O necem jiném (Something Different)

A housewife struggles with a dull routine fully equipped with ceaseless labour, her husband lacking natural empathy as he plays a traditional role.

Her son's a handful and makes things worse as he tries to assist throughout the day, his habitual playful headstrong mischief encouraging disillusion.

Another woman constantly trains to remain the world's preeminent gymnast, her resilient daring in/flexibility haughtily admired by her earnest trainer.

Her life is sheltered and strictly focused driven by determined excellence, lacking holistic variety yet irrefutably established. 

Director Vera Chytilová juxtaposes their lives to examine distraught vigour, each path overflowing with poise but only one rich in reward.

The husband's a piece of work who stubbornly applies unimaginative blueprints, which structure everything to his advantage as he consistently ignores her.

He's having an affair but so is she, she breaks free from the callous bondage.

Her lover rather frustrated.

As she thoroughly disregards him.

Different extremes converge and complement as feminine strength consults, contends, no rest and relaxation, no sympathetic trends.

It seems to me that if you're lucky enough to have someone who supplies you with meals and a tidy pad, you should at least listen and pay attention to them at the end of the working day.

They rigorously do the work for you out of love and devout commitment, is it that hard to engage in conversation or acknowledge the heartfelt effort?

Isn't it important to get to know someone you're spending that much time with, to develop multiple open-ended narratives that creatively transform throughout your life?

They probably love you too which makes conversation so much easier, something that doesn't require earnest effort or careful planning or years of study.

Love isn't something to be dismissed or ignored or taken for granted, shouldn't it be evocatively cultivated through wondrous warmth and passion?

It isn't in O necem jiném (Something Different) and the results are generally bland (not the film itself), a life devoid of pith or colour controversial blasé strands.

Make life a beach just by caring and perhaps something epic will emerge.

Throw on the gear for a feisty dip.

BBQ.

Frolic.

The Hours

Three timelines incorporeally corresponding through the art of independent abstraction, drawing clever coherent parallels, as applied to married life.

Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) struggles to find peace as she compellingly writes away, always desiring what she doesn't have even when possessing an idyllic life.

Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) looks after her husband (John C. Reilly as Dan Brown) who's just returned from World War II, but she's ill-suited to the lofty role traditionally assigned her gender.

Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) cares for a contemporary poet (Ed Harris as Richard Brown) who expresses gratitude with verbose criticism, their lives provocatively intertwined inasmuch as they seek individual expression.

Family provides creature comforts but they can't find solace in routine.

One husband admires his wife's gifts and provides everything to establish calm comforts, and desperately critiques itinerancy in declarations of hopeless l'amour.

Another remains unassuming in his picture perfect suburban life, blissfully unaware of her struggles to find something more compelling.

The third can't believe someone would love him and does everything he can to push her away.

Even after the awestruck age where desire imaginatively fades then vanishes.

A different world wherein which mobility is something less economically prohibitive, may have surmised novel alternatives to distract people from bland consistency.

If that's what they sought to escape, through inspiring enlivening motion.

I rather like public transit myself, and libraries and bookstores host so many wonders.

A strong network interconnecting dozens of cities and neighbourhoods provides all kinds of cultural know how, to be curiously explored at times without pattern or brochure or transcript.

But I don't know many people like me.

And there's often no relevant answer.

Sometimes honesty isn't an option if there's no outlet for resounding difference, and some people don't pick up on the signs if everything's going well for them.

Marriage is a wonderful institution that creates joys for sundry families, but it by no means works for everyone, and is perhaps too highly elevated at times.

Constant motion, always travelling, could perhaps provide a working remedy, you've just gotta find that job that facilitates working life.

The Hours presents strong heroines oppressed by guidelines demanding role play, who approach immersion from varying perspectives to express wholesome particularity.

Sometimes questions are more important than answers beyond practical working life.

Language learning can be invaluable.

If you're looking for instructive distraction.

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.

Wild

One foot forward, a crushing weight backpacked, stricken through the desert, identity intact.

To the summit.

Waves of energizing and/or haunting memories intermittently bombarding and/or enlivening, accomplishments, missteps, experimental independence mixed with overwhelming grief dealt with through taking on a herculean quest for conscious convalescence, reestablished resilience, contemporary being flushing out the destructive life choices made after the death of a loved one, and their corresponding affects on friends and family, a path with a goal and a purpose, the Pacific Crest Trail, blistering heat and instructive elevations, gear, wildlife, companionship, the impossible slowly dispersing picturesque probabilities, a new sense of self, persevering in the hearth throes.

Emerging.

Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild sets out into the wilderness to build a future by confronting the past, through presence, chillingly capturing subconscious correlations, raw elemental exacting births.

She's tough.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) improvises her way with sheer grit and determination, poetically driving her will, its valleys and peaks, a subtly directed incarnation.

Editing by Martin Pensa and Jean-Marc Vallée as John Mac McMurphy.

Live in the world while focusing on the beautiful.

Posture outfox and sidewind.

Overcome.

Thérèse Desqueyroux

And it is foretold that marriage will squander the limitless theorizations of an inquisitive maiden (Audrey Tautou as Thérèse Desqueyroux) as she attempts to redefine herself according to her husband's (Gilles Lellouche as Bernard Desqueyroux [France's Liam Neeson?]) rigid prejudice.

His prejudice and the specific roles to which it narrow-mindedly assigns meaning to every in/tangible subject/object it wields, has not incorporated the art of bilateral communication into its privileged perspective, forcing his wife to seek alternative methods of resoundingly breaking through.

The other side can be distinguished as vital but tradition and continuity prevent him from unclenching his patriarchal grip.

Oblivious and unreceptive to the simplest of his wife's unexpected ambitions, he remains ensconced in his paradigm dans les bras de Morphée.

Interring the process of subjective decay, transferring random natural acts to a domestic realm's uncharted vicissitudes, sinisterly challenging immutable contraceptions, and suggesting that related solutions exacerbate that to which their remedy is applied, in terms of the preservation of identity, Claude Miller's Thérèse Desqueyroux nocturnally invokes fluid conjugal taxonomies as a potential interpersonal strategy applicable to estranged partnerships.

Or simply states that some people shouldn't get married.

No they should not.

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.

Brave

Traditional gender roles are set ablaze in Disney Pixar's Brave, the magical tale of young Princess Merida's (Kelly MacDonald) coming of age.

Disillusioned by her culture's tradition of demanding that a mate be selected from a tiny prestigious feudal stock, and the rather strict regimen of feminine codes of conduct to which she must adhere, while the men train for battle, the feisty Princess shelves her mother's (Emma Thompson as Queen Elinor) strategic plans and rides off into a forested nexus.

Wherein resides her destiny.

And a witch who provides her with a treacherous tasty treat which turns her mother into a bear upon her return home. 

August insurmountable accumulative wisdom having been startlingly transformed into the wild unknown, little Merida must find a way to relax the resulting tensions and restore order throughout the land. 

As a product of adrenaline.  

The film's piecemeal approach to socio-cultural structural modifications presents a practical framework within which transfigurations can be cunningly concocted, considering the myriad factors which need to be balanced when tempering historic-ideological architectures.

Wasn't impressed by its top-down approach however.

The bears are pretty cool though. 

Not the ferocious bear.

Suppose the other bears aren't really bears either.

There are moments of playful grumpy bearness nevertheless.  

Bears.   

Carnage

Propriety is caustically deconstructed in Roman Polanski's Carnage as two couples meet to discuss a recent altercation between their contentious offspring.

And inadvertently try to get to know one another.

The situation is this: one kid was confronted by a group of kids mouthing him off so he picked up a stick and hit the leader of the group in the mouth, damaging his teeth. The parents of the former make an effort to apologize to the parents of the later by stopping by their apartment in a show of good faith. They discuss things amicably and the parents of the former are about to leave but one thing leads to another and their conversation is extended.

As the mother of the later (Jodie Foster as Penelope Longstreet) becomes more and more intrusive in her comments and suggestions, the father of the former (Christoph Waltz as Alan Cowan) becomes increasingly defensive and irate. The resulting polemic pits two couples from different socio-demographic backgrounds against one another and the children are soon forgotten as the animosity intensifies.

But each couple has their own internal struggles as well and the genders eventually square off while enjoying another round of afternoon scotch.

Known for its transformative curations.

Carnage works as a deconstructive piece which champions open honest airings of grievances over uptight formal indisputable appearances. Tearing away at the veneers which constitute a wide variety of social interactions, it finds catharsis through confrontation while productively disrupting and recasting established codes of conduct.

As everyone remembers their youth.

This could have been an exceptional film but there's something missing from its bitter tranquil blend. While I respected its formula, I couldn't find that cohesive regenerative spark which would make me want to wholeheartedly engage in subsequent viewings.

Some sort of kinetic catalyst.

Everything's reputably in place to make Carnage stand out and I think that may be the problem. This script may have found more life with a less successful cast and crew looking to make a resounding impact.

As they fight for recognition.