CHAPTER 27: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Mark Chapman
Director: Jarrett Schaefer
Runtime: 84 min.
Rating: ***
Genre: Drama

When Mark Chapman was asked why, he tried to explain – “It was just a tremendous compulsion of just feeling this big hole." I think Chapter 27, more than anything, is that big hole of nothing. It might have been intended to be a case study of an obviously psychotic personality, for there are such clues strewn all over the place. But somewhere, looming behind writer director J. Schaefer was the idea about a film dealing with a state of mind, rather than understanding a person. That is why I cannot claim with much authority when I say he has succeeded more or less, because I’m not sure the reasons he set out with. Chapter 27 has an obese Jared Leto (Requiem for a Dream, Alexander), as Mark Chapman, staring at the camera for almost the entire length of its running time, yet I’m not sure if we have managed to achieve even a shred of insight into what made the man. Yet still, we experience the world through his eyes, or something along those lines, over the span of those three fateful days, mirroring the twenty six chapters of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the book that Chapman had in his hand when he shot John Lennon.
Let me ponder over this matter with you over the span of this review, and maybe we can arrive at something. Maybe we can decide if it is an anatomy of a murderer, or as I doubt, is it an anatomy of a murder.
The question is – was Mark Chapman an interesting enough character so as to merit a feature length production devoted to understand him. I’m not sure, just as I wasn’t when they made that excuse about Sam Byck, otherwise titled The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), or Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). They have already created what is the defining moment in the history of cinema as far as sociopathic insanity is concerned in Taxi Driver, and I think it is impossible to create another film of its type and try and exist outside of its shadow. Much of it is because there’s naked truth in practically every moment of that film, so much of it that could be learned and felt over multiple viewings. Taxi Driver is a masterpiece of such immense stature that it would be unwise and unfair on our part to criticize any film just because parts of it are inspired. It is bound to occur because Taxi Driver is practically a psychopathic lonely gun-crazed assassin, pretty much where every assassin even in real life boils down to. As I read through Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, I could recognize the hazy frameworks of a conclusion, that was, well, pretty much Travis Bickle. Chapman had tried to commit suicide a couple of times before, and as is the norm, this was a man clearly in need of a reason. I mean, there’s nothing much to understand except the usual. You dig deep in and you will find a child whose parents quarreled, and as a result he retreated into his own world. Standard issue that. So let us leave the obvious comparisons here, of which there are many, including Chapman trying out his .38 in front of a mirror.
The movie strives for an ominous beginning, with Chapman whispering, in a dragging voiceover – “I believe in Holden Caulfield…and the book…and what it was saying to a lost generation of phony people.” He is narrating to us, just as Holden Caulfield was, and much in the same vein, he would be sharing everything that spanned in those three days, but nothing would be bared from his past. He does acknowledge the influence of his past, he shrugs it off nevertheless. As if, in a dilemma, if he is the product of his life, or if he is the master taking reins of it. The film hasn’t constructed it, it is itself confused about its central character and how he fits in where. It wants to have it both ways, it wants to look down upon this whacko, and it does honestly want to understand his devotion to Lennon and Caulfield.
Somewhere in the first quarter, Chapman asks a cabbie the same question that drove Holden nuts – where did the ducks in Central park go in the winter? The cabbie thinks he’s kidding him. And from his reaction, which Chapman seems to have anticipated, he takes heart. As if vindicating the truth of The Catcher in the Rye. And hence the world is phony, because what is in the book is in real life. I wasn’t sure of the stand the movie was taking here, and if you happen to watch it, do supply me with your thoughts. This is a film which believes what it says, and then says what it believes. Consider this, the Dakota where Lennon stayed was the place where Polanski shot his satanic Rosemary’s Baby. And then, Polanski’s wife was murdered by a man obsessed by the Beatles song Helter Skelter. Chapman uses this as an omen for him to carry out his act. And he believes in signs too, and he’s looking all over the place for them. He is living Caulfield’s last three days of freedom, right down to ordering for a prostitute, and then he seems to take great heart from the fact she has worn a green dress. Probably, he mentioned that in his call too.
One could claim that this here is the long- awaited take on Salinger’s novel, which has been sought by innumerable greats from Brando, to Nicholson, to Billy Wilder, to Spielberg, to Elia Kazan. It is aware of its narrative style, as in the flashback, and as if to prove it is clever, it uses brief flashes of events from the future and the past. Chapman is talking to his wife, and we see a flash of him sitting in the back of the police car, looking as they clear Lennon’s body of the front gate of the Dakota. But neither the script, nor the filmmaker seem to be very sure of where to go with that approach. They obviously are keen to show the narrator Chapman as the central version, ala a Keyser Soze without the twist, but they lose it somewhere. This is obviously a show through Chapman’s eyes, yet other people feel inconsequential, and that includes Lennon. Maybe that is what was intended, to a world through a Chapman who had Holden breathing through him, but to whom is the angst directed towards. We never feel it. All there’s looming for those 80 odd minutes is the impending murder. Imagine In Cold Blood narrated not by Capote but by the minds of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, and you might have a fair idea how the film develops its style. Only that the film is a bit too stylish, and too technical.
Not that it doesn’t have a heart, which it does, and at times it is moving. Much of it is because of Leto, who despite a good performance is hampered by unnecessary additions. He huffs and puffs, and he whispers as if the Satan inside is speaking to him, but it is when he acts natural and from the heart is when it works. Like the sequence of his call to his wife. Or the way he stands on the curb with Lennon’s disc staring somewhere beyond. He seems to have gained a hell of a lot of weight for the part, and this is one of the better performances of this kind.
One thing I hated was the terrible shift in tone as the grief stricken faces of thousands of Lennon fans are hurled at us. Look, the way I saw it, this film was about a murder of a person who happened to be Lennon. What if it wasn’t him? I wouldn’t think it would matter too much. Maybe a bit of back-story, and that’s all. They try to take a stand and go out of the way to distance themselves from Chapman, which really made me sad. I know, this film seems to have been hated by a lot of people, and a lot of critics I have read have scorned the man under the pretense of ripping the film apart, which in my opinion is unfair. Needless and uninteresting were the terms most often used, and when Yoko Ono upon Lennon’s murder asked of one and all never to utter the name of this weasel for he committed the murder to claim fame, it is this film that is getting the boycott. I have got to be honest here, I have never consciously heard a single line of a single song of Lennon or The Beatles. Maybe in the soundtrack of some movie. And so, I wouldn’t necessarily feel like many folks who have been touched by the man and his lines. But for one thing I take a firm stand, and that is a film owes nothing to nobody. Especially this one, which is very far from being flawless, and even at 80 minutes has hell of a lot of needless elements, one of them being Lohan. Yet, it is far better than the phony artistic pictures that get made these days, and nobody seems to hate them with their living guts.

SPEED RACER: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon
Director: The Wachowski Brothers
Runtime: 206 min.
Rating: **
Genre: Action, Sport

Just in case you’re interested, here I toss another incident to vindicate my long standing belief that everything happens for a reason. Kind of. The show was at 2230, and I was stuck up with work till a quarter of an hour before. And I had no money on me either. Result? Extra brute force applied on the accelerator of my bovine car. A left here and a right there. Hurling a couple of curses on stray wanderers. Getting some on the way for wandering off commonly appreciated lane discipline. Reaching there needlessly early. The kind of drive I guess that geared me just about perfectly for this film. As in sinking into my seat watching the screen explode in total chaos.
Speed Racer is one hundred percent visuals. When someone coined ‘eye-candy’, and I guess it was a child rather than an adult, he meant something along these lines. Every possible shade of every possible color from the near 2 million or so the Asian Paints catalog has to offer, bright or glum doesn’t make a difference, is crammed up into every inch of space in those two odd hours. Extra saturated at that. It worries me a bit that $100 million have been spent to religiously replicate the sleaziness of an afternoon 60s Japanese filler I have never seen. I wonder what commercial sense it makes to spend outrageously to render something that was produced for a sum less that one hundredth. And as for artistic endeavor, there wasn’t any I believe with those anime shows of yore in the first place. That makes the technical carbon-copy exercise near vacant and futile and terribly short-sighted. As in relentlessly pursuing to create something bad. I might never understand, and neither did I understand the camp of Grindhouse. You might strive to pay your homage, but strive to better it. Not consciously make an equally bad production. Jackson didn’t re-make a 1931 film complete with a man in an ape-suit, he gave King Kong his own spin. Frank Miller gave The 300 Spartans through his own graphic novel, not by merely replicating them. That is why I say vacant, and if anybody claims that The Wachowski brothers have art on their mind, I think it would be a case of giving them too much undeserving credit.
In fact, The Wachowski brothers are so consumed in rendering the anime part as it is, that a requirement as pertinent as lending coherence to the proceedings is all but forgotten. Needless it may be, yet there’s something dazzling about it all. You might have to brace yourself for conditioning in the initial hour wherein your brain might go for a spin and eyeballs may very well pop out of exhaustion. Probably, you haven’t seen anything like this, I haven’t, and I don’t think that is necessarily a good thing. And neither is it all bad. Merely in the bad hands for once. It is a spectacular showcase of vanity, and I suspect even the filmmakers themselves didn’t find themselves in command either. They seem too confused, too distracted and it shows in the initial part where the film moves nowhere and the actors seem as lifeless as the surroundings around.
Let us get done with the story part here, which by the way doesn’t have much going its way. It is about Speed Racer (Hirsch) who has racing flowing through his veins. As a child the only thing that brings any shred of sense to him is fast speeding cars. Good for him, because the family business is racing run by his pop, Pops (Goodman). As he grows up a terrible tragedy befalls the family with the death of the elder brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter), a tragedy that all but destroys their love for racing. Obviously it doesn’t, and Speed Racer, the brilliant new talent on the block, has to live with the ghost of the family’s past and live up to his ideals in this capitalistic world as he races his Mach5.
The first half if anything is terrible, and for a movie based on the adrenaline of speed, it is damp squib. Completely hollow, it might catch you more often that not stifling a yawn. I would advise you not to suppress it, and neither should you suppress the need to catch a breath of fresh air. Dialogues are crammed into whatever minutes that are available from that bludgeoning visual pomp. Most of them seem to have been written on the spot, in a terrible hurry, and the only purpose they fulfill is inform what’s happening around. Of course, nothing much is. I wonder if these lifeless sequences which offered little room for inserting special effects to The Wachowski brothers were directed by a second unit. The opening racing sequence is so awfully made that you might have trouble spotting the car in all its delirium. Color, effects, close-ups, dialogues, cars, a monkey are vomited on your face. At regular intervals they throw at you ‘comical’ situations most of them involving Speed’s younger brother and his partner, a chimp, just so you’re aware the film isn’t taking itself too seriously. Not humor though, the film has an dreadful sense of it. Coupled with the wink-an-eye style, it harms the first hour no end. One thing I would have appreciated is honesty, and there isn’t any on offer.
I have always maintained that The Wachowski brothers have never been good with their effects, they tend to overdo them. The Matrix was just about perfect but The Matrix Reloaded, for all its money, was garish. Especially the sequence where Neo fights a thousand Agent Smith’s where you could clearly notice the below par effects, as in computer games, whenever Neo flew in the air. They have called their film motorized kung-fu, but there’s a serious lack of choreography to any of the races. A serious lack of method.
It is the second hour, that saves the film from being a total disaster. The brothers seem to come into their own, the film grows a bit coherent, more sequences are lent to the family, and a cap is put on the effects. As a result it grows a lot warmer. The climactic couple of races are done quite well, though they are overtly campy, the whole film is and that is the point. There’s energy to the proceedings and a sense of direction and you’ll find yourself involved. As I said the conditioning lasts for an hour.
There’s nothing special with the actors. It isn’t remotely the actors’ fault either since this is wholly a technical film, and they are just set pieces. Just about as important as the colors around and the jumping cars. I would agree when you say the film is a terrible waste of an opportunity. And neither will it give Iron Man any serious threat. But The Wachowski brothers have given us a glimpse what could be done. Someday, there will be a film where someone like Terry Gilliam might explore this option to the wonders of their own imagination. And I’ll be waiting for it.

BIKUR HA-TIZMORET (THE BAND’S VISIT): MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Sasson Gabai, Ronit Elkabetz, Saleh Bakri
Director: Eran Kolirin
Country: Israel
Language: English, Arabic, Hebrew
Runtime: 87 min.
Rating: *****
Genre: Comedy, Drama

In the heart of this simplest and gentlest of tales lay music in its purest form. It is at once royal and humble, and it plays out like a series of tender notes, created straight out of the loneliness of its heart. The Band’s Visit isn’t a musical in the traditional sense, in that there aren’t any extravagant songs to speak of. But I’m tempted, more than any film in recent memory, to call it a true tribute to music because of the richness of its heart, and it’s almost simpleton honesty. Its rhythms flow softly and smoothly to us, something akin to the sight of a tiny fish hustling in the serenity of the deepest ocean. Truth is the word that comes to mind for some unknown reason.
Back in 67, if one were to venture into the Sinai, the temperature might have shown a reading markedly higher than normal. That would remain the status quo for a considerable period of the ensuing years. Though politics have changed, and certain leaders seemed to have warmed up, I’m certain there exists a certain degree of friction. On its face, The Band’s Visit might appear to be particular to Israel and Egypt, and I believe looking at it in that context alone would be an oversight of cruel proportions. Cast aside all those prerequisites, and discover a film about the interaction of people, good people, warm people, common people, you and me, who merely happen to be from different parts of the world.
Nobody pays respect anymore to the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra of, Egypt and nobody deems their classical music worthy enough. Headed by Tawfiq (Gabai, Rambo III), and desperate to prove their efficiency and value, The Band land into Israel seeking the Arab culture centre, dressed in their sky-blue uniforms exponentially adding to their apparent importance. They’re supposed to be, or they at least expect to be ceremonially welcomed and driven to their destination. The reality on the ground couldn’t be more different, and nobody seems to care even wee bit about them. By nobody, I mean the concerned authorities. The common people around at the airport seem to take great interest in the sight of them though, and some of them intend to have their picture taken. When the wait gets to their nerves, they inquire at the information center for a bus to take them to Petah Tikvah. Middle of nowhere, with few buildings if anything and a lost of dust and wind blowing around, is where the bus drops them. And a cafeteria in sight with a handsome woman incharge. They have breakfast, and when they explain their situation, they learn that the next bus would be coming the next morning.
It is a great sight, the woman, her name Dina (Elkabetz) and Tawfiq, to whom she refers to as the General, converse with each other. Especially the brand of English they utter. Every facet of him speaks of measured pride and discipline, and his every word weighed carefully before letting it heard by the outside world, lest someone would think low of their culture. She speaks casually, with gay abandon, and a confidence of a person who has the rein of her life in her own hands. Nothing else matters to her much, it seems, and neither to the two men who have been sitting there sharing her amusement and surprise that these thorough gentlemen evoke. As she replies in what is a beautiful line, complete with its sardonic observation to his question about the location of the Arab culture center – “No culture. Not Israeli culture, not Arab, no culture at all.”
She proposes to them to stay for the night, the other two Israeli citizens sharing her burden. One has a birthday at his house, and other intends to go out for a date, but on her insistence they help. Over the night, the film brings out a whole lot of a spontaneous mixture of comic encounters and tender emotional revelations. A night of lives being shared. There’s a wonderfully witty sequence, reminding me of Chaplin’s films, where the young and romantic Khaled (Saleh) helps his host reach out and grab the seeking hand of love. And there’s a sequence on a solitary bench, in the middle of an imaginary park, that involves veils being dropped and loneliness being disclosed. Not with a shouting desperation, but subtly and probably unknowingly. The sight of a good person warms up your heart in many ways, and it doesn’t matter if he’s a stranger from a far off land, it still opens up to a smooth flow you might never believe. Especially when it has great isolation buried inside of it.
This is Kolirin first feature film, and it is astonishing to view the mastery on hand. He seems to almost always know how to compose a shot. Make that always. We view the characters interact from always the precise location, and not even once are we disturbed by an unnecessary edit or movement. The night transpires with languid grace. It is an accepted rule, that the longer a sequence the more emotionally involved we become. Every sequence is just about the perfect length, and as it passes by we feel richer having shared a slice of life. Perfect is the word that comes to mind.
His economical approach lend great generosity upon the actors and each of them, even the ones with the tiniest parts leave an impression. The interaction between Simon and his host is so heartfelt, and there’s something so deeply profound and alive about their view on his long unfinished concerto. There’s Sasson Gabai, whose every wrinkle seems earned, and deserving of respect. An elder, isolated and lonely, and hoping for a companion. It is a wonder how the same feelings echo in Elkabetz’s eyes too, yet in a manner more desperate. Maybe she has broken the shackles of her culture, and language, the twins that separate us. Salman Rushdie, in his magical new novel The Enchantress of Florence has Mogor dell’Amore, the bearer of a great secret tale, declare – “This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we’re so different from one another, but that we’re so alike.” On the contrary, I think it is one of our great blessings.
When the band finally plays its song, it felt like I missed a beat. Something swelled inside my heart, maybe a glow of happiness. It was the realization of their insistence to spread music, and it touched me so gently I felt the warmth of elation flow out of me like never before. I closed my eyes for a fleeting moment to cherish this film. A film of the rarest beauty and elegance. A film so poignantly insightful of the strangeness of the bonds that flow between us. I guess that is what The Band’s Visit is all about. I guess that is what music is all about. And I wish to cherish it again, and again.


Note: The Band’s Visit was Israel official entry for the Oscars last year, but the Academy ruled against it citing that more than half of the language was in English thus rendering it ineligible for the Foreign Language category. As a result Beaufort was sent. I’m not qualified enough to argue for or against this judgment, but I wouldn’t hesitate one bit in opining that The Band’s Visit is one of the finest films in any language of last or any year.

IRON MAN: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard
Director: John Favreau
Runtime: 126 min.
Rating: ****1/2
Genre: Action, Superhero

Ladies and gentlemen, I assure you, you would be hard pressed to find a better film this summer to munch your big bag of popcorn on. Iron Man is light on everything, almost everything except fun. The kind of fun you would most want to have lain on that popcorn of yours. Pure gripping fun. There’s always a laugh, a chuckle just around the corner, and so is a thunder of an action sequence. Not big CGI-driven nonsense, but the kind of action that makes you jump in your seats, pump your fists, want to forget commonly appreciated cinema-theater behavior and growl a ‘YEAH’. And then, smile in satisfaction.
When Iron Man was introduced into the Marvel world way back in 1963, the early seeds of a great embarrassment, for at least one country, were being sown. It would be some time before results were reaped, but Iron Man, the almost clichéd amalgamation of billionaire playboy business man, was already harvested in Vietnam. More than forty years hence, history seems to have served a weird purpose by repeating itself – it has provided an alternate, very contemporary setting for the cinema version of the Marvel superhero to be re-harvested. Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is the billionaire businessman, a MIT grad exceptionally genius, and more importantly owner of Stark Industries – a verifiable Lord of War. His latest designed weapons are the reason the United States Armed Forces need to be considered the scourge of all its enemies. On the demonstration of a new missile system, intended to blast the Afghani enemy right inside his cave, Stark visits Bagram. Just as he’s enjoying with the Air Force unit, their military vehicles are caught in a booby trap and everyone on his side gets killed. The resulting firing embeds shrapnel in his body, and when he gains consciousness, he sees himself a prisoner of a curious pacemaker. More importantly he has been taken hostage by some group of Afghani militia in some cave in possession of weapons manufactured by Stark industries, which is as good as being in the middle of nowhere. As he realizes, his fellow prisoner Yin Sen (Shaun Tob) who is some kind of a multi-linguist wizard himself, has placed that pacemaker in his body, which is working on a car battery, that works as some sort of a magnet holding the shrapnel from reaching his heart.
Now don’t ask me, how a car battery, minus its home, drives its way into those caves. I have no clue, and if you intend to put yourself through such questions, I would advise you better not. Look, Iron Man is a convenient film, by which I mean, when someone wants to find a stick to be broken they invariably find one nice and dry to be broken to the satisfaction of an echoing crackle. Tony Stark is ordered by the militia leader to build for them the latest missile, and under that pretext we see a lot of material that I guess ought not to be there. But if the film starts addressing such issues of logic, there wouldn’t be any summer left, and it would be very imprudent of us to ask anything of a film that has been designed only to entertain, to help us have a blast. If a film does try and hurdle over any such problem, say for example at the end how does the villain who turns into the Iron Monger so deftly acclimatize himself to the new suit/machine without any apparent practice, with only convenience in its mind and our entertainment I do not have any problem. And entertain it most certainly does.
Almost heading perpendicular to all the movies of this genre, Favreau (the writer of Swingers) doesn’t bludgeon us with some insipid romantic arc or an out-of-place moral conflict. In a way, he returns the comic book films to its origins where it is all primarily meant to be crazy fantastic fun. He almost always succeeds in what he sets out to do with a scene keeping things running smooth and fine, always managing to wrap its otherwise grim situations in breezy light humor. Yet, when the moments come, whatever few there are, they are touching, romantic and whatever else they were intended to be. They key to such success lay with the actors, prestigious names all. Robert Downey Jr. is turning out to be one of our most bankable actors. There’s always wit in his ways, his own brand, and what he does to the character is something what Depp brought to Captain Sparrow – he brings exceptional charm. Iron Man owes as much to him as much to anyone else, and it is the twinkle in his eye that always wins us over. He’s left on his own for a significant period, constructing the suit and with the aide of his fabulous virtual partner, and it is probably the best time of the film. His exchanges with Bridges, who chews scenery like a true master, blast off as much of a firework as any action sequence. Paltrow, as the secretary Miss ‘Pepper’ Pots graces the film with just about enough of her delicate touch, and she is a delight whenever she is on screen. I’ve to admit here, when I first saw Paltrow in Se7en all those years back, I didn’t warm up to her too much. But over the years she has kind of grown up on me, and I think that is the mark of a good actor. Howard has his own moment or two, and I would love him to have a real major part in what will be a sequel I’ll be keeping a desperate eye on.
In a way, Iron Man is as much a superhero film as it is tending towards a parody of the genre. Which it isn’t at all. The film quite brilliantly juggles its way between the seriousness of the moral conundrum, that the weapons of destruction in the hands of the Afghan militia are of his own making, and then occasionally shrugs it away in a sly moment of wit. It tries to wrestle with the whole weapons cause war versus vice-versa debate too, but wisely turns away, just giving us a fleeting thread to ponder upon. Here is something else I managed to lay my hand upon. Initially Stark is the Merchant of Death, and when he stumbles upon the perils of his own creation and how they’re wiping off soldiers of his won country, he creates what is perceived as the Masterpiece of Death. Only to be snatched away from him from some capitalist entity. Like that everlasting struggle. I kind of liked that underlying theme, intentional or not.
What sure is intentional is it is having fun with its material, loads of fun, and that is what rubs off on us. Iron Man fires off the rockets of his arm, and turns away, and in a super-‘wow’ scene he walks away as the tank blows up behind him. It is the kind of scene you would want to capture in your latest Canon digi-cam. It is the kind of scene you would want to rewind again and again when you purchase the DVD. That is the kind of panache superhero films have been missing all this while, Okay, maybe Hellboy and that was a seriously overlooked film, but there’ve been precious few offering such fun. I guess at some level, Iron Man is a parody on Batman too, for obvious reasons and if Stan Lee claims he was influenced by Howard Hughes, there’s an acknowledgment due.
The ending is a bit on crutches, but never mind, it never irks you one wee bit. It is enjoyable in its own way. As are the rest of the action sequences, which are short but roaring thunder. I was on a back to back schedule, at least when I drove from my home. Iron Man dispelled even the foggiest notions of any such plan, and off I drove back to my home. A film that can change your plan, and give you fun for a whole weekend is, I guess, a real slam-bang start to this summer. All that with more than a dash of heart. With the major chunk of the cream yet to be served, I can only lick my fingers in glee. Marvel, bring on Captain America. I’m all eyes. And Michael Bay, bring on your Megatrons and Autobots and Decepticons. Iron man is going to kick some serious metal posterior.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura
Director: Clint Eastwood
Rating: *****
Runtime: 141 min.
Genre: War, Drama, History

Andy Dufresne declares, in The Shawshank Redemption, one of the pillars of life I hold with great belief near to my heart– Hope is a good thing, probably the best of things, and good things never die. Clint Eastwood is one I revere, and his films mean more to me personally than they should. I have resisted numerous moments of temptation where the lure of an easy download was seemingly too much to bear. Yet, I hoped that I’ll one day get to watch this film on the big screen, the viewing it so much deserves, and that hope carried me through. When I finally installed myself on the seat, with one half of the ticket-stub in my hand, it was a great moment for me and my belief. Small moment in magnitude, but a great one it will be in its everlasting significance.
The greatest of films echo what you bring along with yourself, irrespective of the subject they are based on. Hope was what I brought with myself this day, and satisfaction, and spiritual inspiration. I have never been much of a letter-man myself, in that the emotional gravity supposedly surrounding the written words has always managed to bypass me, inspite of being far from home for considerable stretches of time. But then again, I have not nearly managed a distance the soldiers at war feel every moment of the day. And one doesn’t need to be there to understand it. Those simple words written in those letters carry all the hope in all of the wide world, and few things in our world bind every one of its peoples with such resonance and maybe, that is what overwhelmed me.
Letters from Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood’s companion to Flags of our Fathers, the two films that look upon the Battle of Iwo Jima from the points of view of both camps, the Japanese and the Allies respectively. The battle for a barren, volcanic piece of land that wasted innumerable soldiers. The battle that lasted for 40 odd days with the Japanese digging a labyrinth of tunnels, and probably their graves. What these films attempt is to exist at their core as mirror images of each other, the Japanese soldier trying to understand if the man on the other side is any different. At times, it seems, one is providing answers to the questions posed in the other. There’s a sequence in Flags of our Fathers where Ryan Philippe walks into one of the caves and his face is filled with absolute horror at the carnage before him. The carnage is never revealed to us, and we’re only left to imagine what could have been so haunting. In Letters from Iwo Jima, when a group of Japanese soldiers on Mount Suribachi blow themselves with their own hand grenades, in an act of Seppuku (ritual suicide) honoring the Bushido code of honor, it is a powerful sequence of unending meditation upon the nature of a soldier. The soldiers who perform it aren’t Samurais by any stretch of the imagination; they’re simple family men who write grieving letters to their loved ones in a hope to return home. Yet something drives them, to cry out loud and pull the grenade near to their hearts and pull the pin and shred themselves to pieces. And I choose to believe it has little to do with the fear of the commanding officer and the firearm in his hand.
One reason for the greatness of the film, and its profundity is it subverts the temptation to go the easy way and show graphic war images and rouse the anti-war pro-soldier feelings. The good war films always manage to find a channel to the emotional aftermaths of a war the soldier has to undergo and those aren’t limited to combat. That most films of this genre decide to show bullets blazing on all sides with limbs going for a toss is just another manner of entertainment through shock because few of these have any level of understanding. It is just a pretense under which they hide the ignorance of their intellect. More so after Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, probably the only good film of its kind. Clint Eastwood is a man of 75, and one of great intellect and wisdom. One that has been earned, not learned. He carefully sidesteps these obligatory landmines for more emotionally intense and claustrophobic sequences set inside the tunnel, affecting us with the soldiers. It is not about the courage behind the Banzai attack but the vulnerability behind the fear of imminent death. It is a better film than its companion purely because each of its characters leaves an indelible impression. Flags of our Fathers did get a bit heavy-handed, but this here as all the maturity that a film made by Eastwood so very much deserves. The soldiers die of dysentery borne out of unhealthy water and unlivable heat. They are grossly undersupplied and their leader, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi knows more than well that defeat is a foregone conclusion. Yet the man plans unendingly so as to give his men another day to live. Most of whom having never ever even ventured near a firearm, let alone a war zone. As the greatest of war films, this film so very much exemplifies the enormity of an ordinary man stuck in an extraordinary situation.
Eastwood for most of his career has examined the very nature of killing. In Unforgiven, in Mystic River, in Million Dollar Baby. Killing is far more than taking a man’s life, and beyond it, and more than anything else, Eastwood’s career can be summarized through the various facets of it he has presented, and the reasons he thinks lurk behind each of them. Kuribayashi was a vastly learnt man, and in the United States he carried out extensive research on the technological front and its military implications. It was long before the war, and he won over many friends. In a superb sequence showcasing the excellence of Ken Watanabe as an actor, he is presented with a Colt 1911 as a farewell gift. When he’s asked by the wife of one of his US military counterparts if he would kill her husband in case of a war, Kuribayashi nonchalantly replies in the affirmative. For his country, he says. Most of the soldiers here live under the impression that the guy on the other side is a savage, and a coward. A relatively lesser human being, for none of them have known anyone. And for most of them, I believe, it was easy to pull the trigger. There’re two soldiers, Kuribayashi and the Olympic gold medalist show jumper Lt. Colonel Baron Nishi, who have stayed in foreign lands and met its people, and they happen to know better. They even understand the other man, and more than any other man they are better capable of putting a face on him, yet they kill. Out of patriotism, out of professionalism. It is fascinating. The killing isn’t limited to there. A higher ranking officer asks of his men to kill themselves by passing an order. Kuribayashi confesses to his men, in a poignant speech that their defense is a futile attempt and at best an exercise in delaying the inevitable, yet he asks of them to die defending in honor. Not surrender. The real Kuribayashi died under mysterious circumstances, and his letters are one of the great artifacts of the war. Eastwood might have made a war about Japanese, but through them he addresses every soldier of every army who has ended on the losing side and in turn has been ignored royally through the medium of cinema.
At this point of time I’m not sure if what I have seen is a masterpiece, but I know that I’ll be watching this film again. It is the kind of film that needs to be watched twice to feel every moment put on screen, and get enriched by it. There’s behind it the wisdom of one of cinema’s great knights, and its soothing touch is humbling. Alongwith its companion, Eastwood has lent the genre with an altogether different and profound viewpoint. As they prepare for the final suicide attack, Kuribayashi promises his men – “A day will come when they will weep and pray for your souls.” I don’t know if the real man claimed thus, but I’m sure of one thing. If ever a soldier who fought there in those trenches could watch this film, he would weep in gratitude for the acknowledgement. And I don’t think there is any greater achievement for a picture on war.

10,000 B.C.: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Mammoths (Yabba dabba doo! scores of them), Saber Tooth (too bad, only one), Ostrich? Emu? Dodo?, Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis
Director: Roland Emmerich
Runtime: 109 min.
Rating: *
Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy?

Do not tell me ever again a movie is unwatchable just because it is stinking bad, and 10,000 B.C. reaffirms my long standing belief. If you doubt it, go watch the film and try stopping your guts from exploding into laughter when you hear the name ‘Tic-Tic’ on screen. That’s right, a very important character is named just that, and it is pronounced just the way you doubted. And that is not the only twentieth century commodity providing inspiration to our brothers from way, way back in the past. There’s a goatee that seems to be the pride and fashion of one African tribe. They have an interesting spin on it too, one that renders the goatee immune from shaves and lice. Rather than hair, why not attach a stump of wood to the chin. It looks special, real special, especially to an outsider.
Allow me to be blunt right at the outset, saving you some precious time. 10,000 B.C. is pure nonsense, unintelligible and a whole lot of mammoth-dung. It is so bad ancient cavemen could have made a better film. It is so bad, future generations will be relentlessly tested to come up with funnier ways to describe the epic stupidity of the filmmaking. It is so bad, such epic clunkers as Batman & Robin, Battlefield Earth and The 13th Warrior might suffer a complex. It is so bad, it is the worst film of a career that has made such terrible embarrassments as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow. It might be boring, but if you lighten up yourself, and turn up all cheerful like me, and go inside you just might have a blast your internal organs splintering in all directions. 10,000 B.C. doesn’t even need a spoof, it is the film and it is the spoof all rolled into one. Unintentional, accidental, serendipity you might say, but our brothers from way, way back evolved just like that, discovering the world around. Probably this was the time, somewhere around 10,000 B.C. when they discovered that thing we now know as bad films, but not necessarily a bad time at the movies.
Forgive me if I get some of the plot wrong; half of the time all I could manage was watch and giggle. Hear, and giggle. Think, and giggle. There’re a million jokes cramming in for space in that brain of yours in there, fuelled by everything that manages a presence on the screen, and all I could do was giggle uncontrollably like an idiot. The tribe in question is located in some snowy part of earth and is seemingly suffering from starvation. A little girl comes to them from some far-off land, and the local psychic at hand, a lady, called Old Mother declares the little girl named Evolet to be a good omen. Cut to twenty years and the same starvation in the air, and a young lad, marginally better looking than the males around, called D’Leh (Strait) is in love with Evolet. So is she with him. It is around that time the film seems to cross the 15-20 minute mark, and it realizes that there hasn’t been much by the way of action, the one we call enormous spectacle. Out of thin air, a whole army of mastodons (mammoths, it doesn’t matter actually) swarm as the day dawns. One of them is hunted by our young lad, the hero, and he is made the leader of the tribe. For some peculiar reason, which if you discover be kind enough to supply to me, D’Leh disclaims his position of authority the reason being he hadn’t killed the giant beast intentionally. Anyways, it doesn’t matter much either for soon enough evil marauders ride into town and beat everybody and loot everything and eat every piece of flesh and take everybody hostage, including Evolet. Not our young lad, and his uncle though and they stay behind following the riders collecting warriors from various other tribes from various other unknown lands. Forming, what my brain chuckled and admitted, the United Tribes Rapid Action Force. As it turns out the marauders are twenty times ahead of our heroes on the civilized-scale. Don’t ask me how, but our civilized brethren, who although in possession of horses and ships always manage to be just a stone’s throw away from the UTRAF, who primarily have the services of their foot. I’m sure the scriptwriters must have hit upon the same doubt, but must have flung it across over a chilled bottle of beer. It shall be that way, and it was filmed that way. Hence, thou shalt not ask. From then on, it is just the thing you expected – one thing after another but not necessarily leading to the next. Strung together on their end with the intention of creating an epic adventure. What awaits them, and us, at the end is a climax set amidst the dawn of a new city – the construction of beautiful palatial complexes, buildings, pyramids, and what not.
You know what, our heroes, the valiant members of the UTRAF, should be given a firm kick on their posterior for besetting the civilization by at least 40 years for the sake of some silly romantic cockamamie of an adventure. Damn you tribes, for were it not for your stupidity we would have been having regular weekend flights to the Moon. I loved their fake accents though; some African tribe managing the Queen’s English much before colonization ever occurred to anybody. Sometimes the accents changed, each tribe exchanging the other’s midway through a conversation, probably as a result of first impression. Accents can be influential. It is also interesting to note how every tribe boasts of a psychic, each of them supposedly trained in some ancient school, and each of them in command of a radio frequency at the exclusive service of their job. Tune in, and the world is a considerably smaller place.
I now realize how unkind I’ve been overall to Gibson’s Apocalypto. Although I had huge issues with the film, to the point where I was considerably offended, yet I know none of those issues were related to basic filmmaking. 10,000 B.C. offends you at the most basic of levels by assuming that someone out there in the audience will put up with whatever trash is put on the screen, irrespective of caste, creed, race, gender, age and what not. Although IMDb lists screenwriters for the film, suggesting that there did exists a script, I’m not sure it surfaced anywhere near the sets. The general idea was to have CGI animals run amuck, and then try and create some sort of a comprehensible mess around them. Although they seem to have largely succeeded in their ultra-low ambitions, the special effects aren’t exactly convincing. Whenever our actors are thrown up against a make-believe background (they were standing against green-screens for large parts of the film), it is a pain in the eye. For Emmerich you need to throw away much more than $75 million, it seems. A handsome Saber Tooth makes a spectacular guest appearance, and while it is all alone on screen everything seems fine and dandy. Just when it shares screen-space with our hero, we realize it isn’t looking at him, but beyond him. We realize the limitations of two-dimensional geometry at every possible level. There’re some ostriches in the picture, that sound exactly like someone from those Jurassic Park films. They seem to have style too; whenever someone hits them on the head they raise their neck, and turn it to one side and vocalize – ‘How’? Too bad they were villains, I was rooting for them. The horde of mammoths though is a spectacle to behold. Let me tell you, Hollywood needs to take great care of these enormous CGI animals for if they ever plan to go on a strike, I’m sure there are many films which might never ever fill the vacuum.

SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF THE FLEET STREET: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen
Director: Tim Burton
Runtime: 116 min.
Rating: ***Genre: Musical, Horror

The closest I’ve ever paid a visit to man wreaking a gruesome violent act and exercising his vocal chords no hold barred was when this certain lad called Alex DeLarge brutalized ‘Singin in the Rain’ and raped and maimed this innocent couple. It was, in the best of Brechtian traditions, disturbing no end. Come to think of it, the macabre idea of a barber vocalizing nihilist lyrics, and with his glistening silver blades craving for the slightest of contact with human skin, and then slitting them in chilling hurry blood gushing out in all directions, would be uniquely horrifying. That was my idea what Sweeney Todd would be, the Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical that has captured audiences like few others have since its premiere way back in 1979.
Looking at the motion picture adaptation, it feels like the quintessential Tim Burton film – loud, pompous, lavish and largely bereft of any soul. What you see is everything, and that is all to be had. It is an interesting exercise in the genre, confined within the boundaries and probably the first of its kind, with blood and songs walking hand in hand. But disturbing it certainly is not. Moving? No chance. Profound? Not even in hell. Entertaining? You could watch it.
Burton’s favorite partner Depp plays Sweeney Todd in this tale of revenge, the sort of which have been rehearsed before us time and again, in all forms possible. Todd sails into a London filled with vermin, after having spent 15 years in an Australian prison, for a crime he never committed. Standard that. Hard to stifle a yawn. 15 years ago he was an innocent barber in possession of a beautiful wife, until she caught the eye of evil Judge Turin (Alan Rickman) who has Todd arrested. As he walks into his place on Fleet Street, which was his shop previously and now is Mrs. Lovett’s (Bonham Carter) home of the worst pies in the whole of London, he learns his loving wife had committed suicide and his daughter Johanna is in the clutches of Turin caged seemingly forever. Revenge is the dish on the menu now, with the erstwhile barber a barbarian now.
It is a highly stylized atmosphere much in the tradition of any Burton film, who is a brilliant designer of atmosphere (Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands). But then, much in the very same tradition, it almost has no other recommending feature by the way of substance. For a musical that needs to boast of some sort of energy, some sort of momentum, howsoever dark, howsoever misanthropic in tone, the proceedings here have an obligatory flow to them. Each slit throat, I suspect, was supposed to induce a reaction of immense shock. Instead all we muster is another attempt at stifling the yawn, as each of them is reduced to B-slasher movie production values. Been there, seen that is the resident feeling. There’s the chair, the execution chair of the barber but it seems to be largely ignored. So is the broken mirror into which every customer would look into. There’s great many avenues at mythology surrounding them bubbling in my mind, some of them which i would have liked the film to ponder upon a bit.
On the precious few occasions when this spasmodic venture seems to have a caught a new breath of wind in its lungs, it dissipates it in another obligatory boring number. The problem is the actors, who aren’t exactly as good singers. Depp, playing the degraded, vengeful soul is all monotone, quite wonderfully of a singular note. The greatest of actors acquire the surroundings, the notes, the execution what their directors create around them, and Depp is one such name. His Todd has only revenge in his mind, on the inside, on the outside and all around him. It is a grim character and Depp plays him with as much panache as possible. It is the singing that does him in though. Depp was previously a lead singer from some group, and though his vocals come across as assured, they do not rouse us with the negative exhilaration they’re supposed to. It is not enjoyable, foot tapping numbers that should be accompanying such dark material, but what we seek is an encore, a passion in the revenge that is deserving of the singular totality of his mind, that metes out some sort of justice to the dark times it speaks of. What we expect is the spirit of vigilantism, what we get is some unpleased barber.
In such a scenario, where the central figure is monochromatic, it comes to the characters surrounding him to lend agility. Mrs. Lovett, who aids Todd in his quest, is a character that is required to be sprightly, a counterpoint to the largely lifeless Todd. Instead Bonham Carter is even more of an exercise in the dull. She is a wonderful actress, believe me, but her singing is rather inept. We feel the pains she is taking to pronounce every word as carefully as possible, which sometimes overshadow the feeling, the subtext at hand. Similar is the case with Depp, and whenever both of them sing, what we feel like is dialogues have been put to music. They might as well have been talking, with sentences and periods, and we wouldn’t be concerned either way one wee bit. Listening to them vocalizing, I realized for the first time that ‘piss’ and ‘this’ rhyme, and find myself disturbed for some reason. Last year, we had Dreamgirls and Jennifer Hudson, and that was a rousing exercise in the singing department.
It is all left to Sondheim’s original score, and that is all that lends this film any degree of life. There is a degree of Bernard Herrmann, and Psycho to it, especially during the last stabbing. It shrieks and that is where we know this is horror. Burton covers his London in soot all the time, save one scene, and much of it is just shades of black. Dark, darker and darkest.
The ending few minutes do affect us, but then the strange and the macabre have always had it easy on us. Compared to the spiral into the evil and the vicious and its ghastly effects, goodness is considerably difficult to pull off. This is as much a musical as Psycho was about stolen money. The thing about great films, and for that matter the very good ones, is a reason why they’re what they’re. Why is There Will Be Blood the force of nature it is than a straight out epic drama? Why is No Country for Old Men a crime thriller concealing its true nature? The answer to these is simple, and the reason why they are what they are. With Sweeny Todd, there’s no reason for it to be a musical, other than that it is one, and most times productions like these are known as travesties. Dropping into songs is just an interesting exercise, being a musical is just an interesting angle. With a dead end. Next I hear, there will be a gangster musical with an embarrassing Robert De Niro and a hamming Al Pacino squaring off their vocal chords. Oh! I hope no one heard me. Hush! Hush!

Let me sing it for you straight and loud –

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
On the American Shore, better not set your feet
Two paragons of dark walk in the day
Chigurh and Plainview making hay
Darkness around you is routine and bore
Tiresome to wade in the soot, revenge the only oar

Those angels have coffers, of every which kind
They open it all and the world will be blind.

DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN (THE LIVES OF OTHERS): MOVIE REVIEW [Top 2006 - #6]

Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Tukur
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Runtime: 137 min.
Rating: ***** (Masterpiece)
Genre: Thriller, Drama

Hauptmann Wiesler doesn’t express much, doesn’t talk much, and if asked to install himself in the chair at the corner of the room facing the walls, he could sit longer than most folks would even think of. He’s the Stasi (the East German secret police) wiretapping expert, a pure believer in the Socialist regime and he sits, alone in a room, listening. A patriot. For hours together, for even the tiniest of detail missed in those tumultuous times could spell disaster. He has trained himself, probably beyond repair, for the single-minded dedication to his work. Probably, that’s the one thing he’s brilliant at. Identifying even the earliest evidence of a revolutionary idea, in people heading towards total disillusionment with the country. And then, those people aren’t a problem ever again. That is the theory. But ideas only inspire us; it is the lives that transform us.
Sitting there alone, listening to the life of an artist couple – one a great writer and the other a popular stage actress – Wiesler is the very picture of gradual discovery. He listens to their heartfelt love for each other, and clutches his chair, mesmerized. Through him, Ulrich Mühe creates one of the most memorable performances of any year in recent memory. His face registers every single step towards the discovery of love, happiness, freedom – pretty much the entire gamut of life. He probably needs someone to hug him, with unabashed love, and tell him clutching his shoulders, that there’s good within him waiting to be discovered. Someone later in the picture does more than just that, he acknowledges it. The triumph on Wiesler’s face, of infinite subtlety, is a wonder to behold. And that is how I guess the Berlin wall came down on November 9th, 1989, not in a moment of heated passion but slowly, gradually in several moments of simmering emotions, brick for brick.
Morality in cinema is often a prey to easy decisions. The Nazi officer, or the Soviet bureaucrat or the Stasi agent simply cannot be any other than bad. If he is good, then he’s against the system. It is a moral quandary, you know, for how can goodness prevail being part of such a system. 33-year old Mr. von Donnersmarck showcases an awe-inspiring level of maturity and intellect, and in dealing with the subject he never for once takes the route of clichéd opinion. I have been wrong previously, on two counts, when I mentioned this film in my list of the best films of 2006 – one it ought to be higher on the list, and two, Wiesler isn’t a case of transformation. And both of them had to do with conclusions made on my end after just one viewing, something this film doesn’t need in the least. It is a picture that is breathtakingly layered – political, emotional, moral – each of them to be enjoyed, felt and discovered over multiple occasions.
The film opens with Wiesler describing to a class how pertinent it is to grind the accused during an interrogation for long hours, to excavate the secret out of him. It is set in 1984, and it is not a coincidence if you hear the echo of Orwell’s 1984. Probably the emotional complexity of The Conversation too. And maybe just the tiniest bit of Casablanca’s romance. The principal characters, and especially the two men, are individuals of supreme faith and principles, as much are realistically possible. But then, one doesn’t know the boundaries which separate the realistic and idealistic. They do what they do, not out of sympathy, not out of change of character but because of their beliefs. Because, in an ever changing world true characters, like true individuals, grow.
The film has been written by von Donnersmarck himself. It is an extremely detailed picture, both visually and by the word, and he directs it with a great narrative insight. Consider the sequence where they bug the artist’s house for the first time. As Wiesler waits outside their building for a whole day, recording their every movement, it sets the principal character without even spelling a single word. He summons tension from thin air, with a soft but sure score on the back, but that is the last thing on his mind. With the same assurance, and what the film aims for is charting the emotional path, and it is the sign of a great career when you realize the film is not playing to you but has absorbed and engulfed you within it. No matter what direction it turns, it will be affecting you.
Look, I do not want to spoil the joy any further, and I’m satisfied I have given away the bare minimum of the plot. If there’re things left undiscussed as a result of that, so be it. This film is intriguing, complex but an achievement in narration. Discover it, and discover how moving an experience it is. There aren’t many times you will find me begging you, on my knees to go and watch a film. Mark it in your diary if you want to, but before that please visit one of the great motion pictures of recent times. It is a wonder we’re opening to foreign language films other than the ones in English, and when it does with as memorable a film as this, you ought not to miss it. And especially not, for one remarkable performance that do not come every year.
Ulrich Mühe probably found the inspiration from his life, because he was himself under the surveillance of the Stasi. He was one of the active members against the Communist regime and denounced it in a memorable address at Alexanderplatz on 4 November 1989. His second wife, Jenny Gröllmann, was registered as an informant during the Cold War, an "Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (unofficial collaborator). When asked how he prepared for his role, his answer was – “I remembered.” Simple, and profound. No award is too great for a performance of this kind. Mühe died in July 2007.

VANTAGE POINT: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, Matthew Fox
Director: Pete Travis
Runtime: 90 min
Rating: *1/2
Genre: Thriller, Action

If one were to assemble a trailer out of the reactions the actors muster here from their respective vantages, when the President receives a bullet from an unknown source, I wouldn’t be surprised if young audiences could be fooled into buying the admission ticket thinking it was one of those spoofs Hollywood seems to churn with mighty potency this time of the year. Unfortunately, it isn’t one.
There’s the President’s security man, who it seems is played by a mannequin with an uncanny resemblance to Dennis Quaid, only that it seems to be sweating profusely. It is a thing of wonder how some performances manage to scrape through an entire picture barely registering more than one expression. There’s Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, as a tourist with a video camera shooting anything and everything that finds its way to in front of him. The manner in which Whitaker acts around his new found possession gave me some unintentional chills, especially when he was around a tiny girl, and if for some reason his behavior comes across as weirder than that kid in American Beauty, I’m sure no one even in their dreams meant that. I’m also sure about one more thing – a brief montage through the audience would have thrown up more than a few faces with reactions infinitely more genuine.
This seems to be one of the early movies on a relatively new sub-genre. The film gives the game away, though quite late for my liking, when an important character observes – We’ve to tie all the loose ends. See, in a thriller, there’s only one kind of an audience band that needs that kind of a reassurance – teenagers who seem to have forgotten their way out of a dead teenager film. So what we now have, on our hands ladies and gentlemen, is the dead President movie.
The plot in question is an assassination told from multiple viewpoints, or more precisely multiple vantages. The President of the United States, played by a rather uninterested William Hurt, is in Spain to sign some deal. Just when he spreads his arms to embrace one and all, the bullet from somewhere turns out to be the first and only one. That would be the first ten odd minutes. The rest of the film essentially rewinds itself, and us, back through time and forth into these events. Again, and again. How? Why? The last question did find an echo through the audience but I believe for significantly different reasons.
The film obviously seems to be delighted with its narrative gimmick; it just cannot have enough of it. Vantages, it seems, be damned. Events shown have little plausible relation to the vantage concerned, and most of them seem to have a blurting feel to them. To some extent, cramming too. Consecutive vantages seem to have chunks from the previous reruns and we never are supposed to know why. The rule of the game is don’t ask. Damn logic. You could almost feel an epiphany around you – the filmmakers seem to have wound up watching the following DVDs – Air Force One, In the Line of Fire, Death of a President – and have capped it up with Rashomon. William Hurt even has his own moment to emulate Harrison Ford where he gets to beat the bad guy, but too bad for him, the entire sequence is an exercise in the shoddy.
There’s little reverence to plausibility in general as well. When the weapon in question turns out to be in the nearest building, and you throw your arms up in aghast please be assured you aren’t the only one. If you venture in there expecting something complex, kindly brace yourself for a miserably foolish assassination plan. There’s the ending, which is structured around a piece of ridiculous coincidence, and any script that comes up with such sort of a pack up doesn’t exactly deserve to get off the shelf. I learn the film was delayed for over one year. I can easily see enough reason why this kind of picture deserves a straight-to-DVD status, one shelf to another.
Before I forget. You cannot have your President played by a William Hurt, or a Jon Voight or a James Cromwell and expect people to believe he’s an early goner.
Another. No matter how many times you replay a bad film, from every which view it still remains a bad film.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD: MOVIE REVIEW [Top 2007 - #2]

Cast: Daniel-Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciarán Hinds
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Rating: ***** (Masterpiece)
Runtime: 158 min.
Genre: Drama, Thriller

On most occasions when we pay the movies a visit, we’re looking for the best ride possible. Most times, movies probably are made keeping that very endeavor in mind. Howsoever we’re familiar with it, we’re never failed to be enthralled by that ride when done with a touch of class and novelty. It probably takes a genius to attract us away from that ride, and induce the realization out of us what a great experience inventing the wheel, all over again, could be. To make us experience what watching the movies all over again, afresh, could be. Paul Thomas Anderson is that sort of a genius, and in the relentlessness of There Will Be Blood, in its arduousness we’re exhilarated and drained. There’s intense richness of tragedy, of eccentricity, of obsession, of audacity, of performance, of filmmaking, of literature, of humor, and when we’ve moved on a bit far from this year into the future, we’ll learn there’s still more to be discovered.
I’m being absolutely plain here – I’m not one hundred percent sure on the wheel-ride metaphor and what I intend to say. It was late into midnight when the end credits started rolling, and here I was exhausted, reeling under the searing and sprawling intensity of the film. It was very necessary for me to step back and take a toll, and as I started gathering my thoughts this was what came to me, out of nowhere. It felt right, but why is not a question I’m in possession of an answer of. I decided to open my review with these random thoughts, as a testament what an artist Anderson is. He doesn’t create easy parables – one note films dealing in allegories that rarely have more than a single layer to them. He believes in, and creates stories – complex, intriguing – and never settles for any one emotional note, or any one character trait, or motion in any one direction. In There Will Be Blood he has unleashed a tornado hurling itself along with random fury, expanding in all directions – there is horror, there is satire, there’s screwball. It doesn’t give us any single moral to hold to; in its imperfections of tone, of pacing it is pure mania we feel. I’m not sure there’s another modern director who could boast of such cinematic flourish, and if there’re any I’m sure there aren’t many.
The film could be labeled a chronicle of the force of capitalism, of the unscrupulous ways of evangelism, of distrust, of families, of power. That would be describing the obvious about of the crust. If anything, it is a desperate attempt to claw and peel layers of a man, a force of nature, who has named himself Daniel Plainview. Apparently he has folks who are named Plainview too, and strange as it may seem, Daniel is at odds with his name. He is at odds with his fellowmen, with his family, with nature, with God, and I believe himself too. As much like the story, Anderson’s Plainview is anything but for plain view, a paradox and more than any modern movie character, he’s impossible to be described, and typified. It requires a level of greatness and the same unrelenting passion to humanize this misanthropic being, and there lay the one and only Daniel-Day Lewis. Rarely do two talents explode into each other with such fervor, and There Will Be Blood is one such film in a very, very long time. Let me paint you a brief sketch of the panorama.
It is 1898, and Plainview is all alone in that rough terrain digging for silver. For a good part of five minutes we see him wrestling with nature, slowly inching his way through the hole, against an ear numbing score with a shrilling intensity. We hear not one word, and it is haunting just like the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is the beginning of the evolution of him, and probably an allegory to the birth of capitalism in that wilderness of Southern California. He’s all on his own, and when he breaks his leg badly in a fall through the hole, we hear the first word, rather the first cry – No! He exhales in the hole, and inhales, picks up himself, picks up the rock and crawls his way, all along the ground, back to the nearest shred of civilization.
Years later he turns to oil, and when he first digs that slimy fluid out of the ground he wipes his hand on and raises it, drenched in oil. The sequence would be at home in any horror picture, ready for unintentional laughs. But here, it is terrifyingly cold and rings an ominous sign of things to come. It is fifteen minutes into the film when we first hear the man speak a full sentence. It is a strange slimy voice, a snarl here and a grunt there, a monster twirling its nose to breathe fire. It speaks with an authority borne out of the unabashed belief in ones deceitful ways. So confident it probably believes in its own deceit. He has his child H.W. Plainview alongwith him, whom he uses, it only seems, more for his little-boy sweetness than anything else. H.W. has been almost baptized in oil, and practically the first word he must have learnt is oil. Yet, I believe Daniel loves his little boy, and immensely so. There is a wealth of information how Daniel treats his young son, and it is never quite sure if he’s putting a charade or if it is genuine affection. As with much of the film, it is take-a-pick contest, with us having the fortune of quite a number of options. But more than any Michael Corleone, this man is headstrong, and there’s nothing out there that he believes is worthy enough to compete with him. Not man, not nature, not life, not God. Nothing is worthy enough to earn his respect, hell he despises everything and bends before nothing.
Enter Paul Sunday (Paul Dano, Little Miss Sunshine) who walks upto Daniel and tells him about his town that literally has oil seeping out of the ground, the cause being a recent earthquake. Daniel and his son walk up to their ranch, the Sunday Ranch, and place a bid to buy them, and buy all of the lands of the village. Here, in the Sunday ranch lay a confusion of sorts, rising out of a last minute casting problem, as a result of which Paul’s brother Eli is again played by Dano. Eli is the smooth voice of evangelism and it is his desire to extract money out of Plainview and further the plan to spread his Church of the Third Revelation. As much as one ought to dread the slimy voice of capitalism, the viciousness of the smooth voice is an able adversary. Partners in crime, but adversaries nevertheless. Plainview though, doesn’t think much of him either.
We call a character Shakespearean when he starts showing realizations of his tragic existence, thereby opening the window of transformation towards repentance and good. We do not necessarily like these characters, but we do not hate them either; we plain feel sorry for them. Jake la Motta in Raging Bull comes to mind. Plainview has nothing to do with any of those clichés, if any attempts were made to reduce him to words, would be the monster in one of those teen slasher horror pictures. An unremitting force. I use cliché not in the cinematic sense, but in the sense of describing the common man, for La Motta in the end is what could be described a common loser. Plainview is what Michael Corleone was in The Godfather, and to a certain extent the sequel. I cannot admire Anderson and Lewis enough here to go the full distance, pull out all the stops, on Plainview and keeping him the way he is. Plainview wouldn’t budge before anybody and that would include his inner voice. The greatest of performances work in paradoxes, not providing us any easy inferences, open to be comprehended. This is right up there with the very best, and when I say this is Daniel-Day Lewis’ finest hour that sure is saying something. Kathleen Murphy, of all the futile attempts I’ve read to sum Plainview, does the best job –
The key to character and performance in "TWBB" comes in Plainview's query: "Can everything around here be got?" The answer is pretty much yes. Day-Lewis chews scenery in "Blood" because he's incarnating a monster bent on eating up as much of the world/movie as he can. "I have a competition in me," he shares almost clinically -- and that's the engine that makes his wheels turn. He hardly knows how to act naturally, with his brother or anyone else.
Probably a human monster, or a monster-human. Take your pick. (Kindly visit this debate on Daniel-Day Lewis’ performance between two of the more esteemed scholars on film – Kathleen Murphy and Jim Emerson - http://movies.msn.com/movies/oscars2008/DanielDayLewis)
The filmmaking is of the highest order possible. I believe Anderson never looks at perfecting his films as a whole; rather he goes for achieving a life for every single sequence. There is never a fixed tone to the film, and even through its single-minded doggedness it strives to create an atmosphere of emotion perfect with the concerned sequence. As Martin Scorsese calls it, it is the kamikaze method of directing going for absolute broke. The score has no emotional trappings. Composer Jonny Greenwood supplies a stark combination of western and horror, but that goes only for sometimes. The score is almost never formulaic, in that it is never in a state of agreement with the emotional tone of a scene, never, not even for a single moment, supplying us with a clue as what to feel of it.
Look at how Anderson creates and scores an oil fire sequence in the middle of the film. There’s nothing traditional to it, and the scene at once feels like an eerie combination of a war and disaster. It is spectacular, it is grand but it also pulls us right into it. No shaky camera can achieve that, and it is the sheer genius of Anderson how he manages to enthrall us with the epic scope of the greatest of old time war films, and bludgeon us with the grit of the newer ones. All in the span of one scene.
I’m not sure under what genre to classify the film, and I’ve only done it as an obligation looking at IMDb. Strange and astonishing surely come to mind. If someone would walk up to me and say this is a half-horror picture, I would have no reason to disagree, and in the ending few minutes there’s the same screwball insanity of any standard B-grade horror fare. I’m sure many are livid at the ending, but everyone would agree it is just as a thunder as the rest of the film. There aren’t any women in this world, and I’m not sure what to make of that. For that matter, I’m not sure what to make of Daniel Plainview. I seem to have observed him enough, but with my limited intellect I am not sure I’m any closer to understanding the person, and I’m sure neither is the film. We know him, and his madness, but we almost never know what to expect of him. He seems to have destroyed everything that did have any connection to him for all he needs, it seems, is a prop upon which he could rest the scarce emotions of the day. With all his power at his disposal, brought about by his immense wealth, I think this was what he was looking for in his life. Destroy everything that has had, at any point of time, committed any speck of offence to him. Physically destroy.
And in the end he utters these words to his butler – I’m finished. He has just finished his meal, killing a man, and has seemingly clubbed out of existence his adversaries. Just like the rest of the film, I’m not sure what to infer from that. It isn’t ambiguous like more standard fare, but it has seems to have so many layers to it. It is a great line to end on, and I’ll probably go with the meal, and would like to think he is up and ready to stamp the next challenge – God.
If that is how one chooses to look at it.

The 80th Academy Award Predictions

Check out my predictions for the Oscars, and see if you can outguess me.
http://satish-movieviews.blogspot.com/2008/02/80th-annual-academy-awards-predict-me.html

The Best Movies of 2007

Visit my list of the Best movies of 2007 at -
http://satish-movieviews.blogspot.com/2008/02/best-movies-of-2007.html

MICHAEL CLAYTON: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack
Director: Tony Gilroy
Runtime: 115 min.
Rating: *****
Genre: Thriller

Michael Clayton is the kind of film that grows on you, on repeated viewing, because you would be so engrossed in the intricacies of the plot the first time around. I state this as an observation. When you know how things will pan out you see how brilliantly it was all set up, and how smart its characters are. It is rare to have pictures, and rarer still are thrillers that have incredibly smart people making decisions. Michael Clayton, after Breach, again represents my kind of cinema, the kind of filmmaking involved, the kind of people in it, the kind of conversations they hold I most identify with. I’m not sure it is great cinema, but hey, it is what it is. When an idea takes birth in my brain, the manner my brain deals with it pretty much feels like Michael Clayton. When I’m critiquing a thriller, the template my brain is referring to is that of Michael Clayton. Let me give you a detailed picture and see for yourself if you need to be wary of me in future.
Michael Clayton is a force operating in the shadows behind the legal lines playing what the law business calls a fixer. Held in high opinion by the head of his New York City law firm, and that would be Marty Back played by Pollack in that trademark style where his authoritative demeanor commands respect and exudes reliability, Clayton is great at his job. He has the necessary connections, he knows the score, he keeps it simple, he talks straight and he lets the client know the reality of the situation. He doesn’t boast of the same skill as far as his life is concerned – he is divorced and seems to have no regrets on the front, an avid gambler down at Chinatown, and he for such a job he doesn’t seem to be having 75 grand, an amount he needs to stop a grave crisis on the personal front. Let us just say that the crisis augurs bad things for him.
Meanwhile, one of the firm’s partners and one heck of a brilliant lawyer Arthur Edens (Wilkinson) has had a relapse of a mental problem in a deposition room, defending the agro-chemical company UNorth being sued for toxic pollution. The psychiatric side of it is murky because he seems to be having an aggravated conscience too, and probably a combination has made him run butt naked through a parking lot allegedly chasing the plaintiffs. The company is unhappy, and Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) Perfect situation for Michael Clayton to enter, and just about the perfect note to be done with the plot.
It is the script, all the way, and it is a killer. That and the actors. Gilroy is a super scriptwriter, boy he has penned the Bourne films and that underrated thriller Proof of Life. He keeps the tension high, but then that is given when you walk into it. For much of the opening time you might find yourself holding to invisible threads having no idea which is going where, but I can assure you it isn’t a state of confusion. It is riveting, listening to the smart dialogues. For a film dealing with people in the law business, it is essential to have great conversations because that is what earns them their bread. This is one such film, and it is a joy to witness these snappy exchanges. These people almost always come to the point, mean business, and whenever it is they’re beating around the bush they’re essentially playing blind, negotiating. It is a pleasure as they almost always find the right words to put forth their point, and in today’s films it just doesn’t happen that often.
I love genre exercises, especially the legal ones, and this one here elevates itself beyond any such confines because of the nonchalance it braves, the slickness with which it moves without resorting to cheap tricks of the trade. Like say a twist in the tale at the last moment, which there isn’t any. I’ve told you I’ve benefited from a second viewing, and the way the game is played out here with nuts and bolts will be appreciated more once you know the street round the corner. Arthur is the good, Karen his counterpart down at the other end of the spectrum and the line in between probably belongs to all the others. Both Arthur and Karen break the set of rules, and cross the line, which in the legal world is lethal. You will be fascinated the way events shape up by the decisions taken.
If the tension in your film is primarily derived out of high-tension technical-term-laden dialogues rest assured you need very good actors. Michael Clayton is the kind of film that has not one or two but four such talents.

George Clooney is one of our precious few combinations of an actor and a performer, stealthily brilliant like Eastwood or Redford. You wouldn’t know how good this guy can be unless you see him immerse completely into his characters without even having to stretch himself. You never feel aware he’s acting, by that I mean there’s never a false note to him. There’s just the hint of weariness and anger simmering underneath that face, in almost every sequence. His Michael Clayton is a case study in urban moral conflict. Two years ago, he would have woken up in the morning walk up to the window and stand gazing at the morning light. Probably reflecting upon himself, trying to squash his conscience. He still does it, probably, only he has got infinitely better at it. Maybe that is why he is getting into the restaurant business. Look at the sequence after his father’s birthday celebrations when he meets Timmy and the conversation he has with his son. You would have probably seen this scene on innumerable occasions, but seldom handled with such flair, seldom such reality to it. In its nonchalance we believe in its feelings all the more. Such is the effect of the performances in it, supported by the filmmaking and not the other way round, that we know Henry, twenty years from now, will hold on to this conversation in a special vault of his heart in the gravest of moments. Hollywood, or for that cinema, just cannot have enough of such brilliant performers.
Tom Wilkinson is a powerhouse, and he has all the ‘big’ lines. There aren’t many character actors like Wilkinson who could provide a film its tour de force without hamming it all up. The film begins by his narrative, his confession of sorts to Michael, and it benefits immensely with the ominous touch it achieves right at the outset. Tilda Swinton, and her character, benefit most from the script and are aided most by the filmmaking. Her Swinton has a lot of nervous bones in her body, and she seems to have a method or an exercise of sorts to allay them. I was reminded of Faye Dunaway in Network and this is probably the best compliment I can manage for her. When the principal characters have such good actors playing them, the supporting cast easily feels perfect.
This is Tony Gilroy’s first film as a director, and it is apparent he has the heart and soul of a storyteller. He never imposes himself upon the film; he just lets the narration flow effortlessly. He seems to be an actor’s director, and the finesse with which he handles them, in close ups, dealing with each other reminds me of Steven Soderbergh. Alongwith the great cinematographer Robert Elswith (Syriana, Magnolia) he opts for a coldly menacing environment around much of the film. It is interesting though how he has all the family sequences in the daylight, opposite to the run of the play. It is a great transition, and I can say I expected it considering the intelligence of his work with his scripts.
There’s a scene involving horses that seems to be bothering a lot of people. All I would like to ask of you is to juxtapose it with conversation Arthur holds with Michael’s son Henry. And ask yourself – Do lawyers dream of meadows? Oh yeah, they do. Everyone does.

Please do visit my predictions for the Oscars by clicking on the link below -

http://satish-movieviews.blogspot.com/2008/02/80th-annual-academy-awards-predict-me.html

ATONEMENT: MOVIE REVIEW

Cast: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
Director: Joe Wright
Runtime: 130 min.
Rating: ***1/2
Genre: Romance, Drama

It is easy to compare Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s classic, set in a period before the World War II, and dismiss Atonement. McEwan’s classy blend of robust prose describing delicate feelings lends a certain amount of earthliness to the proceedings, a rich verve of humor, and that is what absorbed me into its world. But let us just leave that classic novel as it is, and first grasp the essentiality of the story.
Atonement is essentially a drama caused by a silly girl, silly and vain, who has lived her entire life under the impression of being the center of the universe, who derives the reality of the world through literature. She is 13, her name is Briony Tallis, and I say vain because although she writes hell of a lot of stories dealing with the feelings of her characters the prose embellished with recently acquired barely comprehended adjectives, still the soul limits itself to only the letters and the words. I say silly because I’ve myself been 13, and have spent a significant amount of my childhood under that very impression and I’ve been around with several such kids. For that matter, we all have. Yet, none of us ever breezed through our lives viewing ourselves exclusively that, and most of us have been incredibly smarter than this girl here. I remember wading through McEwan’s prose, and wanting so desperately to get worked up on my punching bag. Believe me, she’s that silly. So, let us leave her at that, where she’s new to the process of discovering the teen