Saturday, August 31, 2013

Fènix 11-23

A young child's fascination with Harry Potter leads him to create The Army of the Phoenix online, dedicated to promoting Catalonian language rights, and defending the culture of Catalan.

Due to recent terrorist bombings, however, his activism runs afoul of Spain's anti-terrorism laws, and he's soon absurdly disciplined and punished.

Recalling Jason Buxton's Blackbird, Èric Bertran (Nil Cardoner) makes the mistake of responding to a threat with threatening language, hostilely mentioning a controversial underground organization in his reply, naively behaving as youngsters often do, unaware of the legal ramifications of his rapid fire inflammatory comment.

Both films examine the resulting social consequences but in Fènix 11-23 a support network develops which eases the tension.

Èric's life undergoes monumental changes as his family, friends, teacher, surrounding community members, and love interest come to terms with their fears regarding the penalties, directors Joel Joan and Sergi Lara rationally unreeling these fears, slowly moving from the callous to the understanding, as concepts such as democracy become more tangible.

Fènix 11-23 doesn't maudlinly express its examination of free speech (it's a true story), nor engage in sensationalist practices.

Rather, it shows how sensationalism can be a political byproduct that can ruin the lives of the people politicians are supposed to protect.

You can't write about controversial issues without expecting the police to take note and place you on a list of some kind. They are concerned with fighting terrorism.

You can expect them not to harass children, or anyone, exercising their democratic rights, turning playful miscalculations into seditious intents, winning a few votes and/or budget increases thereby, while sacrificing the ideals they're supposed to uphold.

Èric's unyielding courage is an inspiration.

Talk about bold.

La fille du Martin

The passing of a loved one accompanies a young woman's thoughts as she travels to the region of her birth to mourn.

Unbeknownst to her, a free-spirited youth awaits to assist in the grieving process.

As she convalesces basking in the Lac Saint-Jean wilderness, cinematographer Ronald Richard sensuously suggests that its pristine pastimes strengthen her beauty (Catherine Michaud as Sara Leblanc).

That beauty is indeed strengthened, as young love ignites to cause problems for villainous poachers, headaches for parental guidance, undisclosed wisecracks for a fraternal rivalry, and campfire tales for local legends.

Samuel Thivierge's La fille du Martin unpretentiously lodges a romantic reel in the Laurentian filmscape, lightheartedly casting its luminescent lures, hooking urban and rural encampments alike.

Straightforward, freewheeling, and independent yet accountable, it amicably shifts from outstanding shot to outstanding shot, infusing its comedic relations with bucolic luxury, its health sustained by its spry self-restraint.

I'll have to visit Lac Saint-Jean someday.

Only 5 hours away.

Rent an ATV, do some fishin'.

Hey hey!

(Nice porcupine shot).

Lost in Laos

Alessandro Zunino's sly transformational obscurely poised Lost in Laos potentially situates a metamockumentary between two worlds, wherein survival is latticed with familial, relational, and biological vertebrae, adrift in the Laotian jungle, anxiously struggling at home.

On the bilateral, feisty student Daniela (Daniela Camera) sets out with her partner Paolo (Daniele Pitari) to intermingle inebriated and impressionistic filmic observations as part of a wild abandoned ad hoc international trance known as Lost in Laos.

She keeps in contact with her traditional parents until too many substances are consumed at once and she wakes up with Paolo miles from town, down the river, passports and related pieces of identification missing, no food, soaking wet, lost.

The credits set up the film's serious yet sardonic transitional identifications by creatively yet dazzlingly introducing each letter of the crew's names before the name appears in full, at that point in time each character possessing a stable conception of self developed over time, after which the full name breaks apart into its individual components, thereby foreshadowing the upcoming psychological turmoil by the letter.

The creative yet dazzling dynamic sets up the surreal metamockumentary exposition as well, Lost in Laos intellectually diversifying its subject matter while picturesquely percolating a piquant self-awareness, whose bright abnegations voyeuristically mystify.

The boundary between truth and fiction forms part of Daniela's thesis and this dialectical deployment caused me to wonder if the film was really about either an aging professional couple imagining what life would have been like if they had taken more risks, or a young adventurous couple theorizing on the benefits of a bourgeois life spent together.

At which point I had to take mockumentary itself into consideration, wondering if Zunino was eruditely lampooning this style of analysis to simply present a troublemaking voyage of discovery.

Difficult to say.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Blackfish

Glad I don't work for Seaworld.

Seems to me, that if you capture a killer whale, and stick him or her in a bathtub for the rest of his or her life, forcing them to do ridiculous tricks thereafter, there are going to be problems, problems, problems, as the decades go by.

And if one of the orcas kills a trainer, you should release it back into the wild afterwards, making sure to warn current and future employees about the dangers of working with them, in order to mitigate future conflicts, if you don't decide to simply let them all go, to roam the ocean freely at their leisure.

But while working at Sealand formerly of Victoria, B.C., an orca named Tilikum did kill a trainer, Seaworld did then purchase him, they didn't let their trainers know about his problematic past, and he did kill again, what is your problem, Seaworld?

Documentary filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite comprehensively examines Seaworld's business practices in Blackfish, expertly intertwining the plights of both orcas and workers, thereby synthesizing environmental and humanistic concerns, while chillingly interspersing promotional Seaworld commercials, in an attempt to help put a definitive end to socioenvironmental circus acts.

Obviously if you're working with orcas or bears or tigers you need to exercise caution at all times.

Obviously if you're employing people to work with them you have to warn them to exercise constant vigilance, and reevaluate your capitalistic considerations once life threatening patterns emerge.

For example, this whale killed someone. Be careful.

The animals might not understand how much stronger they are than humans and may end up killing someone during what they thought was harmless playtime.

They may also go mad after living in cages for years and grow tired of not receiving staple food allotments after failing to perform the perfect trick, and may seek to teach their trainers a lesson of their own.

Blackfish scientifically explores the nature of orcas and the evidence uniformly indicates that they are highly intelligent beings possessing complex emotional matrices, and strong family bonds.

Leave them in the ocean I say, and let them conduct their leviathanesque affairs unabated.

Whalewatching, a fun family friendly option during the right times of the year.

It's a wonderful thing seeing marine life actively and independently engaged.

Seaworld can recuperate lost profits by building an orca themed roller coaster.

Where people sit in killer whale trains.

And are splashed by artificial sea spray at some point during the ride.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

We're the Millers

A cornucopia of unrefined protracted sleaze, non-traditional role models doing their best to advise, their chosen economic insignias problematizing their bourgeois endorsements, choosing questionable yet confident manners of expression, juxtaposed with professional counterparts whose assiduity assumes authority yet lacks respectability, the perseverance of youth humanely automatizing errors in judgment, so many errors in judgment, serendipitously sanctioned, incontinently divine.

The film struggles as its characters acclimatize themselves to each other.

All you really have to do is write about what happens and you're good.

Although you're really not supposed to do that.

There are so many good ideas worked into We're the Millers's script that thinking about what happens afterwards trumps actually watching the film, many of the jokes falling flat, not that there aren't hilarious moments.

For me, it's most significant flaw is a product of the enormous and commendable risks that went into its construction, an attempt to simultaneously deconstruct and build-up cherished yet occasionally hypocritical codes of conduct, the juxtaposition requiring a contraceptive consensus to export its value that never intangibly materializes.

Lacking stability, character development is sacrificed for references and in/direct pop cultural criticisms, leaving it blindly searching for a good episode of Family Guy, rather than focusing on Trailer Park Boys, season 2.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Elysium

Universal healthcare, workplace health and safety initiatives, and true love are spatially vindicated in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, wherein the unsympathetic inprickacies of a totalitarian state create an orderly robotic despotic exactitude whose overbearing calculations encourage widespread temporal discontent.

A colony for the wealthiest has been created in space on a station known as Elysium, whose cloistered citizens enjoy incomparable privilege and general legal impunity.

On Elysium, everything is relatively perfect, advanced technologies guaranteeing ideal health and well-being, pools, mansions, extravagance, for all.

For the 99.9% still living on an overpopulated underfunded desolate and impoverished planet Earth, in the year 2154, the law is applied authoritatively and immediately, statistical automatons having replaced the potentially understanding, the struggling worker left with no harmless option but to silently obey.

But even though Elysium possesses enormous technological and financial superiority, Earth's population is too large to ubiquitously suppress, and a group of freedom fighters, whose poverty and encumbering lack of resources necessitates a frugal expedient expensive quid pro quo, covertly flourish in the rubble, using their brilliant hands-on luminosities, to keep a faint degree of hope alive.

Extremes abound.

With characterless villains.

Their attempts to degrade the system even further accidentally nourish an individualistic inductively altruistic messianic thrust, whose attempts to reform were systematically rebuked.

Emphasizing an egalitarian redistribution of resources, and citizenship and advanced healthcare options, for all, Elysium is quite the blockbuster, medically administering a sensationally practical ethical solvency.

Myriad sociopolitical dynamics are built into the script.

Which welds the human factor to the heart of structural change.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Blue Jasmine

Financial fermentations can require that lifestyle adjustments be made, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine perplexedly yet malleably corrugating lead character Jasmine's (Cate Blanchett) descent into madness, competing economic logistics blending the blunt and the beautiful, comedically interspersing experimental affective influences, opportunity knocking, devotion concocting, bitterness imbibing, ripely spoiled.

The truth can be important.

Truths within truths etherealize.

The ethereal cherishes its material foundations.

Specific bases firmly rooted in itinerant psychohistorical discourses.

Jasmine drifts into the past as social interactions manifest a poppy madeleine effect, but their incremental narrative progressions problematize the device's distractions, the plot being secondary to the reflections in In Search of Lost Time.

I've got to find some way to work Proust into the cinema.

The device itself at first tore me away from Blue Jasmine's narrative thread, interrupting scenes which I was hoping would last much longer, at which point I was mildly frustrated by the intrusion, then lured in by the realism, but initially dissatisfied with the resolution.

Within the resolution, when the distraction's coordinated revelations reveal Jasmine's role as ethical agent, the two narratives synthesize then implode, a symbol for the equation of the imaginary and the real, drinking the water of life, causing her to lose her mind consequently.

Which makes the resolution satisfactory, albeit too neat and tidy, apart from the madness, I suppose.

The act of going with the flow is subtly and not-so-subtly lampooned throughout.

With Sally Hawkins (Ginger), Bobby Cannavale (Chili), and Andrew Dice Clay (Augie).

Thursday, August 8, 2013

2 Guns

Centripetally incensing two sharp sabre-toothed cynosures to shifting psychotic solipsistic syndicates, vengefully frothing from within and without, taking precautions which establish guidelines ad hoc, a weathered weaponized multileveled liaison, 2 Guns fires, 2 Guns fires back, a Fred Ward cameo keeps things intact, the script sometimes swoons, occasionally falters, through cutbacks monterey jack, transitional malters, but chemistry can be a wonderful thing, and Denzel and the Wahlberg flow smoothly, ching ching, learning to trust what they've often been taught, is foolhardy nonsense, born, to be bought.

They should seriously do more movies together.

Functioning in fraternal unison.

Excited for the sequel.

Their are a bunch of, for lack of a better phrase, prick moments, where one prick talks business with another, both express their angst, neither comes across looking particularly sympathetic, but their points are made, confidently, confidence backed up by bravado.

The soldiering aspect of this Summer's blockbusters, already inculcated by The Wolverine's frenzy, bridges an international divide in 2 Guns, as Trench (Washington) and Stigman (Wahlberg) are forced to bypass the vehicularly qualified Mexican/American border with a group of hopeful workers, reminiscent of a theme from Pacific Rim as well (soldiering also present in Pacific Rim), Trench and Stigman having been abrasively abused by the CIA (Trench), the American Navy (Stigman), and a cartel Kingpin (Edward James Olmos as Papi Greco)(both), leading them to forge a more comprehensive understanding of social democracy, American style.

The 'oak leaves costume' comment worked well, this being a work of fiction.

Strong female role models are lacking within.

Not much of a focus on technology either.

Also, there's no way Trench and Stigman would have been able to kidnap Greco that easily.

The ease with which he was kidnapped does accentuate raw individualistic teamwork however.

Yes, it does.

Fruitvale Station

Tragedy strikes a young struggling family in Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station, as a tough ex-con (Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant) makes the hard decisions necessary to turn his life around.

The film doesn't make him out to be a saint, rather, it delivers a down to earth condensed synopsis of the last few months of his life, during which he comes to terms with the potentially damaging consequences of his extracurricular economic pursuits, and decides it's time to stop selling drugs, find and keep a job, and start applying a higher degree of respect to his partner (Melonie Diaz as Sophina) and daughter (Ariana Neal as Tatiana).

Not so easy to do if you're used to working on your own for more money, but there's respect for working within the law, if you believe in yourself.

Oscar starts to believe but isn't given the chance to make good on his promises after an abusive cop (Kevin Durand as Officer Caruso) unnecessarily roughs up him and his friends one night, another police person then shooting and killing him.

The police had no right to drag them off the train so they were justified in actively voicing their criticisms.

If you do happen to run into a bad lieutenant, however, who has the power to make things difficult for you, and then they start to make things difficult for you, I recommend not saying anything, just keeping quiet, even if they try to provoke you, think of something beautiful, close your eyes after trying to catch their badge number and/or name, and resist passively.

Then they'll have no reason to detain you and if they do anyways just remain quiet until it becomes clear that they have no reason to detain you later on.

There are a lot of situations where this strategy won't work, but if you fight back, things will only get worse.

Freedom is more important than lipping off and the police can take that freedom away.

Or go so far as to take your life, as they did with Oscar Grant.

I'm assuming that in many cases what I'm writing here doesn't apply because the police aren't going to abuse their authority.

They certainly did in Oscar Grant's case though, he was justified in actively voicing his criticisms, and should be currently working and taking care of his family, in the land of the free.

Friday, August 2, 2013

The Wolverine

A critical plastic treatise on indestructibility, wherein the mighty Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) regenerative distinction is resolutely compromised, a family's billions intergenerationally contend with their honour, a seductive viper embodies intransitive antidotes, and an adopted perspicuity prognostically makes dire predictions, James Mangold's The Wolverine sentimentalizes Logan's recrudescence, as he reluctantly travels to Japan, to visit, a man whose life he once saved.

Not the best of X-Men films but full of intense scenes which decoratively dilate their doctrine.

Including a wicked-cool high-speed train workout.

For me, it wasn't the trip to the veterinary student that caused Wolverine to begin questioning his mortality, the look on his face as Shingen's (Hiroyuki Sanada) sword punctures his chest lacerating a more penetrating ageless lesion, combatively materializing his countless confrontations with death.

Which strengthens his own conception of honour, reminding him that if he is to die he should die honourably, his encounter with the grizzly earlier on, Wolverine, friend of the bear, laying the foundations of this theme, returned to often enough throughout.

While pointing out how cruel it is to hunt with poison.

But, don't read this if you haven't seen the film, how is it that Professor X (Patrick Stewart) lives again?

He blew up in X-Men: The Last Stand, blew up.

I'm happy to see him back, preferring his approach to Magneto's (Ian McKellen), and am wondering if he transferred his consciousness to Magneto's before his body shattered, and now has the power to create a projection of himself for those by whom he wants to be seen, only after he has stopped the passage of time, which provides a bilateral explanation for how Magneto was able to partially move the chess pieces at the end of X-Men 3, and a rather tight resolution to the Professor X/Magneto conflict, the powers of both leaders adhesively united as one.

Wondering how Mystique will fit into this one.

Her powers must have returned somehow.

Considering watching All of Me again.

Awesome bear scene.