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.
Tag Archives: 2019
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.
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.