Sherlock Holmes - Rewriting Holes as an action hero seems so weird and American but I guess it is an enjoyable movie if you forget all your pleasant memories of reading Doyle's character. A fairly decent plot with some nice action sequences.
Broken Embraces - The Pedro Almodóvar movie continues in the same vein as Volver. A soap opera-ish drama about a writer and his tragic love affair with the mistress of a rich, old man. A very well made film and entertaining for a little bit. And Penelope still cannot act. She should really consider some advanced acting classes that will teach her to add more dimensions to her character than to be an attractive lover/mistress. I think Pedro accepts this fact when the Mateo character casts her as the leading lady in his film (this is a film within a film) mainly because he is enamoured with her. So, Pedro, are you planning on doing an RGV? :)
An Education - It revolves around a school girl who has a whirlwind romance with a silver tongued older man who turns out to be married and she decides to go back to school and to Oxford. Some really nice performances by Alfred Molina and Rosamund Pike (who will probably will not get the credit she deserves). The film itself is so deceptively conservative that it is bourgeois.
Surrogates - Poor Sci-fi. Nothing makes sense in this movie and I am not even sure why they chose to make it. Seems like a poor allegory for the fact that people are spending more time online/playing games on the computer than sniffing the polluted air outside.
Avatar - Eye candy.
Law Abiding Citizen - Another Hollywood action film about a man who decides to take on the corrupt justice system and cure it by killing all those he considers rotten. Could have been interesting but it seemed to run out of new ways of killing people and the end was abrupt and unexpected.
There were more movies I saw on the in-flight entertainment system. I cannot seem to recall which ones I saw. I was probably half-asleep through most of them anyway. :)
Seppuku's narrative style is very similar to that of Rashoman, in that the main plot is revealed in the words of characters in the story and give different perspectives. But where Rashoman uses the differing versions of the same story, Seppuku uses different stories as witnessed by two characters.
The movie requires a little knowledge about the samurai culture. You can read the wikipedia entry on seppuku (hara-kiri) which would give you some idea of what goes on in the film. The samurai code of honour is quite well known, I guess, and it plays an important part both in their culture and in this film.
The samurais were prosperous when Japan was a basically ruled by numerous feudal lords (daimyo) and there were numerous wars and clashes in Japan where the samurais came in very handy.
The film is set in the 17th century when Japan had been more or less unified. A time of peace, as the film observes. For people whose lives depended on war, this was disastrous. Dialogues such as "But in a world of peace there is no hope" and "But in such times of peace, all was in vain" seem to be cynical on the surface but as the character played by Tatsuya Nakadai says, "But in times of peace, the honored warrior is no longer in demand."
If you think about it, all samurai films you have ever watched have had some kind of war or major conflict in the plot. And the emphasis is on the action and the samurai is dignified by being elevated to a super-human status in combat. Here you see a more human side of the samurai. You see what happens when a samurai is unemployed and poor and what choices he makes in times of crisis.
Nakadai is an amazing actor and he does justice to this role of a veteran samurai who has been through a lot and he conveys the extreme sadness and anger through his intense eyes like no one else can. He portrays a man who has lost everything and who wants a bit of revenge. Without him, this film might not have been so great. He really carries the film through with his performance and he looks every bit the weathered father as well as the skilled samurai that he plays.
But what I liked more about the film was its cinematography. Black and white film is such a beautiful medium but to use it well requires real skill and even though, the cinematographic technique is pretty traditional in this film, it is used very effectively.
But I am usually very partial to cinematography. There is no aspect of this movie that I think was less than perfect. Kobayashi's direction is, as usual, brilliant. The background score is evocative of the situation. I also liked the fact that the dialogues were pithy. Nothing in excess. Measured and just right.
Over the weekend, I watched a couple of movies. First was a delightful new movie that I have been waiting for quite some time - Michel Gondry's "Be kind, rewind" and the other was a shallow shell of a movie based on the premise that if you throw in a few big names, you can get away with anything and still make money, "Sarkar Raj".
First let me talk a little about Sarkar Raj. The reason I went to this movie was because me and my brother-in-law had nothing better to do on a saturday morning (my sister was writing an exam that day) and we ended up buying tickets for this movie. Firstly, I was shocked by the cost of a ticket (200 for a morning show, arguably on a weekend) and secondly, I was more shocked to see the theatre full! No wonder the multiplexes are raking in tons of money. The movie itself was ridiculous. An insane plot, bad screenplay and poor acting was just expected but what was incredible was the fact that the character who is shown in good light is one who says things like, "If he doesn't agree to my views and stands in my way, I will kill him". Intolerance seems to be the order of the day and people seem to like watching such movies about a "good man" who does not like being told he is wrong. Yikes, that was a ghastly movie and I hope the Bachchan family popularity dies a quick death. I think they are far worse than SRK, who is quite unhypocritical about what he does.
Be kind, rewind is a fun film. How can it not be with Jack Black in it? But it is also a very well written script that is a brilliant commentary on Hollywood and the movie business. The premise of the movie is absurd. Jerry, played by Jack Black, gets magnetised after a botched attempt to wreck a transformer and erases all the tapes of the video store owned by Fletcher (Danny Glover) and where Mike (Mos Def) works. After that, they have to recreate all the films that they have destroyed in order to satisfy their customers. Watch the trailer below:
The first movie that they re-shoot is Ghostbusters, which is one of the iconic film of popular cinema. They create the effects using relatively simple methods, like turning on the negative switch to make it look like night (day-for-night would perhaps have been too exotic), creating small figures and shooting them close up but making them look in the actual film. We see this happen over and over again, as they very creatively reinvent science fiction films like RoboCop, Men In Black, King Kong, 2001: A space odyssey. I would say it is a commentary on the illusionary nature of films and how visual effects can be created using simple, inexpensive methods. Camera is a tool for creating illusions, contrary to the belief that something captured by film would have be real.
I also think the film comments on the racial politics that exist in Hollywood. Since they reshoot movies already created by Hollywood, Jerry is inevitably the star of all the movies because he is the white guy and this is subtly pointed out when Mike becomes jealous of Jerry's stardom. It is a well known fact that in early Hollywood movies, asian characters were played by white guys because "asians were too asian to play asian". And in the film, the second movie that they shoot is Rush Hour 2 and Jerry plays the part of Jackie Chan. Race does play a major part in the film since three of the four major characters are non-white and Jerry, the white guy is more of a goofy character than the 'hero', a character stereotype that is usually played by a black guy (example, pick any movie of Eddie Murphy). One of the customers of the store is a white woman who likes to see Driving Miss Daisy and later requests that movie to be sweded, ie, remade, which is a movie about how an old white lady teaches a Black man to read and write, a theme that Hollywood seems to be very fond of and something that MAD TV brilliantly parodied in this skit.
Very soon, the team of two guys is joined by Alma, an hispanic woman whose role in the movie in the movie is not just limited to being a prop. Her quick thinking and fast talking gets them out of trouble a couple of times and she has a sense of humour too. Quite unlike roles given to women in Hollywood movies. So, we have two black characters, one white guy and an hispanic woman and that's where the racial representations ends. Of course, you cannot represent every race in a movie but can it be looked as a analogy to the way the rest of the races, except for perhaps the chinese, are rarely represented in Hollywood movies anyway?
The store is a video store which is kind of archaic in this day and age. The title asks the audience to 'rewind'. Fletcher is advised by his friends to adapt to the market and give the people what they want. He then researches the 'market', particularly staking the shop(s) of what seems to be a big video rental chain and he makes a lot of observations: "limited choices, lots of copies, digital video, easily recognisable uniforms for the employees, no specific knowledge required", etc, etc. This throw back to a previous era is mirrored by another subject of the documentary they make, Fats Waller, who Fletcher claims was born in the same building as the video store. In the end, Mike with the help of the community create a documentary on Fats that they screen on the day the building gets torn down.
Film technology has evolved over the years. For a long time, VHS ruled the roost till digital video came along and then digital video improved manifold with the introduction of DVDs. Now, it is time for DVDs to die, though that it still a while away. Fats lived merrily but died an early death in a train. The video store lasts 90 minutes. For a lot of us, video seems to be an archaic technology but it lasted much, much longer than any of the digital technologies that are prevalent right now. This is quite similar to film making technologies. Celluloid is probably the oldest and still the most widely used medium of film making. But as the digital technologies get better and better, making film making cheaper, more efficient and a lot more accessible to people but it comes with its own problems - different and varying formats, lack of standards, lots of choices making it tougher to make a choice without a proper technical know-how, etc, etc. This film kind of just hints at these problems though it does not deal with it in any great detail.
The film also deals with the legal idea of 'copyright'. The films that Mike and Jerry remake literally gets crushed through legal action. There has been a lot of debate about what constitutes violation of copyright. Are creative reenactments, reediting (like the mashup I blogged about in my last post) violations of copyright? It is big debate and one that is not likely to be resolved very soon. Till then, creativity will be crushed by the movie companies citing copyright violations.
There are a lot of other things that I wanted to write about but I guess this review has already become very long and if you really are reading this line, which I doubt very much, I will let you know that I am stopping here. Watch the film and if you want to discuss more, the comments section of this post is always open...
What do you call a movie that is full of stereotypes and hasn't the courage nor the guts to deal with reality and hides behind the mask of "Inspired by a real story"?
A Hollywood movie.
Talk to me is a stereotypical movie about a black man from the 60s. I do not know much about the history of the United States but from the little I know, the 60s were perhaps the most tumultuous times in their history of this century. And if you are making a movie about a black man in the 60s, you just cannot ignore the era and the historical context. But in this movie, the history of the 60s comes up and lives on the screen for five minhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifutes, maybe less. Amazing! Truly incredible how they manage to do that.
Now I have never heard of Petey Greene before I saw the trailer for this movie and read a little about him on the internet. From the wikipedia page:
He also became a community activist, having joined United Planning Organization (UPO) immediately after his release from prison. He founded Efforts for Ex-Convicts, an organization devoted to helping former prisoners succeed in legitimate ways. He railed against poverty and racism on his shows and on the streets, participating in demonstrations during the height of his popularity. [Link]
But this aspect of him is never shown or mentioned in the entire movie. Without this knowledge, the guy's reason for fame, from the movie, would seem to be his trash talking, "man from DC" appeal and nothing else. It would just have seemed to be a story about a ex-con who became a popular radio host.
I expected the movie to be something that it actually turned out to be.
I haven't yet seen any of Spike Lee's movies but I do have one with me that I plan to watch sometime soon.
I Love Le Guin's works. Le Guin comes across as a very careful writer whose every word needs to be read with care as it is written with a lot of thought behind it. The Earthsea series is one of my favourites in fasntasy series, actually make that all of literature. I have enjoyed reading those books and I am currently reading "The Left Hand of Darkness" which so far has lived up to its expectations. I have read Le Guin's books at different times in my life and everytime, I have discovered something profound in her writings.
For people who know me, they know how big a fan I am of Miyazaki's works. Usually dismissed by people (who I consider to be idiots for stereotyping) as children's films, Miyazaki's animated films are brilliant and a rare breed of filmmaking and I rate his works right at the top of my list of great films. His movies usually deal with subjects very human and earthy but set in worlds that are fantastic, to say the least. He would have the been the perfect director for visualizing the world of Earthsea. And that almost happened. I say almost because the Earthsea series was filmed by his studio, Ghibli, but was directed by his son, another Miyazaki. I had to see it.
But the release of the film was followed by a lot of criticism that just did not suit the expectations I had. Ursula herself bashed the film with strong words -
"Both the American and the Japanese film-makers treated these books as mines for names and a few concepts, taking bits and pieces out of context, and replacing the story/ies with an entirely different plot, lacking in coherence and consistency. I wonder at the disrespect shown not only to the books but to their readers." [Link]
That sealed the fate of the film. I no longer seeked it as much I had.
Of course, that does not mean I would never see the film. Authors are notorious for hating the interpretations of their books. And after I watched it today, I had only one feeling left for it - I hated it. That is probably the worst handling of the series that one can imagine (I haven't seen the American series yet but I am sure that it cannot be worse than this). Le Guin's criticism which seemed harsh is actually bang on target and perhaps, a little lenient. None of the wisdom that I have come to love about Miyzaki's films was on display. In fact, it was a two hour film of pointless fantasy with an inane attempt to instill some aspects of spirituality into it by lifting ideas from the books out of context and making it almost religious. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. This really is a forgettable piece and is best not seen.
Hot Fuzz comes from the makers of the Shaun of the dead, which was an hilarious spoof of the zombie movies. I loved Shaun of the dead and when I heard that the same guys have made a spoof of those single-man-army action movies, I had to see it. Most filmmakers, after a fabulous debut, disappoint with their subsequent movies. I was hoping this wont be the case with these guys and after watching the movie, I can say confidently that they don't. Hot Fuzz is a hilarious spoof and one that is well acted too. Catch Nicholas Angel who is so good at what being a London police constable that he is promoted to the position of Sergeant and... transferred to a small village called Sandford. How so? In the words of Chief Inspector Kenneth, "Yes, I can!" Sanford is a small village in the country which has won the Model Village of the Year award a lot of times with low crime rates and a police force (sorry, I mean police service) comprising of incompetent and bumbling fools, the chief of which is the lovably dumb constable Danny. But Sandford is not as benign as it looks and Sergeant Angle (apologies, Angel) thinks that there the "accidents" that seem to happen with regularity are really murders but nobody believes him and it is all upto him to bring the criminal(s) to justice. Simple enough concept, isn't it? The movies follows the travails of Nicholas Angel, the one man army, and his sidekick as they pursue Sandford's most wanted. Also, the movie makes a case kicks the 'greater good' argument in a amusingly perfect manner and I had to say this way is much better than reading Roy's flowery prose. And their adventures are nothing but hilarious. One scene goes like this - George Merchant: Thanks fellas! How much do I owe you? Danny: 20 quid. GR gives Danny the money. Nicholas snatches the money from Danny and gives it back to GR saying: And here's your change. GR (accepting the money): Thanks.
This is just of the many funny moments in the movie brought about by some really straight faced dialogue delivery.
Ok, I am bored and I tend to watch a lot of movies when that happens. Over the last two weeks, I have been to the theatres thrice and have seen as many movies. I was contemplating to go to 'The Host' sometime but haven't gotten around to doing that. So, the movies that I saw are -
300
A friend of mine recommended and since me and another friend had nothing much to do, we walked into this theatre in LA and saw this movie. Turned out to be the biggest waste of six dollars ever! The movie is entirely shot in front of a blue screen (much like the disastrous 'Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow' which gave the film a unrealistic PC game feel. But that wasn't the worst of it. I can't even begin to explain how lousy this movie was. The other day, I was watching 'Cool Hand Luke' again and I felt that they have stopped making films like those in Hollywood. The best movies of the contemporary world come from Latin America or Iran. No, not even Europe is making them anymore! Anyway, 300 was by far the most bloated, over-hyped movie that turned out to be so goddamn lousy that someone in the crowd (in the theatre) said aloud, "that was horrible" at the end of it.
The Namesake
Based on the novel by the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, this movie is directed by Mira Nair, a director whose works I have loved over the years. I did not like the book probably because I did not relate to its characters. Even though, I did not relate to the characters in the movie version too, I liked the film and I felt that it was probably the best Indian American movies I have seen. All the other 'Desi' movies are things I have found very shallow with caricatured parents and silly storylines but this was refreshingly different. For one, it does not ridicule the parents but portrays them with dignity and even though they do not express their love for each other in the way the Americans do, their love is hard to miss and more harder to not appreciate. Also, it does not go to the other extreme of disparaging the American culture as immoral but shows them to be different. One gets some idea of why ABCDs are called so. Caught between two different worlds and cultures, it might be hard to balance the two. A film that is worth seeing, though there is nothing great about it, unlike Salaam Bombay.
Pan's Labyrinth
After an Indian crossover film, I saw a Mexican film (Spanish with English subtitles). I liked the film because I thought it mixed fantasy with reality (of the setting it was set in - the Spanish Civil War) quite well and is paced very well. The Americans suck at creating fantasy in their movies and they usually resort to things like princesses and queens and kings and princes, which is fairytailey and quite unoriginal. The Japanese animes have gone to whole other world of fantasy, creating the most incredible worlds and amazingly complex stories (see any Miyazaki's films and try not falling in love with them). This film is somewhere in between because even though it deals with a central character who is supposed to be a reborn princess of the underworld, we never see the kind of princess worship that we see in the American films. Also, it deals with pretty adult themes and has some scenes that are fit for children (the villain stabbing a boy in the face with a broken bottle is one). I liked it for its emphasis on its women characters and a nice suspenseful story. Would definitely recommend as a movie to be watched in a theatre.
