Piñeiro's quiet virtuosity, which binds the movie's relentless energy to intimate discoveries, is giddily thrilling.
The second syllable of Copernicus, rhyming with "turn" and "burn," intimates its owner's discovery of the solar system.
For Scorsese, the technical side of the movies doesn't just provide opportunities and delights but also quasi-metaphysical mysteries and profoundly intimate modes of self-discovery.
"In the film, we'll accompany Le Guin on an intimate journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, inspiring generations of women and other marginalised writers along the way.
What he's showing us is the intimate, exquisitely close details of discovery, what you see when your vision first narrows on another.
His discovery of the intimate musicality of the French language was doubtless instinctive, but, during his most creative years, he was a conscious artist constantly seeking to develop his unique gift and "reform" his nation's poetic expression.
Such a scene alerts us to a difficulty of life in postwar Bangladesh in an unexpected and intimate way: we experience the discovery as a child's rite of passage, made persuasive by familiar signs (the child's awareness of difference preceding his understanding of it, the confidential chat with his aunt that gives him an adult's "serious walk").
Moreover, botanical, faunal, and geological evidence associated with very early fossil hominids in Ethiopia and Kenya intimate a forested environment, a discovery that clearly constrains hypotheses explaining the success of the bipedal adaptation.
His recent relocation from Hartford to the Connecticut countryside, gardening, backstage politics, his latest musical discoveries, his fondness for intimate dinners, his horror of cocktail parties: all these yield delightful volleys.
With fair warning and my own promise of caution, here goes: "Colossal" fuses the intimate romantic-comedic drama of self-discovery with monster movies — specifically, with the Japanese kaiju genre of gigantic quasi-reptilians inaugurated by "Godzilla".
