Strange Brew

A TV show is granted to two playful brothers who take rest and relaxation beyond excessive limits, their habitual shenanigans still sincerely amusing and able to please a critical crowd.

They're tasked with creating a film which they proceed to do without much of a budget, or crew or script or plan they're loving fans are none too impressed.

Out of beer and without any money, they concoct a plan to trick the Beer Store, a mouse in a bottle furiously exchanged for serendipitous suds should things go well.

The irritated staff has no patience however and quickly sends them to the brewery, where they try the same scam without success yet somehow manage to secure new jobs.

Their friendly nature genuinely endears them to the cheerful staff once they're introduced, while their carefree mindsets accidentally ensure they wander at random throughout the brewery.

Where they eventually discover the Brewmeister's mad and intends to addict the world to his despotic lager.

A mind control drug having been infused.

Within a fresh batch headed for Oktoberfest. 

A different age, a less serious time, when alternative narratives found lithe animation, their absurd ideas not meant to cultivate political movements or autocratic agendas.

Rather ridiculous heroes were meant to outwit much more maniacal foes, and celebrate sloth and gluttony through lackadaisical nimble networks. 

Who would have thought that the people at Fox would see such narrative strategies as political gold, and effectively use them to convince the public that candidates like Trump were closet geniuses?

For decades they catered to audiences who preferred characters who didn't excel, or even moderately comprehend good governance instead they never stopped behaving like children.

And Trump emerged in the televisual vortex to provide these people with a Fox Network candidate, not someone who wanted to improve things but instead a self-obsessed vainglorious madman.

I don't deny finding these characters funny when ludicrously situated within a sitcom, but to see them unleashed as leaders of the free world is far too dangerous and full-on insane. 

Sigh.

That's why the people who should love me hate me and why those who shouldn't secretly adore me.

Too complicated for blunt storytelling.

Which for some reason holds American sway.  

Alienoid: Return to the Future

The ancient world tempestuously welcomes alien renegades from a far distant future, whose apocalyptic orchestrations may suffocate all life on planet Earth.

Along for the ride we find a computer program who can take on human form, and serendipitously shapeshift as awkward circumstances dictate. 

He surreptitiously protects a courageous determined fledgling warrior, who seeks to ensure the malevolent convicts permanently rest in medieval Korea. 

Back in the present day, the deadly haava will soon be released, after which all life on Earth will perish and reckless malfeasance rule absolutely.

The multivariable eclectic mix of dynamic characters effectively duel, and furiously express their athletic witticisms as the ensuing chaos thunders.

In terms of recalibrating A.I and giving it transformative humanistic features, could the cyberspatial efficiently be freed from incarcerated bland electronic environments?

If an electronic code exists for variable lifeforms within different realms, could it be effectively replicated thereby creating carbon copies?

Somewhat like the cloned sheep "Dolly" but without the elaborate multifaceted process, Star Trek: The Next Generation providing insights into the organic simulations.

On Star Trek's holodeck diverse beings find instantaneous ingenious life, and can interact and joke and play music while following intricate complex instructions. 

The characters can't leave their simulated environments they're imprisoned there however, in Star Trek you can't find the code for Proust or Shakespeare and see them miraculously reborn.

Nevertheless, within the food replicators organic material is suddenly created, with infinite variety from manifold planets and it fluidly exists in the outside world. 

Thus, within these highly useful machines computer codes take on physical forms (like they do in cyberspace), and can be consumed outside the domains in which they were originally produced (unlike cyberspace).

Thus, if you had a machine that could take a code like that used to clone different animals, you could theoretically duplicate them ad infinitum, like the food replicators on Star Trek.

You could therefore also alter their programming so they could transmutate at will. 

It's just a matter of discovering the manifest codes.

Which clandestinely structure organic environments.

Love the Twin Peaks intertextuality. 

Cool sequel. 

The Adults

A close family constructively enjoys a creative childhood dynamically engaged, during which characters and acts and plays are imaginatively shared with receptive audiences. 

The two older siblings have an unspoken rivalry but the youngest generously co-exists, angelically posturing with unselfish sincerity she forges a bridge between the feuding duo. 

As time moves on, and their parents pass, the brother packs his things and leaves one day, their tightened bonds tritely cast aside as he travels the country playing poker and working.

Unable to process his hard-pounding grief he stays away for many a year, hardly calling and showing little interest in the resourceful sisters who made up his home.

But one remorseful soul-searching day he decides to return with undetermined intention, certainly to play poker with ye old school friends, still genuinely curious about his family's goings on.

The older sister who had to embrace responsibility after their mother's passing to save the house, isn't exactly pleased to see him when he suddenly shows up having never lent a hand.

To make things worse he strictly divides his precious free time between family and poker, heading out to intense games in the evenings, sleeping late, and vouchsafing afternoons. 

A habitually logical man attempting to abide by rational guidelines, who once embraced artistic endeavours, must consciously manifest spirit. 

Or suffer cataclysmic austere dissonance.

The Adults perhaps adding a hands-on French touch.

It seems to respect Band à part anyways with random inspired improvised dancing, not sure if that was just a coincidence or an intertextual shout out to independent hommage. 

The film excels at patiently observing the unpleasant difficulties associated with maturity, and the inherent frustrating cold calculated reckoning attributed to derivatives and distant dividends. 

As he slowly comes to realize he's somewhat of an artist playing real world at times, the film warms up and becomes more cute and cuddly, not without pressure and argument and confrontation.

Brought together through soulful reminiscence times creatively conjuring collective cohesion.

Adulthood having presented a lasting challenge.

Stronger united.

To non-traditionally age. 

Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses

The Cowboys have fallen on hard times, down on their luck and stricken, forsaken, filiblustered.

They were once one of Mexico's most exhilarating acts, but after duelling with tequila incontestably, collapsed upon destitute ruin.

The band still exists however even if several of its members did not survive, those remaining somewhat revitalized after an invitation to play in New York.

But they've been tricked, hoodwinked, bamboozled, as they learn shortly after arrival, for Vladimir (Matti Pellonpää) their once loathsome manager turns out to have set up a ruse.

He seeks to once again rule them and lead them back to northern realms, and has awoken as a scandalous prophet who refers to himself as Moses.

The band is weary, downtrodden, aghast, and succumb to his ironclad will, which supplies a rickety motorboat for their journey across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, he stays behind to chisel off spry Liberty's nose, before hitching a ride clasped and wingéd to the lonesome European coast.

They're reunited without much delay and are even joined by old school band members, and set off merrymaking homeward bound through less inhospitable continental climes.

But Vladimir hasn't failed to make headlines and he's become a wanted man.

And the law avails in hot pursuit as they actively gig hot damn.

Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses adds significant layers and depth, to a narrative eclectically posturing with unyielding jocose inhibition.

A collection of wry self-reliant ideas intermittently staked uniformity notwithstanding, the story appealing to subsequent nodes which elucidate demonstrative beacon.

Sometimes the plot's surely secondary to verbose improvised momentum, providing adhesive broadened outlines which embrace reformed asymmetry.

For 'tis not argument Kaurismäki covets but rather offbeat ironic declension, messages bridled to slam dunk transparency as they softly sway in complement willow.

Enlivening inherent dimension through spatiotemporal interplay, it highlights disembodied ascension with aeronautic grassroots unconveyed.

A break from paramount logic resets and recasts judicious responsibility, inasmuch as too steady a jet stream cloys wise recourse clad indubitably.

Meet Moses takes its time to let loose but then settles to bewilder anew.

The Leningrad Cowboys are a real band apparently.

And still perform to this very day.

La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur)

Ceremoniously shifting from breaking wave to breaking wave, cast adrift to buoyantly submerge, the surf submissively dominating, an exacting cyclical shock, one young playwright, fascinated by insubordination, jostling the erotically profane, is interrupted, is, slowly, commodified, undeniably secure in his misplacements, subdued emphatic gusts, assured of their tidal pertinence, to enact the derailment of triumph.

On its own terms.

Ambiguity/ambivalence beguilingly solemnizes the dialectic, the exchange, a protracted piecemeal purge, sensuously persuasive, overpoweringly contained.

As the page turns.

A reading.

Precision.

Opportunity.

Mesmerizing mythical lambasted seduction generously vouchsafes its domineering obsequiousness, in Roman Polanski's crippling La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Furs), existentialism be damned, fiesta.

My favourite filmic adaptation of a play with a small cast and minimal setting is Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night, but La Vénus à la fourrure now firmly occupies second place in my thoughts, due to Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric's powerful performances.

Opulently humble.

The ending was a surprise since it makes a definitive suggestion, although ambiguity remains, only a vestige however.

I would have faded with him tied to the cactus.

There must have been passionate arguments here.

Perhaps the definitive suggestion makes for a stronger ending.

I admit to being a sucker for critical controversy.

Not that there isn't plenty of critical controversy in the film.

You could argue that it's about the aesthetics of critical controversies themselves.

The whole night through.

Don Jon

A sexually active male whose interests and activities generally correspond to a popular idealization of traditional masculinity finds himself attempting to conform to what at first seems a model relationship, in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature length directorial debut Don Jon, seduced by a perfect 10, then willing to abide by related sociocultural courting mechanisms.

There's just one problem.

Well, a couple of problems (she's very bossy).

But the main problem is pornography.

Porno, porno, porno.

This guy's addiction to porn knows no limits and he even prefers it to sex, completely and utterly obsessed, strategies, a psychological playbook, on his phone while waiting for class, always on his mind, no holds barred, wild uncontrollable excessive lust, instantly activated at each and every opportunity.

His new partner is unimpressed and it causes friction in their relationship.

The film intelligently and comically exaggerates a controversial phenomenon to its extreme, lusciously and ironically opposing it to an obstinate depiction of perfection, interspersing familial dynamics at well chosen intervals (best Tony Danza performance ever!), while patiently revealing a workable solution.

It's fun, the script (written by Gordon-Levitt) providing every character with solid lines and developmental motions, firmly rooted in what's often considered to have been normal in the 1950s (with more swearing), subtly launching a raunchy prorated convalescent case-study, whose sustainable solution vivaciously stylizes.

Jon's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) internal turmoil is expressed through road rage.

The pulsating gender based intertextual clashes work well.

Surprisingly tame considering.

Swear those were CFL clips.

Trance

Establishing an historical distinction regarding old and new security precautions taken to protect precious paintings during auctions, right-off-the-bat, thereby foreshadowing both the ways in which Danny Boyle's career has progressed from Shallow Grave to Trance and its contemporary utilitarian utilization of amnesia and hypnosis, narrative tools which frequently showed up in the television shows I watched during my youth, and have possibly been used regularly since then, although I may be blowing the memory out of proportion, Trance has traditional motifs, enticements and motivations (find the painting and cash in) which are thrust into a coherent mesmerizing fugacious distillery, whose economic and romantic film noiresque reversals, complete with critical comments concerning legal structures that prevent female victims of violence from obtaining justice, fitting in relation to the recent horrific suicide of Nova Scotia's beautiful young Rehtaeh Parsons, its diversified ambient tonal modifications, young professional addiction seeks underground remedies for financial miscalculations (gambling debt) which in turn threaten the livelihoods of everyone involved, upend expected outcomes, as if Boyle is precisely aware of what you require him to elucidate, apart from the absent review of Simon's (James McAvoy) extracurricular activities, which I thought would have fit considering that he's responsible for safekeeping 25 million dollar works of art (is that how much it cost to make this film?), most likely because I just saw New World, a review which wouldn't have fit well anyways due to the dense nature of Trance's convolutions (another layer within would have made the brew too lucidly phantasmagorical), destined diagnostic discombobulating detoxification, a less analytical form of Inception, but, if they had found a way, amidst the sex and the greed and the artifice, to stick to the opening sequence more devoutly, while paying the same meticulous attention to unnecessary yet compelling details, I would have perhaps given it a rating of 9.7 instead of 9.4, which really doesn't make much difference.

Not Fade Away

Youth for me is often characterized by spontaneity and conviction, tackling the unforeseen head-on, learning to personally adapt to shifting interrelated paradigms and opportunities, struggling to synthesize components of both the contemporary and historical real.

Not that careful planning doesn't also often play a strategic role, it's just that this aspect of youth is much less romantic, not to say that it isn't more durable, and more likely to win consistently when playing cards.

Tough to say which trajectory is more reckless.

And it's obviously relative too, the 27 year old seeming more youthful than someone in their 50s, etcetera, etcetera, wow.

David Chase's Not Fade Away concerns a number of youths and the rock and roll band they form during the '60s, as well as the familial and amorous relations of one of its members. Success is referred to within as the result of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, from a variety of socio-economic stances.

The question here is, according to this criteria, is Not Fade Away's exploration of youth a success, and if so, does it interrogate the reckless, planting a forest through the trees?

The dialogue also heavily favours the commercial side of art and it's this domain within which the film operates.

It's very calculated.

Throughout I kept thinking that this is the corporate packaged conception of what should be appealing to suburban youth without going so far as to plausibly alienate their parents, based on composite statistical data.

The only possible artistic moment (I should clarify what I mean by art in a book someday) occurs during a point where the film seems pointless, and you're thinking, good lord, corporate pointlessness, how 21st century!

But then the main couple critiques a film they're watching for its pointlessness, after which things become more bourgeois, and a more traditional plot takes shape.

Perhaps I'm too old to comprehend Not Fade Away's spontaneous conviction, but I am old enough to appreciate the skilful ways in which it condenses multidimensional intergenerational issues into a mildly entertaining fictional synopsis.

Still wasn't enough for me though, and if that 10% inspiration doesn't transmit at least the possibility of spontaneous artistic conviction to the rest of the text's perspiration, I can only state, that if packaged corporate youth is a success, with all its missionary incarnations mathematically corporealized, planned twenty years in advance (note that the Rolling Stones, whom I love, are still being used to classify youth 50 years later), and completely lacking spur of the moment improvisation, it's reckless, and therefore youthful, yet hopelessly banal (the wrong side of The Schwartz).

Gus Van Sant's Promised Land offers an escape from this predicament.

Not that this form is ever going to fade away.

Drank a busch tallboy while writing this.

Bonsái

A bond, an extended period of growth, a felicitous fortuitous frequency, historically resonating.

Julio (Diego Noguera) accidentally finds love in Christián Jiménez's Bonsái and its particularized peculiar panoramic proclivities produce a prepositional poignancy.

Subjective logical adaptations to seemingly immutable biological fascinations harness the everlasting.

The simulation of a tangible incorporeality as well as the fabrication of the authentic necessitate themselves when related artistic proliferations are suddenly materialized, due to the verisimilitude encapsulating a missed opportunity.

Beginnings and canonical literary liaisons foundationally reappear.

Melancholic longing permeates each aspect as Julio's amorous recapitulations attempt to revitalize a long lost cohesive fragility.

Or the reification of a dream.

Didn't even know In Search of Lost Time played a role in this film prior to choosing to see it.

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.

Paul

One of the most comfortable science-fiction comedies I've seen, Greg Mottola's Paul introduces several distracting characters whose down home urbanized savvy fuels a quaint campy road trip. This road trip includes science fiction writer Clive Gollings (Nick Frost), his best friend Graeme Willy (Simon Pegg), a devoted Christian (Kristen Wiig), and a pot smoking trash talking fun lovin' alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogan). Paul has escaped from the military facility which held him prisoner for decades and used his advanced knowledge to drive various technological/pop cultural/industrial/. . . economies.

He seeks to return home.

Clive and Graeme have arrived in America from Britain to attend Comic-Con and then travel the midwest. They accidentally meet Paul on the side of a highway one evening and agree to help him reach his destination. In hot pursuit are Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) and his reluctant sidekicks Haggard (Bill Hader) and O'Reilly (Joe Lo Truglio), intent on recapturing Paul so that the government can cut out his brain.

And reclaim their weed.

Every scene in Paul is well written, fun, and entertaining (written by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg). The humour isn't the most cerebral but it takes a lot of brains to be able to successfully write and sustain so many catchy one-liners, skilfully using repetition to recapture laughs throughout. There are many hilarious shots of characters standing there with bewildered quizzical looks on their faces, and including Moses Buggs (John Caroll Lynch) in those near the end was priceless. Knowing that the road trip will not likely be threateningly interrupted produces feelings of comfort, although you would think the military would be searching for Paul in greater numbers (this would have ruined the film however!). Paul structurally references myriad science-fiction classics and it's fun trying to unravel them all (I did not catch them all). Watching Graeme and Ruth Buggs (Wiig) exchange romantic observations works well. Frustration, Frost and Pegg are experts in comedically timing moments of productive frustration.

Are humans smart enough to have come up with all of the technological advances of the last 100 years on their own or have aliens been sharing their related knowledge with them? Paul's answer to this question is "no, they are not, aliens have been sharing their knowledge, period."

Sukiyaki Western Django (Fantasia Fest 2008)

With enough intertextuality to rival an Angela Carter novel, Takashi Miike blitzkriegs his way into the traditional American western, blasting through its chest to lacerate lungs, spleens, livers, pancreases, hot-pumping blood-frothing black and white hearts, leaving enough blood viscidly slithering in its reels to satisfy legions of cinophiliatic sadists, masochists too, craving construction, conflagration, annihilation, irons, flowers, prurience, self-indulgence, honour, death, love, viciously and communally feasting upon one another, in a beautiful beastial banquet of carnally re-formulated comedic and romantic horror, leaving no trope untethered, in a search for individual purity (whose owner wants nothing to do with it). If you are searching for another Western, and only seek to see one and only one ever again, ensure that your pick is Sukiyaki Western Django: there's more artistry in 35 seconds of this searing bloodbath than 56 minutes of 3:10 to Yuma or The Assanination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, although these films seek to achieve objective reverberations of a different breed.

Two Japanese clans meet. In Nevada. They fight, they forage, they flicker and fuck, ravaging culture for idyllic muck, breaking through history's presence in stone, growing a bleeding, convulsing, pulsing, impoverished, unleashed, brazen, tome.