The Invisible Counterpoint

Pain and Gain (2013) No film which can at all remind you from where Ronald Regan-era began to about the termination of the first incarnation of Tiger Woods -- all muscle, arrogance, and domination -- is going to really seem a Depression-era film, where stupid willfulness is going to be showcased simply as a sort of madness the hopeless adopt to believe they've got a chance in the world. In this film you've got Michael Bay as director, a bunch of body-builders as the main protagonists, and as well a very A-team-reminiscent van as home-base, so you basically get what you'd expect out of an 80's/90's film -- if you can amass a signfiicant amount of stupid wilfulness, you'll be treated as a meteor that's got to be allowed to destroy it's loaded-up fuel content of others' carefully procured affairs. If you show enough of yourself while daring to equivocate with them, it's "dispatch" for you -- as appropriately happens to the Miami porn-kin...

Place Beyond the Pines One might be tempted to say that after seeing this film what you’ll want to be is a good parent – being there for you child, so he doesn’t go astray – but this isn’t really foremost what this film communicates. Instead, it is really more about automatizing, exerting yourself against the pull of others, and experiencing how your self-assertion forces others to adjust to your insistent sense of purpose. We encounter Ryan Gosling’s Luke as he is about to take part in a circus act, where he spins about in a circle cage, intertwining his motorbike with two others in angry-bee-but-still-beautiful kaleidoscope patterns. The camera doesn’t enter the cage with him; we stop short outside – but however fantastic an ability he has as a performer we get that this is a skill one can acquire eventually, if bike-riding is your natural bent. In short, there’s no adventure in it for him, however much it does require a moment of “steadying” before going on. There is...

Oblivion How many films exist where there are two worlds a protagonist will exist in—the first, ostensibly superior, almost always cleaner, but really corrupt, and the second, more raw – if not also dingier – but really the last remaining refuge of humane community? Lots and lots, of course, and Oblivion is another, and belongs with probably the whole host of those which don’t really convince that the hero doesn’t actually forego the more appealing world. The two worlds in this film are the first one, where he’s essentially living in a Tony Stark pad, with his very pretty Pepper, who, we note – just as we note with Pepper – comes close-enough to being his age-equivalent. Good for the Tom Cruise in this world, for conquering his fear of intimacy of older women for the pleasure in mature company! He has a hankering for old ways of the past, which makes him not so much sentimental as cherishing, but which could look to become obsessive: witness his whole lake-cabin thing. And ...