Marvin & Tige

A young kid with no known family blindly struggles to get by, after his mother suddenly passes one forlorn and sombre evening. 

Adapt at finding food yet still suffering from malnutrition, the enticing canned goods he regularly consumes lacking all-encompassing vitamins and nutrients. 

Good fortune serendipitously emerges after a borderline homeless widower takes note, and invites him to stay with him until members of his family can be located.

He's worried since the youngster's on his own and has a bad attitude and can't read or write, his inner-avuncular instructive instincts attempting to find ways to teach and educate.

He's not so great at it though he'll admit his personality lacking warm-hearted discourse, he's blunt and direct and ye olde hard-knocksy which even the child awkwardly observes. 

Nevertheless, his intentions are honourable and he tries his best to give the lad a home.

The makeshift family embracing improvisation.

Abundant arguments. 

Resolute care.

Old school stories flush with sympathy encouraging less severe social structures, wherein which compassionate dynamics overtly showcase heartwarming alternatives. 

There must be no cultural shortage of kind and friendly tales circulating, where people finding themselves down and out are tenderly uplifted with heartfelt sympathy.

Is it foolish to wonder why impoverished circumstances distressingly abound, alongside so much wealth within so many countries where riches proliferate? 

Doesn't a more level playing field lead to more innovation and greater diversity, compelling ideas and irresistible inventions accompanying arts and crafts and newfound technologies?

Supplying millions of impoverished people with food and shelter and healthcare and education, doesn't just lead to healthier communities, it also cultivates a more gifted culture.

It's working all across Europe and also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada & Québec. 

It doesn't even cost that much considering.

And you don't need a massive army. 

Diqiu zuihou de yewan (Long Day's Journey into Night)

Anxieties of the inconsequential reimagine derelict desires, as guilt and a lack of purpose approach disdained oblivion.

Time to recollect, take stock, rediscover, make amends, recapture to crisply qualify, invigorate verbose loose ends.

Down the line, burlap breadcrumbs, wayward whispers coaxed, reclassified, far more questions than awkward answers, far more mystery than concrete clues, a fountainhead dissembling rations, the tracks followed arresting news.

What things were like when it seemed invincible, when life thrilled with chaotic refrain, as if freedom were nimbly tangible, disseminating secreted exclaim.

Ironclad substantial remonstrance disrupting carefree joys, bittersweet and bumptious longing, thick glacial abeyance.

Luo Hongwu (Jue Huang) navigates vague memories to adjust and define a feeling he can't recall, as if there's something ecstatically slumbering within exhaled mnemonic mists.

But the path isn't viscid or binding, there's still room for alternative flair, perhaps since the shoreline's receding, he's finally found something there.

Labyrinthine waking dream.

Not as unconscious as Bergman or Lynch, but still more surreal than shocked or cerebral, Gan Bi's Diqiu zuihou de yewan (Long Day's Journey into Night) reminisces to invoke cheer, without revealing aims or objectives.

There's a narrative, a story, but it's broken up like a cryptic jigsaw, with striking flashbacks that emerge unbidden, which winds clarify with mortal gravity.

Like a series of vignettes prevailingly bizarre, you can agilely pick and choose your favourites, then comatosely piece them together, with variable enlightening savour.

It approaches the macabre but never loses sight of the real, or at least what I've come to associate with logic, keeping rooted yet ready to blast off, like scaled traditional tracks mutating.

Search for the lost kernel.

Diversify breadth lengthwise.

Keep your mind active and open.

Feel free to lose sight of your goal.

*Not if you're playing professional sports.

There are shades of Inception artistically interwoven within, to keep you dislodged and uncertain, without structured definitive gains.

Have to start somewhere though, it's verifiable, at some point you have to write those first words, phrases, sentences, with some sort of goal in mind perhaps, that's bound to conjure innumerable alternatives.

Endemically.

Good companion film for Inception or Lost Highway.

I stand by my use of the word "cheer".

Swiss Army Man

Languishing in loneliness lugubrious in doubt, hangin' high the penetrating suicidal shouts, when suddenly upon the beach betwixt the waves and sand, a body flatulent in thrust emerges ampersand.

Friendship fervid moribund enriching live decay, frolicking within the flora ursine twitchy craze, batteries a slowly pining loves lost intercepted, consummate stardust inverted glacial verdant 'spectives.

Lessons lounging lynchpins gouging finch the new companion, eagerly consumes the trust with gaseous abandon, launch relight ignite insights the leveraged absentia, automatic crisp erratic exercised 'fluenza.

Visitors a challenging courteous ebbs and flows, calisthenic plights endemic rockets robins hoe, curious the interactions surely socialized, tricks refastened sparred Sebastian glimpsed etherealized.

Caught up in surfin' chagrin like dismal diuretics, forward movement grooved attunements exiled resurrected, burly bitchin' swift restitchin' crucial conversation, wild restyled agile nubile explicit intonations.

Back within the suburbs thinly overwrought disguise, aware the stare lays bare the madness cruising lunar tides, imbued exotic dues hypnotic cloistered campy crystal, jostlin' prim the seraphim bewildered glistenin' gristle.

Loved Swiss Army Man.

What an idea.

Great performance from Radcliffe (Manny).

I've been waiting to see something different from him for awhile.

I don't see everything he does.

Mr. Holmes

Reflections on lives lived and current pastimes, a tripartite treatise, excavated thoughts on loneliness, the life of the mind, a life of service, three families torn by grief, Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), sleuth, benefactor, cause, troubled later in life by hindsight's haze, fortuitous fog cutting, carving out a literary track.

Conducive.

One mother longs for her lost children, another takes care of her son, one son lost his father to empire, families surreally strung.

Bees with their honey, organized, assiduous, living a life of harmony and order, perniciously plagued par les guêpes.

With the aid of his housekeeper's (Laura Linney as Mrs. Munro) clever son Roger (Milo Parker),
Sherlock tends his hives while painfully looking back.

Has he done his best to promote unity?

Or functioned as unwitting predator?

Apicultural endeavours, interrogating the solitary life.

Mr. Holmes couldn't be more different than Guy Ritchie's films.

Or any other manifestation of the iconic detective I've seen.

A pasteurized yet potent clarification of the facts, Sherlock's existential longing, a search for wisdom's tranquility.

For rest.

For satisfaction.

He seems to embrace related impossibilities in the end, while finding what joy he can in thoughts prone to melancholia.

Sherlock the retired country gentleperson.

Taking care of a family.

Keeping his bees.

The Age of Adaline

Coyly acquiescing to time passing, chronicling cultural rhapsodies like timid mellow echoes, epochs merging and diverging like predetermined burgeoned whiplash, photo luminescent filaments, spurned inchoate cracks, immortality strikes in The Age of Adaline, and with it comes frayed responsibilities, the importance of remaining impersonal, hesitant refusals to love.

Aloof highlander.

She can't get close, watch while others develop, like physically disinclined incandescence, engaged in lifelong learning, observant, patient, withdrawn.

But a suitor emerges who will not yield, and temptation entices her dormant romantic desires.

Euphoria exfoliates before fate steps in, a cosmic interpersonal strike, socializing sequestered surveillances, interdisciplinary constructs, radiance mesmerized in bloom.

Like father like son.

Maddening immersed fraternities.

A beautiful film, saliently capturing the awestruck, the in/visible, historically intensifying inflamed conjugal passions, a universal library, modesty in timeless curation.

I thought it was odd that the FBI eventually stopped searching for Adaline (Blake Lively), because it would have been so easy to find her by following her daughter, although, in hindsight, continuing with that plot thread would have added an irritating sense of oppression, whose lingering aftershocks haunt the film regardless, as it wisely focuses on romance, delicately arranging an iridescent jaunty bouquet, from securely self-imposed isolation.

Distant, tragic, torn.

Good decision.

Fading Gigolo

Financial fissures beget liaising insurances while potential clients attract attentive patrolpersons in John Turturro's Fading Gigolo, wherein the world's oldest profession brings good fortune to Murray (Woody Allen) and Fioravante (John Turturro), suddenly caught-up in an historical vortex, secularly lucrative, religiously blasphemed.

The film unreels pleasantly enough, risks taken, rewards cashed-in, comical awkwardness syncopating charm, Midnight Cowboy's lighter side.

Fioravante is a strong character, mild-manneredly reflexive, sensitive yet powerful, equanimously conscious.

His love for Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) isn't tragic or heartbreaking, more like a mature delicate yet robust scintillating red wine, caressed then invested, with lucid modest elegance.

About 50 minutes in I thought, is it starting to drag?, but then Avigal appeared again, and I was immediately reminded of my nightly glass of red wine, and then knew that it wasn't starting to drag at all.

Ancient religious practices follow, a ridiculous patriarchal kerfuffle, chillingly yet playfully impassing an ancient contemporary dialectic.

The negative side of prostitution, apart from a requisite ethical dilemma, is totally absent from the film, but it is a lighthearted comedy, presenting issues of race/ethnicity, identity, and community from a temperately confrontational perspective.

Apart from the nut with the baseball bat.

Not sure if I'm reading too much into some of Woody Allen's introductory lines, but from an off-the-wall point of view, it's as if he's handing off his reins to Mr. Turturro, either sincerely or mischievously, who proves he could be a worthy successor.

There's a volatile scene near the beginning involving a traffic accident.

Minor characters feud to introduce Dovi (Liev Schreiber).

More scenes like this one throughout, not necessarily volatile, just ones which interject cameos to inquisitively motivate the action, work well.

Highlighting the multidimensional nature of the world at large.

Thereby romanticizing the role of individuals within it.

He sort of does this with Murry's kids, but they have a direct relationship to a major character, which lessens their impact.

Dabba (The Lunchbox)

The hearty provision of delicious nourishment slowly melts Saajan's (Irrfan Khan) frozen exterior in Ritesh Batra's Dabba (The Lunchbox), Ila (Nimrat Kaur) enraptured as someone finally takes note, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) benefitting from the frosty fallout.

As depicted in the film, Indian lunch delivery is a complicated procedure, providing employment for many, their services applauded by Harvard.

Lunch, potentially homemade, is cooked, picked-up, dropped-off at a central location, then distributed to hungry workers, as the day's labour approaches its extended period of rest.

In Ila's case, the lunch she prepares for her husband is delivered to the wrong person.

Curmudgeony Saajan revels in his good fortune even if his bouncy inquisitive replacement (he's retiring) Shaikh continuously annoys him with his enthusiastic go-getting.

Ila discovers that her husband isn't receiving his lunch and begins sending Saajan letters, the two slowly developing a fledgling romance thereafter, Saajan gently mending her broken heart.

Hesitantly yet tenderly unreeling, Dabba quotidianly explores the thoughts of two modest upstanding hard working subjects, their difficulties with the im/moral dimension of their love lettering, or the joys/hardships associated with transgressing cultural codes.

The film required something else to hold it together, and Shaikh's presence, youth contending with age, adds flavourful ingredients to its recipe, rounding out its amorous intentions with related thoughts concerning integrity, friendship, and saturated job markets.

Ila's relationship with her Auntie (Bharati Achrekar) achieves similar ends albeit from a domestic standpoint.

The lotus.

Whitewash

Bland mundane blunt verisimilitudes cordially plow absurd fail-safes in Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais's campy Whitewash.

It's not that it's bland.

The characters and situations are somewhat bland but the ways in which they mitigate predetermined discourses of the sympathetic hyperstylizes their cerebral forthcomings.

A down-to-earth puzzling routine pervasively co-opts its miscalculated immersions but Bruce's (Thomas Haden Church) struggle to legitimize his poorly executed attempts to avoid the truth apply a lively coat of untarnished wherewithal.

During his discussions with Paul (Marc Labrèche), and others, he tries not to be blunt, but lacks the finely tuned verbal veneers necessary to convivially cloak his to-the-point observations, although he doesn't have many alternatives when interacting with Paul, whose death may not even be as accidental as it appears.

He remains cordial while hiding-out in the wilderness but guilt and fear infiltrate his interactions, causing him to appear awkward and creepy, loneliness, indulgence, bad luck.

He has to pick up supplies from time to time.

He drives a snow removal machine.

The more I think about it, the film seems less and less absurd, as if it's trying to trick you into thinking it's absurd by exfoliating the unexceptional.

Which makes for some constructive camp.

The previews were pleasantly misleading.

I've wanted to see this since I heard Thomas Haden Church was being paired-up with Marc Labrèche.

Brilliant.

Casting by Margery Simkin.

If you're thinking, this winter's been long and harsh, go see this film.

Not only is it worth seeing, it's perfect for a long harsh winter's February.

On par with Premier Amour and Vic + Flo ont vu un ours.

Chinese Take-Away (Un cuento chino)

A random gravitational incongruity crushes a soaring romance after which one partner haplessly finds himself mired in a self-inflicted mimesis.

Thus Jun (Ignacio Huang) travels from China to Argentina in search of his uncle where he meets a frigid loner (Ricardo Darín as Roberto) by chance who is firmly set in his ways.

Jun doesn't speak any Spanish and Roberto dislikes house guests but the good samaritan Roberto keeps locked within persuades his finicky craftsmanship.

But as those with whom he must interact to find Jun's uncle ironically do not posses the same level of social reflexivity, things take a lightheartedly combative turn, until fate forecasts its fortuitous frequency.  

Decisions made, gut garnished, ethos, codified.

But it's really not that cheesy, I mean, Sebastián Borensztein's Chinese Take-Away (Un cuento chino) does press the curds but if you're interested in seeing a heartwarmingly blunt piece of extroverted reticence, primarily focused on an eccentric small business owner's stubbornly withdrawn principled hardboiled tact, wherein fascists and communists alike take their comeuppances, it's fun to watch.

Sensitive, enumerative, obdurate, and tender, assuredly a go-to-option if dating and seeking to sneak in an alternative cross-cultural b/romantic comedy.

I'm assuming that's what people who date are trying to do. 

Regardless of gender.

Magnifica Presenza (Magnificent Presence)

Radiating an offbeat, gentle, luminescent reflexivity, Magnifica Presenza's Pietro Pontechievello (Elio Germano) works in a bakery while striving to become an actor.  

After renting a house, he's visited by the ghosts of a theatre troupe (Compangia Appollonio) who worked for the resistance and were betrayed by their feature during World War II.

They strike up a friendship and their influence ameliorates his performance while imbuing his social interactions with experimental antiquated idiosyncrasies.

Awkwardly yet humanistically elevating while humorously tenderizing an artist's ambitions, subtly suggesting that blending the contemporary with the historical can lead to a broader understanding of one's self, or the surmounting of socio-cultural barriers (the stigma of homosexuality) more suited to a different time (within the film's temporal boundaries the stigma of homosexuality isn't prominent), and simultaneously warning against and romanticizing the internalization of the cult of the hero, Magnifica Presenza lovingly offers a clinical diagnosis of loneliness alongside a curative aid.

Boundlessly allusive and reticently merry.

In the mind's eye.

L'Incrédule (The Skeptic)

Two couples forge a spur-of-the-moment friendship in Federico Hidalgo's L'Incrédule (The Skeptic), after which a small business is inaugurated whose indeterminate outputs whimsically delineate the ambiguous.

The service they provide is known as the Charuflauta, which, from what I gathered, is a cure for loneliness.

None of the characters are able to definitively describe it, however, or figure out whether or not they should seek payment for their efforts.

When their first clients require a practical application of their abstraction, the comedic results lampoon the melancholic while stultifying the hyper-analytical.

Great film, mischievously mixing a broad array of sociological, personal, financial, artistic, and conjugal intersections, loosely framed within a recurring photographic motif, which establishes a reverberating ontological/epistemological dialectic, in order to clarify a sense of belonging.

Cheeky, uplifting, indecisive, self-assured.

In regards to the encapsulations of the concretely abstract.

Talk to Her (Hable con ella)

Love is a strange emotion, awakening oceanic depths of creativity, thought, and malevolence, to be deconstructed, refurnished, and psycho-analyzed, as maelstroms, typhoons, and sunsets qualify particular epochs and re-materialize evocative conjectures.

Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (Hable con ella) examines love's destructively revitalizing spirit by introducing two men both in love with women in comas. Benigno Martín (Javier Cámara) loves Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer whose been in his care for 4 years. He talks to her constantly and treats her as if she's cognizant in the hopes of one day awakening her from her slumber. Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti) loves Lydia González (Rosario Flores), a volatile matador whose managed to successfully compete in bull fighting's chauvinistic domain. After having been gorged by a bull, little hope is predicted for her survival. Benigno and Marco strike up a related friendship and contrast one another productively. While Benigno possesses the fantastic self-taught grit and determination of a confident yet fragile artistic tragedy, Marco is a journalist and thoroughly educated in the 'realistic traditions of rationality.' Benigno's passionate and devoted approach has a resounding affect on the broken Marco, whose objectivity is eventually remodelled by the clearcut desires of his sensitivities.

One of the most affective investigations of friendship I've seen, Talk to Her presents a subjective ideal tempered by practice whose theoretical forecasts are realistically detonated. In the aftermath a friend awaits, patiently supporting his fallen compatriot, through thick and thin.