to whom the most sought after precious women helplessly swoon, his innocent unattached habitual eloquence effortlessly ensnaring them within psychological shackles composed of forgiveness, sympathy, contempt, and guilt.

Apart from his betrothed who can't be found.

Culturally inclined, bucolic and urban socioeconomics multifacetedly engender amorous situations which fleetingly comment on relationships and/or conjugal commitment inasmuch as they carnivalesquely sexualize poverty and privilege.

The subject of so many wild comedies intellectually transformed into a literary matriculately meandering exposé, undesirable men imagining they're exceptionally endowed with unqualifiable gravitational irreducibility, which the opposite sex is irresistibly drawn towards, ethically as irresponsible as sadism, politically, masochistically responsive.

L'Avventura gets away with it, cloaking its victorious Lothario in voluminous vulnerable versatility, surrounding his endeavours with enough différence to democratically deconstruct any paradigmatic impulse, wildly commenting with realistic fascination, embroiling and staking with convectional subterfuge, brilliant inspired indulgence or bold calculated virtuosity?, metanarrative expression expressly exalting, cinematic sophistication, love, adventure.

Blade Runner 2049

Discontinuous highjacked expedited inevitable irrelevancy.

Circuitous momentous obedience bountifully propelling twisted archaic innate atypical hemorrhage.

Existential awakening argumentative dawn autosuggestive auspices communal cast iron cravings, clues, ambulatory optics, somnambulistic certainty, neigh, whisker.

Fragmentary vestiges ominously scattered cryptic pathfinder serpentinely excavating miracles, whippoorwills, potash.

Direly coaxed into a subconscious vortex transformative sensual belonging propagated harvested posterity.

Suckling within the protospatial womb.

A set plan, goals, preconditioned life programmed to pounce and prognosticate, virtual violations inorganic technotruths, aesthetic vibrations old school orchestrations architecturally hallowed within alternative sanctuary, every scene reigniting the ambivalent distraught investigative visceral momentum, symphonically sequestering emotional anomalies to imagine identity harmoniously hewn, institutionalized on the outskirts primordial emergent feeling, a home, a relationship, a father figure, integration, tacit knowledge extant and mobile, coveted like uncertifiable exception, music, production design, editing, cinematography, as vocal as dialogue, plot, or character.

The most beautiful dress I've ever seen.

Every sequence painstakingly sculpted to intangibly perspire life while inquisitively examining manufactured ontological biology by humanistically juxtaposing desperate and plutocratic being.

Without sharp contrast.

With minimal direct contact.

Non-existent environmental biodiversity morosely levels artistic conflict like a galaxy with no solar system or a workplace without feminine voice.

As fragile as cloistered brilliance she cultivates eternities crafting memories as wondrous as the Saguenay for the fortunate to joyfully consider.

Respectful of its origins while dynamically creating divergent vision, Blade Runner 2049 is on par with Mad Max: Fury Road in terms of revelation, in this case that of Denis Villeneuve's genius, which successfully synthesizes so many gifted subjects.

Harrison Ford's (Deckard) so real.

Ryan Gosling ('K') too.

My Cousin Rachel

A loyal adopted son, filled with impotent rage, blindly seeks closure concerning his father's sudden death as it relates to a mysterious relationship beguiled in the Italian countryside, forged with an enigmatic English belle, who had the strength to seduce proud misogyny.

He sets out seeking justice, never having had much interest in women either, but soon finds himself enraptured with the sought after murderess, his presumption quickly fading as her charms mellifluously sway, his fortune soon levitating at her disposal, all-encompassing infatuation contending with more worldly criticisms, is she friend or foe?, matron, or dominatrix?

Beyond classification.

Contraceptive indigo.

My Cousin Rachel commences soundly.

Its sophisticated introduction to character, historical period, familial severance, and exotic cataclysm, gingerly yet coercively narrated with bitter incisive pause, led me to think I had stumbled upon something otherworldly, something radiant, something timeless.

It's not that the rest of the film isn't worth watching, it is, but My Cousin Rachel's first 25 minutes or so lour you in with a compelling cinematic elegance that rarely showcases its distinct eloquent reticence.

There are no answers, no solutions, no conclusions, it's strict theory, strict conjecture, a mystery lacking a brilliant sleuth, wherein which contingencies construct discombobulating distractions that harrowingly question what has indeed come to pass, a man who knows nothing about women obsessed with a woman who knows everything about men, who's intent on achieving independence from stiflingly patriarchal codes of conduct, without ever asking for anything, or seeming as if she desires six pence.

Was Rachel (Rachel Weisz) the hapless generous victim of sexist preconceptions themselves incapable of trusting anything a woman says after having fallen in love, thereby sacrificing their former unconscious unilateral independence, their control, as a consequence, and winding up mad, or was she indubitably trying to poison both father and son in order to access their vast unencumbered fortune?

Can free unattached wealthy male loners ever listen to anything overtly uttered by their curious brilliant feminine correspondants without suspecting conspiracy and treachery, the magnitude of the duplicitous betrayal slowly intensifying as the bond between them grows tighter and tighter?

How would a brilliant woman without a fortune who seeks control over her own affairs ever achieve financial and personal independence without comment in a society dominated by men?

Would both characters have lived pleasant lives if homosexuality hadn't been culturally abhorred?

Sometimes narration works, sometimes it doesn't.

The narration was working in My Cousin Rachel, and I wished it had played a more prominent role throughout the majority of the film.

The Beguiled

Lost and desperate, unable to move, in need of shelter, nourishment, warmth, comfort, convalescence, clinging and clutching, forlornly crutching, a young isolated soldier lies dying in the woods having survived to expire woebegone, patiently waiting to succumb to his injuries, consciousness slowly fading, as the days coldly pass by.

A haven, a sanctuary, a cloister, a dream, a school nestled in the forest delicately composed, full of sympathy and understanding, it miraculously takes him in, cares for him, coddles him, feeds him, talks to him, falls in love with him, the absence of men blended with Corporal McBurney's (Colin Farrell) charm and good looks leaves it tantalizingly taken and amorously affected, yet he can only respectfully choose one belle without slighting the others wholesale.

Like Paris of old yet disregarded by the gods, he grievously misjudges the situation and attempts to claim everyone for his own.

Perhaps he's not thinking clearly, due to his wounds, but he honestly believes his counsel can guarantee active lust, and proceeds to recklessly gorge with impulsive selfish gluttony.

Hold on, just let me explain . . .

Look, we're just . . .

Let's think about this logically . . .

I swear, it's not my fault!

Screwin' up big time, even if he would have screwed up less if he hadn't been so adamantly sought after, the palatial invokes the pernicious, a wanton craven eruption, infernally and retributively so.

It's a great film, painstakingly and provocatively crafted by Sofia Coppola, her clever well-written multileveled script and poetic title, composed with several compelling characters from different ages and regional backgrounds, presents a sound intricate knowledge of her controversial subject matter, and what otherwise could have been a raunchy sensational grotesque flash comes across as a cerebral elegantly fierce tale.

The feeling, the tranquil restful sensitive bucolic emotion stylizes an environmental awareness that's as curious as it is unconcerned.

Cinematography by Philippe le Sourd.

Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha) keeps getting better.

Pressing matters for the unrestrained, an optical host confined to disillusion.

Desire undoubtably blessed incarnate.

Rent in wonder dis/possessed of forthright loss.

I would have ended it right after he hit the floor.

A controversial metaphorical take on the American Civil War.

Félvilág (Demimonde)

Fair weather thickets, robust tumbledown, opulent rickety flush strings resound.

Erotic.

Instrumental.

Respect and fascination, a subject of the film, one diligently striving to detect an aesthetic hidden within musical provenance, thought allied with action distilling muses to kindle pluck, historical serenity, vixens and vertices, the other manifesting sensation in a shroud, aware of its immaculate presence, seizing and securing the moment's acceleration, ostentatious in its longevity, commanding, assured.

Time slowly transfiguring each one.

Elza Mágnás (Patricia Kovács).

Achievement and success, unconcerned with scandal or perplexity, like Odette de Crécy, she mesmerizes in swoon.

Kató (Laura Döbrösi) escapes life on the streets and is caught between the ethical and the spectacle, rigorously learning what she can to survive.

Quickly.

Visceral film, Félvilág (Demimonde), examining morality through an economic lens, poverty and poignancy luxuriously dissected, picturesque propriety, enabling restrictive plights.

A romantic poet, jealous servant, and coddling magnate complete the script, their attention devoted to Elza, who consequently revels in her agency.

Carefree leisure and desperate servitude liaise within, desire harmonizing their ambitions, dedication sterilizing their chagrin.

Far from the Madding Crowd

There seems to be at least 2 ways to view Thomas Vinterberg's Far from the Madding Crowd, one favourable and another dismissive, without focusing on the strong performances.

I often say this, but it applies here as well, when you cover dense literary material in a short span of time and try to maximize the amount of your narrative coverage, you often lose much of the poetic subtlety that maintains the vision's life force, by causing complex emotions to seem trite due to their overabundance, which adds a subliminal comic dimension to your structure.

Joe Wright's Anna Karenina worked well in this frame.

Strong performances can fight against this tendency, and they do in this case, but as the frequency of the condensed points of fascination increase, there's little they can do to avoid being swamped by the deluge.

Two scenes in particular struck me, when Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge) discusses his preference for Fanny Robbin (Juno Temple) with Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a definitive moment, where the depth of emotion simply isn't there, and when an exasperated William Boldwood (Michael Sheen) pulls out his rifle in the end, once again a pivotal pinpoint, which falls flat in terms of critical perplexion.

But, if the film is viewed as a sombre love story in/directly examining Everdene and Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) specifically, then it makes sense that both the scenes I've mentioned above would fall flat, in order for the film's subconscious to structurally validate all the interactions Bathsheba has with Oak.

By making the scenes with Oak stand out, and making those featuring the other men who desire her insignificant, Bathsheba and Gabriel's love rings true, an appealing romantic cultivation.

This is a risky move because it necessitates lacklustre moments, but if your aesthetic preferences are in tune with such stratagems, Far from the Madding Crowd works on a high level.

Liked the black bear and how it highlights Everdene's suffocated independence, both spirits prospering as they assert themselves, suffering when forced to perform parlour tricks.

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.

O Lobo atrás da Porta (A Wolf at the Door)

Desire's stability taunts the victim of a brutish man's lust in Fernando Coimbra's O Lobo atrás da Porta (A Wolf at the Door), consuming her unworldly trusting desperation, a locked-latched-and-lesioned barricade, jaded withdrawn innocence, enraged, and vindictive.

Love for the transgressed.

Unforgivable abuse.

Atrocity begetting atrocity.

Wherein recoils the unleashed.

Oddly light, considering its subject matter, O Lobo atrás da Porta emphasizes contemplation as opposed to emotion while exfoliating an affair, a detective's blind recourse, to the facts, judiciously partaken.

The film's madness is kept hidden beneath a cloak of reason, its insulating logistics, perhaps too cerebral for its conditioning.

The score highlights this tension, erupting in intermittent bursts, reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's from The Thing (1982), striking yet transitory, harrowingly subdued.

Seduction.

Seclusion.

Possession.

Crime.

Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm)

The importance of observing traditional checks and balances can be psychotically nurtured if oppressive horrific novelties ironically pasteurize love's volatile abandon.

To tenderly sympathize with incarnate cruelty is to harvest oneself a baleful dereliction.

A surprise can self-awarely compromise a narrative's prim and proper puerility if its imaginary facts have not been uniformly concentrated.

Awkward evasive perplexities.

Undisciplined counterstrikes, will be willfully punished even if their unexpected serenities instigate lasting calm.

Assuredly.

The madness associated with a cultural code's disavowed diversions creates sickeningly compelling bonds of trust in Xavier Dolan's brilliantly disturbing Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm), awestruck incredulous bereft terror, to submit, penalize, collapse, love's dedicated time honoured insurgencies, incomparably construct an orderly trespass.

There's no need to introduce his face firsthand, just driven concrete crazed malevolency.

Violently obscuring.

Before the resurrection of sound.

Editing by Xavier Dolan.

Violette

The drive for publication, honest controversial fearless prose, risks taken, contacts established, unerring syntactic strides, desires unfulfilled, sacrifices, tormenting, longitudinal allusive reins, interactive bucolic strains, prohibited friendships lamented, unsettled confrontational muse, pluralizing her stricken sentence, substantive, and disobeyed.

Didn't think Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) would like Proust.

Perhaps she did momentarily.

Making the short-film in the middle broke up the traditional chronological categorizing well, hilariously lightening while intensifying the sombre desperate elegance.

Tough life decisions.

Rewarded.

The countryside provides a nourishing wellspring of seductive solitude whose tranquil rhythms encourage profuse flourishes.

Difficulties associated with maintaining prolonged professional literary acquaintances are amorously and quasi-hierarchically socialized.

She just does what comes naturally, boldly sharing her relevant thoughts which create intellectually diverse yet accessible cultural markets for millions who were otherwise forced to unconsciously contemplate the patriarchal.

Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos).

Groundbreaker.

Innovator.

Writer.

We're the Millers

A cornucopia of unrefined protracted sleaze, non-traditional role models doing their best to advise, their chosen economic insignias problematizing their bourgeois endorsements, choosing questionable yet confident manners of expression, juxtaposed with professional counterparts whose assiduity assumes authority yet lacks respectability, the perseverance of youth humanely automatizing errors in judgment, so many errors in judgment, serendipitously sanctioned, incontinently divine.

The film struggles as its characters acclimatize themselves to each other.

All you really have to do is write about what happens and you're good.

Although you're really not supposed to do that.

There are so many good ideas worked into We're the Millers's script that thinking about what happens afterwards trumps actually watching the film, many of the jokes falling flat, not that there aren't hilarious moments.

For me, it's most significant flaw is a product of the enormous and commendable risks that went into its construction, an attempt to simultaneously deconstruct and build-up cherished yet occasionally hypocritical codes of conduct, the juxtaposition requiring a contraceptive consensus to export its value that never intangibly materializes.

Lacking stability, character development is sacrificed for references and in/direct pop cultural criticisms, leaving it blindly searching for a good episode of Family Guy, rather than focusing on Trailer Park Boys, season 2.

1er amour

Whoa.

Hold on a second.

What the hell just happened?

Trauma, maximized.

Traditional everything, capsized.

An idyllic summer of youthful exploration, satirized.

Desire and the literary imagination, terrorized.

Or distilled, depending on whether or not young Antoine (Loïc Esteves) and Anna (Marianne Fortier) can poetically compute.

The setting is idyllic. Traditional notions of marriage are elevated. The pivotal moment synthesizes far too many constitutional traumatic clefts for Guillaume Sylvestre's 1er amour not to be considered satirical.

While trying to write a breakthrough novel.

Classical music, cicading un/aware.

The shots of the insects etc. innocently foreshadow.

Is M. Sylvestre trying to classically pinpoint a salacious oxymoronic yet foundational postmodern quintessence or simply diagnosing a psychiatrist's dream?

The final image of the boat speeding away, the family unit confined yet in constant motion, offers little guidance.

But that look on his face.

The risk factor, Lothario, focus on the risk factor.

I might have released this in November.

Solid satire.

The Kings of Summer

United off-kilter offspring.

Clinical bourgeois dexterity.

Juvenile introspective applicatory superciliousness.

Plunging right in.

Two friends and an accompanying oddball run away to the woods for the summer, and, since no one thinks to check for them there, their wilderness survival antics wantonly dipsy-doodle.

Perhaps not wantonly.

The Kings of Summer could have been more wanton.

Wanton at times however, as the daydreamy trouble making instigator must realize that he lacks the instincts of the hunter possessed by his lifelong associate who can't figure out what his problem is after the introduction of a feminine element.

Biaggio (Moises Arias) etherealizes a somewhat useless hands-on constructivism with a pertinent decorative unassuming acumen, best captured by the interpretive dance he releases to the beat of his rhythmic companions's drumming.

They interact as would young idealistic ill-prepared yet stubborn teens who find themselves inhabiting a nimble hardy brash funny neurotic filmic reverie.

The other main feature is Joe's (Nick Robinson) sarcastic jaded controlling super strict live-in family member whose prick of a temperament endears him to none.

Although he does steal a couple of scenes with his complete lack of sensitivity.

Suppose the scenes were meant for him.

He doesn't steal them.

These kids aren't that concerned with electronic devices.

They are able to competently manage a budget for awhile anyways however.

When Joe actually does hunt The Kings of Summer reaches a higher level.

Fun film.

Mud

Innocent pluck tenderly, loyally, and brazenly clashes with his ideals as their real world applications resoundingly prove despairing.

Not that they aren't still omnipresent, as vital to those whose desires and incomes problematize their sustainability as to those whose iron will does not, uncompromised dedication liaising with starvation and prevarication to slowly devastate an unyielding devotion, destructive acts of retributive jealousy increasing in proportion with their subject's maniacal progressions, with no recourse to substantial alternative educational or economic detachments, to productively cover things up.

Mud's (Matthew McConaughey) love for Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) defines his sense of purpose as a career or a pastime might define another, and only after seeing his self naively rematerialized in the form of a 14-year-old risking everything to help him, does difference dawn.

Jeff Nichol's Mud ruggedly evaporates an accidental transient symbiotic bilateral pact, having uplifted both partners in its unwritten momentary apotheosis.

Seen through a child's eyes, many of the film's sequences are oversimplified.

Strength of character compensates.

Mandatory for lovers of romantic impoverished hard-hitting innovative coming of age bucolics.

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.

L'homme qui rit

A child is grossly deformed and abandoned.

Chance intervenes, providing shelter, friendship and nourishment.

The passage of congenial times nurtures love and success, swathed within an impoverished yet self-sufficient itinerant tenacity, innocent yet cunning, diligent and stable.

Until historical alignments introduce an aristocratic heritage whose peers and privileges threaten his sense of balance.

But these very same entitlements present means, pretentious and vitriolic though they may be, through which that sense's desire for social justice can institute positive change, in pre-revolutionary France.

L'homme qui rit is more of a kid's film, filled with obvious larger-than-life stereotypical depictions situated within a maudlin yet tear-jerking realistic fairy tale, but it does function as a contemporary allegory for democratic citizens who lack wealth but still wish to use their (available) political channels to influence current affairs, such as the environmental footprint of big business.

It's difficult.

It's daunting.

And seemingly impossible.

Unless you take into consideration the work of organizations like Avaaz and/or what's currently taking place in highly industrialized nations like Germany, whose decision to replace all of its nuclear reactors with environmentally sustainable technologies should be applauded.

It can be done.

It's being done.

Canada can do similar things.

If it's intent on moving forward.

Oz: the Great and Powerful

The Wizard of Oz meets Xena: Warrior Princess?

That's an A+ in my books.

The old school Wizard of Oz film with which I'm familiar was a lighthearted tale, adored by generations of fantasy loving children, devoted and unassuming, blindly caught up in its melodramatic charm, dreaming sweet dreams filled with hope and sincerity later that night, never failing, to wake up anew.

There's no doubt that there's some of this in Sam Raimi's envisioning of the land of Oz, wherein we find the Wizard learning to become the factor everyone believes him to be at first sight, but while we don't discover that there's something not quite right about him until Toto's astute perception in the Judy Garland film, it's obvious from the get-go that in Oz: the Great and Powerful Oz (James Franco) is a sleazy unscrupulous cad, successfully (and spontaneously) brandishing his smoke and mirrors, yet hopelessly lacking what one might refer to as conscientious considerations, apart from their individualized financial formalities.

The title itself offers further insight into these competing fantastic motivations.

Oz: the Great and Powerful sounds like the sort of ridiculous phrase you'd expect someone cravenly searching for riches, even if the search only takes place within their own head, to use to describe themselves, while also seeming like an exaggerated mesmerizing monicker carefully chosen to inspire charismatic imaginations, when its historical spectacle is taken into consideration.

I didn't know Sam Raimi had directed before entering the theatre, and his presence added a latent sense of potentially ingratiating cheesy carnivalesque conviviality to these contemplations, wherein bold mischievous alternative emoticons masquerade on a traditional family friendly frequency, seeking to covertly manifest their raunch(iness).

The opening credits themselves kaleidoscopically illuminate this multiplicity, ebulliently engineering a phantasmagorical dissimulation, for whatever audience, startlingly straightforward, arguably the film's best feature.

But after the Wizard lands in Oz and meets Theodora (Mila Kunis) the film is far too startlingly straightforward for the next hour at least. The lines are terrible. Kunis struggles to deliver them. But they're so bad that you start to think that this could be one of those great films which subtly satirizes its generic counterparts while trying to remain appealing to the young at heart in order to conjure a laconic lackadaisical laxative before suddenly introducing moments of kitschy consubstantiations which attempt to transform the preceding mockery into a campy enduring endearing romp, just as the Wizard casts off his mortal shell and takes on his ethereal form, while coming to believe that yes, he can.

When the brutal lines are isolated, with no community within which to blossom and grow, they're tough to take, but when the time comes for Glinda (Michelle Williams) and the Wizard to unite their citizens to fight Evanora's (Rachel Weisz) minions group dynamics socially network their way into a publicly pertinent pyrotechnic plurality, as the Wizard uses his artifice in a startlingly straightforward phantasmagorical dissimulation, lighthearted, melodramatic, and ridiculous yet conscientious and ingratiating, fighting the good fight against overwhelming odds, to save both his community's, and his own, imagination.

And the film too.

I'd like to read a study which places both films within their social historical contexts in order to elucidate which possesses a more substantial degree of traditional alternative reflexivity, thirty years from now.

Classic Sam Raimi.