Bad Words

Goals.

Objectives.

Means.

The will to live.

Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) must be crowned national spelling bee champion at age 40 in order for his unerring orthographical prowess to be forthrightly recognized, his youthful competitors and their parents somewhat infuriated by his choice, the drive to accelerate concocting regardless, asinine assiduity acrimoniously idealized, congruent considering, the rules of the game.

Friendship and romance are cumbersomely nuanced with playful degrees of sharp insouciant admissibility, jaded alcoholic weariness slowly transforming into infinitesimal merriment, as trashy transgressions legitimate their inclusivity.

Bad Words is a solid mix of pejorative eccentricity and misanthropic mirth.

The friendship between Guy and young Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand) tenderly transitions the tempered tailspin.

Was going to use some of the challenging words from the film in this review but they're simply too much.

It's subtly hilarious when some of the irate parents can't hide how impressed they are with Guy.

Rollin' with the punches.

Spelt infinitesimal wrong while writing this out.

Loved the spelling bee antics.

Wonder if writer Andrew Dodge (great script), who at least justifies his use of the stubborn ass, ever saw the episode of Get a Life where Chris Peterson (Chris Elliott) discovers he's a genius after consuming toxic waste and then decides to win as many spelling bees as he can, episode 9, season 2, Chris' Brain Starts Working.

Pelican, Peter Doig

Sworn bisheltered forlorn perch
hazy sweltering converse
blurred indent, pan rain foresty
collection, first impressions, been
a rapidding announced slalom
albeit cradling contact strummed
transcontinental time-lapsed trance
snapshot sinewed, cathedralled chant.

Maïna

Intertribal relations bellicosely deteriorate as a restless megalomaniac seeks control of his clan, the Nearly Wolves, the aftermath of his ambush of the Men of the Land of Ice leaving Maïna caught between Innu and Inuit worlds, wherein misunderstandings and revelations communally mingle, devastatingly enlightening in turn, chasing the wind, in the land without trees.

The unknown presents an invigorating sense of bewilderment as Maïna (Roseanne Supernault), daughter of the Nearly Wolves's Chief Mishtenapeu (Graham Greene), protecting young Nipki (Uapshkuss Thernish), must join a group of Inuit travellers on their voyage home, one of them, bold Natak (Ipellie Ootoova), known to Maïna through her dreams, a new language, new customs, new lands, viscerally vivifying, as she adventurously comes of age.

Natak and Maïna fall in love but challenges face their union as she acquaints her new neighbours with the traditions of the Innu.

At a critical moment, her continuing survival having been jeopardized, Nanook embodies the unknown's extreme malevolency, understanding and support being required to integratively overcome the hunger, and peacefully initiate the flowering of difference.

Maïna comprehensively blooms love's emotional omniscience, artfully blending the confrontational with the mesmerizing, navigating clasped distances, flourishingly mused.

Petulance and prejudice challenge its tumultuous tranquility, as Maïna demonstrates that she too can hunt, and Natak must balance divergence and docility.

Cinematography by Allen Smith.

The Monuments Men

To enter a war zone with inadequate training and hardly any ground support with the goal of retrieving precious works of art from Nazi thugs, risking everything to return them to their rightful owners, this is how George Clooney's The Monuments Men proceeds, decadently daring and cluelessly clever, exoterically unreeling, with far too strong a sense of invincibility.

It's a great idea but it's difficult to treat Monuments Men like a serious war film.

War films need to be serious.

World War II's more of an afterthought than an omnipresence within and although the high spirits of the tangential team are endearing, in war films the war needs to be present in each and every nanoframe, every aspect scrutinizing the terror.

True, such films often include moments where the struggling combatants think of home or let loose for a while, but their despair still ominously flows.

Monuments Men sort of reverses this standard, the film occasionally focusing on the war while it seems like the combatants never left home, and, while it's noteworthy that the film doesn't play by the book, it falls flat throughout.

I applaud what it sets out to do however.

It's simple and easy to follow, providing a clear sensible message: great works of art chronicle and catalogue a people's historical and contemporary conditions, and any attempts to pilfer this aspect of a culture is universally unacceptable, to be resolutely fought against even if the impracticality of fighting against it directly during an actual war is daunting, that fight being artistic in its pursuits nevertheless.

By stating this message in terms that can be easily understood, Monuments Men will hopefully encourage many latent art lovers to cultivate their interests more actively.

One scene is commendable too, when James Granger (Matt Damon) returns a stolen painting to the house where it once belonged, even though the homeowners may never return, this scene defining a post-war rebuilding stage's genesis, highlighting how difficult it must be to know where to begin.

It passes by far too quickly.

Loved the Granger.

House of Pictures (Carrera), Peter Doig

Ripen chords acoustic flurry
oceanic bluebird's worry
viewings pray-tell bleached and blazing
submarine symphonic phasings
stag belittled, the carefree thirst
wherefore the picks attune immersed
in sightings stretched across the sand
like windward whiskered sage bandstands.

Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises)

The dreams of a modest principled hard working youth patiently materialize in Hayao Miyazaki's Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises), an animated account of a brilliant Japanese aeronautical engineer whose poetical mathematics helped remodel Japan's aviation industry.

The frame insulates a wise psychological stratagem for growing and changing during tumultuous times, within Jirȏ Horikoshi's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) mind, and provides him with the strength to go-with-the-flow as hardships, sicknesses, and political aggressions challenge his strong sense of self.

He grew up in the years leading up to World War II and had to helplessly sit back while his designs were co-opted by the military.

The film doesn't shy away from exploring technological testaments to militaristic miscues.

Horikoshi has to hide for a time as jingoistic agents grow suspicious of his activities.

This aspect of the film fades without receiving enough attention.

I'm supposing the pre-war years were quite oppressive as indicated by Horikoshi's attempts to converse with less fortunate citizens who are frightened by his humble offering of sponge cake.

Research and development processes and workplace pastimes are a recurring feature as his dreams become a reality through the application of diligent trials and errors.

Love fills-out the creative cure, as a respectful romance energizes his designs.

Kaze tachinu offers innocent industrious insights into a dedicated upright life of work and study whose successes and failures are stoically articulated.

Romance, rewards and retinues refine his tragic pursuit of innovation, his revered reveries, seek, search, discover; apply; install.

Stay

The baby factor plays a crucial role in Stay's conceptual christening, the key sociological stitch practically tying the abstractions together.

Aging Dermot (Aidan Quinn) reacts none to supportively upon discovering that partner Abby (Taylor Schilling) is carrying his unborn child.

Content to live out his life quietly with minimal responsibility, the shock halts his settled steady stride.

He's a bit of an ass.

Abby leaves Ireland to visit her family in Montréal where her father (Michael Ironside as Frank) is thrilled by the news, yet troubled by her questions about her own mother, who left their family when she was 6.

Back in Ireland, Dermot strikes up acquaintances with a teenager who's skipping school to work and a single mom, their conversations causing him to reconsider his dismissive attitude regarding child rearing.

He also goes out of his way to irritate a fellow community member looking to sell a piece of property close to his own, disrupting his hopeful plans, even though he needs the money to save his struggling business.

He's a total ass.

Although his shenanigans do unearth a rare archaeological find.

The pints must flow.

Weathered and worldly, Abby and Dermot's relationship stubbornly and pensively communicates realistic fears concerning the introduction of youngsters, the upheaval of a stable set of solidifiers, the ground changing announcements of birth.

Communal and familial observations and traditions supply down-to-earth accidental supernatural provisions, fortune or fate?, interactive antecedents.

Balcony (North Coast), Peter Doig

Basking silently within
a state of nature's wizened brim
stretched to comfortably support
an evening's parched fatigued cohorts,
in the densely packed enlivened
beastial beauty's hunger's striving
sense of stimulated symptoms
flickers, binds, nebulous rhythms,
lush lounging life regales the heat
with timewarped preachings from the street,
pastis prolonged and pluralizing,
chaotic joy is hypnotizing.

Ping Pong, Peter Doig

It disappears into the woods,
opponents dash, retrieved, withstood,
enigmatic plushing paddlers,
transverse pyrodactic saddlers,
environments are mitigated,
49 black-blue-grey plated
bricks through which a point of view
kaleidoscopically renews
the jungle's prescient perspiration,
instinct throttled, merged migrations,
t(r)o/pics flush with fragrant sound
as the ball slowly rebounds,
attentive, then, for its return,
revolving shades, to play, to yearn,
apply far-sighted syntheses
and integrate the timeless breeze.

Miraculum

Flight plans, guilt-ridden, felicitous, miserable, and emancipating flight plans, desperately intermingle differing degrees of shock, immersed in Daniel Grou's Miraculum, as risks deteriorate familial stabilities, and the concept of vice, is multifariously de/moralized.

Synoptic suffering.

A weary outcast attempts to make amends through profits earned from drug smuggling.

An affair crushes and/or enlivens the members of two elderly couples.

Distant addictive empty partners seek to rejuvenate their marriage.

A struggling Jehovah's Witness is tempted by secular advancements (blood transfusions).

The four stories downtroddenly unfurl within and without (like Babel or Tian zhu ding), lucidly pinpointing vectorized vertices, occasionally peaking ensemble, dedicating a despondent deconstructive density to open-minded conscientious plights, which resists clear and distinct binding generalizations, to materially matriculate the mundanely divine.

Although communal belonging is fluidly challenged as unforgiving bulwarks fortify their positions.

Wherein resistance is rather futile.

Miraculum isn't like pastis, milk, and honey, more like a caressing melancholic ideological tempest, compelling in its whirlwinds, tight, multifaceted, challenging.

Editing by Valérie Héroux.

Written by Gabriel Sabourin (Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne consulting).

It breathes difficult distinct tetralectics into profound ethical quotients, corrugating crisp conceptions of the beautiful, rationally masterminded, exacting, composed.

Keeping you focused at full attention.

Built to multilaterally stimulate.

300: Rise of an Empire

I'm not sure if 300: Rise of an Empire is supposed to be taken seriously or rather should be treated as a healthy cerealized kitschtastic crack, its graphic epic historic amplitude hilted, jacked, and drawn, battle-ready and menacing in its entirety, strategically frothing, an implicated grind.

Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) and Artemisia's (Eva Green) nocturnal knockings knit like necromanced kerosene, enriching yet servicing quinoa, while Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) gracefully prances about like an impregnable prophesied faun, mystically captivating, ornate and commandeering.

There isn't really that much happening in the film besides battling and preparations for battling.

The majority of the battles taking place on water.

The Persians insist on invading Greece and go rather multitudinously about it, which necessitates constant inspirational speech making from Themistocles, a plain everyperson possessing ingenious gifts for fighting and strategizing, whose experiential wherewithal infuses his speeches with spry rallying rectitude, democracy under siege, his fellow citizens, pressurized and proverbed.

According to my tastes, many of the speeches fell flat, but since I realized that Themistocles's gifts were for warfare, not rhetoric, and his legend demanded that he set out to unite Greece, a soldier shepherding a synergy, I could forgive the fact that the words he chose didn't resonate with me, strictly focusing on their underlying message.

A relationship between father and son familializes both the preparations for and the acts of battling.

Heavy on the gore.

At several points it seems like the reasons for battling are secondary to the battling itself, blood spurting from hacked-off limbs the motif which occurs most often.

Which adds a mischievous quality to the design.

Which perhaps should be taken seriously.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Rimes pour revenants)

A systematically brutalized culture's subjugated displacements resiliently assert themselves in Jeff Barnaby's Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Rimes pour revenants), a hardboiled look at a Mi'kmaq reserve (Red Crow) oppressed by a cruel vindictive Indian Agent and laws requiring children to attend residential schools.

There's friendship, family, camaraderie, language, culture, belonging, humanity.

But the gang of authoritative thugs who govern the place still do everything they can to impoverish.

The film's violent.

It's fight-back or fuck-off as a might-is-right philosophy confronts resistance, ubiquitous altercations, outrageous regulations (no boats on the lake for starters).

Alia (Kawennahere Devery Jacobs) knows how to fight.

Left to be raised by her deadbeat uncle after her father was sent to prison and her mother committed suicide, she establishes a flourishing business which earns her enough cash to pay off the Indian Agent.

Thereby freeing her from the residential school.

But his abusive grip squeezes tighter and tighter, necessitating a potent counterstrike, sounding the call of the warrior.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls isn't shy.

It starkly lays out a ravaged set of institutionalized sterilizations while demonstrating how the victims remain elastically fertile.

Many of the characters are young and their tragic innocence exacerbates the tyranny.

Accentuates the acrimony.

While their communal bonds reify the transcendent life.

Love the analogous relationship between the wolf and the mushroom story and the bloodthirsty pursuit of capital.

Stalingrad

Improbabilities abound in Fedor Bondarchuk's oddly sentimental Stalingrad, my first look at a Russian blockbuster, just as grandiosely sensational as their American counterparts, so it seems, dazzling and heartbreaking, modestly skewed.

The film concerns one of the Second World War's Battle of Stalingrad's myriad crazed territorial trespasses wherein the Russians possess a building the Germans covet, hoping to win it back, their opposing forces exchanging ample audacities.

A beautiful young Russian ingénue still lives in the building (Mariya Smolnikova as Katya) and 5 hardened comrades fall for her as the fighting intensifies.

The situation's dire and the soldiers are countering inestimable odds with neither supplies nor reinforcements.

Katya offers a fleeting escape from the surrounding horrors, reminding the men that they're fighting for a greater purpose, substituting radiance for perdition, dignity for misery.

Even if what I've read about Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union makes it sound like hell on Earth.

It's difficult to determine whether or not the film is simply celebrating the sacrifices of courageous persons thrust into an abyss whose maddening pressures necessitated the emergence of heroism, the overwhelmed and underfunded Russians forced to bravely ignite their internal flames (one of the best scenes depicts this), or if it's glorifying the war itself, the scene where two would-be lovers sit back and watch the artillery light up the night sky like a fascist/communist fireworks display functioning as a romantic yet too distracting display, although had I been in a similar situation I too would have likely watched in wonder.

Focusing on the inherently deadly and ruinous nature of the display rather than any secondary futuristic aesthetic qualifications no doubt.

The deadly and ruinous nature of the display isn't referred to, discipline is brutal as a Russian sailor is shot for presenting an alternative point of view, Stalin isn't mentioned with loathing, the best speech is reserved for the enemy German captain (Thomas Krechmann/Kretschmann)(it reminded me of Robert Graves's description of Julius Caesar's pre-battle motivations in I, Claudius), in short, the discourses of the Left are largely absent (one Russian soldier is reprimanded for using the word retarded and there's a conciliatory frame whose presence is dismissible), which I was hoping would not be the case in a film celebrating Commie heroes, even if I'm (now) aware that it was mass-produced in Putin's Russia.

It's not necessarily that improbabilities abound, but when I watch these films and think, "this is a life or death situation and that's what tricked you?", I tend to use words such as improbable to describe what happens.

A must if you want to see your first Russian blockbuster, even if it's one of the worst movies you'll ever see.

I was naively hoping it would be similar to Elem Klimov's Come and See (all I knew about the film going in was that it was called Stalingrad and made in Russia).

Here's hoping Putin doesn't become any more Hitleresque.