Into the Deep

It was difficult to take Into the Deep seriously until a friend verified it wasn't a mockumentary, it seemed so definitively rehearsed that I had trouble believing real people were being interviewed.

I read on Wikipedia that several people didn't want to be involved with the film after what happened, and that they asked for their scenes to be removed to avoid being exposed to public scrutiny.

It looks like their scenes were then reshot with real actors trying to seem as if their interviews were authentic, but it appears as if actors are trying to fake real life and it doesn't work at all.

Then there's what actually took place which seems even more improbable, a mad genius takes a reporter out for a ride in his submarine and then murders her and dumps the body.

He had been planning a trip to space and hoped to get there before his rivals, whom he had recently worked for until the disputes grew too intense.

Since he was hoping to travel to space, he inspired bright documentary filmmaker Emma Sullivan to follow him, and create a movie about his life for peeps curious about bold endeavour.

As she filmed she captured raw footage of a fledgling psychopath perhaps emboldened, by his sudden emergence into pop culture and its corresponding associations of invincibility. 

Which of course are rather misguided but if the film is true (honestly, I'm still not convinced), he thought he could murder someone in his submarine and then dump the body and get away with it.

When parts of the body are found shortly thereafter he has a wild tale for the police, which continues to change every time they find fresh evidence, until he's finally locked away.

I'm not sure if it's a syndrome, but with the ubiquitous flourishing of social media, along with ye olde traditional televisual outlets, it seems like many will take mad risks to go viral.

Supported by a culture which elevates malevolence and consistently associates it with power through film (even winning Oscars), when people find themselves in the popular spotlight, they may do whatever it takes to go viral.

Reality TV never faded either and with Twitter and Facebook its sphere of influence expanded significantly, whereas on the one hand you have people trained to work in media (CBC, BBC, CNN, NBC . . .), and on the other, a mass improvised colossus 😎.

Perhaps that's why the people being interviewed in Into the Deep seem like ragtag actors, they're trying to be real like their favourite reality TV stars while forgetting they are aren't acting (or are they?).

The story's no doubt incredible how did something like this ever take place?

The world has fundamentally mutated.

There's so much freedom if you live offline. 

The Good Liar

A reptilian overture preys on aged innocence, moving from one lonely widow to the next, as he amasses prim misfortune, too incorrigible to ever give it up (Ian McKellen as Roy Courtnay).

Lifelong aggressive tremens, no friend to terms or tact, slipped through the cracks for many a year, avoided wayward trim detection.

He's quite hawkish, rather diligent, a partner lending a helping hand (Jim Carter as Vincent), watching out for eager fools all too willing to softly land.

Romance by night, fraternizing by day, not one to take time off, he's insatiably disposed, as voracious as they come, an emotionless career psycho.

He meets another unsuspecting victim (Helen Mirren as Betty McLeish) all too happy to make a new friend, she's so overcome with infatuation it's not long 'til he's movin' in.

Her grandson's (Russell Tovey as Stephen) more suspicious and proceeds to make historical inquiries, uncovering a gruesome awkward scandal dating back to World War II.

But explanations are forthcoming and life's less bitter if you can forgive, the two making it up on the shifty spot, and carrying on as if nothing's unhinged.

But if the title's none the wiser, there may be more surprises in store, The Good Liar as composed as its enmity, begetting bitter strikes richly scored.

It's straightforward yet tough from the get-go, but neither textbook nor boring, a brisk pace highlighting the novelty, of high stakes octogenarian high-jinx.

The couple's half bourgeois, half streetwise, at times they pleasantly blend, Betty's sympathy keeping things afloat, providing excuses for Roy's demeanour.

I think a particularly vile realm in hell should be reserved for those who prey on the elderly, if such a place exists, and it's odd to see the elderly preying upon each other in this one, sheer proof of the ageless psychopath.

Certainly a good idea for a film and I can't think of anything else like it, although if it had been shot like a creepy indie, it likely would have made more of an impact.

It's a bit farfetched that Roy is still at large at his age, can you always work in a British detective?

Still enjoyed it, a bit of irreverent controversy, nice to see Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen in something dramatic, without fast cars or apocalyptic agendas.

Some unexpected twists keep it moving along as their coupling becomes more intense, neither too poised nor that full-on thug, without ever displaying much feeling.

Is this a date movie?

Thoroughbreds

A maladjusted teen, recently expelled from boarding school, despises her severe step-father, a man's man who would rather command than converse and instantly turns brutal if you question his decisions.

Another maladjusted teen, a sociopath in fact, is tutored by the aforementioned, although Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) has really been hired to function as only friend and confidant, a well-meaning parental decision, that may vindictively prove fatal.

They don't consider killing each other, but after Amanda (Olivia Cooke) encourages Lily to honestly express her contempt, the dark side descends with maniacally pure unaccountability, the two revelling in their vicious designs with cold calculated temerity, proceeding ever more closely towards their goal, absolutely unconcerned with ethics or fatigue.

Malicious young Sith.

Irreverently resolved.

The planning of the murder works well.

It's difficult to generate sympathy for their adversary (Paul Sparks as Mark) and their plans themselves are rich with cinematic intrigue.

The music and settings add contemplative depth which harrowingly develops a computerized sensitivity thoroughly lacking in emotional connections, apart from mutual desires to talk with others, and a base instinct to punish anyone who restricts freedoms.

There's no well reasoned opposition to their plans, however, except for an isolated moment during which the subject of their murderous rage logically expresses his concerns, after placing them within an historical context.

The douchiness fades for a brief sharply contrasting moment.

Before stubbornly returning.

The sociopath even acknowledges his rationality although that doesn't mean she's not still prepared to savagely orchestrate his demise.

Okay, their both sociopaths.

Mark's likely a sociopath too.

With a more well-reasoned opposition to their plans, some doubts at least, the second half of the film would have been more compelling.

The first skilfully lures you in with a chillingly haunting mix of psycho comedy and dark psychology, like Thoroughbreds was crafted to flip the bird to raunchy teen melodramas like American Pie.

It does this well.

But without the alternative voice during the second half, apart from flailing Tim (Anton Yelchin [what a tragedy]), who seems to have been proactively included to remind adolescents to stay in school, the psycho is laid on too thick, and although it's still well done, a great film, more well rounded argumentation may have transformed it from an indie nightmare into a crucible of malevolence.

They should have gone through with it either way.

If an alternative viewpoint had been substantially introduced, and they hadn't gone through with it, it would have been much lamer, most of its shocking edge having been dulled.

Preferred it to Compulsion (1959).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.