As true and fine this arc of life may appear, there is no avoiding the suffering and isolation in the end. The world is rotten. That’s our curse to bear.
I think of when I was young and didn’t know like I know now, but still had that sense, the darkness looming, that what was coming was a dreadful thing, sudden and terrible. Life was a burning house, everything eventually consumed, down to the last timber.
Maybe that’s why I like to hide in the bathroom downstairs.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), films produced over 50 years apart, are similar in that they are tedious with predicable plot devices, populated with dull characters and saddled with stilted dialogue; in short, they are bereft of any effective story structure.
These films should instead be celebrated for the artistry of the cinematographers.
Stanley Cortez’s work on The Night of the Hunter, clearly inspired by the German Expressionists of the 1920s, is haunting in the framing and lighting. 
Time and again, whether the underwater shot of a drowned woman still at the wheel of her car or the preacher looming over a bed, Cortez constructs shots that unsettle, reminding the viewer of the uneven landscape in our own heads. 
Wally Pfister’s cinematography for The Dark Knight Rises, although burdened with obsessive special effects, also resonates with this dark subterranean subconscious. 
Inspired by a Wagnerian grandiosoty and the final macabre days of the French Revolution, Pfister does not allow the Batman, hence all of us, to escape this morass of humanity. 
More a collection of brooding images, these films are better in pieces, isolated fragments, allowing us the freedom to drift through our thoughts.
I understand that Godzilla has her bad days. I understand that she has this destructive streak and needs to get that out. 
But what about her other side, beyond the fury? What about this giant reptile in repose? I would like to see her after the destruction, with all of that pent-up frustration out, what she does in repose. The sadness of the monster in her underwater cavern, alone and misunderstood, the beauty of her regretful eye looking over her rocky lair. 
To understand Godzilla as all anger and violence is silly and human-centric; there is so much more to her than that.
The question is when a film-maker will take on this far more interesting story, this existential examination of how we might seek a way out beyond all the noise and annihilation.
The Danish film, Expedition to the End of the World, follows a crew of artists and scientists to the formidable northeastern coast of Greenland. 
Punctuated by pithy reflections – “So what if Copenhagen and Hamburg are flooded (by global warming)? We can move to Mongolia and Switzerland” – the film provides a landscape on which to reflect. 
The film could be considered something of a cinematographic Stendhal Syndrome – where one is so overwhelmed by a moment of personal significance as to have a physical reaction – as our inevitable demise is discussed in a sensibility that, although self-deprecating and humorous, is overwhelmingly bleak. 
It is a fitting film for these apocalyptic days and offers so much more than the mindless effects of all the super-hero pictures, Noah and Godzilla.
Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott’s joint project The Counselor shocks to sell. 
Brutal imagery and non-stop sex banter aside, a main selling angle is in the exotic cats. 
Offered as colorful metaphors, the cheetahs – to say nothing of the film – quickly become blunt and unwieldy. 
Meant to convey, as Cameron Diaz’s puerile character explains, examples of killing “a quarry with elegance”, they are realized only as gimmickry, much like Diaz’s cheetah tattoo. 
“It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin. And the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.” Hopefully not words for a sequel.
Lars von Trier’s cinematic mission to shock audiences continues with the release of Nymphomaniac.
Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac”
Using scandalous images to sell isn’t a unique plan.
Henry Miller’s early work
Sarah Lucas’s “Nud Nob” in New York
Fat White Family perform at Pianos in New York
But instead of shocking, this tack becomes more a source of amusement, the kind of thing that sells t-shirts. 
Which seems to be all they’re trying to do.
I get that Philip Seymour Hoffman had an addiction. I get that he was a sensitive person who ate himself up with his intensity and devotion to his work.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman in “Owning Mahoney”
And I get that there is a black hole staring back at all of us. 
And I know that there are few, if any, who can match, Hoffman’s talent, his roles in Happiness, Magnolia, Doubt and on stage as Willy Loman.
“Death of a Salesman”
But I’m still pissed off at the guy. His death makes me lousy. Not sad. Mad.
His energy is gone, fucking gone. I can’t forgive him. Not yet.
And I expect it to be a while before that changes, considering that I’ve yet to forgive Jerry Garcia for his dumb-ass death…18 years back..
Inside Llewyn Davis starts where it ends, in desperation and isolation. 
Moments recur, varied but not; characters change and don’t. Llewyn Davis sees himself in his incontinent father, his wide-eyed nephew, his various hosts and the cat. 
Ulysses is an interesting creature, always escaping, down the fire escape, on the road, on a movie poster, there and not there, almost like Schrodinger says, but more like an animal of eternal recurrence, life in a loop. 
The Coen brothers’ latest film is remarkable simply because it pretends to be simple, reiterating the basic truth that everything has already been done.
Like many, I am curious about the enigma of J.D. Salinger. I would like to know why, after writing The Catcher in the Rye, he vanished from the public eye so long ago. 
The film Salinger doesn’t answer any questions but rather is an an indicator for why Salinger never emerged.
There are a few interesting interviews: Jean Miller, the muse for For Esme – with Love and Squalor, is interviewed extensively about her relationship as a teenager with Salinger.
An old friend A.E. Hotchner, tells how his relationship with Salinger ended suddenly when, unbeknownst to him, his magazine, Cosmopolitan, published a Salinger short story, Scratchy Needles on a Phonograph Record, but changed the title to Blue Melody.
There is some thought-provoking conjecture regarding his wartime experiences, his fixation on young women and his dedication to his writing, as well as his secluded life in Cornish, New Hampshire.
But it amounts to little more than sensational hyperbole; either the people don’t know him, or did briefly long ago, or they have an ax to grind. It’s an attention-seeking movie in the end, re-affirming Salinger’s point of staying away. 
As I am wont to do, I can spend an entire day – such as yesterday – watching movies, the worse the better.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is pure caricature but offers a visually poetic penultimate moment where massive bullet shells pummel a forest in 180-degree, slow-motion, sepia-matrix technology.
Re-cut and re-imagined, it could be installed in a gallery.
The Change Up – yet another Freaky Friday – is a predictable disaster of mediocre dialogue and morality, except for an off-kilter scene involving babies, blenders, knives and outlets.
Oliver Stone’s Savages is an aimless train wreck of drugs, violence and sex narrated by a omnipotent dumb blond. 
“Just ’cause I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it. It’s that kind of a story.” Yeah, it is.
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