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 ...

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon   has suggested  that Brave , however feminist, doesn’t really undermine patriarchy – the daughter weaves a spell of command and rhetoric to sway them to her side, but ultimately it’s to the men to determine when sharp changes to tradition can be undertaken.  But the whole (or almost the whole – see below) of what Brave does is show only women as capable of the maturity, the majesty to see what the realm needs to survive; the men, are twits, practically always ready to hack at one-another over the smallest slight.  The men, that is, though they can supply buffoonish charms, are mostly a drink-fest and a random melee waiting to happen:  does the movie really supply any doubt as to who maneuvered these realm-saving “patriarchal” traditions into place in the first place?  Andrew’s former peer at Salon , Stephanie Zacharek,  has argued  that Brave is closer to Ratatouille and The Incredibles than to Wall-E and Up;  ...

More Cuts, Please:   Current Films and Our Self-Torture Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston   2012 If you’re like me and you’re beginning to notice a lot of evil being passed off as innocuous, just a joke, or even as good , and you’re wondering why this has become so widespread, why people are doing the opposite of the holy crusader and enterprising ways to target, to demean the precariously placed, let me tell you what this is all about.  Most people are not comfortable when too much of the good life has been made available to them.  All the great things they’re hugging to themselves has them feeling they’re worthy of disownment, of catastrophic punishment, as this was the crippling experience they were made to feel when they first as children started attending more to their own needs than the unmet ones of their mothers.  The superego, set up as a child to protect him from reviving this intolerable experience, by dissuading him from having too ...

Adam Sandler deserves credit for being angry that a culture he grew up knowing pleasures from, has essentially been demarcated subsequently as something you can only bring up with shame.  The really quite wonderful Grosse Pointe Blank is, however, an indication of this unfair pattern – the 80s were Reagan and aids, a time to get trapped in.  Well, in truth, so it was – it was a period where society seemed mostly interested in abandoning its dependents and building remove so to not hear their complaint (bang on, Risky Business and Breakfast Club ).  The kinds of things we were offered to take pleasure from showed what growing up in that decade did to our preferences – I’m sorry, but though Vanilla Ice, Mustang 5.0s, gloomy uterine strip clubs did please for seeming to grant us access to black culture, powerhouse prowess, the illicit, something is off with you in retrospect if you can’t see that the main reason to now stand up for them is because they once meant somethin...

1)  "Prometheus" succeeds in showing us that whatever the ultimate secrets of the universe might be, they're going to have to be really something to not instinctively seem less rousing than when a spirited human being is roused into action out of fidelity to a felt truth that she is part of something worthwhile and good in this world.  The android draws wonder from two things in the movie -- the aliens' cosmological map, evidence of their distilled, focused interest in us; and the anthropologist's surprising resiliance.  I did find the light show appealing, but when we realize the star men are considerably less possessed of life than the android is -- that they're really just battle robots, further evolution of the android looks to involve his drawing wonder that the young woman hasn't shorn herself of needing to find something outside of herself for authority and inspiration.  "It speaks for you that you want to see greatness in everyone ar...

Maria Aspan has written  an article  praising “Friends with Kids,” and I would feel inclined to do the same if I felt the film began to open up for new explorations what had felt foreclosed in pattern.  But I tend to find that in many films that tip the hat to your preferences, you’ll relax enough in them to want to praise them for the new they’ve shown you, the possibilities, considerations, they’ve lived out for you.  “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” if, like the central characters, you’re comfortably mainstream, uninterested in having the intellectual edge on anyone and more just participating in the -- to you -- exciting trends/new truths manifesting now, does have the material to have you thanking it for what it did right too, for it fleshing out in a compelling fashion a whole variety of ways expecting a child affects you and your partner.  But if the mainstream is loathsome to you, the film becomes simply garbage; no true explorations, just exten...

Alison Willmore, in  her review  of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” aired her humble request to Hollywood that when it makes a film which features a young, precariously situated couple, with no obvious love-bond yet who have conceived a child, that it at least –- then -- bring up the possibility of abortion.  Certainly seems reasonable, except since by expecting the film leads us to think of the late-term child rather than onset protoplasm, I thought the request actually out of place here.  Yet I appreciate the attack in any case, for the film, if not as bad as critics have taken it as, is vile, very much advocating Willmore’s other concern with the film, that you haven’t known human fulfillment until you’ve had a kid.  You could be an Adonis, and be a rival -- for a moment.  But as the film shows with the comparison of Chris Rock’s character, Vic, leader of the men with babies for being amply besot with them, against Davis, a single man of exc...

Alison Willmore, in her   review  of "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," argues that the film "is a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended underserved older audience," and one wonders if even if its intention was to serve only them , if the reality is that it could and should serve a swath more.  The film, like the Harry Potter series, features both young and old, with key storylines for both, only with "Hotel" the focus is on the latter rather than the former.  But one could never say of "Harry Potter" that it's principally for the young, that it serves its intended audience well -- and only them -- without expecting reproach for this being obvious  nonsense,  that "Harry" is, rather, clearly universal, with appeal to anyone who hasn't lost all touch with life.  In fact, if you were to say that the films / books were only for the 7 to 12 set (or, as they move along, the adolescent), and that adu...