His personality trailing behind, obliviously, inquisitively and contendedly basking in the wake, quietly lounging in his own residual perpetual motion, with a sun he fails to see warmly beating down on his inebriated candour, Freddie Quell's (Joaquin Phoenix) proclivities for the peculiar lead to transformative miscues while the narrative which he inhabits, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, derisively lambastes its own nostalgic attachment to film's longing for nostalgic attachments (through its initial choice of music).
Mr. Quell's sense of buoyancy has been quasi-permanently kept afloat due to his wartime experience, as has his creative knack for improvisationally concocting alcoholic beverages.
He also seeks partnership.
Fortunately, he stows away on a ship by chance which has been rented by a carefree spirit (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd) and his followers, many of whom share his desire to circumvent sobriety.
They have taken things one step further, though, having devotedly conjured a flexible theoretical fundamental foundation, whose profits have secured a fantastic incorruptibility.
As these two tinkerers intersect, pseudoestablished faith-based charlatanism attempts to absorb obstinate itinerant (restrained, undirected, generally harmless) epicurean anarchy through a series of mind tricks, the confident modest inclusive yet principled performance expertly executed by Mr. Hoffman in their first obligatory interaction sophisticatedly counterbalanced by Joaquin Phoenix's focused resistant exactitude.
As Freddie is lured in, the film's structure attempts to grab hold of its audience's recalcitrance and transfer it deep within its hallucinatory consciousness, as if it's relying on the sheer conviction of its form alone, regardless of what form it takes, to transcribe potential transgressions of the post-modern through personal investments of hesitant, guilt-ridden trust, incipiently causing a cult to appear happy-go-lucky, and attempting to internally harness a distilled independent rationality.
The best American film I've seen so far this year.
Amy Adams puts in a great performance too.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Stories We Tell
Beguilingly intermingling the dubious and the customary, synthesizing various direct and interpretive recollections while modestly integrating her own position's anti-overarching take, Sarah Polley subtly (and accidentally?) mythologizes an incident from her family's past, to quaintly and indirectly interrogate memory, narrative construction, the facts, and urban legends, in a familial paragenealogical account of the origins of decentralized identity.
It's so 21st century National Film Board of Canada.*
Her investigation leads a principal participant to whimsically actualize that whose literary character was encouraged by his deceased spouse decades previously, this actualization 'stomping' through a gentle creek of sorts from which the additional commentaries reflexively break off and return (the format reminding me of Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone).
(There are various loosely interoperational domains which possess their own consequent features whose rhetorical/technological/meteorological transmissions can coalesce to fabricate distinguished conceptions of value, which, when re/acting with the complementary/contradictory features of their fellow inter/national/regional/local/individual agents, and the constant imposition of random occurrences whose unforeseen interjections conduct concrete theoretical abstractions, before and after the fact, team-up to market sundry identities, who are nonetheless reliant upon historical events, and their consequent/subsequent interactions, themselves).
There's a sly intertextual reversal built into the film's flow as well.
Impressive.
*Kermode hasn't seen enough 21st century National Film Board of Canada films to be able to objectively make this claim, but couldn't resist due to the ways in which Stories We Tell reminded him of the many NFBC films he enjoyed watching during his youth. He also lives within the 21st century.
It's so 21st century National Film Board of Canada.*
Her investigation leads a principal participant to whimsically actualize that whose literary character was encouraged by his deceased spouse decades previously, this actualization 'stomping' through a gentle creek of sorts from which the additional commentaries reflexively break off and return (the format reminding me of Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone).
(There are various loosely interoperational domains which possess their own consequent features whose rhetorical/technological/meteorological transmissions can coalesce to fabricate distinguished conceptions of value, which, when re/acting with the complementary/contradictory features of their fellow inter/national/regional/local/individual agents, and the constant imposition of random occurrences whose unforeseen interjections conduct concrete theoretical abstractions, before and after the fact, team-up to market sundry identities, who are nonetheless reliant upon historical events, and their consequent/subsequent interactions, themselves).
There's a sly intertextual reversal built into the film's flow as well.
Impressive.
*Kermode hasn't seen enough 21st century National Film Board of Canada films to be able to objectively make this claim, but couldn't resist due to the ways in which Stories We Tell reminded him of the many NFBC films he enjoyed watching during his youth. He also lives within the 21st century.
Francine
Diagnosing a particular psychodemocratic symptom by following the release of a shy free-spirited loner from prison, Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine correlates a general disenfranchised flair for self-imposed isolation with a personal tendency to spontaneously combust in a tight examination of a private experimental individual.
Francine (Melissa Leo) has no trouble finding work after her release and has the confidence and strength to go so far as to pick and choose among jobs (all of which relate to animals).
She does lose one due to her unique approach to customer relations, but she quickly bounces back, doesn't seem phased, and finds another position.
(After stealing a puppy).
She feels more at home with the animal world and as the film unreels the number of pets within her apartment steadily increases.
She meets people within her new community and loves to go out, whether its head-banging by the roadside or a visit to a local church; but after years of not fitting in (I'm assuming) doesn't encourage the growth of either friendships or relationships.
Or maybe she never liked spending extended periods of time with others; there isn't much backstory to go on so this is just speculation.
But she loves her pets and there's a great scene which festively superimposes a frenetic degree of freeform felicity upon a dysfunctionally operative domestic diorama, which looks like so much fun.
But she eventually goes too far publicly, and her actions, although relatively slight, when aligned with her criminal history, (likely) engender harsh penalties.
Chill film considering.
Francine (Melissa Leo) has no trouble finding work after her release and has the confidence and strength to go so far as to pick and choose among jobs (all of which relate to animals).
She does lose one due to her unique approach to customer relations, but she quickly bounces back, doesn't seem phased, and finds another position.
(After stealing a puppy).
She feels more at home with the animal world and as the film unreels the number of pets within her apartment steadily increases.
She meets people within her new community and loves to go out, whether its head-banging by the roadside or a visit to a local church; but after years of not fitting in (I'm assuming) doesn't encourage the growth of either friendships or relationships.
Or maybe she never liked spending extended periods of time with others; there isn't much backstory to go on so this is just speculation.
But she loves her pets and there's a great scene which festively superimposes a frenetic degree of freeform felicity upon a dysfunctionally operative domestic diorama, which looks like so much fun.
But she eventually goes too far publicly, and her actions, although relatively slight, when aligned with her criminal history, (likely) engender harsh penalties.
Chill film considering.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Mars et Avril
A rhythmic terrestrial interplanetary concordance collegially captivates audiences of the future in Martin Villeneuve's Mars et Avril, set in Montréal.
So nice, to watch, a science-fiction film, that humbly celebrates interdisciplinary artistic creation instead of some damn war culminating in an epic battle.
Crisp cosmic cerebral clarity: another, great film, made, in Québec.
The plot concerns the solidification of an abstract feminine image which is in turn corporealized as a musical instrument which a virtuoso performer then instantaneously masters live to the delight of his devoted listeners, thereby uniting inspiration, extraction, construction, distribution, and reception, in a harmonious synthesis of artistic production.
Yet as proof of a legend's historical longevity is ambitiously sought, an unknown factor, a representative of that which was sacrificed in order to sustain a radiant resurgent reverberation, threatens the unity of the whole, by accidentally silencing its voice, while ensuring the survival of its exhalations.
As the output destabilizes, so does the artist's basic distinction between interior and external reality, as if the film itself is unaware of a subtle intoxication, until the manufacturer finds a way to unite the process's conception and etherealization, directly binding two consciousnesses in their dreamwork, and generating un noveau monde.
Now that's science-fiction.
There was an odd moment for me in said dreamwork where I was wondering why the dreamworlds within films often closely mirror those established by alert spatio-temporal objectivities, which awakened a countermemory of David Lynch and Mark Frost's Red Room from Twin Peaks, when the scene suddenly changed to one invoking a comparison between it and said Red Room, with music reminiscent of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's "Sycamore Trees."
That was weird.
The marsonautes infuse the artistic philosophical romance with a cheeky degree of comedy that rounds out the film's intellectual action.
Indeed.
So nice, to watch, a science-fiction film, that humbly celebrates interdisciplinary artistic creation instead of some damn war culminating in an epic battle.
Crisp cosmic cerebral clarity: another, great film, made, in Québec.
The plot concerns the solidification of an abstract feminine image which is in turn corporealized as a musical instrument which a virtuoso performer then instantaneously masters live to the delight of his devoted listeners, thereby uniting inspiration, extraction, construction, distribution, and reception, in a harmonious synthesis of artistic production.
Yet as proof of a legend's historical longevity is ambitiously sought, an unknown factor, a representative of that which was sacrificed in order to sustain a radiant resurgent reverberation, threatens the unity of the whole, by accidentally silencing its voice, while ensuring the survival of its exhalations.
As the output destabilizes, so does the artist's basic distinction between interior and external reality, as if the film itself is unaware of a subtle intoxication, until the manufacturer finds a way to unite the process's conception and etherealization, directly binding two consciousnesses in their dreamwork, and generating un noveau monde.
Now that's science-fiction.
There was an odd moment for me in said dreamwork where I was wondering why the dreamworlds within films often closely mirror those established by alert spatio-temporal objectivities, which awakened a countermemory of David Lynch and Mark Frost's Red Room from Twin Peaks, when the scene suddenly changed to one invoking a comparison between it and said Red Room, with music reminiscent of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's "Sycamore Trees."
That was weird.
The marsonautes infuse the artistic philosophical romance with a cheeky degree of comedy that rounds out the film's intellectual action.
Indeed.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Faust
And within a mendicant, mountainous, microcosm, classically constructed, Gothically germinated, and residually realized, wherein one's affluent 21st century appetites atrophy while those of its citizens starve, he who possesses bountiful knowledge is tempted by a resplendent representative of an aspect which he fails to comprehend, his fabricated yet all-encompassing desire having been serpentinely syncopated, as a bear growls in the wilderness, in Alexander Sokurov's Faust's obstinate prolonged periodical remonstrance, whose resultant subjective reconstitution, climactically dislocates an historically sustained psychodeterminancy.
Through the art of manipulation.
Its traditional themes and monumental modalities are elaborately elucidated and sensuously entwined.
Competing rational classifications are cantankerously, sinisterly, and conditionally, collated.
Notwithstanding a little joy.
The world Sokurov creates arguably situates the contemporary depersonalized alienated televisual lack of collective agency within an impoverished feudal stasis to materialize an ahistorical fabric, but that may be a bit of a stretch.
For me, it also functions as a dramatic counterpart to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings triology, the opening sequence having begged the comparison (not that Faust isn't fantastic and The Lord of the Rings undramatic).
And Faust (Johannes Zeiler), you fool, you had it in you all along.
Didn't you see "Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me?"
Through the art of manipulation.
Its traditional themes and monumental modalities are elaborately elucidated and sensuously entwined.
Competing rational classifications are cantankerously, sinisterly, and conditionally, collated.
Notwithstanding a little joy.
The world Sokurov creates arguably situates the contemporary depersonalized alienated televisual lack of collective agency within an impoverished feudal stasis to materialize an ahistorical fabric, but that may be a bit of a stretch.
For me, it also functions as a dramatic counterpart to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings triology, the opening sequence having begged the comparison (not that Faust isn't fantastic and The Lord of the Rings undramatic).
And Faust (Johannes Zeiler), you fool, you had it in you all along.
Didn't you see "Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me?"
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Bonsái
A bond, an extended period of growth, a felicitous fortuitous frequency, historically resonating.
Julio (Diego Noguera) accidentally finds love in Christián Jiménez's Bonsái and its particularized peculiar panoramic proclivities produce a prepositional poignancy.
Subjective logical adaptations to seemingly immutable biological fascinations harness the everlasting.
The simulation of a tangible incorporeality as well as the fabrication of the authentic necessitate themselves when related artistic proliferations are suddenly materialized, due to the verisimilitude encapsulating a missed opportunity.
Beginnings and canonical literary liaisons foundationally reappear.
Melancholic longing permeates each aspect as Julio's amorous recapitulations attempt to revitalize a long lost cohesive fragility.
Or the reification of a dream.
Didn't even know In Search of Lost Time played a role in this film prior to choosing to see it.
Julio (Diego Noguera) accidentally finds love in Christián Jiménez's Bonsái and its particularized peculiar panoramic proclivities produce a prepositional poignancy.
Subjective logical adaptations to seemingly immutable biological fascinations harness the everlasting.
The simulation of a tangible incorporeality as well as the fabrication of the authentic necessitate themselves when related artistic proliferations are suddenly materialized, due to the verisimilitude encapsulating a missed opportunity.
Beginnings and canonical literary liaisons foundationally reappear.
Melancholic longing permeates each aspect as Julio's amorous recapitulations attempt to revitalize a long lost cohesive fragility.
Or the reification of a dream.
Didn't even know In Search of Lost Time played a role in this film prior to choosing to see it.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Looper
Casually steeping the intertextual typography for a poppy paranoid streetwise technovernacular, real horrorshowlike, frenetically interspersing euphoric and trepidatious tremors, bumptiously, offhandedly, and rupturously stimulating abbreviations, while synthesizing an intertemporal suicidal personalized universal, Rian Johnson's Looper ruggedly relies on standard fictionally scientific reflexivities, without deflating their zeppelinesque thermocline, to romanticize a gritty, graphic, gregarious shock, while autosuggesting, an intransitive perpetuity.
As the crow flies.
One loop sees a job well done, followed by a carefree binge, a requisite regression, and vindication through love.
In the other, to sustain and avenge said vindication, a monstrous methodology metastasizes.
Either way the outcome is inevitable.
But a third way does present itself, nurtured by a split-second revelation based upon the prior knowledge of a definitive causeway the agency of which is too much to precondition.
So, rather than embracing what seems like predetermination, the agent spontaneously disorients his 'historical' trek.
Stretching through the void.
As the crow flies.
One loop sees a job well done, followed by a carefree binge, a requisite regression, and vindication through love.
In the other, to sustain and avenge said vindication, a monstrous methodology metastasizes.
Either way the outcome is inevitable.
But a third way does present itself, nurtured by a split-second revelation based upon the prior knowledge of a definitive causeway the agency of which is too much to precondition.
So, rather than embracing what seems like predetermination, the agent spontaneously disorients his 'historical' trek.
Stretching through the void.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Trouble with the Curve
Trouble with the Curve.
Trouble with the Curve is a nice story. It situates a complicated familial dynamic within a competitive professional atmosphere which is adorned with collegial and asinine interactions that polarize the continuum established between youth and age.
Relationships and ethnocentric tendencies are examined as well, and after an explanation is provided, the resultant synergies mobilize the disenfranchised.
And the multidimensional nature of experiential competencies collaboratively contends with electronically generated statistics to offer an holistic approach to the practice of forecasting.
It's presented in an easy-to-follow and understand format, potentially photosynthesizing a modest kernel of truth.
All of these things, are good.
Clint Eastwood's character could have been more diversely differentiated from that whom he played in Gran Torino however.
Not that I don't love the old curmudgeon, but not enough time has elapsed between the two films.
And it's tough to find shelter from the narrative's after-school-special-like style, which, while cultivating a strong inclusive yet combative framework, lacks the creative virtuosities needed to motivate a wide-ranging reception.
Not that it's trying to do that.
Trouble with the Curve is a nice story. It situates a complicated familial dynamic within a competitive professional atmosphere which is adorned with collegial and asinine interactions that polarize the continuum established between youth and age.
Relationships and ethnocentric tendencies are examined as well, and after an explanation is provided, the resultant synergies mobilize the disenfranchised.
And the multidimensional nature of experiential competencies collaboratively contends with electronically generated statistics to offer an holistic approach to the practice of forecasting.
It's presented in an easy-to-follow and understand format, potentially photosynthesizing a modest kernel of truth.
All of these things, are good.
Clint Eastwood's character could have been more diversely differentiated from that whom he played in Gran Torino however.
Not that I don't love the old curmudgeon, but not enough time has elapsed between the two films.
And it's tough to find shelter from the narrative's after-school-special-like style, which, while cultivating a strong inclusive yet combative framework, lacks the creative virtuosities needed to motivate a wide-ranging reception.
Not that it's trying to do that.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Remember being disappointed when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released in 2003. I liked it when I eventually rented it, but still couldn't shake that "I wish they'd just left it alone" feeling, which had inspired my initial hesitation.
Watched it again a couple of times last weekend and was seriously impressed. It's arguably better than T2 although it depends upon what time in your life you view it/them.
T2 was great when I was a kid (it's still good [I also watched it last weekend]). The apocalypse is averted, the future remains open, and things can reattain a level of relative normalcy if the trauma can be creatively dissimulated.
Solid sci-fi, convincing absurdity, collaborative outlook, intact.
T3 represents a sequel which strategically follows a similar pattern to its predecessor(s), revisiting familiar scenes and situations in order to socialize on the franchise's precedents, while reimagining them with enough mutated historical ingenuity to subtly transmit an evolutionary code.
Without screwing things up.
Such revisitations are done at great risk for if the scenarios fail to entrance, the predecessor/s quickly begin/s to appear more appealing.
T3's resolution is somewhat less innocent, however (it's much less innocent), which, for those of us who saw T2 when they were 12 and T3 many years later, while still remaining in possession of the firm environmentally friendly conscious T2 shyly promotes, fictionally nurtures a degree of realistic despondency, brought about by an increasingly monolithic technocratic agency's dismissal of environmental concerns (the environmental movement, from what I remember, was stronger in Canada in 1991), by directly working its principle audience's growth into the script, bizarrely taking into account different trends and fashions, while harshly yet romantically preparing them for the post-symbolic (notably when John [Nick Stahl] resignedly yet affirmably utters a cliché when he's flying to Crystal Peak with Catherine Brewster [Claire Danes]).
Hence, within T3, a pagan dimension in touch with the eternal timeline and its intertemporal distortions (whether or not these distortions should be viewed as part of the eternal timeline is up for debate but the evidence provided by T3 suggests they should not) intervenes and ensures that two somewhat unwilling individuals are given a fighting chance to subvert an inevitable machinismo (to continue to fight for a more collaborative playing field against forces possessing incontrovertible resource rich 'class-oriented' biases)(the timeline is reconstituted to the best possible version nature can provide after which its 'unwitting' agents must generally fend for themselves).
And who has returned with updated loveable psychological subroutines? None other than the converted patriarchal killing machine who saw the light (was reprogrammed) and began using his organic metallurgic abilities to protect humanistic interests instead (himself). Much of what his counterpart from T2 learned flows within but now that Mr. Connor's older and realizes what he's up against, his counterarguments to that created by his significant other's interpretation of his childhood memories occasionally lack his youthful antagonistic conviction.
After surviving the intermediary years, he comes to understand the T-101's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) no-nonsense methods.
Mechanically, T-101's primary adversary is a younger more flexible model, but even though he's an older design, this doesn't mean he can't compete.
In regards to the dialogue established by the changing feminine gender paradigms culturalized by the gap between these two sequels, in T2 the only strong female character with knowledge that would make a significant historical difference is locked-up in a mental institution; in T3 the feminine is split, one character representing independent unyielding destructive technocratic oppression, the other, bourgeois stability transformed (consequently) into a fierce warrioress.
In regards to identity, as far as John and Catherine Brewster go, and ignoring the acute crisis the T-101 must face, T3 seems to be suggesting that if you're unclassified or professional (notably in the "you're not exactly my 'type' either" exchange), and if democratic institutions become so diluted that their impact no longer bears any teeth, or a well-funded psychological campaign produces a wide-ranging cynicism regarding their effects even when they're still capable of bearing fruit, you'll both be stuck necessarily contending with an entrenched systemic opponent who had been modestly brought to heel after the Second World War.
Try and think about what Barack Obama would have been able to do then.
Which seems to be T3's prescient message, which could explain the lacklustre reviews it received during the George W. Bush Era. I don't know. But it takes the risk of bombing due to the ways in which it relies so heavily on T2's format and manages to ironically cultivate greener pastures to the contrary, which is a sign of bold writing, and great filmmaking (directed by Jonathan Mostow, screenplay by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato).
And the Dr. Silverman (Earl Boen) scene is priceless. I'll watch it again just to see that alone.
There's more humour within too, notably the ways in which the 'asocial' terminators affect those they meet, my favourite line being "and, the coffin," subtly reflecting the difficulties the eccentric encounter on a regular basis.
Oh, and considering how much revenue Judgement Day generated, it's hard to believe that it took 12 years for them to release Rise of the Machines.
Watched it again a couple of times last weekend and was seriously impressed. It's arguably better than T2 although it depends upon what time in your life you view it/them.
T2 was great when I was a kid (it's still good [I also watched it last weekend]). The apocalypse is averted, the future remains open, and things can reattain a level of relative normalcy if the trauma can be creatively dissimulated.
Solid sci-fi, convincing absurdity, collaborative outlook, intact.
T3 represents a sequel which strategically follows a similar pattern to its predecessor(s), revisiting familiar scenes and situations in order to socialize on the franchise's precedents, while reimagining them with enough mutated historical ingenuity to subtly transmit an evolutionary code.
Without screwing things up.
Such revisitations are done at great risk for if the scenarios fail to entrance, the predecessor/s quickly begin/s to appear more appealing.
T3's resolution is somewhat less innocent, however (it's much less innocent), which, for those of us who saw T2 when they were 12 and T3 many years later, while still remaining in possession of the firm environmentally friendly conscious T2 shyly promotes, fictionally nurtures a degree of realistic despondency, brought about by an increasingly monolithic technocratic agency's dismissal of environmental concerns (the environmental movement, from what I remember, was stronger in Canada in 1991), by directly working its principle audience's growth into the script, bizarrely taking into account different trends and fashions, while harshly yet romantically preparing them for the post-symbolic (notably when John [Nick Stahl] resignedly yet affirmably utters a cliché when he's flying to Crystal Peak with Catherine Brewster [Claire Danes]).
Hence, within T3, a pagan dimension in touch with the eternal timeline and its intertemporal distortions (whether or not these distortions should be viewed as part of the eternal timeline is up for debate but the evidence provided by T3 suggests they should not) intervenes and ensures that two somewhat unwilling individuals are given a fighting chance to subvert an inevitable machinismo (to continue to fight for a more collaborative playing field against forces possessing incontrovertible resource rich 'class-oriented' biases)(the timeline is reconstituted to the best possible version nature can provide after which its 'unwitting' agents must generally fend for themselves).
And who has returned with updated loveable psychological subroutines? None other than the converted patriarchal killing machine who saw the light (was reprogrammed) and began using his organic metallurgic abilities to protect humanistic interests instead (himself). Much of what his counterpart from T2 learned flows within but now that Mr. Connor's older and realizes what he's up against, his counterarguments to that created by his significant other's interpretation of his childhood memories occasionally lack his youthful antagonistic conviction.
After surviving the intermediary years, he comes to understand the T-101's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) no-nonsense methods.
Mechanically, T-101's primary adversary is a younger more flexible model, but even though he's an older design, this doesn't mean he can't compete.
In regards to the dialogue established by the changing feminine gender paradigms culturalized by the gap between these two sequels, in T2 the only strong female character with knowledge that would make a significant historical difference is locked-up in a mental institution; in T3 the feminine is split, one character representing independent unyielding destructive technocratic oppression, the other, bourgeois stability transformed (consequently) into a fierce warrioress.
In regards to identity, as far as John and Catherine Brewster go, and ignoring the acute crisis the T-101 must face, T3 seems to be suggesting that if you're unclassified or professional (notably in the "you're not exactly my 'type' either" exchange), and if democratic institutions become so diluted that their impact no longer bears any teeth, or a well-funded psychological campaign produces a wide-ranging cynicism regarding their effects even when they're still capable of bearing fruit, you'll both be stuck necessarily contending with an entrenched systemic opponent who had been modestly brought to heel after the Second World War.
Try and think about what Barack Obama would have been able to do then.
Which seems to be T3's prescient message, which could explain the lacklustre reviews it received during the George W. Bush Era. I don't know. But it takes the risk of bombing due to the ways in which it relies so heavily on T2's format and manages to ironically cultivate greener pastures to the contrary, which is a sign of bold writing, and great filmmaking (directed by Jonathan Mostow, screenplay by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato).
And the Dr. Silverman (Earl Boen) scene is priceless. I'll watch it again just to see that alone.
There's more humour within too, notably the ways in which the 'asocial' terminators affect those they meet, my favourite line being "and, the coffin," subtly reflecting the difficulties the eccentric encounter on a regular basis.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Bullhead
Symptomatically and jaggedly pluralizing the personal psychological affects of a sudden all-encompassing disillusionment, while intricately stratifying a diverse bombastic barrage, literally interjecting his film with bellicose doses of testosterone, Michaël R. Roskam takes Bullhead and cacophonically synthesizes a man with his husbandry, as he tries whatever he can to surreptitiously distend.
An event. A transformation. Perseverance. Sublimation. Shock. Disintegration.
The wind in the willows.
Or the cyclone in the spruces in this instance. Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is one volatile powder keg lacking the deflammatory passions which may have softened the blow.
But apart from scintillatingly nocturnalizing a tragic character study, Bullhead complacently, cerebrally, and chaotically economizes its 'subject matter,' potently intensifying a somewhat underrepresented particular submergence, while using it to indirectly comment upon Belgian social interactions.
If Mr. Vanmarsenille represents the local, then the local is diversified, then regionalized (the regional possessing a nationalistic nuance), and then subjectively traumatized, historicized, and atemporalized, while the film retains a selective degree of objectivity (which dissipates near the end), the catalyst of said trauma triumvirately functioning within the local, regional, and national domains, with romantic, familial, comic and veterinary issues exhaustively adorning its multiplicity.
Mr. Roskam knows how to get things done (screenplay by Michaël R. Roskam).
It offers a potential counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one film focused primarily on a individual's parenting struggles within an environment theoretically dominated by the personal, the other's less subject-centric caricature working within one hypothetically attempting to produce a less hostile bilateral congregation, both lamenting static subjective growth.
Stress. They're both, full, of stress.
I recommend Bullhead for lovers of multidimensional cinema but be prepared cause it's rather dark.
I kind of think of it as a stubborn grouchy emasculated subdued rowdy intellectual action film to which you must pay strict attention.
Calamitizing the maintenance of an ideal.
Which blindly obscures what's beautiful.
An event. A transformation. Perseverance. Sublimation. Shock. Disintegration.
The wind in the willows.
Or the cyclone in the spruces in this instance. Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is one volatile powder keg lacking the deflammatory passions which may have softened the blow.
But apart from scintillatingly nocturnalizing a tragic character study, Bullhead complacently, cerebrally, and chaotically economizes its 'subject matter,' potently intensifying a somewhat underrepresented particular submergence, while using it to indirectly comment upon Belgian social interactions.
If Mr. Vanmarsenille represents the local, then the local is diversified, then regionalized (the regional possessing a nationalistic nuance), and then subjectively traumatized, historicized, and atemporalized, while the film retains a selective degree of objectivity (which dissipates near the end), the catalyst of said trauma triumvirately functioning within the local, regional, and national domains, with romantic, familial, comic and veterinary issues exhaustively adorning its multiplicity.
Mr. Roskam knows how to get things done (screenplay by Michaël R. Roskam).
It offers a potential counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one film focused primarily on a individual's parenting struggles within an environment theoretically dominated by the personal, the other's less subject-centric caricature working within one hypothetically attempting to produce a less hostile bilateral congregation, both lamenting static subjective growth.
Stress. They're both, full, of stress.
I recommend Bullhead for lovers of multidimensional cinema but be prepared cause it's rather dark.
I kind of think of it as a stubborn grouchy emasculated subdued rowdy intellectual action film to which you must pay strict attention.
Calamitizing the maintenance of an ideal.
Which blindly obscures what's beautiful.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Samsara
Ron Fricke's Samsara takes upon itself the modest task of pictorially presenting an interdimensional panoramic account of a synthesized set of (free)ranging semantic variables, a fluid rhetorically viable atemporal mosaic whose effervescent movements are acoustically interwoven according (perhaps) to the harmonics of three itinerant factotums, who practically reverberate throughout the humanistic theoretical continuum, giving birth to hope, sculpting immobility, and choreographing the infinite.
The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.
The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.
I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.
But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.
At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.
Without saying a word.
The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice? Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?
It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).
Best film I've seen in a long time.
The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.
The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.
I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.
But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.
At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.
Without saying a word.
The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice? Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?
It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).
Best film I've seen in a long time.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Elena
As a barren particular is brought into the forefront, behind which
rests a model representative of flight, stationary and passive, pensive
and solitary, the image's distinction begins to slowly fade, before,
after a fellow aviator arrives, it is subtly and universally
interiorized.
What follows is an expertly executed yet modestly matriculated morphology, wherein each member of a seemingly content couple exercises their predetermined propensities to finance a younger generation.
Hypocrisy and deception abound.
Historical preference bifurcates.
Galvanized wit is rewarded.
And opportunity will not be displaced.
Andrey Zvyagintsev adopts sparse means to inculcate a breathtaking exemplar, which suggests that the film's form undeniably upholds Elena (Nadezhda Markina), although an internal cross-examination, mischievously interjected by its music, which preliminarily tricked me into believing Elena is simply a collusively cheeky quotidian parody of your traditional blockbuster, sustainably supports the case's other systemic suitor (original music by Philip Glass).
The imaginary factor is brilliantly lubricated by Elena Lyadova's (Katerina) provocative pirouette, volatile yet absorptive, as she self-indulgently tears up the runaway.
Melancholic film.
What follows is an expertly executed yet modestly matriculated morphology, wherein each member of a seemingly content couple exercises their predetermined propensities to finance a younger generation.
Hypocrisy and deception abound.
Historical preference bifurcates.
Galvanized wit is rewarded.
And opportunity will not be displaced.
Andrey Zvyagintsev adopts sparse means to inculcate a breathtaking exemplar, which suggests that the film's form undeniably upholds Elena (Nadezhda Markina), although an internal cross-examination, mischievously interjected by its music, which preliminarily tricked me into believing Elena is simply a collusively cheeky quotidian parody of your traditional blockbuster, sustainably supports the case's other systemic suitor (original music by Philip Glass).
The imaginary factor is brilliantly lubricated by Elena Lyadova's (Katerina) provocative pirouette, volatile yet absorptive, as she self-indulgently tears up the runaway.
Melancholic film.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Teddy Bear
A tough, trusting, reserved, youthful 38 year-old bodybuilder, unfamiliar with the feminine sex and generally unable to generate first contact, spontaneously departs to an undiscovered country, having no desire to insurrect a moral nemesis, or the wrath of dawn, where, too upright to cross the final frontier, he sticks to his game plan, hits the gym, and serendipitously discovers that for which he has been searching.
In Teddy Bear, the motion picture.
The film's a calm, patient, joyful, timorous study of a caring athlete, dedicated to his calling, possessing practically no knowledge of worldly affairs, coyly proceeding from one day to the next.
If you've no interest in celebrating a strong contemplative investigation of ageless dreams or oedipal blunders, you may find that Teddy Bear lacks the flexibility continuously recycled in many a phantasmagorical flick.
But if you desire to humbly enjoy a robust quotidien reflection which elevates the passive struggles of an underexplored muscular happenstance, or any of the other things I've already mentioned, it just might work out, with multiple rep potential, without making much of a stretch.
In Teddy Bear, the motion picture.
The film's a calm, patient, joyful, timorous study of a caring athlete, dedicated to his calling, possessing practically no knowledge of worldly affairs, coyly proceeding from one day to the next.
If you've no interest in celebrating a strong contemplative investigation of ageless dreams or oedipal blunders, you may find that Teddy Bear lacks the flexibility continuously recycled in many a phantasmagorical flick.
But if you desire to humbly enjoy a robust quotidien reflection which elevates the passive struggles of an underexplored muscular happenstance, or any of the other things I've already mentioned, it just might work out, with multiple rep potential, without making much of a stretch.
Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on the Couch)
Felix and Percy Aldon's Mahler auf der Couch is well orchestrated.
They take a predictable story, let you know what's going to happen from the outset (the scores shown during the opening credits covered in prose), challenge you to pay attention anyways, and then provide a sombre, despondently energetic, physically and psychologically active rendition of a successful composer's troubled personal life, complete with a traditional Freudian (Proustian) resolution, minimalistically yet grandiosely conveyed.
The narrative follows a traditional artist who humbly employs a Highlander maxim both professionally and conjugally which simultaneously propels and curtails his development.
The film's form is noteworthy insofar as it biographically serenades the standard interviewing technique comedically nuanced in Mike Clattenburg's and Ricky Gervais's/Stephan Merchant's (Trailer Park Boys and The Office having been released contemporaneously) different mockumentary television shows, within an autobiographical soundscape, as Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) attempts to reestablish an I with Freud's (Karl Markovics) help while referencing data based upon the ways in which his psyche has internalized the potential praise/disdain/indifference/misgivings of his admirers/competitors/friends/family, thereby atonally harmonizing its classical unconscious rhythms with multiple indeterminate perspectives (while remaining ripe with emotion).
Barbara Romaner (Alma Mahler) impresses as 'she' attempts to break through.
If I've ever heard anything written by Mahler, I'm unaware.
They take a predictable story, let you know what's going to happen from the outset (the scores shown during the opening credits covered in prose), challenge you to pay attention anyways, and then provide a sombre, despondently energetic, physically and psychologically active rendition of a successful composer's troubled personal life, complete with a traditional Freudian (Proustian) resolution, minimalistically yet grandiosely conveyed.
The narrative follows a traditional artist who humbly employs a Highlander maxim both professionally and conjugally which simultaneously propels and curtails his development.
The film's form is noteworthy insofar as it biographically serenades the standard interviewing technique comedically nuanced in Mike Clattenburg's and Ricky Gervais's/Stephan Merchant's (Trailer Park Boys and The Office having been released contemporaneously) different mockumentary television shows, within an autobiographical soundscape, as Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) attempts to reestablish an I with Freud's (Karl Markovics) help while referencing data based upon the ways in which his psyche has internalized the potential praise/disdain/indifference/misgivings of his admirers/competitors/friends/family, thereby atonally harmonizing its classical unconscious rhythms with multiple indeterminate perspectives (while remaining ripe with emotion).
Barbara Romaner (Alma Mahler) impresses as 'she' attempts to break through.
If I've ever heard anything written by Mahler, I'm unaware.
Lawless
John Hillcoat's Lawless ballistically perforates a hostile approach to rapid wide-scale systemic change, polemically posturing various players within a bucolic dynamic in order to counterpoise federal and local reputations.
The year is 1931 and prohibition and the great depression are taking their toll.
But dozens of Virginian bootleggers in Franklin County have found ways to circumvent the prudish law while ensuring the availability of steamwhistlin' scratch.
Their business has its share of internal and external dangers, but if their entrepreneurial caution, confidence, and charisma is combatively backed-up, should the situation demand, it's possible for them to get by.
The film's social demographic places egalitarian commercial race relations in the underground, using its most formidable character to deconstruct Southern stereotypes without hesitating to allude to their pernicious influence.
This accomplishes the following: African American customers (unfortunately) occupy the underground but said occupation is directly (and vivaciously) displayed (bigots can spread their hate but they can't suffocate your spirit). Segregation's pernicious influence on the other hand is indirectly showcased on main street. Such an opposition realistically situates racist cultural dynamics within an historical paradigm while simultaneously suggesting that said paradigm isn't as prominent (in certain areas) as it used to be (without resorting to pointing out how bigoted things can be outside of the American South).
By making the underground activities lively and inviting, and those flourishing in the forefront antiquated and distasteful, Hillcoat subtly contemporarizes his narrative without aggrandizing it, thereby formally instituting a reversal of fortunes.
These commercial relations commence sharpening Lawless's predominant (and much more blunt) focus upon allowing local jurisdictions to settle economic matters according to their own industrious proclivities, the ways in which they particularly interpret the universal, one step at a time, or at least without dismissive, infantilizing, violent authoritative impositions.
Its narrative is quite different from Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, wherein federal authorities seek justice according to the somewhat peaceful (and necessary) application of the law only to be stymied by local thugs (after which 'authoritative impositions' are 'enacted').
Lawless is of course more concerned with underground economies and identity transformation (or solidification), and Special Agent Charlie Rakes's (Guy Pearce) psychopathic abuse of his power to 'tax' and/or crush small businesses during an economic crisis, while using his knowledge to intimidate people as they try to grow/change, is grossly counterproductive.
His exaggerated character represents both the reputation a lot of city folk have for using their 'wit' to consistently enflame the age-old urban/rural antimony, and the ways in which many federal law officers likely abused their authority when transferred to the South (can you break down an institutionalized culture of segregation by treating everyone bigotedly?).
But he bats heads with the Bondurant Boys whose (justifiably) invincible reputation and refusal to back down on certain matters of principle have garnered them considerable respect within (and outside of) their community, although Forrest's (Tom Hardy) adherence to the doctrine of fear generates problematic socio-ethical questions.
I suppose if you live in an excessively violent location you need to physically maintain a resolute persona that demonstrates that it won't take any shit.
But who the hell wants to live like that?
It's like cultivating paranoia instead of grain and such methods will have significant detrimental longterm effects.
Nevertheless, Lawless's explosive yet clever refusal to allow the South to be characterized according to a set of generalized notions, which legitimately carry substantial historical weight but at the same time demonize those who lived within a system without operating according to their divisive rules, tenaciously operates within an incendiary critical domain whose approach to achieving social democratic objectives isn't so light and fluffy.
Although it does ironically employ the cult of the individual (an individual family) to achieve them.
The year is 1931 and prohibition and the great depression are taking their toll.
But dozens of Virginian bootleggers in Franklin County have found ways to circumvent the prudish law while ensuring the availability of steamwhistlin' scratch.
Their business has its share of internal and external dangers, but if their entrepreneurial caution, confidence, and charisma is combatively backed-up, should the situation demand, it's possible for them to get by.
The film's social demographic places egalitarian commercial race relations in the underground, using its most formidable character to deconstruct Southern stereotypes without hesitating to allude to their pernicious influence.
This accomplishes the following: African American customers (unfortunately) occupy the underground but said occupation is directly (and vivaciously) displayed (bigots can spread their hate but they can't suffocate your spirit). Segregation's pernicious influence on the other hand is indirectly showcased on main street. Such an opposition realistically situates racist cultural dynamics within an historical paradigm while simultaneously suggesting that said paradigm isn't as prominent (in certain areas) as it used to be (without resorting to pointing out how bigoted things can be outside of the American South).
By making the underground activities lively and inviting, and those flourishing in the forefront antiquated and distasteful, Hillcoat subtly contemporarizes his narrative without aggrandizing it, thereby formally instituting a reversal of fortunes.
These commercial relations commence sharpening Lawless's predominant (and much more blunt) focus upon allowing local jurisdictions to settle economic matters according to their own industrious proclivities, the ways in which they particularly interpret the universal, one step at a time, or at least without dismissive, infantilizing, violent authoritative impositions.
Its narrative is quite different from Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, wherein federal authorities seek justice according to the somewhat peaceful (and necessary) application of the law only to be stymied by local thugs (after which 'authoritative impositions' are 'enacted').
Lawless is of course more concerned with underground economies and identity transformation (or solidification), and Special Agent Charlie Rakes's (Guy Pearce) psychopathic abuse of his power to 'tax' and/or crush small businesses during an economic crisis, while using his knowledge to intimidate people as they try to grow/change, is grossly counterproductive.
His exaggerated character represents both the reputation a lot of city folk have for using their 'wit' to consistently enflame the age-old urban/rural antimony, and the ways in which many federal law officers likely abused their authority when transferred to the South (can you break down an institutionalized culture of segregation by treating everyone bigotedly?).
But he bats heads with the Bondurant Boys whose (justifiably) invincible reputation and refusal to back down on certain matters of principle have garnered them considerable respect within (and outside of) their community, although Forrest's (Tom Hardy) adherence to the doctrine of fear generates problematic socio-ethical questions.
I suppose if you live in an excessively violent location you need to physically maintain a resolute persona that demonstrates that it won't take any shit.
But who the hell wants to live like that?
It's like cultivating paranoia instead of grain and such methods will have significant detrimental longterm effects.
Nevertheless, Lawless's explosive yet clever refusal to allow the South to be characterized according to a set of generalized notions, which legitimately carry substantial historical weight but at the same time demonize those who lived within a system without operating according to their divisive rules, tenaciously operates within an incendiary critical domain whose approach to achieving social democratic objectives isn't so light and fluffy.
Although it does ironically employ the cult of the individual (an individual family) to achieve them.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Joker
Wow. There's a lot goin' on in this film.
Antiquated misunderstood terminologies are cartographically forsaken for reasons of self-preservation only to remain fluid within their own internal landscape within which a lyrical agrarian dynamic flourishes in isolation.
Until external structural constructions cut off their carnivalesque currents.
Enter Agastya/Sattu (Akshay Kumar), a community member who tackled adversity and found himself a job attempting to establish communications with radical otherness within an international setting.
His talents are extraordinary and he returns home with his adventurous wife (Sonakshi Sinha as Diva) to altruistically put them to work.
The lone village is situated along the border of three Indian states, and he hopes to negotiate a resolution (a communal pact) with one of them in order to resurrect its crops.
While doing so, he adapts to local customs out of respect for their traditions.
Finding no bureaucratic streamline, he employs his knowledge of the sensational to create a spectacle, based upon one appropriated from another domain, with the aid of compatriots, which intrigues the media.
They promptly capitalize on the reconceptualized market as the villagers begin to exchange services for currency.
But a competitive dimension seeks to expose their fantasy's reality which results in the expansion of its theatrics and the intrusion of the American military.
Meanwhile, the three states attempt to incorporate that which they previously disregarded.
But when radical otherness miraculously appears, it becomes apparent that the misunderstood antiquated terminologies that had been topographically eclipsed possess the means through which to intergalactically communicate, and a gift is presented.
The gift enables the village to refuse each of its suitors and remain independent.
Unfortunately, it will also introduce an industrial peculiarity (at the beginning of the film the village has no electricity).
It's quite the present . . .
Yet hopes remain high and Agastya's wit is unmatched, which suggests a sanitary synthesis between two polar means of production loosely intertwined by an improvised intermediary stage.
Scintillatingly scored and jocosely choreographed.
Antiquated misunderstood terminologies are cartographically forsaken for reasons of self-preservation only to remain fluid within their own internal landscape within which a lyrical agrarian dynamic flourishes in isolation.
Until external structural constructions cut off their carnivalesque currents.
Enter Agastya/Sattu (Akshay Kumar), a community member who tackled adversity and found himself a job attempting to establish communications with radical otherness within an international setting.
His talents are extraordinary and he returns home with his adventurous wife (Sonakshi Sinha as Diva) to altruistically put them to work.
The lone village is situated along the border of three Indian states, and he hopes to negotiate a resolution (a communal pact) with one of them in order to resurrect its crops.
While doing so, he adapts to local customs out of respect for their traditions.
Finding no bureaucratic streamline, he employs his knowledge of the sensational to create a spectacle, based upon one appropriated from another domain, with the aid of compatriots, which intrigues the media.
They promptly capitalize on the reconceptualized market as the villagers begin to exchange services for currency.
But a competitive dimension seeks to expose their fantasy's reality which results in the expansion of its theatrics and the intrusion of the American military.
Meanwhile, the three states attempt to incorporate that which they previously disregarded.
But when radical otherness miraculously appears, it becomes apparent that the misunderstood antiquated terminologies that had been topographically eclipsed possess the means through which to intergalactically communicate, and a gift is presented.
The gift enables the village to refuse each of its suitors and remain independent.
Unfortunately, it will also introduce an industrial peculiarity (at the beginning of the film the village has no electricity).
It's quite the present . . .
Yet hopes remain high and Agastya's wit is unmatched, which suggests a sanitary synthesis between two polar means of production loosely intertwined by an improvised intermediary stage.
Scintillatingly scored and jocosely choreographed.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Starsky & Hutch
Starsky and Hutch.
Back at it again.
Although, this film was released 8 years ago so perhaps 'again' isn't the correct word to be using here, but, since I'm viewing it according to the dynamics of the ways in which the second decade of the 21st century is influencing my writing, the term 'again' can therefore be thought of as being applied appropriately, give or take that there's still a lot more I need to learn about globalization.
Much much more.
That being said, I still don't have much to say about Starsky & Hutch.
To literally break it down, it takes two psychological law enforcement extremes, one which is so anal retentive that it alienates everyone and is consequently regularly forced to find new partners, another with an approach that is so laissez-faire that it can smoothly make contacts and move about suavely but can't effectively get any work done, and slowly synthesizes them throughout as they grow and come to function like a strong resilient team.
Alternatively, in regards to its comedic aspects, I didn't find it as funny as I probably would have in 2004 but I may not have found it that funny back then either.
Cool car though.
Alright, I'm really not that into motorized vehicles.
Just trying to sound cool.
Fun to ride around in sometimes though.
I'm not cool.
Back at it again.
Although, this film was released 8 years ago so perhaps 'again' isn't the correct word to be using here, but, since I'm viewing it according to the dynamics of the ways in which the second decade of the 21st century is influencing my writing, the term 'again' can therefore be thought of as being applied appropriately, give or take that there's still a lot more I need to learn about globalization.
Much much more.
That being said, I still don't have much to say about Starsky & Hutch.
To literally break it down, it takes two psychological law enforcement extremes, one which is so anal retentive that it alienates everyone and is consequently regularly forced to find new partners, another with an approach that is so laissez-faire that it can smoothly make contacts and move about suavely but can't effectively get any work done, and slowly synthesizes them throughout as they grow and come to function like a strong resilient team.
Alternatively, in regards to its comedic aspects, I didn't find it as funny as I probably would have in 2004 but I may not have found it that funny back then either.
Cool car though.
Alright, I'm really not that into motorized vehicles.
Just trying to sound cool.
Fun to ride around in sometimes though.
I'm not cool.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
The Dark Knight Rises
Not feelin' it for The Dark Knight Rises.
Don't get me wrong, the rapid pace and intelligent script make for an entertaining thought-provoking film, packed tight with a judicial balance of solid and cheesy lines/imagery/situations, set within an armageddonesque scenario which exemplifies the apotheosis of campy mainstream political drama basking in subtly sensational ludicrousy.
Note that it's just a movie.
Within however, the villain Bane (Roger Hardy), who works in the sewers and is backed by some of Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) excessively wealthy competitors, has been using construction workers and freelance thieves to launch a strategic attack which will incarcerate Gotham City's entire police force, set up a kangaroo court to 'judge' the wealthy, get his hands on a source of limitless energy that can be turned into a catastrophically destructive weapon, the whole time acting like a person of the people.
It's a bit much.
And the ways in which construction unions are depicted is frustrating.
Of course it's just a movie, within which Bane is a fanatical lunatic who employs absurd methods to achieve insane objectives.
I mean, what person of the people would destroy a football stadium?
But making him a 'person of the people' does cunningly vilify genuine persons of the people like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who still had to operate in a political dynamic which encountered expedient matters I'm assuming) which is problematic.
He is financed by the excessively wealthy, as mentioned earlier, which logically states that plutocrats are theoretically capable of using popular tropes to achieve despotic ends, thereby making Bane's adoption of the label 'person of the people' all the more problematic.
But this doesn't mean individuals who come from privileged backgrounds don't care about structural issues relating to poverty, individuals such as Jack Layton, and want to try to do something about them using legitimate political methods (pointing out a social democrat's rich upbringing is a divisive tactic used by the right to discredit them, from what I can tell anyway).
Having a source of limitless environmentally friendly power that can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction is also problematic, inasmuch as it indirectly vilifies alternative energy sources while propping up the nuclear/petroleum-based-product status quo.
Obviously, when your economy is seriously dependent on this status quo (see The End of Suburbia, 2004) and the ways in which its revenues fuel social programs, you can't simply change everything overnight without causing mass unemployment (perhaps I'm wrong here, I don't know, but it seems to me that if your economy is functioning with a significant deficit, large scale structural changes to its infrastructure will be disastrous unless they can definitively generate mass profits in the aftermath [which is a pretty big risk to take if you're not flush with cash]).
But at the same time, not trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives to the petroleum/nuclear power base that can't be turned into WMDs or be inexpensively integrated into the grid is equally disastrous (I suppose while searching for such power sources it's important to hire people to continuously monitor whether or not their construction can lead to the creation of WMDs [obviously enough {perhaps this isn't so obvious: it took a very long time to cap the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because they weren't prepared}]).
People often call me naive, but, whatever: "It was all the more [troublesome] because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality"(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5 [I don't think I'm like Proust, I just love reading In Search of Lost Time]).
Hence, as an escape, I did enjoy The Dark Knight Rises, but I can't support some of its structural issues inasmuch as, according to this viewing, they aren't very progressive.
There is the issue of Selina (Anne Hathaway) however who is trying to change her life around but can't due to the ways in which her criminal record prevents her from finding employment.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
Take 'em or leave 'em.
Don't get me wrong, the rapid pace and intelligent script make for an entertaining thought-provoking film, packed tight with a judicial balance of solid and cheesy lines/imagery/situations, set within an armageddonesque scenario which exemplifies the apotheosis of campy mainstream political drama basking in subtly sensational ludicrousy.
Note that it's just a movie.
Within however, the villain Bane (Roger Hardy), who works in the sewers and is backed by some of Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) excessively wealthy competitors, has been using construction workers and freelance thieves to launch a strategic attack which will incarcerate Gotham City's entire police force, set up a kangaroo court to 'judge' the wealthy, get his hands on a source of limitless energy that can be turned into a catastrophically destructive weapon, the whole time acting like a person of the people.
It's a bit much.
And the ways in which construction unions are depicted is frustrating.
Of course it's just a movie, within which Bane is a fanatical lunatic who employs absurd methods to achieve insane objectives.
I mean, what person of the people would destroy a football stadium?
But making him a 'person of the people' does cunningly vilify genuine persons of the people like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who still had to operate in a political dynamic which encountered expedient matters I'm assuming) which is problematic.
He is financed by the excessively wealthy, as mentioned earlier, which logically states that plutocrats are theoretically capable of using popular tropes to achieve despotic ends, thereby making Bane's adoption of the label 'person of the people' all the more problematic.
But this doesn't mean individuals who come from privileged backgrounds don't care about structural issues relating to poverty, individuals such as Jack Layton, and want to try to do something about them using legitimate political methods (pointing out a social democrat's rich upbringing is a divisive tactic used by the right to discredit them, from what I can tell anyway).
Having a source of limitless environmentally friendly power that can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction is also problematic, inasmuch as it indirectly vilifies alternative energy sources while propping up the nuclear/petroleum-based-product status quo.
Obviously, when your economy is seriously dependent on this status quo (see The End of Suburbia, 2004) and the ways in which its revenues fuel social programs, you can't simply change everything overnight without causing mass unemployment (perhaps I'm wrong here, I don't know, but it seems to me that if your economy is functioning with a significant deficit, large scale structural changes to its infrastructure will be disastrous unless they can definitively generate mass profits in the aftermath [which is a pretty big risk to take if you're not flush with cash]).
But at the same time, not trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives to the petroleum/nuclear power base that can't be turned into WMDs or be inexpensively integrated into the grid is equally disastrous (I suppose while searching for such power sources it's important to hire people to continuously monitor whether or not their construction can lead to the creation of WMDs [obviously enough {perhaps this isn't so obvious: it took a very long time to cap the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because they weren't prepared}]).
People often call me naive, but, whatever: "It was all the more [troublesome] because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality"(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5 [I don't think I'm like Proust, I just love reading In Search of Lost Time]).
Hence, as an escape, I did enjoy The Dark Knight Rises, but I can't support some of its structural issues inasmuch as, according to this viewing, they aren't very progressive.
There is the issue of Selina (Anne Hathaway) however who is trying to change her life around but can't due to the ways in which her criminal record prevents her from finding employment.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
Take 'em or leave 'em.
Monday, August 27, 2012
2 Days in New York
The artistic, political, familial, conjugal, critical, social, quizzical, spiritual, sexual and psychological creatively intermingle in Julie Delpy's 2 Days in New York, wherein free-spirits lackadaisically/audaciously/petulantly/mendaciously contend with both the pretentious and the vituperative, in the pursuit of playing a specific role.
These roles themselves, when abstracted, transformed into symbols, placed within a fluctuating in/determinate semantic matrix, in/determinate depending upon the rhetorical convictions of the urges to clarify (and the resultant multi/bi/lateral counter-clarifications), fluctuating inasmuch as difference guarantees the establishment of multiple points of view (many of which temporally fluctuate within themselves [unless you write this kind of thing]), can produce multilateral takes which nurture an inclusive body politic wherein manifold outlooks survey their surroundings, i.e., Web 2.0.
The film itself isn't really my style but I appreciate the dynamic complexity within which it's exoterically expressed.
Employing the spice mélange.
These roles themselves, when abstracted, transformed into symbols, placed within a fluctuating in/determinate semantic matrix, in/determinate depending upon the rhetorical convictions of the urges to clarify (and the resultant multi/bi/lateral counter-clarifications), fluctuating inasmuch as difference guarantees the establishment of multiple points of view (many of which temporally fluctuate within themselves [unless you write this kind of thing]), can produce multilateral takes which nurture an inclusive body politic wherein manifold outlooks survey their surroundings, i.e., Web 2.0.
The film itself isn't really my style but I appreciate the dynamic complexity within which it's exoterically expressed.
Employing the spice mélange.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Magnifica Presenza (Magnificent Presence)
Radiating an offbeat, gentle, luminescent reflexivity, Magnifica Presenza's Pietro Pontechievello (Elio Germano) works in a bakery while striving to become an actor.
After renting a house, he's visited by the ghosts of a theatre troupe (Compangia Appollonio) who worked for the resistance and were betrayed by their feature during World War II.
They strike up a friendship and their influence ameliorates his performance while imbuing his social interactions with experimental antiquated idiosyncrasies.
Awkwardly yet humanistically elevating while humorously tenderizing an artist's ambitions, subtly suggesting that blending the contemporary with the historical can lead to a broader understanding of one's self, or the surmounting of socio-cultural barriers (the stigma of homosexuality) more suited to a different time (within the film's temporal boundaries the stigma of homosexuality isn't prominent), and simultaneously warning against and romanticizing the internalization of the cult of the hero, Magnifica Presenza lovingly offers a clinical diagnosis of loneliness alongside a curative aid.
Boundlessly allusive and reticently merry.
In the mind's eye.
After renting a house, he's visited by the ghosts of a theatre troupe (Compangia Appollonio) who worked for the resistance and were betrayed by their feature during World War II.
They strike up a friendship and their influence ameliorates his performance while imbuing his social interactions with experimental antiquated idiosyncrasies.
Awkwardly yet humanistically elevating while humorously tenderizing an artist's ambitions, subtly suggesting that blending the contemporary with the historical can lead to a broader understanding of one's self, or the surmounting of socio-cultural barriers (the stigma of homosexuality) more suited to a different time (within the film's temporal boundaries the stigma of homosexuality isn't prominent), and simultaneously warning against and romanticizing the internalization of the cult of the hero, Magnifica Presenza lovingly offers a clinical diagnosis of loneliness alongside a curative aid.
Boundlessly allusive and reticently merry.
In the mind's eye.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
L'Incrédule (The Skeptic)
Two couples forge a spur-of-the-moment friendship in Federico Hidalgo's L'Incrédule (The Skeptic), after which a small business is inaugurated whose indeterminate outputs whimsically delineate the ambiguous.
The service they provide is known as the Charuflauta, which, from what I gathered, is a cure for loneliness.
None of the characters are able to definitively describe it, however, or figure out whether or not they should seek payment for their efforts.
When their first clients require a practical application of their abstraction, the comedic results lampoon the melancholic while stultifying the hyper-analytical.
Great film, mischievously mixing a broad array of sociological, personal, financial, artistic, and conjugal intersections, loosely framed within a recurring photographic motif, which establishes a reverberating ontological/epistemological dialectic, in order to clarify a sense of belonging.
Cheeky, uplifting, indecisive, self-assured.
In regards to the encapsulations of the concretely abstract.
The service they provide is known as the Charuflauta, which, from what I gathered, is a cure for loneliness.
None of the characters are able to definitively describe it, however, or figure out whether or not they should seek payment for their efforts.
When their first clients require a practical application of their abstraction, the comedic results lampoon the melancholic while stultifying the hyper-analytical.
Great film, mischievously mixing a broad array of sociological, personal, financial, artistic, and conjugal intersections, loosely framed within a recurring photographic motif, which establishes a reverberating ontological/epistemological dialectic, in order to clarify a sense of belonging.
Cheeky, uplifting, indecisive, self-assured.
In regards to the encapsulations of the concretely abstract.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Total Recall
Whether or not the action within the Total Recall remake takes place solely within Douglas Quaid/Hauser's (Colin Farrell) mind or in the film's objective domain is obviously up for debate.
The evidence for both sides is provided within a functional formulaic opposition between two states, one who owns the means of production (The United Federation of Britain/UFB), and another who is forced to work within them (The Colony/Australia).
The rest of the planet is uninhabitable due to prolonged chemical warfare.
In the onset, Quaid/Hauser has become bored with the status quo and decides to check out Rekall, a notorious company who can directly plant living memories within your mind. After arriving, he chooses the secret agent program (with the double agent option) and just as he's about to drift off, seconds after he's intravenously hooked up, security forces rush in.
For the rest of the film he's a pseudo-double agent (Hauser) who has had his memory erased and replaced with the persona Douglas Quaid. He instinctively remembers details of his former life, usually gut reactions which help him escape UFB traps, but cannot reconstruct the big picture.
His situation directly relates to a bewildering recurring dream he's been having, prior to visiting Rekall.
I probably should have paid more attention to the myriad chase sequences and mushy one-liners that predominate afterwards, for it's likely that within their action/delivery lie clues designed to disambiguate Total Recall's 'dreamscape.' But said sequences and one-liners are abundant and I found myself zoning out after a while.
However, before Quaid enters Rekall, the one-liners are delivered with a self-reflexive gritty disengaged realistic dexterity.
After entering Rekall and then travelling to the UFB, Hauser's first olympian flight is characterized by constantly shifting ground and split-second opportune life saving reflexes, in short, the stuff dreams are made of.
Yet, as many people find themselves looking for permanent work, often having to travel and compete to secure it, their terrain constantly shifts, working for a year here, another there, perennially stuck in a probationary period.
And while searching one must often use brief inter/national/provincial/regional expressions while communicating.
Quaid knows who he is. There's no doubt in his mind as to his identity nor to his historical path.
Hauser has to rely on hidden messages and/or direct support/condemnation, mired in contradiction due to his supposed status as double agent, apart from the messages he's left behind for himself, and his actions, to formulate a stable I, oddly mirroring the establishment of a dream identity, albeit purely rational within the space's systemic parameters.
His sudden epic coercive confusing circumstances require a leap of faith which he makes, choosing to fight for the oppressed (the UFB has run out of land and seeks to invade the Colony to take theirs), which he does with the aid of his stunning versatile partner (Jessica Biel as Melina) while his former wife (Kate Beckingsale as Lori Quaid) does everything she can to stop them.
And an enigmatic individual whose personality reflects the end of history prevents the colonialization while enabling the creation of a social democratic state, amidst cheers and celebrations and a giant advertisement for Rekall.
Is this resolution too good to be true?
Well, in order to openly discuss the legitimate claims of oppressed workers in the post-9/11 age of austerity while working within a domain that regularly produces works designed to infantilize them, it makes sense that such a discussion would have to take place within an ambiguous framework in order for everyone involved to avoid any imperial entanglements.
At the same time, if the narrative does take place solely in Quaid's mind, it's designed to provoke critical discussions of the ways in which the military industrial complex is using pop culture to substitute images for reality in order to disrupt collective left-wing political actions by situating them within the cult of the individual, thereby making them seem unattainable (director Len Wiseman having taken control of the means of production).
Meaning that either way, Quaid is Hauser.
The evidence for both sides is provided within a functional formulaic opposition between two states, one who owns the means of production (The United Federation of Britain/UFB), and another who is forced to work within them (The Colony/Australia).
The rest of the planet is uninhabitable due to prolonged chemical warfare.
In the onset, Quaid/Hauser has become bored with the status quo and decides to check out Rekall, a notorious company who can directly plant living memories within your mind. After arriving, he chooses the secret agent program (with the double agent option) and just as he's about to drift off, seconds after he's intravenously hooked up, security forces rush in.
For the rest of the film he's a pseudo-double agent (Hauser) who has had his memory erased and replaced with the persona Douglas Quaid. He instinctively remembers details of his former life, usually gut reactions which help him escape UFB traps, but cannot reconstruct the big picture.
His situation directly relates to a bewildering recurring dream he's been having, prior to visiting Rekall.
I probably should have paid more attention to the myriad chase sequences and mushy one-liners that predominate afterwards, for it's likely that within their action/delivery lie clues designed to disambiguate Total Recall's 'dreamscape.' But said sequences and one-liners are abundant and I found myself zoning out after a while.
However, before Quaid enters Rekall, the one-liners are delivered with a self-reflexive gritty disengaged realistic dexterity.
After entering Rekall and then travelling to the UFB, Hauser's first olympian flight is characterized by constantly shifting ground and split-second opportune life saving reflexes, in short, the stuff dreams are made of.
Yet, as many people find themselves looking for permanent work, often having to travel and compete to secure it, their terrain constantly shifts, working for a year here, another there, perennially stuck in a probationary period.
And while searching one must often use brief inter/national/provincial/regional expressions while communicating.
Quaid knows who he is. There's no doubt in his mind as to his identity nor to his historical path.
Hauser has to rely on hidden messages and/or direct support/condemnation, mired in contradiction due to his supposed status as double agent, apart from the messages he's left behind for himself, and his actions, to formulate a stable I, oddly mirroring the establishment of a dream identity, albeit purely rational within the space's systemic parameters.
His sudden epic coercive confusing circumstances require a leap of faith which he makes, choosing to fight for the oppressed (the UFB has run out of land and seeks to invade the Colony to take theirs), which he does with the aid of his stunning versatile partner (Jessica Biel as Melina) while his former wife (Kate Beckingsale as Lori Quaid) does everything she can to stop them.
And an enigmatic individual whose personality reflects the end of history prevents the colonialization while enabling the creation of a social democratic state, amidst cheers and celebrations and a giant advertisement for Rekall.
Is this resolution too good to be true?
Well, in order to openly discuss the legitimate claims of oppressed workers in the post-9/11 age of austerity while working within a domain that regularly produces works designed to infantilize them, it makes sense that such a discussion would have to take place within an ambiguous framework in order for everyone involved to avoid any imperial entanglements.
At the same time, if the narrative does take place solely in Quaid's mind, it's designed to provoke critical discussions of the ways in which the military industrial complex is using pop culture to substitute images for reality in order to disrupt collective left-wing political actions by situating them within the cult of the individual, thereby making them seem unattainable (director Len Wiseman having taken control of the means of production).
Meaning that either way, Quaid is Hauser.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Take this Waltz
Disorientingly positioned between two socio-cultural persuasions (traditional vs. open marriage), one, familiar, cozy, predictable and solid, option 2, unknown, spicy, spontaneous and in inspirational flux, Take this Waltz's Margot (Michelle Williams) struggles to choose a specific gravitational counterpart, their contradictory forces amorously messin' with her mind.
Associated risks and issues of comfort are respectfully juxtaposed with daring intoxicating improvisational interest.
As if a beautiful funny intelligent woman rediscovers that sensuous spark that unrecognizably redefined her as she let herself go in the arms of another, and it becomes increasingly difficult to dialectically distinguish her two suitors.
Until earthly realities draw attention to the responsibilities of the symbolic and the imaginary must be qualified by a degree of practicality.
An escape, a happy place, something blissful, is required, where, perhaps, when emotionally tied to demanding conflicting relational engagements, one can reassert a transcendent sense of self while existentially weighing their details against their general affects, one which functions as a secret personalized counterpoint to that generated by the partner's enigmatic propulsive particle, from which balance can be dependently realized.
Having interiorized and subjectively promulgated the gaze of her subjects of desire.
And negotiated a flexible impervious pact.
Grabbers (Fantasia Fest 2012)
A peaceful island is resting quietly off the Irish coast, congenially taking care of its daily business, relaxed and chill, content and thirsty, relatively unconcerned with the partitions of the mainland, enjoying what little they have with everything they've got.
But after an austere by-the-book officious smartypants arrives from Dublin for a two week shift, strange things begin to happen.
A pod of deceased whales washes up on shore.
Residents and fisherpersons disappear.
A bizarre unclassified squidlike creature is caught in a lobster trap.
Who has given birth to young seeking to feast on human blood.
This means local constable Ciarán O'Shea (Richard Coyle) must give up drinking in order to save the village when papa comes searching for his imprisoned mate, and his by-the-book superior must tie-one-on for the first time.
In fact, since the aliens can't digest blood infused with alcohol, the entire town is invited to a local tavern, where there is a piss-up of biblical proportions, mirthfully unrestrained, at first, on the house.
Celebrating the love of stiff pints while comedically and romantically illustrating how they can effectively fight off bloodsucking monsters, Jon Wright's Grabbers jovially and collectively serves up a round of experimentally crafted filmic fermentation, torrentially tapping a traditional reservoir, to insouciantly distribute an ironic distillation.
Brazenly brewed.
But after an austere by-the-book officious smartypants arrives from Dublin for a two week shift, strange things begin to happen.
A pod of deceased whales washes up on shore.
Residents and fisherpersons disappear.
A bizarre unclassified squidlike creature is caught in a lobster trap.
Who has given birth to young seeking to feast on human blood.
This means local constable Ciarán O'Shea (Richard Coyle) must give up drinking in order to save the village when papa comes searching for his imprisoned mate, and his by-the-book superior must tie-one-on for the first time.
In fact, since the aliens can't digest blood infused with alcohol, the entire town is invited to a local tavern, where there is a piss-up of biblical proportions, mirthfully unrestrained, at first, on the house.
Celebrating the love of stiff pints while comedically and romantically illustrating how they can effectively fight off bloodsucking monsters, Jon Wright's Grabbers jovially and collectively serves up a round of experimentally crafted filmic fermentation, torrentially tapping a traditional reservoir, to insouciantly distribute an ironic distillation.
Brazenly brewed.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Roller Town (Fantasia Fest 2012)
Rollin' along; roller skatin' down that road.
Bringing disco, back to life.
Haligonian comedy troupe Picnicface insert their distinct brand of hypertense laissez-faire creepy yet ingratiating socio-cultural commentary into their first full-length film, Roller Town, overflowing with the same cerebral mix of nostalgic innocence and nauseous necromancy that nauticalized their television show, ironically transmitted through a vicarious fundamental frequency, which fetishistically elevates the construction of a permanent sense of psychological well-being, localized and qualified by an irresistibly naive belief in the eternal values of pop culture, avatarized with direct access to the divine, while criminally agitating its impending neuroses.
A lot of the jokes/situations have an immediate impact (are funny) while many of them seem like they were deliberately set up to just be as inane and I-don't-give-a-fuck as possible. But when you think about them afterwards it's these inane moments that lacked depth that make you laugh and want to see it again.
Which isn't that easy to do.
Bringing disco, back to life.
Haligonian comedy troupe Picnicface insert their distinct brand of hypertense laissez-faire creepy yet ingratiating socio-cultural commentary into their first full-length film, Roller Town, overflowing with the same cerebral mix of nostalgic innocence and nauseous necromancy that nauticalized their television show, ironically transmitted through a vicarious fundamental frequency, which fetishistically elevates the construction of a permanent sense of psychological well-being, localized and qualified by an irresistibly naive belief in the eternal values of pop culture, avatarized with direct access to the divine, while criminally agitating its impending neuroses.
A lot of the jokes/situations have an immediate impact (are funny) while many of them seem like they were deliberately set up to just be as inane and I-don't-give-a-fuck as possible. But when you think about them afterwards it's these inane moments that lacked depth that make you laugh and want to see it again.
Which isn't that easy to do.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Les Aventures de Chatran (Fantasia Fest 2012)
One day Chatran's living with her mother and siblings on the farm, the next, she's floating downriver in a wooden crate, timorously preparing herself for life's unexpected verisimilitudes.
Her friend Pousquet chases after her and is always there in her time of need.
As her hesitant curiosity cautiously explores her new environment's mysterious terrain, collecting eclectic sensory stimuli as she travels through the countryside, a steady approach is diversely enacted, aided by her instinctive elasticity.
Making friends while avoiding the overbearing.
And verdantly investing in deciduous synergies.
Her friend Pousquet chases after her and is always there in her time of need.
As her hesitant curiosity cautiously explores her new environment's mysterious terrain, collecting eclectic sensory stimuli as she travels through the countryside, a steady approach is diversely enacted, aided by her instinctive elasticity.
Making friends while avoiding the overbearing.
And verdantly investing in deciduous synergies.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Trishna
Aesthetics clash with socioeconomics after a brief period of romantic resignation in Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, where love is permitted to bloom if it knows its place.
Although, as it becomes increasingly clear that that place, due to the different circumstances into which the partners were born, will involve prolonged periods where the dependent lover, Trishna (Freida Pinto), must submit to whatever desire her wealthy benefactor adopts, immediately and without question, her thoughts and feelings being considered by him to have been forfeited in return for the employment and luxuries with which he provides her, said blooming soon morbidly decays.
There is no balance, no give and take, just a one-sided narcissistic vacuum taking full advantage of its power and privilege.
Trishna's father doesn't help much either being more concerned with honour and saving face than his daughter's trauma.
And a shy, modest, beautiful impoverished woman, who was only searching for things such as respect and a voice from her partner, wanders off into the desert alone, while school children sing a song celebrating equality (it's a powerful scene in terms of strengthening the left in India).
Having symbolically used her realistic imagination to ceremoniously slice through the imaginary real.
Although, as it becomes increasingly clear that that place, due to the different circumstances into which the partners were born, will involve prolonged periods where the dependent lover, Trishna (Freida Pinto), must submit to whatever desire her wealthy benefactor adopts, immediately and without question, her thoughts and feelings being considered by him to have been forfeited in return for the employment and luxuries with which he provides her, said blooming soon morbidly decays.
There is no balance, no give and take, just a one-sided narcissistic vacuum taking full advantage of its power and privilege.
Trishna's father doesn't help much either being more concerned with honour and saving face than his daughter's trauma.
And a shy, modest, beautiful impoverished woman, who was only searching for things such as respect and a voice from her partner, wanders off into the desert alone, while school children sing a song celebrating equality (it's a powerful scene in terms of strengthening the left in India).
Having symbolically used her realistic imagination to ceremoniously slice through the imaginary real.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
To Rome with Love
For a summer in Rome, an office clerk finds himself thrust into the spotlight, his routine reflections hyperbolically sensationalizing influence, as an architect revisits his youth to bring back to life/cross-examine his most serendipitous subject of desire, a young communist lawyer contends with a retired opera producer when it's discovered that his humble father can sing exceptionally well, and a married couple, in town for a potentially prosperous employment opportunity, find themselves accidentally embracing exotic extramarital affairs.
Felicitously framed by a traffic cop's dissolving point of view.
The conditions of which inculcate calisthenic creativity.
Romantically mingling the celebrated with the starstruck and the ordinary with the hyper-intensive, while evoking the nimble necessity to unearth metaphorical mirth within corresponding psychoanalytic observations, Woody Allen's To Rome with Love's palpable playful pluck picturesquely procures impressionable popularizations, and salaciously serenades atemporal condensations.
Fidelity strengthened through chance, temptation tethered to testimony, regret distinguished from revelation, and dreams evanescently alighted.
A virtuosic variation on a theme.
There's a lot more to it than that.
Felicitously framed by a traffic cop's dissolving point of view.
The conditions of which inculcate calisthenic creativity.
Romantically mingling the celebrated with the starstruck and the ordinary with the hyper-intensive, while evoking the nimble necessity to unearth metaphorical mirth within corresponding psychoanalytic observations, Woody Allen's To Rome with Love's palpable playful pluck picturesquely procures impressionable popularizations, and salaciously serenades atemporal condensations.
Fidelity strengthened through chance, temptation tethered to testimony, regret distinguished from revelation, and dreams evanescently alighted.
A virtuosic variation on a theme.
There's a lot more to it than that.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) (Fantasia Fest 2012)
12 Indigenous tribes are living harmoniously amongst one another in the late-18th/early-19th century in the mountains of central Taiwan, when imperialist Japanese forces invade.
Their harmonious relations are highly aggressive inasmuch as manhood is achieved by cutting off the head of a member of a surrounding tribe.
The conquerors see things differently however and colonize said tribes in order to put them to work maximizing the economic potential of their natural resources.
Decades pass, and a once proud warrior culture is reduced to back breaking poorly paid labour, alcohol abuse, suffocating ethnocentric taunts, and the systematic depletion of their ancestral hunting grounds.
And respect for their traditions is anathema.
Yet the knowledge that rebellion is akin to mass suicide keeps them at bay, until the situation proves too belittling to be endured forever after (no treaties whereby they could maintain their way of life were negotiated and signed).
And a revolt is launched.
The ways in which director Te-Sheng Wei depicts the revolt incontrovertibly turn one's stomach, as the legendary Mona Rudao (Da-Ching, Lin Ching-Tai) and his Mahebu people express their revenge.
Obviously I was cheering for the downtrodden Mahebu but my support was structurally challenged as they massacred every Japanese person in their village.
The challenge being the result of the generation of an internally cathartic traumatic absolutist aesthetic, which chaotically yet rationally glorifies battle while championing the enslaved, accompanied by a feminine voice singing a haunting lugubrious lament, working within and celebrating the traditions of the vanquished, without hesitating to showcase their warlike being.
A being which I'm not used to inductively digesting.
The rest of Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) practically answers Camus's cliché contention that the only properly philosophical problem is suicide.
Assuming that's a cliché by now anyways.
And its response heroically illustrates the fearless spiritual will of a fierce uncompromising people, forced to adopt extreme methods, dedicated to their way of life, refusing to passively perish.
As time goes by.
Their harmonious relations are highly aggressive inasmuch as manhood is achieved by cutting off the head of a member of a surrounding tribe.
The conquerors see things differently however and colonize said tribes in order to put them to work maximizing the economic potential of their natural resources.
Decades pass, and a once proud warrior culture is reduced to back breaking poorly paid labour, alcohol abuse, suffocating ethnocentric taunts, and the systematic depletion of their ancestral hunting grounds.
And respect for their traditions is anathema.
Yet the knowledge that rebellion is akin to mass suicide keeps them at bay, until the situation proves too belittling to be endured forever after (no treaties whereby they could maintain their way of life were negotiated and signed).
And a revolt is launched.
The ways in which director Te-Sheng Wei depicts the revolt incontrovertibly turn one's stomach, as the legendary Mona Rudao (Da-Ching, Lin Ching-Tai) and his Mahebu people express their revenge.
Obviously I was cheering for the downtrodden Mahebu but my support was structurally challenged as they massacred every Japanese person in their village.
The challenge being the result of the generation of an internally cathartic traumatic absolutist aesthetic, which chaotically yet rationally glorifies battle while championing the enslaved, accompanied by a feminine voice singing a haunting lugubrious lament, working within and celebrating the traditions of the vanquished, without hesitating to showcase their warlike being.
A being which I'm not used to inductively digesting.
The rest of Sàidékè Balái (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) practically answers Camus's cliché contention that the only properly philosophical problem is suicide.
Assuming that's a cliché by now anyways.
And its response heroically illustrates the fearless spiritual will of a fierce uncompromising people, forced to adopt extreme methods, dedicated to their way of life, refusing to passively perish.
As time goes by.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) (Fantasia Fest 2012)
Presenting a comic romantic over-the-top ultraviolent musical, wherein bourgeois values resolutely seek to pacify a versatile tumultuous rogue, the undying and overpowering intensity of love unwaveringly guiding their reformative resolve, streetwise unconditional consistent combative tenacity governing his, Takashi Miike's Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) does not refrain from elaborately executing every consummate class cliché ever created, sensationally synthesizing quixotic and hardboiled extremes, relentlessly reproducing unerringly awkward amorously explosive motifs, in the implacable pursuit, of emancipated co-dependence.
Group dynamics repetitively insist that young Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) obediently pay his respects, but as their challenges are uniformly discombobulated, his limitless disenfranchised individuality, and consequent unwittingly seductive magnetism, remain intact.
Attaching a monetary value to the ability to maintain specific ideological viewpoints, while catastrophically choreographing their constructive affects, Ai to Makoto pugnaciously parodies the domain of rehabilitative reckoning, while chaotically kitschifying the practice of revenge.
For love's sake.
Group dynamics repetitively insist that young Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) obediently pay his respects, but as their challenges are uniformly discombobulated, his limitless disenfranchised individuality, and consequent unwittingly seductive magnetism, remain intact.
Attaching a monetary value to the ability to maintain specific ideological viewpoints, while catastrophically choreographing their constructive affects, Ai to Makoto pugnaciously parodies the domain of rehabilitative reckoning, while chaotically kitschifying the practice of revenge.
For love's sake.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Cosmopolis
A brilliant young billionaire, having maintained his fortune by grammatically applying the mathematical rhythms of nature to the metaphorical constructs of his social interactions, something like that, philosophically travels throughout New York in his cork-lined limo, calmly discussing various subjects with his astute personnel, occasionally stopping to chat with his literary wife, protests pulsating outside, historical echoes allusively gyrating, definitive risks annihilating his wealth, the pursuit of pleasure conjugally detected, security forces requiring guidance, meaning, substantially, trying to break its way through.
On his way to have his hair cut.
Operating within a conscious surrealistic intellectual structure spatially adorned with sudden startlingly ephemeral enactments (momentary dreamlike logical displacements), wherein questions of tangibility become remarkably fluid before alternatively reverting to their previous states, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis examines an individual's steady response to a shockingly increasing barrage of multilayered financial, cultural, and, derivatively, psychological derailments, whose consequent disruptions cannot be experientially sublimated.
Mr. Packer's (Robert Pattinson) unaffected emancipated solution attaches a horrific qualification to the concept of freedom.
Even when Cronenberg zeroes in on the cerebral, he can still find other ways of exemplifying his roots.
On his way to have his hair cut.
Operating within a conscious surrealistic intellectual structure spatially adorned with sudden startlingly ephemeral enactments (momentary dreamlike logical displacements), wherein questions of tangibility become remarkably fluid before alternatively reverting to their previous states, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis examines an individual's steady response to a shockingly increasing barrage of multilayered financial, cultural, and, derivatively, psychological derailments, whose consequent disruptions cannot be experientially sublimated.
Mr. Packer's (Robert Pattinson) unaffected emancipated solution attaches a horrific qualification to the concept of freedom.
Even when Cronenberg zeroes in on the cerebral, he can still find other ways of exemplifying his roots.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Et maintenant on va où? (Where Do We Go Now?)
A remote village in Lebanon remains technologically isolated from its surrounding politico-cultural environment which erupts in a religious war. Seeking to ensure that no more of their children are needlessly slaughtered, its Christian and Muslim female inhabitants unite to distract their masculine counterparts. However, regardless of the fact that they know nothing of the war, tensions between these men have been increasing due to sacrilegious activities that have inspired retribution.
Trying to covertly manage the vindictive violence proves challenging.
A challenge to which these heroic women stalwartly, respond.
Exercising a seductive mix of the expedient, the temperamental, and the divine, Nadine Labaki's Et maintenant on va où? (Where Do We Go Now?) fictionally verifies how destructive overtures can be pacified within pressurized time constraints.
Certain aspects of the solution they facilitate may have practical applications beyond said constraints, although reflecting upon whether or not their means justifies their ends pasteurizes acute ethical dilemmas.
Nevertheless, a powerful film with a progressive message, Et maintenant on va où suggests that a rural dynamic can play an influential role in the byzantine global mosaic, as a matter of perseverance as opposed to pride, or acceptance as the foundations of transcendence.
Trying to covertly manage the vindictive violence proves challenging.
A challenge to which these heroic women stalwartly, respond.
Exercising a seductive mix of the expedient, the temperamental, and the divine, Nadine Labaki's Et maintenant on va où? (Where Do We Go Now?) fictionally verifies how destructive overtures can be pacified within pressurized time constraints.
Certain aspects of the solution they facilitate may have practical applications beyond said constraints, although reflecting upon whether or not their means justifies their ends pasteurizes acute ethical dilemmas.
Nevertheless, a powerful film with a progressive message, Et maintenant on va où suggests that a rural dynamic can play an influential role in the byzantine global mosaic, as a matter of perseverance as opposed to pride, or acceptance as the foundations of transcendence.
Moonrise Kingdom
Stoic particular oddities are seamlessly intertwined with a general reconceptualization of a stilted romantic American summer vacation, framed through recourse to a revitalized instructional capacity, championing the ingenuity of two young outcasts, demanding that those who neglected them altruistically unite, with the aid of Bruce Willis, as the peculiar becomes the pertinent and vice versa, discussion engenders understanding, the resulting text overtly incarnates visceral dialectics, melodramatically idealized by the pursuit of love.
Regardless of the structural impediments firmly bulwarking a sustained historical social reverberation, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) courageously escape to the wilderness which created it, only to find their commitment to one another strengthened all the more, after having been discovered.
Underground authorities are then enlisted to creatively sanctify that which has been forbidden.
And as the heavens thunderously strike back, only s/he whose bravery eclipses his/her intellect can function as saviour.
And the Moonrise Kingdom shines forth.
Having been integrated into the system.
Regardless of the structural impediments firmly bulwarking a sustained historical social reverberation, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) courageously escape to the wilderness which created it, only to find their commitment to one another strengthened all the more, after having been discovered.
Underground authorities are then enlisted to creatively sanctify that which has been forbidden.
And as the heavens thunderously strike back, only s/he whose bravery eclipses his/her intellect can function as saviour.
And the Moonrise Kingdom shines forth.
Having been integrated into the system.
Intouchables
Improvised confident agile productivity meets frustrated restrained routine continuity in the heartwarming new odd couple film, Intouchables, the two dimensions elastically forging an incorporeal amicable trust.
Or friendship. Friendship is another way of describing that which they forge.
Philippe (François Cluzet) is a wealthy aristocratic quadriplegic who requires the aid of a live-in attendant. Driss (Omar Sy) comes from the projects and only applied for the position to demonstrate to social assistance that he's looking for work.
It quickly becomes apparent that Driss's honest, easy going, cheeky camaraderie is precisely that for which Philippe has been searching, having grown tired of fawning, hesitant, by-the-book cookie cutters.
And the result is mutually cathartic.
The mix of different attitudes regarding artistic modes of expression is invaluable.
Oddly enough, it seems that there are still a lot of people who don't mix the classical with the popular.
Which is just simply weird.
Illustrating the rewards of embracing alternative therapeutic methodologies in order to rediscover innocuously rebellious invigorating affects, Intouchables acrobatically and celestially displays its inclusive joie de vivre without losing its practical edge.
Worth checking out.
Or friendship. Friendship is another way of describing that which they forge.
Philippe (François Cluzet) is a wealthy aristocratic quadriplegic who requires the aid of a live-in attendant. Driss (Omar Sy) comes from the projects and only applied for the position to demonstrate to social assistance that he's looking for work.
It quickly becomes apparent that Driss's honest, easy going, cheeky camaraderie is precisely that for which Philippe has been searching, having grown tired of fawning, hesitant, by-the-book cookie cutters.
And the result is mutually cathartic.
The mix of different attitudes regarding artistic modes of expression is invaluable.
Oddly enough, it seems that there are still a lot of people who don't mix the classical with the popular.
Which is just simply weird.
Illustrating the rewards of embracing alternative therapeutic methodologies in order to rediscover innocuously rebellious invigorating affects, Intouchables acrobatically and celestially displays its inclusive joie de vivre without losing its practical edge.
Worth checking out.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Abraham Lincoln.
Vampire hunter.
His chosen weapon: an axe.
His cause: the abolition of slavery.
His purpose: just.
His approach: universal.
During his set of historical circumstances, piecemeal strategies simply don't cut it.
And alternative methods must be idealized.
Fighting an age-old evil whose tyrannical agenda is constantly seeking to revitalize its divisive malignant incredulity, Mr. Lincoln, with the help of an incredible woman who believes in the strength of common persons, and many other friends, including Christian Slater, decisively acts by any-means-necessary, his initial youthful personal vendetta evolving into a prolonged politico-cultural crusade.
Guided by wisdom.
And driven by faith.
Timur Bekmambetov's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is poignantly pulpy and genuinely clear.
Incisively laying a lucid altruistic track upon a dismantled phantasmagorical transcendence, he uses the tools prominent within his own set of historical circumstances to popularly reconstruct its influential engine.
Working within the system without preaching to the converted.
Or worrying about critical repercussions.
Great film.
Vampire hunter.
His chosen weapon: an axe.
His cause: the abolition of slavery.
His purpose: just.
His approach: universal.
During his set of historical circumstances, piecemeal strategies simply don't cut it.
And alternative methods must be idealized.
Fighting an age-old evil whose tyrannical agenda is constantly seeking to revitalize its divisive malignant incredulity, Mr. Lincoln, with the help of an incredible woman who believes in the strength of common persons, and many other friends, including Christian Slater, decisively acts by any-means-necessary, his initial youthful personal vendetta evolving into a prolonged politico-cultural crusade.
Guided by wisdom.
And driven by faith.
Timur Bekmambetov's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is poignantly pulpy and genuinely clear.
Incisively laying a lucid altruistic track upon a dismantled phantasmagorical transcendence, he uses the tools prominent within his own set of historical circumstances to popularly reconstruct its influential engine.
Working within the system without preaching to the converted.
Or worrying about critical repercussions.
Great film.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Ted
Magic and a child's dream of having a friend brings a cuddly teddy bear to life in Seth MacFarlane's Ted, thereby transforming little John Bennett's (Mark Wahlberg, Bretton Manley) existence from one dominated by loneliness to one permeated with joy.
With neither responsibility nor consequences.
And an inexhaustible supply of the kind.
But the introduction of John's steady love interest Lori Collins (Mila Kunis) and their 4 year relationship threatens to end John and Ted's (Seth MacFarlane) non-stop binge, and a hitherto unimaginable strain threatens their impregnable friendship.
Obviously things need to change, and Lori is exceptionally relaxed and understanding, but after Ted moves out and John continues to haplessly disregard his social and economic obligations, things fall apart, and he finds himself back on his own.
Struggling to get by.
Mr. MacFarlane's undeniable gift for packing his scripts full of nostalgic pop cultural references does not struggle, however, and Ted's narrative is jam packed with witty intertextual memorabilia (also written by Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild).
Johnny Quest is mentioned.
Ted Danson makes light of his more successful Cheers co-star Woody Harrelson in a bit of playful bad taste.
And Ted's answer to The Wedding Singer's use of Billy Idol impresses at first.
A lot of the jokes are funny, but the consistent barrage of cheap shots loses its appeal as the film unreels.
While some movies use repetitive jokes effectively (Paul's three boobs for instance), the devices Ted borrows from Office Space grow tiresome and the second half doesn't hold together well.
The subplot involving Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) is taken way too far.
As is the use of Ted's Billy Idol.
And the nauseating Rex (Joel McHale).
Too much reliance on knee-jerk reactions and not enough on strong character development, Ted flounders where it could have flourished and applies the brakes when requiring acceleration.
I've seen Adam Sandler movies that were better.
Seriously.
With neither responsibility nor consequences.
And an inexhaustible supply of the kind.
But the introduction of John's steady love interest Lori Collins (Mila Kunis) and their 4 year relationship threatens to end John and Ted's (Seth MacFarlane) non-stop binge, and a hitherto unimaginable strain threatens their impregnable friendship.
Obviously things need to change, and Lori is exceptionally relaxed and understanding, but after Ted moves out and John continues to haplessly disregard his social and economic obligations, things fall apart, and he finds himself back on his own.
Struggling to get by.
Mr. MacFarlane's undeniable gift for packing his scripts full of nostalgic pop cultural references does not struggle, however, and Ted's narrative is jam packed with witty intertextual memorabilia (also written by Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild).
Johnny Quest is mentioned.
Ted Danson makes light of his more successful Cheers co-star Woody Harrelson in a bit of playful bad taste.
And Ted's answer to The Wedding Singer's use of Billy Idol impresses at first.
A lot of the jokes are funny, but the consistent barrage of cheap shots loses its appeal as the film unreels.
While some movies use repetitive jokes effectively (Paul's three boobs for instance), the devices Ted borrows from Office Space grow tiresome and the second half doesn't hold together well.
The subplot involving Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) is taken way too far.
As is the use of Ted's Billy Idol.
And the nauseating Rex (Joel McHale).
Too much reliance on knee-jerk reactions and not enough on strong character development, Ted flounders where it could have flourished and applies the brakes when requiring acceleration.
I've seen Adam Sandler movies that were better.
Seriously.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Brave
Traditional gender roles are set ablaze in Disney Pixar's Brave, the magical tale of young Princess Merida's (Kelly MacDonald) coming of age.
Disillusioned by her culture's tradition of demanding that a mate be selected from a tiny prestigious feudal stock, and the rather strict regimen of feminine codes of conduct to which she must adhere, while the men train for battle, the feisty Princess shelves her mother's (Emma Thompson as Queen Elinor) strategic plans and rides off into a forested nexus.
Wherein resides her destiny.
And a witch who provides her with a treacherous tasty treat which turns her mother into a bear upon her return home.
August insurmountable accumulative wisdom having been startlingly transformed into the wild unknown, little Merida must find a way to relax the resulting tensions and restore order throughout the land.
As a product of adrenaline.
The film's piecemeal approach to socio-cultural structural modifications presents a practical framework within which transfigurations can be cunningly concocted, considering the myriad factors which need to be balanced when tempering historic-ideological architectures.
Wasn't impressed by its top-down approach however.
The bears are pretty cool though.
Not the ferocious bear.
Suppose the other bears aren't really bears either.
There are moments of playful grumpy bearness nevertheless.
Bears.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Rock of Ages
Well, without digging too deeply into the ideologic-socio-political dimensions of Rock of Ages, here's a brief snapshot of what happens.
A beautiful young girl (Julianne Hough as Sherrie Christian) travels from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming a singer. It becomes clear early on that the odds are stacked against her but she's fortunate enough to catch the eye of a barback (Diego Boneta as Drew Boley) with similar dreams who finds her a job at the prominent nightclub (The Bourbon Club) where he works.
In less than a week they've developed a strong emotional bond.
Known, as love.
Legendary demonic alcoholic singer Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) and his band Arsenal are scheduled to play their last collective performance at the Bourbon Club, and the sultry studious astute Constance Stack (Malin Akerman) of Rolling Stone hopes to ask Mr. Jaxx some sharp related critical questions beforehand.
After three or four minutes she's prancing around in her underwear.
She does still publish a vitriolic article later on.
But by the end of the film she's carrying his baby.
Meanwhile, the clueless adulterous Mayor Mike Whitmore's (Bryan Cranston) religious wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) hopes to put an end to the Bourbon Club's cult and is crusading against Mr. Jaxx as well.
The only man who ever made her feel like a real woman.
By the end of the film she's back in the audience, hoping Stacee will notice her once again.
Sherrie and Drew break up and she finds a job stripping while he gets stuck in a boy band.
And another monster rock ballad is sung.
I'm not really looking to complicate this film or anything, but it does present politics and feminism as hypocritical meaningless endeavours whose initiatives crumble beneath the seductive gaze of the established subterranean patriarch.
In this case, the political initiatives are invasive and counterproductive but if they function as a foil for such initiatives generally they can be considered belittling and grossly disproportionate (there is no alternative political option presented).
I prefer grassroots music to that manufactured by market based research but it's not as if classic rock isn't alive and well.
It's nice to see gay characters given a strong masculine structural role within, not in terms of encouraging anti-feminist apolitical activities, but in regards to taking risks in order to establish an integral celebrated entrepreneurial identity.
I can't think of any other things to say besides the fact that the film's soundtrack contains some songs that I like.
Rock of Ages.
Rollin' along.
A beautiful young girl (Julianne Hough as Sherrie Christian) travels from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming a singer. It becomes clear early on that the odds are stacked against her but she's fortunate enough to catch the eye of a barback (Diego Boneta as Drew Boley) with similar dreams who finds her a job at the prominent nightclub (The Bourbon Club) where he works.
In less than a week they've developed a strong emotional bond.
Known, as love.
Legendary demonic alcoholic singer Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) and his band Arsenal are scheduled to play their last collective performance at the Bourbon Club, and the sultry studious astute Constance Stack (Malin Akerman) of Rolling Stone hopes to ask Mr. Jaxx some sharp related critical questions beforehand.
After three or four minutes she's prancing around in her underwear.
She does still publish a vitriolic article later on.
But by the end of the film she's carrying his baby.
Meanwhile, the clueless adulterous Mayor Mike Whitmore's (Bryan Cranston) religious wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) hopes to put an end to the Bourbon Club's cult and is crusading against Mr. Jaxx as well.
The only man who ever made her feel like a real woman.
By the end of the film she's back in the audience, hoping Stacee will notice her once again.
Sherrie and Drew break up and she finds a job stripping while he gets stuck in a boy band.
And another monster rock ballad is sung.
I'm not really looking to complicate this film or anything, but it does present politics and feminism as hypocritical meaningless endeavours whose initiatives crumble beneath the seductive gaze of the established subterranean patriarch.
In this case, the political initiatives are invasive and counterproductive but if they function as a foil for such initiatives generally they can be considered belittling and grossly disproportionate (there is no alternative political option presented).
I prefer grassroots music to that manufactured by market based research but it's not as if classic rock isn't alive and well.
It's nice to see gay characters given a strong masculine structural role within, not in terms of encouraging anti-feminist apolitical activities, but in regards to taking risks in order to establish an integral celebrated entrepreneurial identity.
I can't think of any other things to say besides the fact that the film's soundtrack contains some songs that I like.
Rock of Ages.
Rollin' along.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Well, I haven't seen the first two Madagascar films, but Europe's Most Wanted makes it clear that at some point the loveable animal stars spent time in a zoo in New York City.
And are hoping to return.
Their penguin and chimpanzee acquaintances ditch them at the beginning to fly to Monte Carlo and make a fortune gambling.
Frightened of having to spend the rest of their lives in Africa, they follow.
How they travel to Monte Carlo remains a mystery (it's possible that they swam).
After they discover their whereabouts, they accidentally fall through a glass ceiling, thereby simultaneously reuniting while interrupting a lavish spending spree of Europe's elite.
Which engenders a confrontation with the law.
As represented by a rather determined feminine figure.
From which they escape by posing as circus animals and finding refuge in a hostile yet hospitable train.
The penguins then buy the circus from owners who are eager to sell only to discover that it suffers from a serious lack of talent.
And that things need to be competently restructured in order to impress an American promoter who may finance a tour of the United States.
Starting in New York City.
Even though our heroes have no circus experience, they have lived in an American zoo where they acquired transferable do-it-yourself-know-how, easily applicable to any situation.
And the characters from Africa, who prefer life in a zoo to their homeland, teach the struggling Europeans how to dazzlingly manage their showcase, thereby enabling a tour of the U.S.A.
The revitalized Russian tiger is heard to utter 'bolshevik' instead of 'bullshit.'
Labour laws in France apparently only require two weeks of work a year, a subtle indirect (annoying) elevation of the 50 week work year.
A Platonic mode of political production is partially at work insofar as the wise penguins use the spirit of their inspirational lion, zebra, hippopotamus, and giraffe to reconstitute the European appetites, even after said appetites find out that they've been convincingly lied to.
In the interests of entertainment.
Can't say I'm disappointed that I missed its predecessors, nor that I find the title Europe's Most Wanted amusing.
Suppose a kid's film about the state of the American economy wouldn't be commercially feasible.
"God only knows it's not what we would choose to do (Roger Waters, Rick Wright)."
And are hoping to return.
Their penguin and chimpanzee acquaintances ditch them at the beginning to fly to Monte Carlo and make a fortune gambling.
Frightened of having to spend the rest of their lives in Africa, they follow.
How they travel to Monte Carlo remains a mystery (it's possible that they swam).
After they discover their whereabouts, they accidentally fall through a glass ceiling, thereby simultaneously reuniting while interrupting a lavish spending spree of Europe's elite.
Which engenders a confrontation with the law.
As represented by a rather determined feminine figure.
From which they escape by posing as circus animals and finding refuge in a hostile yet hospitable train.
The penguins then buy the circus from owners who are eager to sell only to discover that it suffers from a serious lack of talent.
And that things need to be competently restructured in order to impress an American promoter who may finance a tour of the United States.
Starting in New York City.
Even though our heroes have no circus experience, they have lived in an American zoo where they acquired transferable do-it-yourself-know-how, easily applicable to any situation.
And the characters from Africa, who prefer life in a zoo to their homeland, teach the struggling Europeans how to dazzlingly manage their showcase, thereby enabling a tour of the U.S.A.
The revitalized Russian tiger is heard to utter 'bolshevik' instead of 'bullshit.'
Labour laws in France apparently only require two weeks of work a year, a subtle indirect (annoying) elevation of the 50 week work year.
A Platonic mode of political production is partially at work insofar as the wise penguins use the spirit of their inspirational lion, zebra, hippopotamus, and giraffe to reconstitute the European appetites, even after said appetites find out that they've been convincingly lied to.
In the interests of entertainment.
Can't say I'm disappointed that I missed its predecessors, nor that I find the title Europe's Most Wanted amusing.
Suppose a kid's film about the state of the American economy wouldn't be commercially feasible.
"God only knows it's not what we would choose to do (Roger Waters, Rick Wright)."
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Prometheus
And a group of scientific diplomats and their escort departs on a trillion dollar mission financed by Weyland Corporation towards a planetary alignment discovered by a team of archaeologists upon several ancient culturally isolated works of art.
In search of those who brought life to their home world.
But their investigative proclivities awake volcanic slumbering behemoths whom are intent upon annihilating their planet.
Which has functioned as their laboratory for millennia.
In the end, only a devoted non-denominational Christian (whose faith still burns) who at one point initiates a self-inflicted abortion and a brilliant amoral android who was responsible for infecting her husband with the fertile extraterrestrial virus, remain.
Still determined to make contact.
Still driven, to carry on.
Ridley Scott's Prometheus has its moments but on the whole functions like an amorphous geyser, patiently stratifying different levels of neuroses before startlingly expelling their searing undulations.
Several approaches to handling the unknown are precipitated, each exemplifying differing degrees of prohibition.
Thereby carnally creating within a paranoid social constellation.
And intergalactically quarantining exploratory consonance.
In search of those who brought life to their home world.
But their investigative proclivities awake volcanic slumbering behemoths whom are intent upon annihilating their planet.
Which has functioned as their laboratory for millennia.
In the end, only a devoted non-denominational Christian (whose faith still burns) who at one point initiates a self-inflicted abortion and a brilliant amoral android who was responsible for infecting her husband with the fertile extraterrestrial virus, remain.
Still determined to make contact.
Still driven, to carry on.
Ridley Scott's Prometheus has its moments but on the whole functions like an amorphous geyser, patiently stratifying different levels of neuroses before startlingly expelling their searing undulations.
Several approaches to handling the unknown are precipitated, each exemplifying differing degrees of prohibition.
Thereby carnally creating within a paranoid social constellation.
And intergalactically quarantining exploratory consonance.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Snow White and the Huntsman
A wicked Queen who loathes men kills her husband due to her blind fear that he will cast her off when her beauty fades and then takes psychotic steps to insure that it will remain forever.
But when his daughter whom she has kept prisoner comes of age and it becomes clear that she is even more beautiful, she immediately seeks to put her to death.
But Snow White (Kristen Stewart) escapes and her purity and innocence help her to make her way back to the forces who fought for her father and will still nobly battle for his seed.
A Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), seven dwarves, and many others assist her during her journey.
Her innocence would likely have not been so pure had she not spent her entire youth locked inside a cell.
Unfortunately, unlike the creators of Mirror Mirror, those responsible for Snow White and the Huntsman seem to have never escaped from the cell in which they were nurtured, and are still struggling to develop genuine tension, emotion, and plot.
At no point throughout this film does it seem probable that Snow will not succeed. Her young curious yet cautious inner light intuitively and instructively guides her steady improvised actions.
As if she was born to lead.
But the film sets up another tired opposition between naturalistic and fabricated extremes with the King's only heir exuding divine rights with every instinctive calibration.
Snow's rallying cry when she's reunited with the resistance lacks depth, character and ferocity.
I really wanted to like Muir's (Bob Hoskins) omniscient observations but they were just too much.
The Huntsman predictably abandons Snow but only for two to three minutes.
And William (Sam Claflin) doesn't hide his feelings at all upon being reuniting with her, going so far as to actually display them.
It just doesn't make sense.
The Huntsman and William do form a pseudo-Jacob/Edward dichotomy for Kristen Stewart which brings in a little Twilight.
But this really only makes things worse, although in the end it seems that she desires Jacob, which is, of course, the correct preference.
However forbidden.
But when his daughter whom she has kept prisoner comes of age and it becomes clear that she is even more beautiful, she immediately seeks to put her to death.
But Snow White (Kristen Stewart) escapes and her purity and innocence help her to make her way back to the forces who fought for her father and will still nobly battle for his seed.
A Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), seven dwarves, and many others assist her during her journey.
Her innocence would likely have not been so pure had she not spent her entire youth locked inside a cell.
Unfortunately, unlike the creators of Mirror Mirror, those responsible for Snow White and the Huntsman seem to have never escaped from the cell in which they were nurtured, and are still struggling to develop genuine tension, emotion, and plot.
At no point throughout this film does it seem probable that Snow will not succeed. Her young curious yet cautious inner light intuitively and instructively guides her steady improvised actions.
As if she was born to lead.
But the film sets up another tired opposition between naturalistic and fabricated extremes with the King's only heir exuding divine rights with every instinctive calibration.
Snow's rallying cry when she's reunited with the resistance lacks depth, character and ferocity.
I really wanted to like Muir's (Bob Hoskins) omniscient observations but they were just too much.
The Huntsman predictably abandons Snow but only for two to three minutes.
And William (Sam Claflin) doesn't hide his feelings at all upon being reuniting with her, going so far as to actually display them.
It just doesn't make sense.
The Huntsman and William do form a pseudo-Jacob/Edward dichotomy for Kristen Stewart which brings in a little Twilight.
But this really only makes things worse, although in the end it seems that she desires Jacob, which is, of course, the correct preference.
However forbidden.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
John Carter
Was surprised by the internal dynamics of Andrew Stanton's John Carter.
Within, one finds a disengaged despondent protagonist, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), refusing to take part in any unnecessary interpersonal relations because his family was murdered by the North during the American Civil War.
He's searching for gold in the Arizona Territory.
After escaping from regional military authorities, he finds himself in a cave where he is accidentally transported to Barsoom (Mars).
On Barsoom, he winds up in a typical scenario where one side of a bloodthirsty jingoistic 'might is right' community (Zodanga) is using a weapon of unlimited power, given to them by godlike beings (the Therns) who want them to rule the planet, to defeat their ancient enlightened enemies (the citizens of Helium) who are on the brink of discovering a method of harnessing an infinite source of energy (the Ninth Ray) whose secrets have been manipulated by the Therns for millennia.
A third party, whose political structure and cultural activities are somewhat Romanesque (the Tharks), are avoiding the conflict.
Helium can end the war if Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds) marries his daughter Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) to Zodanga's leader, Sab Than (Dominic West).
However, the resourceful, fierce, and brilliant Dejah refuses and escapes with the serendipitous assistance of Mr. Carter.
The Tharks provide them with sanctuary until their curiosity proves sacrilegious.
If one thinks of Zodanga's aggressive warlike colonialist activities as representing an ideology far to the right, Helium's feudal yet scientifically and socially progressive practices (women can be just as strong, intelligent, and successful as men and science isn't being used exclusively in the manufacture of weapons) as one that is left of centre, the Tharks as having adopted a neutral approach whose internal ideological dimensions are still far to the right (the non-voting uncritical receptors of Republican pop culture?), the Therns as a powerful interventional technologically advanced group seeking to maintain their immemorial monopoly, and John Carter as a jaded nihilistic entrepreneur only seeking to return home, then the altruistic effects of the following denouement could possibly play out.
Sab plans to murder Dejah after their wedding thereby uniting the cities while eliminating the feminine scientific element. Carter overcomes his individualism, decides to fight for Helium, and uses his influence with the Tharks to secure their aid. Together they out maneouvre the Therns and Zodangans leaving the door open for the people of Helium to develop constructive means of utilizing the energy of the Ninth Ray to bring about a more sustainable perennial planetary infrastructure whose enduring surplus could break down the dominant feudal structures preventing the Tharks, Zodangans, and citizens of Helium from forging a united front capable of shielding themselves against the Therns's meddling.
And their preference for brute force.
And general smugness.
Within, one finds a disengaged despondent protagonist, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), refusing to take part in any unnecessary interpersonal relations because his family was murdered by the North during the American Civil War.
He's searching for gold in the Arizona Territory.
After escaping from regional military authorities, he finds himself in a cave where he is accidentally transported to Barsoom (Mars).
On Barsoom, he winds up in a typical scenario where one side of a bloodthirsty jingoistic 'might is right' community (Zodanga) is using a weapon of unlimited power, given to them by godlike beings (the Therns) who want them to rule the planet, to defeat their ancient enlightened enemies (the citizens of Helium) who are on the brink of discovering a method of harnessing an infinite source of energy (the Ninth Ray) whose secrets have been manipulated by the Therns for millennia.
A third party, whose political structure and cultural activities are somewhat Romanesque (the Tharks), are avoiding the conflict.
Helium can end the war if Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds) marries his daughter Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) to Zodanga's leader, Sab Than (Dominic West).
However, the resourceful, fierce, and brilliant Dejah refuses and escapes with the serendipitous assistance of Mr. Carter.
The Tharks provide them with sanctuary until their curiosity proves sacrilegious.
If one thinks of Zodanga's aggressive warlike colonialist activities as representing an ideology far to the right, Helium's feudal yet scientifically and socially progressive practices (women can be just as strong, intelligent, and successful as men and science isn't being used exclusively in the manufacture of weapons) as one that is left of centre, the Tharks as having adopted a neutral approach whose internal ideological dimensions are still far to the right (the non-voting uncritical receptors of Republican pop culture?), the Therns as a powerful interventional technologically advanced group seeking to maintain their immemorial monopoly, and John Carter as a jaded nihilistic entrepreneur only seeking to return home, then the altruistic effects of the following denouement could possibly play out.
Sab plans to murder Dejah after their wedding thereby uniting the cities while eliminating the feminine scientific element. Carter overcomes his individualism, decides to fight for Helium, and uses his influence with the Tharks to secure their aid. Together they out maneouvre the Therns and Zodangans leaving the door open for the people of Helium to develop constructive means of utilizing the energy of the Ninth Ray to bring about a more sustainable perennial planetary infrastructure whose enduring surplus could break down the dominant feudal structures preventing the Tharks, Zodangans, and citizens of Helium from forging a united front capable of shielding themselves against the Therns's meddling.
And their preference for brute force.
And general smugness.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
Enjoyed Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.
Some of the jokes aren't the greatest and one situation almost made me retch, but these guys are undeniably flexible in terms of producing sustained awkward oblivious carefree traumatically endearing comedy, nostalgically nuanced with a 1980s commercial naivety, and overflowing with nimble bad judgment.
In search of a billion dollars.
Chef Goldblum's (Jeff Goldblum) transitional introduction sets the stage.
The hysterically fruitful job interview where Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell) devotedly demands that Top Gun be played a second time keeps things flowing.
Taquito's (John C. Reilly) epic battle with the mall wolf invokes tragedy.
And Katie's (Twink Caplan) indiscretion cannot tear Tim and Eric apart.
They've been taught what to expect from life and how to approach it from television and the movies, and, as a consequence, haplessly proceed with limitless confidence.
No matter what situation they face.
Ignoring the ways in which everything around them is crumbling and decaying, they manage to not let a little financial instability get them down.
While forging a strategic plan.
And unerringly living the dream.
Some of the jokes aren't the greatest and one situation almost made me retch, but these guys are undeniably flexible in terms of producing sustained awkward oblivious carefree traumatically endearing comedy, nostalgically nuanced with a 1980s commercial naivety, and overflowing with nimble bad judgment.
In search of a billion dollars.
Chef Goldblum's (Jeff Goldblum) transitional introduction sets the stage.
The hysterically fruitful job interview where Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell) devotedly demands that Top Gun be played a second time keeps things flowing.
Taquito's (John C. Reilly) epic battle with the mall wolf invokes tragedy.
And Katie's (Twink Caplan) indiscretion cannot tear Tim and Eric apart.
They've been taught what to expect from life and how to approach it from television and the movies, and, as a consequence, haplessly proceed with limitless confidence.
No matter what situation they face.
Ignoring the ways in which everything around them is crumbling and decaying, they manage to not let a little financial instability get them down.
While forging a strategic plan.
And unerringly living the dream.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Men in Black III
The clandestine Men in Black security force is back to monitor Earth's alien activity in the franchise's third instalment, Men in Black III, fully loaded with neuralyzers, inexhaustible technological and knowledge resources, a law enforcing odd couple, and monumental temporal distortions.
The Men in Black films do directly acknowledge and imaginatively fictionalize the existence of well funded secretive agencies designed to prevent the public from learning, but don't seem to recognize that this is problematic, since they're made to look fun and hip yet rigid and combative.
Like a euphemistic police state.
Just in time for Summer.
If the darkness is literally thought of as a nocturnal limiting force within which means of generating light must be creatively produced in order to enable vision (fire, candles, electrical lights), and this literal example is then metaphorically transferred to the domain of patriarchal construction (Men in Black), then perhaps this film is saying that one of the ways in which the male traditionally tends to visualize attempts to quarantine the unknown (the feminine, difference, egalitarianism) is by interminably equipping solid and steady agents of cultural homogeneity with flashy gadgets and binary intergenerational banter which provides the elder with a stubborn and taciturn way of expressing himself (he's seen everything before and seeks to waste no time discussing things) and the younger with an endless supply of frustrated curiosity.
In Men in Black III we find Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin) at work preventing the public from preserving extraterrestrial information. Traditional heteronormative difference is supported while gender bending is not. Of the two most prominent female characters, one is motherly (she has a prominent position in the present but doesn't directly take part in the action), the other, a criminal (who dies early on). Agent K, who reads the entire menu every time before ordering the same thing, is the more elderly of the two (while the options have multiplied, he remains resistant to change). After Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) heads back in time and kills him, Agent J's present turns into a war zone as aliens invade to destroy the Earth. After travelling to the past to save his partner, Agent J is pulled over because police officers are stopping every African American driving a nice car. Agent J has stolen the car and is African American. Now, he has stolen the car to save the perseverance of an unyielding content permanency in order to prevent the Earth's destruction. Meaning that if the side effects of this permanency had been successful in the past they would have resulted in their own annihilation (Agent J escapes). Yet those very same side effects are indirectly legitimized by Agent J's actions. Which also include monitoring difference to ensure that its multidimensional presence doesn't have a disruptive effect.
The Men in Black films do directly acknowledge and imaginatively fictionalize the existence of well funded secretive agencies designed to prevent the public from learning, but don't seem to recognize that this is problematic, since they're made to look fun and hip yet rigid and combative.
Like a euphemistic police state.
Which isn't very bright.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
What to Expect When You're Expecting
It's not the multiple storylines in Kirk Jones's What to Expect When You're Expecting aren't cleverly woven together or some of the observations presented within transferable.
It's just, well, I've never seen a film before that more closely resembles a 110 minute Hallmark card.
My apologies if you like Hallmark cards. They're not really for me but it's not like I turn my nose up if I receive one.
Like the best feature of What to Expect When You're Expecting, the group of fathers who get together to privately discuss the challenges of parenting, I'm not judging.
But this style of film is simply one that I have trouble relating to.
I was going to make an extended comparison to John Carpenter's They Live but think I'll just leave it at that.
It's just, well, I've never seen a film before that more closely resembles a 110 minute Hallmark card.
My apologies if you like Hallmark cards. They're not really for me but it's not like I turn my nose up if I receive one.
Like the best feature of What to Expect When You're Expecting, the group of fathers who get together to privately discuss the challenges of parenting, I'm not judging.
But this style of film is simply one that I have trouble relating to.
I was going to make an extended comparison to John Carpenter's They Live but think I'll just leave it at that.
Monday, May 28, 2012
The Dictator
Okay, let's take a big piece of autocratic shit, give him plenty of time to express himself, strip him of his privilege, place him within a formulaic situation which usually exemplifies redemption, and use his despotic voice to ambiguously promote substantial social democratic initiatives.
While satirically making light of reprehensible realities in order to suggest that disengaged nihilism can make one actively receptive to anything.
In an unrestrained salute to decadence.
Equating the structural socio-economic realities of dictatorships with those found in democratic countries makes a powerful point, representative of the Occupy Movement, perhaps attempting to speak to some who ignored it by encouraging their revulsion not only to Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) but also to the formula creatively used to try and generate knee-jerk sympathy for him.
Without the revulsion, however, a socialist/fascist dialectic presents itself wherein socialist initiatives (multiculturalism, universal healthcare, public education, freedom of speech, . . .), which progressively attempt to provide workers with agency so that their voice can play a meaningful role in the ways in which an entity (a business, corporation, parliament, school) conducts its affairs, are sadistically separated from their collective foundations by acts which attempt to convince them that since they have this agency, this voice, this individuality, they are therefore no different from your average plutocrat/monarch, and should consequently regard collective actions as being beneath them, seeing as monarchs often have more important things to concern themselves with than the impoverished concerns of their subjects (which are pervertedly generalized as being the result of morally corrupt characters).
The relationship between Aladeen and Zoey (Anna Faris) in The Dictator examines this dialectic by having a tyrant work at a collective organic grocery (Free Earth Collective). While working, Aladeen demonstrates his complete lack of social understanding (monarchs are not like workers) and Zoey is so naive she ignores the multiple signs indicating Aladeen's sadistic tendencies.
And after Aladeen employs a stiff upper lip to improve her business's efficiency she marries him and helps to introduce a number of ineffectual political reforms within his home country.
Hence, The Dictator rashly sanctifies a maniacal potentate to level out the Western/Middle Eastern political playing field while indicating the need for change by wickedly evidencing how disengaged things have become.
There's a lot of corruption out there but for every Stalin there's a Tommy Douglas.
Greece is not Norway, Sweden or Finland.
Your vote does matter.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Battleship
Wasn't expecting to find a social democratic aesthetic at work in the latest alien invasion flick, Peter Berg's Battleship, but it's there, disguised in a maritime cloak, paying respect to multicultural nautical subjects, and demonstrating how an inclusive team excels.
As if the spirit of Battleship Potemkin is alive and well and theorizing what the Soviet Union's navy would have looked like after a century of reforms inspired by the courageous mutiny, distancing itself from its revolutionary heritage by codifying and transferring its content to 21st century American propaganda.
To battle a plutocratic blitzkrieg.
Can the aliens in Battleship be legitimately thought of as plutocrats?
Well, as environmental laws are repealed or gutted and scientific research is ignored in favour of religio-economic fanaticism (the misguided belief that the free market can do no wrong), the planet (or Canada at least) becomes more and more polluted. The 1% have the means through which to 'purify' their resources by purchasing expensive speciality ethically produced items without using credit excessively. If fracking ruins their neighbourhood/district/region's water supply, they can move, easily, potentially beforehand after setting up the extraction. Keeping abreast with technological advances, they can purchase or commission devices that can decontaminate their water even if they do stay while mitigating additional toxic effects.
The aliens who land in Battleship are technologically advanced, possess suits that shield them from that to which they cannot acclimatize (while protecting them from critical repercussions), are uninterested in the concerns of the citizens whom their policies disturb, and are using the military to pursue interplanetary colonialism.
Sounds like fundamental plutocratic behaviour to me.
The international sailors who confront them however represent different ethnicities, socio-economic contingencies, genders, historical periods, and physical disabilities.
It's a well rounded group.
They have no armour to protect them from the polluted Earth and must collegially improvise a strategic plan.
Not to naively present this social aesthetic as being ideally fine and dandy.
Before the invasion takes place egos collide and disorder persists.
Yet after a reason to work towards a collective goal presents itself, unity is restored.
The hierarchy within is troublesome yet look at how inclusive it is. Everyone has a voice regardless of rank whose logic is taken into consideration. When Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) suddenly finds himself in command and must make an immediate decision, his subordinate isn't afraid to challenge him in the pursuit of an alternative objective. Hopper even relinquishes command when it becomes clear that Japanese Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is a more suited candidate.
The fact that the confrontation takes place within a force field which separates the combatants from the world at large suggests that Battleship does indeed present a popularized plutocratic/social democratic dialectic insofar as these elements have been isolated and subjectified within an impenetrable ideological vacuum (let's find a way to represent these opposing approaches by creating a fictional polemical context within which they can aggressively interact), one which removes the concealments everyday life often necessitates.
The plutocrats through their blind ambition accidentally create a space within which their adversaries are capable of launching a constructive protest.
Because no matter how polluted things are, their adversaries are still capable of absorbing the sun.
As if the spirit of Battleship Potemkin is alive and well and theorizing what the Soviet Union's navy would have looked like after a century of reforms inspired by the courageous mutiny, distancing itself from its revolutionary heritage by codifying and transferring its content to 21st century American propaganda.
To battle a plutocratic blitzkrieg.
Can the aliens in Battleship be legitimately thought of as plutocrats?
Well, as environmental laws are repealed or gutted and scientific research is ignored in favour of religio-economic fanaticism (the misguided belief that the free market can do no wrong), the planet (or Canada at least) becomes more and more polluted. The 1% have the means through which to 'purify' their resources by purchasing expensive speciality ethically produced items without using credit excessively. If fracking ruins their neighbourhood/district/region's water supply, they can move, easily, potentially beforehand after setting up the extraction. Keeping abreast with technological advances, they can purchase or commission devices that can decontaminate their water even if they do stay while mitigating additional toxic effects.
The aliens who land in Battleship are technologically advanced, possess suits that shield them from that to which they cannot acclimatize (while protecting them from critical repercussions), are uninterested in the concerns of the citizens whom their policies disturb, and are using the military to pursue interplanetary colonialism.
Sounds like fundamental plutocratic behaviour to me.
The international sailors who confront them however represent different ethnicities, socio-economic contingencies, genders, historical periods, and physical disabilities.
It's a well rounded group.
They have no armour to protect them from the polluted Earth and must collegially improvise a strategic plan.
Not to naively present this social aesthetic as being ideally fine and dandy.
Before the invasion takes place egos collide and disorder persists.
Yet after a reason to work towards a collective goal presents itself, unity is restored.
The hierarchy within is troublesome yet look at how inclusive it is. Everyone has a voice regardless of rank whose logic is taken into consideration. When Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) suddenly finds himself in command and must make an immediate decision, his subordinate isn't afraid to challenge him in the pursuit of an alternative objective. Hopper even relinquishes command when it becomes clear that Japanese Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is a more suited candidate.
The fact that the confrontation takes place within a force field which separates the combatants from the world at large suggests that Battleship does indeed present a popularized plutocratic/social democratic dialectic insofar as these elements have been isolated and subjectified within an impenetrable ideological vacuum (let's find a way to represent these opposing approaches by creating a fictional polemical context within which they can aggressively interact), one which removes the concealments everyday life often necessitates.
The plutocrats through their blind ambition accidentally create a space within which their adversaries are capable of launching a constructive protest.
Because no matter how polluted things are, their adversaries are still capable of absorbing the sun.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Dark Shadows
Tim Burton's Dark Shadows revisits an American gothic soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971 and is therefore supposed to be superfluously tactless.
Not that the emancipated 18th century vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is lacking in sensitivity, it's just that he rigidly abides by a strict moral code through which he hopes to reconfigure his family's fortunes and reanimate its pseudo-aristocratic position within the town of Collinsport.
Okay, he is lacking in sensitivity, and a bit of a prick, and bloodthirsty and unforgiving and functionally clueless.
But he also embodies a raw nocturnal decisive magnetism which sanguinely yet solipsistically cultivates the melodrama (the film focuses too intently on him to the detriment of the supporting cast).
In the 1760s, his family sailed to the New World and established a successful fishery, for all intents and purposes administrating the town thereafter. While growing up, Barnabas caught the eye of many a local maiden including one his servants, Angelique (Eva Green). Unbeknownst to him, Angelique was a witch who proceeds to curse his family after he scorns her. She eventually turns him into a vampire and has him chained and buried deep below ground, proceeding to use her witchcraft to incant a fishing business of her own afterwards. When Barnabas is accidentally unearthed in 1972, her business has expanded significantly and the Collins family is in a state of practical ruin.
And she still desires him.
Barnabas remains uninterested however although he does reflexively entertain. His actions engender her fury in the aftermath when she discovers that he has once again fallen for another.
Another who is the spitting image of she whom Barnabas left Angelique for all those centuries ago.
Dark Shadows could have been good had its writers nonchalantly taken their uninspired subject matter more seriously (in order to concoct something terrible yet fun). Having Johnny Depp in your film, giving him the majority of the lines, and having him hypnotize characters within does not spontaneously conjure happy returns.
Further, working uncritically within kitschy commercially feudal fantastic frames serves to romanticize patriarchal socio-economic representations (which is probably the point).
Thus, noble Barnabas feasts on construction workers and itinerants and the only successful female characters used spells to achieve their goals or are punished severely for their transgressions.
There are flamboyant moments but their affects are localized and therefore don't pervasively instil the narrative's underground with a recurring thematic foil (and the film isn't much fun).
There may not be a foil, but one over-the-top scene where Angelique briefs her best and brightest, all of whom are men, seems to cast doubt on the fact that higher corporate echelons were almost uniformly masculine in the seventies, through the use of excessive exaggeration, which sinisterly places the film's manifested patriarchal focus within its subterranean realm by suggesting that male dominated boards of directors were perhaps not as permeated with testosterone as progressives would have you believe, thereby hyperbolically challenging the 21st century ideological playing field by conservatively deconstructing historical reality.
Dark shadows to be sure.
Not that the emancipated 18th century vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is lacking in sensitivity, it's just that he rigidly abides by a strict moral code through which he hopes to reconfigure his family's fortunes and reanimate its pseudo-aristocratic position within the town of Collinsport.
Okay, he is lacking in sensitivity, and a bit of a prick, and bloodthirsty and unforgiving and functionally clueless.
But he also embodies a raw nocturnal decisive magnetism which sanguinely yet solipsistically cultivates the melodrama (the film focuses too intently on him to the detriment of the supporting cast).
In the 1760s, his family sailed to the New World and established a successful fishery, for all intents and purposes administrating the town thereafter. While growing up, Barnabas caught the eye of many a local maiden including one his servants, Angelique (Eva Green). Unbeknownst to him, Angelique was a witch who proceeds to curse his family after he scorns her. She eventually turns him into a vampire and has him chained and buried deep below ground, proceeding to use her witchcraft to incant a fishing business of her own afterwards. When Barnabas is accidentally unearthed in 1972, her business has expanded significantly and the Collins family is in a state of practical ruin.
And she still desires him.
Barnabas remains uninterested however although he does reflexively entertain. His actions engender her fury in the aftermath when she discovers that he has once again fallen for another.
Another who is the spitting image of she whom Barnabas left Angelique for all those centuries ago.
Dark Shadows could have been good had its writers nonchalantly taken their uninspired subject matter more seriously (in order to concoct something terrible yet fun). Having Johnny Depp in your film, giving him the majority of the lines, and having him hypnotize characters within does not spontaneously conjure happy returns.
Further, working uncritically within kitschy commercially feudal fantastic frames serves to romanticize patriarchal socio-economic representations (which is probably the point).
Thus, noble Barnabas feasts on construction workers and itinerants and the only successful female characters used spells to achieve their goals or are punished severely for their transgressions.
There are flamboyant moments but their affects are localized and therefore don't pervasively instil the narrative's underground with a recurring thematic foil (and the film isn't much fun).
There may not be a foil, but one over-the-top scene where Angelique briefs her best and brightest, all of whom are men, seems to cast doubt on the fact that higher corporate echelons were almost uniformly masculine in the seventies, through the use of excessive exaggeration, which sinisterly places the film's manifested patriarchal focus within its subterranean realm by suggesting that male dominated boards of directors were perhaps not as permeated with testosterone as progressives would have you believe, thereby hyperbolically challenging the 21st century ideological playing field by conservatively deconstructing historical reality.
Dark shadows to be sure.
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