Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman)

Year : 1997
Language : Persian
Director : Majid Majidi

Children of Heaven is a movie from Iran, with a subject that is very universal. Ali is a 9 year old child who loses the shoes of his younger sister Zhara while he took it to get them repaired. Being from a poor family they know their father cannot afford to get new pair of shoes for her and they strike a deal to do a time-sharing of Ali's sneakers for going to their respective schools without letting their parents know about it. The rest of the story moves on with the difficulties they face and still overly understanding to each other's situation compounded with the love and affection for each other.

The movie has a simple subject and so pure and innocent and yet powerful is the portrayal of the children, their feelings, their adventures that it strikes an immediate chord of familiarity with the viewer irrespective of whichever culture or background the viewer is from, certainly more than the children movies where a superman comes flying from the stars and kills the dragons, or saves the world from devils masked with rotten flesh. I certainly do believe our children should be exposed to movies like this than the zillions of violent superhero movies and animations.

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12 Angry Men

Welcome to real cinema, 12 Angry Men is one of the finest works in cinema making I have seen. I say so not because this is the most awesome movie I have seen (though it stands among the finest I have seen), but because it stands apart due to raw talent and work of art, the entire movie is completely character driven.

Everything takes places inside a single small and claustrophobic jury room, no background music during the entire movie. But yet Sydney Lumet's characters which make their appearance as distinct entities having widely different personality traits, prejudices and backgrounds, over the course of the movie evolve into a group of such tightly bound organs of the setup that will pull and glue you into its world. Each character is so different that an entire chapter can be devoted to describe each of them and yet they together add up to the complete symphony that is 12 Angry Men.

The story is about a 12 member jury who have to decide the fate of a boy who is accused of killing his father. The jury begins with a vote where 11 vote "guilty" and the only one (Henry Fonda) votes "not gulity" based on "reasonable doubt". The verdict has to be taken unanimously. What follows is a totally gripping discussions and collisions of prejudices and reason.

Reading Roger Ebert's review and watching for the second time I could notice the effect that the movement of the camera had on my emotions the first time I watched it. During the course of the movie, its sheer amazing how the camera places the characters as they evolve in the story and as to their personality aspects, and according to how the atmosphere in the room develops.

The movie was nominated for 3 oscars but apparently lost all of them to another great movie made in the same year "The bridge over the river Kwai" (reviewed earlier).

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The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette)

Year : 1948
Language : Italian
Director : Vittorio De Sica

Its a real pleasant surprise when you watch a movie, love it immensely and than do a little googling only to find out that the movie is regarded as an all time masterpiece. "The Bicycle Thief" is a movie by the Italian director Vittorio De Sica. After watching this movie I got an idea of the meaning of often heard term "neorealism" which in the context of art and movie making often means dealing with the life of the real lower strata of the working class society which is most often poverty stricken.

The movie is set in the post 2nd world war Rome where unemployment is rampant and the society is gravely poverty stricken. Antonio is one such unfortunate man who has a family of four to take care of. He happens to find a job of pasting posters in the city which requires him to have a bicycle. Not having one he and his wife deposit their bedsheets to get some money to get a bicycle. The prospect of having a secure income brings about cheer in the family which has Bruno, Antonio's son and an infant child. With Antonio along with his bicycle which is so must for his livelihood in the city, added to that the title of the movie, it feels so certain that the bicycle is about to be stolen and Sica does take advantage of that suspense at certain times teasing the anxiety of the viewer before the bicycle really gets stolen.

Soon after Antonio along with his son (also initially with some more friends) get on to a tiring and day long hunt for the stolen bicycle. What follows is an up and down ride of hope and despair, finally leading to the most striking and touching scene where Antonio is lured and compelled by his own desperation and agony into attempting to steal another bicycle. The pain, sadness and utter helplessness hanging on the face of Bruno when he sees his father being chased by people on the streets and when he runs to save his father from the crowd is so real. The movie has a very simple story which is rather less of any story with any start or end, but simply a tale of the common day's events in the life of a very common person studied and depicted very strongly with the camera.

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Il Postino : Review

Year : 1994
Language : Italian
Director : Michael Radford

Il Postino is a movie by Michael Radford in italian. The movie is about a young man Mario Ruoppolo who is hired as the personal mail carrier for Pablo Neruda who happens to come and stay in the small island following his political exile from Chile. Mario's first fascination for Neruda begins when he notices the huge number of letters that Neruda receives from women around the world.
His fascination and curiosity about Neruda and his poetry draws him into focusing all his devotion and admiration to the poet. Neruda after some initial overlooking starts taking notice of him. The relationship between the poet and Mario acquires a forceful form when Mario falls in love with the local restaurant girl Beatrice and sees poetry as the only way to reach to her heart. Neruda teaches Mario how to understand poetry but Mario goes a step further and learns how to use it for softening the heart of Beatrice. Mario impresses the girl with the poems of Neruda. When Neruda complained about Mario stealing his poems, Mario says "poetry doesn't belong to the one who composed it, but to the ones who need it" :) Mario and Beatrice get married and than Neruda returned to his country Chile.

After Neruda left, the world of Mario turns upside down. Mario awaits letters from Neruda which never came. It plunges him into a state of depression and he feels he deserves to be forgotten as he is worth nothing, he is not a poet as people thought as he hadn't written anything that came from his heart. That's when he begins recording the sounds of life in the island which he thought would remind the poet of it. It was an act straight from his heart. He began writing and one of his poems that he wrote about Pablo Neruda was invited to be recited on a stage, unfortunately a fight broke out between the crowd and the police and in the stampede Mario never reached the stage. All this recording, the sounds of the waves, of the wind finally leading to the sound of the stampede was finally given to Neruda by Beatrice when long later he visited the island.

The movie delicately touches upon romance, on the beauty of poetry, the relationship between Mario and Neruda which was a complicated web of feelings that encompassed love and admiration, of friendship and of teacher and student. Mario who calls himself a communist after Neruda leaves, also showed how he bent to an ideology not out of any intellectual spark but rather for his immense devotion and trust for the man whom he believed stands for everything right and beautiful. The beautiful island with its rocky and sandy beaches, with the blue sky and the sparkling Mediterranean in the backdrop was a real feast to the eyes. Overall a great movie.

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Parzania

This movie is inspired from the true events that happened during the communal violence in Gujarat (India) that started with a carnage and ended with a genocide.

The story starts with a picture perfect parsi middle class family, with the roles of husband and wife played by Naseruddin Shah and Sarika respectively. There's also this character, an American guy writing his thesis on Gandhi and trying to find the answers to his questions about life. The couple has a son named Parzan and daughter Dilshad. They happen to live in a neighborhood predominantly dominated by muslims. The story is about the sequence of events that happen on the day after the Godhra carnage, where in less than 30 hours tens of thousands of fanatics mobbed the city, burnt and butchered men, women and children, raped women and girls, burnt houses and property belonging to muslims. Withing 72 hours almost a thousand living human beings were dead because they happened to be muslims. Cirus and Sehnaz lost their only son Parzan.

Technically the movie has too many drawbacks, I fail to understand why the movie was made in english. The common people depicted in the movie speaking english sounded strange. The movie has really excellent performance from Sarika (she got the best actress award in the national film festival just days back for this role), Naseruddin Shah and Raj Zutshi, but rest of the characters fail to do their job very well.

Its a must watch movie not because its a masterpiece in its script or direction or photgraphy, but rather for touching the truth which needs to be spoken and reminded.

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A Passage to India

It took me a while to get down to write something about this movie as I felt at loss to jot down my own thoughts about it for some time. A Passage to India is based on the novel with the same title written by E.M.Forster. One of the reviews about this movie said that its a literary riddle that every viewer is challenged to decipher in light of his or her own perception of human passion and prejudice. I couldn't agree more.

At several instances in the movie India along with the Indian villagers are shown to be massively chaotic which for a moment irked me (or probably to the indianess in me) but the truth is that India is chaotic or rather to make it complete as Rushdie says in Shalimar the Clown, India is a chaos that makes sense.

The movie has really good cast. Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), the beautiful Adela Quested (Judy Davis) and Richard Fielding (James Fox) all do their job to perfection.

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The Bridge on the River Kwai

Brilliant movie, with a story that kept me engrossed right from the start till the climax at the end, having characters who couldn't be better. The story is neither about the bridge, nor about the river but deep subtle descriptions of the characters placed under extraordinary situations. A group of British soldiers being brought as PoWs in a camp managed by a stern Japanse Colonel Saito who doesn't believe in going by books but has his own set of rules as exemplified by when he says "Do not speak to me of rules. This is war! This is not a game of cricket!"

The british soldiers are led by their officer Col. Nicholson, another superb character who is committed to his principles and military code of integrity. After a dramatic war between Nicholson's principles and Saito's ego , they make a deal. The soldiers build a magnificent bridge that was assigned to Saito to be build over river Kwai (deep inside the forests of Burma). In the process Nicholson was able to feed his men proper food, kept them off from Prisoner Camp's depression, maintained their discipline. The third and in my opinion the most intriguing character of the movie is Col. Shears who made a miraculous escape from Saito's capture and made it to Ceylon where his nice days come to an end sooner than he expected, when he was asked to accompany a team which would go to the bridge site to destroy the bridge. The way Shears' character unfolds and explains itself to the viewer is so amazing. The gunfight leading to the climax and the climax itself had some fantabulous dialogues and expressions, especially when Nicholson sees Shears while he crossed the river to save the mission, Nicholson gets into a moral remorse saying "What have I done ?" Dr. Clipton witnessing the entire carnage says "Madness! Madness!"

This is the first movie of David Lean that I saw. A must watch movie and a well deserved 7 Oscars and 8.4/10 at IMDB.

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Unforgiven

Another high IMDB rated movie. The westerns genre doesn't really fit my taste but this movie was worth spending the time. Clint Eastwood appears as Will, father of two kids and a former killer/gunslinger who happened to change and become an honest person by the efforts of his late wife. But things change when one day a kid who calls himself a killer as well, comes upto him asking him to partner in to kill a couple of cowboys who had a 1000 dollar bounty on their heads, given by a group of prostitutes. After initial refusal he decides to do this last murder for the money and goes on for the killer journey with his old friends Ned (Morgan Freeman). The story unfolds in very unexpected ways and depicts a personality of Will dotted with so many contradictions. There are some real nice punching dialogues as well as the ending soundtrack is amazing. Wikipedia has a very interesting entry having details/opinions about the movie which i think is a must read after watching the movie.

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Born on the Fourth of July

"Born on the Fourth of July" is a Vietnam War movie based on the book of Ron Kovic and directed by Oliver Stone. To date this is best movie of Tom Cruise I have seen. Infact it won't be an exaggeration to say that this movie is a "One man performance", inspite of a lack of a great story and a complete flat lack lustre performance by all the other characters (infact the other characters virtually don't matter in the story), the movie is extremely good. Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) after finishing his school being driven by patriotism, joins the marine and is sent to Vietnam. After going through all the war horrors he returns back with half his body paralysed. Expecting a great honour back home which he doesn't get, he undergoes a mental collapse. The whole portrait of Ron transforming from a smart patriotic youth to a physically and mentally broken man and thereafter into one of the lead figures in anti-war demonstrations is sheer amazing.

Making a movie on the war horrors as a theme is a difficult job as evident from the few which have been able to handle it very well. I wonder if there would be ever an attempt to make some movie on this subject in the indian film industry, dealing the subject rationally, pointing out the ugliness on all sides of the fence rather than spreading sheer jingoism.

(watched on july 28th, 07)

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SiCKO

Michale Moore's latest documentary SiCKO is a documentary about the American Health Care system. IMHO this is one of most serious piece of work I have seen in recent times. This guy has a big mouth (according to those who actually have big ones) but I am glad there is someone like him who has the spine to speak out so strongly on subjects that matter. I have never needed the American Health Care but the blues of Private Health Insurance I believe is the same everywhere. Last time I got a private health insurance, was for a travel (coincidentally to US) and one of the terms of the insurance was that my insurance would be declined if I don't take the prior permission on their toll free call number before I need the healthcare. I always kept wondering how on earth I would be able to call a number if I happen to meet with an accident on the road with my body broken and if I am not able to, will they not cover my treatment ? And yes I saw the answer, one of the patients appearing in SiCKO actually had an accident in a head-on car collision and she couldn't make the call, and so were the Insurance company not able to pay the money.

I loved this work of Moore. He has also given some funny (though covering serious subject) and typical Michale Moore touches to the documentary. Post SiCKO release Moore appeared in CNN on a head-on collision track with CNN's medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, and if you want to see how a man looks when he speaks what he doesn't believe in, than look at Dr.Gupta's face when he counters Moore's points with loose and insignificant arguments.

One of the questions that Moore puts before Dr. Gupta is "you as a doctor, how do you feel when a patient is lying before you and you got to call up someone sitting in a cubicle 1000 miles away who doesn't understand a bit about medical care and take permission from him whether or not you should treat him ? " That's immoral, unethical and inhuman.

(Watched on july 26th, 07)

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