Moonfall

While conducting routine work in space, a strange Venom-like entity belligerently cascades, proceeding to wreak extraterrestrial havoc, its malice resulting in one fatality. 

Back on Earth the lead astronaut's (Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper) pleas find no bureaucratic quarter, and with no proof the higher-ups conclude that he was responsible for the accident (classic Aliens).

He loses his astronaut status and must return to civilian life, his marriage soon falling apart, it's a huge downer, but he keeps things cool.

Meanwhile, a self-taught scientific theorist works odd jobs to pay the bills (John Bradley), while finding creative ways to observe data, and taking care of his cat and mom (Kathleen Fee). 

He accidentally meets Mr. Harper one morning and unfortunately fails to impress, but his work gains more attention when NASA acknowledges the moon's shift in orbit.

In possession of a working theory regarding the moon's new alarming trajectory, the disgraced astro hooks him up with NASA (they're like a less/more campy Flash Gordon and Hans Zarkov), his old partner now its managing director (Halle Berry), the moon about to disastrously crash land.

They improvise a plan nevertheless and are soon extemporaneously space bound.

Destined to adventurously uncover.

Humanity's chaotic origins.

Moonfall's quite the ride the action's fast-paced and non-stop throughout, improbability delineating progression as each new leap is overtly field-tested.

It reminded me of Independence Day almost 30 years later Roland Emmerich's still got it, no doubt crafted through intuitive expertise, and first hand knowledge of cataclysmic virtual reality. 

Spoiler alert: loved how it took on A.I with an ingenious reworking of the Terminator thesis, it does seem likely that self-aware computers will cause quite the disturbance in the nanofuture.

That disturbance may counterintuitively save the planet or at least humanity's role upon it, however, the survivors forced to relearn old school ways to make the most of a world without technology.

Scouts will once again be a big deal and take their place at the forefront of society, while animal populations rapidly expand and our once limitless oceans resplendently recover.

You wonder sometimes about Roswell and if all this technology is somehow related (as I imagine many others have supposed).

But why would aliens want us to create A.I if it's indeed destined to objectively destroy us?

It could be a trap ingeniously devised!

To get us to annihilate ourselves to save on the costs of an invading army. 

😜

Mirai no Mirai

An imaginative cloister at rest or at play sharply asserts itself in aggrieved upright tantrum.

For the solitary world within which he was ensconced has been definitively altered by the presence of another.

Attention that was once solely centred on him must now be shared with a sister, and even if she's somewhat adorable, he still can't fraternally conduct.

Strange forces align within his domestic playground to provide him with familial aid, and soon, through recourse to animated historical visuals, he's swathed in verbose fluent didact.

But he still may be too young to absorb his interactive lessons, and whether or not he can accept little Mirai (Victoria Grace) remains truly and innocently uncertain.

As dad (John Cho) learns the domestic arts.

And mom (Rebecca Hall) settles back in at work.

The child (Jaden Waldman) creatively explores pasts and presents to embrace Mirai no Mirai, the film excelling at presenting tactile evidence while he struggles to grasp and comprehend.

A wonderful film, rich with effervescent showcase, abounding with nimble tutelage, proceeds to generously foil and viscerally cascade, like windswept rains intermittently drenching the tropics in inclusive instructive echo, it proceeds with a friendly light heart playfully immersed in soothing reprimand.

Revelations must be hidden in order to avoid conflict as mom and dad wonder what's happening in their unassuming nondescript back garden.

As Kun embarks on journey after journey, it's as if luminescence has been seamlessly disseminated, the film's insouciance mysteriously matriculating, in nurtured inculcated frisk.

Deconstructing disillusions of age.

Enveloping unpasteurized wonder.

The scenes aren't boring or risk-fuelled or death-defying or controversial, they're way more chill, like they aren't working within a systematic production slyly cultivating grass-is-greener ideologies.

Thus, with intergenerational independence and particularized unique charm, they offer alternatives overflowing with paradigmatic initiative, laidback, like childhood storytime.

Categorically unconcerned.

You try to keep your eyes open as you age so you don't miss life passing by, like Ferris Bueller, and from time to time you still notice something novel for which you're totally unprepared.

It's like Mirai no Mirai harnesses this outlook in narrativized jazzy melody, which it thoughtfully focuses on itself, to compose something calm and collective.

A must see.

Hochelaga, Terre des Âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls)

In the 13th Century, a vicious battle having claimed the lives of many young men, a wise First Nations Prophet (Raoul Max Trujillo) chants out through the ages, pleading for peace to flourish eternal within his realm, his words planted on the winds with fertile simplicity, harvesting paradise in war torn isolation.

Who could have predicted what would happen in the following centuries, that another people would come and carve an alternative civilization out of the wilderness, and then another would land and attempt to transform it to their liking, and then others would appear and industriously cultivate traditions of their own, united by the prosperity of a distinct French culture, its multidisciplinary environment, adventurously preordained?

The island of Hochelaga slowly transformed into a metropolis, several of its epochs colourfully brought to life in François Girard's Hochelaga, Terre des Âmes (Land of Souls), sport having replaced destructive battles long passed, an incomparable nightlife spiritually enlivening working days, respect for nature thankfully lambasting fracked revenues and nuclear energy, a versatile collective creatively redefining culture on a mesmerizing weekly basis, orchestrated and executed, with transcendental evanescence.

Terre des Âmes follows a young First Nations archaeologist as he presents his thesis before a gathering of academics, a thesis based upon discoveries made at Percival Molson Memorial Stadium, after a sinkhole opened up during a feisty Redmen's game.

The sinkhole gave Baptiste Asigny (Samian) the opportunity to excavate the field, and the discoveries he made led him to reasonably piece together a convincing historical narrative covering Cartier's discovery of the island, missionary/fur trading clashes in New France, and the Patriot Rebellion of 1837, while also evidencing dynamic First Nations settlements on the island, the film complete with intriguing theoretical associated dramatizations of the periods.

If you find Canadian history somewhat boring, try reading books focused primarily on Québec. If you're at an age where the study of history is becoming more interesting (around 28 for me), you may thoroughly enjoy reading them as much as I do.

I've obviously wondered how long bears survived on the island after its population exploded, and I've never been able to find the date when they disappeared in the books I've read, which weren't about wildlife, but I imagine it was in the late 19th Century or the early 20th, fox, skunks, raccoons, groundhogs, opossums, coyotes, and squirrels still living on the island.

Even though I find Montréal's current composition fascinating, my favourite images from Terre des Âmes show what it may have looked like when it was still predominantly forested, indistinguishable from the massive mainland forests surrounding it, so many centuries ago.

Do some landscapes have a spiritual significance similar to that of Percival Molson Memorial Stadium as it's presented in Terre des Âmes, a kind of undetectable mass accumulation of positive spiritual energies which generate sincere subconscious synergies, like a hub or a server?

Can't answer that question myself.

I've always loved the idea though, since reading about it in Morgan Llywelyn's Druids, and I absolutely loved what Terre des Âmes does with it, how it beautifully unites Montréal's history in a thought provoking contemporary hypothesis, which speaks to the best of what Québecois culture has to offer, has always offered, and will continue to offer.

All down the line.

*With Siân Phillips (Sarah Walker) and Linus Roache (Colonel Philip Thomas).

L'Insulte

Politicians spreading hate to prey upon the weaknesses of their flocks, to turn their latent prejudices into jingoistic warlike ambitions, to transform tolerant markets into breeding grounds for death and destruction, to gain power for themselves which they will share with no one, perniciously pervert and corrupt the religious and/or secular principles they exploit to gain recognition, then bask in luxurious splendour while lives are lost and communities torn apart, after their viewpoints become codes of conduct, and harmless repartee starts invoking wanton bloodshed.

A mechanic falls for the volatile rhetoric of a Lebanese demagogue in Ziad Doueiri's L'Insulte, and proceeds to express himself contemptuously thereafter.

But the Palestinian man whom he targets isn't willing to let things slide, and immediately comes a' knockin' to assert his sincere displeasure.

He's ignored, tensions escalate, his boss, a levelheaded kind hearted understanding person, asks him to apologize for the way in which he retaliated, he agrees, only to have his people vitriolically criticized as he prepares to do so, a genocidal comment that inflames his passions, and leaves his provocateur on the ground with two broken ribs.

As they wait for their day in court, both men are reasonably counselled, and even though Yasser (Kamel El Basha) has a legitimate defence, he refuses to air grievances when eventually pressed by the judge.

He's an ethical person whom the world keeps beating down.

He won't sit back and take it, but he won't rat out his adversaries either.

Complicated film.

Multicultural dilemmas.

Their dispute makes headlines and soon the appeal is a national sensation, ethnocentric hatreds refuelled by each carefully calculated examination, a recent civil war still haunting collective memories, only the truly wicked hoping to see them reanimated once more.

L'Insulte shows how misguided individual actions can have horrendous cultural repercussions if hatred is left to pontificate unchallenged while those who profit from its dissemination publicly promote its virulence.

Tony (Adel Karam) and Yasser can't stand the spectacle. It's one of the film's best aspects. They detest the ways in which their simple disagreement becomes a demented political powder keg.

They slowly learn to understand, and as they tacitly agree to tolerate one another, both as people and as people who have suffered greatly, the film's deep multifaceted layers become more respectfully binding (revolutionaries turned civil servants, diaspora discourses, a child is born, workplace health and safety . . .).

Myriad characters offer brief challenging insights that condense manifold local, regional, national, and international personal and communal ethicopolitical viewpoints into a compelling heartfelt cerebral narrativization.

An argument that could have just been quietly settled.

If they had listened to their wives.

And ignored mad extremists.

Transformers: The Last Knight

Can science, myth, religion, history, the aristocracy, the people, the British, Americans, the privileged, the self-made, the men, the women, humankind, and Autobots, be chaotically yet adventurously, ideologically yet practically, intergalactically yet locally, or quite simply extracurricularly brought together in a wild brainiacally styled jewelled Nile Summertime extravaganza, complete with a spellbinding mix of the brash and the delicate which epically unites risk, love, service and dedication, to thoroughly entertain while multilaterally seeking knowledge, like a trip to New York, or a voyage down under?

Yes.

I would say, "yes, yes they can."

"Affirmative" even.

A constructive ebb and flow.

It's always fun when the new Transformers films are released but I'll admit I've never enjoyed one as much as The Last Knight.

I mean, I'll actually watch this one again.

It's number 5 too.

So many metamorphic developments.

Plucky little Izabella (Isabela Moner), resiliently in search of friends and family.

The hyperreactive robotic butler (Jim Carter as Cogman), who flamboyantly yet earnestly adds neurotic inspirational spice.

Agent Simmons (Jon Turturro) is back, theorizing and analyzing his way to the heart of the narrative's conceit.

Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins), youthfully and mischievously contemporizing more than a millennia of British legend.

England and the United States romantically come to terms?, the couple in question perhaps creating an invincible universal super being?

Plus secret entrances, spontaneous sushi, cheeky self-reflexive criticisms of blockbuster music, Cuba once again warmly featured in a 2017 American mainstream release, prophetic books preserved, getting-away-with-it explanations, scenarios, Bumblebee (Erik Aadahl), First Nations fluidity, Tony Hale (JPL Engineer), whales.

The wild script energetically shifts from sentiment to shock to certitude to sensation, manifold short scenes eclectically yet straightforwardly stitched together with (en)lightninglike speed and ornate dishevelled awareness.

Fascinated, 'twas I.

I've often thought these films don't focus enough on Transformers, but Last Knight presents a solid shapeshifting/organic blend, its biological proclivities overwhelming desires to see Transformers discursively deliberating, relevant contributing human factors, caught up in the thick of it, creating solutions intuitively their own.

In fact, the subplot involving Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) was my least favourite part of the film.

The extraordinary examination of British History and its relationship to transforming-lifeforms-from-space easily made up for it though.

I'd love to see Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice during the witching hour.

How did they move those rocks?

They be pretty freakin' huge.

Jackie

Historically aware conscientious crucible within which responsibilities interdisciplinarily decode.

Crushing enervating profound despondency augustly conciliated with urbane stately poise.

Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) seeks to comfort a nation grieving the loss of her husband while consoling their two young children and arranging funerary dispositions.

Details of which are verbally transmitted to a trusted reporter ensconced in the mournful countryside.

Utterly alone.

Concealment.

Deluge.

Pablo Larraín's Jackie endears to relate a lachrymose tale as a matter of dire consequence, benevolence still abounding within formal restraints as a portrait emerges with metadignified calm.

To be immersed under such scrutiny during such tumultuous transitions, a thunderous inducement having suddenly arrested, while still remaining conscious of steadfast bristling influence, is to augment an orbit's c/rippling individuality, resplendent in its tender, lustrous, febrile, mint.

The film sophisticatedly staggers memories and missives to elegantly charter stilted suffering in swoon, a stunning versatile interred x-ray, quintessentially courting philosophical entailments.

Lost in anodyne ethereal cruise, extraordinarily tight renditions, realistic reveries, antique extant gravity.

So many films keep going and going long after they should have ended, but Jackie packs several startling finales into its cordate nerve, curtained accented asseverations, lives, frolics, longing.

Phenomenal.

Interstellar

Times have changed, and centuries of polluting irresponsibly and unaccountably have left the Earth's soil predominantly barren, unsupportive and lifeless, the survivors carrying on, old pastimes still cherished, historical insights curiously revisited, a voice from the future, codes risen in dust, a father's love for his family, paramount, indeed to be sacrificed.

The big picture.

To do it all again, or make alternative choices.

A mission which cannot be refused.

There's no time to panic, no time, to hesitate.

It doesn't use scare tactics, Interstellar's quite reasonable, scientific.

There are options, pros and cons, we must do this, and hope there's enough time to find a solution.

Elements of the classic Western are reliably built into the script like quiescent caregiving sweet nothings, or an afterthought, a reflex, a calm level-headed proactive reflex, hindsight's compendium, temperately transitioning to science-fiction, its environments still cruel and unforgiving, and wild, with neither monsters nor civilizations, just will power and the unknown, assignments boldly navigated.

Survival.

Some wild cards are thrown into the mix which rely more heavily on the tropes of science fiction, an intergalactic clue, an explosion of self-interest, but they're skilfully intertwined, Interstellar quietly ascending in investigative baby steps, from the micro to the macro, mellowly maturing, to blow you away in the end.

I preferred Inception, and Inception's ending, but the same mix of cognitive entertaining emotive rationality still humanizes Interstellar, and its climax is as strong if not stronger, depending on which film you prefer.

Nolan suddenly creates a bucolic, like Birdman's bucolic foil, after having spent so much time in dreams and Gotham City, outstanding career move, this director is multidimensional.

It's worked into the script.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared)

A pinnacled piña colada, perchanced and periodized, passively strolls through an entire century, piercingly riding its waves, aloe primavera, alert gestations, blindly yet acutely detonating his trade, Forrest Gump's Benjamin Button teething Archer, hypnotic happenstance, turn that screw, Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared) flashes back to tumultuous times, with ironic blissful candour, serendipitized tailspins, explosively tiptoeing, from one cryptic epoch to the next.

After escaping from a retirement home to the fury of the underground's Never Again.

Friendships blossom.

A team is assembled.

A sentiment's thrust.

Through the coming of the ages.

Poetically refining what it means to blunder, the situations he finds himself within seem rigged with ideological dynamite.

Franco's saviour builds an atomic bomb to end the Second World War before sterilizing the Commies on his way to becoming a stayed bilateral messenger.

Destined for paradise.

This film has depth; it playfully reimagines twentieth-century carnage with the casual indifference of an essential tribal fluidity, unconscious forward motion, courting precise precious movements.

Impeccable comedy.

It's even family friendly, in the best possible way, like Amélie, with a loveable elephant.

Could have worked Ireland in somehow.

The Skeleton Twins

Crippling depressions cope with mundane predictability as a brother and sister are reunited after an attempted suicide in Craig Johnson's The Skeleton Twins, mundane predicability in regards to the lives their leading, not in relation to the film, which is a sensitive reflective chill occasionally brash comment on the applicability of predetermined roles, the individuals who play them (wife, husband, actor, . . .), the results of their interactions, and the coming together of kindred spirits.

The sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), is married to a boring yet supportive excessively positive husband (Luke Wilson as Lance) who provides her with stability but strongly lacks an exhilarating thrill factor, which she finds with other men while taking different courses after work.

The brother, Milo (Bill Hader), has been struggling to find acting work in LA, and after drinking too much one night, decides to take his own life.

They meet up for the first time in 10 years shortly thereafter and Milo then decides to return to his hometown in upstate New York to live with Maggie while he recuperates.

They're both somewhat bipolar, and suicidal, so when they're getting along, we're treated to witty caustic unconcerned distracted deadpan takes on living, and when things break down, things often breaking down after something great happens, things turn ugly, vindictive and spiteful, each trying to play a parental role as the other screws up, historical controversies complicating things further.

Neither has had much guidance that has helped over the years, and both crave regular adventurous stimuli to transcend routine frustrations.

It's well-acted, well-written, and the best comedic drama I've seen since Stand Up Guys.

I don't think I've ever seen two former Saturday Night Live actors perform so well in a film this low key and striking.

They convincingly struggle with issues of life and death in a relatable way complete with thoughtful advice which isn't over the top or endearingly ridiculous.

Wilson's great too.

Casting by Avy Kaufman.

Finsterworld

Emerging from a state of nature to historically contextualize the present, eccentricity multifariously contesting its conditions, authenticity, percolating its plight, poetic instances of curious introspective creativity contentiously enraging the callous, cruelty and innocence sociopathically and lovingly coexisting, tricks, cancellations, balanced asymmetrical genders, beetles and dress-ups and birds, the conformist's intention to ignore, in Frauke Finsterwalder's Finsterworld, a dynamic open-ended multigenerational cross-section, microscopically invested, with macroscopic instigations.

Interpretively dependent.

Spoiler alert.

World War II's legacy haunts the film and difference, while uplifting it to an aesthetic celestial syntax, in various ways, is often contemptuously reprimanded.

The ethnic school teacher who takes his students on a trip to a concentration camp, focussing on its abhorrence, ends up in jail after rescuing a student who's been brutally pranked, giving in to his perverted instincts in the process.

The African character found in the film's final moments is listless and primitive, as seen when a documentary filmmaker ironically visits Africa in search of the authentic, ironic because her visit's based on the recommendation of her policeperson partner, whom she rejects after he reveals he's a genuine furry.

The other german men who salute difference include a pedicurist who takes the dead skin from his clients and then bakes it into cookies which he eventually serves to them as a treat. When one client admits her love for him, he reveals his secret, which is naturally met with ghastliness, although they do end up together.

A school boy who poetically and comically talks to beetles and puppets made out of his hand, reminiscent of Thomas Törless, is assaulted by a wealthy SUV renting tough guy, after possibly viewing his wife relieving herself at the side of the road. The three become quite friendly, when the man who lives in the woods and has just had his dwelling vandalized and bird friend killed starts firing shots from a bridge at the passing traffic, one of them fatally wounding the boy; as if to say that this young Törless's future would unfortunately resemble that of the humble forest dweller, who has therefore spared him a life of loneliness.

The death and incarceration of these two characters (the forest dweller ends up in jail), as well as the rejection of the furry, are perhaps vindicated by the pedicurist's romance, as an elderly german matron embraces difference, perhaps paving the way for a more inclusive cultural frame.

Perhaps Germany is quite inclusive at the moment, I'm just interpreting the evidence provided by this film.

The younger generation's sociopathic rep who doesn't want to accept World War II's legacy and doesn't speak up to save the ethnic school teacher, even though he was the prankster in question, while torturing his helpless victim further in the aftermath by insulting her intelligence, casts doubt on this possibility.

Which makes for a well-rounded albeit bleak conclusion.

To a depressingly thoughtful and brilliant reflexivity.

Outstandingly controversial film.

The Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate's cold calculated construct of Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) maintains that he's a driven well-meaning intense prick whose inability to bend resolutely cost him dearly.

Guilty of high-tech intractability.

The portrait's possibly unfair.

It was a simple matter of redacting articles posted on WikiLeaks so that the names of covert individuals mentioned within them would not appear and the individuals themselves would likely not be violently punished (murdered) afterwards.

Not such a simple matter for Assange, according to The Fifth Estate, however.

He was determined to publish leaked articles in full on principle to demonstrate that he wasn't doing anything to hedge the truth.

I respect this on principle, but when people's lives are at stake I do have to agree with The Fifth Estate's condemnation of the practise, Assange being unable to recast his image as his freedom fighting persona gained international traction.

The problem in the film is this.

Assange rightfully despises tyranny.

It's what he fights against.

Tyrants tend to kill people.

In The Fifth Estate, as WikiLeaks's reach exponentially extends, it becomes clear that Assange is a general of sorts, more of a supreme commander, and that by releasing unredacted documents, he has the power to sacrifice troops for what he considers to be the greater good, but he still sacrifices troops nonetheless, somewhat carelessly, I might add.

So on principle, he makes decisions that could have cost people their lives, people who may have been fighting for the same things using different methods, when he really didn't have to, he could have redacted the documents without ruining them, which causes him to become tyrannical himself, an unfortunate development for such an heroic person.

What I loved about The Fifth Estate was its examination of history, contemporary history, how many of its characters are aware of the monumental changes the internet has brought about, like Gutenberg's printing press on hyperactive culturally enlivening intergalactic booster juice, The Guardian's Nick Davies (David Thewlis) offering some notable insights, moving the film away from the severely intensifying interactions between Assange and Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl).

Looking forward to reading/viewing what other biographers have to say about Assange over the upcoming decades.

Compelling person.

Brilliant colossus.

The Lone Ranger

A naive child's material desires accidentally instigate a collusive capitalistic intercultural catastrophe, as contemporary conditionals refurbish historical hindsights with oratorical laments, and a story is told, details epically bulleted, questions, considerations, responses, internally and externally as the dialogue between listener and storyteller is narratively emboldened, and The Lone Ranger arrives incognito, possessing both lock and key, determined to develop a fair and equitable jurisprudent viaduct, even after it becomes clear that the canyon's been railroaded.

A sincere yet ingenuous circumspective screw, he lacks the pugnacious grit his fellow citizens unconsciously prevaricate, yet is aptly suited for the role of quizzical non sequitur, twisting and turning to fasten himself to the margins.

The film's first 45 minutes are a fast-paced exhilarating hyperkinetic mélange of symbolism and ideology, economically and stereoscopically situated, frothing, gushing, crushing.

The rest awkwardly yet entertainingly condenses myriad systemic tropes, honesty and integrity occupying the position of outcast in a direct no-nonsense Western filmscape (cinematography by Bojan Bazelli), wherein established politicians and lawbreakers represent both sides of an irremediable coin.

Tonto (Johnny Depp) and the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) activate a spiritually guided sense of justice, the former having no recourse to courts of law, the latter dedicated to enabling one.

The mask remains.

Also an imaginative account of what can be created if one frequently visits museums, libraries, art galleries, etc.

While taking an interest in sport.

Kon-Tiki

Since a young age I've preserved a healthy skepticism regarding whether or not Columbus discovered America.

As I'm sure many others have as well.

Noting that many of my interlocutors have always maintained a healthy degree of mistrust regarding anything people other than themselves happen to mention, and figuring that this is nothing new, that people have always cultivated such suspicions, it seems hard for me to believe that everyone agreed that the Earth was flat way back when, and that a bunch of disenfranchised trouble makers never simply jumped on a boat to sail the open unrecorded seas, forbidding prohibitions be damned.

I know there are continents on the other side of whatever ocean.

But if I didn't, yet I knew there were islands in the middle of mainland lakes, I could easily hypothesize that similar landmasses existed offshore, and confidently set out in search of their voluptuous bounties.

Thinking ancient cultures didn't travel open waters trading and communicating with each other ir/regularly is too Eurocentric a viewpoint for my tastes, too reliant on the written word, as it was for Thor Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) in Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki, who sets out to prove that Indigenous Polynesians already knew, thanks to their reliable oral traditions, that some of their islands were settled from the East as opposed to the West, by ancient Peruvians bravely crossing the Pacific.

Thor boldly proceeds with a crew of 5 adventurers, on a raft, across the Pacific, with no support from the scientific communities of his day, risking everything to expand certain understandings.

Kon-Tiki congenially presents a family friendly bit too comfortable narrative considering wherein hope, faith, inspiration, and truth miraculously guide a stalwart team, with endless shots of their leader (Norway's Peter O'Toole?), and the crabby sentiments of a pesky stowaway.

Its best sequence shows how broken attachments lead to immediate retributions whose consequences, instigated after a confrontational organizational challenge, pits trust against doubt, the same doubt that Heyerdahl represents regarding established truths of his time, said trust triumphing, and said consequences, the situation demanding an immediate life saving response, prove remarkable fortuitous, if not generally foolhardy.

It also productively examines group dynamics for although Herman Watzinger's (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) doubt threatens his group's cohesiveness at times, his continuing presence provides them with the information they need to avoid disaster as they approach their destination, thereby elevating the film's conception of a critical yet devout unified team.

A contemporary established theory that I often hear referenced that seems suspect to me suggests that North and South America were populated by peoples walking across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia.

I've also heard other people suspect this theory and am drawing on such conversations (and writings) in presenting this idea.

And I mean, seriously, enough people crossed this bridge to cultivate multidimensional populations from Tuktoyaktuk to Patagonia, walking all the way, only crossing a land bridge between East Asia and Alaska?

Makes more sense to me that there were already peoples inhabiting North and South America and some eventually walked over the bridge to join them.

Does anyone dispute that Australia's Indigenous population lived there for millennia before first European contact?

Worth investigating anyways.

Midnight's Children

At the stroke of midnight, as India's independence lights up the sky, several children are born.

An ironic twist of fate, whereby bohemian and bourgeois babies are switched at birth, in an act of amorous solidarity, simultaneously precipitates openminded and hegemonic serializations.

One possesses the remarkable gift of being able to use his mind to create a cerebral in/corporeal clandestine commons where all of Midnight's Children can meet and discuss various subjects.

One's overwrought jealousy upholsters a ballistic desire to dominate, within.

The others, playing by a more reasonable set of hospitable synchronizations, collegially, discern.

That's a rather truncated description of what takes place in Deepa Mehta's film; it's much more complicated than that, narratively deconstructing particular parental preconceptions, touching upon complex interconnected conjugal and familial (and pre- and post-colonial) provocations, illustrating the effects of 'practical' ideological implementations on individual constituencies from jingoistically fraternal (ugh) and resurgently romantic jetties, at a frantic pace, which generally focuses on one character's brittle innocence.

The depth of potential lying within the film's itinerant confluences suggests that Salman Rushdie's novel is worth picking up, and that militaristic conflicts prevent the cultivation of prolonged endearing chill relationships.

At first, I found the film's magically real cloak to be somewhat flippant in relation to the gravity of its historical trajectory, but it's actually this light, dreamy, bewildered and baffling ambience that transcends its unavoidable puritanical devices, evoking an abstract laissez-faire conspicuous caricature.

That isn't that concerned with absolutes.

Covering a lot of interdisciplinary ground while firmly resisting attempts at classification, Midnight's Children sacrifices elaboration for stylization to divine a potential mantra.

More fitting to its humanistic features.

Cloud Atlas

Reincarnating a diverse sense of individualistic multiplicity, wherein manifold acts see their transhistorical countenances ambiently 'serialized,' as circumstances determine varying degrees of personal expedients and collective commitments, the most powerful of which are preconditioned by love eternal, of the other, an ideal, Cloud Atlas draws poetic intertemporal parallels amongst 'distinct' narratives to progressively decentralize teleological discourses without sacrificing their forward thinking critical cores, thereby generating a hardwired interdisciplinary mutlivaliant transistor.

As history comes to life.

It's as if the process of taking forms with myriad malleable landscapes and inter'connected' representational layers and populating them with breathing socio-political contents is itself materially manifested, through a vivacious, ethical engagement.

It doesn't shy away from using science-fiction to situate the cannibalistic nature of shortsighted grossly counterproductive characterizations of workers as one-dimensional subservient automatons being sinisterly force fed their own collectively suicidal divisive tropes in the present, from suggesting that aesthetic realms beyond our current epistemological methods of comprehension can be artistically realized (through music), from attaching an everlasting quality to the bucolic/urban dialectic, from elevating humanistic strategies for combatting the pervasive influence of unfettered capital, or intimating the ways in which capital can profit from events which never had to take place.

At the same time, it's not that serious.

Didn't like the whole inevitability dimension, but still, there's enough diegetic material here to create/continue the development of its own subgenre and it reminded me of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

And Keith David's characters have great responses to the role he played in Crash(2004).

Looper

Casually steeping the intertextual typography for a poppy paranoid streetwise technovernacular, real horrorshowlike, frenetically interspersing euphoric and trepidatious tremors, bumptiously, offhandedly, and rupturously stimulating abbreviations, while synthesizing an intertemporal suicidal personalized universal, Rian Johnson's Looper ruggedly relies on standard fictionally scientific reflexivities, without deflating their zeppelinesque thermocline, to romanticize a gritty, graphic, gregarious shock, while autosuggesting, an intransitive perpetuity.

As the crow flies.

One loop sees a job well done, followed by a carefree binge, a requisite regression, and vindication through love.

In the other, to sustain and avenge said vindication, a monstrous methodology metastasizes.

Either way the outcome is inevitable.

But a third way does present itself, nurtured by a split-second revelation based upon the prior knowledge of a definitive causeway the agency of which is too much to precondition.

So, rather than embracing what seems like predetermination, the agent spontaneously disorients his 'historical' trek.

Stretching through the void.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Remember being disappointed when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released in 2003. I liked it when I eventually rented it, but still couldn't shake that "I wish they'd just left it alone" feeling, which had inspired my initial hesitation.

Watched it again a couple of times last weekend and was seriously impressed. It's arguably better than T2 although it depends upon what time in your life you view it/them.

T2 was great when I was a kid (it's still good [I also watched it last weekend]). The apocalypse is averted, the future remains open, and things can reattain a level of relative normalcy if the trauma can be creatively dissimulated.

Solid sci-fi, convincing absurdity, collaborative outlook, intact.

T3 represents a sequel which strategically follows a similar pattern to its predecessor(s), revisiting familiar scenes and situations in order to socialize on the franchise's precedents, while reimagining them with enough mutated historical ingenuity to subtly transmit an evolutionary code.

Without screwing things up.  

Such revisitations are done at great risk for if the scenarios fail to entrance, the predecessor/s quickly begin/s to appear more appealing.

T3's resolution is somewhat less innocent, however (it's much less innocent), which, for those of us who saw T2 when they were 12 and T3 many years later, while still remaining in possession of the firm environmentally friendly conscious T2 shyly promotes, fictionally nurtures a degree of realistic despondency, brought about by an increasingly monolithic technocratic agency's dismissal of environmental concerns (the environmental movement, from what I remember, was stronger in Canada in 1991), by directly working its principle audience's growth into the script, bizarrely taking into account different trends and fashions, while harshly yet romantically preparing them for the post-symbolic (notably when John [Nick Stahl] resignedly yet affirmably utters a cliché when he's flying to Crystal Peak with Catherine Brewster [Claire Danes]).

Hence, within T3, a pagan dimension in touch with the eternal timeline and its intertemporal distortions (whether or not these distortions should be viewed as part of the eternal timeline is up for debate but the evidence provided by T3 suggests they should not) intervenes and ensures that two somewhat unwilling individuals are given a fighting chance to subvert an inevitable machinismo (to continue to fight for a more collaborative playing field against forces possessing incontrovertible resource rich 'class-oriented' biases)(the timeline is reconstituted to the best possible version nature can provide after which its 'unwitting' agents must generally fend for themselves).

And who has returned with updated loveable psychological subroutines? None other than the converted patriarchal killing machine who saw the light (was reprogrammed) and began using his organic metallurgic abilities to protect humanistic interests instead (himself). Much of what his counterpart from T2 learned flows within but now that Mr. Connor's older and realizes what he's up against, his counterarguments to that created by his significant other's interpretation of his childhood memories occasionally lack his youthful antagonistic conviction.

After surviving the intermediary years, he comes to understand the T-101's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) no-nonsense methods.

Mechanically, T-101's primary adversary is a younger more flexible model, but even though he's an older design, this doesn't mean he can't compete.

In regards to the dialogue established by the changing feminine gender paradigms culturalized by the gap between these two sequels, in T2 the only strong female character with knowledge that would make a significant historical difference is locked-up in a mental institution; in T3 the feminine is split, one character representing independent unyielding destructive technocratic oppression, the other, bourgeois stability transformed (consequently) into a fierce warrioress.

In regards to identity, as far as John and Catherine Brewster go, and ignoring the acute crisis the T-101 must face, T3 seems to be suggesting that if you're unclassified or professional (notably in the "you're not exactly my 'type' either" exchange), and if democratic institutions become so diluted that their impact no longer bears any teeth, or a well-funded psychological campaign produces a wide-ranging cynicism regarding their effects even when they're still capable of bearing fruit, you'll both be stuck necessarily contending with an entrenched systemic opponent who had been modestly brought to heel after the Second World War.

Try and think about what Barack Obama would have been able to do then.

Which seems to be T3's prescient message, which could explain the lacklustre reviews it received during the George W. Bush Era. I don't know. But it takes the risk of bombing due to the ways in which it relies so heavily on T2's format and manages to ironically cultivate greener pastures to the contrary, which is a sign of bold writing, and great filmmaking (directed by Jonathan Mostow, screenplay by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato).

And the Dr. Silverman (Earl Boen) scene is priceless. I'll watch it again just to see that alone.

There's more humour within too, notably the ways in which the 'asocial' terminators affect those they meet, my favourite line being "and, the coffin," subtly reflecting the difficulties the eccentric encounter on a regular basis.

Oh, and considering how much revenue Judgement Day generated, it's hard to believe that it took 12 years for them to release Rise of the Machines.

Bullhead

Symptomatically and jaggedly pluralizing the personal psychological affects of a sudden all-encompassing disillusionment, while intricately stratifying a diverse bombastic barrage, literally interjecting his film with bellicose doses of testosterone, Michaël R. Roskam takes Bullhead and cacophonically synthesizes a man with his husbandry, as he tries whatever he can to surreptitiously distend.

An event. A transformation. Perseverance. Sublimation. Shock. Disintegration.

The wind in the willows.

Or the cyclone in the spruces in this instance. Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is one volatile powder keg lacking the deflammatory passions which may have softened the blow.

But apart from scintillatingly nocturnalizing a tragic character study, Bullhead complacently, cerebrally, and chaotically economizes its 'subject matter,' potently intensifying a somewhat underrepresented particular submergence, while using it to indirectly comment upon Belgian social interactions.

If Mr. Vanmarsenille represents the local, then the local is diversified, then regionalized (the regional possessing a nationalistic nuance), and then subjectively traumatized, historicized, and atemporalized, while the film retains a selective degree of objectivity (which dissipates near the end), the catalyst of said trauma triumvirately functioning within the local, regional, and national domains, with romantic, familial, comic and veterinary issues exhaustively adorning its multiplicity.

Mr. Roskam knows how to get things done (screenplay by Michaël R. Roskam). 

It offers a potential counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one film focused primarily on a individual's parenting struggles within an environment theoretically dominated by the personal, the other's less subject-centric caricature working within one hypothetically attempting to produce a less hostile bilateral congregation, both lamenting static subjective growth.

Stress. They're both, full, of stress.

I recommend Bullhead for lovers of multidimensional cinema but be prepared cause it's rather dark.

I kind of think of it as a stubborn grouchy emasculated subdued rowdy intellectual action film to which you must pay strict attention.

Calamitizing the maintenance of an ideal.

Which blindly obscures what's beautiful.

Samsara

Ron Fricke's Samsara takes upon itself the modest task of pictorially presenting an interdimensional panoramic account of a synthesized set of (free)ranging semantic variables, a fluid rhetorically viable atemporal mosaic whose effervescent movements are acoustically interwoven according (perhaps) to the harmonics of three itinerant factotums, who practically reverberate throughout the humanistic theoretical continuum, giving birth to hope, sculpting immobility, and choreographing the infinite.

The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.

The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.

I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.

But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.

At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.

Without saying a word.

The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice?  Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?

It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).

Best film I've seen in a long time.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

A murderer has avoided detection for decades. A journalist's reputation has been publicly ridiculed. A brilliant young researcher's incredible talent flourishes. A family's dark secrets seek revelation.

Patterns lie hidden within eclectic sources. Technological expertise facilitates their synthesization. The resultant thesis can be investigated with meticulous precision. Alternatives and subterfuges staggeringly structure the aggregate.

David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a sombre subterranean endeavour. Deeply digging into clandestine contrivances frenetically attempting to function without restraint, it descends into the feverish dementia affluently prospering beyond the restrictions of amicability.

And exorcises demons.

Ostracized individuals use their resourcefulness to disentangle an established privileged network from within and bring its mastermind to justice.

Having recreated a foothold within their culture's social fabric, divisions remain which prevent them from socializing on their gains.