Marvin & Tige

A young kid with no known family blindly struggles to get by, after his mother suddenly passes one forlorn and sombre evening. 

Adapt at finding food yet still suffering from malnutrition, the enticing canned goods he regularly consumes lacking all-encompassing vitamins and nutrients. 

Good fortune serendipitously emerges after a borderline homeless widower takes note, and invites him to stay with him until members of his family can be located.

He's worried since the youngster's on his own and has a bad attitude and can't read or write, his inner-avuncular instructive instincts attempting to find ways to teach and educate.

He's not so great at it though he'll admit his personality lacking warm-hearted discourse, he's blunt and direct and ye olde hard-knocksy which even the child awkwardly observes. 

Nevertheless, his intentions are honourable and he tries his best to give the lad a home.

The makeshift family embracing improvisation.

Abundant arguments. 

Resolute care.

Old school stories flush with sympathy encouraging less severe social structures, wherein which compassionate dynamics overtly showcase heartwarming alternatives. 

There must be no cultural shortage of kind and friendly tales circulating, where people finding themselves down and out are tenderly uplifted with heartfelt sympathy.

Is it foolish to wonder why impoverished circumstances distressingly abound, alongside so much wealth within so many countries where riches proliferate? 

Doesn't a more level playing field lead to more innovation and greater diversity, compelling ideas and irresistible inventions accompanying arts and crafts and newfound technologies?

Supplying millions of impoverished people with food and shelter and healthcare and education, doesn't just lead to healthier communities, it also cultivates a more gifted culture.

It's working all across Europe and also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada & Québec. 

It doesn't even cost that much considering.

And you don't need a massive army. 

The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature

Gluttony and greed contend with sustainability and prudence as a group of mischievous animals from a local park run afoul of a corrupt disingenuous mayor, in The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature.

As overflowing with contempt for anything that doesn't immediately enrich his vast fortunes, as he is unable to prevent himself from gorging upon snacks encumbered by a cardiac degree of immobilizing trans fat, Mayor Muldoon (Bobby Moynihan) decides to turn public land into an amusement park without seeking the guidance of council beforehand.

It is cheaply constructed for the bare minimum with concern for neither structural integrity nor public safety, a ghastly house of carnivalesque cards ready to crumble at any given moment.

The animals protest.

The public land is their home, the ground upon and within which they rear and nurture their young, without it they'll have to move to the surrounding unforgiving concrete wastelands, wherein which they'll likely be divided, and forced to live unscrupulously alone.

They are also guilty of flagrant distraction.

Spoiled after having fortunately gathered extreme wealth, they squandered their resources with reckless unconcern, consumed by ravenous appetites, their carefree excess foolishly cost them their homegrown instincts.

But one squirrel kept her head, Andie (Katherine Heigl), thorny love interest of leader, Surly (Will Arnett).

Together they begin to rebuild, encouraging each individual member to share their ideas, demonstrate their competencies, synergize their strategies, and mobilize their momentum.

With the sole goal in mind, of taking Muldoon the fuck down.

It's an energetic children's film that environmentally examines contemporary obsessions with grotesque profits by juxtaposing plutocrats with the penniless, the nimble, with the immutable.

The Mayor consults no one, cares nothing for his clients, it's pure unregulated capitalism, sacrificing sanctuary for psychotropics, and solace for crime and hunger.

Communal ghettoization.

Globalization is metaphorically presented as different animal groups share their mutually hopeless predicaments.

One hell of a squirrel.

One hell of a mouse.

An incredible synthesis.

Problems in one region of the globe/town, problems in another.

Symbiotic stitches, cooperative communications.

Pursuant, indicative.

Of global citizenry.

Tabu

After sterilely establishing a set of sociological effects, wherein moments of personal literary expositions and devout religious expressions firmly respond to an extroverted eccentricity, capriciously gloating in the ether, following a solemn sentimental allegory, Miguel Gomes's Tabu imprioritizes their structural causes, by soberly elucidating their passionate progenitors.

Tabu's dimensions are difficult to define because it obliquely plays with narrative conventions with a jocose leavened degree of cohesive disparity, as if to say, "based upon certain doctrinalized expectations, there are specific aspects which we must include, even if throughout the process of their inclusion, we have found ways to romantically mistrust them."

I highly doubt they would have expressed themselves in such terms.

Sterile's the wrong word to be using. The film's anything but sterile. Yet it coyly employs a pervasive intermittently poppy sterility to slyly postulate its poetic position, as if it's trying to sustain sundry spontaneous combustions, like a ravenous crocodile.

By imprioritizing the structural causes, Tabu laments the ways in which events solidify points of view, as epitomized by Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) and Aurora's (Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira) relations, as Santa asserts herself.

Although I'm basing this point on a supposition drawn from a character's memory and then applied externally (by me) to a nondescript incidental circumstance (act II).

There's much more to it than that, if that even applies.

So worth seeing.

Cloud Atlas

Reincarnating a diverse sense of individualistic multiplicity, wherein manifold acts see their transhistorical countenances ambiently 'serialized,' as circumstances determine varying degrees of personal expedients and collective commitments, the most powerful of which are preconditioned by love eternal, of the other, an ideal, Cloud Atlas draws poetic intertemporal parallels amongst 'distinct' narratives to progressively decentralize teleological discourses without sacrificing their forward thinking critical cores, thereby generating a hardwired interdisciplinary mutlivaliant transistor.

As history comes to life.

It's as if the process of taking forms with myriad malleable landscapes and inter'connected' representational layers and populating them with breathing socio-political contents is itself materially manifested, through a vivacious, ethical engagement.

It doesn't shy away from using science-fiction to situate the cannibalistic nature of shortsighted grossly counterproductive characterizations of workers as one-dimensional subservient automatons being sinisterly force fed their own collectively suicidal divisive tropes in the present, from suggesting that aesthetic realms beyond our current epistemological methods of comprehension can be artistically realized (through music), from attaching an everlasting quality to the bucolic/urban dialectic, from elevating humanistic strategies for combatting the pervasive influence of unfettered capital, or intimating the ways in which capital can profit from events which never had to take place.

At the same time, it's not that serious.

Didn't like the whole inevitability dimension, but still, there's enough diegetic material here to create/continue the development of its own subgenre and it reminded me of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

And Keith David's characters have great responses to the role he played in Crash(2004).  

The Help

Boldly displaying the ugly dimensions permeating a culture whose social fabric is thoroughly racist, Tate Taylor's The Help situates us in Jackson, Mississippi, and demonstrates how difficult it was for African Americans to either express their points of view or hope for a better life within.

Not to say that it's any easier now, Taylor just situates her narrative in the past in order to mitigate the shock of investigating current pervasive racist realities, thereby making her message easier to digest while enabling it to reach a broader audience.

This strategy works effectively for the aforementioned reason but it also ignores the fact that there are still systematic racist discourses influencing sundry public and private spheres whose destabilizing affects are as vicious as they are subtle. It's not a matter of thinking that things were like that 50 years ago and they're fine in the present, it's a matter of reexamining the present in order to discover the ways in which racist attitudes continue to disable so that 50 years from now our cultures will be all the more inclusive, and so on.

The film presents an aspiring writer, 'Skeeter' Phelan (Emma Stone), who finds the ways in which her African American compatriots are treated revolting, seeing how their wages are low, there is no possibility for advancement, they are treated like slaves, and have basically no means by which to defend themselves. She seeks to disseminate their voices in the form of a book which collects and transmits their stories. This is no easy task due to the legal ramifications of challenging Mississippi's segregated society, so said stories must be collected clandestinely, pseudonyms must be employed, specific geographic locations cannot be identified, and during the collection process appearances must be kept up as usual.

Two maids, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), agree to share their stories at great personal risk and as the Civil Rights Movement intensifies many of their friends sign-up as well. The book is released, it has an impact, there's a happy ending.

I found one aspect of the ending troubling, however, in regards to the ways in which Minny is offered full-time employment with the Footes (Jessica Chastain as Celia and Mike Vogel as Johnny). Internally, the ending works insofar as Minny's career had been threatened by a rumour spread by her former employer and she now no longer has to worry about putting food on the table. But she's offered full-time employment within the same set of circumstances within which she was previously employed, albeit with a much more enlightened couple. Obviously one book isn't going to magically uproot and transform decades of oppressive practices and suggesting that this had happened would have made The Help seem somewhat flippant. But if the Footes had made a stronger commitment to trying to redefine things so that Minny didn't have to work as a maid for the rest of her life, thereby suggesting that they were trying to open up a broader commercial space for her within which her talents could flourish, The Help would have packed a stronger progressive punch into its already sturdy, innovative, repertoire.

The stifling nature of being any married woman in a culture defined by strict patriarchal gender roles is intelligently illustrated as well.