Mo' Better Blues

A resourceful mother expeditiously seeks potential employment for her talented son, and wisely purchases a musical instrument for him to learn to dynamically play.

It means a bit less free time but he puts in the hours and develops a style, which transforms into a sought after act on the New York scene several years later.

He becomes a renowned band leader playing each night at a fashionable club, with a solid group deftly backing him up, and versatile friends animately adoring.

Trouble's a' brewin' nevertheless his manager's unable to renegotiate their contract, and they could be making so much more considering how many people come nightly to see them.

His saxophone player's just as good as he is too if not better they make quite the team, but like so many other famous acts with two leading men, conflict arises as egos exasperate. 

Gambling's a big issue too and that very same manager gets in way too deep.

The pressure, the rivalries, the contract, the romance.

Everything suddenly comes crashing down.  

Band conflicts didn't make sense to me when I was really young and I always loved it when they held it together, or didn't frequently change their line-ups, which I briefly studied in a Rock'n'Roll Encyclopedia. 

Pink Floyd's leading men held it together for so long, The Guess Who for a shorter time period, The Beatles making the most of their time together, Jagger and Richards only briefly splitting up (Union by Yes unavailable on Apple Music). 

The Benny Goodman Jazz Quartet can't be beat in my opinion. What incredibly quick inspired jams! I've never heard anything like it. Lionel Hampton doing so well with his own bands too. 

Playing cards can be a lot of fun but I would recommend not making it your principal goal, unless you have no responsibilities or bills, and don't really mind if the house always wins. 

I'm not saying you can't win at a casino but you should intently study before making your bets.

There are quite a few books that can help.

And I imagine hundreds of YouTube videos.

But still even then the odds favour the house but on one special might you might just get that lucky.

If you want to bet on sports, just practice beforehand.

You can easily find out if you know what you're doing.

Inside Man

A detective gets his shot since he's the only one around when the call comes in (Denzel Washington), his captain less willing to throw work his way after a recent erroneous routine rupture.

But a bank's being robbed and they want to negotiate the robbers taking their forbidden time, many hostages struggling nerve-wracked within, a smooth flowing exchange stretched out stressed suspicion.

Meanwhile, the bank's agéd owner (Christopher Plummer) hires an alternative negotiating team (Jodie Foster), to recover an ancient safety deposit box he's worried the thieves have set in their sights.

She exists in the theoretical ether wherein which higher-ups employ extreme discretion, to tidy up raunchy embarrassing mishaps, or in this lofty case, World War II profiteering.

The detective doesn't like it when she shows up with answers to questions he wasn't considering, but the communicative green light is still freely given and soon it seems the bank owner's fears weren't that off base.

Afterwards, chaos ensues, with emboldened predicaments furtively enabling, the concealment of the hypothetical thieves whose plutocratic endeavours indeed prove fruitful. 

The detective still needs to piece things together with precocious puzzling and reasonable riffs.

Interviews discourse entanglements hyperbole.

Thoroughly reckoned with guttural instinct.

A cool suave exoteric rigamarole effortlessly enriches voltaic vehemence, as the opposite ends of Inside Man's investigative continuums cohort and calumnize courtly contusions.

Critically clasped clandestine camaraderie sincerely conversing cross calculi composites, war profiteering is reckless abuse of a world controlled by volatile wickedness. 

I haven't seen any recent related articles covering political condemnations of war profiteering in Ukraine, but you would think some bureaucrat would have thought up something to passionately critique it in the last couple of weeks. 

Many business have pulled out of Russia and I imagine sanctions are making routine life difficult in the massive country, but weeks into the brutal conflict and it's still raging with destructive frenzy.

If businesses and individuals are profiting from Russia's continued vicious bombardment, it would be nice to know they'll be held accountable with sincere constricting jurisprudent venom.

How to monitor myriad factors multidimensionally mired in mad malfeasance, is hopefully being taken care of at the maniacal moment with exceptional haste and sentient synergies. 

BlacKkKlansman

Do you remember when you were really young and differences between peoples weren't emphasized, criticized, aggrandized, socialized, when everyone you met was just someone you were meeting and there weren't any ridiculous stereotypes ruining cultural communications?

Before small-minded misperceptions with hateful agendas attempted to dismally attach specific labels to races and ethnicities, when things were rather peaceful and calm, when there weren't any differences between peoples?

I attended an anti-racism seminar years ago and its facilitator emphasized this point along with many others that logically broke down hate fuelled ideologies.

It's still absolutely clear to me, no matter what the racists try to claim, that there are no specific differences amongst peoples themselves, just alternative cultural traditions, which both enrich one's life when curiously explored, and celebrate the constructivity of intellect across the globe.

You can educate yourselves about them online or at your local library or by attending various cultural events, there's an infinite number of positive community-building materials freely available for curious minds, in a variety of different formats, the constructive peaceful materials themselves functioning like a chill multicultural spirit, which enlivens and emancipates minds with carefree convivial charm.

The world can be quite cruel of course and many conflicts are so complex finding solutions for them is a herculean task as long as both sides won't lay down their weapons.

Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman examines both sides of the African/European American racial or ethnocentric divide to shed sombre light on how divided many black and white peoples living within the same community are in the United States.

An intelligent caring African American individual (John David Washington as Ron Stallworth) joins the local police force within, and soon finds himself working covert operations.

He sees what the world could be like if racial and ethnocentric stereotypes didn't divide so many peoples, and agilely walks the razor's edge to promote less confrontational ways of living.

He's aided on the force by a brave cop named Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan in order to find out what they're up to.

They're assisted by a multicultural team dedicated to both preventing violence and promoting sustainable living, even if some members of the force don't see it that way.

I know the police often act foolishly because people often catch them acting foolishly in videos posted online.

But don't forget that there are many cops out there who are dedicated to both preventing violence and promoting sustainable living as well, and they're there to serve and protect regardless of race or ethnicity or sexuality.

Why would police promote a violent world when it's their lives that are on the line when violence erupts?

It doesn't make sense.

Doesn't make any sense at all.

Spike Lee emphasizes this in BlacKkKlansman, an edgy film that lampoons the KKK and celebrates strong individuals dedicated to fighting racism.

Perhaps too light for subject matter this volatile, it still takes the reckless, thoughtless, unethical comedy that's erupted in the U.S in recent years and turns it on its head to formally deconstruct it.

I don't know how many people will understand that that's what he's doing, or even if that was his intention, I'm not Spike Lee, but in the final moments it's clear that BlacKkKlansman is meant to be taken seriously.

Extremists take peaceful inclinations and use fear to transform them into paranoid disillusion.

The key is to simply stop listening.

And focus on continuing to cultivate communities where their nonsense need never apply.

Period.

Oldboy

Much lighter than Chan-wook Park's demented bitter construct, Spike Lee's Oldboy is still illicit enough to provoke degenerative thoughts of decay, bathed in a regenerative yet psychotic ludic lotion, like a transgressive pantomime, cauterizing ruin.

Suppose this particular narrative inevitably comes across as dark.

Even if you throw in Ron Burgundy and his chipper news team.

The vindictive carousing of an insatiable werehyena.

A leather apron.

And a codified shield.

The game plan's the same.

Asshole. Locked in a room for more than a decade for no apparent reason. Suddenly released. Abounding tension. A set of clues. The diagnostic hammer.

Seismic atrophy.

The tension abounds but it lacks the all-encompassing sense of discombobulated dread cultivated by Park.

But I did prefer the new ending.

So dismal it brought a tear to me eye.

Why do people excel at imploding such vivid monstrous moral vivisections?

Vision. Goal. Cyanide.

The discipline of the Real.