Reviews

I watched this for the 2nd time recently and it's even more fresh than the 1st time. & I picked up some details that i had not focused on before.

I Like how Pablo Schreiber, as Wayland, is a realistically stoic, big-galute of an ex-15-year felon, with a generous but troubled blue spirit.

Jena Malone is richly real as lost and angry, but sincerely sweet, Dolores, a single mother three times over without one baby-daddy even just on the very distant unrecognizable horizon. Each child character is authentically unique and they wear well too, each one of them in their very own mien.

The dialogue is incisively contemporary, and surprisingly from ALL of the characters, without being preachy, "cute", nor hipster cliches. & There's a classic-Greek chorus posed as a kind of mellow, but righteously wheeled, leathered, and furry motorcycle club on the periphery of everyone's story.

Writer-Director Sabrina Doyle and her video lensmen clearly personally love ALL of these faces up close and also in their magnificent Northwestern forest and mountain stage. This mostly misty environment is occasionally accented, with surprising subtlety, for just a bit of sunny fun in the fun-park colors of Wayland's free-ice-cream truck.

Darkly dear and enchanting closing shots of Jena, in her generative mythical title role, exponentially mirror the beginning of this pearlescent mystery about how all of them got real from where it all began in prosaic high school daze past.

Lots of macro and micro eye candy speaks in chorus with a minimalist, but empathically sonorous, sound climate in an almost absolutely bare existentialist script, complete with light touches of self-deprecatory humor.

Even the two film "goofs" are associated with reasonable plausibilities: why didn't Nemo think of the fire alarm system earlier in his travails? - the story is about something imperfect that is afoot and Nemo is obviously a part of that chaotic imperfection from the first moment that the hacked security system reads ARMING OUTSIDE right AFTER the "security" code is entered.

Also, how could the fire sprinkler system not bring the Fire Department and First Responders almost immediately? - Hypothetical clue: the soundscape for this movie did not have to have helicopter elements REPEATED several times throughout from the first moments through to the end. So: where did #3 go? That allusion is larger and much more amorphous than conventional stories of thievery usually are; was something besides art intended to be stolen here? By whom??? & Did it/"they" succeed?

When I first read about Garuda many decades ago, I was charmed by their nobility and, of course, to fly, what a great honor due to their being!

Though I have read about Buddhism several times and the Bhagavad Gita too, in all of the years since that first small introduction, I haven't encountered any other reference to Garuda and have only occasionally interacted with Buddhist or Hindu persons. That fact made encountering this movie, on one of my streaming services, a distinct pleasure, especially as I immediately remembered the Garuda.

Somewhat less than state-of-the-art animation aside, which was the only thing I rated this movie down for, I enjoyed this tale about the Garuda and the other classic mythical creatures, like the Naga, from Western Asian culture, because it pre-dates Western European cultural assumptions about rationalism and history, so the whole movie made me think about dimensions of human experience and struggle, things that all humans share throughout the ages, each in our own way in our own space-time.

Fun!! . . . though not well received, but I don't know what part it is, of what the word "fantasy" refers to, that some reviewers don't get, so I'm giving this movie poetic license.

Perhaps it's just me, because I'll put up with a lot for the sake of ENTERTAINMENT, but there's a good story line here, lots of characters with different orientations on the thematic content and I enjoyed the funny things that the characters say to one another. In its nascent form, the monster is, perhaps, a little too cute, but I don't care if it is. The main demerit I can see is how formulaic the structure of the action is. However, that trait does make it quite accessible to certain age and cultural cohorts, so, when taken as a counter-balance to the complex interactions between characters and situations, the prosaic trajectory of the action is a plus.

... requires enough mental and emotional strength and agility to lay a coherent story path through deliciously lively chaos among persons, place-times, and things. All of it is enhanced by quite a cleverly light, but definitely significant, verbal script, alluding to diverse details of the challenges inherent to personal and social human experiences.

One example that illustrates this point:

Alluding to competing interests, personally between potentially romantic Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline, VS professionally between their role as agents of the government and their de facto advocacy for the Rights of Beings and for justice for the inhabitants of Mul irrespective of government -- a Shakespearean quote in the dialogue, relatively late in the movie action, AFTER all of the iconic elements (and that is iconic, because it IS a Shakespearean quote after-all) and after the consistently dialectic events between elements have been identified in imagery, action, and dialogue, the script uses a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to tie everything together and to establish why this isn't just an especially colorful space jaunt with a more or less irrelevant personal romance story unnecessarily tacked onto it, so there's nothing accidental about the choice of this specific quote:

Antony, "There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," ...

... making of Valerian's and Laureline's relationship an event related to what the TWO of them CHOOSE to do, that is, activism independent of their assigned roles and which is irrationally motivated for other beings, the Pearl who had inhabited the planet Mul, and which agent behaviors go against common reason, since Valerian and Laureline could have quite acceptably claimed plausible deniability for any responsibilities in regard to what happened to the Pearls and could have just as "successfully" gone off to engage in their next episode of beach-hopping, without more risk to themselves.

This story is like an alternative form of Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra in which (instead of giving up and killing themselves and thus becoming nothing but more detritus in the tides of history in their space-time) Cleopatra had NOT feigned her reaction to their situation and Antony had NOT been so addicted to her as to have had no real choice in his relationship to her except suicide - AND - instead, the two of them had decided, even in the light of real risks of catastrophic failure, to do something authentically different, and therefore authentically revolutionary, to change the forces that they had participated in and to which they could ascribe many of their own doubts about their relationship to one another and, thus, also to others.

The rest of that quote from Shakespeare's play sheds additional light on the structure and action of this movie:

Cleopatra: "I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved." Antony: "Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth."

The old English derivation of the word "bourn" has to do with the intermittent flow of some small streams or other water-sources that provide the boundary of how far travelers or wanderers can go without losing access to the necessities of life. In response to the challenges that one faces in the presence of the possibilities of love, our screen writer adds the adult perspective on love that recognizes its fundamental risks and suggests that specific necessity creates opportunities for new persons and new space-times, instead of old repetitions of essentially and, therefore, inevitably suicidal mistakes and consequent lies, one sub-type of which, in the story of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is what destroyed the Pearl beings and their planet, Mul, to begin with.

In addition to Sun Wukong, Monk Sha is also a main character on the road, so, since the Scriptures have not been acquired at this point, writers, Ning Wen and Cheng'en Wu, have added depth to Timothy Wu's storyline by associating character traits with the Buddhist monk.

This is legitimate artistic license, because the cultural context includes Buddhism, which makes common romantic questions germaine to a monk's commitment to his journey toward The Scriptures and enlightenment.

Add to those monkish facts the imprisonment of (another road) the River and, consequentially, also Womanhood and you have implicit dimensions of the Monkey King's wholistic story made explicit for the sake of a presumably universal language artifact embodied in The Scriptures, which Timothy Wu writes about, but does not create himself.

The best storytelling, at minimum, implies, or the more so, outright alludes to additional dimensions of being human, which the story's audience can choose to engage, or not. Therefore, The Monkey King 3 also works as basic action dialectic, especially if you remember such an extremely old and cosmically relevant story is not owned by whoever produces a more recent version.

The Monkey King 2 is a beautifully wrought conversation about Buddhism compared to the ethics of killing for a just cause. While poignantly crafted, an appropriately lite-on-philosophy screenplay has threads of humor and lots of action to illustrate the ethical struggle.

Extremely high Art Direction fills the entire movie with eye-candy. The Monkey King 2 even refrains from commercially desirable, simplistic, Western Morality Tale endings, so the challenges to our understandings, in light of human history, are real.

Aaron Kwok, as the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, uses his maximally forward costume, instead of the costume using him, to add well-tuned facial empathy to a character that is in danger of being mistaken for more conventionally wooden "super heroes", then Kwok adds precisely focused micro-body language from a simian dialect that adds more lite touches of delight throughout this movie. Strong ensemble performances from the other characters accent and are accented by Aaron Kwok's distinctly strong lead.

Not something I do often, but I will watch this movie again and again. I'm also looking forward to more of this storytelling.

Babylon's over twenty years of fundamentally decadent culture compressed into.a little over 3 hours seemed over-the-top to me at first, until I realized that the film's depravity was not gratuitous. It was essential to the real life facts that had to be condensed to fit the film's time constraints. The sexual excesses were also all of a piece with the absurd production faults depicted in the movie's stories about movie making in that time and place.

Contrapuntal accents in movie making vignettes expressing hope and humanity, for example the audience's reaction to. Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, and in the Jovan Adepo character Sidney Palmer's glorious jazz artistry, were accentuated that much more by the background of a maximally debauched culture.

Having written these thoughts, I am now getting a David Lynch-ian read off of the mix of perfect flaws in Babylon's Production Design. I see a self-referential critique on the inevitable nuts and bolts of movie making, similar to the obviously mechanical stuffed robin that is central to the closing frames of another thematic hybrid of cinema, Lynch's film Blue Velvet.

Quite the not-so-little dissertation mystery here on dimensions of humanity in ethics and revenge. Adult film fare because violence is a major theme, not because of sex which is refreshingly absent.

Very seductive nonetheless and maybe even more so because: sometimes it's what you think it is; sometimes it's what you think it isn't; always it's something else; something old-and-new in the same most immediate moment.

Attractive faces and interesting faces, dramatic sounds, heroes, john does, poignant words, absolutely zero cliches, unusual settings, men-and-women, childhood . . . Pretty much Everything embellished by the possibility that it might be Nothing. Existentialist extravaganza & you really don't know, because no one is going to tell you what to think.

About the only negative thing I can say about this story is that some of its most important elements do require valid inferential reach that is not distracted by the many diverse conventional clue/symbols that are presented but not defined for us, but which doesn't dismiss them either with easy dichotomies.

That's also an asset to those of us, in current electronic media cultural generations, who find ourselves bored to the point of aversion by template driven eye-candy, no matter how putatively "outrageous" its loud choruses be.

A more nutritive eye-candy, The English clearly is, in bare-bone, "calcium" laden, post-post-postmodern, vignettes, the architectures of which emerge as organically derived syntheses of times, places, and persons connected, or not, by y/our more - or - less valid powers of rational inference.

The English's wide open spaces, in an extremely minimalistic frame, bring to mind Cormac McCarthy's sparsely rich and open telling phenomenology in The Road, but with a whisper more of surprisingly complex pattern elements that are left inviolate all of the way through a very great deal of who/what/when/where/how, but, thank goodness, not why, to the end.

The stark consequent right - or - wrong conundrum characteristics of The English keep you viscerally engaged in the risk of inferring from verifiable experiences into true - and/or - false empirically derivative dimensions, without too much help from story tellers handing us infantilizing answers. It's a troubling substance all of the way through to a very satisfyingly atmospheric "end" that leaves viewers watching for more.

Completely engaging, intellectually and physically: Escheresque.dimensions illustrating the interplay of physically encoded inertia, a.k.a. Fate, and relative free will versus two sets of authoritarian factors, religion and politics . All of that cleanly embellished by stunning architectural scenes, inside, and, because Philip K Dick is the source, inside inside, plus metropolitan outside, as a canvas for human connections between Damon's and Blunt's bodily physiognomy in nearly constant motion and their very personal faces. The script manifests its most authentic responsibilities, by not handing you the story, so, through to the very last frames, you really aren't sure what Emily Blunt, in particular, is going to do about the puzzle that is her life but doesn't provide the usual "answers."

This one's a keeper; I will buy it for my collection and, for special occasions, watch it again.

And that's the challenge of dialogue that is ordinary. Script, casting, and direction, all, are spot on in this gentle, but strong, satire built almost entirely out of irony. The pace of the film enhances the irony of describing something as significant as our own mortality and couching that portrait in the most mundane traits of our relationships to others facing the same truths. I think this type of production takes real courage and succeeds very convincingly in showing our pettiness, without being afraid to also share genuine, real life, romance in discovering commitments that are made possible by these truths too.

Producers and the director get an A for the courage to add intimations of what could be ethnic differences for the purpose of describing what is unique about Polynesian culture.

From the beginning of this film, I was bothered about the obvious roles of "Anglos" in this story, initially assuming that type of casting was crass marketing commercialism. This challenged me all of the way through the story, even after I considered the historical authenticity of the mix and admitting to myself that I just didn't want "whites" elevated what I assumed was above others in the story, but then the story itself showed me the errors of my assumptions about its own characteristics, by revealing the people and the culture it portrays.

Important aspects of the Polynesian culture itself is how that happens, the joyous choral music, simple details of their daily lives, dancing communities, diverse physiognomies, detailed clothing, all given generous lens-time by the director to allow us to feel the organic bounty.

I admire the challenge to conventional identity assumptions that this film presents, but its truest, most valid, self is in how the whole of it and the story that it blossoms out of is greater than the sum of its parts.

So I won't, but if I had to, it'd be between: Dominique Tipper, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Frankie Adams, and David Strathairn. I'm sure there are others, but I just don't know how to sort all of this good acting out. I'm puzzled why they aren't mentioned in awards to be included in imdb's files.

I will be disappointed with Amazon if this is the show's last season.

Nobody in front of that lens has the weight that Jessie Buckley brings to her role, except, perhaps, Olwen Foure, the mother, but, the script doesn't give her the opportunity to establish her presence that way and Foure has the sense to restrain her delivery without the script. However, this is a worse problem with Johnny Flynn, who does get a chance in how the script works, but delivers basic vacuity. I suppose someone will make the counter-point that vapid presence is the point of Pascal Renouf and that would justify the emptiness in his face when the camera lingers there a little too long. It still just does feel as though this film needed more of an interpersonally dynamic context, not too strong, but strong enough to highlight the unusual jewel that Buckley gives to it.

An honestly critical meditation upon the nature of what is commonly called "courage", this film is also a realistic metaphor for what constitutes social courage in a time of social challenge, such as those we see today, within political, economic, and environmental contexts.

I'm not sure how satisfied I would have been with a more existentialist ending, but I do appreciate the screen-writer's intent to make a clear statement about how synchronistic potential, which rises from authentic organic commitment, can also trigger serendipity out of abject failure, because, even if they don't ALWAYS do so, humans CAN learn from their mistakes, even if these particular humans did a rather tooooo abrupt about-face, when they got their hands on Gary Cooper's journal.

It's hard to say enough about this movie. It's almost more than one bargains for from a movie and, yet, it's embrace is deeply, though not subtly, nuanced. It feels a little like the desecration of poetry to try to decipher how Biutiful manages to be so beautiful. Script, music, casting, the actors' ensemble, sound direction especially for Bardem's voice, and photography that indulged, not only the details of life in that place, but also featured the topography of Bardem's fascinating face in all of the emotional details of the story, so real that you might have to remind yourself that you weren't part of the story itself.

I really enjoy seeing interesting development of what has become of the Anti-Hero character, especially without anything didactic added to it. The child characters also had a part in why you might enjoy this movie, their role in the story was simply and obviously woven into what happened, again not too moralistic and not too cute.

Another character was the astounding beauty of Finnmark. I think human eyes and hearts have an instinct to just contemplate such a place. It's actually satisfying on an intuitive level just to know that it's there and it's real.

I'm not sure now why I didn't give this movie and 8.

This is more than your usual coming-of-age story and it's not one of those self-conscious "uplifting" emotional rides either. A seriously existential bit of meta-physics is engagingly wrought into charming characters, innocently clever action, and interesting allusions without becoming pretentious and overbearing. That's a bit of a feat really! I'm sure that I'm going to be watching it again and telling my movie motivated friends about it too.

Within its time and context, an extraordinary work, especially the script about a post-modern Eve after The Fall and an anti-Christ "Savior".

I know that's a bit of a conundrum, but this is a movie about and for women and you might say we are a bit more at home with paradoxes.

If you love the soul of Rock 'n' Roll, you're going to like this move about the people of the USA. Watch it for the Beautiful Humanistic portraiture videography/faces, or for the Rock soundtracks, which include the lyrics in subtitles, btw, or because it's Honestly, but Joyously, funny, then watch it again just for its Spirit!

Allowing for the condensing that is necessary to tell this story in this format, this film is: wide, deep, articulate, informative, starkly beautiful, highly detailed, intellectually challenging, gorgeous character portrait imagery, realistically emotional, exciting, humanistic, fully engaging and an example of coherent ensemble casting at its best. It is so thought provoking that there is way more to it than I have sketched here, so I look forward to watching it again.

The writing makes you wonder what kind of space authority fails to vet the personalities of their mission crew any better than this.

Although the story has a few promising elements, there's too much high school soap opera on a space ship.

Katie is great. Samuel is beautiful. The rest of it is "meh", but I'm used to thinking that about most season 1s, maybe if Another Life stays alive, the writing will grow more sophistication and depth.

Excellent, very hooky, thematic construct.

The only reason I didn't give it a 10 was some degree of suspension-of-disbelief that was necessary for the engineering details of how this premise would work.

Otherwise, very powerful in every way: writing, casting, acting, artistic and social values, directing.

This episode has it all.