Zemletryasenie (The Earthquake)

I like how Sarik Andreasyan's Zemletryasenie (The Earthquake) focuses primarily on rebuilding a town after a massive natural disaster strikes, thereby championing the ways in which local, regional, national, and global citizens gather to respond to crises, the lasting bonds forged thereafter strengthening the endurance of their latent communal resolve, like winter in Canada and Québec, or the logistics of the World Cup of Soccer.

You can also create a bunch of characters and situate them within troubled relationships wherein which stubbornness and idiocy prevent them from appreciating their resounding good fortune, and then have an earthquake destroy their lives, the end, in order to suggest that your audience take some time to reconsider its own stable state of affairs, and perhaps encourage them to engage in random creative acts of kindness in the upcoming months, to prove that people don't require exceptional shocks to demonstrate their love.

That point may be missed, however, and Zemletryasenie actually does demonstrate how Armenia grieves, bleeds, retrieves, constructs post-quake, albeit in an ultra-patriarchal blockbustery fashion, complete with crime, heartbreaking sensation, flourishing hope, and cosmic justice.

It's a shame sophisticated delicate intricate less emotional dramatic tragedies don't make the same impact.

It's like you ignore the simplistic yet worthwhile message from the blockbuster because it's too cheesy, and refuse to accept the complicated ethics of the artistic because they're too serious.

You don't need earthquakes you know, or hurricanes, tornadoes, or ice storms, to show family and friends every once in a while that you're not quite so self-obsessed, it can be done either spontaneously or within a designated time slot every Saturday evening, depending on the dynamics of your sociocultural surroundings, and/or your willingness to express genuine care.

I suppose if someone who's known to be self-obsessed suddenly does have a Scroogesque awakening one day their resulting conduct would generally be regarded tectonically, artistic revelations inspiring thereafter like agile movement on a seismograph, as the tyrant's goodwill resoundingly evokes cheer.

Although when such acts occur interlocutors might reasonably respond suspiciously, thereby frustrating the curmudgeon in mid-reformation.

Wage hikes perhaps placate these tendencies.

Ice cream also.

And dinner at the Keg or Végo.

Money donated to help endangered species.

Grand Marnier.

A blender.

It's kind of fun to hangout with others sometimes and listen to what they have to say.

So many different takes on things.

So much emphatic life.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The quest to reclaim the treasure stolen then hoarded by the accursed dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) continues, one hobbit and thirteen dwarves audaciously adventuring away.

Bilbo's (Martin Freeman) steady unerring quick-witted agility saves them from many interminable ends.

Humanistic politics and economics enter the fray as they meddle in Lake-Town (Esgaroth), the pragmatic and the opportunistic squaring off in a heated debate concerning the potential fallout from pent-up dragon wrath.

Parochial wood-elve rulers are critiqued for occupying their thoughts too exclusively with the safety of their own domain, even though the forces of evil threaten neighbouring lands as well.

One of his subjects, the stunning Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), with long flowing red hair, breaks with tradition, and seeks the affections of Jacob rather than Edward, thereby securing a sacred trust, in pristine, alluvial pastures.

A new instalment in The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings narrative could focus primarily on her relationship with Kili (Aidan Turner), as the two are shunned by their respective cultures, eventually finding refuge with the skin-changing Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt).

(He changes into a bear).

Bilbo, in possession of the ring of power, could stop by to spy on them from time to time.

The Desolation of Smaug is a fast-paced thoughtful energetic sequel.

Loved how Thorin (Richard Armitage) dematerialized the imposing gold statue in his attempt to defeat Smaug, thereby symbolizing his own surmounting of the Scrooge-like pretensions akin to the acquisition of limitless wealth.

Kind of cheesy in the final moments.

Nice cliffhangers nevertheless.

Furry Vengeance

Roger Kumble's Furry Vengeance is actually a lot more than an annoying comedy with poor bear representation and far to many repetitive scenes. It's also an attempt to indoctrinate children with an eco-friendly racist attitude regarding globalization (I suppose this is about as progressive as Republicans get). As the film unreels, real-estate developer Brendan Fraser (Dan Sanders) plans to turn a forest into a subdivision and cash-in both professionally and economically. But the forest's residents are aware of his ambitions and set out to annihilate them. As time passes, Fraser realizes that the animals are simply trying to protect their families in the same way that he is trying to protect his, and he consequently takes their side in the order of things. But his change of mind angers his Asian American boss who was trying to raise the related development capital from a group of East-Indian industrialists and all hell breaks loose at the annual town festival. And the reconstituted American champions the rights of his community and India and China are prevented from ruining the American landscape. Children should be spared the ways in which films like Furry Vengeance attempt to xenophobically and racistly indoctrinate them, and it's a shame trash like this received a widespread mainstream distribution.

Inception

Dreamscapes contain valuable corporate secrets. Hidden within the depths of one's psyche lie descriptive vaults and tumultuous treasures which competitors ruthlessly seek to discover. In Christopher Nolan's Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb) and a team of elite surrealists are experts in the art of extraction, an architecturo-scientific technique which enables thieves to enter the dreams of their quarry and learn volatile and valuable information. Basically, chords, chemicals, and a mysterious brief case allow a group of individuals to share a dream. The dream's form is designed by Cobb's architect while its content is filled with the victim's experiences. After the individual bearing the sought after information falls into a drug induced sleep, everyone else joins his or her dream, doing their best to avoid being detected by her or his subconscious (many persons in prestigious positions have trained their subconscious to recognize extractors and fight back). Extraction's opposite is known as inception, the placing of an alien idea into someone's subconscious so that it appears as if it was self-generated. Inception is thought to be impossible, but when a Japanese businessperson (Ken Watanabe as Saito) intent on breaking up a global monopoly offers Cobb the chance to be forgiven for his American crimes and return home to see his family, he accepts, and begins placing the necessary mechanisms in order (the individual is granted the opportunity to rejoin his community if he can effectively shatter a universal).

Problems: while dreaming, Cobb's diseased ex-wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) consistently appears, takes sides with the victim's subconscious, and attempts to thwart his efforts. Usually when you die within a dream you wake up, but the drug used during inception operations is so potent that if your life ends while dreaming you are cast into limbo, and you may stay there for decades while only minutes pass in the real world. In order for inception to work, you need to suggest the idea to your prey at three different levels. Hence, in the real world you are sleeping. In the first stage of the dream world you wake up, find the individual to whom you are attached, make the requisite suggestion, and are then forced to enter a deeper level of dreaming in order to make the suggestion again. While in this secondary level, one member of your team must remain in the first level and prevent the primary dreamer's subconscious from ending your mission. The process repeats itself until you reach the third level at which point it is thought that the idea has been planted with enough cohesiveness to undoubtably produce results in the real world. Hence, you need to be able to militaristically maneuver within a tailored dreamscape wherein you must also execute a precise plan requiring the coordinated efforts of at most four groups of resolute individuals. The defences against which you contend are determined and hostile and the environment in which you are situated is an organized chaotic psychological cataclysm.

Inception's subject matter is deep and skillfully crafted. The execution of the plot contains several well-timed peaks and valleys which dextrously establish an energetic if not schizophrenic ambience. It's definitely dense. A significant portion of the film unreels like a slick lecture but some of the principle points could have still used some more elaboration (why do the different layers of the dreaming have distinct temporal coordinates for instance [it would have been outrageously cool if Neil Gaiman's Dream had somehow explained this!]) . Nevertheless, it's pretty stunning visually and demanding intellectually, not only in regards to the narrative's hefty overt dimension, but also in relation to its tantalizing and ambiguous ending (stop reading if you haven't seen it), which suggests that the entire film was simply Cobb's dream, and would explain why he's the only character whose personal experience is manifested while inhabiting 'someone else's.' To create a work that has at least two layers of critically motivational depth in an exciting fashion that directly deals with issues of individuality, corporate politics, marriage, family, scientific exploration, globalization, and so on, while indirectly interrogating any pedagogical institution (for me the film's dreamworld is that of an educational structure's relationship to a political agenda and the difficulties of ever successfully planting a dominant idea in the minds of its rebellious students [one level elementary, then secondary, then post-secondary]) is exceptional, and Inception is the best Sci-Fi Thriller I've seen in a long time. A shape-shifting analytical delineation of the synthetic, Inception multidimensionally interrogates what it means to dream, while efficiently disseminating its controversial characteristics.

Very real.