French Cancan

A sophisticated yet chill theatre manager intricately constructs engaging spectacles, with a keen versatile eye for talent he showcases skill and drive and virtuosity. 

Financing the show and paying the bills along with the performers has its share of complications, which he imaginatively overcomes with personality, as enthusiastic patronage ebbs and flows. 

Another potential dancer catches his eye so he goes to great lengths to deftly train her, her husband-to-be none too fond of theatre nor its endemic sensational ways and means.

She demonstrates considerable talent and gives it everything she's rhythmically got, vivaciously responding to the stern bright tutelage benevolently offered on her behalf.

Theatres come and theatres go as grand designs and monumental hypotheses, eccentrically endow legendary prowess with extant fluidity and resourceful spawn.

Worlds colliding, the rough and tumble the idle rich the strict performers, inherent bedlam chaotically subscribed to creative enlivening tactile expenditure. 

From their inquisitive interactions lay jouissance enigmatically rejuvenates.

Fresh ideas, omnibus character.

Indeterminate structure. 

Foundational fugacity. 

Such a shame the theatre so often relies on finances otherwise disdained, and the people who want to put on a show haven't the slightest regarding flair or subtlety. 

Not that good friends who study science and math don't occasionally appreciate artistic independence, and lend a hand to struggling performers with no explicit strings narratively attached.

Yet how often does artistic independence mean "superhero film" or "adventure romance?", "did you see the latest Batman film?", "it had the heart of supernatural engineering!".

Not that the films aren't entertaining or that Truffault and Godard would have severely criticized them, they're just so easy to instantly love, with adoring characters implored, succeeding.

Remember, they're in charge so don't remind them of their bad taste. 

It's even worse when they've been offended.

Especially when they notice your flattery's awkward.  

Stillwater

A father whose tumultuous routine led to an awkward relationship with his struggling family (Matt Damon as William), is consumed with obsessive guilt several years later when his daughter's arrested (Abigail Breslin as Allison). 

She's found guilty of resonant murder and sent to prison near the coast of Marseille, her father visiting her there when he can, the flights expensive, work hard to find.

She emphatically proclaims her innocence and on his most recent visit reveals a clue, which gives him reemergent hope as he soon tries to get her case reopened. 

Obdurately blocked however by pressing realities within the law, he buckles-down and radically adjudicates by trying to find the suspect himself.

Problems: he doesn't speak French and is oblivious to local custom, he's also spent most of his life in the rural American mid-west and is generally uncertain as to how to proceed.

Moving forward nevertheless fate soon secures a definitive lead, and provides shelter and cultural refinement not to mention employment and domestic salvation. 

But to find the irascible murderer he may have to pay too high a price.

Caught between cultures and families. 

He instinctually reacts with western-style gusto. 

Expediently extemporary the ethical dilemmas contract and metastasize, no easy answers no glib illumination as a hard-boiled family deals with its own.

As newfound chances wholesomely radiate and enlivened parenthood intricately seasons, bad decisions still surreally occupy a bitter frustrated entombed consciousness. 

He's willing to risk everything he's gained on an assuréd probability which crosses the streams, if things work out, tout va bien toujours, if they fall apart, it's worse than worst case.

Not only that, it soon becomes apparent that his daughter's innocence is not that clear-cut, and that the investigation held in accordance may not have been led quite so far astray.

I wouldn't have taken such a risk new life's far too precious for improvised risk management, it does bring about the sought after ends, but they could have been achieved through less threatening means. 

In terms of a neo-western-film-noir mind*^*& Tom McCarthy's Stillwater internationally succeeds nonetheless.

Nothing quite like amoral gristle.

Destitute detritus.

Mid-winter mayhem. 

Caesar Must Die

The real's incarcerated dominion finds itself transformed into a Shakespearian atemporal time warp whose interpersonal intertextual transhistorical vertices passionately bridge a parochial rubicon.

The play within the play transports the film into a concrete surreal hyper-reactive microcosmology, crime, punishment, serendipity, urbanity, patiently orchestrated by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, enacted by denizens of the damned.

As the conception is corporealized manifested methodologies collaboratively clash while their situational subject matter is acutely fumigated.

Artistic adornments and monumental minutiae see their beings metamorphically idealized as the process of creation extends its interdimensional limits.

Memories forge an objective counterbalance.

Brutus and Cassius must flee.

That is how it was written.

More than a thousand years after the fact.

A roguish retinue theatrically matriculates as an artistic presence brings semantics to life.

In/transitively.

Opening Night

While knowledge and treaties, expectations and caricatures haunt her, as horrible people transmit their perspectives nonchalantly, striking yet stark, cutting yet insignificant, Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) prepares for Opening Night and artistically assails its cultural predisposition. A young fan is dead, struck by a car after having sought her attention. A brilliant role threatens her fluidity and unwittingly seeks to sequester her career. Friends offer advice which she refuses to indulge, instead choosing to transform its venom into a seductive performance, on her own terms. Is John Cassavetes a misogynist? He certainly presents how abrasive powerful men can be and how hard it must be for women to have to navigate a culture saturated with paternal misgivings, as they're expressed benevolently as if they represent some sort of divine goodwill, as if they reflect a woman's best interests. The psychological abuse Myrtle suffers directly presents the subtleties of a misogynistic discourse, thereby courting a misogynistic qualifier for the film. But it seemed to me as if Cassavetes was using misogyny to point out how trapped many women feel while championing a strong heroine who stoically and creatively endures and counters its virulence nevertheless, thereby realistically accepting its cultural and political prominence and productively demonstrating the herculean effort required to combat it. He's not playing softball and taking a walk through Central Park, he's presenting difficult and controversial material in order to capture the essence of a pervasive dark cultural tenant from which progress can be made (by those who accept his diagnosis and want to do something about it).

It's really quite ingenious.

Opening Night's a powerful film that doesn't bombard you with its thesis; rather, it modestly presents an artist struggling to maintain control of her craft while suffering a midlife crisis. The politics of performance and the relationship between strict adaptions of written material and inspired improvisations are dramatized within, and Myrtle's predicament (that of the successful female actress trying to preserve her identity in an industry dominated by masculine ideals) reflects that presented by several prominent Canadian journalists in regards to the feminine voice's place in 21st Century film. Rowlands's performance is strong enough to dig deep down into your psyche and propel you to feel what she feels, think what she thinks, as you desperately prepare to deliver the performance of a lifetime. On par with A Woman Under the Influence and stronger than Husbands and Faces, Opening Night delivers a play within a heroine within a film within a vision which courageously exposes a deep rooted cultural miscue.