Howdy Y’all
Just a quick catch-up here, a few sentences of your time. Due to difficulties in accessing certain films (and deciding on which to view/write-up) and rampant personal sickness, I’ll be delaying the National Cinemas feature a slight bit. November had been scheduled for Italy and December for France, with January serving to showcase China/ Hong Kong. Being half-way through the Italy month, I’ll instead continue focusing on that nation until the end of December (so expect two to three new reviews for this month). January then will tackle France and February China/Hong Kong. Then there’s that rather long last feature for Germany to be posted, which I expect will come sometime around Christmas. Perhaps then I’ll add a few more months for other nations. But we’ll see about that when the time comes, ehh?
Best,
Jake
Edited for Clarity
Clash of the Titans
In a nearly dialogue-free sequence blanketed together by long-shots that cut only when absolutely necessary, capturing feeling and physical space with stunning, sparing clarity, we learn just about everything we could possibly need to know about the state of Wall-E‘s world with an awe-inducing elegance that casts its gaze on inspired little moments of action and (mostly) inaction. We are also treated to the finest cinematic homage to bright, feeling, humanist silent cinema snark this side of …well, the heyday of silent cinema. While Pixar’s follow-up film, Up, pulled out all the stops for a life (or two) in a minute, Wall-E is wonderfully content to just chill and explore its world a little in the most wonderfully non-narrative fashion, invested less in “arc” than in the little visual moments that define character. The opening scenes of the film are, quite literally, just a slice-of-life drama, except there’s nothing alive to be found. There’s just a robot, and his name is Wall-E.
If, as I am increasingly inclined to believe, every Guillermo del Toro film is a “Guillermo del Toro idea delivery device”, Hellboy 2 is right up there with his best works. This is to say, if a Guillermo del Toro film is all about the Guillermo del Toro visuals he can imagine for us and transfer to the screen, which is not necessarily the case but has some value for his highly and pointedly surface-level films, then Hellboy 2 is a hell of a film. It’s weighty yet zippy, filled with consequence yet light on its feet, it’s buttoned-up in all manner of cozy, boisterous lights and sounds, and it has a dreamer’s streak a mile wide. Many blockbusters attempt to find a center in their visuals, some of which succeed and many of which crash under their own superficiality. The visual splendor on display in Hellboy 2, however, exists on another level – its images do not merely heal the eye, but they achieve genuinely transcendent emotional heft all their own. 
2008’s Tropic Thunder, while far raunchier and more overblown, is the closest mainstream American cinema of the 2000’s has come to its own Sunset Blvd. While it was marketed as something of a comedy poking fun at war movies, that is only true by technicality. The narrative of the film, as such, has the movie stars making a war film let loose in the jungle where they must 1. survive, but more importantly, 2. battle their egos and the fact that their struggle isn’t just a test designed to help them work as a team in the name of making a better movie. If it pokes fun at war movies, that’s because the film is primarily a mockery of the filmmaking process at large, and more specifically, the actors, producers, directors, agents, and everyone else in Hollywood who combine limited skill with limitless, towering, monumental egos. 
Pineapple Express
Iron Man
The Long Take 