Onibaba

The miseries of civil war afflict a nation with desolate abstemious dereliction, crops having failed people starving while the thund'rous death machine brings moribund destruction. 

An older woman awaits the return of her conscripted son with increasing desperation, as does her daughter-in-law their resolute team struggling to survive the scurrilous agency. 

To find food and maintain their health they murder stray samurai who show up in their swamp, and sell their armour and swords and trinkets to a dissolute profiteer flush with millet. 

One day the son/husband's friend whom he left with long ago appears, with a sad tale denoting the end of their imagined saviour heads hang low.

But he takes a shine to the widowed maiden who is far too destitute to deny her will, their resultant coupling enraging the elder who sees starvation as her only future. 

She pleads with the worldly opportunist to let her partner in crime live free.

He loves her far too much however.

To deny his innocent jouissance. 

A sordid examination of despondency as dismally applied to wanton logic, people struggling to find food while others flee through reckless innovation. 

Grim realities to thoughtfully consider the frugal basics embracing thrift, if you value your life it's best not to join although there's no telling what desertion may aggregate. 

The atheist basks in comfort after escaping the feckless bloodshed, living day to day even hour to hour but remaining certain of his scorned trajectory. 

The elder employing supernatural tricks to convince her compatriot not to leave, the eventual extensive forlorn irony as unexpected as it is deceiving. 

Lost in the luscious swamps of medieval Japan driven mad by hunger.

Enabling strategies accidentally emergent.

Ethereal endowments.

Spiritually embalmed.  

Into the Deep

It was difficult to take Into the Deep seriously until a friend verified it wasn't a mockumentary, it seemed so definitively rehearsed that I had trouble believing real people were being interviewed.

I read on Wikipedia that several people didn't want to be involved with the film after what happened, and that they asked for their scenes to be removed to avoid being exposed to public scrutiny.

It looks like their scenes were then reshot with real actors trying to seem as if their interviews were authentic, but it appears as if actors are trying to fake real life and it doesn't work at all.

Then there's what actually took place which seems even more improbable, a mad genius takes a reporter out for a ride in his submarine and then murders her and dumps the body.

He had been planning a trip to space and hoped to get there before his rivals, whom he had recently worked for until the disputes grew too intense.

Since he was hoping to travel to space, he inspired bright documentary filmmaker Emma Sullivan to follow him, and create a movie about his life for peeps curious about bold endeavour.

As she filmed she captured raw footage of a fledgling psychopath perhaps emboldened, by his sudden emergence into pop culture and its corresponding associations of invincibility. 

Which of course are rather misguided but if the film is true (honestly, I'm still not convinced), he thought he could murder someone in his submarine and then dump the body and get away with it.

When parts of the body are found shortly thereafter he has a wild tale for the police, which continues to change every time they find fresh evidence, until he's finally locked away.

I'm not sure if it's a syndrome, but with the ubiquitous flourishing of social media, along with ye olde traditional televisual outlets, it seems like many will take mad risks to go viral.

Supported by a culture which elevates malevolence and consistently associates it with power through film (even winning Oscars), when people find themselves in the popular spotlight, they may do whatever it takes to go viral.

Reality TV never faded either and with Twitter and Facebook its sphere of influence expanded significantly, whereas on the one hand you have people trained to work in media (CBC, BBC, CNN, NBC . . .), and on the other, a mass improvised colossus 😎.

Perhaps that's why the people being interviewed in Into the Deep seem like ragtag actors, they're trying to be real like their favourite reality TV stars while forgetting they are aren't acting (or are they?).

The story's no doubt incredible how did something like this ever take place?

The world has fundamentally mutated.

There's so much freedom if you live offline. 

Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend)

Playful deceit with murderous intent wickedly tricks resigned desperation into committing uncharacteristic crimes in Wim Wenders's Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend), the lucrative potential payoff producing imaginative cures for dissembled diagnoses, beforehand, while innocence still tenderizes, while conscience remains impenitent, while a child acknowledges fraternity, while a wife willingly confides, the sudden possibility, the imposing tactile ease, inherent obscurities coaxing refined obsolescence, disappearing into the fold, in possession of purist panacea.

Concurrently, a fraudulent easel facilitates brushstrokes which comfortably pay the bills for both facsimilator and procurer, a man of the world always eager to make new friends, his kaleidoscopic contacts adroitly brimming with opportunistic fervour.

Begrudged meetings of minds.

Corruption classed exclusive.

The film's mix of grizzled despondent frightened action and curious childlike malevolent pause maliciously meows with tantalizing solemnity, like you've been dating a cool partner for a while and have run out of ideas, your whiskers rustling with uncertainty as you acquiesce to their control.

Cat style, things are still rather loose knit and unconcerned but the spontaneous bursts of profound inspiration startlingly ignite uncharted expeditionary crazes.

Visceral emotions.

Subconscious realization.

Like the ingredients for grandma's seductive shepherd's pie, Der Amerikanische Freund reflexively socializes with clandestine variability, each mouthful uniquely pronounced, the devouring of morsels plain yet sublime.

Taken in its entirety, it timorously yet nonchalantly plays dangerous games as it heuristically high jumps, surprisingly settled with enterprising leaps and bounds, intuitively melding cautious authenticity with bold improvisation, it angelically clasps demons, in cloaks of aspen rue.

Murder on the Orient Express

Possessing an inexhaustible gift for anaesthetizing extraordinarily complex behemoths, resolved riddles exemplifying multidisciplinary mettle, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) fittingly decides it's time for a vacation, and boards the lauded Orient Express in search of computational repose.

But just as he begins to exercise his literary imagination, a hardened degenerate comes a quizzically calling, in search of world renowned vigilance, to serve and protect his undignified exemptions.

Having already proven that dignity is something he regards philosophically inasmuch as he takes manifold vicissitudes into intellectual account before making variable judgments, he still refuses the thug's request and continues to seek solitude.

Only to awaken to discover that a fellow passenger has been, murdered, and that he must therefore astutely detect once more, to avoid indirectly condoning the free movement of violent criminals.

His voyage having been impeded by a serendipitous avalanche.

He flexes inquisitively.

As his investigation commences.

Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express condenses the famed detective's sleuthing into a series of short but meaningful exchanges, each fully charged with guilt and inculpability, cloaked details deductively electrifying a productive narrative gridiron.

With somewhat more formal spectacle (production value) than I'm used to seeing in stories concerning culturally elevated investigatory phenomenons.

I rather enjoy watching the great detectives/inspectors/private investigators/dudes piece together clues delineating nefarious acts, with my parents, but I'm more used to seeing them explore within televisual boundaries.

I'm happy to see the actors who haven't yet become heartthrobs, starlets, or characters on demand cut their chops in a well written episode (usually around 2 hours in length), and am often not that concerned with how much screen time they each receive.

Indubitably.

When this format is given a much larger budget, as it should be more regularly, with many more famous actors, I certainly appreciate the cinematography, along with corresponding cinematic eccentricities, but if it ends with one of my favourite actors not having been given a larger role, when they could have been, or if the pressures of having more critical exposure make it seem rushed, it can be somewhat of a disappointment, one which might have been dismissed had their been a lower budget with multiple unknowns.

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy Branagh's take on Poirot, the cunning nature of the collective revenge reverberating with vindicated compunction.

Poirot himself mesmerizes, and the eclectic yet cohesive jigsaw cast commands the puzzling scenes judiciously.

Another 45 to 90 minutes though, too much of a commercial focus (were Frost or Morse ever trying to make money?[the commercial approach worked more successfully for Guy Ritchie methinks]), how many more tributaries could have been navigated with that much more time?

Thus, I'm hoping there's an extended version coming out soon, which adds more depth of character to a film that's already highly thought provoking as it scintillatingly yet diminutively reprimands.

Crimson Peak

I think Crimson Peak was meant to be funny, to be a dis/possessed take on an old style of filmmaking that used to relish in its mediocrity before succumbing to mass alterations in taste.

If this is the case, I didn't get it, and although it might have been paying tribute to a bygone era of gaudy enterprise, it doesn't change the fact that this film suppresses.

It's hard to write that, I usually love Guillermo del Toro's films, larger than life macabre matriculations fluidly dictating realities of the fantastical.

Crimson Peak's production design is on par with his earlier work but the story and its associated devices are uniformly unexceptional and consistently dull.

It seems to be taking itself seriously throughout, that's its greatest shortcoming.

And the intermittent bursts of graphic violence taken out on historical paradigms, the stricken aristocrat avenging herself on the rise of the bourgeoise for instance, seem out of place in a horror film that's so resoundingly not scary.

If it had seemed comic, like it was seriously making fun of itself, it may have corrosively triumphed.

It didn't seem that way to be me though, not, not, at all.

Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe) does put in a great performance however.

She's got talent, and commands every scene she's in.

La isla mínima (Marshland)

Fastidious expediency, Mississippi's burning, clenched vicious smouldering license, eagerly applied, kept in check by stolid capacity, a team, an investigation, creepy crawlies eviscerating the night, extinguishing flames, chomping chomp chomp, youth and innocence curiously explore to their horror, the aged preying on them like craven vampiric necrocities, their tracks covered, their pastimes grim, flouting respectability with mechanized chagrin.

The monstrous hunting the monstrous by employing monstrosities to covet the truth.

Concealment.

Parthenon.

La isla mínima (Marshland) uses a sombre criminal text, employing politics and professionalism to smoothly and steadily increase local tensions, thereby critically examining post-fascist Spain, the survival of perplexing methodologies blended with contemporary romance to question means and bitter ends, crucially constructed, like hardboiled lucid dreaming.

Restraint abounds.

You get the sense that it could have been much darker, but level heads kept things neat to rely more on integrity than sensation.

It presents an ethical dilemma in terms of using violent policing methods to bring about social democratic ends.

I think what's happening in the film needs to be considered as a case, working within a system functioning on a case by case basis, still possessing many remnants of a society that applied such methods to every case, many of the cases likely involving peaceful people who simply didn't like Franco.

I want to see criminals such as the ones depicted in La isla mínima in prison.

But that doesn't mean I want to see every movement of the entire population monitored and scrutinized.

Pejorative panopticon.

Panoramically percolating.

If you monitor and scrutinize the entire population's movements then freedom itself becomes a prison.

If people can function on a case by case basis, while obviously still looking for recurring patterns of behaviour that forge a logical connection between crime and culprit, without employing them dogmatically inasmuch as each case is unique and individual, they will likely still catch many such villains, and learn to appreciate the distinction between reaction and restraint.

Isn't that what they often do already?

Know need for the CyberStasi.

If cooler heads prevail.

Irrational Man

Hold on.

Situation critical.

It's been a long time since I haven't liked a Woody Allen film.

Curses.

Merry-go-round and around and around.

It seems like a joke, Irrational Man.

What I think happened was that Allen realized his script wasn't on par with his typical texts, and salvaged what he could by including recurring lackadaisically upbeat music, which consistently states, "whoops", while deliberately editing scenes too quickly, or including rather short scenes that could have been left out, to formally chide philosophy, mock the corporate tendency to pack too much information into too little a packet, and reflect on the emptiness of existence, when one never has time to calmly sit back and reflect.

When you take a bunch of philosophers and reduce what they're saying to a couple of trite statements, the engagement with philosophical texts is lost, Xavier Dolan making the same error with literature in Laurence Anyways, if they're not the focus, it's better just to leave them be.

There are so many banalities and clichés in Irrational Man, leap-frogging their way through the script like giddy platitudinous inanimate cockadoodles, inadequately developing character and then arrogantly assuming firm bonds between character and audience, that it's difficult to sit through, until the music picks up again.

Take the Russian roulette scene.

If a professor actually plays Russian roulette at a party with students, firing the gun several times, you would think it would have a greater impact on the story, but it practically disappears immediately afterwards, like it wasn't significant, like Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) was comparing prices on toothpaste or blankly examining bark on a tree.

Perhaps Irrational Man really is Allen's subtle satirical crack at corporate filmmaking.

It does co-star Queen of the Indies Parker Posey (Rita).

And Allen has stood outside the system for decades while generally still delivering high quality accessible thought provoking films.

I've heard people critically condemning Allen's examinations of relationships and he seems to be acknowledging their insights by exaggerating these faults in Irrational Man, the male protagonist's relationships within being way freakin' ridiculous.

There was an interesting critique of romanticism mentioned by Jill's (Emma Stone) Father (Ethan Phillips), however, that caught my attention.

Utopias, goodwill, fluffery, I admit that such ideas, when applied to daily life, often seem bizarre and out of touch, especially in the "we're all hopelessly craven so why don't we just act that way?" nihilistic disengaged pandora, but without them you leave yourself vulnerable to total and complete ethical unaccountability, because they set practical guidelines which apply foresight to fascination, in order to uphold something greater than common individuality.

One additional point.

In regards to my interests in action and science-fiction films, note that gregarious generalizations about literature and philosophy (etc.) in dramatic films often work more successfully disguised as character traits for monsters and heroes in action sci-fi, like in, one more time, Mad Max: Fury Road.

The action is the argument.

Surveillance, likewise.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is at it again in Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein, a Hammer Films production. Having grown audacious after reanimating a small dog, the Doctor sets his sights on the construction of the perfect human being, to be made up of parts cut away from fitting lifeless specimens. His partner and former tutor Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) contends that his path can only lead to evil but Frankenstein refuses to heed his warning and proceeds unabated. But the local crop of corpses will not supply a top rate brain which leads Victor to wine and dine a revered scientist (Paul Hardtmuth as Professor Bernstein) before murdering him later on in the evening. Krempe discovers what he has done and in the ensuing struggle damages the sought after material. Is this what causes Frankenstein's creation to act childishly and violently or was it the fact that it was brought back to life in the first place that guaranteed its inability to cognitively function?

Having subverted the laws of nature.

Fisher's film doesn't answer this question but does provide those searching to see Peter Cushing play someone besides Grand Moff Tarkin with the chance to watch him at work early on in his career. His performance is convincing enough even though several scenes could have benefited from additional takes, and more crafty editing, and another round of dialogue adjustments, and a keener insight into the logical timing of key events which move the action along. But The Curse of Frankenstein isn't about editing and dialogue and presenting captivating enticing scenes. It's about shooting a readymade script in as little time as possible in order to capitalize on the product, reinvest, and do it all over again and again while cultivating a receptive audience and slowly learning to enhance your constructions as time steadily passes.

And spending most of the budget on the lab, wherein there are many pretty scientific instruments and bubbling beakers and frothing 'fermentations' and a Frankenstein (Christopher Lee).

Desperately seeking life.

Careful

Oedipal values. Strict discipline. Polished refinement. Unyielding dedication.

The Alpine village of Tolzbad is stricken with alimentary sentiments whose counterproductive yearnings threaten its cohesive fortitude. Silence and obedience are resolutely inculcated as objective reminders of embryonic resuscitations remain cast off and docile. Dreams serve to lacerate adhesions, while palpating intoxicating allegiances, whose nostalgic loyalties resist ethereal pressures and condemn those seeking both forbidden and propitious pleasures, arduously seek satisfaction.

In the flesh.

The vocal chords of animals must be cut. Hearts punctured after death ensure eternal sleep.

I will do anything for you.

Relinquished yet stilted rebirth.

A comedic sense of terror is dramatically worked into a stifling set of immutable characteristics which maintain a supple lighthearted generosity in Guy Maddin's imaginative Careful.

Multilayered scene after dynamic scene segregates its narrative from the realm of conscious production while providing a template for the remodelling of the expected whose boutique would most likely remain concealed.

Purposefully frustrating or frustrated with a purpose, Careful introduces a disengaged sense of disingenuous perplexity whose recalcitrant creative ethos should be heuristically taken seriously.

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.

Rubber

Quentin Dupieux intelligently and playfully pulls off a ridiculous off-beat puréed slice of incongruity with Rubber, a film which challenges you to keep watching even though its subject matter is incredibly discombobulated.

Question: can we improve upon the typical Hollywood horror-comedy by stripping it down to its bear essentials, presenting an inanimate villain, crafting a film within a film, and then virulently exterminating its audience?

Or to put it another way, is watching a tire that rolls around randomly blowing up things and people preferable to series such as Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer (note that I did like Final Destination 2)?

Without providing any back story explaining why or how the tire gained consciousness and why it decided to start randomly destroying.

The answer is yes, it can be improved upon, and a back story is not required, if you don't care in the slightest what your audience thinks but still take the time to expertly craft an audacious non sequitur which appears as if it was haphazardly constructed.

Rather than simply destroying the minds of its audience with nauseating dialogue and unimaginative viaducts, Rubber simply destroys its audience half way through after they ravenously gorge on a roasted turkey.

Rather than trying to seem as if there's a point or introduce something saccharinely tragic, Rubber makes it quite clear that there is no reason structuring its dementia, and proceeds to unreel unabashedly.

But nothing can exist without placing itself within a multifaceted logical fulcrum, as each subject is free to express their interpretive difference in regards to the ways in which artistic objects are constructed (or sporting objects etc.), thanks to the freedom built into democratic societies made viable by the internet, and it's possible to gain constructive insights into complicated dynamics from bizarre examples of lucid frivolity, if you search for them (search for them within the new show Picnicface, especially the Lost Highway themed episode wherein the Mystery Man looks like John Waters).

Reason underlies Rubber's tracks although its content salutes insanity. But it's only insane from the point of view of the monotonous narrative that has been produced to shackle the many as the few exercise their free self-development (Terry Eagleton), and from this point of view, accentuating difference, it makes nothing but perfect sense, and a rational explanation is presented for its not so subtle ending.