Miracle on 34th Street

It often seems like the jaded objective concrete materialistic obsession, is a feature of contemporary times which didn't exist in bygone days. 

The lack of spiritual enlightenment often attributed to common sense, seems like it wouldn't have existed long ago when cultures were more fantastically grounded. 

But if 1947 is the time marker which correspondingly took place 78 years ago, the agile contention that the present is less imaginative loses momentum in Miracle on 34th Street. 

For within its festive reels we find compulsive dismissals of the Holiday Spirit, and exacting rituals tempestuously inclined to rid its culture of compelling levity. 

Does the indefatigable spiritual not viscerally sustain scientific experiment, through the steady encouragement of alternative endeavours that strategic reasoning would have never conceived on its own?

Does the existence of incorporeal ethereal intangible dynamic being, not facilitate unorthodox thinking that leads to new developments in scientific theory?

We find stale and overwrought examples of traditional skeptical and cynical thought, dismissing the essence of Christmas with contemptuous vitriol in 34th Street.

Even as the remarkable benefits of harmless play lead to exceptional results, bitter acrimonious characters still crudely objurgate Santa's existence. 

Even as he exhaustively displays a meticulous knowledge of toys and where to find them, while speaking different languages with intricate foresight and linguistic flexibility, he's still excessively critiqued by agnostic stipulations from a roundabout age, and even thrown in a mental institution for boldly defending lighthearted humour. 

Should spiritual folk condemn the scientists to an improvised world of non-traditional reckoning, or should psychiatry and reason clerically expel all otherworldly thoughts from cultivated continuums? 

Does a grounded focus on reason and science not lay the framework for reliable consistency, while alternative arrangements cosmically endowed exalt sleigh bell sensations in ceremonious flight?

Does the fortuitous blend not effortlessly synthesize yin and yang with reflexive sanity?

That brings about open-minded efficiencies? 

Magic and moonbeams.

Hot cocoa. 

Gingerbread. 

What About Bob?

The traditional meeting once a week between the maladjusted and their doctors, the routine format innocently encouraging freeflowing thoughts and observations.

A set time-limit producing boundaries within which to fluidly optimize potential, the information shared creating a narrative through which diagnoses can be stipulated.

The expansion or contraction of the framework occasionally necessary confidentially speaking, as dull humdrum repetitive stasis ridiculously shifts into ludicrous gear.

The quaint determination of coordinates bringing psychiatrist and patient together outside the office, likely universally frowned upon as far as professional relationships go, the possibility of misguided friction leading to awkward unorthodox quandaries, inherently structured by comic accident but at times reaching obsessed despondency.

The giving of advice so often unrewarded and intermittently resented by the genuinely insane, who can't accept a humble position within any sociocultural contract.

Tender affection can also characterize habitual desires to play or fraternize, degrees of comfort misread misinterpreted as unexpected meetings flow.

While the offering of modest counsel hopes to clarify points of confusion, the continuous embrace of unsolicited comment forged through madness can churn and fluster.

What seems irritating to you in consistent surprising recurrent conversation, may seem much less irksome to others who only entertain it in modest intervals.

As you point out your irritation and they swiftly counter with disbelief, the vexation itself can exemplify the obnoxious development of a syndrome.

If typically ensconced meaningfully within a reasonable scientific realm, burgeoning unacademic study may stifle clear-headed lucid imagination. 

Generally confined to the family unit it seems rather harmless as expressed by children, but continual confrontation with compulsive lunacy can sincerely obfuscate acute illustrations.

Steadfast reason having maladroitly transformed into random illogical glib orchestrations, dependable equilibrium wildly shuts down and leaves incoherent tense bewilderment.

Thank god for the onset of summer gleefully shouts parents everywhere.

Who have hopefully found enough time.

To regroup, decompress, and sterilize. 

The Cars that Ate Paris

It's tough to say what's bound to happen if you leave isolated communities on their own. 

Should representatives of a central government keep in consistent contact as they blossom?

If they had in The Cars that Ate Paris, the situation may have been different, and the thriving supplemental auto parts industry may not have flourished so devastatingly. 

The leader would have been proactively concerned.

He's attempting to facilitate familial community.

Local inhabitants can routinely depend on an uplifting speech to keep them motivated. 

He's not particularly adept at generating sincere enthusiasm, yet still attempts to absolutely encourage village-wide co-operation and understanding.

Inhabitants have grown to be somewhat restless due to a lack of sure and steady employment, and have taken to recklessly engage in spirited acts of hard-driven disjunction. 

One individual survives and isn't sent to the local hospital, where outsiders are usually lobotomized after their cars are blown off the road. 

He lacks vision and focus and usually seems quite friendly and unobtrusive, and is therefore permitted to live in the town assuming he doesn't cause any mischief.

Xenophobia is taken to ridiculous degrees as the murderous townsfolk routinely express themselves, alone and forgotten in the far distant Outback where rarely a traveller comes passing through.

Absurd no doubt but indubitably commensurate with low-budget frights from around the world, its innovative use of vehicular vocation demonstrating odd technoautomotive authenticity.

The ways in which they doctor up their cars with intricate designs and supplemental parts, reminded me of Fury Road and I wondered if The Cars that Ate Paris had been historically instructional. 

Then it occurred to me that the phenom's likely widespread across the sweltering resourceful Outback, and that these films are artistic examples of something I've never seen in North America. 

I would argue that the moment when the clueless lobotomized outsiders show up at the mandatory town dance, transports The Cars that Ate Paris to another level, that's as shocking as it is original.

A challenge if you like old school cult films the existence of which encourage disbelief.

Before heading out on the road.

Destination carefree and uncharted. 

The Starling

No telling how the shock of unexpectedly losing someone will short-circuit, but there's no doubt it's an awful experience requiring patience, understanding, and compassion.

In The Starling, a loving husband is thoroughly overcome with grief (Chris O'Dowd as Jack Maynard), after his baby daughter doesn't wake up, a beautiful gift whom he adored.

He's so overwhelmingly grief-stricken that he checks into a local hospital, where caring sympathetic professionals try their best to ease his pain.

His wife remains at home and continues to work while slowly convalescing, visiting her husband once a week and bringing treats for each encounter (Melissa McCarthy as Lilly Maynard).

But since he doesn't progress and remains sadly lost in a deep depression, she struggles to optimistically adjust, especially when he no longer wants to see her.

It's recommended she seek therapy too, guidance from a former psychiatrist working as a vet (Kevin Kline as Dr. Larry Fine), with whom she strikes up a begrudging friendship, like a therapeutic odd couple.

Meanwhile, she cleans her yard and a resident starling starts to pester her.

She responds with uptight disdain.

Then feels guilty for her hasty actions. 

The Starling doesn't shy away from emphasizing sincere distress, and related waves upon waves of anguish as the Maynards come together. 

But it also praises the painstaking sacrifices spouses make while married at times, providing an amicable unassuming exemplar of devout enduring flexible partnerships. 

So many conflicting emotions difficult to comprehend since they're new and sad, add a steady routine on top of them, and there's bound to be a lot of confusion.

Lilly honestly reacts with genuine innocence as she freely adapts, with classic aggrieved McCarthian carnage, somewhat mollified for sombre subject matter.

As Lilly tries to poison the starling, human/animal relations are oddly characterized, she also hits it with a rock later on, the vet fortunate enough to save it.

After that everything's great for the starling and it seems as if she's welcome in the yard.

This is how people who don't understand human/animal relationships write about them (perhaps like Lindsay Bluth-Fünke). 

I sincerely hope that I'm not missing something. 

Return to Oz

After having returned from Oz, little Dorothy is having trouble sleeping, her parents believing the care for her insomnia lies in electric shock therapy.

She's transported to a local institution hell bent on legitimizing experimental theory, the radical idea no doubt having been spearheaded by bored opportunistic sadists.

Another patient warns her of the horrors and they make a dashing escape together, during a forbidding storm no less, the "doctors" trailing in hot pursuit.

Dorothy awakes the next haunting morning to find herself having returned to Oz, amidst a lugubrious transformation ill-disposed to posit welcome.

She's remembered with distraught reverence by the absolutists who have brought about ruin, and as she attempts to discover what's happened tribulation maniacally sets in.

Fortunately, she quickly makes friends who are none too fond of totalitarianism, and seek to assist her altruistic endeavours to facilitate reanimated prosperity (I am not saying the COVID-19 measures in Canada are totalitarian. I support them and the ways in which they will save the lives of frontline workers).

But an evil queen and gnome king flourish in the bland malaise.

The bourgeoisie having been crushed.

Along with craft and celebration.

A bit of a puzzle as to how Walt Disney gave this idea the green light, why did executives think the sequel to a cherished family classic should be cultivated through mass depression?

The Wizard of Oz was once perhaps the most popular film, and it festively aired every year on television, even 40 years later in my youth, it was still mesmerizingly reverberating.

Why then did Disney decide to produce a calamitous morose successor, Dorothy has only aged 6 months, and has yet to be tested by practical independence?

From the point of view of teasing or distressing mad comedy it indubitably succeeds, bizarro decisions blended with inane guidance through the art of dysfunctional aneurism. 

It's just so strange to see Disney emphatically promoting what's usually reserved for art house mischief.

No Cowardly Lion, no Tin Man, hardly any Scarecrow, sure let's make a sequel without them!

It's like Newt and Hicks perishing before the beginning of Alien 3.

Instead there's a decapitated moose who talks, a wise robot, a pumpkin man, and a chicken (no Toto in Oz).

Perfect for cynical head wounds.

Otherwise somewhat dismal. 

David and Lisa

Sequestered far off in sympathetic regalia a gifted adolescent gradually makes friends, his highly strung opinionated disposition leading to conflict after first moving in.

If anyone harmlessly touches him or even suggests shaking hands, he erupts in crise de colère believing illness or malady will soon emerge.

None too amused with the psychiatric practice he defies his doctors as they present questions, quick to diagnose what's latently presumed in whatever is lightheartedly discussed.

Extremely defensive and generally combative an otherworldly fellow student puts him at ease, as she innocently communicates with rhymes and freely expresses herself through drawing.

Her carefree influence institutes calm and he starts agreeably listening to others, and taking part in various activities without introducing bitter criticisms.

But his parents aren't so sure he requires consistent supervision, and decide to bring him home long before he's contentedly transformed.

They try to help him comprehend what they consider to be sound.

But he misses his newfound friends.

And their free-flowing unorthodox collective.

David and Lisa is a touching must-see for anyone who's ever felt like somewhat of a misfit, for within irreverent rascality finds cohesive charmed community.

The affected or grouchy or compulsive or blunt find a safe place unobstructed by conformity, and eclectically assert multivariable dissonance in sweetly flowing uncanny favour.

Fortunately the doctors aren't motivated by strict pretensions, and by listening while freely conversing they remodel overbearing instruction.

There's no specific time limit and even less of an agenda and by no means a strategic plan, the students are rather given free time to matriculate beyond firmly structured commands.

Since there is something they just don't quite get in relation to generalized sociocultural temporality, it's wonderful to see them given the space to cultivate something random and specialized.

Through mutual acceptance and compassionate tolerance healing ascends with concordant eccentricity, and hang-ups and grudges and chips slowly fade since there's much less demand for routine predictability. 

Grievances persist but they're much less intense and friendship sees that they're readily forgiven.

An outstanding heartfelt film.

That's as sharp as it is mellifluous. 

Glass

Mystery Men aside, I imagine superhero films would be less compelling (or less profitable) if they focused on the lives of people who don't defy scientific law, even if random acts of kindness or diligent commitments to stable routines also aptly reflect agile superheroics, in their own more modest less celebrated ways, inasmuch as many routines lack regular confrontations with mindblowing exceptions.

I remember briefly watching at work one day while a team of three people carried an awkwardly shaped new countertop up a narrow awkward flight of stairs, for instance, and an hour later I noticed they were still working.

In my foolish mind I thought, "why aren't they finished yet, it doesn't look that complicated," before reprimanding myself for assholism and listening in on their conversation.

They were patiently and rationally discussing how to move the heavy object up the stairs carefully to avoid injury, which of course made sense, and explained why they were taking so long.

It's rare when I move large heavy objects so when I do so I carelessly don't worry about injury.

But if you move them around for 40 hours a week for 10 to 40 years and you don't take your time to patiently think about what you're doing, you likely will sustain injury, and therefore it makes sense to proceed cautiously and think things through.

Always.

Nothing you learn in your youth really prepares you for middle-age and the routines you find yourself cultivating at times.

I'm lucky to have a lot of variability in my life and to work with cool people, as I have been for the last decade or so, but middle-age still isn't like school, you don't progressively pass from one grade to the next and have your whole life reimagined each year based upon pedagogic and biological transformations, different stages, it's more like a big 40 year block of time, an extended megastage that's full of change and diversity but at times is somewhat predictable.

But it's precisely the lack of exception that makes it exceptional once you figure that out, the ability to endure sure and steady predictability from one day to the next, to handle different variations while maintaining a reliable theme, and to do it for an incredibly long period of time.

Little things making a phenomenal difference.

Whether it's a film, a new type of hot sauce, a new dress, or ordering the same thing off the menu every time, it doesn't get old if you don't let it, if you let disaffection age you.

Everyone understands there's a big difference between carrying something up a flight of stairs and being a neurosurgeon, or a politician, but sometimes I think neurosurgeons and politicians forget how difficult it can be to carry awkward things up flights of stairs, for years, although I'm sure it's by no means endemic.

The end of Glass celebrates superheroics gone viral online, attempts to suppress them having been outmasterminded.

True, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Keven/Patricia/Hedwig/The Beast etc. (James McAvoy) do have otherworldly abilities, and it would have been cool if Dunn had turned out to be his/her father, but the ending's so like the genesis of Twitter and YouTube that I couldn't help thinking they were standing in for magical unrehearsed postmodern superheroics, randomly disseminated upon the worldwide net.

It's another superhero film that contemplates the nature of superheroics and therefore adds more philosophical finesse to the genre, with hints of The Secret History of 'Twin Peaks', Under the Silver Lake, and Iron Man peppered throughout, and nimbly unreels like a full-on indy.

I liked the characters and the plot and the ways in which Unbreakable has found a way to situate itself within the post-Iron Man maelstrom, and McAvoy's outstanding, but it was the ending and its Twitteresque reflections that I enjoyed the most, and seeing Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price) at it again I suppose.

So many things you never would have heard about thirty years ago pop up on Twitter and YouTube every day.

It's a fascinating worldwide change.

As accessible as your local library.

Stable, steady, unpredictable variation.

Is there a project out there that's codifying YouTube?

Who's writing that book?

Could you finish a page without becoming obsolete?

Like you need a multicultural team of librarians working full-time around the globe just to capture Tuesday, March 8th, 2016.

Categorically driven inherent impossibility.

Infinity conceptualized.

There's nothing quite like it.

Elephant Song

Dr. Toby Green (Bruce Greenwood) is ill-prepared for the devious manipulations of psychiatric patient Michael Aleen (Xavier Dolan), as he visits him for the first time on Christmas Eve, at his long term care facility.

Aleen, the unwanted son of a legendary opera singer, skilfully exploits Green's palliative expectations, expediently employing cunning and subterfuge, prevaricative expertise, with goals in mind.

Artfully engaged in indirect communication, they painstakingly proceed through a kaleidoscopic array of circumlocution, Dr. Green unconvincingly naive, unprofessionally struck by Aleen's dazzling intellect.

His disingenuous merit.

To which he cannot rhetorically respond.

It's the film's weakest point.

It's hard to believe someone that accomplished would fall for Aleen's tricks so quickly, so easily, even on Christmas Eve, and sincerely keep up the same level of trust for so long, having been so effortlessly duped from the outset.

Masterfully.

Why does he maintain the level of trust?

Frustratingly quilled yet mesmerizingly insouciant, Charles Binamé's Elephant Song still ambivalently deconstructs relational therapeutics, 2 steps forward, 2 steps back, patient bilateral supplications.

The application of learning.

To heartaching horizons.

*Dolan's that good in English too. Impresario.

**I'm not against employing clichés in writing, but they need to be worked in with carefully placed well-timed elasticity, to thrivingly live again.

***As the crow flies . . . ;)

Shock Corridor

Just how far will one person go to win the Pulitzer Prize?

Journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) discovers an unsolved murder case and decides to engage in some psychological detective work of his own in order to bring the deceptive culprit to justice. After convincing a psychiatrist that he lacks sanity, his information hunt begins in a state mental hospital where three perennial residents witnessed the crime in question. Challenging his reason as he acclimatizes himself to life in the Shock Corridor, he discovers that when his clandestine lucidity is synthesized with a particular brand of patient curiosity, he can bring his troubled co-denizens back from the brink for long enough to unravel their valuable references. But his search is tempered by a mischievous and seductive mental quid pro quo that subtly reveals its malevolent intensity as he comes closer and closer to delineating the subject of his desire.

Through the passage of time.

Two of the three witnesses find themselves locked up because they have been unable to face the predominant homogenized semantic denominators that structure the social lives of their democratic communities, and have in turn embraced said denominators in a ridiculous fashion, thereby taking control of the means of production, subjectively situating themselves within positions of power.

One, while a prisoner of war, flirted with communism as a reaction against the bigotry that conditioned his family life growing up, and was given a dishonourable discharge after being exchanged. He was shunned afterwards and adopted the persona of an heroic confederate general to compensate.

The other, an African-American student attending a recently desegregated Southern University, was broken by the toxic racist sewer of white supremacy and reinvented himself as a grand wizard in the ku klux klan.

The third, being unable to handle the fact that he had helped to create weapons of mass destruction, reverted to an infantile state in order to forget the past.

Thus, in order for Johnny to solve the case and win his Pulitzer, he must function as an inclusive understanding open minded trustworthy citizen, thereby normalizing the activities his co-denizens engaged in prior to being committed in order to provide them with rational voices.

Unfortunately, Mr. Barrett was concerned primarily with winning the Pulitzer and not with capturing a criminal, and doesn't possess the fortitude required to individually combat madness's cloak and dagger, losing his voice in the process.

I think that's what Fuller's saying.

The Couch Trip

Some solid ideas are in place.

John W. Burns, Jr. (Dan Aykroyd) is causing trouble for his lacklustre psychiatrist, Lawrence Baird (David Clennon). But just as he is about to be transferred back to prison, he intercepts a phone call offering Baird a position as a psychological radio host in Los Angeles, sitting in for one George Maitlin (Charles Grodin), which he promptly accepts. All he needs to do is escape from the ward, fly to LA, convince a shrewd lawyer that he is a trained professional, and dispense beneficial practical wisdom live with the electric confidence of a warm and friendly person of the people. But before he can get his act in place, another individual with a somewhat skewed relationship with 1980s socio-cultural sublimations catches instinctual wind of his former identity (Walter Matthau as Donald Becker), and decides that it's time to cash in on his disenfranchised observations as well.

The Couch Trip's form is well thought out. If I was in charge of deciding which pitches receive the opportunity to be fleshed out whimsically I definitely would have given that for the The Couch Trip the green light. But unfortunately, while gathering critical creative support, unable to sustain the potential of its expectations, it ironically suffers a nervous breakdown, from which it rarely recovers.

When you have an over-the-top idea which requires a sharp degree of energetic immediacy, one impossible situation to overcome after another, the ways in which that energetic immediacy is galvanized must be sensationally plausible while seeming run of the mill. And The Couch Trip's script, boldly defended by Dan Aykroyd, lacks the wherewithal needed to project even a paltry degree of plausibility, and therefore only transmits a mediocre current.

Walter Matthau does save the day from time to time, and the script is deep, establishing multiple subplots and providing several characters with room to flow. But the material with which said characters are provided falls consistently flat, and although the idea of John W. Burns, Jr. works for me on every level, the predicates and commentaries used to build up his rhetorical flexibility do not, at least in terms of making a film entertaining.

The Wolfman

Joe Johnston's recasting of the classic Wolfman legend wantonly howls while slashing and thrashing, but its romantic subplot can't effectively counterbalance its vicious nature due to the lacklustre execution of its sentimental content. A father and son known as Sir John (Anthony Hopkins) and Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) are set up in opposition. Sir John is a macho patriarch while his estranged son is an contemplative actor, the two excelling in their chosen roles. When Lawrence discovers that his brother has been savagely murdered, he swears vengeance, and recklessly pursues the unidentified killer, only to wind up bitten by the beast and condemned by both the local gypsies and reverend (Roger Fisk) alike. His brother's betrothed (Emily Blunt as Gwen Conliffe) reminds both Lawrence and Sir John of Solana Talbot (Cristina Contes), wife and mother, which serves to further complicate matters. As Lawrence falls for Gwen, their dialogue becomes increasingly saccharine even though Lawrence is a famous Shakespearean actor and likely used to expressing himself eruditely. Since she reminds him of his mother, it makes sense that his education and experience would be misplaced in her presence as he slips into a childish state consequently. However, this reason doesn't legitimize the dialogue, it merely points out that logical depth can't trump banal posturing unless the irony sustaining their relationship can be artistically cultivated, i.e., banal lines that seem superficial at first but reveal hidden semantic currents upon further reflection. Sir John is maniacal and revels in his son's incarceration, gleefully basking in their familial discomfort. The horror is therefore composed of both carnal and psychological elements, apprehensively destabilizing any attempts at a rapprochement between father and son. But The Wolfman's infantilized romantic inclinations troublingly traumatize its terror, and arguably suggest that such a lack of congruity is where the film's transformative powers reside.

Shutter Island

Condensing dream sequences, identity (de)mystifications, psychiatrical polarizations, and traumatic war related manifestations into a staggered, disorienting psychological thriller, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island invigorates and interrogates the traditional detective film. Federal Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are on the beat, sent to the Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane to track down a missing patient. Located on Shutter Island, this isolated mental institution is reserved for violent criminals whom Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) does his best to humanely treat. Provided with limited access to the resources necessary to conduct their investigation, Daniels and Aule do their best to take advantage of organizational loopholes while restrainedly exchanging professional courtesies. A graveyard, a storm, witnesses living in caves, and a healthy supply of cigarettes keep their attention focused, while clues lead to questions followed by riddles and conundrums. Daniels's past haunts him throughout as he digs deeper and deeper, valiantly attempting to subjectively recalibrate his object. The heart of the matter harrowingly pulsates, as personal veins and institutional arteries enigmatically transmit their heuristic fluid.

Tough to craft a mainstream thriller that doesn't come across as hackneyed. In Shutter Island, Scorsese successfully infuses his subject with suspense while cultivating a paranoid, disillusioned aesthetic. Many of the scenes stand on their own and the coherent whole they eventually establish benefits from their gritty individualism. The paranoia is often moderately ridiculous and the dream sequences drag and would have benefitted from a more clandestine form of surrealism. The performances are strong, skillfully utilizing Laeta Kalogridis's hardboiled dialogue which diligently and effectively delineates their characters (Mark Ruffalo stealing the show). The ending suggests that means are more important than ends and objectively salutes tenacious innovative thinkers for attempting to remodel professional paradigms. But the ends are still distressing and I can't help but wonder if they reflect Scorsese's own fears regarding his attempts to rearrange the genre's conventions.

Zelig

Zelig, Zelig, Zelig: just who the hell is Woody Allen's Zelig? In every situation he physically, mentally, and spiritually adjusts to become one with his interlocutors, and there's nothing he can't learn, stomach, or do. His story inspires songs, advertisements, sensations, newsreels, critical and commercial interpretations, parades, biographical imitations. There's a wealth of tightly edited picturesquely paced material reminiscent of Citizen Kane and formically linked to any Wes Anderson film. His doctor does her best to establish an I but as he moves from congenial agreement to aggressive confrontation similar situations and age-old psychological adversaries arise. Playing baseball, writing academic essays, acting, golf, Zelig moves and grooves with the rest of the 'em all the way to an hilariously restructured resolution, creatively and comedically cast with the most intertextual of designs in mind.