Bale and Crowe prove such an impressive dyad in 3:10 to Yuma. The film runs eagerly and compulsively like an experimental ecology—Bale, like a mainline, true to his ideologue nature—replete with glib terror and pundit anarchy, born and sunk in Biblical mist and stifled by disconsolate ardour, at every scene seeming to start to draw its stagnant emote only to wind up bursting into debilitating cross, an ethical jinx. Crowe’s rhetoric and violence remain demanding yet unseen, his identity affected like a hoax, and unsurprisingly the skill of the movie goes unmatched.
Gangs of New York (2002)
Gangs of New York suffers against the grain of its de-spiriting cacophonics, and immediately I am opposed to its ambulatory wastrels, who are hoarded for the thrill of sharing an interminable, expository hue, like someone decided to gauge fetters with a tuning fork. Whereas it goes living-breathing like a restless huff, its penniless barbarism serves a pretty dimwit consolation, and its tabernacle histrionics are crammed in just to subdue fits of, maybe, future pricing, apprising, soft-core domineering. It features a spineless cast of drudges and sewer newts and Irish spunk like it were aping a maimed tendon, playing its sumptuous and anguished histories like a great, collimated decoy. It is gilded and baroque, a fowl-tizzy—yet in the sense of undergarment warfare, rather than being concomitant and urbane. It gets indefatigably deadlocked in collecting its scrums and ravages, which, however, is unsurprising given its plot is like an outhouse, a place for privateer dribbles. I get the feeling it, like a sodden barnacle, has confused echolalia for egoic drive, and I wonder if I should feel bad for a movie. Bill the Butcher seems to stab wildly more for the reason of an internal revival of vapid or penurious shortcoming than for the corporeality of a mutual sacred place; he is so bad, in fact, that his specious broadcast comes off as injurious, like a slight from beyond the wall, and by the time of the film’s Chinese or Chinatown sycophancy distressing my ears I could no longer palate its cold, stingy exposure, could not stand its fetid, sunken overture to espousal of myriad mutinies between broodless ilk, with their crass, crossed-over, disappointing, seamster dialectic. My failure to watch at some indifferentiable point actually libidinalized the film’s inept, noxious, cruciform current, attuning it rather preferably to its skeletal gravitas, in which more than anything (with true cached, bohemian anality), knives are more held to than guts; postures, than pains; and blood, than bind. Gangs of New York made me think of many things: grease, baby hooligans, dietary restrictions, and of all simpering, equestrian, survivable, purportedly orthogonal places, Oregon, with its involvement of pre- and post-virtues—but not of lesser nor higher spirit, nor carnassial lust, and much less hide, fortitude, or even a scandalous, diseased historical trial prior to our present societal bliss, showing that sometimes it is just—and only—good for things to be over.
Broken City (2013)
Broken City is another all-in imago, casting an unwholesome spectrum of depth-defying shadows, pinning a docket and playing funny-man while failing a people. It is full of New Yorkian overhaul sophistry, of caustic ridges and pulpy margins and flickering sellout permanence, spending its first moments twiddling its visions and unlocking its jaw. Russell Crowe has no temptation throughout, while Catherine Zeta-Jones squirts a lemon and swallows its seed, and Mark Wahlberg—slurring and loafing un-neurotically—remains scared for his word; hence the film seems cooked up in boring acetone, decompensating into self-aware aesthetic knowing little more than that it, as soon as it is alone, punches and kicks. I think it—like every other urban fracas—heaps and ladles onto the stagnant cusp of rent, creating a raised and pulverized horizon; but luckily for its fortitude (in the sense of, primitive suspension barely off sick-copville TV episode, as it were well and good in its virtual slum), it is not seen totally barging its encounters. In particular, when Walhberg eventually escapes in a vehicle it is something the likes of which has never been seen, as if his character’s anxiety were projected into the steering wheel, which might explain why—for once—he jams the gas without dying.
Ultimately, Broken City expels bad ju’, strangling an ugly tainted noir from the tubes of city moratorium, which is also to come full circle.
Vice (2018)
Vice, rather than chew itself, manages to hand-feed its handsome portion of Austrian camouflage to the domestic koi pond. It is pokey and irritating, irruptive like a barn rash, misleading its own circularity just to capture dangers and awards—and, of course, this consequentialist tic is just a gnomish Siamese miscreant in its natural fairyland, as it were perfectly at home. Vice argues, nay fundamentalizes, the American political packet of joy for which the country’s skeleton is notorious, full of its freeloading life just like unabashed heavy metals, while it is plugged with appalling decency, whereas, the average typecast of its sort is brash, flatulent, impossible to ignore. It casts its signifiers for the thrill of the haunt, showing a lurid peepshow by the tail rather than the crank. The meeting between Junior and Cheney is one of the most pervasive dialectic swings ever captured on camera, and the poetic fugue proceeding it is like its flamboyant assault. Meanwhile, its milquetoast didacticism characteristic of American cinematic temper has the same kilter of having been pushed, of having fallen into the spotlight with time spent backing and keeling, placing it in a familiar, if not familial, network; and amidst the neurotic placation of civil injuries, Bale egests Cheney like a spinal tap draws pain—with absolute must.
The 6th Day (2000)
The 6th Day is peculiar and hyperopic, distorted, obnoxious, full of decrepit formalities and deliquescent animus. It seems to abandon the comparatively craven aptitude of the Transporter series, Spun, and their alienated ilk, as well as the excepting brims of post-educated hackery and technological thumbs, to lousy behavioural paradox and abruption; its skulking interruptus, in other words, is a conceptive failure of pulmonary proportion, no bigger than its shooting gasp, less explosive and actionary than perverse—yet its conjoinment, its atmospheric syncretism, is flawless, like a soft acidosis. The truly climactic point in the movie of clonal encounter functions like a burden or deadweight, leading the vindictive rest of it to wind itself down into nebulous apoptosis, into a sort of firefighter triage or small-fire emittance. Its crude amniotic belligerence alleges the terminus cannot be lost, only rather that it can be made inebriate and abusive. Both Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Michael Rapaport draw themselves rightful attention—across structural pace, under serious dereliction—like hulking chip-insertions shot from seriously mulled barrels. For all its anger, however, The 6th Day truly has the sleepy identification of its era, a wistful and bemusing candour.
Once Upon a Time In… Hollywood (2019)
Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood is important and, at the same time, discerning, a feat, a belfry of surreal impressionism just a tad higher than its cause (as if the viewer were gazing inwardly), catching aesthetic decomposition at just the right turn, doing a kicking backflip off myth and parable, and deploying the ignominious catch of great beaming mugs—normalization of the Herculean—just to string and dilapidate neighbourhood laundry, to etch existence in its wrongful place. Pacino, for his short part, is a canned diplomat par excellence, and DiCaprio, whose elliptic role-portage succeeds like an endorphin, must be at his utmost censorial, categorically denying his hands in so many pots.
Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood is betrayed and shuttled, full of pulsations and palpitations, a heroic sublimation eroded by harsh object-relation. It is mirrored eruptively where language is weakest (probably somewhere between the basal ganglia and brain stem), showing that the self-ideal is, indeed, Real, and more, is just a simple autological prism, but what tainted reticence it takes. It pits and piles pieces under impromptu oaths just to skim the nervous ‘geal off of outliers, throwing unconscious virtualization versus instantiation and energizing an anachronistic, practically co-morbid friendliness, and blending desire and egoism into quintessential Substance, whose inveterate nesting acts like preconscious avowal, whereas its aggression is sensitive—more so, at least, than its masochistic response-set, its denatured dialectic. Finally, sharing its story as alternately matter-of-fact and colloquial, skin-raising and slippery, its narrative sidebar at the hippie ranch, riddled to heart with the sorts of pitfalls formerly known only to deep alcohol, is the single best depiction of neurological anxiety in cinema history.
Predestination (2014)
Predestination is like an empty respite of self-awareness knowing its episodes, a bleak and tumultuous silence. It is full of poignant but mawkish contextualization, which is persuasive but lacking remark to temporal chasm—to alienated Notion without Bildung—in its vacuous dip, dropping out and omitting incompetently as much as it censors. It drives impulsive expostulation with good intention, namely to provide appropriate, albeit specious template identification, yet which is like saying time can be defied just to mend interpersonal ties when neither, in fact, is intelligible mutually. It seems to mark out an ambitious ambiance for, to cherish, the flat disturbance and erroneousness of spies, being steeply attracted to nuisance behaviours like barkeeping, self-indulgence, and scholasticism habituated (with, sadly, utmost seriousness) in the film, like its heightened sounds and exogenous things to shrug off.
Predestination deliberately carves a niche for insincere acceptance of hysteria, only to repress its possibility in every way. It draws purely on the power of personalization, which is then and later subjugated in function of sadistic regulatory deliverance (to float institutional embodiment), in order to validate an apparently futile series of disclosures, and yet its depiction is anachronistic, a selfsame admission. What might be an homage to mental illness is concealed with force—much like involvement with variegated plethoras of treatment service in real life often exists—albeit, not intentionally—in this same way, leaving only a tenuous stranded certainty that, if there was really a rational champion to the pockmarked narrative, as it were, it were not people with vested interest, but oneself. At one point, Hawke’s mercenarial offer to his co-actor, who is clearly the suffering party, constitutes an outright elision of reality, quite beside the all-consuming point of time travel, and his doggedness as an actor is engulfed by his related steps to self-stimulation.
6 Underground (2019)
6 Underground is squeamish, anguished, squelching profundity in with the outlandish like every other sputtering, asinine tantrum, and exhibiting an uncharacteristically id-like incipience for such a sugary hork. Franco, for his part, sets an inappropriate pace as an unconscious canary, and his chicks are like living pipettes. It is hard to tell if the movie’s garnish enumeration or its destruct-o privilege is more suggestive, which is to say each performs interchangeably above—not even within—an incorrigible failure, another post-romantic piece of cake splayed on its styrofoam plate in excruciating nothing, like a monotonous goop, to feed indebted ideals of the energized and responsive ego, to curry the purportedly good nature of its entourage shootout brainstorms, stopping short just to let Reynolds gasp the reflexive juice of an attractive brunette. Moreover, the movie flushes some of the most abrasive and indissoluble dialogue the film-watching world has ever sanded themselves with: where it is not outsized, it is displaced, where it is poignant, it is not plangent, and quite frankly, it is damaging, yet maximally indifferent to its order of reproach to minimal coordination, and for this reason is culpable and pitiable, like a sea skeleton or a tree of rotten fruit. It spreads its compulsive waste so far I lose track of its origin, wherefrom its desertification—the last or final exception, that is, of waste—worked better in small-minded fantasy, like as an obligatory spandrel inflamed entirely by group-thought and mildew, both pervasive cumulata, and by music so undead and imperative it is rendered obtuse.
Toc Toc (2017)
Toc Toc is a gratuitous case of basic commercialism—opportunity-within-opportunity, an obscene and un-self-conscious window, starting off poking and shaking treetops frantically with its yardstick. However, I am betrayed early on, in that even as its sweat and wrenching mettle traduce its humour, it goes swinging and jumping like it would be charged with sportsmanship, pure ease, all the while doing Dialectics like this were a Gaian sack of self-proliferating, Fabergé coconuts—hairy but true, copious and veracious.
Toc Toc, I charge, is nothing but a Bronze Calf, a bootleg totem, revived from somewhere far, far back in the chain of determination, caught embezzling aggressive psyche yet again. It quickly sinks from healthy Family time into miasmatic board game time, ripping idiosyncrasies from important hands (and showing like the Self equals bad hands without knowing how to say it), even striving to pull together the heady companionship of Biblicism using self-evidently implausible theatricality, which is a bit like miffing the leader.
Toc Toc tries but fails to convince the viewer that clients find loss of boundary sorely missed, propounding its cheap hypnotism that deep interest and social jab must, writ, become superego. Honestly, mental cinema of its kind is, very often, responsible for bad cases of recursion, for indoctrinating an outright epidemiology of cheating solipsism, for mistakenly presuming line of perception plus cathected phraseology does not equal magnitudinous psychoeducation. And in the same way the film characterizes aggression, it creates characters just to keep this involved, and then condemns its gimmick from public to private, from circulation to storage, in an artless, dubious haste. It shows itself to be post-Oedipal, pulling, not straining, muscles, shrinking too far down into the couch of fear, and to be completely equivocal about group and individual ego, which is arguably the path of most resistance to self-collected mastery.
Man on a Ledge (2012)
Man on a Ledge is, unlike at least its overt subject, tedious and unflattering, intensifying and dissolving its clarity conjunctively with the substance of its Name. It scants dialectic hubris for short escapist jollies, progressing with the slow or tortuous wits of refined—or traumatized—ego. For one, the only complete Form during its funeral scene is the word “free”, as if to categorically deny the lurch of freedom at an intersection of its axes from an unfair position, showing a crepuscular or poorly guarded madness, an unconscious preformation, and seeding tenuous relation to its eventual cultivation of long-winded attention, that is, to crowd censorship. And as if to celebrate the episode—rather than the life, the very long life—of the city, relished unto its people, it is caught dragging out a close thing to behaviourism just to better know itself, proving how canny and normalistic it is that urban suicidal ideation of its depicted nature—that is, making an impassive cost and absurdist laughing stock of egoistic differences ramped up to, at least here, their rarest impediment (as opposed to burning and securing the freedom of professional paths like many movies)—has been mostly foreclosed and repressed into more derogative, less intensive former eras, revealing that suicidal ideation is a merit, a critical mass, in and of itself.
Man on a Ledge burns out quickly, despite its subliminal and duplicitous ties; it takes off spiralling in unhelpful directions, practically as if its heist—which conveys a sarcastic or nonsensical, aphasic separation of artistic modalities—could go without saying; its developmental connect-omics are ham-fisted like its symptomatology, when this latter should be the domain of experience, whose purposiveness is infallible (and so, typically, is its depiction). It is a comedy of fuses—from incipience outward—leaving its legal kinship to portmanteaus, to the casual dress of humility, and intimacy or close affect for its expected part skims around psychotically, showing a virtual eye only as filler, and being a clear reminder that movies—unlike people—do not understand the meaning of difficult lengths.