Top Ten Tearjerkers, Part II

10. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan – Spock’s Untimely Demise

I will concede that a slight, sub rosa scintilla of the proverbial “Trekkie” mentality does festoon its farragoes over my soul. When Spock does evocatively evanesce within a woefully unforeseeable imbroglio, he left his footprints in the sands of time…

9. On the Waterfront

A classic, quintessential constituent of the “tearjerker” pantheon, Brando’s Oscar-winning, elegiac, and perfervid personation of Terry Malloy comes to fruition in the indelible “I could have been a contender!” colloquy, which I, for sentimentality’s sake, scrutinize on a daily basis, without exception…

8. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Not commonly construed as gut-wrenchingly visceral, but its ideological and, yes, almost pedagogical portents, indigenous to any Tennessee Williams diegesis, commingled with stellar performances from Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, and Burl Ives, renders the last exchange ‘twixt Brick and “Big Daddy” particularly poignant when the latter reminisces rapturously upon his father, for whom he bore such seeming enmity…

7. La Grande Illusion

Alternatively with Chaplin’s “City Lights”, the venerable Orson Welles himself, whom I have idolized, lionized, and panegyrized for years, feeling behooved now and then to converse quite copiously with the poster above my mattress, averred that it was the most sublime substratum of cinema in history, which is substantiated by the sepulchral symposium between the moribund French patrician and the melancholy German one, puling profusely for having eviscerated his compeer, regardless of the inculcations of war. The Frenchman, Captain Boieldieu, rationalizes rather regally, “For a commoner, dying in a war is a tragedy. But for you and I–it’s a good way out.” Erich von Stroheim, lauded for such luminous direction in cinema for “Greed”, “Foolish Wives”, etc., was histrionically heartbreaking.

6. The Kid

Whilst not Charlie Chaplin’s most cerebral, sardonic, or superlative piece of cinema out there, it is self-evidently the most tear-educing.

Top Ten Tearjerkers, Part I

The legerdemain-like lachrymosity of the movies… Whilst my palette is by no means the paradigm, I would asseverate, aesthetically, that if any sentient, suspiring entity is not moved by these firmament-foretokened films, they have no semblance of a human heart.

5. Ordinary People

One empathizes, quite empirically, not with its innumerable intricacies, but the primeval truths within.

4. It’s a Wonderful Life

Capra’s quasi-cathartic contretemps on the silver screen could not be reproduced today, and just barely stands the test of time. I, being a social pariah, cannot commiserate copiously, nor cognitively, with the protagonist, but the consummate cast, particularly Jimmy Stewart (whose crowning magnum opus was Vertigo, but that appertains to another week’s wondrous, beauteous bagatelles) and a scintillating script render George’s plights palpable. The congenial quintessence of Christmas…

3. Driving Miss Daisy

Obvious, really…

2. Schindler’s List

Manipulatively saccharine? Perhaps, yet the humanity, and inhumanity, integrated into the film renders it an unconquerable crown of filmmaking felicity.

Wild Strawberries

Neither East Nor West

The following entails an unscrupulously unrefined draft of a quasi-psychological discourse I hadn’t deigned to submit…

Amidst prior pontifications propagated here, I might have divulged my delineation of one’s disposition – the self – as merely the aggregate of our trials and tribulations, and, of course, the adjustments we accumulate in accordance. Nonetheless, without suspiring slumberously with the specificity, nor indeed pettifoggery, of ontology, I will aver that any traumatic, transmogrifying travail which is of sufficiently sanguinary status so as to sunder, irrevocably, the aspects of oneself which, intrinsically, is one’s self, is tantamount to death. Therefore, this “treatment”, whilst proclaiming itself a panacea for perennial picaroons, with its facade of “rehabilitation”, is merely elaborate capital punishment. Now, while I have quite contumeliously confabulated, so to speak, in regards to my recalcitrance towards the rationalization that ethical or societal scrupulousness warrants aversion therapy, I am behooved to direct my rapier-like acumen to capital punishment, which, as has been hitherto averred, is equivalent to said therapy. Ethics are merely the fictitious, folderol-festooned foil with which one rationalizes a social sine qua non. Thus, not ethically, but practically, should we extinguish the red-hot coals of sentience for that ever so amorphous entity that is the greater good? That’s predicated upon the perspective which ponders upon it. For a state, in all its glacial and gubernatorial grandiloquence, and the nescient next-door neighbors of which it consists, they are excising from their sparklingly salubrious society a vile pestilence. For the vile pestilence in question… well it, more often that not, is rather refractory towards such prospects. I am an advocate of neither socially-sustained sobriquet (wrong and righteous), though a certain Susan Hayward film does imbue one with sympathy, spasmodically, for the offenders and the malefactors. The contention  concordant with the most portentous penalty of them all is ubiquitous in literature, painting, cinema, etc… I recall a rather redoubtable West Wing episode which revels, frolics, and disports with the distinction of being Karl Malden’s final televised appearance…

Encomium for a Nightmare

The following entails a compendious “review” which I was obligated to transcribe, truculent-ly, nescient-ly, and grandiloquent-ly, in twenty minutes or so during a quixotic chemistry course in which the film reviewed was scrutinized by us cerebration-subjugated students and scullions with the intent of interpreting the ramifications of narcotics misemployment by myriad malefactors, with parents’ permission, axiomatically. It is piteously peripeteia-like, but, alas, my critiques of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “West Side Story”, “The Pianist”, “Gattaca”, “Hiroshima, mon amour”, “City Lights”, etc. have hitherto vanished, passing from nature into the wretched ash-heap of inexplicably deleted disquisitions. This must suffice…

If “Requiem for a Dream”, is, in psychedelically sublime sooth, precisely that, a requiem for the dreams, hopes, and reveries of the reprehensibly self-rationalizing ragamuffin-like ruffians who have become equated with the proverbial “stink of the streets”, as Robert De Niro had once despondently delineated it, then it is, simultaneously, a susurrus of encomium for a nightmare. This drastic juxtaposition is comparatively copiously capitalized upon insofar as the visual, pictorial, and ontological aspects of the aesthetic azure that is at the heart of this cinematically psychedelic cynosure. It foretokens a fixation with that fine line that differentiates the desiderata of the decorous from the depraved. When are mild and mercurial malefactions against the paradigms of civilization, stemming simply from sybaritic self-indulgence, inculpated as being the gateway into an abhorred abyss, an all-too discovered country from those whose bourn no traveller returns? Furthermore, what bellicosity-begrimed brouhahas betoken to betide within such a man-made perdition? According to the film, it consists of amputation, manual labor, narcotics-fueled orgies, and insanity. Simplistic? Indubitably, one may insinuate, inimically, that such is incongruous, even contumelious, given the complexities foretokened, rather phantasmagorically, by the film, and yet, from the poems of Tennyson to the plays of Tennessee Williams, the quintessence of the cathartic has revolved around ideas and ideologies intertwined with the human condition which epitomize simplicity? The relevance of “Requiem for a Dream” is not wholly and incontrovertibly entrenched within within the subcultural strata of narcotics dealers and their quite confounded confreres in the trade, because its motif is not merely that of addiction to heroin, cocaine, or crystal meth, but the general, perpetual, and universal notion of addiction, in and of itself. Cinematographically, it festoons, felicitously, the cinephile’s eye with a farraginous feast of dexterous camerawork, if not to the extent of exhilarating exultation emitted by Welles, Hitchcock, or Keaton. I’ll not digress into the didacticism of cinematic mechanics, predominantly due to the vivaciously varlet’s-vouchsafed verity that merely “half of a page” was stipulated for this cerebral, empyreal, and congenial chronicle, but, all in all, a transcendent film has been crafted, callously and conscientiously, and it coruscates as a quintessential cornerstone of the twenty-first century’s initial decade, albeit inferior to “There Will Be Blood”.

The Wonder with which We are Born

“Art is life… caprice… …[A]rt affects our everyday lives. Every time we walk out of the house in the morning we are looking at… people doing things that are essentially themselves, and what they’re doing should be of great interest… from an artistic point of view. Because if we are looking at it in that way, we are looking at the wonder that we are born with.
- James Cagney

The cornucopia of consternating conundrums provoked by any exegesis on Brave New World will harrow you with its heuristically, fundamentally, and epistemologically profound nature. The  glacially gargantuan enchiridion limns literary and linguistic legerdemain of all forms, moods, and shapes of greatness which denote it truly, from allusion, to connotation, to juxtaposition. But for all of the prose poetry and pulchritude portended therein, the soul of the novel is endeavoring to inquire about the human condition, ironically by prevising its extinction. Alas, I, growing wondrously, wastrel-befittingly weary of the wandering stars made to stand like wonder-wounded hearers, or rather, the cells of the encephalon, enervated by the deluge of didacticism stemming from topics akin to “Freedom” and “Humanity”, upon which I’ve sufficiently cerebrated, if not pontificated, within our so-called “discussions”, opted for illation of a more elementary manner. Thus, “Consumer Culture” proffered the prompt for the great pith and moment I would be behooved to betoken. I suppose, with a mere modicum of masochism, I inevitably indulged myself with a more abstract prompt: “What is the role of art (literature, architecture, film, music, theater, etc.) in culture?”.

But what is art? What defines, presages, and elucidates the elusive, yet cogitative, coruscation for which every sane and sentient cynosure should strive. I have a rather personal postulation… That, whether it be from the film reels of a Bergman, or the parchments of a Shakespeare, or the marble monuments of a Roark (the only “architect” of whom I am quite convivially cognizant), the artistry is not in the art, but the artist and the artificer. I would aver that the ingenuity of Joyce’s drastic, esoteric scriptures or the phantasmagoria foretokened, flibbertigibbet-like, by the paintings of Dali are not so much predicated upon the predilections, interpretations, or extrapolations of us, mutes or audience to their act, but the ineffable shards of life that they have seen fit to commingle with a pencil or a paintbrush.

The Evanescence of a Walking Shadow (Lite)

The following entails the introductory enunciation of the circumlocutory suspiration that was my sociological thesis for the concordant class, drafted, drastically, yet jovially, in mid-April…

“O, I die, Horatio! The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England, but I do prophesy election lights on Fortinbras. He has my dying voice, so tell him, with the occurents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence.”

Whilst plunging into the cavernous jaws of the abyss, what is the last coherent or comprehensive cogitation which will spew forth from our lips – the faintly suspired whispers which divagate into a denouement, of sorts, for the detritus of billions of accumulated thoughts? Of the myriad, mental maledictions, adjudications, or felicitations which phase through the mind’s eye, unheard and unspoken, what final phrase of sorrow might conjure the wandering stars? One may fathom the inevitability of death, scrutinizing many a cerebral, ontological, or pedagogical pearl of profundity, but for all of the Nietzsches, Schopenhauers, and Kierkegaards we blindly emulate for existential solace, there will betide a juncture in which one’s own ideologies, as ideal or idiotic as they may be, must be given a voice. Call it catharsis, epiphany, or even eye-opening enlightenment, but, when at the precipice of the black beyond, one is never indifferent. Some change or transfiguration, transcendentally, perhaps, must take place so as to adjust to the greatest form of deracination thinkable. And thus, it is naturally ratiocinated that, in concordance with a cornucopia of recorded incidents, humans, if they are not delirious or demented on their deathbed, will, much more often than not, endeavor to encapsulate themselves, emotionally and/or ideologically, so as to derive a disenthralling sense of closure to the shallows and the miseries to which their last voyage had been bound.

The Bellicosity that Bowdlerizes Blogging

In sooth, I stigmatize, trivialize, and even anathematize the profoundly parasitic praxis of “blog-posting”. To consign the commendable and sweet sentiments which sear the human mind to the dehumanizing dung-heap of cybernetic impalpability is to imprecate the images of lapidary, literary luminosity which evoke Steinbeck, slavishly cerebrating, contemplating, and gesticulating with jouissance, a typewriter by his side, or Tennyson, sojourning to a cathedral with several pages of parchment, the ink upon them having collated into such forms of felicity… Regardless of the various and multifarious modes of preserving these syllables of recorded time, from an Elizabethan dramatist to a twentieth-century modernist, it the accoutrements of acumen, or rather, those who’ve acquired it, we may perceive, palpable, with perusals so pertinacious in purport. A sort of apprehension, the auspice of awe and wonderment, overcomes oneself in the museums merited by the likes of Freud, Hemingway, Kurosawa, etc. whose portentous paraphernalia procures such perusals from those inspired or incentivized by them to be not like dumb, driven cattle, but heroes in the strife! I suppose I’ve essayed espousing, esuriently, if you will, the emulation of those literary luminaries who were blissfully unaware of cyberspace, thus minimalistically marginalizing the affinity for effigy, e.g. pictures, video streams, excruciatingly repetitive jingles… which pervades throughout the paradigm of posts.