Cinema Blog

Naalu Pennungal AKA Four Women

2009-02-16T02:36:00.000-08:00

Year : 2007
Language : Malayalam
Country : India
Director : Adoor Gopalkrishnan

The film distills to a rare purity four tales of village women in south India. Their titles are elemental: The Prostitute, The Virgin, The Housewife and The Spinster. In each, a woman submits to a role society decides for her. Each role offers a paradox of freedom and bondage in nearly equal measure.

Buddha Collapsed out of Shame

2009-02-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

Year : 2007
Language : Persian
Country : Iran
Director : Hana Makhmalbaf

The youngest of the Makhmalbaf clan of Iranian filmmakers, Hana Makhmalbaf has made her second feature before the age of 20; though Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame has an economy and control directors twice her age couldn't manage.

Set in the Afghan town of Bamian, amid the rubble of the statues of Buddha blown up by the Taliban in 2001, the film follows the heartbreaking attempts of a six-year-old girl to take herself to school. The tenacious and cute Bakhtay's desire, in the absence of her mother, is not easily attained. And her allegorical travails, as she struggles first to find the money to buy a schoolbook, then to get past the barrier of boys "playing" Taliban in the desert – a game that includes putting a hood over the girl's head, threatening to stone her, and digging her grave – speaks volumes about the plight of women in her country.

My review postponed for later, this one is copied from another reviewer...

Nayagan

2009-02-16T02:24:00.000-08:00

Year : 1987
Language : Tamil
Country : India
Director : Mani Ratnam

Godfather style epic movie, great one.

...Detailed Review Later...

Before the Rains

2009-02-16T02:21:00.001-08:00

Year : 2008
Language : English, Malayalam
Country : India
Director : Santosh Sivan

...Detailed Review Later....

Pestonjee

2009-02-16T02:15:00.000-08:00

Year : 1988
Language : Hindi
Country : India
Director : Vijaya Mehta

This movie certainly needs a very detailed review as it is a great movie with some awesome craft involved in building each and every character. Another must watch movie.

Detailed Review Later...

Teesta

2009-02-16T02:04:00.000-08:00

Year : 2008
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Bratya Basu

Very strange movie. Shows the life of a very lonely young and beautiful lady Teesta, who slowly wins the sympathy of the viewer only to loose all of it as the movie moves forward, for what ? What the director wanted to show I have no clue.... There is some awesome scenic beauty of Darjeeling area though.

Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist

2009-02-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

Year : 1999
Language : Tamil
Country : India
Director : Santosh Sivan

Very very good movie, another great example of Santosh Sivan's craft. Must watch movie...

...Detailed Review Later....

Hatey Bazarey

2009-02-16T01:54:00.000-08:00

Year : 1967
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Tapan Sinha

Very One dimensional characters depicting fight btw good and evil. But brilliant acting by Ashok Kumar.

...Detailed Review Later....

Tahaan

2009-02-16T01:51:00.000-08:00

Year : 2008
Language : Hindu
Country : India
Director : Santosh Sivan

Excellent Movie.

.....Review Later..... (Not enough time now :) )

Nimantran

2009-02-16T01:47:00.000-08:00

Year : 1971
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Tarun Majumdar

....Review Later....

Printed Rainbow

2008-12-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

Year : 2006
Type : Animation
Director : Gitanjali Rao

Printed Rainbow is an animated short film by Gitanjali Rao, a gold medalist from Sir JJ Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai. The film has a very simple story, that of an elderly woman who lives in a small apartment of a residential-complex in a big city with her cat. Her life is very monotonous and to say the least without any joy and excitement, as is the life of senior citizens in big cities. Her only escape from the real world is her collection of match boxes each of which has a picture of a very colorful world. She sitting on her arm chair escapes into this imaginary world where she fulfills her crave for excitement and happiness such as walking into a palace, floating with a boat in a river inside the forest, or driving a truck and overtaking all others on the road.

The story of Printed Rainbow has a very strong universal appeal cross-cutting cultural boundaries and beatifully portrays the difficulties of elderly people in a metropolitan lifestyle. The life in the apartment is shown in black and white animated sketches showing the dullness and the other imaginary world which is full with adventure and happiness is shown in bright beautiful colors which conveys the mood of the story very strongly without uttering a single word.

The movie also made me very nostalgic and reminded me of this childhood pre-occupation I had of collecting the front picture of matchstick boxes, often competing among friends of the most exclusive collection one had. It flooded me with pleasant memories of those "Sivakasi" brand match boxes and my friends who were lost in my old memories.

Printed Rainbow saw her become the only Indian to win three awards at the Cannes Critics' Week Section and win awesome reviews and acclaim worldwide. A very beautiful work of art, one must see.

Tingya

2008-12-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

Year : 2007
Language : Marathi
Country : India
Director : Mangesh Hadawale

I will quote the content from Tingya's webpage : It is a painstakingly meticulous movie about an emotional love story between a bull and a boy, Tingya. It inquires through Tingya’s innocence the validity of existence. It queries the order of the alive and breathing. Is it the man, animal, bird and the sea or vice versa? Who regulates and classifies the categories? Who arranges and sorts the array of the breathings? Is it legitimate?.

The movie starts paying tribute to those thousands of farmers who committed suicide between years 1993 to 2006 at a ratio of 9,360 a year, and who inspire the story.

It was the time to harvest the potatoes. Karbhari, the village farmer was all geared up to yield the tubers and payback the money he owed to the local village money lender Sahukar Tatya. It was one unfortunate evening that coming back from the graze, Chitangya, Karbhari’s bull fell into the leopard traps and broke his hind leg. Unable to stand on its feet and move, it was not possible for Chitangya to plough the fields. Persistent and constant medication and treatment by Karbhari and his wife Anjana could not resurrect Chitangya to employ. Karbhari now went through shivers. As a little delay in reaping would have the buds on the potatoes. Karbhari did not want to penalize himself more from the sahukar. Pandu, a neighbor farmer from the village had just committed a suicide two days ago as not able to return the money to Sahukar. The only choice he could think was to sell the bull to a local butcher and add some money to buy a young bull who could work. But Tingya, Karbhari’s 7 year old younger son did not think of Chitangya in the same breath. Chitangya was not just the animal for him. Chitangya was his elder brother. He was born with Chitangya. He was two months younger than Chitangya.They had shared so many moments together. They had grown up together. And he had a volley of valid questions to which no one had the answers... “Why wasn’t Rashida’s grandmother being sold to the butcher? She too was old and not working. Why were they all taking care of her and not his Chitangya? Chitangya certainly would not depart.” The death of the old grandmother in the neighboring house and selling of an animal come face to face to reveal the reality.

David Lynch's short interview

2008-12-02T07:04:00.000-08:00

Read here. or the following inlined text...

Questions for David Lynch

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: November 21, 2008

This interview is scheduled to appear in a special issue on screens, so let’s start by contemplating the current fascination with the small screen.
That’s a terrible subject. There’s nothing like the big screen. The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience. As an example, there’s Stanley Kubrick’s “2001:A Space Odyssey” — this would be kind of a pathetic joke on a little screen.
How do you feel about someone watching your films — “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” — on a laptop?
More and more people are seeing the films on computers — lousy sound, lousy picture — and they think they’ve seen the film, but they really haven’t.
Because the small screen emphasizes plot over visuals?
It’s a pathetic horror story.
On the other hand, you do appear on countless computer screens every day, giving a weather report from your home in Los Angeles, on your Web site.
People are kind of interested in weather. It’s not artistic. It’s just me sitting there in my painting studio.
Who films you?
It’s a camera that comes down out of the ceiling.
I hear you’re starting an online series on transcendental meditation, based on your book “Catching the Big Fish.” Is the small screen a good format for discussing meditation?
Any format is a good format for meditation. Every single person has within an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness. Every single human being can experience that — infinite intelligence, infinite creativity, infinite happiness, infinite energy, infinite dynamic peace.
Tell us about your foundation.
The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace — we raise money to give meditation to any student or school. There is a huge waiting list.
As a devotee of cultivated bliss, how do you explain the proclivity for twisted eroticism and dismembered body parts in your films?
A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.
Do you see yourself as an American Surrealist?
Dennis Hopper called me that, and that is the way he sees it. It’s more than just Surrealism to me.
I think of you as someone who transported the noir sensibility from the city into a Norman Rockwell setting. What do you think of his paintings?
I love his work. It’s like Edward Hopper. They see a certain thing, and they catch it.
What is that clock you’re holding in this photograph?
I just didn’t want to stand there like an idiot. It’s an old clock, but I am building this plastic bubble around it.
Is it a sculpture?
In a way it is. You mentioned Surrealism, and time was very important to the Surrealists.
But Dali painted melting clocks, and yours isn’t melting, is it?
It’s not melting, no. But part of it is made of polyester resin, which at one time was liquid.
I hear you’re getting married again.
In February. I’m marrying a girl named Emily Stofle.
Is she an actress? Was she in any of your films?
She was just in one, “Inland Empire.”
You’ve been married three times before?
Yeah, it’s real great.
Why would someone who feels so generally blissed out marry so many times?
Well, we live in the field of relativity. Things change.
Do you plan to film your wedding?
No. It’s a hassle. So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?
Because most people have the experience and forget it.
Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

Bollygood Stereotypes

2008-11-22T08:48:00.000-08:00

An amazing article on Bollywood movie industry appears in the latest Tehelka written by Jerry Pinto. I am quoting the article below... A must read.

Bollywood stereotypes have always been magnified versions of ourselves. In tracking 10 that have changed, JERRY PINTO tells us things — both encouraging and alarming—about our society

THE MORE Bollywood changes, the more it stays the same. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is to admit that it is the popular culture of note in this country; that it is still patriarchal and insensitive to issues of gender and sexuality and community, but that it has also been forced to change.

For example: When did you last see a Bollywood daddy come to the head of the winding staircase in a wine-red robe and declare, “Yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti”?

When did you last see a Bollywood mummy grab her son by the arm and, in a voice flooded with tears, implore, “Mera suhaag bacha lo beta”?

When did you last visit a villain’s den with a resident crocodile, a pool of pink acid — or even a pole on which to twirl the hero into submission?

When did the heroine last throw herself on the bed and weep because she had been offered a blank cheque on her happy bir-day?

When did the hero last spread his legs, bend one knee, point into the sky and yodel?

Tell the truth. There’s even a bit of you that misses them. They were the old tropes of a cinema that now seems addicted to kitsch. Then, when God appeared on screen, he wore a mukut and was barechested and, in order to prove he was God, he skipped from the left to the right of Sanjeev Kumar in KS Sethumadhavan’s Yehi Hai Zindagi. Today, God wears a three-piece suit and has a bunch of kudis as his board of directors. And it wasn’t Amitabh Bachchan playing God; not even Amar Singh; it was Rishi Kapoor in Kunal Kohli’s Thoda Pyaar, Thoda Magic.

One reason for this change is the DVD revolution. In Kerala, you can get Wong- Kar Wei for Rs 30. In Mumbai, Parajanov for a 100 bucks. In Bangalore, there’s an unnamed young lawyer who dumped hundreds of downloaded DVDs to kickstart the piracy market. In Palika Bazar, you can get all of the above and more.

Another is the presence of an international audience. Says Dr Sudha Rajagopalan, author of the engaging and informative Leave Disco Dancer Alone: Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-Going after Stalin, “The Hindi film is now a spectrum of genres and its makers come from a variety of backgrounds; so they now try to address a greater diversity of audiences than they used to. What I have seen over the last decade are lead protagonists who get to play romantic superheroes but still others who articulate small-town ambition, foreground minority identities, critique consumerism, interrogate political apathy and accommodate (even if only discreetly) gayness. I think Hindi films continue to be very socially engaged, and have only replaced the earlier ‘socialist’ concerns about class disparities and middle-class hypocrisy of the 50s films with a new interest in a wider range of identity politics in contemporary India.”

Here, we’ll look at some stereotypes that we’ve grown to take for granted — and at the changes that have happened to them. They may tell us a little more about ourselves, some of it encouraging, some alarming.

THE HERO
IT BEGAN IN Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela. “Kya kare, kya na kare, yeh kaisi mushqil hai” sang Munna (Aamir Khan), wondering at his inability to take the step that separated friendship from love. An era of uncertainty was born: the man was no longer top dog but a somewhat lovelorn puppy.

But it was the rise of Yashraj and his young Turks that redefined cinema. Just as Yash Chopra had rewritten the romantic film, insisting on lush locales, the perfect sari, Lata Mangeshkar keening in the background and the air frosty with sugar candy and icicles, the young men in his stable began rewriting the hero.

“The hero has become less of an epic hero — unless it’s a super hero movie — and more of a low-key, low-intensity friendly neighbourhood patriarch,” says Rahul Srivastava, popular culture enthusiast and urban studies scholar. “I’m thinking of Munnabhai, for instance. But patriarch he remains. The male figure reigns supreme even when the narrative is women-oriented, as in old-fashioned films like Damini or Lajja. This extends to Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na: the tests for his machismo — riding a horse, going to jail and beating someone up — are played against the socialisation that his mother [Ratna Pathak-Shah] is trying to enforce. It takes the logic that Rangeela initiated to its conclusion.”

Before Bollywood was born, the hero was the lover. Amitabh Bachchan turned him into a warrior. For 20 years, he and all the men around him, waged single-handed war against evil, playing out the Ramayana again and again. Now, the pendulum is swinging back to the lover.

Only this time, no one is quite sure what kind of lover is needed.

When Munna took Milly (Urmila Matondkar) in his arms at the end of Rangeela, we knew this was a triumph of the proletariat. The rich and successful Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff) lost her to love. This was the standard trope of Hindi cinema. The rich boy had everything — including blank cheques for his birthday — except love. The poor girl has nothing except a loving family. (Raj Kapoor’s Bobby may be the prototype.) He raises her to his caste and class position in a process of Sanskritisation called anuloma. (Marriage in the natural way of things. Pratiloma is marriage against the grain.) Now, we don’t know who’ll win.

Srivastava is fascinated that the hero is no longer the little guy. The tramp is now firmly dead. Just as America replaced Charlie Chaplin with Rambo, we replaced Raj Kapoor with Salman Khan. “What is interesting is that the loser has such little chance of becoming (even accidentally) a hero. It’s very much the age of worshipping success,” he says.

So, while it is possible for Saif Ali Khan to be a little confused about women in Salaam Namaste, Ranvir Sheorey in Ugly aur Pagli is only seen as contemptible. (Thanks to the DVD revolution, we have Jae-young Kwak’s My Sassy Girl playing at a pirate next door. Why should we want a pale imitation?) And if someone had asked the patriarch in an office the size of a football field, he would have told them: A hero cannot kill the parents of children and hope to win their love. It doesn’t work that way. Loser.

THE HEROINE
FOR NEARLY EIGHT decades, the basic heroine remained unchanged. She was a virgin, in body and soul and mind; dutiful, beautiful and almost immobile in her virtue. The world was divided between the safe (the houses of her father and her husband) and the fraught (the wider world, the bhari duniya that the ablaa always feared).

And then she began to change.

Marginally.

It may have begun with Kunal Kohli’s near-unbearable Hum Tum. In this mess of humourless cartoons, there was one moment in which the old script was thrown out of the window. In a moment of passion, Rhea (Rani Mukherjee) and Karan (Saif Ali Khan) have sex. That they do this on a Mumbai beach, after a dip in the sea around South Mumbai, might suggest suicidal tendencies. But the next morning, when Rhea wakes up, she is not thinking of killing herself. She is not weeping copiously. That’s something of a first. Nor does she die at the end, as other women who transgress these sexual limits inevitably do.

One of the many couples who board the pink bus of honeymooners in Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd is a Bengali couple: the anally retentive Partho (Kay Kay Menon) and the dewy-eyed Milly (Raima Sen). In one hilarious sequence, she goes paragliding in a sari, which begins to unravel as Partho dances about on the beach below, horrified at this vastraharan. But when Milly lands, she chooses not to wrap herself in her sari, strutting away from him in her pretty blouse and petticoat. This marks a departure for her character, for the heroine in general, and for us as audience.

Look at Geet Dhillon (Kareena Kapoor) in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met. She is talkative, brassy, she meets life head on. When she meets Aditya Kashyap (Shahid Kapur), he is reticent while she babbles on. Finally, she leans in close and asks if he’s taken any “drugs-shugs”. Her tone is not outraged, she’s not drawing away in horror, she is merely curious and somewhat solicitious.

But, to many, these are the swallows that do not make a summer. “Even if the heroine has taken over the vamp’s role, she must have a certain innocence about her,” says Dr Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, “She cannot be aware of the effect she is having on men. That was what made Madhuri Dixit such a star. She had the innocent face and the direct smile that undercut anything she did.”

In that sense, the formula we will always have. The heroine may be independent, she may have a career, she may even be an object of some mystery to the hero, but she will always return to her roots once she falls in love. This is generally indicated by a shift of sartorial allegiance from west to east.

And while it is quite the done thing for a heroine to play a prostitute — there has been a long line of such women from Meena Kumari in Pakeezah to Sharmila Tagore in Mausam to Kareena Kapoor in Chameli — it’s quite another thing to play a woman of loose morals. Soha Ali Khan tried that in Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand and that went nowhere.

As the positive moral pole of the universe, the heroine cannot move too far from her position. She’s right, she’s always right, and the right-wing will keep her there.

THE FAMILY
ONCE UPON A time there was a father, a mother and several sons. Always sons. This showed how efficient the family was at baby-making. They would sing a song as the mother did her tulsi puja and the boys did their boy thing and the father went to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

Bollywood took it seriously, this thing about the family being the building blocks of society. We knew a lot about characters simply from their names. Devdas? Brahmin. Vijay? Kshatriya.

Amitabh Bachchan punched through that. In Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar ka Sikandar, he has no name, he tells his Eternal Mother Nirupa Roy, because people only abuse him. She calls him Sikandar. She’s a Muslim, we know, because Sikandar takes her corpse to be buried — but we never know where his allegiance lies.

This cinematic moment is extended in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela. Munna is not a name, it’s a nickname. Munna could be Hindu or Muslim or nothing at all. When we visit his house, he has no gods, only a picture of Schwarzenegger. In Satya, we meet Satya (Chakravarthy) stepping into Mumbai’s underworld. We know he must be Hindu, but he has no family. He never refers to his parents, his village, his origins. At last, we seemed to be cutting loose.

But a simultaneous development suggested that we weren’t done with the family. As a production house, the Rajshris spent decades promoting clean family dramas. They located action in either the extended family (Tapasya) or in the unit of two lovers (Taraana). The advent of the violent 1970s had left their films flopping, all that kept the company from bankruptcy was a small film called Nadiya Ke Paar which did more than a crore rupees business in Bihar.

It was this story that Sooraj Barjatya resurrected for Hum Aapke Hain Kaun..? The wildly successful film reminded Bollywood that there was no need for a villain, no need for a vamp. The old debate between duty and self could still be brought into play. That it was now set in a huge mansion and played out by young, westernised people, gave it a stronger charge. Baghban’s success set that in stone.

The family, we are always going to have with us.

THE CHILD
KITAAB, THAT STRANGE 1977 experiment by Gulzar, relies almost entirely on the skills of Master Raju and Master Tito, and the most unimpressively picturised song of all time: Dhanno ki aankhon mein raat ka surma. Both children tried to put years of cutie-pie acting behind them but failed. The child was never a person, but a tool with which your heartstrings were tugged. To this end, they fell asleep crying, had rare diseases, made huge sacrifices — and simpered.

It was only in Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom that we came close to the level of Daisy Irani, or Master Rattan and Kumari Naaz in Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish. (Time called it a gem of a film.)

Instructively, both Kitaab and Boot Polish offer depictions of poverty and suffering. In Kitaab, Babla (Master Raju) experiences coldness from the middleclass passengers on the train, but is welcomed by the beggars, and even shares the last traces of body warmth in a corpse. In Boot Polish, a bootlegger offers Belu and Bhola a chance at selfrespect, while finding herself in a rich home makes Belu very unhappy.

Perhaps the age of the normal child star is over. In Mani Ratnam’s Anjali, Baby Shamili was feted for her performance as the mentally challenged little girl, helped by some skilful lighting. When Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s dreadful Black was released, ‘critics’ went gaga over Ayesha Kapur’s young Michelle McNally. And then Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par brought us Darsheel Safary’s little boy with dyslexia and parents with dementia. (They never cotton on that he has learning disabilities? Sure.)

Notice something? If you’re going to have a child in the movies, you had better give it some kind of problem. Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, you get the little tykes of Siddharth Anand’s Ta Ra Rum Pum, which tried to combine two genres in one uncomfortable film. Ever since Feroze Khan first strutted his stuff in the 1970s, the racing car has been a phallic symbol, suggesting sexual freedom and license. And here was Rajveer Singh (Saif Ali Khan), daddy to Princess and Champ, revving his engine rather hopelessly in the pit?

An odd and tangential idea. We need to call all the Iranian directors we can find to run workshops for Indian children. We could have Jafar Panahi, who handled the independent little kid in The Mirror; or Majid Majidi, who tore our hearts open with Children of Heaven; if we’re lucky, we could get Abbas Kiarostami, who got two superb performances from two young men: Babek Ahmed Poor in Where is the House of my Friend? and Amin Maher in Ten.

THE FRIENDS
THE FILM THAT launched Harman Baweja, Love Story 2050, was set in the future, but quite a few of its elements seemed set in Bollywood’s distant past. The rich boy with no love in his life and a mother in the sky, with whom he holds conversations designed to wring your withers. Bratty kids who interrupt the lovemaking. Male friends who wander behind the hero, looking dopey and making the hero look more…well, more heroic.

We never saw the heroine’s friends as individuals. Once in a while, a special sakhi would read her letters and offer camp comments; but, in general, it was the girls’ hockey team, as in Teesri Manzil. The hero’s friend, however, served a special purpose. Before the multi-starrer, he was a comic who often announced his sexual immaturity with the clothes he wore: bright colours, short trousers, strange hats. His job was to provide contrast: where the hero was brave and dashing, the comic wanted to go home; the hero much in demand, the comic unwelcome; the hero oozing testosterone, his friend trailing slime.

In the late 1970s, budgets shot through the roof as multi-starrers seemed the only way to make money. Start with a Bachchan. Add a Kapoor, any Kapoor. Is there room for a Sinha or a Khanna? Script? What script? The new heroes spoke Bollywoodese, a strange argot by which men pledge eternal devotion to each other, to their mothers, to God and their native lands. Which is why Sai Paranjpe’s Chashme Buddoor was such a relief. Jai (Ravi Baswani) and Omi (Rakesh Bedi) have only one function in the life of their roomie Siddharth (Farooque Shaikh): to make him get a high-paying job so they can all live in the manner to which they’d like to get accustomed.

But that was seen as a middle-of-theroad movie, a new coinage for the egregious 1980s. Bollywood didn’t make that kind of film; outsiders did. Then Farhan Akhtar made Dil Chahta Hai. For the first time, young men talked like young men. They lived in houses that looked like the kind you might live in if you had lots of money, and a very chic interior designer. One scene merits attention: the moment when Akash (Aamir Khan) mocks Siddharth (Akshaye Khanna) for having a relationship with an older woman. It has all the rough edges of young men talking to each other.

This spawned a clutch of ensemble cast films, spreading bets over a bunch of smaller stars, casting Farhan Akhtar as a rock star and Purab Kohli, the reliable and ignored talent, as the friend.

But when Daddy makes a film for beta, you must bring on the 1970s caricature- friends because you don’t want competition to share his spotlight. So what if it doesn’t work?

THE MINORITY
ASCENE IN FEROZE Khan’s Qurbani sums up Bollywood’s attitude to Parsis. The hero encounters a Parsi couple in a vintage car. The man speaks in a high-pitched voice, the woman is seductive. What are we to take away? The man is impotent? The woman is unsatisfied? Both are nuts?

In KS Sethumadhavan’s Julie, the Anglo-Indian Roman Catholic Julie goes to her Hindu boyfriend’s house and says she loves coming over because their home smells of incense. Her own smells of alcohol, cigarettes, meat and a fourth odour made of the other three.

In my book, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, I noted that the secularism of Bollywood arose out of commercial arithmetic. Muslims were a huge segment of the film-going audience so the Muslim was always a sympathetic figure: the basti’s Rahim chacha wanted everyone to come and eat sweets at his home over Eid. Parsis and Christians were seen as westernised, uninterested in Bollywood, so could be lampooned.

But, as in all things Bollywood, there are so many exceptions that the rule almost founders. The biggest is Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony, a film with a heart so large and a spirit so magnificent that it takes in everyone and laughs at everything, including its own pretensions. The titles roll on the blood of the three brothers surging into the veins of their mother. Each boy is asked his name. The first says, Amar. The second says, Akbar. The third says, Anthony and the blood rises from each young arm and joins into a single red stream and flows into the arm of the blind flowerseller, Nirupa Roy, to the tune of “Kya iski keemat chukaani nahin? Khoon khoon hota hai paani nahin”. Desai was told that blood donation didn't happen that way. He said he didn’t care how they did it in hospitals. He had a statement to make: we contribute to the body politic, Hindus, Muslims, Christians.

But for all this, the eldest brother is always Hindu and if ever there must be an intercaste marriage, the boy is always a Hindu. Hindus and Muslims do not marry onscreen, unless in an overt political statement (Mani Ratnam’s Bombay). But in the odd hierarchies that custom and power have established, a heroine could be Christian. Liz (Waheeda Rehman) in Baazi, Miss Edna (Madhubala) in Howrah Bridge, Bobby (Dimple) in Bobby, Jenny (Parveen Babi) in Amar Akbar Anthony and Annie (Manisha Koirala) in Khamoshi all marry their men without anyone saying, “She’s Isaai”.

How far have we come? When I was writing Helen, it struck me that one reason she may not have made the transition from dancer to heroine might have been her name. Today, we have quite a few Christian sounding names: John Abraham, Genelia D’Souza, Dino Morea, are three examples.

But the parodies continue. In Imtiaz Ali’s Socha Na Tha, Karen Fernandes's (Apoorva Jha’s) father (Sohrab Ardeshir) is a parody of the Bollywood Catholic. He speaks with an English accent, lives in a bungalow, drinks alcohol by the litre and sees it as a test of masculinity.

And as for Muslims... unfortunately, skip forward a bit to Villain.

THE POOR
THE POOR OFTEN showed up in Hindi cinema. Not just the decorative poor, but real people of flesh and blood and dreams. KA Abbas and Raj Kapoor turned them into box office magic, giving us the little man with big dreams, who could pick up a dafli and sing, “Dil ka haal suneh dilwaala.”

Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, a faithful portrait of the landless poor, was a hit in Mumbai. Watching it today, you can see why the poor rickshaw puller that Bhisham Sahni mentions in his book Mere Bhai Balraj was so moved, why he kept saying to Balraj Sahni “This is my story, babu, this is my story.”

As lathis rain at Singur, as motorcycles roll into Nandigram, the farmers lose all over again. When Shambhu tells the landlord that land is the farmer’s mother, the landlord replies that industry is its father. The metaphor of penetration and conquest implicit in this patriarchal retort is evident, even today.

After Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...? it became a rule: everyone dresses well. Even extras must be colour-coordinated. The school-teacher's daughter wears designer saris. The poor we will always have with us, but must we tell their stories? The only time poverty enters the pictures today is in films like Pradeep Sarkar’s Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, but it is sorted out with a quick spot of high-class prostitution, as if there were no pimps in Mumbai to make sure prostitutes remain poor. Sarkar’s Parineeta had some poor people but they, like the family in LCMD, were land-rich upper-caste people.

The peasantry are reduced to colourful people, almost always in Rajasthani clothes, as in Apoorva Lakhia’s Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost. With the death of middle-of-the-road cinema, with Shyam Benegal going into what seemed like retirement, it seemed as if we weren’t going to notice our villages again.

But once again, all is not lost. The multiplex cinemas and DVD revolution have conspired to make possible films like Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi and Shyam Benegal’s robust comedy, Welcome to Sajjanpur.

Bollywood would do well to look at Marathi cinema. Nishikant Kamat’s Dombivli Fast was a powerful look at the man on the fourth seat of local trains. (These seats are built for three. The fourth man must adjust on a narrow strip of metal.) UV Kulkarni’s Valu and Mangesh Hadawale’s Tingya were both set in villages and had the charm of Sai Paranjpe’s films in the 1980s.

Hindi cinema should remember that it is the telling of stories that makes a national cinema. If it wants to retain its claim as the popular culture of India, it is going to have start thinking local even as it starts behaving global.

THE ALTERNATIVE
THERE HAS ALWAYS been a camp element to Bollywood. “The stars were always flamboyant and as the male body became sexualised, it wasn’t just gay, it was also kinky. There was a strong element of sado-masochism in the leather trousers and the chaps and the like. Sometimes, I think the kinky was more important than the gay thing,” says Vikram Doctor, long-time observer of Bollywood and of gay trends.

Few people remember it but Bollywood’s first outing with gay trends was Prem Kapoor’s Badnaam Basti (1971). While not about homosexuality, it refered to two men in love and didn’t either demonise or caricature them.

Otherwise, the gay man turned up only to be mocked. In Sholay, he offers the ersatz Hitler of Indian jails (Asrani) a kiss. In Bobby Darling, Bollywood found his apotheosis: camp, shrill, of indeterminate gender. Ecce homo, said Bollywood with delight.

Things changed with films like Onir’s My Brother Nikhil and Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd (Although, even when situational lesbianism shows up in a film like Jabbar Patel’s Subah/ Umbartha, the heroine, herself struggling for selfhood, shows no sympathy.)

Dostaana is not a departure. Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham are only pretending to be gay, as all those heroes in drag weren’t actually women. The humour was derived from the pretence. At the end of Rafoo Chakkar, for instance, Paintal confesses to his admirer that he is a man. The admirer is not discouraged. “Nobody’s perfect,” he says.

It may be a while before we make our Brokeback Mountain, but the viciousness of Bollywood’s homophobia has changed into an almost affectionate spoofing.

And there is some recognition that the homosexual and the hijra are distinct identities. The hijra has always had a marginal position in society, duly reflected in cinema. For years, the hijra song from Mehmood’s Kunwara Baap was sung in school-buses heading off for picnics. Yet, beneath superstitions about powers granted to the third sex, there has always been a fear of castration. In the 1980s, Mahesh Bhatt played on this fear in Sadak, although he had a more sympathetic portrait of a hijra in Tamanna. Such spaces opened up more with films like Amol Palekar’s Daayra or Yogesh Bhardwaj’s Shabnam Mausi. In the latter, although Ashutosh Rana’s is a sustained performance as the first transgender person to win an election to the Madhya Pradesh State Legislature, Vijay Raaz as his ‘mother’ Halima, turns in a brilliant cameo.

The boundaries are shifting at the speed of an iceberg, but there’s been some movement.
THE VILLAIN
BOLLYWOOD HAS NEVER really had to worry about shades of grey. There are shades of grey in every role. Ask any actor asked why s/he agreed to play a role. “Well,” says the actor, putting on the kind of expression he assumes John Malkovich might use on Inside the Actors’ Studio, “I wanted to play Tia because there are interesting shades of grey to her character. She may be a poor girl in love with a rich boy, but she isn’t the standard poor girl in love with a rich boy.” No, she isn’t. That kind of poor girl has acid thrown in her face by the rich boy’s family.

Any actor playing a villain will tell you he’s doing it because the character has shades of grey. These shades are generally to be found in his beard. And he will wear a beard because, have you noticed? The villains are now all terrorists and the terrorists are all Muslim.

This makes it easy to tap into a way of thinking being encouraged by the mainstream media, who show only images of Muslims en masse at prayer; by the police, who buy Muslim-looking headgear for those arrested; and by right-wing political parties, who want to make capital. It also allows Bollywood to claim that it is reflecting current situations; telling us stories of today.

Will Bollywood choose to make a film on the attacks on Christian churches? Unlikely. Will it make a film on what happened at Khairlanji or what happened at Nandigram? Unlikely. But the extreme edge of violence and uncertainty that terrorism brings to our life has been deemed sexy, so we have had any number of films using terror as the backdrop. Where the villain was once motivated by simple desires — greed, lust — he is now an ideologue.

What’s new, you might ask. We’ve had terrorism films since Mani Ratnam began his terror trilogy with Roja in 1992. The difference is that Ratnam went beyond the easy patriotism of Roja to attempt understanding the interior world of the terrorist in Dil Se. Santosh involving the ultimate sacrifice. It seems we must believe that the Muslim not only hates everyone else in the country, but hates successful Muslims too. The first scenes of Mani Shankar’s Mukhbiir juxtapose a terrorist, with a portrait of the Ka’aba behind him, and the hero, praying in a white dhoti to an image of the Mother Goddess under a waterfall.

It has been a long time since we could believe a director as we believe Anurag Kashyap, who writes about Black Friday in his blog, passionforcinema. com, “I don’t take sides because there are no sides... the only side I am on is ‘This will continue if we don’t learn to forgive’. When you take sides you only see one POV, and that misleads.”

THE COMIC
DON’T LOOK NOW, but the funeral of the comic is passing. Send up a raspberry for the likes of Johnny Walker, Mehmood, Kishore Kumar, Keshto Mukherjee and even Johnny Lever. Requiescat in pace.

Humour, we have always had with us. We have made some very funny films: Jyoti Swaroop’s Padosan and Ketan Mehta’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro are at either ends of the scale, between the lighthearted comedy and the social satire. Sai Paranjpe made a couple of delightful films at which we could all laugh.

Then David Dhawan took over. He was assisted by the enormous talent of Govinda as a comic actor: flawless timing, a mobile face, an ordinary body blessed with a rhythm from the gods themselves. That often kept things from going too bad — in the bawdiest of Govinda’s moves, there was a suggestion of effrontery, of not quite believing in all this. And an effortless undercurrent of subversiveness: the MTV generation was being sent up, big time, by the smalltown boy in lemon yellow trousers.

Somewhere along the line, we devalued the comic so much that we threw out the baby with the bathwater. Blame Priyadarshan; his comedy rests on the assumption that an actor who comes cheap can be a comic. Thus, he will put together a bunch of young men and assume that if they are all looking to woo the same woman, it will work. It doesn’t.

In Hera Pheri, Priyadarshan’s first comic outing, we made two astonishing discoveries: Akshay Kumar could act and he could be funny, even if he had a pretty awful voice. But even he could do nothing in the face of Paresh Rawal’s sheer comic firepower. So figure this out: what was Suniel Shetty doing in the film?

Hindi cinema has never been kind to its comics. They don’t get top billing. They don’t get awards. So, if a Bollywood hero can do comedy, he tries to conceal it. Amitabh Bachchan was a very good comic, but he spent most of his life lashing out with his fists. Dharmendra was funny, but he had that Punjabi body and that face, so he became an action hero who couldn’t do anger without sounding out of breath. Arshad Warsi is way funnier than Sanjay Dutt in both Munnabhais, he’s the better actor, but who gets the credit? The man with the muscles. What happened to comedy?

What happened to the rest of cinema? The writers are disappearing. In the old dispensation, the writer was an integral part of the team.

Take KA Abbas from Raj Kapoor and you get Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Take Abrar Alvi away from Guru Dutt… but that didn’t happen. Guru Dutt left early. Today, everyone’s working on a script but the power is still in the prodooser’s paws. He will ask for an item number. He will ask for a big-name hero. And then he’ll say, “Chalo yaar, let’s make another Bheja Fry.”

As if you can allow the money to drown out talent and expect to make intelligent cinema.

And so we get the writers we deserve. Right now, the writing has gone into the toilet so everyone asks everyone else in a Bollywood comedy:

“Jaana hai kya?”

Actually, yes.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 47, Dated Nov 29, 2008

Charulata

2008-11-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

Year : 1964
Langauge : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Satyajit Ray

Aita holo Oshadharon cinema.

Satyajit Ray said this was the best movie he made. And I can't disagree.

Detailed review later...

Elippathayam (The Rat Trap)

2008-11-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

Year : 1981
Language : Malayalam
Country : India
Director : Adoor Gopalkrishnan

Elippathayam was Adoor's 3rd movie but the first one which brought him wide national and intenational acclaim. I started watching the movie with very high expectations given the reputation it carries, and ended with more than impressed. Actually its a very haunting movie.

The film is based in rural kerala in a feudal family which is almost at the end of its feudal existence. It consists of Unni the last male heir and his two sisters Rajamma and Sridevi. All of them are coming to terms with the change that has happened at the end of feudal system. Unni doesn't do any work and lives in the small cocoon of his own inner world. Rajamma takes care of the entire household and works virtually like a slave without the slightest care of herself. Younger sister, Sridevi is rebellious and assertive.

Adoor's own words sum up best what the movie is about :

The film is trying to explore the question, what is being? It is an incisive examination of what constitutes an individual. In close scrutiny, a person is made out of his actions and interactions. It is always a give and take. For Unni, it is always takes and no gives, while for his sister Rajamma it is always giving and no taking. There is no individual sans the society, which is what ultimately gets clear.

Read here Adoor's description of the film.
Must watch movie

Scream of the Ants

2008-11-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Year : 2006
Language : Persian (with lots of english)
Country : Iran
Director : Mohsen Makhmalbaf

I can only imagine that Makhmalbaf, a director whose past works I have liked must have been very schizophrenic when he thought of making this movie, given that this movie is ought to be some philosophical adventure.

In brief, the story is about an Iranian couple consisting of an ex-communist atheist husband and a mildly religious wife, go on a philosophical adventure honeymoon to India looking for some "perfect man" and some answers.

I couldn't manage to find the english subtitles, so watched it in its native language but more than 70% of the spoken words were in english/hindi so it didn't quite matter. The movie has some very good cinematography, but the thoughts behind the script simply sucks. Though this movie has been screened in many reputed international film festivals, but I can only imagine that this was due to the very good cinematography and possibly the reputation of Makhmalbaf.

Baran

2008-10-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

Year : 2001
Language : Persian
Country : Iran
Director : Majid Majidi

The most beautiful romantic movie I have ever seen. "Baran" is yet another awesome work from Majid Majidi whose "Children of Heaven" had earlier impressed me beyond words.

The movie is based in contemporary Iran where millions of Afghan refugees live after being displaced off their homes due to Soviet Occupation followed by civil war leading upto Taliban rule. Several of these Afghan people work as manual labor in underpaid jobs as they are not allowed to work without valid IDs. Lateef is a teenage Iranian boy who works in one such construction site where several Afghan refugee men work. He happens to be a rash and aggressive guy who mocks everyone in the site, his work involves serving food and tea to the workers.

One day, one of the Afghan workers breaks his leg at work. Since he is handicapped and has small children to feed at home, he sends his son Rahmat, a tender small boy to work at the same site. Rahmat when introduced to Memar, the site foreman, doesn't utter a single word and is hired to work.

Since, Rahmat is too weak to do the hard manual work, Memar asks Rahmat to do the tea and food serving and asks Lateef to start doing the manual construction work. Having lost the luxury of easy work, Lateef becomes gets infuriated at Rahmat and makes every attempt to make it hard for him. Rahmat's silent and calm posture even at repeated provocations makes Lateef very surprised and curious. By chance one day Lateef peeks into the kitchen only to find a girl combing her hairs and murmuring a song. He is stunned to discover that Rahmat is actually a girl. Here on, Lateef's life changes for ever. Without letting anyone (including Rahmat) know of his new found discovery, his attitude towards Rahmat changes, he becomes very protective of her. One day to protect him from an Inspector who was looking for illegal Afghan workers, Lateef ends up in a fight with the inspector and his men which ends up in Memar firing all the Afghan workers including Rahmat.

At the sudden disappearance of Rahmat, Lateef gets impatient and goes around the Afghan refugee camps looking for her. This journey of discovery is dotted with interesting experiences where he meets a philosophical cobbler. When he finally succeeds in finding her, he is appalled at the hard working conditions in which she has to work. He goes back to Memar and asks for all his savings which he pretends to asking for his ill sister. But fate didn't end Lateef's feeling of misery from looking at Rahmat's hard life, by now he knows Rahmat's real name is Baran. To help her he finally sells his most important possession, his ID card, which he sells and gives the money to Baran's father who says with this money he will go back to Afghanistan the next day with his family. In the last scene where before Baran leaves, their eyes are stuck at each other and their hands cross without touching to pick up some things that had fallen. is the most beautiful and touching expression of love one could ever imagine to see.

An amazingly simple and beautiful story and on top an incredible direction. Majidi had managed to portray even the least attractive setup of a construction site into a gripping surrounding. The broad daylight imagery of the city, the countryside, without any tinge of artificiality was simply incredible. It reminds of one of the writings of Satyajit Ray (on the making of Kanchenjunga) where he mentions how effective natural sunlight, be it bright or cloudy, can be in depicting the mood of the situation. In Baran Majidi has made a movie which is just perfect from every aspect I can think of. Undoubtedly this is the most beautiful love story I have seen on the silver screen.

2008 Cinema Militans Lecture by GEORGE SLUIZER

2008-10-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

GEORGE SLUIZER delivered a very thought provoking lecture at the Holland Film Meeting, the international section of the Netherlands Film Festival. I quote the text here

To put myself and you in the right spirit, let me start this Cinema Militans Lecture with a quote by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “The only attitude of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes as useless, to observe a discipline he knows is 'sterile' and also utterly 'inconsequential.' "

Keep this in mind if you hear inconsistencies in my thoughts, or a touch of anarchism…

When the festival asked me for this lecture, the first thought that popped up in my head was that I had to be present at a friend’s funeral, in this case Menno ter Braak’s, and that my task was to say goodbye to all those ingenious and wonderful people who invented cinema and film art.

“Cinema” is, or I should say was, a thing of the 20th century. The film d’auteur died recently with the death of Bergman and Antonioni.

In 2008, do we still need to devote our time to theories regarding film language, structure, style, editing, camera positions and all the other things we studied and were curious about 50 or 75 years ago?

Today, the business of images for mass consumption is responsible for 95% of the media industry, including film for maybe 2% or 3%.

Should we be nostalgic about the avant-garde filmmakers and essayists of the 20th century? No. Their way of filmmaking is now past history: very seldom today can we see films that remind us of the craft of “direct visual storytelling,” cinema that produces images that in principle need no explanation with words.

Cinema is ruled by other media: television, DVDs and the Internet, and whatever is invented next.

The Internet has many more consumers and much more influence than cinema ever had, and therefore it also has much more power. The new technologies determine and rule the business. They are responsible for the new way of communication between the people of the world.

Let me flashback for a second and recall what happened since the films of Carl Dreyer or Pasolini were slowly but greedily devoured by the Supermen and Dark Knights of today.

We became interested in other things: football, and pop and rock music became popular and important.

From an economic perspective, there is no point in investing in a delightful, memorable, challenging or subtle film, except if the product has a chance to make money. Politically speaking, art is unnecessary, because one does not need art to survive.

The need for spiritual and artistic nurturing seems to have faded. It lives on mainly because some people need to fight the triumphant materialism and crave for emotions and emotivity as a proof of their existence.

Some money is spent on arts to keep a proper conscience. But given the amount of money spent on defense, medical care, security etc., I am not sure that our governments, if we closed our eyes, would not push artists back in the attic like a century ago.

Is such an attitude degrading to the artists and to art? Is it good that politicians decide what to care about and to protect? I don’t think so. It’s not their job.

There are two processes that human beings cannot stop as long as they are alive: one is breathing and the other is thinking. Thinking makes us present to ourselves; thinking is the main component of our identity. Thoughts are the only assured possession we have. Thinking is supremely ours, and buried in the uttermost privacy of our being. No other human being can think my thoughts for me.

Therefore, politicians, funds and managers should not be held responsible or take decisions about human creativity and the creative process. It’s us, the ordinary people, we citizens, we craftsmen, who should be in charge and decide what we want to make and what we need to see.

To start with, our attention and our interest should focus on the incredible progress in scientific, technical and technological inventions. This obliges us to rethink our concepts of culture and cultural values.

Can we still make films for audiences in a world where most human beings seem not to be at ease, unadapted, stressed, out of context, lost, in panic or in shock?

There is a dichotomy, a deep fault between our old classical education and the speed of technological development. The two don’t match anymore. The abyss grows.

What we have to learn is to think, something not usually taught in schools. To stay in sync with tomorrow, to learn to think, we have to learn. We have to re-adjust our mental education and mental training. Can we, for example, conceive of a society in which thinking is rationed… restricted to certain hours of the day, like food in the war was?

If we want to be happy, we have to work on our mutation, to accept living in a world where the creative principle resides in mathematics, and where we have no difficulty feeling at home in a methodical, technological environment, without becoming robots.

Mutation, if I may illustrate with a simple example, is to teach children to like the plastic, concrete and metal in their playgrounds in the city, instead of missing the trees and flowers in nature, if their parents can’t afford to travel to the countryside.

In the past, our religious, philosophical or ethical concepts helped us survive. We felt reassured about the essential problems of life, the eternal, the infinite, life and death… and so on.

Now we have to give up those faded intellectual and emotional thoughts and ideas. The new technologies will probably never give us reassurance, certainty or safety. So we have to model for ourselves new ways of thought and thinking.

As we know, human thought does not like emptiness. We have to avoid the black hole of emptiness. A task for the arts… and film?

If we are lazy and take a break from thinking, our “me,” who we are, will come apart. A combat will be triggered between the emotional and the scientific that may lead us to despair.

Just imagine for a second that we had interplanetary communication, or if the experiments with the big bang tell us totally new things about the universe and our planet. Wouldn’t we have to modify and redefine our moral issues? And therefore also the content of our films?

Anyway, to come back to our Western world of today, it is evident — like it or not — that growth is the key to survival. In our so-called democratic capitalistic countries, the state and big industries have the power. The question is: How fast do we want to grow? And, do we care if we create victims on the way?

It took Europe more than 200 years to grow from a “no one” voting continent to an “everyone” voting continent. How many years did we need to go from film to tape, VHS, DVD, Internet, Blu-ray, laser. Not so many.

So, what are the consequences for the filmmaker, who might start a film on digital to finish it a short time later in another technical medium, to be distributed in another technique again afterwards?

How does the filmmaker fit into a system where economic power and mass communication lie in the hands of those who decide how we consume the goods?

The filmmaker has to adapt to new machines and new content if he wants to produce and create.

But, creatively, no filmmaker, however skilled, can fully realize the transfer on to his film of his internal vision. Those of us who seek perfection chase an always unfulfilled dream of thought.

In fact, we are all lured and pampered, “forced” if you prefer, every one of us, into the social and political values that are profitable to the state and to other powerful organizations. They provide the entertainment — we don’t.

Is “entertainment,” by the way, another word for putting to sleep the minds of the audience? Or, if we watch the entertainment, will we suffer from brainwashing and eventually from brain damage? Should we have our brain medically checked after watching some of the TV programs?

One thing is sure: to be invaded day by day with stupidity, permissiveness, violence, sex if not perversion is sometimes amusing, but not always pleasant for those that recognize that banality and vulgarity are important attributes of the media and modern cinema. As my remarks should tell you, I am an optimistic fundamentalist!

I have a feeling that the minds of the audience are getting more and more confused and that they have difficulty in distinguishing reality from fiction or from fake. The consequence of this “confusion” is that the viewers lose the sense of a coherent vision and that makes it very easy for an audience to be conditioned and accept what the market suggests to them.

Just look at some film posters and compare the slogans on the posters with the content of the films. The slogans are preferably exploitative, use words like kill, death, sex, erotic, terror, etc. Words to attract the audience often on false premises as the content of the film is usually somewhat different.

Why is it necessary to cheat the audience? To be dishonest? And is the audience indeed so naïve and easily manipulated that they won’t go to a film with a fitting and adequate slogan? Why do we all stay willingly immature?

This silly juggling and fooling leads to a misunderstanding of pictures and to an impoverishment of human relations.

Education is needed!

What can we understand by the term “cultural”? Is culture similar to indoctrination or is culture the same as alienation? Alienation being the distance we create between the essential values and ourselves as human beings.

Can we or should we try to improve the situation? If our goal is to humanize our society, then a real human should be someone who can express his personal qualities and someone who is true to himself. Many of us have, however, a feeling of resignation: that we can’t avoid “wrong” things or “wrong-doing.” The church and our educators, family and school, have reasoned mankind into doing “good” and refused to take into consideration their vices, which belong to the world of demons. To clarify my point of view, I say that the most human quality of man is his inhumanity.

We should not be blind or blinded, and know that like rats in a cage, we move and move, run around, but we finally always return to the same place. It’s a bit like philosophy, which is in a way a waste of time. We think and think and think in the course of thousands of years, but we don’t change anything essential in our actions or behavior.

In capitalistic society, where money keeps the individual in the position of a non-free person (some consider themselves slaves of the system), moral decline is the logical consequence of our way of life.

So, can we do something about our indoctrination or about our alienation? Can we change culture? We can, if we are willing to be critical about the world we live in, to accept no compromise, to reject preconceived ideas and the choices imposed by family and society.

We should realize that our sense of values are not ours, but that they are defined by others, partly by the legislators we voted for.

One of the main questions I asked myself when writing this paper was: can we integrate religion, philosophy, arts and science? I doubt it. Science takes a much faster road than the other three, and soon science will take over all power. Probably, in the future, our brain will eliminate everything that is not connected to scientific knowledge. Moral concepts, the idea of good and evil for example, will alter or disappear.

By the way, morals only exist within the human race, not in the world of animals. To kill thy neighbor does not enter the mind of a bee, but the bee will kill without hesitation the queen-bee, if there is a queen too many. The community of bees take the decision. Not the individual killer.

Politicians, moralists, idealists who desire to make social changes, should promote new forms of education, new forms of culture. Redefined without passion but with rationality.

One of the ways to redefine culture is to accept and acknowledge that every humanbeing is unique, and each of us original. We look alike, but we are different. Every child has some resemblance to his parents, but he/she/it is not identical to the parents. Human beings want to share feelings and emotions with each other, but we should not forget that, even in moments of deep intimacy, the lover cannot embrace the thoughts of the beloved — “What are you thinking? What am I thinking” — as we make love. We shall never know.

The closest, most honest of human beings, remain strangers to each other. Thought veils as much, probably far more, than it reveals.

That doesn’t make it easy, so we and the community play safe.

Society prefers to obey existing structures and it has decided that the structures — where people are treated equally or similarly — are more important than “imagination” or a “spirit of innovation.” Society is always busy protecting stability, and not evolution. Education is a way to keep the status quo.

Some centuries ago, when man stepped into new historic times, that is when documents, mainly written documents, were established, and administration and bureaucracy appeared, our evolution slowed down. We do not want to favor evolution anymore, but prefer to keep the solidity of our thoughts and social structure. It is also the time when the majority of people became “victims” of a minority who wanted to keep their privileges. Real, full integral education would resolve the differences between majority and minority.

Some of us think there are profound intellectual differences between men… or women. In reality, there is not much difference in mental capacity in people. But there are deep cultural differences, which give us the impression that one person is more intelligent than the other. What one person ignores or does not know, another knows or understands. Ignorance is not useful to anyone, except to those who take advantage to dominate others.

If we really want to move on, to be in connection with our times, we should give more attention to scientific and biological facts than to psychological notions. Mathematicians think first in general terms, then in particular terms. A logical order.

The arts, on the other hand, don’t have to be logical, they can be a mess, mentally deficient, inconsistent and beautiful, and sometimes even poetic.

Again I plead for education! But to learn what?

The only profession we should learn is to be a human being. That takes a lifetime, so we have to devote a whole lifetime to this profession.

If we want to know, to acquire knowledge when we are small. We will keep our curiosity for knowledge when we become older.

We could quite easily improve our situation, if we cared and devoted time to our need of identity, our need of orientation, the need to build a bridge between our humanity and bestiality.

We, human beings, are a special kind of animal because we use our brain both to think and to feel.

How do our senses play a part in all this?

It is evident that eyesight is the most essential of our senses. Well, we start our life by seeing. To see is the first step in the learning process. To remember what man learned, he had to invent words, language.

Being a filmmaker, I’ll limit myself here to the power of visuals. Images, including cinema images, can teach us all we need.

Let’s compare images to language. Languages have taken thousands of years to develop. We translate all our observations and mental processes into words. The images we produce are only ornaments attached to language. We illustrate our language with images. That is quite a different process to direct vision, which I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture.

Seeing does not explain or prove. Language has the possibility to prove. Seeing cannot. It is direct, real and it cannot lie. Didn’t God create the word so we could lie to each other?

I think that when we finally learn to see, many of our actual problems will diminish or disappear. Direct vision will help us become conscious of the fact that sex and death will be more of a guarantee of the richness of the human race and of our evolution than we care to believe now. We have to see who we are, to learn who we are, to enjoy who we are, and not to be confused by all the different and contradictory opinions we encounter.

What I am trying to say is that we should search for a better and more definite balance and reach greater harmony. If we are willing to participate in the adventure of knowledge, it will bring us consolation and courage. As we know, we are the only living species who by their biological constitution want to dominate the planet and the space we live in. We want to decode and master the universe, a tiring and often destructive exercise at times.

Man invented work, basically an absurd evolution, sometimes also an inhuman one, because in work we tend to lose touch with our true nature.

But, on the other hand, work provides us with a lot of leisure time. Today, we spend more time in leisure than in work, and in the near future, I would not be surprised if we had 90% of leisure time in the week. Time enough to solve big problems. Time which we don’t have now, seemingly.

The biggest problem to tackle is the co-existence of one billion people who are comparatively rich and 8 billion who are poorer. Or getting poorer. To try to solve this imbalance, we study our diseases: recession, underdevelopment, inflation, unemployment, terrorism, drugs etc. What are the result of all these meetings, conferences: a lot of talk and not much action or change. Drastic remedies are avoided. Politicians don’t dare or are incapable or lazy.

Do we really wonder why and how our planet got sick and its inhabitants weary?

Let’s take a look at ourselves, observe why we do what we do. What are the main motives of our actions? I name them: desire and fear.

We are torn between the two. Fortunately, the incredibly fast scientific development of the last 40 years provides us with an answer to a lot of problems if we care to think carefully.

Education leading to knowledge will obliterate all the incoherences we are accustomed to. We have to disregard the emotivity and sensibility that define us today.

Most cultural manifestations, be it in the theater, movies, plastic arts or the press, present a loss of lucidity sometimes close to alcoholism. When we pronounce the word “culture” today, we think automatically in terms of nice images, tragic images, savory, warm artistic, ornamental efforts. The cultural disciplines I am referring to now have nothing to do with real knowledge. Science is sometimes even considered an enemy of the arts. Propaganda and marketing, very popular today, distance us from concrete knowledge. Democracy gambles on the emotions of the people to win them for the cause of democracy, rarely defending reason and logic, which are not popular. All cultural activities, festivals, exhibitions, biennales, in short, all artistic manifestations, are an exaltation of abstraction and emotivity, which means in fact “alienation.”

For clarity’s sake, by alienation I mean any process by which the human being becomes estranged from himself, the individual deprived of his humanity.

If we care to know to what extent we are alienated, we should just remind ourselves of the overdoses of cultural debates, conferences, pure intellectual exercises, artistic, critical or psychological games, to which we lend ourselves willingly …like myself today.

Everybody can notice that there is quite an opposition between the number of people who deliver emotional, sensitive, intuitive, spiritualistic values and the few who think scientifically. Strange in that regard is the paradox we encounter in our society: the great majority of people are adepts of materialism…with handkerchiefs for the tears.

This education I mentioned tends to inculcate respect for existing public structures. It does not take into account the critical and civic capacities of the individual: it leads to obedience or submission but not to responsibility. Museums, libraries, concerts of classic music, artistic collections intimidate quite a number of individuals.

In conclusion, if we consider “education” to be the promotion of existing ideas, then we should conclude that such an education is insufficient and instead go for “integral education.” Everything should serve everybody.

Imagine gathering knowledge without exams and diplomas. And living well afterwards. Without problems!

We need to make better use of our potential intelligence. And slowly but surely the new education will lead to a greater collective wisdom.

We know for sure now from what biology has discovered that the brain of every human being living on this planet, whatever his race may be, has the same surface, the same number of nerve cells, the neurons. Their quantity is evaluated at 10 billion, and their network can produce about 100,000 billion connections. Therefore, everybody who is part of humanity has virtually an equivalent intelligence. (I realize that numbers are not necessarily equivalent to quality.)

It’s the cultural and social differences that mean certain people know more than others. By upgrading the cultural level, among other things, we can diminish or even eliminate those differences. To achieve that goal, the industrial powers and politicians must want it.

Unfortunately, hardly any economically oriented group wants to adopt a scientific method of information and disperse knowledge so that we could profit from the intelligence of everyone, of the whole human race.

To my knowledge, nothing is done in that field. We still lean on the old premises, utilizing emotivity, the passionate tendencies of man, methods of seduction and demagogy. The world is overloaded with opinions and empty of intelligence. Sentimental motivation has the upper hand over knowledge.

Have we deserted our human nature? We created schools to guide us on the road to life. But what have the schools given us? We have become active members of society. But the schools have not taught us to judge or reform our society. Only to contribute. Schooling teaches us how to become specialists, doctors, engineers etc., but from the day that we have a profession we renounce our right to be totally human.

Work has its bad side. I am a workalcoholic, so I should know.

Today, we are full of illusions. We have lost our bearings. We are more alienated than we have ever been.

We suffer from an illness that is called semi-culture; this semi-culture being broadcast or distributed by the different means of communication. Film and TV produce semi-culture: the illusion of knowledge and the illusion of feeling.

The mass media is not engaged in knowledge or understanding, but is busy conditioning people.

The semi-culture is worse than ignorance, because it is an illusion.

Every day, we are fed with stimuli and news. The groups who feed us with the news belong to the dominant groups. They have to make money at all costs and to reach sufficient numbers of viewers. This explains why they search for the sensational, blow up every bit of news, repeat every item until one is brain-dizzy.

And due to the need to be fast, the news is often half-true or superficial. A lot of problems and subjects are discussed in all kinds of field, but usually we do not have the knowledge to solve the problems. It is preferable to fake the solutions than to admit the lack of knowledge. If we don’t understand what’s happening, we will never eliminate collective ignorance.

At the end of the day, we have to choose between the sweet consolation of the arts, the magic of dreams and the restlessness of science. Or, said with a sneer, should we live in “drunkenness” or knowledge?

To help us dream, we should remember that the great currents of thought from Socrates to Marx and further, that all philosophies had a common thought: trust mankind.

Mohammed, in his own way, said the same, and I quote: “The variety and multiplicity of intelligences is the proof of our existence and the generosity of God.”

Today, science echoes: it has proven the multiplicity of intelligences. We should profit from this richness. It should lead to an authentic and harmonious participation of all individuals in society. Film and the media in general should also profit.

I end with another quote: "Learn, because we will need all our intelligence. Flutter your wings, because we will need all our enthusiasm. Organize, because we will need all our strength."

Utsab (Festival)

2008-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Year : 2000
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Rituparno Ghosh

A friend after looking at my blog said I write "very good" for all the movies that I write about, what she missed to notice is that I mostly see only good movies, and if I wasted time watching any bad movie, I prefer not to waste any more time writing about it :) Utsab is another awesome movie from the master of handling human emotions "Rituparno Ghosh". I am so awestruck how this man manages to write such complex screenplay with so many characters in the same story. The only other directors who come to my mind when comparing this trait are Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman.

Write now I am too pressed for time to write a detailed review for this movie, but go and watch it, its very nice movie.

(detailed review later)

Paromitar Ek Din

2008-10-26T09:27:00.001-07:00

Year : 2000
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Aparna Sen

Aparna Sen is a genius of our times. 36 Chowringhee Lane, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Yugant are among the great movies from this lady of high intellect. "Paromitar Ek Din" is a movie exploring the dual subjects of "loneliness" and relationship between two women Sanaka (Aparna Sen) and her daughter-in-law Paromita (Rituparna Sengupta), overcoming some social stigmas. Both the ladies' marriages are unhappy and the only common thing they share among themselves is nursing mentally handicapped children, they forge a close friendship among themselves. When Paromita decides to break her marriage and marry a documentary film maker, Sanaka breaks down and drowns in her loneliness.
The movie at times felt slow but nevertheless very good. Most of all, the settings of the movie - the stereotypical old bengali house, women clad in Taant'er sari, made me nostalgic about my roots. It had some awesome acting by Aparna Sen and Sailee Sengupta as the schizophrenic daughter of Sanaka. Rituparna's acting was also very good but the others seemed pretty much flat. Use of Rabindrosangeet was very absorbing.

Salim langde pe mat ro (Don't cry for lame Salim)

2008-10-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Year : 1989
Language : Hindi
Country : India
Director : Saeed Akhtar Mirza

Very sensitive and well directed movie touching some difficult subjects from Saeed Mirza, of the fame of Teleserial Nukkad. Salim is a small time criminal living in a poor neighborhood of Bombay largely inhabited by muslims with his family consisting of an unemployed father, younger sister and mother. Due to his father's inability to earn enough, Salim never had any education and has been fending for himself by indulging in small crimes with local gangs controlled by some powerful smugglers, thugs and police.

Even while being part of the local thug gangs he is frustrated with the society's attitude towards people like him (poor and muslim) which leaves no option other than to indulge in crime to make his ends meet. The passing thought of the scope to live an honest and clean life gets stronger once he meets a local urdu-newspaper's proofreader who wishes to marry Salim's sister. There had been communal riots in the neighborhood in which both hindus and muslims have died. One day a rotten body of someone dead in the riot is found in a gutter of the streets, its too mutilated to be even recognized at which the street sweeper says "Mandir Masjid ke liye ladta hai, aur marta hai gutter mein (fights for temple and mosque, but dies in the gutter)".
In an ironic situation Salim is watching his cronies Abdul(Ashutosh Gowrikar) and Peera (Makrand Deshpande) dancing with some little kids from the slum at the song sung by Johnny(Tom Alter) on the tunes of "Mera juta hai japani, patloon englishtani, sar pe laal topi rusi, phir bhi dil hai hindustani (my shoe is japanese, pant english, the hat russian but the heart is indian)". Salim's conviction to leave the mean life of crime gets stronger and he gets a job in a car repair garage, where he agrees to work for a meagre salary. He feels happy and proud at having started that life. But as it turns out his destiny has something else in store for him.

The movie not only portrays the helpless situation the underdog in the society lives through but also it makes one question the value of a human life. In the beginning of the movie in one scene Johnny tells Salim and his friends about Hiroshima, "Ek sahar hai, wahan ek chota sa bomb phoota aur paanch laakh log dhuen mein udd gaye (its a city, there one small bomb exploded and half a million people flew away in the smoke)" at which Salim laughingly asks him why today he is remembering it suddenly, the seriousness of the historical tragedy disappearing in the thin smoke of the pot they were smoking. At another point the three friends sitting besides the sea decided to live an honest life, though without a clue of how to achieve that, the mere thought made them burst into joy of the moment which seemed inaccessible to them before.

The movie won the National award for Cinematography that year. Pawan Malhotra as Salim acted amazingly and so was the direction of Saeed Mirza.

The Graduate

2008-10-15T09:22:00.001-07:00

The Graduate tickles the soft corners of a graduate :-P Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) a recent college graduate is seduced by Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a woman twice Ben's age and wife of Ben's father's friend. They meet and make love till one day Ben is introduced to Elaine, Mrs Robinson's daughter. The movie is hilarious and Dustin Hoffman as always was amazing.
The "Sounds of Silence" stills rings loud in my ears :)

Such a long journey

2008-10-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

Year : 1998
Language : English
Country : India
Director : Sturla Gunnarsson

Absolutely flat with admiration watching this movie. It is based on the novel of the same title written by Rohinton Mistry. I would have liked to write more on it but I happened to read Roger Ebert's review and I think it aptly and nicely described what I felt but couldn't have wrapped in words like this. The script of the movie was written by Sooni Taraporevala, of the Salaam Bombay fame and is in english. Roshan Seth's acting was really good, well supported by my all time two favorite actors Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri.

Ramchand Pakistani

2008-10-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

Year : 2008
Language : Hindi/Urdu
Country : Pakistan
Director : Mehreen Jabbar

Really down to earth movie inspired by true events, depicting the life of a woman, her husband and their son which gets upside down because of the acrimony between two nations on the brink of war. Though many movies have been made on this subject but most if not all lend themselves to jingoism, this one avoids making that mistake and rather gives a very sensitive touch to it.

(Detailed review later....)

Dosar

2008-09-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

Year : 2006
Language : Bengali
Country : India
Director : Rituparno Ghosh

Rituparno Ghosh is undoubtedly among the top 3 cinema makers from India among his contemporary ones, a master storyteller and a great screenplay writer. Dosar is his best movie that I have seen till date. Handling the subject of feminism in a creative work like cinema or book, in my opinion is a daunting task even for an intellectual of high calibre. Often the story writers get carried away by the urge to get aggresive and "women liberty means family murder (or man bashing)" kind of loose ends, here's where Rituparno comes with his deep understanding of the complexities of relationship, an anti patriarchal view added with the emotional dimension of humans. Dosar is an astounding real portrayal of a husband-wife relationships that is marred by infidelity, simple and an old subject but with a completely different story. Acting of Konkana was as always superb. A must watch movie.

Rock On

2008-09-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

Am so happy that I watched this movie. Revived the "Dil Chahta Hai" memories... Wonderful acting and super wonderful music... I think Bollywood should stick to movies like this : No story, nice music and great acting. Whenever the mainstream directors muddle with their lesson preaching, emotional story and cheap comedy stunts, they start stinking... Whoa after such a long time I enjoyed every bit of a mainstream bollywood stuff.

Summer of 2007.

2008-08-30T09:21:00.001-07:00

I had written an earlier post on this movie which was as abusive and distasteful as I felt after watching it, but removed it after someone pointed out that it was too libelous. But the fact remains that its one of those movies that made me feel extremely disgusted.

Blue Velvet

2008-07-21T06:22:00.000-07:00

Perfect !! No surprise this movie gave immortality to the transcendental meditation yogi David Lynch :-)

Aakrosh

2008-06-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

Is this the best hindi movie ever made ? I dont know !!
Is this the best among the ones I have seen ? Probably yes.
Is this the most powerful and moving movie I have seen ? Undoubtedly.

When two great thinkers like Vijay Tendulkar and Govind Nihalani come together as script writer and director respectively with two greatest actors like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, what comes out is "Aakrosh (Cry of the Wounded)".

A movie made in 1980 but none lesser contemporary than 2008-India, it is one that even fills the viewer with Aakrosh !! The movie is based on the corrupt, blatant, dishonest and cruel system comprising all the centers of power in the society which ruthlessly crushes the underpriveleged.

Bhiku Lahanya(Om Puri) is a rural adivasi(tribal) man whose wife(Smita Patil) has been raped and murdered by a group of men comprising a doctor, politician, contractor and his aide. Bhiku has been charged with the same murder. Bhaskar Kulkarni (Naseeruddin Shah) is a young lawyer who is handling the case for Bhiku, who right from the begining is un-cooperative with the lawyer. He doesnt utter a single word throughout the case and rather carries an angry and deeply frustrated face. While trying to find any clues to the muder, Bhaskar sees the editor of a local newspaper being beaten up by thugs which he doubts is related to the same case, later one of the thugs also attacks him. Public prosecutor Dushane (Amrish Puri) is a senior lawyer with big repute and spends his time in the company of big and powerful, he is shown to be a person who denies to see the truth unless it can be proved in the framework of the judicial system, though knowing it that there exists the truth outside this boundary.

Om Puri's acting was just breath-taking, during the whole 2+ hour long movie he spoke only 2 sentences, but his face spoke louder than what ears are capable of listening. Naseeruddin Shah is undoubtedly my most favorite actor and in this movie he proved it again that he is the best, undoubtedly this is the best performance I have seen from him. The direction from Govind Nihalani was too good, he keeps the viewer glued and challenges every now and then with his shocking surprises and the heartbeat never stays normal.

The movie is a satire on the judicial system which takes pride in its eyes being wrapped by the black strip but fails to recognize that closing the eyes is not enough in a system where power is concentrated in the hands of those who are supposed to be protectors but turn into the perpetrators.

Its amusing that this movie was made close to 3 decades back, halfway since democracy foot hold in this country, but the problem of a corrupt and ruthlessly cruel system duly neglected (in turn protected) by a blind judiciary still persists. The armed Naxalite movement which has taken the form of violent Maoist rebels across this country is just an example of that Aakrosh, the anger that has to erupt one day. A ruthless police in the hands of the executive body run by no less than a band of corrupt men, have been let loose leading to snatching of even basic human dignity among the underprivileged, be it the farmers loosing their land for the setting up of Car Factory, or a Special Economic Zone or the tribals loosing their villages and land for the building of Dams.

Watch the movie at your own risk, the Aakrosh(anger) of this movie is very contagious !!

Mirch Masala

2008-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Rated among the best ever made movies from India and having won many national and intenational accolades, "Mirch Masala" is one of those movies which made Smita Patil an unforgettable name in the Indian Cine history. The movie is based during the times of colonial India where a remote small village is haunted repeatedly by a Subedar (govt tax collector) whose visit along with his gunmen to the village is always dotted with fear. But this particular visit sends the whole village into turmoil when the Subedar (Naseeruddin Shah) puts his lustful eyes on Sonbai (Smita Patil) a young woman from the village whose husband has gone to the city for work. Having escaped from the Subedar, Sonbai hides in the village spice factory which is guarded by the old gatekeeper Abu Mian (Om Puri). The men in the village, led by the Mukhiya (village head) readily agree to handover Sonbai to the Subedar who otherwise threatens to smash the village if he doesn't get her. Abu Mian locks the door of the factory against the collective approval of the hapless woman's rape.

A movie which casts three such amazing actors certainly is an acting feast but apart from that I think this movie though made more than 2 decades back is all the more contemporary today. Smita Patil was probably the most feminist actress in the Indian Cinema and Mirch Masala was one among the few more pieces of work based on serious issues she created before her untimely death.

Shaurya

2008-04-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

I am always skeptic before watching any new Hindi movie and ask for tens of feedbacks before I start the risky business of watching it but there's exception when the movie has Rahul Bose (ever since he acted in Mr and Mrs Iyer). And when in the same movie you get to see Kay Kay Menon as well, its a feast of great acting. Shaurya is very different from any previous movie I am aware of that is made on the subject relating to Indian Army. While all previous movies show the Army in the light of greatness and high values, this movie touches those darker aspects which the Indian Army suffers from just like many other armies in the world, after all an army decorated with guns is just a necessary evil. While armies around the world also carry out numerous humanitarian activities, its necessary to note that they don't need guns for those, they need guns to kill, the victim can be a worthy terrorist or if the gun is in the hands of a whimsical lout the victim can be very well an innocent.

The story is almost a carbon-copy of "Few Good Men" but it fits exactly in the scenario depicted in this movie. The great thing about the story is that the solution to the problem is depicted to be coming out from within the institution, which is so necessary in my opinion if the institution has to survive popular support and gain credibility. My only disappointment with the movie was the script concerning the character of Brigadier Rudra Pratap Singh where he is shown to suffer from the prejudices against muslims because of personal reasons. That I think is a very easy escape from reality, in reality in this country (if not in the whole world) people harbor strong prejudices up to the extent of hatred not necessarily because of any personal reasons but due to overwhelming euphoria of hatred that the politicians, mainstream media and others with narrow objectives have created. Though I doubt a movie blaming the public euphoria can really be a box-office hit among the same public. I wish in reality things like as shown in the movie happens, and the individual rapists, murderers and fanatics within the Indian Army are brought to justice for their gross tyranny they unleash time and again among people in the North Eastern States, the Kashmiris, the Bangladeshis in the border areas etc. I really appreciate the courage shown by Samar Khan in making this movie, it was high time such a movie was made.

Into the Wild

2008-04-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

"Into the Wild" is a movie based on real life story of Christopher McCandless. The movie has very spellbinding beautiful imagery coupled with awesome acting by Emile Hirsch.

This was one of the most amazing movies I have seen and saw so much of a sort of reflection in it. While watching a movie I am in the habit of noting down sentences/quotes I find worthy of note, but in this movie I just gave up as every other minute the scriptwriter would make me pick up the pen. My perennial frustration with the shallowness of the sheep around me and their unhappiness spilling over into my life, along with my never ending fascination with nature, mountains and rivers, all seemed to have been packaged into this one movie, I am so overwhelmed. To add up to all this emotional flood, the movie has such awesome songs and music by Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam fame), especially "society" and "guaranteed" are very beautiful.

Some more movies

2008-01-27T04:49:00.000-08:00

Updating blog for all the movies I see would mean putting too much time which otherwise I can use for watching more movies :) so for quite some time I have been watching lots of movies but haven't been able to update the blog. Here I put just a list of movies which I watched but don't have time to write separate posts... so here goes the list :

Infinity : A movie on Richard Feynman. It seems the movie script was adapted quite as it is from the Book by Feynman, so while I had loved reading the book, the movie fell short of being called good. Especially the acting other than of Matthew Broderick, was quite horrible.

Pi : An ambitious movie that used some of the movie making techniques which aren't widely used but studied in schools. I heard this was the first movie of Darren Aronofsky. The movie is intense and I liked it.

Artificial Intelligence : The last one from Kubrick and was given shape by Spielberg. The central question around which the movie revolves is probably the only thing which I liked, but then the whole movie is only about that.

The Seven Samurai : A movie which for a long time stood as a benchmark of movie making. Another quite intense movie, black and white, lots of violence, great acting and above all great direction from the great Kurosawa.

Memoirs of a Geisha : Didn't like the story but had a spellbinding beauty of cinematography. Ziyi Zhang as Sayuri couldn't be better. The soundtrack left me intoxicated. Though there are too many controversies around this movie, but who cares. I liked watching it. The movie invigorated my cherished desire to travel to and know Japan, the land of so much distinct culture and beautiful people.

Proof : One of those movies which I saw and wished I hadn't wasted my time doing so. Very flawed piece of work. This movie was like you go to watch a movie about Alan Turing which ends up not mentioning Turing Machine and The Enigma or like attending a lecture on understanding poetry without reciting a single poem. The story is a fiction about a mathematician's daughter who is herself a mathematician and in the whole story the director doesn't step a single foot on the subject of mathematics. It has such good actors but the Director made sure the movie turns out disgusting.

Taare Zameen Par : Its so nice to see atleast one movie in an eternity coming out of mainstream Bollywood which appeals to our good sense :) Lovely movie.

Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman)

2007-11-24T15:41:00.000-08:00

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.

12 Angry Men

2007-11-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

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).

The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette)

2007-11-10T10:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Il Postino : Review

2007-11-10T03:46:00.000-08:00

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.

Parzania

2007-08-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

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.

A Passage to India

2007-08-06T13:53:00.001-07:00

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.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

2007-07-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Unforgiven

2007-07-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Born on the Fourth of July

2007-07-28T07:20:00.001-07:00

"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)

SiCKO

2007-07-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

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)