Boyhood

Cradling incalculable creative mismatched fluencies, irregularly dispatched as an artist comes into being, Richard Linklater's Boyhood follows a struggling family's progressive course for more than a decade, intermingling climactic catalysts and laid-back observations to serialize the traumatic and the beautiful, the courageous and the chill, helpless free-flowing resilient tenacity, a pervasive sense of wonder, enlightened, eiderdown.

Nice to see an asshole who isn't loveable.

What a strong mother (Patricia Arquette).

Responsibility and teaching are major factors, the children living with their mother, spending weekends with their father, encountering caring facilitators of learning along the way.

Dad (Ethan Hawke) steals a lot of scenes because he has less responsibility and can therefore spend more time being cool, but mom commands more respect, having to make extremely difficult choices as her stable partners turn into beasts.

I liked how the film's divided into different sections as the children age without seeming like it's divided at all; Boyhood has a seamless continuous flow which maturely reflects the passing of the years by not choosing to focus too intently on significant events, while still unreeling cogently enough to recognize their developmental importance.

This style also allows Linklater's characters to smoothly change and grow without constant reminders that they are changing and growing, which may have become tiresome.

Chef

Don't know what to make of Jon Favreau's Chef.

It has all the ingredients to be a great film, strong cast, relatable situation, strong characters, heartwarming familial pains, a professional individual's difficulties maintaining a sane work/life balance, artistic expression versus profit-based-strategies, cool tattoo, emphasis on resiliency, neat way to move forward, chill sophisticated artistry sustaining a team, acclimatizations to contemporary phenomenons (social networking issues), crisis, tenacity, rebirth, economic realities respected in terms of friendship, change, coming together, growth, it inspires its audience to diversify their outputs, family friendly yet not picture perfect, imbroglios, composure.

I like all of these things.

But Chef just wasn't my style.

Ah well.

Snowpiercer

The ravages of global warming have accidentally imprisoned the last surviving members of humanity on an invincible super train, Sheldon Cooper's purist blast of ecstasy, which travels the entire globe over the span of a year, codifying condensed calisthenics, perpetual in its autarkic motions.

Built to function as an enviropolitical scientist's incendiary trench-line, if they like quenching sensationally instructive transistors, a fierce class struggle has erupted within, its boiling point having been reactively reached, crisis, calamity, infraction, the oppressed rebelliously coming into being, extinction, be concisely damned.

It comes down to the food supply.

Mixed in with spatial limitations.

Unprepared perplexing stamina.

Jackass authoritative guidelines.

Why the train's supreme ruler chose to employ an oppressive model to govern his domain after the potential for continuous expansion was obliterated, speaks to the ridiculousness of his model itself, as well as the preponderance of its all-encompassing indoctrinations.

The price of a ticket bears consequences eternal.

The population would have to be controlled, but why one section lives in luxury while the other has to resort to cannibalism makes no sense.

The torches made me think of Plato's cave.

The key is solutions precipitated by a lack of preparation.

John Hurt (Gilliam) is showing up in everything cool these days.

Sheldon Cooper would probably have serious issues with the train.

It would be a great lecture.

At least one other species survives.

My Sweet Pepper Land

In a remote section of the land of the Kurds, in a remote section, of, Kurdistan, a raw independent audacious subject, committed above all else to upholding law and order, a hero to his people, fearless of the unknown, begins to confront village crime, directly, stubbornly, and effectively, dedicated instinctual calculated improvisation, challenge discovered, in the interests of nation building.

Also living in the village, attempting to teach its uneducated school children, is a feisty strong-willed educator, who also has trouble handling entrenched corruption, refusing to marry at the request of her brothers (who live elsewhere), subverting what they consider to be their lawful authority, majestically playing the hang drum.

Discovered the name of her instrument from Jordan Hoffman's research.

I think of the film as having two main thrusts, Baran's (Korkmaz Arslan) attempts to install a sense of justice in the region, and the coming together of Baran and Govend (Golshifteh Farahani).

It has elements of the classic American Western but its budget prevents it from convincingly executing in this domain.

However, Baran and Govend's relationship forges a very convincing kinetic bond, reminding me more of Bollywood than Hollywood, tumultuously holding the film together.

Hiner Saleem's My Sweet Pepper Land is no minor film in terms of what he sets out to do (have to discuss the ending here).

With the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds have achieved a degree of independence.

My Sweet Pepper Land asks what can be done with this newfound independence, how should our nation be built?

Patriarchal authority is strong in the film, counterbalanced, however, by both Govend and a group of female guerrilla fighters.

Both Baran and Govend are interested in nation building, through governance and education respectively, yet resist familial pressures to marry someone for whom they have no feelings.

It's more of a Western model.

It seemed like Saleem was saying that if Kurdistan is to come into being, it should be guided by a strong sense of morality (Baran's law upholding), yet, Govend and Baran's union indicates that he believes that that strong sense of morality should be influenced by substantial individual freedoms.

My Sweet Pepper Land's brilliant move comes near the end when Govend firmly resists the demands of her brothers.

I was expecting Baran to show up to assist, but he doesn't, she resists on her own.

The ending sees them calling out to one another in the wilderness, searching for the other's embrace. The credits role before they find one another, thereby suggesting that the possibility for substantial individual freedoms as well as equal opportunity regardless of gender exist within Kurdistan's developing autonomy, and it's up to progressively minded Kurdish people, to bring Govend and Baran together.

Hoping the soundtrack becomes available.

Saleem does make the most of his budget, peppering his filmscape with nature's beauty, capturing a hawk in flight (think it's a hawk), or the moon and the mountains in the background as Govend approaches the camera's eye.

New Twin Peaks Series?

If the new Twin Peaks footage David Lynch has hopefully shot leads to the creation of a new series, here's a potential list of guest directors for select episodes: Xavier Dolan (Tom à la ferme), Alex van Warmerdam (Borgman), Denis Côté (Vic + Flo ont vu un ours), Guillaume Sylvestre (1er amour), Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida), Denis Villeneuve (Enemy), and Jon Favreau.

Potential actors: Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, Robin Aubert, Shia LaBeouf, Molly Parker.

Co-ordinated by Lynch and Mark Frost of course.

Tammy

Crushed by the impact of three significant life altering events, young Tammy (Melissa McCarthy) hits the road with Grandma (Susan Sarandon), destination, Niagara Falls, fuel intake, anything containing alcohol, issues, several issues present themselves, confidence, emphatic, invective, and sworn, tested through the pertinence of picturesque pit-stops, cavorted, as night descends, and the juniper flushes its aromatic cones.

Lessons learned.

Hold-ups congenialized.

Hydrosonic viking burials.

The modest and the mouthpiece.

Fashionably fermenting a fetching frisky fawn, mobilizing jail-time while standardizing the getaway, Tammy transitions both its tempers and its testaments, to lampoon highs in earnest, while pinpointing the pressures, of barometric bonds.

Co-written by McCarthy (also written by director Ben Falcone), I think she can do better.

It's alright, but a long way from Anchorman 2. 

I was searching for a feel-good slightly raunchy twirl-a-whirl summertime swing, and Tammy synchronously delivered.

That's what it did.

Was thinking of my favourite films of Summer earlier that day and The Great Outdoors popped into my head, which fit well.

Thought more could have been done with Gary Cole.

Another Brady Bunch sequel?

Written by Ms. McCarthy?

There's got to be a market for another Brady Bunch film.

From the White House, to Alaska.

Or, Kansas.

Down on the farm.

Ida

Diametrically opposed feminine caricatures, each possessing their own semantic strengths, volatile penitence, the vixen's splurge, contextualize their continuum within Ida's scene, after and during their first unexpected meeting.

They're related.

One is about to take her vows.

The other struggles with her political legacy.

The younger seeks to discover the whereabouts of her dead parents, killed during World War II, her aunt is able to assist, they set out to interrogate 20th century Polish history, stylizing their familial cross-section, with upbeat moving jazzy consolidations.

Existentializing the saxophone.

As blunt, bellicose, and bitchin' as it is chaste and resigned, Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida solemnly soars through perceptible heights, contemporary fusions stern and frolicked, olives, rye bread, beemsters, or a fast with a glass of Soplica.

Unassailable friction diffused in check.

Begets temptation.

An hourglass.

For a crucible's chime.

Perfect companion piece for Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest.

Borgman

The bourgeois patriarchy finds unconditional support in Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman, a poignantly pointless florescent canker, rifle at the ready, red alert middle-class aesthetics.

While viewing, you may find yourself considering at least two questions, the first, why in hell would anyone make something like this?, the second, is this the pinnacle of paranoid stereotyped fabled uncensored grit, the beast aimlessly targeting the beauty, the arrogance of a stifled hypodermic, unreeling like a Criterion in the making?

The only film to ever remind me of Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout.

It could have been an after school special direly warning teens not to hitchhike.

Or a film where a plane crashes in Alaska and wolves communally hunt down the survivors.

Instead, suburban peace and tranquility is infiltrated by a troupe of travelling possibly demonic psychopaths, who, in this instance, seek employment in order to use the tools at their disposal to create a platform upon which they intend to put on a show, the couple's wife residing in their grip, the husband, completely oblivious.

Discontent is sewn.

I'm assuming Warmerdam has worked a Dutch fairy tale or legend of some kind into his script, the film seeming as if it's a crisp contemporary take on a medieval horror, with cars and cellphones, although the fact that it seemed that way to me is based on my assumption.

Off they go, into the forest.

If there were still bears in the Netherlands, keeping with the fairy tale hypothesis, they would be on the lookout.

Bears were obviously guardians of the forest in Dutch fairy tales/legends.

I know nothing about the Netherlands.

La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur)

Ceremoniously shifting from breaking wave to breaking wave, cast adrift to buoyantly submerge, the surf submissively dominating, an exacting cyclical shock, one young playwright, fascinated by insubordination, jostling the erotically profane, is interrupted, is, slowly, commodified, undeniably secure in his misplacements, subdued emphatic gusts, assured of their tidal pertinence, to enact the derailment of triumph.

On its own terms.

Ambiguity/ambivalence beguilingly solemnizes the dialectic, the exchange, a protracted piecemeal purge, sensuously persuasive, overpoweringly contained.

As the page turns.

A reading.

Precision.

Opportunity.

Mesmerizing mythical lambasted seduction generously vouchsafes its domineering obsequiousness, in Roman Polanski's crippling La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Furs), existentialism be damned, fiesta.

My favourite filmic adaptation of a play with a small cast and minimal setting is Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night, but La Vénus à la fourrure now firmly occupies second place in my thoughts, due to Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric's powerful performances.

Opulently humble.

The ending was a surprise since it makes a definitive suggestion, although ambiguity remains, only a vestige however.

I would have faded with him tied to the cactus.

There must have been passionate arguments here.

Perhaps the definitive suggestion makes for a stronger ending.

I admit to being a sucker for critical controversy.

Not that there isn't plenty of critical controversy in the film.

You could argue that it's about the aesthetics of critical controversies themselves.

The whole night through.

The Green Line

Waverly reticent concise parlay,

mercurial famished enticement;

retreating approaches, stitched torn and flayed,

conditional sandstone revisements;

tempt for an on-sight resonant rush,

hesitating enveloped credentials;

sporadic flighty sing-song-stencilled thrush,

precisely protracted potential.

One-two hush attendant rehearsals,

three-four slides the opening door;

descend shift uplift twist precursial,

introductions/farewells coyly stored.

This stop suggests craze carnival;

this one a drowsy enthrall;

off to the next destination,

mobile mischievous shawls.

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Humanity has forsaken and betrayed the Autobots in the latest Transformers sequel, forcing them to strategically dissimulate in order to avoid detection.

An intergalactic jailer by the name of Lockdown (Mark Ryan) seeks to imprison Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), punishing him for disobeying his creators, uniformly inhibiting his hard-fought freedom fighting.

Megatron's brain has been harvested and the technological secrets residing within have led brilliant scientist Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) to believe that the power of the Transformer can be governed by Homo sapiens.

A new generation of Transformer is therefore created, to be used as military drones, the Autobots having become obsolete.

Fortunately a feisty independent struggling inventor has discovered the whereabouts of Mr. Prime, and he remembers the sacrifices he made, improvisationally fighting by his side.

Scolding his young daughter all the while.

The resulting combat, wherein the American individual boldly teams up with the abandoned to challenge the forces of oppression, is ingeniously summed up in the film's best scene, which sees Mr. Joyce cowering in a Hong Kong elevator, a momentary respite, from the cataclysmic confrontations.

Anyone notice the apartment complexes in Hong Kong?

Wow.

The act of creation unites the converging storylines, along with issues of operational control, to thematically cap the series's 4th instalment.

Convincingly hypothesizing a new set of sociotechnological indicators, while economically aligning them for the film's terrestrial inhabitants, earning a living subconsciously contends with manufacturing a soul, to experimentally produce a sensationally revelled playing field.

Because Age of Extinction is so long, the introduction of the Dinobots seems somewhat tacked-on.

However, the introduction of the Dinobots, is, awesome.

The President doesn't make an appearance and I'm betting when he or she does it turns out to be one of the members of Dark of the Moon's most disputatious romantic couplings.

Their presence was missing from Age of Extinction.

But the anticipation is something to look forward to.