Gravity

Trauma's debilitating cloaked severity haunts Gravity's heroine as destructive debris and interstellar circumstances threaten her very survival, necessitating the delivery of split-second correct decision making where the slightest miscue will accelerate her demise.

Her oxygen supply is running low.

George Clooney (Matt Kowalski) doesn't make it.

Perdition rests in the flames.

Of cherished, bygone, days.

The immediacy of her isolated predicament and its associated inanimate malevolence prevents her conscious reflexivity from being able to divert periodic onslaughts of asphyxiating plush, the situation requiring simultaneous internal and external synthesized orchestrations for her reliable future to independently portend.

The film's action reliably and boisterously builds as the bright and beautiful Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) approaches its climax.

Couldn't help but think of the ending of the first Alien film, and that Gravity is somewhat of a gem amongst science-fiction considering that it poignantly and thought provokingly stuns throughout, providing a brilliant exemplar of feminine strength, without introducing a bloodthirsty monster.

Science-fiction more concerned with the beauty of life than gruesome death?

That stands out.

Yi dai zong shi (The Grandmaster)

Reluctantly impenetrable, hesitant yet incomparable, Wing Chun Grandmaster Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) invincibly materializes his compact modest integrity, within, flexibly counterpoised, internationally driven.

Kar Wai Wong's Yi dai zong shi (The Grandmaster) celebrates his life, highlighting both monumental challenges and athletic altercations, some likely coaxed from oral and written records of his legend, complexly diversifying the phenomenon of martial arts, woefully positioning a seductive feminine element.

The film's temperament complements his psyche as an invasion commandeers his financial resources and he's forced to relocate to Hong Kong, having refused to collaborate.

Confident, reticent, and didactic, it unreels as if silent while biographically contending.

His post-invasion love interest forges the film's romantic counterbalance as her tragic commensurable conception of honour unwittingly tantalizes.

A Master of the martial arts herself (Xingyi and Bagua), her farsighted father having permitted her to train, thereby breaking with tradition, her devotion to her admirable related vow therefore remains a point of principled controversy, unable to release her desire, celestially sustained.

Yi dai zong shi's final message reflects a pluralistic pedagogical ideal, one which emphasizes study and traditional fluctuation, without betraying one's sense of concrete socioindividualism.

An action-packed wise accessible film, poignant without reference to the austere, insurmountable and unfathomable, tenaciously breaking through the ages.

Lost in Laos

Alessandro Zunino's sly transformational obscurely poised Lost in Laos potentially situates a metamockumentary between two worlds, wherein survival is latticed with familial, relational, and biological vertebrae, adrift in the Laotian jungle, anxiously struggling at home.

On the bilateral, feisty student Daniela (Daniela Camera) sets out with her partner Paolo (Daniele Pitari) to intermingle inebriated and impressionistic filmic observations as part of a wild abandoned ad hoc international trance known as Lost in Laos.

She keeps in contact with her traditional parents until too many substances are consumed at once and she wakes up with Paolo miles from town, down the river, passports and related pieces of identification missing, no food, soaking wet, lost.

The credits set up the film's serious yet sardonic transitional identifications by creatively yet dazzlingly introducing each letter of the crew's names before the name appears in full, at that point in time each character possessing a stable conception of self developed over time, after which the full name breaks apart into its individual components, thereby foreshadowing the upcoming psychological turmoil by the letter.

The creative yet dazzling dynamic sets up the surreal metamockumentary exposition as well, Lost in Laos intellectually diversifying its subject matter while picturesquely percolating a piquant self-awareness, whose bright abnegations voyeuristically mystify.

The boundary between truth and fiction forms part of Daniela's thesis and this dialectical deployment caused me to wonder if the film was really about either an aging professional couple imagining what life would have been like if they had taken more risks, or a young adventurous couple theorizing on the benefits of a bourgeois life spent together.

At which point I had to take mockumentary itself into consideration, wondering if Zunino was eruditely lampooning this style of analysis to simply present a troublemaking voyage of discovery.

Difficult to say.

We're the Millers

A cornucopia of unrefined protracted sleaze, non-traditional role models doing their best to advise, their chosen economic insignias problematizing their bourgeois endorsements, choosing questionable yet confident manners of expression, juxtaposed with professional counterparts whose assiduity assumes authority yet lacks respectability, the perseverance of youth humanely automatizing errors in judgment, so many errors in judgment, serendipitously sanctioned, incontinently divine.

The film struggles as its characters acclimatize themselves to each other.

All you really have to do is write about what happens and you're good.

Although you're really not supposed to do that.

There are so many good ideas worked into We're the Millers's script that thinking about what happens afterwards trumps actually watching the film, many of the jokes falling flat, not that there aren't hilarious moments.

For me, it's most significant flaw is a product of the enormous and commendable risks that went into its construction, an attempt to simultaneously deconstruct and build-up cherished yet occasionally hypocritical codes of conduct, the juxtaposition requiring a contraceptive consensus to export its value that never intangibly materializes.

Lacking stability, character development is sacrificed for references and in/direct pop cultural criticisms, leaving it blindly searching for a good episode of Family Guy, rather than focusing on Trailer Park Boys, season 2.

Elysium

Universal healthcare, workplace health and safety initiatives, and true love are spatially vindicated in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, wherein the unsympathetic inprickacies of a totalitarian state create an orderly robotic despotic exactitude whose overbearing calculations encourage widespread temporal discontent.

A colony for the wealthiest has been created in space on a station known as Elysium, whose cloistered citizens enjoy incomparable privilege and general legal impunity.

On Elysium, everything is relatively perfect, advanced technologies guaranteeing ideal health and well-being, pools, mansions, extravagance, for all.

For the 99.9% still living on an overpopulated underfunded desolate and impoverished planet Earth, in the year 2154, the law is applied authoritatively and immediately, statistical automatons having replaced the potentially understanding, the struggling worker left with no harmless option but to silently obey.

But even though Elysium possesses enormous technological and financial superiority, Earth's population is too large to ubiquitously suppress, and a group of freedom fighters, whose poverty and encumbering lack of resources necessitates a frugal expedient expensive quid pro quo, covertly flourish in the rubble, using their brilliant hands-on luminosities, to keep a faint degree of hope alive.

Extremes abound.

With characterless villains.

Their attempts to degrade the system even further accidentally nourish an individualistic inductively altruistic messianic thrust, whose attempts to reform were systematically rebuked.

Emphasizing an egalitarian redistribution of resources, and citizenship and advanced healthcare options, for all, Elysium is quite the blockbuster, medically administering a sensationally practical ethical solvency.

Myriad sociopolitical dynamics are built into the script.

Which welds the human factor to the heart of structural change.

Fruitvale Station

Tragedy strikes a young struggling family in Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station, as a tough ex-con (Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant) makes the hard decisions necessary to turn his life around.

The film doesn't make him out to be a saint, rather, it delivers a down to earth condensed synopsis of the last few months of his life, during which he comes to terms with the potentially damaging consequences of his extracurricular economic pursuits, and decides it's time to stop selling drugs, find and keep a job, and start applying a higher degree of respect to his partner (Melonie Diaz as Sophina) and daughter (Ariana Neal as Tatiana).

Not so easy to do if you're used to working on your own for more money, but there's respect for working within the law, if you believe in yourself.

Oscar starts to believe but isn't given the chance to make good on his promises after an abusive cop (Kevin Durand as Officer Caruso) unnecessarily roughs up him and his friends one night, another police person then shooting and killing him.

The police had no right to drag them off the train so they were justified in actively voicing their criticisms.

If you do happen to run into a bad lieutenant, however, who has the power to make things difficult for you, and then they start to make things difficult for you, I recommend not saying anything, just keeping quiet, even if they try to provoke you, think of something beautiful, close your eyes after trying to catch their badge number and/or name, and resist passively.

Then they'll have no reason to detain you and if they do anyways just remain quiet until it becomes clear that they have no reason to detain you later on.

There are a lot of situations where this strategy won't work, but if you fight back, things will only get worse.

Freedom is more important than lipping off and the police can take that freedom away.

Or go so far as to take your life, as they did with Oscar Grant.

I'm assuming that in many cases what I'm writing here doesn't apply because the police aren't going to abuse their authority.

They certainly did in Oscar Grant's case though, he was justified in actively voicing his criticisms, and should be currently working and taking care of his family, in the land of the free.

The Lorax

Sustainable Development finds a pop cultural proponent in the new musical-comedy The Lorax, based on Dr. Seuss's children's book of the same name. Within, young Ted (Zac Efron) seeks the affections of Audrey (Taylor Swift) who loves the environment and would like to acquire a living tree.

They both live in Thneedville where their surroundings are predominantly non-organic.

Having never seen a living tree and possessing no knowledge of where to find one, Ted contends with a puzzling situation as his romantic daydreams complicate his ability to socialize.

Until Grammy Norma (Betty White) steps in.

She secretly tells Ted that if he wants to locate a tree he'll have to consult the Once-ler (Ed Helms) who lives in the treacherous badlands outside Thneedville's city limits.

To obtain the sought after information, Ted hops on his motorized bike and leaves the safety of Thneedville's uniformity behind. The Once-ler is discovered but before Ted can benefit from his stricken arboreal wisdom, a tale must be told in multiple instalments.

Wherein we meet the Lorax (Danny DeVito).

Guardian of the forest.

What follows is a harrowing reenactment of economic opportunism which results in the destruction of a lush wilderness and the displacement of its local bear population. The Once-ler capitalizes on the forest's marketable trees but his blind greed results in the harvesting of every last one.

And the devastation of a vibrant ecosystem.

The Lorax himself may be the guardian of the forest but there is little he can do to combat the forces of commercialization, besides trying to emphasize their folly before it's too late.

He's a secondary character in the film whose non-consequential fantastic presence is there to accentuate the importance of a realistic united environmental front, designed to disenchant extremist right wingers who like to preach about how environmentalism is the dream of children who can't understand that God is going to miraculously come down from heaven and clean up this mess some day.

Or just leave it behind and rapturously reward the extremist faithful.

Who for some reason haven't been diagnosed with a mental illness.

At least The Lorax makes it clear enough that divine intervention is not on the way and that we have to take matters into our own hands to find a progressive vision for a multi-generational solution to this misguided point of view.

Here on planet Earth.