Thursday, March 28, 2013

A change in the adversarial order of things indoctrinates alternative forms of political expression which harness the influence of Chile's pop cultural cheek to bring House Pinochet down.

The inertial byproduct of demographic multiplicities is resolutely ignored as one man's vision wagers that it can disseminate a pluralistic quintessence.

Ethical considerations formulate bilateral echoes as the issue of respect is commercialized.

Transformative modes of production reformulize the new in a combative personally  disadvantageous agitative structuralization of Derrida's conception of forgiveness (as found in Derrida).

Not sure if the timelines match up there.

The film reminded me of harmony's fascist/totalitarian dimension and the importance of bearing in mind chaotic forms of retributive conciliations.

No's outcome speaks for itself.

Localized within a specific set of historical circumstances of course.

I thought it exaggerated the importance of political advertisements a bit but perhaps they really do play a major role in electing governments.

I've read numerous newspaper articles claiming they do but figured they may also be exaggerating their importance.

I learned to see through them at a young age and figured everyone else did too, but, as many commentators have been pointing out for quite some time, Adorno's the one I'm going with here, people feel compelled to purchase products even though they see through them (The Culture Industry), and it is fun, but electing a government isn't like buying pastis or a baconator, and taking the time to critically research online what a party's all about before voting, isn't such a bad idea.

It's not!

It's easy!

It's fun!

Not necessarily easy or fun.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Stoker

A forgotten hushed-up malignant propriety, proper and prim, dainty and exasperating, fratricidically plants himself within a bourgeois pasture, ingenious and precise, incorrigible yet enticing, seeking to cultivate that which he sees fit, to grow, applying a maniacal degree of reflexive fertilization to those he deems a threat, while cloistering the others within a creepy consanguine cluster.

Stoker's plot and narrative lack the depth of the films found within Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy, but its technical aspects, in terms of cinematography and sound especially, prominently display his brilliance, creating worlds within worlds, caverns and teapots and haunting ravished andantes, sustained sorrowful psychiatric sonorities, patient microscopic pristine insections, crawling and sprawling and mauling, within lurid infinite extratextual specifications.

Not that the script doesn't have its moments, with Nicole Kidman (Evelyn Stoker) delivering the most impassioned piece of seditious sentimental solemnity, it just doesn't match-up to Oldboy etc., which, if The Berlin File (directed by Seung-wan Ryoo) is compared to the original Die Hard, for instance, makes sense.

But seriously, give this guy the right script and he could create the most disorienting American psychological thriller ever made, perhaps encouraging a greater sub/conscious expansion in the process.

A film version of Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy?

Something with werebears?

Cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung, original music by Clint Mansell.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Kret (La Dette)

Familial misfortunes beget treacherous tenements whose paranoid genuflections produce pernicious pensions.

The issue of guilt permeates a media sensation whose adherence to the sacred threatens the individual liberties it upholds.

Key players in a pivotal Polish event scramble to defend their prevarications.

And trust is brought to the fore as Rafael Lewandowski thoroughly upends what it means to syndicate.

The film keeps a level head.

Life goes on.

Appointments are kept. Business is transacted. Most friendships remain warm and friendly. Social value appreciates.

Kret's (La Dette's) lack of emotion represents both its greatest strength and most serious weakness as its logic reaches ascetic heights while its emotional depth is stiffly squandered.

Like legal spirituality.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Oz: the Great and Powerful

The Wizard of Oz meets Xena: Warrior Princess?

That's an A+ in my books.

The old school Wizard of Oz film with which I'm familiar was a lighthearted tale, adored by generations of fantasy loving children, devoted and unassuming, blindly caught up in its melodramatic charm, dreaming sweet dreams filled with hope and sincerity later that night, never failing, to wake up anew.

There's no doubt that there's some of this in Sam Raimi's envisioning of the land of Oz, wherein we find the Wizard learning to become the factor everyone believes him to be at first sight, but while we don't discover that there's something not quite right about him until Toto's astute perception in the Judy Garland film, it's obvious from the get-go that in Oz: the Great and Powerful Oz (James Franco) is a sleazy unscrupulous cad, successfully (and spontaneously) brandishing his smoke and mirrors, yet hopelessly lacking what one might refer to as conscientious considerations, apart from their individualized financial formalities.

The title itself offers further insight into these competing fantastic motivations.

Oz: the Great and Powerful sounds like the sort of ridiculous phrase you'd expect someone cravenly searching for riches, even if the search only takes place within their own head, to use to describe themselves, while also seeming like an exaggerated mesmerizing monicker carefully chosen to inspire charismatic imaginations, when its historical spectacle is taken into consideration.

I didn't know Sam Raimi had directed before entering the theatre, and his presence added a latent sense of potentially ingratiating cheesy carnivalesque conviviality to these contemplations, wherein bold mischievous alternative emoticons masquerade on a traditional family friendly frequency, seeking to covertly manifest their raunch(iness).

The opening credits themselves kaleidoscopically illuminate this multiplicity, ebulliently engineering a phantasmagorical dissimulation, for whatever audience, startlingly straightforward, arguably the film's best feature.

But after the Wizard lands in Oz and meets Theodora (Mila Kunis) the film is far too startlingly straightforward for the next hour at least. The lines are terrible. Kunis struggles to deliver them. But they're so bad that you start to think that this could be one of those great films which subtly satirizes its generic counterparts while trying to remain appealing to the young at heart in order to conjure a laconic lackadaisical laxative before suddenly introducing moments of kitschy consubstantiations which attempt to transform the preceding mockery into a campy enduring endearing romp, just as the Wizard casts off his mortal shell and takes on his ethereal form, while coming to believe that yes, he can.

When the brutal lines are isolated, with no community within which to blossom and grow, they're tough to take, but when the time comes for Glinda (Michelle Williams) and the Wizard to unite their citizens to fight Evanora's (Rachel Weisz) minions group dynamics socially network their way into a publicly pertinent pyrotechnic plurality, as the Wizard uses his artifice in a startlingly straightforward phantasmagorical dissimulation, lighthearted, melodramatic, and ridiculous yet conscientious and ingratiating, fighting the good fight against overwhelming odds, to save both his community's, and his own, imagination.

And the film too.

I'd like to read a study which places both films within their social historical contexts in order to elucidate which possesses a more substantial degree of traditional alternative reflexivity, thirty years from now.

Classic Sam Raimi.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Paris-Manhattan

Obsessive particularized therapeutic prescriptions, erudite frank psychological stylizations, pulsating extroverted situational expectations, marriages, family, friends, professions, good food, neuroses, lighthearted delineations, let's observe, express, modify, clarify, recapitulate, integrate, qualify, diversify, riding on bikes, breaking and entering, wherein lies the lesson?, as romance precipitates, with room for error, Sophie Lellouche's Paris-Manhattan theorizes that Woody Allen's form can be refurbished with French content, alarmingly experimental, domesticating the bizarre.

Thankfully Woody Allen will likely be making films for decades to come, continuing to innovate within his hyper-reflective multilayered panorama, but at some point a time may come when no new Woody Allen film can be expected, ever, a terrible time, and someone will have to step in and fill the void.

In terms of compellingly merging commerce, sociology, art and comedy, consistently and prodigiously, no filmmaker has been more prolifically successful, and in order for the void to be filled, the replacement in question must be prolific.

That's the key to competing with while paying in/direct hommage to Mr. Allen and to do so on a high level for decades while remaining relevant is a lofty goal indeed.

Is this Sophie Lellouche's goal?

Don't know, but she's put together a tight film in Paris-Manhattan, adding her own insightful touch to the brainy perpendicular bravado.

There's a scene where while eating dinner characters from different generations working in various fields freely and non-judgmentally share ideas without having to worry about damaging social consequences in the aftermath.

I suppose I could watch it again and imagine Proust was there but that may ruin the effect I'm going for here.

Proust. Being single. Learning French. Never been to Europe.

Could that be the subject of a Woody Allen inspired double feature, after Mme. Lellouche decides to fly me to Paris and start working on a script posthaste?

The world needs another Woody Allen.

Mme Lellouche could be that Woody Allen.

She only has to make more than 40 more films.

Something like, Kermode in Paris.

Starring me.

Also a big Larry David fan.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Safe Haven

Attaching a dipsomanic dimension to an otherwise light and fluffy romance flick, Lasse Hollström's Safe Haven quaintly juxtaposes psychosis and contentment as a struggling woman (Julianne Hough) searches for a new life.

Along the way she meets Alex (Josh Duhamel), a widower with two children living in a seaside town.

I could relate to his love of the wilderness, his favourite places to chill etc.

They meet, start liking each other, authoritative madness intervenes, the symbolic clashes with the void.

Ms. Hough does a great job representing various components of feminine strength until it becomes clear that she's hooking up with Alex, after which Terry Stacey's cinematography becomes less provocative.

Don't let this trick you into thinking that since you're in a stable relationship you have to sequester your keen fashion sense.

On the contrary, this is when you're at your most beautiful and should therefore continue to find ways to share your beauty on a predictable yet regularly changing basis, thereby vivifying natural and urban worlds, keeping in touch with the changing seasons, transforming them into a living breathing tantalizing work of art.

Springtime.

It's springtime!

Snitch

Looking for a dramatized look at how seriously mandatory minimum sentencing laws, laws such as those recently enacted in Canada even though authorities on the subject from the States have sincerely critiqued them, suck?

Look no further.

Ric Roman Waugh's Snitch overtly breaks it down, as one man finds a way to save his son from a system gone wrong, by any means necessary.

The consequences of proceeding by any means necessary harrowingly present themselves shortly thereafter, however.

The only way for John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) to save his generally law abiding son (Rafi Gavron as Jason Collins) from a lengthy mandatory minimum drug trafficking prison sentence simply for receiving a package which he didn't really want in the mail, is to go undercover for a smug termagant who agrees to reduce his son's sentence if he can infiltrate a criminal organization and instigate the arrest of a well-heeled trafficker, which is the option his son was presented with, but, since he didn't know any traffickers besides his friend who sent him the package and was also arrested, and didn't want to be coerced into informing, he was forced to serve the minimum sentence, the judge having no opportunity to use her or his insight to make their decision.

Cold hard cruel absolutes.

That ignore the evidence.

John swallows his pride again and again and suddenly finds himself ready to take down a kingpin, much to the termagant's self-centred delight.

But in the process, his bold decision and enormous risks threaten everything he holds dear.

The particular sometimes indicates a structural issue that can be modified in order to enhance production.

In Snitch's case, Mr. Matthews functions as a particular designed to modify ethical institutions, his sacrifice directly calamitizing one of their misguided aspects.

However, it's possible that a non-contextual cult has been built upon this potentiality, using it to make antiquated outdated notions seem hip and new, even when the evidence provided by recent similar endeavours can be thought of as wholeheartedly indicating otherwise.

This is a problem.

Great performance by Dwayne Johnson.

I've only seen him in supporting roles and was wondering if he could take the lead.

Job well done.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Roche Papier Ciseaux

Blisteringly bivouacking underground economics, wherein financial and fanatical furrows mendicantly and mendaciously intertwine, Yan Lanouette Turgeon's Roche Papier Ciseaux pressurizes a sadistic scenario with a heartbreaking degree of scarified sentiment, thrust within a carnal quotidien naturalistic mythos, helplessly held together by conscientious duct tape.

Four characters are fetishistically infernalized, 2 existing in a state of sycophantic servitude, the others desperately caught up in the hyperbolic sensation.

The film slyly blends chance and fate, intermingling sudden monumental highly unlikely cross sections while trivially refining them to make it seem as if there were no other possibilities.

Post-religious materialistic mysticism?

That works for me, even if it's just a flash in the pan.

The film also displays critical attitudes towards tax breaks for Aboriginal Canadians, critical attitudes which are then severely criticized.

I tend to think that every dollar I make, and all of Canada's wealth, is generated, and will always be generated, from income earned on Aboriginal lands, billions of dollars a year, sustaining a multicultural nation. If that means Aboriginals pay less tax, who cares, it's their former land, that they traded for next to nothing in comparison, that's responsible for maintaining our financial infrastructure, and our system wouldn't exist without the enormous revenue gained from what was once their land.

For further reading on what Aboriginals did for Europeans upon first contact and afterwards, see Basil Johnston's The Wampum Belt Tells Us . . ., part of Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past.

Stereotypes associated with Italian North American communities are deconstructed within Roche Papier Ciseaux while those associated with Asian North Americans are unfortunately intensified.

Multidimensional representation people, multidimensional representation points out differences between communities without one-dimensionally vilifying them.

This is key.