Tiberio TriPPn

Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) is a hitman entirely driven by his fear of something harsher than death: finality . If there’s any truth to religion, death is less an end, more a transition, but finality is an unalterable blackness to which no consciousness will wake from. Of course, death is it’s closest relation, and Frank is exposed to a world where death is at the forefront of his reality – it’s real to him in a way it’s not to you and I, and he can only carry the attitude as long as it’s not me to survive. He probably developed this in World War II, where death was first nature. His killing of two unarmed Nazis, digging their own grave, will be the most buildup we get for any of his kills. In Frank’s eyes, this is a story about survival. But for us, it’s a story about stories. These are the kinds of stories we tell when we’re scrambling to make meaning of life with the looming shadow of death approaching. Many have widely misinterpreted that this is a film about the events lea...

About two weeks ago, I was walking around Walt Disney World, staring at people on lines and wondering about evolution ; how we got to this point, venturing through such severe constructs of imagination, the various bloodlines associated with face types, commonality and a shared human experience of seeking meaning through the grandiosity of myth. I wanted to write a piece about evolution when I got home, and I was fortunate to run into the YouTube page Must See Films, who theorize that the #5 film on my list, The Master , is about evolution. They break it down in three parts: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) the id, apeman; Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) the ego, superhuman; and Peggy Dodd (Amy Adams), the superego, the master. Freddie is a drifter at sea, returning from World War II in the Navy without any direction in life, driven purely by animal instincts such as sex, violence, and alcohol. On a beach with fellow Navy men, we see him climb a tree like a monkey, choppin...

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time,” says Mircea Eliade, a 20 th century religious historian and philosopher. Think of profane time as a worn out world, a period in which chaos has corrupted the foundation of a given space. Rituals are meant to reenact primordial deeds performed by gods during creation, bringing about a sacred space and time; the world is rediscovered, beginning anew. Moonrise Kingdom is more than a love adventure between two 12 year-old kids. Beneath what appears to be a surface of Anderson-verse silliness is a rich mythological subtext rooted in primordial ritualism that defines both the individual and the society. Beyond two kids in love, Moonrise is about a fractured community going through a rebirth. Bob Balaban’s Narrator wouldn’t go through all the trouble to tell u...

The 10s were the decade Disney studio executives hounded Pixar Animation with demands for sequels to their most lucrative properties. But that didn’t stop these independent minded artists from fighting to maintain the spirit of the company’s intent, delivering well-thought, patiently crafted original films. While Disney was getting their Incredibles 2, Cars 2 & 3, Toy Story 3 & 4, Finding Dory, and Monsters University , trailblazers like Pete Docter were focused on turning animation Inside Out , literally. Inside Out is an unconventional, kid-friendly animation dealing with childhood depression. As we know from works like Up, Coco, and WALL-E , Pixar is never unwilling to strike sensitive nerves in viewers of all ages. Whether making us cry over lost memories, or pondering the existential, Pixar is the one mainstream animation company that goes there, all the way, holding nothing back while maintaining a PG-rating. Inside Out may seem like a gentler episode of Black ...

It’s okay, you can shame me for lacking diversity. This is the second French film on this list driven by sexuality and a plot that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. And while they may be bunched up on my list, I assure you, these kinds of films are rarely exposed to American audiences. They take us deeper into the psyche of our most primordial myths, when stories were quite literally merged with the reality of cultures, spirit animals serving as gods and sacrifices, fertility gods and goddesses making the rains fall and the grass grow. Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is an English teacher, disappointed with a classroom that can’t write two sentences. Until he stumbles upon a budding young writer, Claude (Ernst Umhauer), who shares a first person story about a character obsessed with becoming part of another family, the Artole’s. After several entries, it becomes clear that Claude has legitimately cast himself in this story, delivering slightly embellished journal entries tha...

Venus-Aphrodite was born of sea foam. Roman theology presents this watery goddess as essential to the genesis and balance of life. Her male counterparts, Vulcan and Mars, are exertive and combustible. Venus absorbs and tempers these male traits, mutually uniting the opposites of male and female in an affectionate way. Roman Polanski’s film draws upon two sources: David Ives’ New York set play, and the 1870 Austrian novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Ironically, for a person with the last name Masoch, the story deals with sadomasochism and female dominance. Roman Polanski seems to have found himself a mirror through this work, perhaps a template for him to delve into a dark confessional with his controversial sexual history. The film immediately opens with a sense of omnipotence; we are in the presence of a goddess, her point of view shot tracking down a Parisian sidewalk towards a theater. Venus looms over everything, her rainstorm falling upon the isolated box where a fiery...

Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a skilled marksman, an in demand hitman managed by the dimwitted master manipulator, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root). Barry seems to be growing restless with the criminal life, but cannot get himself out from the grip of Fuches’ lucrative underground business. On his latest job in Los Angeles, he gets assigned a hit that thrusts him into the acting school of Gene Cosineau (Henry Winkler), discovering an underlying passion he never knew he had for theatre, or at least a possible ticket out of his violent past. The question all throughout: is he in it too deep to ever get out? Will his past haunt him forever? I stumbled into Barry blindly during a screenwriting competition as I frantically searched for a show I could write a spec for. I liked the simplicity of the title and gave it a shot, knowing nothing about it. I couldn’t believe how gripped I was. Furthermore, the latitude of the show’s range between comedy and drama, fantastical and practical, w...