Smokin’ Aces suffers poor circulation and pathological disunion (or an avid anti-Freudian streak)—from happenstance might claw and punch itself together yet—and out of this impairment it dredges old-school rampage and neo-hubristic insult, the kind of vain shoulder you punch gently just to cool it down. From the beginning it is caught whupping and whelping, playing too many isolateral sides to countenance—let alone mull—its penal injunctions and disjunctions; in fact, it reveals itself to be nothing more than hungover, totally beside itself, with a facile or disgusting taste in its throat. Yet it squints right through the glare of misfortune, dallying its herpetic or concentric bleach like a series of surreptitious thuds, and I get the feeling any adjunction to its dissipation would be indulgent, unnecessary prescription. Smokin’ Aces is agitated, ignoble; it brandishes the penetration of faces and names like it were mixing a bisque of cards and chips. Its statutory depiction of torture is by far the most honest disclosure of presenting conflict—i.e., other than promissory gun-show self-loathing, admixed or abetted with geometrical terror—it manages to make, but conversely, Ryan Reynolds is not, for once, metaphorical, but eponymous, and I have never seen anything like Jeremy Piven’s miraculous gurning, his tempestuous plea. I catch myself away in lamentation, rueing Things and unconscious layers, knocking myself all around its devilish series of converging cuts—its richness of infamy, its posthumous scab delusion, its call-collect ones.
Synchronic (2019)
Synchronic, unsurprisingly, greets by defenestration of cell wall—the yawn-jerking transactional equivalent of sexual dimorphism—which is at the same time, an impelling urge to resolve and reconstitute the reality of drug experience from its tatters in the Real, to salvage the unsalvageable (being that a drug is a psychotic nucleus the moment it changes hands). Quickly its cultivated fakery is apparent and rueful, of an unseen magnitude of scandal, looking much in its element like prodigal Eye-opener, meets backwoods stippling, meets salacious indigenous piggy-backing, meets bad actor—none of which encounter psychedelic exposition as has been set, and soon the film’s condescension is so arrogant and floaty I need to break.
Returning, Synchronic aggressively tenders its hand for identification like an average drug-film. I notice it has its wires and plugs in the wrong chronological holes, but guilelessly passes this off into plot, and that while choosing education over apodeictic doodles, its lite impetus goes rather poorly with its cursive snuff, and that notwithstanding, it actually denudes experience just like it does its proponent surplus—from shock flippantly injected to ecology, to awkward uniform intervention, professional courtesy-cum-apathy, and needle-stick injury. I realize, the frequent problem with playing professionals in movies is that, the shabby authority of attendance is aggressively broken from modality—hence a nearly universal artlessness—and, being the only way these characters can be derelicted from selfish duty, shoved and shoehorned also insofar as praxis. Entertainment treats the druggy drawing room like an aseasonal cabbage patch—as basal, pejorative, not even cooly spaced—and then makes a wild parabolic dance of stowing its empathy in caskets and creators, of being incapable even in a thoughtful stretch of fruiting the solipsistic bodies of self-object, and Synchronic for its part pounds the Symbolic in its mortar and sows the dust in an effort to grow meaning. In other words, the film—albeit not uniquely—embraces the logistic of infantilistic narcissism over nature, but oblates and ultimately castrates their commonality, or rather, that unique synthesis which creates and conceals the spiritualism and virtuous manifold of addiction—and so it is a case of legitimation and authority, of characterological as opposed to individual, disorder. Further, it somehow makes an analogical tragedy of nothing but reverie, of phantasmagoria, and school supplies and organizing principles of the brain, which divorced from a cinematic reality of smooth impressionism and mimesis, shows nothing but failed euphoria. It partakes of free will like it might a commodity, all the while lacking prosocial lubricant, resulting in a perpetual train of awkward baggage; finally it sets a faltering and exotic course to brotherly love, of all readymade places, which is more or less the anamnesis of the quixotic drug experience—showing just how little it really showed, without, after all, being enticing. And most troublingly of all, the film clearly strives to give off the whole of black experience, particularly of trauma and work-related stress, to petty exploration.
An American Pickle (2020)
An American Pickle is laconic emulation, a state of emergency, yet I only fear its familiarity. It is kitschy but queer, lacking the vitalism of idiosyncrasy making Jewish heritage so interesting, and which surely gave forth under the rural semiosis of fixed encounter. However, it is grinding rather than whirring, as if it were heightened by a microdose; and it becomes certain, through the film, that this is the feeling of romance, dumped by weak gravitational force, its wool hung on a loose nail. An American Pickle has no aesthetic flourish in sight, with the exception of irremediable contrast—between charlatanism and gusto, bandwidth and capacitance—which in itself is no small jar, but it flatly refuses to carry these out into concordance, into clarity, all the while ignoring the proximal and distal ghosts of desire making discomfort—making vicarious allusion, so to say, verboten—and thusly screwing down its bare. For all its aggressive modelling, its seminal modes, its impromptu energetics and changeling Zeiten, the film spills and spoils a lot, and über Seth Rogen makes it very clear that he does not speak a Real language, one of self-consciousness, which is I suppose his casual traducement of acting, of actorship, yet placated and largely unhelpful. Its culminant restoration is, at least, cathected mindfully, and for this the film leads itself well.
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
Godzilla vs. Kong is paranoid, hyperthermic, impassioned, developmentally cheap and dispossessed, not just from buildings but from event-horizon, from the weight of unconscious bias. It suffers debilitating pill erotism—the perpetual reversal of gaze—disguised in jungle funk and architectonic monkey grease, likewise an impossible urban transcendence, softened and organized around the edges by two implacable Father-ideals; for this reason and some others, perhaps, it is mostly wretched gibberish under robotic preen. I am repelled by its premature and aftermarket cinematica, as it broaches and dehumanizes scene after scene, by its dumpy pro-institutional artifice and burgeoning chemistry; I reproach and reject its desperate, alternately nubile (visually lissome like a treasure map) and engrossed signalling, its nonsensical prevarication of idolatry and totemism, of veneration and masturbation. Pausing it halfway, I get the inebriate impression of having awoken roughshod from a nap.
Godzilla vs. Kong shakes down slavery and regurgitates only its most pitifully symbolic, smouldering aberrations, about whose humanoid fitness there is something archaic and comical, like it is guilty to wit, but not to effect, of special-effect minstrelsy. It straddles its monocular, game-theoretic globalization for all hell, and in its thrusting lunacy single-handedly despises the Family. And so dressed, it is stumped, embalmed in redundant techno-layers and vapid stimulus induction, lost in its acerbic axiomatization of elders and orders. Eventually I get the impression of two intensified and emulsified gradations of intolerant aquarium siblings, whose difference amounts to chronology, propelled to sardonic limits by nothing but the exfiltrate of death-drive, petrified of any misconduct except annihilation.
Self/less (2015)
I can’t tell—a couple minutes into its whimpering conflation—whether Self/less is fetishistic or promiscuous, which shows a failed Freudian apparatus if there ever was. After dumping its scientistic energy like a stained reality—after giving us yet another guileless spiritual technology—it stays nothing but disappointment, and its ulterior fungibility is stinking or lowly rather than exponential, like a waterlogged mushroom rather than a story proper. It scrimps and bundles its unjust obsession—heart-to-brain, brain-to-heart—like this latter belongs to transcendent Death, like the movie ought to be washed in a higher-order necro- or thana-logic before being acceptable to be shuffled into the foolproof deck of cinematic experience. Eventually a short burst of jockeying perceptual nystagmus links the whole, in a pretty sensible way, to the worst kind of drug experience, to a blot of putrid LSD, and chucks its role of sitter or overseer to British leather forces, so to speak, like we might expect its sour grape to continue independently post-exposure—as if its numskull attitude were ever good enough for shoulder treacle. Then it sits back and coddles the short stick of assimilation, with a conspicuous agenda to canceling enlightenment, a State nature, or both; to this end it swings peanut butter and pills without remorse—the equivalent to its sexual passes—whose measure is sanctified by raving trip, but stuffed unpleasantly with egoistic runoff, giving the viewer an unqualified alchemical chimerism of irritated meaning not unlike hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Sir Ben Kingsley is cast poorly as an apathetic twitch in the arms of Big Idea, Big Mind, Big Trust. Ryan Reynolds, on the other hand, is forced to endow his infinitesimal vestiges of pure aggression to the narrative’s genital umbrage, to its drives and curiosities, in much like the form of a military’s stint with itself—like disintegration whose intentionality is fenced-in—and for this affront their cumulative dimness becomes reflected, I guess, elsewhere. Frankly, it is hard not to admit the movie synthesizes waste, which is I suppose why it makes such a big deal of pest control, with its hot shots and raging flames, its infernal places and excoriations under quiescent tempo. I manage to ponder the past only once—past as self-preface and all—when Reynolds flutters his eyes, which goes to show the wrong sort of scampering blue-light arbitrariness, a pinprick in the ides of Man as it were, and I am immediately re-lived with the patient-at-arms, structure, its lack. Finally—only halfway-in—the movie dissolves entirely, just like it had a bad bath, which I take for its resolution, its breakdown, its transmutation, its puddle, its wire, and so on.
Contagion (2011)
Contagion is a bare beneficence of stateless zero-sum promiscuity, a failure, like a short crushing walk. Its most surprising notion is not, in fact, an illness over-under, but that its soft colligative guts are rather the most oblivious towards industrial hyperreality, to a pernicious and uplifting subscript; its deaths are like one great big pasted, deadpan notice, sordid yet self-explanatory, like treating a dog cage or kennel through its bars like a looking glass. Contagion is the first time a film has ever been both pre-instructive but post-operational; it is responsible for enshrining psychotropic reality, pure selfless medicalism, at the small basal cost of event financing, of logging it off the list, which is to say of marking both ends of the ideological page. Its dialogue drops out like a heat-sensor, and its cinematography—if this, conversely, were even an attributable domain to its search—is like an endoscopic plug for trace-marking or -cutting, having the perspective of an anxious mole-rat.
Contagion is caught between slander or slur, burning or braying, splotchy or blushing. Judd Law announces the loathsome solicitation of the film from purely communicative, Greco-anarchic thrift into psychotic escapism, into nihilitative spillage—just, sick hatred, leaden and opaque, dished in demilitarized equivalents, casually and ineptly. Its quite cordial yet, ignominious Phallus, abruptly retracts where, curiously, would be exactly expected its acting. Its decay is poor, crashing, as graceless as eclectic pocket violence, abandoning thusly its ideological imprimatur to squandered space, to the free-reign commensuration of dark matter and detritus. And it ends on the worst possible note ever was struck: chemistry equal parts expectant yet unimpressed, naturalized yet onerous, mulishly impinged yet industrially cathected, and emotionally unlicensed yet Pollyanna.
Glass (2019)
Glass is intelligible right off the tongue: its sportnik tangents are creamed from the start, much like a sprawling sandwich spread. Its violations of rule are crafted and concealed as if to be unthreatening, like the lugubrious dens and ways of rodents, and the low-pH finesse of its unctuous, postmodern electronic asylum—including, no small success, the point-to-point predicament and verbiage of its staffage—is a capitalization on this substratum exactly, excepting, that is, from the psychiatrist, who emits a form of temporal forfeiture or limitation, the equivalent to fury, and a heartening plea respectively, both of which conspire to cave the ceiling of pervasive acumen, its devious proctological arch ranging from its mentalization of illness to the purgation of plot. Glass is death-defyingly sane, yet reveals Shyamalan’s propensity to challenge oeuvre into inflected enterprise, a feature whose substance evaporates unnervingly not only within exchanges between characters, but also in the exchanges of characters between shots, between shots between foci, etc., etc., leaving it all looking more or less intact.
Shyamalan, unfortunately, rears a racist mane—for how could such pomp be anything but—when Samuel Jackson’s character is made to locate his power, during which point the latter lends a blind nod or acquiescence to total or pervasive cognition apparent, as if to valourize and enshrine the putatively doomed, quixotic, self-recriminating, underdeveloped fate of every black inspiration, and a primary certainty of the film, quite unlike its secondary lucubration, is that this—somehow—was unintentional. It manages to turn the dyadic or dialectical hubris of small-group ventriloquism into enigmatic capitulation, into bathos and pathos—right where it belongs in reality, but not necessarily in cinema. In fact, the same psychiatrist, while she is speaking with Samuel Jackson’s dying character, comes out as a dud all on her own, exposing not really the movie, but in fact the gross Shyamalayan series for its deplorable foundation, whose characters break the mystification of failure quite a lot when they are not well-acted.
Glass is a perfect buoyant semiosis held together with mild civil survivor’s guilt, such that its perceptions are fluid, and its bones emergent as if from a fugue. Its natural confabulation is unapologetic, yet generous and successful, showing its puffy power. I keyed out, however, as soon as its scenes devolved into sub-anarchic mythemes, abutted indiscriminately by Shyamalan’s spa-like disgorgements—full of induced trances and nerdish frigidity, scathing turn-slaps and bastard reaction formations, motifs missing their limbs.
They Live (1988)
They Live grumbles to life like a vacation house, into brash and austere morning, prim with institutional slick, gullible ides and crimson paradox, showing off the hairy shackles of moral omnipotence like its lurid caveat, holding asylum America in its arms. Heeding its synchronic courtesy—namely, when the television sermon aligns with the preacher’s mouthing in the yard—is tantamount to, nutshell, equivocating its plot line with its stimulus, to calling a dull throb by its inertia—so, in my view, it is preferable to assent. And not just its technology, but its jamming pottery ecology also obeys this challenge, this angry unfastened threat, in that both are imperceptibly deprecated and, as such, outlandish, boorish, inconceivable against the grain. It becomes impossible to alienate the film’s homeless traipse from its object worldview, as if these were assigned mutually like footprints and soles, and for this reason its ego psychology is missable and terroristic, like drunken battery or a sexual assault, proving a complete (or rigorous) lapse in cinematic judgment, a failed signal in and of itself, and thus setting a frightful scene for the rest of the movie in toto. Its aggressive cop-killer fantasy proves positively Antichristic in its overindulgence of the equivalent, for belief, of a false start, a premature gun, and is not well-remedied by the quotidian aspersion or roundabout of delusion, showing better altar in least impulse—that is, in elaborate alien schematic. Its porousness is otherworldly, too weak to be true, whereas its emotional surfeit is astonishingly craven and unsafe, and at times this interaction can become surprisingly vicious, at least for such dissolution, for such an Orphic retention.
Don’t Look Up (2021)
Don’t Look Up suffers such naïve realism it sheds its enthusiasm like dander, seeming to embrace and, so far as embellish the shame of having to crowdsource an ego from metallurgical piss. Worse, its dyscalculic pertinacity flashes what—denial, displeasure, impregnable dreams—beneath its robe. It highlights an incorrigible twaddle and grimace at the expense of courtesy; yet most disconcertingly, it aims intentionally to cathect distressed constellations (of bad orders, of pledgees, of acrimonious nodes) like they are full of urgent mediocre honesty, like they are forthcoming, and even to laud this practice for its shambling chemistry—as promising and divisive a microscopy there ever was. It is defective, deadening, possessing a dumbfounding candour. For most of the film I wondered how long the enterprise would continue milking the waiting room, for how long it would keep signifying its babble for the sake of nuancing and pitying its begrudging thanatopsis. It palpates the histriome for lumps like it is under lock and key of sinuous pain, like it is dealing with a scarcity of pressure, a quixotic scansion, overindulgent hurts. Frankly, for however surprising its underhanded monotone, it is an obvious issue of the bald-faced suffrage and denialism of poverty, of a vile, treacherous, and, above-all, unoriginal curse which it refuses to abandon unless you acquiesce to its insipid tactics of table-setting and infantilism.
The Death of Stalin (2017)
The Death of Stalin is a miserable uninhibited sty hand-fashioned with an eo ipso diagnosis—up to, bleak and involuntary possession of posture and pate. Firstly, lining its façade rather than its skittish satire, like a vicarious chariot, it shows it is hard foremost to let the viewer believe it is not just a deliberate sketch or mock-up, as opposed to art. Its borderline treatment of human life is gullible and narcotized, sodden by salted wounds, which are left to close, to learn to weep, to weep their own—in precisely that missing order—when, in actuality, everything just evanesced into thin air, into post-karmic neoplasm.
It twists and jerks the arm of unsalvageable bogies and ancient travesties and coteries; I am felt holding hands with ringleaders the whole way through, with, indeed, great big assurance. Its prodigious sets and transcendent falter impart the niggling ticks letting moribund ethos as object—showing the ideology of a jack-sum torpedo, that is, something inspired and profuse muted by the ocean. It is the homonymic equivalent of some paroxysmal elbow cabal picking away at every last ineffable nest, like a poisoned amble which could not—its insuperable lapse—be its own. Sir Simon Russell Beale behaves and resembles a puffy flog of distended oral suspicion, Steve Buscemi a horny farmer-provocateur, and together they break unarmed jouissance to smithereens.