Wilson

I often love it when I meet people like Wilson (Woody Harrelson).

Feisty and self-taught, they're often up to date with what was popular in the past and can describe many scenes from their favourite films in playfully obnoxious detail.

Extroverted by nature, Wilsons talk and talk and talk about whatever pops into their heads, they have no filter at all and no ability whatsoever to discursively blend with different demographics.

I'm quite introverted and I'm used to navigating fussier domains where you have to watch what you say while people encourage you to speak freely, so it's always refreshing when I encounter free-spirited autodidacts who are flush with alternative phrases and expressions, even if I can only hack it for short periods before returning to my regenerative lair.

They're like conspiratorial sages, blending the hackneyed and the probable with instinctual brazen whiplash, blindly imagining that their interlocutors don't mind being consistently insulted, as they apply their cynical observations to whatever detail those with whom they are conversing are friendly enough to share.

They don't seem to understand that they've caused offence nor that the knowledge they've acquired may on occasion lack truth value.

But they proceed with the unabashed confidence of Olympian gods as they try to create a better world, casually interjecting fact with fiction to elucidate grizzly ideals, practical premonitions, while dis/harmoniously doing whatever they feel like at all times.

Impoverished Joes with aristocratic psychologies.

Try listening a bit longer the next time you meet one.

I usually find it's worth it.

Craig Johnson's Wilson mischievously speaks his mind and loves to talk to strangers as he travels about in search of company.

It isn't the greatest film, in fact the only other person watching it with me in the theatre left halfway through, sort of like St. Vincent's rusty doppelgänger, a valiant effort lacking sustained momentum.

But it does improve about halfway through, shortly before Wilson winds up in prison, and from that point onwards unreels with captivating vulgarity.

When I consider the first half I keep thinking, "that should have been funnier, it's fun to think about what happened anyways, even if the actual dialogue wasn't that funny and lacked any condemned cohesivity."

Harrelson's performance is great but he couldn't turn the bland dribble into something you'd recommend to someone you don't like.

Even if it had been great the whole way through, it would still be glibly satisfying to know someone you don't like, someone who probably doesn't like Wilsons, will have to put up with Wilson for 90 odd minutes.

Could have been better.

Still, don't shut it down midway.

Stories We Tell

Beguilingly intermingling the dubious and the customary, synthesizing various direct and interpretive recollections while modestly integrating her own position's anti-overarching take, Sarah Polley subtly (and accidentally?) mythologizes an incident from her family's past, to quaintly and indirectly interrogate memory, narrative construction, the facts, and urban legends, in a familial paragenealogical account of the origins of decentralized identity.

It's so 21st century National Film Board of Canada.*

Her investigation leads a principal participant to whimsically actualize that whose literary character was encouraged by his deceased spouse decades previously, this actualization 'stomping' through a gentle creek of sorts from which the additional commentaries reflexively break off and return (the format reminding me of Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone).

(There are various loosely interoperational domains which possess their own consequent features whose rhetorical/technological/meteorological transmissions can coalesce to fabricate distinguished conceptions of value, which, when re/acting with the complementary/contradictory features of their fellow inter/national/regional/local/individual agents, and the constant imposition of random occurrences whose unforeseen interjections conduct concrete theoretical abstractions, before and after the fact, team-up to market sundry identities, who are nonetheless reliant upon historical events, and their consequent/subsequent interactions, themselves).

There's a sly intertextual reversal built into the film's flow as well.

Impressive.

*Kermode hasn't seen enough 21st century National Film Board of Canada films to be able to objectively make this claim, but couldn't resist due to the ways in which Stories We Tell reminded him of the many NFBC films he enjoyed watching during his youth. He also lives within the 21st century.

Intouchables

Improvised confident agile productivity meets frustrated restrained routine continuity in the heartwarming new odd couple film, Intouchables, the two dimensions elastically forging an incorporeal amicable trust.

Or friendship. Friendship is another way of describing that which they forge.

Philippe (François Cluzet) is a wealthy aristocratic quadriplegic who requires the aid of a live-in attendant. Driss (Omar Sy) comes from the projects and only applied for the position to demonstrate to social assistance that he's looking for work.

It quickly becomes apparent that Driss's honest, easy going, cheeky camaraderie is precisely that for which Philippe has been searching, having grown tired of fawning, hesitant, by-the-book cookie cutters.     

And the result is mutually cathartic.

The mix of different attitudes regarding artistic modes of expression is invaluable.

Oddly enough, it seems that there are still a lot of people who don't mix the classical with the popular.

Which is just simply weird.

Illustrating the rewards of embracing alternative therapeutic methodologies in order to rediscover innocuously rebellious invigorating affects, Intouchables acrobatically and celestially displays its inclusive joie de vivre without losing its practical edge.

Worth checking out.