24 frames per second

I'm moving!

2007-08-04T00:43:00.000+05:30

Now that I've reached a minor milestone (100 posts), I'm celebrating by moving my blog to Wordpress. It's not a major deal - I just found that I like the features better. So the new URL is:

http://celluloidrant.wordpress.com

Freeze Frame #63, 64: Orange County

2007-08-03T19:02:00.000+05:30

Orange County is the kind of good-natured movie that is impossible to dislike. Within five minutes of its running time, it had me comfortably settled in, and kept me mostly smiling, occasonally chuckling for most of its running time. And it had me laughing out loud at least once. Not a very impressive gag rate, but like I said, hard to dislike.

Shaun Brumder is a bright high school kid who is pretty content growing up to be the archetypical Californian surfer dude when one of his friends dies in a surfing accident. His death leaves Shaun in an introspective mood, which is when he finds a copy of Marcus Skinner's book "Straitjacket" buried in the sand. He reads that book 52 times, and it kindles his passion to become a writer.
Aside: Something like this happened to me with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. A friend of mine gave it to me and told me I'd like it. I opened it one Sunday morning and it changed my life. I did a doctorate because I wanted to teach eventually, and that was because of that book. My thesis is dedicated: To Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who taught me to fly.

Shaun applies to Stanford, wanting to study under Skinner, but gets turned down coz his school counselor accidentally sent in the wrong transcript. After an attempt to win over one of the trustees ends up as a comedy of errors, Shaun decides to make a trip to Stanford and give it a shot. He is accompanied by his girlfriend Ashley and his perpetually stoned brother Lance. What happens there forms the rest of the story.

The performances of the two leads - Colin Hanks and Schulyer Fisk - is pretty decent. Both actors are at ease before the camera and with each other. Given their pedigree (Hanks is the son of two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks; Fisk is the daughter of one of this this year's strongest Oscar contenders, Sissy Spacek), it would probably be unfair to begin comapring them with their parents yet, but I'd say they have the potential to go far. Ditto for Jake Kasdan (son of Lawrence Kasdan).

But all said and done, the best performance is that of Jack Black, who plays Lance. He was a riot in High Fidelity, and did even better in Shallow Hal, but neither of those performances even comes close to his incendiary comic turn in this one. Playing a man who probably stays sober for about one and a half minutes every day and has a knack of screwing up virtually everything he lays hands on, he had me hooked the minute he appeared on screen.

The really big laugh comes in a scene where Lance breaks into the admissions office at Stanford and is caught by the secretary. For reasons best understood only by her, the secretary decides to have sex with him right there, in the office. Maybe secretaries in admissions offices don't have much of a social life, who knows? Anyway, in the post-coital afterglow, they light up a joint (Lance obviously is never without one) and Lance carelessly throws it in the trash. Considering that this is an office and the trash is mostly paper, the results are, well, predictable. All of this is mildly funny, but I guess what gave it that extra edge was the sight of Jack Black waddling out of the burning building in his underwear stoned out of his mind.

Another scene I liked a lot was the penultimate scene, wherein Shaun buries the book back in the sand as he found it, hoping some other kid would find it. It reminded me of a nice little book called "Slow Waltz on Cedar Bend" by Robert James Waller that I read a long time ago. It didn't have the magic of "Bridges of Madison County", but I liked it all the same. The best part of that experience was how I got the book. A friend of mine gave it to me, and told me she was given it by a couple she knew well. They had bought the book, loved it, and decided to start a chain read. They passed it on to her with instructions to pass it on to someone she thought would like it, and give that person the same instructions. I have no idea where that book is now, but I'd like to think it's not languishing in some bookshelf somewhere but is still being passed on.

ps: This is my hundredth post, by the way. Frankly, I didn't think it would get this far. But it's been fun doing it, and I hope you've enjoyed reading it.

Freeze Frame #61, #62: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

2007-08-03T18:36:00.000+05:30

In the beginning of O Brother Where Art Thou?, a title card informs us that it was inspired by Homer's Odyssey. When I saw that, I didn't know whether to believe it - Fargo started out saying it was based on a true story whereas it actually was not. At the end of this quirky, often funny movie, I came to the conclusion that it did have a bit of Odyssey in it, both in form and in spirit. (I also learnt later that the Coens claimed never to have read Odyssey, which isn't surprising either.)

For instance, the hero's name is Ulysses, his wife's name is Penny (short for Penelope, no doubt), a blind prophet bookends the movie... I could go on about the sirens and the Cyclops and everything, but that's not what makes it an adaptation in my view. Homer's "Odyssey" is not so much an epic with a single theme but a series of older stories strung together on a basic plot about one man trying to get back home. Sirens, Cyclops, Calypso... it's really just one damn thing after another. As a result, you could read any part of Odyssey without really knowing what came before or hence, and still enjoy it.

Set in Mississippi during the Great Depression, O Brother Where Art Thou? offers a similar experience as it follows three prisoners, led by Ulysses Everett McGill, as they escape from a penal farm and go in search of a treasure that Ulysses had apparently stashed away before his arrest. On the way, they have all sorts of adventures as they go across the state of Mississippi. They pick up a blues singer named Robert Johnson who has apparently sold his soul to the Devil in return for blues prowess, record a hit song with him as the Soggy Bottom Boys. Then they meet a bank robber named Robery "Babyface" Nelson (there was a real character by that name during that era, I think) and rob a bank. Then... Since we realize very early on that this is not a plot-driven story, our payoff is not in where it eventually leads, but simply in what happens next. This is just a series of great scenes, and that's what makes it so much fun.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? is also a musical - mostly bluegrass. The two scenes that stood out for me both involve singing.
Aside: Robert Johnson, for instance, is a reference to a real Robert Johnson, one of the legends of the blues world. His life is shrouded in mystery. RJ is indeed reputed to have sold his soul to the devil in return for his incredible guitar prowess. He left behind only 29 songs ( 42 different takes ) which are one of the most precious legacies in blues history.

The first is a scene where the three convicts (played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson) come upon a river where three beautiful women are singing and bathing. They sing Didn't leave nobody but the baby, and the men fall under their spell for a while. Well, so did I. To me, this scene defines the word "mesmerising."

The second is a scene right at the end where our heroes perform I'm a man of constant sorrow. The first performance, earlier on, was exhilarating. This one manages to retain that spirit despite the repetition, and add a triumphant note to it as well. This is Ulysses finally coming home. The obviously fake beards, and the way they keep pulling on it to emphasize that it's fake, is a particularly nice touch.

This is a movie rich in trivia for quizzing enthusiasts such as myself. However, instead of listing all that I know here, let me just give you a sample, an excerpt from Scott Renshaw's review of the movie:

If you really want a sense of what the Coens are after in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it helps to know the origin of the title. In Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, a Depression-era filmmaker popular for his frivolous comedies decides to hit the road in America to research an important, significant film story -- a story he plans to call O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ultimately, he discovers that people love frivolous comedies, and that there's no shame in creating them. Forget epics of the common man; make them laugh, and you've got them right where you want them, and right where they want to be.

Freeze Frame #60: The Devil's Advocate

2007-08-03T16:22:00.000+05:30

The principal function of everything and everyone in The Devil's Advocate is to give Al Pacino an opportunity to play the devil. That he does so with considerable style is among the few good reasons to watch this movie.

Al Pacino's greatest strengths are his eyes and his voice. When it comes to delivering a long monologue, there are few in the business who can match him. A showpiece comes in the middle of this movie, when his character speaks of a colleague called Eddie Barzoom who sems to be coming apart. The rant is more about how the world is being taken over by greed and corruption which, from the devil's point of view, is a good thing. It is intercut with a scene where Eddie is being mugged by a bunch of apparitions while he's jogging in the park.

As I've done before, I quote a snippet here for your reading pleasure:

John Milton: You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there? And as we're straddling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet, as the air thickens, the water sours, and even the bees' honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity? And it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare; it's buy futures, sell futures, when there is no future.

The editing and background score in this scene quite effectively create a feeling of dread and impending doom. But all this is just percussion to Pacino's vocals. The man is in top form here, and this rant would rank among his most effective.

Obit

2007-08-02T19:37:00.000+05:30

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni are no more. I know little of their work, so I cannot speak knowledgeably of them. They haven't done much in recent years, so there's no point talking about the great loss to cinema.

But maybe it's a good occasion to remember what they did when they were alive and working. To watch some of those movies. Like The Seventh Seal (Bergman) and Blow Up (Antonioni). Watch this space for the reviews.

Freeze Frame #59: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

2007-08-02T11:32:00.000+05:30

I had heard a lot about Butch and Sundance, so I expected to find a gripping Western like A Fistful of Dollars or High Noon. I was quite surprised to find that it wasn't anything like any of these movies. It was just about a couple of guys who liked to rob banks, and the fun was in watching them, not in the story. They were like Superman and Batman, only they were on the other side of the law, and they got killed in the end.

The scene I remember most vividly is one where Butch and Sundance are perched on a ledge atop a cliff. They're being pursued, and the only way ahead is to jump into the churning and angry waters below. The exchange at that point is as follows:

Butch Cassidy: Then you jump first.
Sundance Kid: No, I said.
Butch Cassidy: What's the matter with you?
Sundance Kid: I can't swim.
Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you.

And they jump.

Music and Lyrics

2007-08-01T19:03:00.000+05:30

Music and Lyrics is what I'd call an easy rom-com. The humor is low key, the laughs aren't forced, the movie's amiable and friendly, and you walk out feeling content. The only part where I laughed out loud was during the music video that played over the opening credits. But I did have a good time all the way through.

Much of its charm has to do with Hugh Grant, who has become one of the most dependable rom-com stars of our time. He still plays a mostly content underachiever, but the affected stutter that served him so well in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and not so well afterwards) has been replaced by a combination of easy confidence and wry, self-deprecating humor. Here he does pretty much all the heavy lifting while his co-star (Drew Barrymore) simply plays her part. The two of them look cute together (yeah, cute - can't find a better word for it) and manage to get the funny parts perfectly right.

The plot, if you will: Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is a musician who used to be part of an 80s group called Pop that enjoyed a brief run of success. His former bandmate has gone on to have a successful solo career while he has been reduced to playing the music man at amusement parks and fairs. His fanbase is mostly middle-aged women who used to love him back in the eighties. He now has a chance to revive his career by writing a song for Cora, a Britney-Christina-type singer. Trouble is, he has zero writing ability. Enter Sally Fisher (Drew Barrymore), a lit student who comes in to water his plants. You can make up the rest. You might be wrong on a few counts, but this is a rom-com - how does it matter?

The music is okay. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore perform their own vocals, and are passable enough singers to make their roles credible.

The highlight, as I mentioned earlier, is the music video that plays over the opening and closing credits - typical 80s pop song, with a hip move that guarantees the necessity of replacement surgery. Grant is amazing in this video - it makes everything he does in the movie funnier, simply because your mind keeps replaying that scene whenever you see him. Barrymore is pretty much overshadowed in this movie; however, I have a soft spot for her so I'll just blame it on the writing. The girl who plays Cora is spot-on in her imitation of Britney and the like.

On the whole, this isnt like an amazing song that you'll list among your all-time favourites. But you'll enjoy listening to it while it's on.

Jailbird

2007-07-31T13:22:00.000+05:30

No, I'm not discussing Kurt Vonnegut, in case you were wondering.

A colleague of mine who just got back from NY told me that, whenever Paris Hilton was mentioned on TV, the prefix "jailbird" was attached to her name. Sure, the girl must've found it a lot more difficult than The Simple Life in there. But think about this: this is publicity you can't buy.

My prediction is that, within a year, Paris is gonna launch a new line of fashion accessories called Jailbird. It might even have gaudy pink handbags that say "That's hot" in her voice when opened. Remember: you heard it here first.

Okay, I was kidding about the handbags.

Okay, I wasn't. Paris might actually do that and make tons of money on it. In which case I want a cut.

The Prestige

2007-07-26T00:29:00.000+05:30

At one point, the narrator Cutter says of the audience that has just witnessed a magic trick being performed: "Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it. Because you don't really want to know."

The Prestige tells the story of two magicians obsessed with each other's downfall. But at a deeper level, it tells the story of two magicians who don't really want to know. They are so involved in the sleight of hand they are performing behind their back that they almost willfully refuse to see what lies before them.

They are also both obsessed with magic tricks. One is more concerned with the beauty of a trick, while the other is more concerned with the beauty of the performance. However, the business defines, in many ways, their world view. They both believe that there is a human hand behind the stage that knows what it's doing, even in life. Even in death, for that matter.

The central trick (or tricks) - the MacGuffin, as it were - is one that involves a magician disappearing from one part of the stage and appearing elsewhere almost instantaneously. Does the magician use a double? Or is there really a way of doing it? More importantly, does it matter?

The story is narrated in nonlinear fashion with three separate timelines (not as confusing as it sounds, though). Not to mention a labyrinthine third act that you wonder how much was planned and how much was improvisation. There is even some science fiction, in the person of Nikola Tesla.

The movie has an intriguing start and a riveting second act that has less to do with the tricks and more to do with these people. But where it could have finished beautifully and powerfully, it chose to place plot over character. In The Pretige, instead of seeing the man appear again, you saw the machine. Pity, that.

Naqaab

2007-07-25T18:56:00.000+05:30

What is it with Hindi movies and infidelity? For a while now, this has been the focus of a number of movies beginning with the execrable Murder. Abbas-Mustan's latest thriller Naqaab is yet another in this series.

Much bile has been vented about the tagline - The most shocking thriller of the year - in various reviews. It's Wednesday evening and I don't feel like kicking a man when he's down on a Wednesday, so I'll say no more on the subject.

The story begins with a girl dancing with a handsome stranger on the night of her engagement and finding herself attracted to him. She meets him a few more times after that and begins to fall for him. But it isn't that simple: the stranger seems to have been hired by a mysterious man, whose voice you only hear on the phone, to make her fall for him. Meanwhile, there's a mysterious man who captures much of this with a handycam. Cameras are all over the place in this movie, and they play a fairly important part as well. To say anything more would probably reveal the suspense. Let me just say that, while I didn't feel exhilarated by what happens, I was surprised and mostly entertained.

The movie uses an interesting device to hold a mirror to the characters' own morality; however, instead of exploring what the characters think or feel, it opts for the thriller route and concentrates just on what they do. It was a choice I was disappointed with, because the other route, I felt, had infinitely more potential.

That said, however, it's not an unwatchable movie, and has its share of entertaining moments. All three leads give solid, unremarkable performances, one of them the debutante Urvashi Sharma (who bears a striking resemblance to Udita Goswami). The only sore point for me was Raj Zutshi, who looked like his dad ought to be asking his mom about that peackock she met while on vacation.

On the whole, I don't think there's much to complain about this movie, or much to write home about either. You can safely avoid it, you can safely watch it, and you won't care either way. The only thing that stands out is the tagline.

Partner

2007-07-24T00:29:00.000+05:30

Yet another movie waiting to be made, and for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Hitch is one of the most obvious targets for a Hindi movie remake, and it was even more obvious to me, even while watching the original, that Govinda would do well in the Kevin James role. Secondly, if Govinda was making a comeback, David Dhawan had to be somewhere in the picture sooner or later. Thirdly, given their similar comic sensibilities, a Govinda-Salman starrer was almost inevitable.

None of this, of course, guarantees a movie's success. If you need more persuasion, watch Bhagam Bhag - a movie where the makers pencilled in the lead cast, had a good laugh about the potential, and then just left it at that. Thankfully, David Dhawan doesn't make the same mistake here. This isn't the veteran director at the apex of his abilities, but it has its moments.

The one thing they got absolutely right is the Govinda-Salman pairing. Strangely enough, Govinda's strength has always been his chemistry with his male co-stars - Kader Khan, Sanjay Dutt, and now Salman Khan. It's so obvious that the two of them are having fun sharing screen space, and the good cheer is infectious. It also helps that their dialogue is rich in wordplay, consistently chuckle-worthy and occasionally brilliant.

Sadly, though, when it comes to the other easy target - making a good remake of Hitch - the movie is way off the mark. Sure, the cast looks appropriate - Katrina Kaif and Lara Dutta both seem like obvious choices in hindsight - but the screenplay is so awful, it sometimes feels like a school play written and rehearsed over half an hour at lunchtime.

Performances: Katrina Kaif was never a great actress, but this movie mostly just requires her to look gorgeous, so it's not a problem, really. Lara Dutta fares much better. I didn't like her much in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (although I'll admit she was marginally better than the other three leads), but this one hasn't given me any reason to complain. David Dhawan's movies require a certain brand of acting, and she seems to understand quite well how to do that. Salman and Govinda are quite good together, but have their share of missteps in the remaining scene. There's a kid who plays Lara's son and got on my nerves - bad dialogue, worse acting, total dead-weight. Rajpal Yadav has a cameo where he spoofs SRK in Don, and mostly fails miserably.

On the whole, I'd say the movie is worth a dekko. It makes its share of mistakes, but its one big positive is enough for me to recommend it.

Freeze Frame #58: Ghayal

2007-07-22T12:30:00.000+05:30

Towards the end of Ghayal, Sunny Deol is chasing Amrish Puri, the man who destroyed his life. Amrish has a gun in his hand and points it at him. Sunny picks up a knife from the ground andstands there, boiling with rage. Mind you, they're more than ten feet apart, so the idea of bringing a knife to a gunfight would, if you look at it objectively, seem absurd. But one look at Sunny's face and Amrish drops the gun and runs. Sure, it's intended for dramatic effect, but the fact is, it works. To me, that was what angry young men in the movies were about.

Screw delayed gratification

2007-07-19T19:41:00.001+05:30

For those of you that regularly visit this blog (insofar as there are any that fit this description), the plethora of posts might come as a surprise. Since I refuse to blame myself for anything other than global warming, I blame Blogger.

Here's what happened: I had a whole bunch of little snippets written down for my Freeze Frame series, and instead of leaving them on my comp, I decided to leave them as drafts on Blogger. Yesterday evening, I spent a fair bit of time uploading them. The plan was to post them one a day, so as to create the illusion of being a regular blogger.

Trouble is, Blogger apparently indexes posts based on the creation date, not posting date. Which means that, even if I held off on posting any of these for the next 20 days, they'd still appear online dated 18 July 2007. Which I find damned inconvenient. So I decided to screw the whole plan and post them all. I might go back and edit a few here and there, but there it is.

The downside, of course, is that I might be all blogged out. Which may or may not be a good thing from your point of view.

Freeze Frame #56, #57: Goodfellas, Satya

2007-07-19T12:13:00.000+05:30

You might wonder why I did not list both Goodfellas scenes together in my previous post. Let me explain.

Goodfellas and Satya are my favourite gangster movies of all time. They represent, in my opinion, the best of the genre in Hollywood and Hindi cinema. The two scenes I shall talk about here are somewhat similar in how they occur and how they represent a turning point in the proceedings.

An important supporting character in Goodfellas is Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci with a sort of fearsome intensity that makes you squirm sometimes. He is given to sudden bouts of aggression, so much so that even his friends are on their guard with him. However, he seems to be rising quickly in the mob and, owing to his Italian-American lineage, he is the only one among the trio (the other two being Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro) to have a chance to become a "made man". Being a "made man" basically means that you are now a member of the inner circle of the mob and cannot be touched. Clearly a big thing. On the day that he is supposed to receive that honour, so to speak, he dresses up in his best suit and accompanies a couple of mob enforces to the house of a mob chieftan. However, as he steps in, realization dawns. He barely has time to say "Oh, no!" before one of them shoots him in the head. The entire build-up is so impeccable that the scene comes as a complete surprise. You realize later that he had it coming (he killed a "made man" not so long ago), but at that moment, it gives you a jolt.

That scene is also a turning point in the movie. Until then, you've seen how they have all the power and privilege they want. But after that, it's all downhill.

A parallel scene in Satya is the one where Bhiku Mhatre is killed. After much infighting and a lot of death, Bhiku has finally managed to oust his competitor and become the top dog. He is now in such a position that even Bhau, a veteran gangster-turned-politician and his mentor, seems to play by his rules. Just as he basks in his success, right in the middle of a Diwali celebration, Bhau suddenly turns and shoots him in the head when he is least expecting it. Manoj Bajpai gives such an electric performance as Bhiku that the story seems to revolve around him, although his assistant Satya is whom the movie is supposed to be about. His death, although inevitable in hindsight, is sudden and shocking. Much like Tommy DeVito, who basked in his invincibility up until he got shot in the head.

Freeze Frame #55: Goodfellas

2007-07-19T11:52:00.000+05:30

Goodfellas tells the story of Henry Hill, an Irish-American growing up in Little Italy. It charts his history with the Mafia - fascination, involvement, ascent, incarceration and eventual descent into despair and betrayal. It is a story told with such energy and obvious skill. More than any other, this movie is why I worship Martin Scorsese.

The obvious comparison is with the other great gangster movie, The Godfather. Just about everyone who has watched both movies have a side to take. Despite occupying the same lerger canvas (i.e., the Mafia), the two movies are different as chalk and cheese. While The Godfather is moody, atmospheric and rests on an almost Samurai-like protocol, Goodfellas has a more contemporary feel, and crackles with energy in every frame. Each has its own strengths, and uses them wonderfully well. I love both movies, but if it came down to it, I'd pick Goodfellas as my favourite.

One of the interesting things about the movie is its visual strategy. In the first half, you get the feeling of being in a lot of open space, whereas towards the end, you feel kinda hemmed in. The editing becomes choppier as you go along, the external noises get louder, conveying, in some sense, the turmoil in the protagonist's mind. Little things that go a long way.

Aside: A similar strategy is adopted in Insomnia, where the protagonist's sleep-deprived state slowly reflects in the editing and camera movements.

A scene that perfectly conveys the sort of power and influence Henry Hill wields as part of the mob is the one where he takes his girlfriend out on a date. They go to a posh restaurant which would ordinarily be very difficultto get into. But Henry takes her through the back entrance, through the kitchen and eventually to a table that materializes right in front of the stage. The entire sequence is shot in one continuous movement and is so smooth that it conveys everything you need to know about the upside of being in the mob.

Freeze Frame #53, #54: Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge

2007-07-19T11:15:00.000+05:30

Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge is an action movie in the glorious tradition of Bollywood potboilers - a fairly racy plot, a nearly invincible hero and lots of ketchup. Did I mention a perfectly logical plot? I didn't? Ah, well...

The plot borrows a few pages from The Bourne Identity and adds its own masala to it. You have an amnesiac hero trying to build a new life when the ghosts of his past intrude upon his idyllic existence, so he goes back to the world he came from, to find out who he was and what happened to him. Of course, as it turns out, our hero was a lean mean killing machine back then (bang bang), so he has enough old and new scores to settle (more bang bang). Job over, he returns to his new life, at peace with the world and with himself.

The first act, detailing the hero's peaceful life in a small village, with loving parents and a beautiful fiancee, is kinda slow and somewhat painful to sit through, but it passes muster on account of the little incidents that indicate that this man isn't who he seems, or who he thinks he is.

Things come to head when his engagement ceremony is disrupted by a bunch of goons who make references to his past, and then make the mistake of trying to kill his parents. He loses control and, in a short and breathtaking action sequence, kills all of them. As action sequences go, this one is among the most effective I have seen. In place of a quiet, shy, slightly confused guy, you suddenly see a cold-blooded killer on auto-pilot. This is how I imagined the first fight in The Bourne Identity would be.

The other sequence that I quite liked is similar to this one in terms of the action and the way it plays out, and comes later in the movie (but chronologically earlier, in a flashback sequence). There's a crucial scene where Salman kills the goon who killed his uncle - the whole scene is so strucured that you see not his face, but his girlfriend's (Sushmita Sen) reaction to her lover becoming a murderer in front of her eyes.

Sushmita Sen's performance is one of the best things about this movie, and her chemistry with Salman is a thing to behold. And what a voice! Deep, husky - more woman than girl in there, and that's a rarity in Bollywood.

Freeze Frame #52: Dum Dum Dum

2007-07-19T11:02:00.000+05:30

Despite its dismal box office performance, I thought Dum Dum Dum was a fairly well-crafted romantic comedy. It did have a slightly tedious second half, and the big conflict between the parental units seemed a little implausible, but I found it much better than the other Madhavan movie that came around the same time and fared quite well - Minnalae.

Dum Dum Dum is essentially a showcase for Jyothika's brand of acting. She is generally accused by her detractors of playing the same role over and over again, and these detractors are usually right. However, I'd say this is a movie where it is not a disadvantage.

The plot involves the two (Madhavan and Jyothika) being stuck in an arranged marriage neither of them wants, so they do all they can to have it called off before it gets solemnized. As luck would have it, none of it works, they find themselves drawn to each other and then an actual fight erupts and... you can fill in the rest.

Anyway, one of the strategies adopted by Madhavan to try and break the alliance is to approach his prospective father-in-law directly and persuade him not to give any dowry. So, when the parental units are meeting to discuss the details of the marriage, the man does as Madhavan says and refuses to pay a dowry. Jyothika isn't aware of this strategy, so the entire thing is a surprise to her. The way this scene plays out is quite nice - there's actual dialogue being spoken, but the real conversation is the unspoken one, between Madhavan, Murali and Jyothika. All three of them do such a good job with their eyes that you are never in any doubt about what each of them is thinking.

Freeze Frame #51: Run

2007-07-19T10:50:00.000+05:30

Run was the movie that allowed Madhavan to break away from his romantic hero image and play an action hero. For the first half hour or so, you don't even realize it: all you see is him chasing Meera Jasmine around, singing songs and doing his usual shtick.

Then comes the scene in the subway, where he is cornered by some of her brother's men. He starts running and goes right up to the exit only to pull down the shutters. Turns, looks at his pursuers, waits for the first one to come at him and lays him out with a single savage blow. Crocks his head, gets a wild look in his eye and walks towards the rest.

Honestly, I didn't think Madhavan had it in him to do that. He is so effective in that moment that it makes the rest of the movie work wonderfully.

Freeze Frame #50: Lilo and Stitch

2007-07-18T21:17:00.000+05:30

The thing about animated features is, even if the little details are new, the basic plot structure is cast in stone and rarely does any movie dare to violate it. Lilo and Stitch is no different in this regard.

The plot involves an intergalactic federation sentencing a self-prclaimed evil genius to life imprisonment for having genetically engineered a new species with superhuman strength and a penchant for mischief.

The creature is sentenced to exile, but escapes to earth and lands in Hawaii. Out there, it gets adopted by a little girl named Lilo who thinks it's a cute breed of dog and names it Stitch. Lilo's parents died when she was young, and her sister Nani has her hands full trying to take care of her. The social service worker (the curiously named Cobra Bubbles) in charge of her case thinks it would be better if Lilo were to be put in a foster home. "It is clear to me that you need Lilo more than Lilo needs you," he tells Nani at one point. With Stitch's destructive tendencies adding to the confusion, nothing seems to be going right for this little broken family. And then you have Stitch's intergalactic pursuers, including the scientist who created it.

Now, you know, for instance, that the little girl's love will transform the dangerous alien into a cuddly little thing. You know that some of the officious characters will have a change of heart at critical junctures. You know that for a short while, the girl will lose her patience with the alien, only to be reconciled with it during the final conflict. Like I said, it's all cast in stone. so the enjoyment usually comes from the little things.

In this case, the little things are reasonably good. The relationship between the sisters works well. ("I love you more as a sister than as a mom," Lilo tells Nani.) There's a supporting character, David, who has a thing for Nani, and the movie, while developing their relationship in the same cliche-worn manner that every movie of this type does, at least has the grace to underplay it. The dialogue is usually intelligent and edgy, and not too sappy. The scientist character makes good use of his accent - it's corny, but I love it. And there's a toad with a non-speaking part that, for some unknown reason, had me in splits.

But the particular little thing that made this movie so much more enjoyable for me was a surprise reference to The King. In an attempt to reform the foul beat, Lilo gives Stitch a role model: Elvis Presley. I was so surprised by that reference that I pretty much fell off my chair.

The plot, despite all the intergalactic nonsense, is typical Disney. And the whole family-is-important spiel isn't anything new either. Sure, it's reasonably funny, but then most of these animated features are. Even the pop culture references, while delightful, are usually predictable.

But what movie would think of making the girl teach the alien to be an Elvis impersonator? There's a touch of Douglas Adams in that idea, and for an intergalactic comedy, that's high praise.

Freeze Frame #49: Frida

2007-07-18T21:10:00.000+05:30

Making movies about artists cannot be easy. The tougher the artist's paintings are to understand, the more difficult it is to depict what inspired it. And to be able to present a picture of both the artist and the person underneath... that is even more difficult. Well nigh impossible, I'd say. And yet, this is precisely what Frida accomplishes, and so beautifully does it accomplish it that few, if any, will come away unimpressed by it.

Frida Kalho was a carefree young schoolgirl when she got injured in an accident that nearly killed her. She lived through a lifetime of pain after that, but managed to achieve her ambition: to be her own person. She also managed to achieve recognition as an artist whose unique personal style has made her an iconic figure.

Her personal life is marked by a long-standing relationship with the famous muralist Diego Rivera. This is Rivera's third marriage, and when Frida uses this fact to argue that he doesn't seem to be the type who believes in marriage, he replies that he does believe in marriage, only he doesn't believe in fidelity. They do promise to be loyal to one another, though. And in many ways, they are loyal to each other, although the relationship is marred by numerous affairs and heartbreak. No matter what happens between them, they recognize the greatness of each other's talent, and in the end that is the strongest bond between them.

While a good portion of the movie concentrates on her personal life (there are very few scenes that actually show her at work), it never loses sight of her art. Frida's paintings were largely autobiographical, and director Janet Taymor breaks free from reality in a number of scenes to show how her life translated into her paintings. It is a very interesting visual strategy, and makes a huge difference to our understanding of Frida's life and work.

The moment that best represents this, for me, is the scene depicting Frida's accident. It ends with an overhead shot of her lying splayed on the floor of the bus, covered in gold dust, a pool of her own blood around her, a steel rod pierced through her abdomen. It is gruesome, yet undeniably artistic. That was Frida for you.

Freeze Frame #45, #46, #47, #48: Last Tango in Paris

2007-07-18T20:56:00.000+05:30

A man and a woman meet regularly in an empty Paris apartment and have sex. They don't know each other's name, or anything about each other's lives: the man insists on it. In there, they don't need names, he says. They leave everything else behind and just bring to that apartment, some essence of themselves.

What he leaves behind is a shattered life: his wife has just committed suicide. His married life wasn't all that rosy either: his wife cheated on him, and he knew it too. In fact, there's even a strange kind of kinship between him and the other man. She, on the other hand, is a twenty-year old Parisienne who is about to get married. Her fiance is a filmmaker who is making some sort of documentary with her as the subject.

The idea is to meet regularly at the apartment for sex. And there's a lot of that, to be sure. But somewhere in between, a real relationship also creeps in. And the sort of compartmentalization they try to achieve doesn't work after a point. And in the end, when he accosts her and tries to start over with her in the real world, she shoots him.

There are things I understand about this movie, and things I don't. The Brando character, for instance. It's not like he is easy to understand or relate to, but after a point, you begin to get a feel for the way he thinks. He is basically a weak man, broken by life, particularly by his wife's betrayal and her subsequent suicide. In the apartment, he plays the dominant role, maybe as a way of compensating for that. But it's not just a gruff man you see there - he is capable of happiness and gentleness as well. For him, the gruffness is a form of defense, even against himself.

The woman, though, I couldn't quite make out. Both physically and emotionally, she's bared to the camera for most of the movie. But ironically, understanding this girl-woman is something I find a lot tougher than understanding the more closed, beneath-the-surface characterization of the man.

The two performances are fantastic. Brando seems to have a talent for playing characters who aren't too likeable, to put it mildly, but end up being legendary in cinema history. Maria Schneider's performance isn't as prominent, but it is a solid one nonetheless. Being both a little girl and a woman and wildly seesawing betwen those two ends can't be easy.

Four moments stand out in memory whenever I think of this movie. I shall talk about them here.

The first one comes just after Brando and Schneider have had sex for the first time. As they lie there, she rolls off, then clutches herself down there and curls up a bit. That moment will stand out forever in my mind as one of the most breathtakingly sexual moments ever filmed.

The second is a scene where the two of them mock-introduce themselves to each other with strange, animal sounds. There's something very playful and romantic and gentle about that scene. For me, that was the moment that signaled that this was no longer just a purely sex thing for the two of them.

The third is the scene where Brando has a long monologue addressed to his wife's corpse just before he breaks down. The intensity and pain he brings out in that scene is such that it is almost difficult to watch.

The fourth comes right at the end. After she shoots him, she sits alone, repeating the same few lines over and over again, ostensibly preparing herself for the questions the police would ask of her. The lines are: "I don't even know his name. He is a madman, he followed me on the street. He tried to rape me." Her eyes are impassive when she says most of those lines, but notice how there's a little measure of pain that creeps into her eyes when says, "I don't even know his name."

Freeze Frame #44: Heat

2007-07-18T20:26:00.000+05:30

To me, Heat is essentially two scenes. One comes in the middle, the other at the end. Together, they represent what the movie is about.

The big one is the conversation between Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) the thief and Joseph Hanna (Al Pacino) the cop over coffee at a diner. This is one of the significant moments in the history of cinema, simply because it is the only scene in which you see these two great Italian-American actors talking to each other. Simple as its cops-and-robbers plot is, this scene encapsulates all that is good about the movie.

Hanna has been tailing the thief for a while now. McCauley knows this. And Hanna knows that McCauley knows. In an earlier scene, Hanna and his colleagues are standing in a warehouse where McCauley and his colleagues were standing sometime ago and discussing something. They see no clues as to what was going on, and suddenly the cop gets it. He says, "You know what they're looking at? Us. We just got made." And sure enough, McCauley is seeing them through a telescopic lens from a distance.

One night, Hanna just flashes his lights and asks McCauley to pull over. Walks up to him and says, "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee."

Over coffee, they discuss the nature of their jobs. Two professionals who need each other. McCauley would, in a purely practical sense (as Arundhati Roy would put it), prefer not to have a cop on his trail. And Hanna would, in a purely practical sense, prefer not to have a crime to solve/prevent. But in reality, what would these two men be without each other? It's yet another sigma field.

"All I am is what I'm going after," says Hanna at one point. McCauley is a lot less obvious about his need. He says, in fact, that he doesn't get attached to anything he can't walk out on in 30 seconds if the shit hits the fan.

And yet, in the closing moments of the movie, when McCauley lays there dying (Hanna has just chased him down and shot him), he puts out his hand, and Hanna comes over and holds it until McCauley dies.

Sometimes, as Charles Bukowski says, you have to kill a whole bunch of people before you realize that life is piss, the sparrow is eternal and that you've been wasting your time.

Freeze Frame #43: Bridget Jones' Diary

2007-07-18T20:05:00.000+05:30

Was the working title of this movie Thirty nine progressively excruciating ways to embarass oneself? Most of the running time is devoted to Renee Zellweger moving from one embarassing situation to another, while a love triangle and assorted eccentric Brits hover in the background. Some of those moments work quite well, others not so much.

One moment that works exceedingly well involves Renee Zellweger coming face to face with Salman Rushdie and asking him a very fundamental question. I'm sorely tempted to reveal it here, but I'm gonna desist, just this once. Go see the movie, and see the expression on Rushdie's face.

Much of the movie is essentially crap, let me warn you. But if you're a girl, you can drool over Colin firth and Hugh Grant. And if you're a guy, you can marvel at how Renee Zellweger can't help but be charming no matter what dreck she's starring in. Or maybe it's the other way round. But whatever your plumbing and orientation, you'll love the Rushdie moment.

Freeze Frame #42: Apocalypse Now

2007-07-18T19:53:00.000+05:30

Most people remember Col. Kilgore's line: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That scene stands out as my favourite, but the thing I remember most is not that line but the one following it. The entire exchange reads as follows:

Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
[Kilgore unhappily walks off]

Notice the blank, yet searching look in his eyes as he stares off into the distance while delivering that line. A better characterization of the carnage of war would be hard to find.

Freeze Frame #41: The Untouchables

2007-07-18T17:27:00.000+05:30

The opening scene in The Untouchables shows Al Capone giving a newspaper reporter an interview while he is getting a shave. At one point, the barber makes a mistake and nicks Capone, annoying the latter. It's a tense moment, for he knows (and we do, thanks to a title card in the beginning, in case we hadn't heard of Capone already) that this is a very dangerous man he's dealing with, and this little nick could cost him heavily. Then Capone smiles, tells him it's all right, and continues with the interview.

It's a small incident, and Capone would probably forget about it in a few minutes, but in that five second pause and the smile following it, he effectively conveys how he holds the power of life and death over people. In fact, the very next scene shows a small shop being blown apart by a bomb placed there by one of Capone's men.

Take away the surface gloss, the art direction and the period setting, and you'll find that The Untouchables is a very well-made masala movie. Robert De Niro's performance as Al Capone is a perfect example. He doesn't play him as a real gangster, and there's none of the searing intensity you'd find in, say Taxi Driver or Goodfellas. Frankly, if he had introduced himself with the lines, Saara shehar mujhe Loin ke naam se jaanta hai, it wouldn't have seemed out of place.

Freeze Frame #38, #39, #40: Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain

2007-07-17T23:18:00.000+05:30

There are movies that tickle the funny bone. There are movies that gently tug at your heartstrings and tickle the funny bone at the same time. And then there are movies so delightful that you can't stop smiling for a long time after you see them.

And then, there's Amelie.

Here is a movie constructed almost entirely out of sunshine and laughter. I think the operative word is confection. Only, Amelie isn't your everyday milk chocolate. It's a bag of Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans. I lost count of the number of times I practically shrieked in delighted laughter. This is one of those movies whose entire running time qualifies for a Freeze Frame post. However, if I had to pick my favourite moments, it would have to be these three:

Amelie's mother's death. Roger Ebert's review describes the scene as follows: "Her mother dies as the result of a successful suicide leap off the towers of Notre Dame, a statement which reveals less of the plot than you think it does." I cannot come up with a more apt summation.

Fifteen. The narrator explains that Amelie busies herself in strange and trivial pursuits, such as guessing how many people are having an orgasm in Paris right at that very moment. And the scene cuts to a montage of people having an orgasm. Fifteen, to be precise. A lesser movie would've just mentioned that line and had us wonder.

My pick of the lot is what I call the Occam's Razor scene. Amelie has left Nino Quincampoix a message in a Polaroid photograph cut into little pieces and left at a random place that he frequents. The photograph shows her in a Zorro costume holding a signboard that asks him to come to the bar where she works that afternoon. If this sounds wierd, you should see the rest of the movie.

Anyway, she's at the bar waiting for him and he doesn't turn up at the specified time. The narrator says:

Nino is late. Amelie can only see two explanations. 1 - he didn't get the photo. 2 - before he could assemble it, a gang of bank robbers took him hostage. The cops gave chase. They got away... but he caused a crash. When he came to, he'd lost his memory. An ex-con picked him up, mistook him for a fugitive, and shipped him to Istanbul. There he met some Afghan raiders who too him to steal some Russian warheads. But their truck hit a mine in Tajikistan. He survived, took to the hills, and became a Mujaheddin. Amelie refuses to get upset for a guy who'll eat borscht all his life in a hat like a tea cozy.

The entire narrative is accompanied by visuals depicting the alternative, filmed in the sort of choppy way you see in old documentary footage.

While teaching neural networks and learning theory, I often refer to this scene when I discuss the concept of having the simplest curve that fits the available data. You understand why, I'm sure.

Freeze Frame #37: Kill Bill Vol. 2

2007-07-17T22:35:00.000+05:30

The thing that stands out for me in all of Kill Bill is the dialogue. Not the spectacular geysers of blood in the first volume, or even the brilliant segment with Pei Mei in the second. Which is why I found it immensely satisfying when the final confrontation with Bill was mostly just the two of them talking. David Carradine gives what is probably the performance of his lifetime. I personally felt he deserved an Oscar nod for this one.

I loved the background music that played during Bill's farewell. And their parting exchange: "How do I look?" "You look ready." And, of course, the brilliant monologue about Superman.

But my favourite moment in that entire sequence comes when Bill explains that, having found her getting married to some nobody in the middle of nowhere, he overreacted. Beatrix listens to this and replies, incredulously, "You overreacted?" Fair question to ask, considering Bill & Co basically wiped out the entire marriage party.

But here's what struck me: she's leaning back in her chair when he's talking, and when he says that he overeacted, she straightens up. Not in one movement, as people usually would, but in steps. She straightens up a bit, then stops, then a bit more, then stops, then a bit more before she responds. It's a very deliberate movement.

The thing is, Tarantino basically slows things down in that whole sequence. With every other major character, the confrontation has involved some degree of violence, so you half expect a bloodbath in the end. Instead, you get dialogue, and lots of it. It's delayed gratification of the highest degree. The way she straightens up is a perfect example.

Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.

2007-07-17T17:43:00.001+05:30

The problem with Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. is simply this: it never really takes flight. It is well conceived and occasionally well written. There's much warmth and sexiness on display. And it's far more interesting than the other honeymoon movie that came out around the same time - Just Married. But somehow, it just doesn't add up.

The movie tells the story of a honeymoon trip taken on a shockingly pink bus by a bunch of disparate couples. As is the case with stories like this, each couple has something brewing under the surface, which comes through somewhere or the other. Some people act as catalysts for some others to reach a turning point. In the end, some go back happy, some don't. A movie of this nature depends largely on the chemistry between the characters. They don't all have to be lovey-dovey, but there has to be something there that makes the viewer invest in each relationship and care for how it turns out. This is essentially the fatal flaw in Honeymoon Travels.

In some cases, the stories aren't interesting. In some others, the acting is a let-down. Sometimes it's both. The only couples who emerge unscathed from this movie are Boman Irani and Shabana Azmi, who play an elderly couple for whom this is the second marriage, and Kay Kay and Raima Sen, a Bengali couple trying to rekindle the spark in their marriage. Of the four, Kay Kay and Shabana give solid, unsurprising performances.

The other two are phenomenal. Boman plays Oscar, an elderly man on his honeymoon with Nahid (Shabana). It is the second marriage for both, and their families react predictably to their pronouncement. Theirs is the warmest relationship of the lot, and Boman in particular invests Oscar with such an interesting combination of crankiness, humor, despair and love that he steals every scene he is in.

The real standout, for me, is Raima Sen who is simply luminous in the role of a Bengali housewife with a streak of individuality that scares her husband at times. There is a moment on a beach in Goa just after an ill-advised parasailing episode, when she just walks into the waves, free of all inhibitions. It is a well written scene, carefully set up in the preceding minutes, but it’s not a surprising one. However, there’s something about how she does it that makes it work far better than we think it might. At times docile, at other times impish, and at yet other times breathtakingly sexy, this is a performance that deserves an award she will almost certainly not get.

The movie has a few revelations in store along the way. Most of them are revealed through a voice-over by a Radio Mirchi jockey and accompanied by snatches from appropriate film songs. These revelations, alas, don’t always work as well as the device does. A couple of them are quite surprising and garner the odd laugh. The rest are considerably more pedestrian. There is also a big non-radio revelation that works so badly it almost completely derails the movie. Thankfully, the characters involved are developed so shabbily that we don’t really care at that point.

The music is mostly okay. The dancing, however, is noteworthy. There’s Pyaar Ki Yeh Kahaani a lovely tango with Abhay Deol and Minisha Lamba, and Kay Kay’s wild gyrations in Sajna Ri. Outside of that, nothing to really write home about.

On the whole, this is a lot less interesting than it could’ve been. I’s not an utter waste of two hours of your life, but if Seinfeld is playing on TV at the same time, you know what to do.

Thank you for smoking

2007-07-13T01:36:00.000+05:30

It looks like a penchant for humor runs in the family. Jason, son of Ivan Ghostbusters Reitman, makes his feature debut with Thank you for smoking, a satire aimed at lobbyists in general and tobacco lobbyists in particular. I haven't chuckled this often during a movie in a while.

What's interesting is how he trusts the audience to see the point. The movie is satire, but it doesn't push too hard. Aaron Eckhart makes tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor into such a smart guy that you find yourself laughing along with him and admiring the way he spins himself out of trouble. A fair bit of the material plays almost as it would if it wasn't actually lampooning the subject.

The movie also has a key moment where it plays it straight. This comes right at the end and concerns Nick's son. You could see this coming a mile off, given how much warmth and chemistry Eckhart and Cameron Bright (who plays his son) bring to their parts. What's nice, however, is that even then, Reitman is content with just pausing long enough for us to get it, and doesn't actually descend into much preachy dialogue.

AKS Reviewwwwws and blog recos

2007-07-12T14:11:00.000+05:30

In my quest for concordant absurdity in the blogosphere, I came across a couple of amazing blogs, both of which feature reviews of AKS. I strongly recommend that you read the rest of their posts as well: both people have so much more to offer.

Doing jalsa and showing jilpa: For most Tamilians with a working knowledge of Chennai slang, the mere title of this blog is enough argument. However, if you wish to be convinced further, consider this: a blog post titled Neocarnatic gajabuja gilma, which contains references to Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, and another on Sivaji titled When I speak, simply vibrating no? Needless to say, Maraththamizhars will enjoy this much more than the others, but there is much of interest here for a non-Tamilian with a taste for the absurd.

Random thoughts of a demented mind: The blog title sounds like something dingchak's blog title generator might come up with, but the content is top notch. Look for reviews of movies such as Red Swastika and assorted Mithun classics.

Another site with good content for lovers of celluloid gilma is Timepass. The opening page has a poster of the Govinda-Kimi Katkar starrer Dariya Dil, with him dressed as Superman and her as Spiderwoman.

Freeze Frame #36: Scent of a Woman

2007-07-10T16:40:00.000+05:30

When you think about it, the tango scene in Scent of a Woman isn't really essential. You have a blind colonel and a young student having dinner at a posh restaurant. They come across a beautiful young woman who is waiting for her fiancé. And while they wait, the old colonel dances the tango with the young woman. The fiancé arrives, she goes off with him, end of story. She doesn't appear again, nor has her presence advanced the plot or added any unexpected dimensions to either of the major characters. That scene tells you more about the tango than about anyone in the movie.

However, if you ask someone what they remember about Scent of a Woman, their answer will be either this scene or Al Pacino's magnificent rant at the end. Sometimes, that is more than enough accomplishment. That moment has a beauty that transcends its context.

Freeze Frame #32, #33, #34, #35: The Third Man

2007-07-10T13:43:00.000+05:30

The Third Man is arguably one of the best British films ever made. Shot on location in the bombed out streets of Vienna, the movie evokes an atmosphere of dread, intrigue and post-war depression like very few movies have managed to do. From a visual standpoint, the movie ranks among the very best. No special effects, just an off-kilter way of viewing the world. So much about that movie remains vividly in memory long after watching it, that picking one's favourite scenes is a difficult task. Having said that, the four moments I quote below are on top of my list:

Right at the beginning, when Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) first comes to Harry Lime's place, a neighbour (or was it the caretaker?) informs him that Harry is dead, and says he doesn't know whether he went to heaven or hell. While saying it, he points upwards to heaven and downwards to hell. However, the shot is composed so that Holly is looking up a flight of stairs to this guy, and the guy is seen upside down, which means that the directions he points to are the exact reverse of what he intends. It's a simple device, but it does much to establish the world view that most characters in the movie have.

Although Orson Welles features prominently in the credits, his Harry Lime is almost a MacGuffin - much of the movie has to do with an investigation of the circumstances of his death, and the people connected to him. "We should've dug deeper than a grave," the British officer says at one point. By the third act, one has almost forgotten that he's listed in the credits when he appears suddenly, framed against a doorway, smiling that sardonic smile like only Orson Welles can. The impact of that shot is fantastic - again, an off-kilter composition, making him appear, both literally and figuratively, at an odd angle to the proceedings.

For most people, the ferris wheel scene with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten is the high point. The tension in this scene, the dialogue that crackles with sardonic wit, the way it trusts the viewer to assemble the jigsaw without having to spell out what has really transpired until then... fantastic doesn't even begin to describe it.

Everyone, of course, remembers the cuckoo clock speech. Legend has it that this speech was of Welles' own devising - it is not in the Graham Greene novel, not did Greene write it in the script. I reproduce it here, simply for the sheer pleasure of quoting it:

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The last scene is yet another of my favourites. After Harry Lime is well and truly buried, Holly hitches a ride with the officer to the railway station. Just then, he spies Anna (Alida Valli) walking down that road in his direction. He still has feelings for her, so he gets off and waits for her. She walks towards him, then past him, and slowly away. The book ends differently, on a happier note (for Holly at least). However, this ending is definitely more appropriate, given all that has happened. When I first saw this movie, I remember praying fervently for her to just keep walking and not go to him. I kept muttering "walkawaywalkawaywalkaway..." almost continuously. Thank goodness someone was listening!

Aside: Incidentally, one other movie where I muttered a similar prayer was Roman Holiday. As Gregory Peck walks away after meeting Audrey Hepburn for the last time, I kept praying that she shouldn't run after him, as she almost certainly would have in a lesser movie. A big reason why I love that movie is that he just keeps walking.

Gangsters and Sigma Fields

2007-07-10T08:25:00.001+05:30

Several months ago, during one of our crazy lunch discussions, one of my colleagues came up with the following line: "The Godfather is a sigma field, machaan."

Now, most people would be bewildered by this statement. However, the geeks that we all were at that table, it struck us as a brilliant analogy and has stayed with us ever since.

Aside: The guy who made this comment was Rajendran, the only human being I know who thinks that explaining the geometry of least squares regression makes girls go weak in the knees. That might serve to explain why he came up with this one.

For the uninitiated (which is, I assume, most people reading this blog), a sigma field is a collection S of subsets of a set X such that:

If the set E is a subset of X and a member of S, then so is X-E
The union of countably many sets in S is also in S
The null set as well as X belong to S

In other words, the set S is a self-contained universe of sorts. Which, when you think about it, describes The Godfather perfectly. The moral universe that the movie inhabits is entirely within the premises of the Mafia. We consider Carlo Rizzi to be a bad guy because he betrayed Santino. Never mind that Santino himself was a gangster and had enough bad karma waiting to bite him in the ass. We cheer when Michael orchestrates the killing of the heads of all the other New York crime families. Rooting for the bad guy is not particularly new, but what makes The Godfather so interesting is that it created a universe that was almost entirely independent of the society we know.

In earlier movies where we rooted for the bad guy, the law still had a part to play. Either it was portrayed as corrupt, or bumbling, or benignly admonishing, or something on those lines. In the ones with a moral, the bad guy you rooted for got killed in the end. But in The Godfather, the law enforcement is hardly seen on screen. The only one you remember is the corrupt cop who is in cahoots with a drug dealer and punched Michael in the face. Self-contained universe, like I said. Almost like Star Wars, except there are no people with snouts and three eyes on their head.

The long opening sequence has much to do with how this is accomplished: the first time you see Don Corleone, he is dispensing favours to a bunch of people on his daughter's wedding day. A few days after that, he meets with a drug dealer who wants his assistance and refuses on "ethical" grounds. The fact that his empire itself is built on the other side of the law is not dealt with at all at this point. You only see the power he wields, and how he uses it to do good, not how he got it in the first place. So, by the time he is shot by the drug dealer, he's gotten you to root for him and his son.

Freeze Frame #31: Independence Day

2007-07-03T23:26:00.000+05:30

Okay, I know this is essentially a B-movie with lots of things going bang. However, it was an immensely entertaining one, with every single member of the cast cheerfully throwing themselves into the absurd scenarios the movie offered. For Will Smith, this was a star-making role - it showcased every bit of his charm and screen presence.

My favourite moment in the movie is the rousing Bill Pullman speech at the end, when the Americans prepare for their last stand against the aliens. Especially the bit where the tone of his voice rises in defiance as he says "We will not go quietly into the night!" Corny as it sounds, that part gives me the goosebumps. So sue me.

AKS: The real box office story?

2007-07-02T18:39:00.000+05:30

Apropos my comments on the box office fate of Aap Kaa Surroor in my earlier post, it appears that I am mistaken. Rediff.com reports that AKS is shaping up to be one of the biggest hits of the year. Having seen just twenty-odd people in the cinema hall when I watched the movie at the Innovative Multiplex in Bangalore on Saturday evening, I assumed that the fate of the movie was similar elsewhere. Apparently, this is not so: the movie seems to have enjoyed a bumper opening in most centres across India.

My opinion of the movie stands: I still think it is hopeless. However, my comments on the movie's performance don't. When HR's numerologist told him to make a movie whose quality was better than the spelling of its title, he knew what he was talking about. It has indeed helped.

Aap Kaa Surroor: The Moviee: The Real Luv Story

2007-06-30T23:00:00.000+05:30

Yess. I actually watched itt.

Sometimes you go in expecting the worrst. Through loong, bittter experience, I've learnt that thiss might be a good strategy to adopt.

Howeverr, instead of being an atrocious, abominable mess of a moviee, Aap Kaa Surroor: The Moviee: The Real Luv Story turns out to be merely forgettablle. Praise the Lord!

I could continue with the awful spelling, but I'm sure you get the point. So I'm gonna spell like a decent, civilized human being from now on.

I'm assuming the odd repeated letter in the title has to do with some numerological advice. Basically, some guy told him that the movie had a better stab at commercial success if the spelling was worse than the film. I think he did follow the advice: the spelling is indeed much worse. But I don't think it has helped, judging by the number of people I saw in the movie hall. Most of them, I suppose, came there for the reason as I did: for a laugh. Sadly enough, we didn't get much of that either. Like I said, the movie is just plain insipid.

The plot involves Himesh "HR" Reshammiya, a rock star, being arrested for a murder of a journalist while on tour in Germany. Half the movie is flashback, mainly dealing with his romance with Riaa (as spelt in the credits). The rest is about how he proves his innocence.

As murder mysteries go, this one has about as much complexity as a story told in a music video. Which, I suppose might be because the makers wanted to keep the focus solely on Himesh. Everyone else - the heroine, the vamp (Mallika Sherawat in yet another jaw-droppingly awful performance) - is just garnish. There's a guy who plays a friend of Himesh and has one good line early on. After that, he too has little to do.

Our hero obliges with a predictably bad performance. His dialogue delivery is at about the same level as his singing, which is saying plenty. The worst acting comes right at the end: an ill-advised cover of Mehbooba, with Himesh giving Mallika Sherawat what is presumably his most lustful stare. Given the lady's performance, the term "good riddance to bad rubbish" springs to mind.

The singing of course is typical Himesh. Either you like it or you hate it. I hate it. Someday in the future, the Museum of Modern (and Incomprehensibly Popular) Art will put Himesh's nose on display. Along with Kumar Sanu's. And Altaf Raja's. And... God in heaven! What have we let our music come to?

I must admit, however, that the theme tune is quite decent. The background score in the scene where he tries to break into a guy's safe shows a touch of innovation. The movie is well shot too: nowadays a standard feature in the Hindi cinema.

On the whole, this isn't the worst moviee (sorry, couldn't resist) you'll ever see. But don't let that stop you from giving it a wide berth. Sometimes, in order to make something look good, you put it next to something that is even worse. After this movie, people are likely to ask him to stick to singing. Which might have been the object of the exercise.

Freeze Frame #30: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

2007-06-23T22:31:00.000+05:30

Karan Johar's debut movie is arguably his best so far. There isn't a single unpredictable moment in the entire movie, there are moments in the first half that make you cringe, and SRK hams it up like nobody's business. But for all that, it manages to convey the palpable enthusiasm of a debutant filmmaker in love with Hindi cinema.

KKHH is essentially Kajol's movie. Not only does the story revolve around her, she gives one of the best performances of her career. The plot is straightforward: Anjali (Kajol) and Rahul (SRK) are classmates and bosom buddies. But before that relationship could progress beyond that, in comes Tina (Rani) and Rahul is smitten. It helps, of course, that Tina has the whole girly-girl thing going for her. Anjali realizes this and tries to compete, but loses Round 1. In Round 2, however, Tina's no longer around (died at childbirth), and Anjali has become an amalgam of Tina and her earlier self. Which makes it that much easier for Rahul to fall in love with her.

The scene that ties these two halves together is my favourite scene in the movie: it is when you first see the "transformed" Anjali. The camera pans over a busy household in the midst of a celebration - Anjali's engagement to Aman (Salman), in fact. Aman sends some girl to ask Anjali to hurry up and, when she delivers the message, Anjali turns, smiles, and says, "Usse kaho, yeh dulhan der lagaayegi." (Meaning, tell him this bride will take some time.) Her look, her smile, the confidence she projects... all of that manages to convey in one moment what will happen over the next hour or so.

Sivaji: Citizen Kenai

2007-06-19T17:59:00.000+05:30

In some ways, this was a movie just waiting to be made. Shankar is a director with a proven ability to create box office magic with movies involving middle-class supermen fighting corruption. Rajni is a star who has made a career out of playing such roles. The only question that remains is: do we get to see Rajni in a Shankar movie, or Shankar directing a Rajni movie? A little bit of both, thankfully.

Shankar is a director with an ability to think really big. His plots usually involve the sort of skulduggery you'd dream up after your third straight tequila, and believe to be plausible after the fifth. His technique is simple and time-worn: First, set up situations where the man on the street is victimized by greed and corruption at various levels - deserving students having to pay high capitation fees, doctors refusing to treat poor patients, politicos and government officials demanding bribes for everything and so on. Now, once you've gotten the audience baying for blood, have the hero blow up the logjam through some decidedly unconventional and swift methods. Usually, these methods involve some illegality - murder, robbery, blackmail and the like - but they are always directed at the established bad guys. What makes it work is the way he ratchets up the tone of the proceedings from the get-go. For Rajni, this sort of filmmaking is the perfect vehicle.

Aside: For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tamil cinema, Shankar is the man who made (either the original, or the remake as well) Nayak, Hindustani, The Gentleman and Aparichit. If you've seen any or all of these, you'll know what I mean in the above paragraph.

However, such an endeavour is not without its risks. Shankar's biggest weakness is a tendency to overdo things on occasion. Usually, this happens in the hero's tragic flashback - someone close to him gets badly burned or electrocuted, and the apathy of the people around him is what lights his fire. Rajni's weakness is a tendency to have his movies revolve entirely around him. Even while making something like Chandramukhi, he took the low-key Mohanlal role in the Malayalam original and added mucho baggage to it. Baggage of the sort his adoring fans have come to expect from every one of his outings. Maybe it's his fault, maybe it's the makers'. It doesn't matter.

Both these aspects - the synergies and the double-flaws - are on full display in Sivaji. Clocking in at around three hours, the movie takes its time to tell a story of a rich man who becomes poor trying to do good, then rich again by beating the crooks at their game, then arrested, then out, then... you know the drill, I'm sure.

Much of it could have been told in less than two and a half hours, and some of it needn't have been told at all. Large portions of the first half, especially the scenes dealing with Rajni wooing Shreya and her family, could have been done away with. It's unfunny, loud, occasionally crude and mostly cringe-worthy. The most shocking part of it all is that one of Rajni's best attributes - excellent comic timing - has deserted him here. What salvages it somewhat is a triumphant return to form by Vivek. He manages to lampoon just about everybody, including the man who has taken his place on the popularity charts in the last few years - Vadivelu.

The song sequences are about as hopeless as the music (A. R. Rehman having an off-day of mammoth proportions), and watching Rajni flap the odd limb at high speed in an effort to approximate dancing is painful at best. And don't even get me started on the costume design.

The only scenes that work in the first half are the serious ones involving his fight to realize is dream of providing free education and medical care to the poor. In this he comes across a dangerous adversary, a corrupt kingmaker named Adiseshan. The biggest problem with Rajni movies in recent times has been finding a worthy foe with sufficient screen presence. What Shankar and Suman have accomplished here is fantastic: aided in large part by a low-key Rajni performance in the first half, Suman creates an Adiseshan who is as soft-spoken as he is menacing. By the time we reach the halfway point, he's made us want to figure out how Rajni would destroy him.

The second half is where it all comes together. Rajni and Shankar both stop fooling around and get down to business, and the effect is electric. Pure masala, peppered with inside jokes that would have seasoned Tamil film goers in splits. And the coup de grace: a Rajni in the final scenes looking and acting like the old Rajni from Thai Veedu, Thanga Magan and Moondru Mugam. Fantastic stuff! There's a dodgy little sequence involving an amalgam of medical science and biblical resurrection, but I'm inclined to forgive that in light of what follows.

On the whole, this is far less of a movie than it could have been, thanks to some disastrous choices in the first half, but delivers its share of vintage Rajni entertainment in the second half. Worth a dekko? Hell yeah! The Rajni you see in the last fifteen minutes alone is worth the price of admission.

ps: The title was inspired by a comment by my friend Gora. For the uninitiated, Kenai is a Tamil word that broadly translates to "imbecile".

Rajnikanth, Amitabh Bachchan and the necessity of dodging bullets

2007-06-19T02:25:00.000+05:30

In the beginning, there was Rajnikanth the actor. He wasn't the best actor anyone had ever seen, but he was quite okay. His biggest gift was an undeniable screen presence. The man had style to burn, and it shone through even when he had a bit of a paunch, a leather belt that could hide Adnan Sami no matter how you draped it, and dance moves that seemed inspired by epileptic robots.

Somewhere along the way, he figured out what his best attributes where, amped up the style, smoothed out a few rough edges, added comic timing to his arsenal and set out to conquer the world. He became Rajni the star. He managed to do it often enough and consistently well, and the public ate it all up. Hence Rajni the Super Star. Whatever happened after that was just momentum.

The bad news is, I'm not entirely sure he can stop it anymore. In order to ensure box office success, the man ends up having to do a whole bunch of stuff that his age and physique no longer permit him to do. The fight sequences in Sivaji alone should get the editor of the movie a national award. Watching him dance is an almost painful experience. It's like he's come full circle, except the robots no longer have epilepsy, they have arthritis.

When you think about it, not too long ago, one could write roughly the same story about Amitabh Bachchan. If this were the Matrix and AB was Neo, the Oracle might've told him at some point that he needed something, maybe death, to take him to the next level. And so it was, that Mrityudaata proved to be his Mrityudaata. A few more filmmakers nailed that particular coffin in movies like Lal Badshah.

And then the man resurrected himself, french beard and all, and became a bankable star again. So bankable, in fact, that scripts like Cheeni Kum and Nishabd and Ekalavya get written now because there's someone like him to star in them. (I said star in them, mind you, not just act in them. AB is a damn good actor, no doubt. But so are Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor. Would these movies have gotten made with them?)

The bottomline is, Neo woke up from the dead and can now stop bullets in mid-air. So can AB. Rajni on the other hand is still dodging them. Action sequences to the contrary notwithstanding.

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

2007-06-18T12:55:00.000+05:30

When I was driving back home after watching Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, I asked myself how I would describe the experience to my friends. My top three candidates were:

3. A lengthy rant involving the occasional throwing of cosmic questions into the void, such as "What were they smoking when they wrote this?" or "What moron heard this pitch and decided to put money into this?"

2. The horror, the horror... (Ideally in my best Marlon Brando voice, which unfortunately doesn't sound much like Brando.)

1. An expression of muted shock and misery, held for about 30 seconds.

If you're an avid moviegoer like I am, with tastes spanning multiple genres, languages and levels of absurdity, you tend to walk into a movie with appropriate expectations. Watching a Yash Raj film and complaining about the lack of realism is akin to watching a West End production of Hamlet and complaining about the lack of car chases.

So, when you walk into a theatre to watch a movie that involves Amitabh Bachchan dressed like a cross between Bappi Lahiri and Bjork, you prepare yourself for more such outlandish excursions. The extraordinary thing about JBJ is that it defies all expectations. Unfortunately not in a good way.

The plot involves two people waiting at a London railway station and falling into conversation. They both claim to be waiting for their respective lovers, and talk of how they fell in love. And somewhere along the way, they fall in love with each other. As it happens, there are no lovers in the background: they just made it up. So now they have to do all the crazy stuff people do in romantic comedies before they finally kiss. None of this is particularly novel, but if done well, it could've been a serviceable rom-com. Ah, well...

I guess what brings it down is, lemme see... the wafer-thin characterization, zero chemistry between the leads, a screenplay with no sense of flow, an average score and bad acting. Short list, don'tcha think? Priety Zinta and Bobby Deol lead the pack with truly atrocious performances. Lara Dutta can be forgiven for not being capable of anything better. To give her some credit, she doesn't do too badly in the second half. And Abhishek Bachchan... considering how many comedies he's been doing in recent times, it's amazing how little his comic timing has improved. The man is often half a second late in his dialogue delivery, which essentially means that half the comic potential of his lines are lost while he's getting there. I've already spoken of his facial hair in an earlier post, but I must admit that his look and mannerisms in this movie aren't half-bad. To do him justice, he delivers the occasional zinger quite well. However, these do little to salvage what is yet another bad performance in a movie chock-full of them. The only one who manages to come out relatively unscathed is Piyush Mishra, who plays Abhishek's friend Hanif.

And now for costume design and art direction. It's so atrocious, it deserves its own paragraph instead of being part of the laundry list above. It even deserves its own blog, but I don't think I have the energy for it. Suffice it to say that some of it makes Baz Luhrmann's work look like German expressionism in comparison. The rest of it is just plain bad.

The music has gotten much airtime in recent weeks, particularly the title number with Amitabh stepping out of a Salvador Dali painting to do a song-and-dance routine. Which is just as well, since the rest of the album is pure noise, while this one has the glimmer of a tune. However, it appears so often in the movie that it begins to get on one's nerves. The argument, I suppose, is that the music would grow on you. Well, so would fungus, except you don't let it.

Traditionally, reviews like this are supposed to end with some sort of savage punchline. But then I ask myself, why bother putting in more effort into the review than the makers put into the movie? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Ah, there you go.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

2007-06-13T23:41:00.001+05:30

Does he plan it all out, or just make it up as he goes along?

So wonders an admiring British officer after yet another of those insane Jack Sparrow escapades that leave him, improbably, out of harm's way (for the moment) and at an advantage over his rivals. With Sparrow, one really couldn't be sure.

On the other hand, with the screenwriter(s) of the three Pirates movies, you could be 100% sure: they made it up as they went along. My guess is, they sat down each day and wrote three scenes or so, and didn't really worry about whether or not they could remember what they wrote the previous day. After it was all done, they might've spent, oh, about half an hour or so tying up a few loose ends. The entire process being lubricated with vast quantities of rum (yo-ho-ho and all that jazz), of course.

Not that this amounts to a criticism of the movie, really. If you've seen Gore Verbinski's The Mexican or the first Pirates movie, you already know that to expect narrative discipline is an exercise in futility: just enjoy each moment and don't worry about how it adds up, or how long it takes. To his credit, the guy knows how to make a movie look visually appealing, and he knows how to make each scene play well enough to keep you interested. Which is essentially what saves this gloriously shot and acted mess called POTC:AWE.

Johnny Depp is as good as ever: who else can carry off a line like "Can we just ignore that she is a woman scorned, the fury the likes of which hell hath no?" And then there's the little pleasure of having watched Jack Sparrow's spiritual father (Keith Richards) play his real one. Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom do their shtick - they do it well, but it's not high wattage, and I suppose they know that they're not what makes the movie tick. Geoffrey Rush brings a marginally kinder, gentler version of Barbossa to the screen in this installment - not surprising, given how many other Part 3s this year have resorted to Karan Johar-esque screenplays.

On balance, I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend this movie. It's an overlong, unedited, and mostly senseless. But if you can look past that flaw, it does entertain. Hey, if you've watched David Dhawan, I don't see why you should thumb your nose up at this one.

Ocean's Thirteen

2007-06-08T22:33:00.000+05:30

I think the first thing that strikes you when you see this movie is the level of emotion on display. The earlier movies had a certain cool reserve that masked whatever emotion the main characters were feeling. This one dared to be sentimental. Not that I think this is a bad thing, mind you.

However, the movie does have its share of problems. First of which is Al Pacino. In the first movie, Andy Garcia conveyed a sense of menace - you felt that he could, and readily would, hurt these guys. In the second one, Vincent Cassel conveyed the sense that he was competent enough to beat these guys. Although with the trick ending right at the end, it was difficult to tell whether he really was. In this one, however, Al Pacino seems to be filling in for the villain that the makers thought Al Pacino could play. He displays less than a tenth of the energy the character needs to have, and less than a hundredth of what he could. However, not all the blame for this performance can be laid at his door. His character is written as someone who is supposed to be quite smart, but the script never really bothers to demonstrate it.

The thing is, intelligence doesn't work the same way as evil in the movies. You could merely hint at the evil a character is capable of and not really show it except in the occasional instance, and people would fill in the blanks for themselves. But with intelligence, you need to demonstrate that the guy is smarter than the people around him - if you don't do that, you can't make people invest in the hero's success. If there was no-one of Lex Luthor's calibre, would you feel happy when Superman won?

The second problem is the payoff. The movie has a sort of kind, gentle tone throughout the elaborate process of setting up the con, which would've been okay if it really managed to deliver a zinger of an ending. But the movie prefers to play it straight, and just brings up a few small surprises, none of which are really surprising to anyone who has watched the two earlier movies closely enough. Maybe it's a problem of expectations, but that's a burden that any third installment in a series would doubtless carry.

The third problem is the humor. The material is so obvious, it's almost juvenile. The Ellen Barkin character, for instance, is written and played too broadly. As is the entire segment in the Mexican factory. You get humor when you're looking for wit. The movie does have the occasional laugh-out-loud moment that really hits the spot. But these are too few and far between.

Let it not be said that this review is one-sided. The movie does have some good things going for it. For one, it's not boring - there's the pleasure of seeing an elaborate con being set up. Then there's the pleasure of watching a bunch of talented actors who have grown comfortable with each other over three outings. And then there's the pleasure of watching George Clooney and Brad Pitt interact with each other. Danny and Rusty have so much history together that their communication has by now become some kind of code. They speak in half sentences and faint gestures, and yet it manages to work.

Clooney is a master at conveying volumes while not moving a single facial muscle, and Pitt has always been a great comedian (I thought he was dynamite in The Mexican, although James Gandolfini hogged all the glory). Watching them react to Linus' (Matt Damon) earnest statements is a master class in how to evoke laughter with the barest minimum of effort.

However, on the whole, this is yet another in a series of disappointing third acts that we've been subjected to this year. Especially so because so many of these series had fantastic second outings. I remember telling my wife that it seemed like the Sophomore Jinx was now a thing of the past. To paraphrase the promos of Ocean's Twelve, it looks like three is the new two.

Freeze Frame #28, #29: Deewar

2007-05-15T18:16:00.000+05:30

Deewar is, in my opinion, the movie that features the best Amitabh Bachchan performance of all time. It is not that he did not do a better job in any movie before or since - a number of movies come to mind where his performance has been fantastic. But the sort of raw intensity he brought to Deewar was just something I've never seen him replicate. Even today, when I see that movie, there are moments that give me the goosebumps.

This is a movie with a number of great scenes, but my pick for the standout scene is pretty much the same as most others' - the one in the temple, where he goes to pray for his mother's life for the first time. The arrogance of his posture, the anger with which he starts speaking, and the way it breaks down when he eventually begs for her life... it still moves me to tears.

The other scene I really loved was when he goes to a garage where a bunch of goons who have been looking for him all day are gathered, and beats them up. It's a standard action scene, and the dialogue that begins it is straightforward. He just says, "You've been looking for me all day and here I am, waiting for you." But what really struck me was how much the lazy drawl in his voice conveyed the kind of man he was.

Most of Amitabh's blockbusters have been remade in Tamil with Rajnikanth. Deewar became Thee, with Suman in the Shashi Kapoor role. The movie probably did good business, but I found it to be a colossal disappointment. It lacked precisely what its title claimed: Thee (Fire).

Incidentally, I was watching K. Bhagyaraj's Thavani Kanavugal on TV yesterday and there's a scene in which Sivaji Ganesan, who plays his crusty old landlord and an army man who has never set foot in a temple, goes to the nearby Ganesha temple to pray for the well-being of his (Bhagyaraj's) family. And what do you know, the speech is basically a precise translation of Amitabh's speech in Deewar!

Ardh Satya

2007-05-08T11:17:00.000+05:30

There's an utterly captivating poem that gets recited in Ardh Satya. I think the poem has the same title as the movie, and is by this guy named Deepak Chitre. I watched the movie once a long time ago and loved it, but it was that poem that became my shortcut to reliving the experience.

I'd been searching for it for a long time, and found it recently here. The rendition by the blogger Neha Viswanathan is decent. Not Om Puri, as she says, but worth a listen. Using Blogger's new transliteration tool, I've keyed it in here:

चक्रव्युह में घुसने से पहले
कौन था मैं और कैसा था
यह मुझे याद ही ना रहेगा ।

चक्रव्यूह में घुसने के बाद
मेरे और चक्रव्यूह के बीच
सिर्फ एक जानलेवा निकटथा थी
इसका मुझे पता ही ना चलेगा ।

चक्रव्यूह से निकलने के बाद
मैं मुक्त हो जाऊं भले ही
फिर भी चक्रव्यूह कि रचना में
फर्क ही ना पड़ेगा ।

मरूं या मारूं
मारा जाऊं या जान से मार दूं
इसका फैसला कभी ना हो पायेगा ।

सोया हुआ आदमी जब
नींद से उठकर चलना शुरू कर्ता है
तब सपनों का संसार उसे
दोबारा दिख ही ना पायेगा ।

उस रौशनी में जो निर्णय कि रौशनी है
सब कुछ समान हो जाएगा क्या ?

एक पल्दे में नपुंसकता
एक पल्दे में पौरुष
और ठीक तराजू के कांटे पर
अर्ध सत्य ।

Neha, whoever and wherever you are, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Freeze Frame #27: Dil Chahta Hai

2007-04-24T10:32:00.000+05:30

Everybody talks about the scene at the Opera House in Dil Chahta Hai. Sure, it's a good scene, well timed and acted, but I found it less than perfect. More on that later. First, my pick for the best scene in DCH:

Shortly before the scene at the Opera House, there's one in a Sydney metro station where Akash gets on the train and Shalini misses it by a whisker. It's late at night, she's alone on the platform. There's a lonely derelict sitting on one of the chairs there, and Priety doesn't quite like the look of that guy. Farhan lets the apprehension grow for a few more moments, then you see Aamir - he's gotten off at the next stop and rushed back here for her. You see her fright, his determination to keep her safe, the relief in her eyes... and then Aamir blindsides you with a move that is less than obvious, yet perfect for the situation.

The way the entire scene plays out is an example of how a well-acted scene can do away with the obvious. There isn't a single line of dialogue in that scene that is obvious, and that is because the director trusts us to fill it in for ourselves. That's intelligence - knowing what *not* to say in a scene. And it wouldn't have been possible to use this intelligence unless Aamir, and more importantly Priety, hadn't done such a wonderful job. In fact, the latter is so brilliant that I'm left searching desperately for superlatives.

As for the opera scene, here's my take on that one: it's a good scene, and the timing of every little part of that sequence, so important to its success, is perfect. In the hands of a lesser director, it could've been awful. But Farhan had already proved that he was capable of such brilliance in the earlier railway station scene. No, the thing that caught my attention wasn't what was so good about that scene, but the one aspect that was less than perfect. At a crucial juncture, Shalini asks Akash to close his eyes and think of the one person for whom he would ask God for another day, so he could express his love for this person. And as he closes his eyes, we are treated to a holographic tour of his thoughts as they pass a number of people in his life and finally settle on... obviously Shalini. He opens his eyes and, as if for the first time in his life, looks at her. All of us know how this scene would play out, so why couldn't he have acknowledged this fact and cut out that entire holographic sequence? Just have him close his eyes and open it after a short pause and look at Shalini - it would've been more potent in my opinion. Every one of us knows what that tour of his mind would've been like. As it stands, it's a great scene, but not perfect.

Aside: To me, the relationship between the railway station scene and the opera house scene is akin to that between a couple of scenes in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. GOST ends with the pivotal scene in the movie - the one where Ammu and Velutha consummate their love for each other on the island. Roy totally nails it with her description of that scene, and what it would result in. Structurally, it's an interesting choice to make - she took a tragedy and ended it at its turning point - the raveling and unraveling came before that.

But to me, the key moment wasn't when Ammu and Velutha decide to sleep together. The key moment was when they began to see each other as desirable. This happens during Sophie Mol's welcome party, when Ammu gets bored with the whole charade, looks out the window and sees Velutha playing with her daughter. At that moment, he turns to look at her as well. Roy describes that moment with the following line:

Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment.

To me, that was the best line in the book. That was the turning point. Whatever the two of them did after that, it was simply mechanics - the ball was set rolling in that evanescent moment.

Freeze Frame #26: Black

2007-03-31T09:53:00.000+05:30

Black is a dramatic movie in every frame. The way it is composed, shot, acted and scored - it is as if the entire movie is climactic. I was quite impressed by it when I first saw it, but regrettably, the movie hasn't aged that well in my mind. I still think it's a beautiful movie with two extremely good performances, but it falls a mite short of being a great one. Who knows, maybe my opinion will change again with time.

There is, however, one scene that I consider great. It comes right at the end of the first half, when Debraj Sahai (Amitabh) has just managed to break through to young Michelle McNally (Ayesha Kapoor), teaching her how to say "water" in sign language. This entire first half has been about irresistible forces and immovable objects (you can pick who is which), with neither party refusing to give. At the end of that scene, when Michelle goes away, Debraj sits there, begins to compose a letter to his friend Mrs. Nair about his breakthrough, and halfway through that sentence, just breaks down and cries.

Freeze Frame #25: Hum Tum

2007-03-31T09:37:00.000+05:30

Now here's a rom-com that works. Kunal Kohli's loose adaptation of When Harry Met Sally (arguably the best romantic comedy of all time) makes a few mistakes, but does a better job than most other Hindi movies in this genre. Saif Ali Khan, who spent years in the wilderness before breaking into the A-list with Dil Chahta Hai, shows here why he is India's best urban actor. The guy has a flair for comedy, an ability to understate things (a rarity in that industry), and is great looking to boot. The film also came at the right time for Rani Mukherjee - the actress has had a fairly steady growth over the years (abominations like Hello Brother notwithstanding) and this movie is about the time she hit her peak form.

My favourite scene in Hum Tum is a quiet one. Saif and Rani are sitting in his apartment discussing the issue of Rani marrying again. They play-act a situation where a guy comes to "see" her - it's funny initially, but during the course of that little game they play, they manage to reveal much more of their feelings than they had perhaps intended. In most movies, this would have been a very obvious watershed moment - in most Hollywood movies, they would've slept with each other that night, and in most Hindi movies, they would've gone all the way to Switzerland to sing a song. Not in this one. The camera just holds on them long enough to underscore the importance of what transpired, then moves on.

Mozhi

2007-03-30T22:43:00.000+05:30

Prakash Raj's Duet Films has been making some fairly interesting films. There was Azhagiya Theeye, which I regard as one of the best romantic comedies ever made in Tamil. Then there was Kanda Naal Mudhal which was nearly as good. And now Mozhi, a movie about a man's love for a woman who is deaf and dumb. The premise has so much scope for melodrama that you stay on tenterhooks most of the time, waiting for the movie to make a mistake. Surprisingly, Mozhi hardly ever missteps.

The humor in this movie is of an everyday kind - the jokes are the sort you or I might come up with. Which means that, while it's not always laugh out loud funny, it is very often chuckleworthy. Prakash Raj, in a comic role after a while, is fantastic.

But outside of that, what really worked for me were some deft little touches. The scenes where the friendship between Karthik (Prithviraj) and Archana (Jyothika), and their friends Viji (Prakash Raj) and Sheela (Swarnamalya) develops is interlaced with music, and the interesting thing is how the deaf-mute Archana responds to music. Like a language she's hearing for the first time, she seeks patterns. She notices the rhythm, and begins to vibe with it. The way this is done is obvious, yet not overdone. You don't see her move her head too much, or start dancing suddenly. You just see her nod, almost to herself, hardly noticeable to an unknowing outsider. Nice touch, that.

The other moment that worked was towards the end, when she takes a cold, hard look at herself after Karthik has just read her the riot act. Her instinctive reaction is to clench her fists in anger - the reaction she has had all these years, and which we have seen so often before. But she kinda realizes that this refuge won't work anymore, unclenches her fists and just screams out in grief. And her grandmom, sitting outside, looks concerned for a moment, and then smiles.

Monsters up close

2007-03-19T17:30:00.000+05:30

Today seems to have been Monstrous Dictator Day for me. I watched a couple of movies - Den Untergang (aka Downfall) and The Last King of Scotland. The former tells the story of the last days of Adolf Hitler, seen through the eyes of his secretary. The latter tells the story of the reign of Idi Amin, seen through the eyes of his physician.

I wish I could say more, but I am too drained to continue. Both films feature scenes of gut wrenching cruelty. The one that I expect will haunt me for a while is the scene where Magda Goebbels sedates her children and then poisons them one by one, so that they will not have to live in a world without Nazism. You hear the soft crunch as she inserts a vial of cyanide into their mouths and forces their jaws shut so the vial would break. You see them shudder for a moment, then become still. You see her cover their faces with their blanket. Not once. Six times.

Nishabd

2007-03-18T19:49:00.000+05:30

Nishabd is, as the title indicates, a movie constructed almost entirely out of silences.

As anyone who has seen the trailers or caught a bit of the endless coverage of Jiah Khan on television will know, it is about the relationship between a married 60 year old man Vijay (AB) and an 18 year old girl Jiah (Jiah) who is his daughter's friend. Some love stories are not meant to be understood, the tagline says.

However, in many ways, the movie is not about this story, about this relationship. It is about who these people are, and the stories in their past that has brought them to this point in their lives. These stories are not told in the movie, but they are what give this movie its meaning and impetus.

It is not that he is trapped in a bad marriage. It just has become one where he finds that he has nothing to say anymore. Nothing that matters to him, anyway. And it is not that Jiah understands everything, either. Just that she listens. She, on the other hand, is the product of a broken marriage. Her dad has left, and her mom has found someone else. There is much residual hurt there, much anger, much longing. She doesn't speak of it too often, but it underlines so much of what she does. He has learnt to retreat within himself over the years, to find solace in his passion - photography. She hasn't had that much practice.

These are not stories that are elaborated upon or articulated by the characters. They let us guess at them through the things they say, and don't say. Silences, like I said.

The movie has just three supporting characters - Vijay's wife Amrita, his daughter Ritu and Sridhar (Nasser), his friend and brother-in-law, in that order. None of them has a single weak moment in the entire movie. Revathy plays Amrita as a woman who has, in many ways, lost the same things that Vijay has, but finds solace in her household routine. Neither of them sees the other's loss - they just see what the other did or did not do. In a sense, that is the movie's tragedy. Nasser plays the understanding friend who nonetheless advises him to do the right thing. Shraddha Arya has the least heavy lifting to do as Ritu, and is adequate.

Jiah is electric in her debut role. There isn't a single moment when her inexperience shows - this is as close to a pitch-perfect performance as one can expect. Sadly, though, it's mostly downhill from here. Unless she's really careful with her choices, she's gonna be playing some random hero's arm candy or Emraan Hashmi's latest femme fatale.

Amitabh was never a bad actor, but somewhere in the last few years, something has clicked into place. His roles have gotten more interesting, and his ability to play them so well has inspired people to make interesting movies with him. He has taken a nearly-dead market for people in his age group and breathed life into it. Say's Law, as they say in economics: Supply creates its own demand.

Here, he creates a character that he could not have assembled from spare parts of other roles he has done. It's not like he's created an unrecognizable character from thin air, like Johnny Depp did with Capt. Jack Sparrow. This is still an Amitabh you can recognize. But the thing is, he embodies the character to such an extent that you are not reminded of anything he has done before when you see him in this movie. His

Which brings us to the director, Ramgopal Verma. Like with his other intensely personal venture Naach, he slows things down considerably and lets the characters take their time. A lot of directors seem to do this when they make something they really love - it's like they want to savour the moment a bit more. Watch Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Ekalavya, or Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black - same principle in action.

The other commonality seems to be the visuals - Amit Roy's work here is definitely on par with what Ravi K. Chandran did in Black and Nataraja Subramanian did in Ekalavya. Less showy, but no less gorgeous. Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into the shot compositions. Watch the scene just before the interval, and how the camera pans in a certain direction and draws your eyes to something, yet doesn't press the point by zooming in. Interesting choice, there.

The curious thing I noticed was how RGV seemed to have brought a horror movie sensibility to the way this movie was shot, chopped or scored (to borrow a Robert Rodriguez phrase). The way the background score keeps sounding premonitions at key moments, the way the camera moves relative to the action... It's a strange strategy to adopt, but effective nonetheless.

Watching this movie, I wondered who put up the money to make it. There is no way on earth that this could become a commercial success in this market. It is concerned with these characters, content to let them be who they are. It doesn't care that there might be an audience. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons why it is so good.

Strange chords #3: Duet Theme

2007-03-14T21:16:00.000+05:30

Duet is not the best film K. Balachander has made. A remake of Cyrano de Bergerac, with assorted additional nonsense and a dash of Alibaba thrown in for good measure, the movie never really manages to get itself out of the way and reach the heights it could. It is, however, one of the most interesting movies I've seen, from a musical standpoint. The main reason why I'm somewhat fond of that movie is its music.

They key, for me, came during the opening titles itself. I didn't notice it when I saw the movie for the first time, since I didn't know the whole plot then. But when I went back home and listened to the album, I realized what KB and Rehman were doing in that opening piece.

It is a Kadri Gopalnath saxophone solo in Kalyanavasantham - a beautiful, beautiful raga (best known example: Nadaloludai, composed by Sri Thyagaraja - yet another of his little gems). In the movie, you see Prabhu playing it.

He plays a character named Guna, a talented musician and sax player, who forms part of a successful music duo with his brother Siva. Guna is overweight, and doesn't have much luck with women as a result, whereas Siva pretty much has them eating out of his hands. A minor early crisis causes them to move to a different city, where they begin their career afresh. Their life settles into a comfortable routine when love comes in the form of Anjali, a film choreographer who lives next door. She loves Guna's music, but thinks Siva is the one composing it. Things get a little heated when this truth is revealed, but before it can be resolved between the three of them, additional complications arrive in the form of Sirpi, a psychotic movie star with designs on Anjali. It all ends in a violent and senseless climax where all extra characters are bumped off and only the hero and heroine are left.

Crazy plot, and there's really no obvious reason why I should narrate it here. But now that you know this plot, go back and listen to the theme music and see how it is patterned - how it starts off slow, breaks for a moment when the waves crash against the rocks, starts again, settles into a rhythm, then picks up the pace, then begins to have more ominous notes sounding in the background, and ends with the waves crashing against the sea. When you think about it, this could have been pretty much any piece - most movies have random instrumental music playing over the opening titles - but KB showed here what he could do with it.

The entire story is told in flashback from Prabhu's point of view, and you realize, after watching it and harking back to its musical set pieces, that this was a man who used his sax as a narrative intrument. Listen to the interludes in En kaadhalae, and you see how he expresses his feelings - his frustration, his despair, his love - through his instrument. Amazing piece of work.

Strange chords #2: Paruvamae

2007-03-12T17:16:00.000+05:30

Yet another gem from Ilaiyaraja, from the movie Nenjathai Killadhe. The picturization involves Mohan and Suhasini jogging together, and the song plays in the background. What's amazing is how much of the visualization has crept into the piece itself.

For one thing, the singers (SPB and Janaki) sound like they're shivering in the cold morning weather - their voices aren't strong and clear. Plus, there's the rhythm of footsteps to cover the jogging - it adds another layer.

But my favourite little addition comes in the second interlude: it fades in, then out slowly, as if the joggers just ran past a bunch of musicians playing the interlude. Again, this is one of the things Rajesh told me - I didn't notice it myself until he did. He called it the Doppler Effect song!

Strange chords #1: Kanne Kalaimaane

2007-03-12T16:37:00.000+05:30

Beautiful, beautiful song. Written by Kannadasan, composed by Ilaiyaraja and sung by K J Yesudas. One of the greatest songs of all time. To me, it's one of the finest examples of pathos expressed in a song. Yesudas' voice is perfectly suited to this sort of mood.

However, what I didn't realize until a friend of mine named Rajesh told me, was that Ilaiyaraja hahd used a little trick t enhance the effect of his voice. If you listen very carefully to the song, you will notice a single violin playing the tune that Yesudas sings. It plays only when he's singing, not otherwise, so it's difficult to catch. But once you do, it's hard to miss afterward. It's a really small thing, almost trivial, but it makes a difference.

Strange chords

2007-03-12T16:34:00.000+05:30

This series of posts is aimed at educating the teeming millions reading my blog (okay, three people including me, if I'm optimistic) on some lesser known aspects of well-known songs. Things like an odd instrument playing an odd note somewhere in the background that adds something to the song. Read on, and you'll find out more...

Passing the musical buck

2007-03-12T16:09:00.000+05:30

Another sub-genre of film songs that I am very fond of is - for want of a better term - the relay race song. These are songs where one singer falters somewhere in the middle for whatever reason, and someone else picks up from where he/she left off and completes it. Here's my top three in that category:

3. Beeti na bitaye raina: Sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Bhupinder, from the movie Parichay. Jaya Bhaduri starts singing, falters, and Sanjeev Kumar steps in. Beautiful number - R. D. Burman at his very best.

2. Chinnanchiru vayathil: Sung by Janaki and K. J. Yesudas, in the movie Meendum Kokila. Sreedevi plays a young woman whom Kamal Hassan has come to "see" (a concept familiar to anyone who knows about the arranged marriage system). She is asked to sing a song, picks this one and promptly forgets the lyrics halfway through. Kamal steps in and finishes it. It's a beautiful song, and beyond just the musical qualities it possesses, Janaki manages to bring out the girl's shyness and embarassment, and her reaction to her husband-to-be singing the rest of the song, in a manner that very few other singers can even aspire to, let alone achieve. Okay, I admit, that wasn't a great sentence. Aw, heck, you know what I mean.

And finally, the Numero Uno in this category:

1. Dorakuna: S. P. Balasubramaniam and Vani Jayaram, from the movie Shankarabharanam. This album was one of the big reasons why I wanted to learn Carnatic classical music when I was a kid, and this song remains my all-time favourite. J. V. Somayajulu plays a great singer who has since faded into obscurity - this is supposed to be his comeback concert. Predictably, he collapses due to ill health right in the middle, and his disciple takes over his mantle, both symbolically and literally. The moment when Vani Jayaram continues where SPB left off after a coughing fit still gives me goosebumps.

... because this door tonight has been opened

2007-03-11T23:59:00.000+05:30

I remember being absolutely blown away by Halle Berry's performance in Monster's Ball. And her victory at the Oscars, while expected, was also a sweet moment because it was part of a trifecta for African American actors - Denzel Washington won Best Actor for an amazing performance in Training Day, and Sidney Poitier won a Lifetime Achievement award. Poitier's acceptance speech was a study in dignity and barely controlled emotion - even if you were only barely cognizant of the history, as I was, it was a very moving moment.

The title of this post is from Halle Berry's speech. I quote more of it here to provide some context:

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened. Thank you. I'm so honored.

Looking at the Oscar winners since then, it does seem a bit like the door has indeed been opened. Jamie Foxx for Ray, Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby, Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland, Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls... even Eddie Murphy nearly joined the party with Dreamgirls but apparently he's lost a lot of goodwill recently. Not to mention the ones who came damn close - Don Cheadle made me cry in Hotel Rwanda, and Terence Howard (Hustle and Flow) was, I felt, the most deserving of last year's Best Actor nominees.

I wonder why this has happened: have Academy voters suddenly decided to believe in affirmative action? I think what has happened is that filmmakers have started looking more at movies with black protagonists, and the producers no longer feel that it might not be as commercially viable. That's the door that I think has been opened.

And the winner is...

2007-03-11T23:34:00.000+05:30

This is my I-told-you-so post, the one where I get to gloat about how accurate my predictions were. I'm discussing the filmfare awards, about which I had made my predictions at the end of last year. Permit me this moment of self-congratulation: rarely have I been this accurate. Here's how I fared:

Best Picture
My prediction: Rang De Basanti
Winner: Rang De Basanti

Best Director
My prediction: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Winner: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Best Actor
My prediction: Hrithik Roshan or Sanjay Dutt
Winner: Hrithik Roshan

Best Actress
My prediction: Kajol
Winner: Kajol

Best Actor in a Supporting Role
My prediction: Abhishek Bachchan or Siddharth
Winner: Abhishek Bachchan

Best Actress in a Supporting Role
My prediction: Konkona Sensharma
Winner: Konkona Sensharma

Best Actor/Actress in a Villainous Role
My prediction: Saif Ali Khan
Winner: Saif Ali Khan

Best Actor in a Comic Role
My prediction: Arshad Warsi
Winner: Arshad Warsi

If you count the toss-ups as correct predictions, I scored 100%. Even if you don't, that's 75%. Not bad, eh?

This was also a safe year to make Oscar predictions in most of the acting categories and in the directing category, but I hadn't watched all the contenders by the time the ceremony came around, so I didn't.

I did watch, and was extremely impressed by Helen Mirren in The Queen. I've been quite fond of her ever since I saw her in Calendar Girls (another movie that cannot be anything but British) and Gosford Park, and this was quite a welcome event. As for Kate Winslet, whom I loved in Little Children, she's already been nominated a handful of times at a very young age, and will continue to get nominated. I'm fairly certain she'll win herself a statuette before she's 40. And I'm sure I'll be watching and cheering.

My happiest moment, of course, was when Scorsese won. They say the winners' names are kept secret until the envelope is opened, but somehow, it seems to me quite unlikely that they brought Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas up on stage to give away the award if there was any chance that anyone other than Marty might be the winner. I'm not sure if he was the most deserving winner this year, but it's not a bad movie to pick. Besides, if they could award Judi Dench for Shakespeare in Love in order to make up for slighting Mrs. Brown the preceding year, then the Academy has a lot more to atone for when it comes to Martin Scorsese. Anyway, I was pretty thrilled when he won - I was rolling around on the floor and making animal noises when he came up on stage.

But Best Picture? You gotta be kidding me!

Freeze Frame #23, #24: Salangai Oli / Saagara Sangamam

2007-03-10T17:35:00.000+05:30

Salangai Oli was one of those movies that characterized the best of its era in South Indian cinema: individualistic, dramatic and comprising a clutch of bravura moments. It also happens to feature one of Kamal Hassan's greatest performances, as a classical dancer whose love for his art, and for one woman, are pretty much the only things that hold him together. Not surprisingly, the two most powerful scenes in the movie focus on these two aspects.

The opening scenes introduce Kamal as Balu, a dance critic and an alcoholic - he staggers into an auditorium where a young woman named Sailaja is giving a Bharatanatyam performance. Most people around him seem quite impressed with her performance; he, however, begs to differ and writes a column that suggests that the lady in question is inspired more by the primates she evolved from than the art itself. Infuriated by the solitary negative review, she and her boyfriend storm into the newspaper office to demand a retraction. And Kamal silences her by an impromptu performance of how she should have danced, in a number of classical dance forms. Sure, this sort of scene has been done before and since, and it will be done again a million times, but to me, Kamal's performance in that scene is the gold standard. The anger, the contempt of people who cannot understand or appreciate his art... I must have watched this movie a million times, but even today, that scene makes me want to stand up and cheer.

The other scene is comes in the final third of the movie, right at the end of the song Thakita Thadhimi. Yeah, the one where he gets drunk and dances on the parapet of a well. Jayapradha, the love of his life who he sent away with her now-dead husband, has tried to hide from him so far in the proceedings, but realizes that her appearance might be the only thing that stops him from killing himself. But since she wants her widowhood to remain a secret from him, she goes up, puts on some sindoor, and goes up to him to persuade him to step down from the wall. He sees her, steps down, realizes that the rain is washing away her sindoor, and puts a hand up to protect it. Nothing about that moment is anything less than obvious, but I find it quite affecting.

Rocky Balboa

2007-03-06T19:38:00.000+05:30

Rocky Balboa is a curious movie. As the latest movie in a series that went steadily downhill after the first installment, the expectations were as low as they could ever get. But, like Rocky himself, it is a surprising triumph. Not a universal one, though - it is about an old boxer coming back to the ring for one last fight, but the only thing about it that doesn't work is the fight itself.

For more than three-fourths of its running time, the movie is just a quiet, well-observed portrait of a man we cheered for three decades ago, when he landed an unexpected title bout with the reigning champion and won his self-respect, and the love of his life, by going the distance. Now he runs a restaurant named after his beloved Adrian (who passed away a few years ago), does a few pull-ups from the bar outside his house every morning, and lives a quiet life surrounded by the relics of a life long past. "If you live in a place long enough, you become that place," he says at one point. This segment is slow, patient and has an emotional power that defies all explanation.

A lot of screen time in this segment concerns Marie, the girl he once walked home and gave some advice to in the first Rocky movie, who has now become a bartender with sad eyes and a beaten-down attitude. When he becomes reacquainted with her, he does what little he can to improve her life. In a lesser movie, she would've become a love interest; Stallone, however, understands Rocky better. He still sees her as "Little Marie", the girl who he tried to straighten out when she was a kid. She needed help then, and she needs it now; they've both grown older, but relative to each other, they're still the same. There's even a quiet little moment when she wonders about this, but recognizes his feelings for what they are. The gentle, unforced nature of this relationship is one of the best aspects of the movie.

And then there's the fight. Rocky decides to get back into the ring, mostly just because he wants to return to the one thing he loved the most other than Adrian. He plans to fight a few small-time bouts. But fate has other plans. A computer program that simulates how he would've performed against the reigning heavyweight champion (had he been in his prime) throws him up as the winner, and the money-makers are suddenly interested. They convince him to fight an exhibition match against the champ, the obviously nicknamed Mason "The Line" Dixon. He agrees.

What follows is the customary montage of him jogging through the cold weather and doing push-ups and weights and what not, ending with him pumping his fists on top of the steps at the Philadelphia art museum - I suppose Stallone realized that, if he didn't do that, longtime Rocky fans would be offended beyond all belief. Following which there's the fight, where Rocky turns up, as usual, to be more than a handful for his celebrated opponent. This part not only stretches credibility, but also feels strangely obligatory. You root for Rocky, sure, but only because you've grown up rooting for him.

However, that glitch apart, this is a solid motion picture with more to offer than the standard sports movie. If this is, as Stallone says, the last in the series, it is indeed heartening to see it going out on a high.

Pokkiri

2007-01-15T23:40:00.000+05:30

The problem with Pokkiri, the new Vijay starrer, is simply this: it does too much. There's the story of how a young, ruthless killer named Thamizh rises up the ranks of the Chennai underworld. There's the love story between him and Asin, which gets interrupted, both literally and metaphorically, by bouts of violence. Then there's the story of the corrupt police officer who has his eyes on Asin. Plus, there's a comedy track with Vadivelu.

I realize that having these many threads is par for the course in many movies, but there are moments when the begins to feel a bit crowded. Plus, there are so many gangsters, most of whom look and talk the same way, that it's difficult to keep track.

These cribs apart, Pokkiri is an entertaining ride with all the masala ingredients one expects of a Vijay potboiler. The man does his shtick, Asin looks cute, the action scenes are well shot... basic paisa vasool, no complaints.

Vijay's performance here owes as much to Mahesh Babu as to his recent movies, in all of which he plays pretty much the same character. Mahesh Babu's performance in the Telugu original came across as a lot colder and ruthless (having seen one other of the man's movies, I am now given to understand that this is his default mode) - Vijay has brought that aspect to his performance here. However, the dialogue delivery - his strongest point - is not as good here. It's different from his usual, but in his attempt to convey more steel, he ends up sounding disinterested in some of the key scenes.

The thing that struck me most obviously while watching the movie was how risque some of the material was. There's a vamp who's got a crush on him, and her dialogues, actions and facial expressions are pretty blatant. And then there's a song at a club that has lyrics just this side of Penthouse Letters. Not that I'm complaining, mind you!

Nasser has one key scene towards the end, where his performance, though well-meaning, struck the wrong note for me. There was a quiet dignity to his character that was suppressed in gavour of rhetoric. Prakash Raj has moments of comedy mixed in with violence and general evil - effective at times. Livingston makes for an impressive cop, and has a scene where he takes the press to task that he does quite well. Vadivelu, who has in recent years made slapstick fashionable again, finds new ways of getting beaten up. His signature style seems to be an active sort of masochism, and it works for him.

For Prabhudeva, this looks like a safe bet to announce himself as a director to the Tamil film industry. The movie is a remake of a Telugu superhit, has a plot and character tailormade for Vijay, and doesn't disappoint on any major counts. Start counting the money - there's a good bit of it bound to flow in.

Sea of Love

2007-01-11T19:51:00.000+05:30

There's a little verse in this Al Pacino movie called Sea of Love. It goes:

I live alone within myself, like a house within the woods.
I keep my heart high up upon a shelf, barren of other goods.
I need another's arms to reach for it, and place it where it belongs.
I need another's touch and smile to fill my heart with songs.

I'm not sure why I like it so much - it's not a great verse on the whole. But somehow, the "house within the woods" imagery seems to carry it through.

Conversational numbers

2006-12-29T00:29:00.000+05:30

I spend a lot of time listening to movie music. The reason for this can be condensed to two words: Marathahalli Bridge. This is a little stretch in Bangalore on my way to work where I've spent a significant fraction of my adult life staring at the butt of the car before me. My only respite from this experience is the music I keep playing in the car - Tamil and Hindi film music, mostly.

I listen to and love so much of it that it's difficult to pick favourites off-hand. But a particular category that I'm quite fond of is conversational numbers - songs that involve some kind of dialogue between two or more characters. The song itself is in the form of a dialogue, and sometimes it also has actual dialogue interspersed in it. Somehow, I find these a lot more involving, and fun to listen to than the generic stuff. So here's my list of favourites in this category:

5. Jaane Kyon Log Pyaar Karte Hain, from Dil Chaahta Hai. Composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Sung by . Picturized on Aamir Khan and Priety Zinta. Playful, romantic and cynical in equal measure. (I'm also tempted to include Pyaar mein sau uljhanein hain from Kyun... Ho Gaya Na! in this list, but it's not a conversational number, strictly speaking.)

4. Ghum Hai Kisi Ke Pyaar Mein, from Rampur Ka Laxman. Composed by R. D. Burman. Sung by Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. Picturized on Randhir Kapoor and Rekha. This is pretty much the only sequence involving Randhir Kapoor that I can tolerate. The song is basically a vehicle for the two of them to tell each other how they feel. He goes first, but is shy and doesn't quite come out and say who he's talking about. She figures it's about her, and tells him she reciprocates.

3. Poongatru Thirumbumaa, from Mudhal Mariyadhai. Composed by Ilaiyaraja. Sung by Malaysia Vasudevan and S. Janaki. Picturized on Savaji Ganesan and Radha. The man is in a dejected mood and sings, almost to himself, of his loneliness. And hears a female voice singing in response, consoling him. One of the best duets I've ever heard.

2. Abhi Na Jaao Chodkar, from Hum Dono. Composed by Jaidev. Sung by Mohd. Rafi and Geeta Dutt. Picturized on Dev Anand and Sadhana. One of the best looking screen pairs of all time, and a sweet, romantic song where she wants to leave and he asks her to stay. It's a damn good song as it is, but the little touches, such as when Geeta Dutt sings Yeh hi kahoge tum sada / Ke dil abhi nahin bhara, and parodies Dev Anand in that line, or when Rafi brings a touch of gentle sarcasm when he says Bura na maano baat ka / Yeh pyaar hai gila nahin... that's what takes it from being a song to a dialogue between the lovers.

And my favourite song in this category, without doubt is...

1. Sippi Irukkudhu Muthum Irukkudhu from Varumaiyin Niram Sigappu. Composed by M. S. Viswanathan. Sung by SPB and Janaki. Picturized on Kamal Hassan and Sridevi. The song is basically a contest between the hero and the heroine - she composes a tune, and he comes up with lyrics to suit it. The exchange is playful, interesting from both a musical and lyrical standpoint, and absolutely magical.

The best movie review I have ever read

2006-12-28T23:42:00.000+05:30

Roger Ebert's essay on Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru - it's so well written, so passionate in its description of the movie, that it ranks among my favourite pieces of writing in general. A lot of what Ebert has written about the movies is brilliant, but his essay on Ikiru is, I think, his best work to date.

Freeze Frame #22: Pithamagan

2006-12-28T23:06:00.000+05:30

Pithamagan has one flaw: Laila is too loud to be credible. There, I've got that out of the way. Otherwise, this is pretty much a perfect movie. Heavy, hard-hitting, and comprising some incredible performances. So good that using anything less than superlatives to describe the performances of Vikram and Surya would be an insult.

The biggest insult of all came when Hrithik and SRK appeared on Karan Johar's Koffee with Karan and Hrithik spoke of how SRK told him that he deserved to win the National Award for Best Actor for his performance in Koi... Mil Gaya. This was the year in which Vikram won for Pithamagan. Sure, Hrithik did a great job in KMG, but that comment... If I killed SRK that night, I'd have played both movies in the courtroom in my defense and claimed justifiable homicide.

This is a movie where Vikram's performance does not have a single weak link - you don't see the actor at all. He plays Chiththan, a man who was orphaned when his mom died in a cremation ground during childbirth, and grew up there. This is a man who grew up in the company of death - he has no conception of grief, nor of happiness. His companions have been the dogs that roam the cremation ground, and his behavious comes from them. Watch how he runs, how he reacts to the situations around him, especially how he behaves in the end after he has killed the man who killed his best friend - this is no ordinary performance.

The standout moment, for me, comes when Surya and Vikram are involved in a fight inside the jail where they meet, and the policemen come to break it up. And just before the cops get to the scene of the fracas, Vikram gives his entire body a kind of shake, to get the dust off - the way dogs shake themselves off when they get wet. It's such an amazing action, it takes you totally by surprise. And if you did not see the dog analogy until then, you cannot miss it after that scene.

Freeze Frame #21: Nanda

2006-12-28T22:45:00.000+05:30

Nanda was Surya's breakout movie, the one that transformed him from a generic romantic hero to an actor of substance. A number of movies that came afterwards cemented that position - Kaakka Kaakka (the best cop drama in Tamil cinema bar none, in my opinion), Perazhagan (his most astounding performance to date), Pithamagan (stole nearly every scene he was in)... but Nanda was where it began.

The movie is about a boy who kills his abusive father as a kid when the guy is beating up his mom. The mom goes crazy, and believes that her son is a cold-blooded killer. The son goes to juvenile prison, and when he emerges, circumstances lead him to work as a henchman for the local bigwig (a towering performance by Raj Kiran). He's pretty good at what he does, and quickly moves up the ranks to become the Raj Kiran's right hand man. All the while, he attempts to reconcile with his mom, but all she seems to see of his is his violent side. Meanwhile, his ascent triggers the jealousy and insecurity of Raj Kiran's son. The consequences are obvious - son kills father, Nanda kills son. So far so good. But Bala has a slingshot ending up his sleeve - when Nanda comes home to eat before fleeing the town with his sweetheart (played by a surprisingly tolerable Laila), his mom poisons him, believing that her son is too much of a violent force to be let loose. Throughout the movie, we can see that she is a bit mad, but this is essentially where it all comes to a head. True, we've seen mothers kill wayward sons before (Mother India, Vaastav), but not like this. Not like this.

With a trio of offbeat movies of phenomenal power (Sethu, Nanda and Pithamagan), Bala has emerged as the K.Balachander of our time - if KB took Rajni and Kamal and made stars out of them, Bala has done that with Vikram and Surya. The difference, though, is that KB's product was relatively more mainstream. And he never hit this hard.

Freeze Frame #20: 16 Vayathinilae

2006-12-28T22:27:00.000+05:30

In an earlier post, I had spoken of my admiration of Bharathiraja, and how he wrote the rule book for village films with 16 Vayathinilae. That movie, more than any others I have seen that came before it, brought that milieu to life. Somehow, earlier movies never really got their hands dirty while making a movie about the heat and dust of rural Tamil Nadu - there seemed to be some distance between the makers and their subject. That went away with this movie. In its own way, I think 16 Vayathinilae did to the village film in Tamil cinema, what Marlon Brando's portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire did to acting in Hollywood.

For me, the defining moment in that movie was right at the beginning, during the title sequence. The movie did something that I had never seen before: it showed each of the main characters and did a freeze frame while the name appeared on screen, but the name shown was not that of the actor, but that of the character. This doesn't seem like much now, considering how often this has been done in the movies. But to me, this was essentially what made me sit up and watch the film with a lot more interest than I would otherwise have had.

Filmfare Awards (2006): My predictions

2006-12-28T14:15:00.000+05:30

The Filmfare awards have long been the barometer of public opinion on the year's Hindi movies. Public opinion, mind you, not necessarily quality. A knockout performance in a little known movie stands no chance against SRK in the latest tearjerker about some rich guy named Rahul and his love life, as far as the Filmfare awards are concerned. This simplifies things when it comes to making predictions about the big winners, since there is often just one, maybe two blockbusters in any given year. This year, though, is different. There have been so many superhits that a number of people stand a chance. So predicting the winners this time is gonna be more interesting. For what it's worth, here are my picks:

Best Actor: Nominees will almost certainly include Hrithik Roshan (Krrish, Dhoom 2), Aamir Khan (Rang De Basanti, Fanaa) and Sanjay Dutt (Lage Raho Munnabhai). SRK (KANK, Don) and Amitabh Bachchan (Baabul) are likely to make it to the list as well. Shreyas Talpade probably deserves a nom for Dor, but I don't know how many people saw that movie for him to make it. As for the winner, I think it's a toss-up between Hrithik and Sanjay - Hrithik is more deserving of the two, but Sanjay might win.

Best Actress: A very weak category this year. Nominees will definitely include Kajol (Fanaa). Other possibilities are Priyanka Chopra (for something or the other - she's everywhere these days), Ayesha Takia (Dor), Kareena Kapoor (Omkara), Aishwarya Rai (Umrao Jaan, Dhoom 2) and Rani Mukherjee (KANK). The statuette will go to Kajol - Kajol's always been a Filmfare favourite, people love a big comeback, and she was clearly the best reason to watch Fanaa.

Best Supporting Actor: Abhishek will probably get nominated for KANK, Amitabh might get one as well (for the same movie), Siddharth (RDB) will make it to the shortlist for sure. Am not sure who else, actually. My guess is, either Abhishek or Siddharth will win.

Best Supporting Actress: Weak category. So weak, I don't really care who gets nominated or wins. But for what it's worth, I think it will be Konkona Sensharma for Omkara. Other nominees will probably be Rekha, Preity Zinta etc.

Best Actor in a Villainous Role: Saif Ali Khan will win this one at a canter for Omkara. Anyone else will probably come a distant second.

Best Actor in a Comic Role: Arshad Warsi for Lage Raho. It's a solid performance, among the better comic turns this year, and he's gathered so much goodwill with his last few screen appearances that they simply can't not give it to him this time.

Best Music: A. R. Rehman for RDB seems the most likely choice. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy will get nominated for Don and KANK.

Best Director: Nominees will include Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (RDB), Rajkumar Hirani (Lage Raho Munnabhai) and Vishal Bharadwaj (Omkara). I'm not sure I care about the rest. Rakeysh will probably win - RDB was good, and more people saw it.

Best Picture: RDB will win, I think. Other nominees will include Lage Raho Munnabhai and Fanaa.

Note: This is still a work in progress. I might change my picks anytime until the awards night comes around.

Dhoom 2

2006-12-28T13:29:00.000+05:30

Okay, here's my problem with Sanjay Gadhvi, the man behind the two Dhoom movies. He's got a nice visual style, a reasonably talented cast and a knack for making women look gorgeous, but he's forgotten a very basic ingredient. He's making movies about a cop on the trail of some great thieves. But not once does he invest enough in the scenes showing the actual crime. You've got the setup, you've got the scenes where the cop (Abhishek Bachchan) talks admiringly of the criminal and his methods... But the robberies themselves are handled so perfunctorily that all this seems for naught. And the chase/fight sequences afterwards have no zing. The movie makes it a point to advertise its high speed chases, but spends so much time in slo-mo that one never really gets a sense of the wind blowing through the actors' hair. Both the robbery and the chase afterwards feel as sterile as the demo section of a video game.

At least Dhoom was fresh and had a few things going for it. For starters, Esha Deol looked phenomenal. Her intro, where the camera slowly pans up her legs and you realize that it's taken a couple of seconds longer than you thought it would before it reaches the hemline of her skirt, was an event in itself. Abhishek Bachchan finally found a role that could showcase his particular brand of brooding screen presence. And I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Uday Chopra - he reminds me of what Saif Ali Khan used to be back in the days of Yeh Dillagi, although I'm leery of predicting that he'd go as far as Saif has in the years since.

This one, on the other hand, is a disaster. They got Abhishek and Uday back to doo their shtick, but neither actor really takes off. Uday sounds like he's trying too hard, and Abhishek replaces acting with general glowering. They've added Bipasha to the mix, just to up the glamour quotient (I thought Rimi Sen did just fine in the first one, but I guess it wasn't enough), and given her a few bikinis to wear on Copacabana beach in Rio. Her contribution to the movie is essentially that: wearing a bikini in Rio.

On the other hand, the man got imaginative when it came to the villains. The Dhoom movies have to have a supervillain, so they got Hrithik Roshan this time around. And for good measure, they added Aishwarya Rai as his sidekick. The first part works brilliantly - Hrithik is in top form here, and is far and away the most watchable thing about the movie. Ash starts off well - she looks gorgeous when you see her for te first time. And then she opens her mouth.

Someday, many years from now, Ash will probably occupy the same pedestal as Hema Malini - a gorgeous woman whose fatal flaw was that she wasn't mute. Ash's dialogue delivery and acting in this movie is so atrocious, it could singlehandedly sink the movie, even if the others didn't do such a splendid job of sinking it anyway.

One of the best scenes in Dhoom, I felt, was the conversation between Abhishek and John in the end - both actors were at their best in that scene. I guess Sanjay thought the same thing, and figured that the key was to give us a great villain, and work on the scenes with the cop and the criminal. The strategy works: Abhishek's only good scenes in the entire movie are those with Hrithik. Those are the only moments when he seems to be anything other than a cardboard cut-out. But these are small consolations in a big movie: the rest of what happens on screen is so phenomenally insipid, it makes the whole product hopeless.

Apparently, there's a Dhoom 3 in the works, with SRK as the villain this time. Not surprising, really: even when I heard about the second movie, my prediction was that, if this one's successful, there'll be one more, and my only question was, which of SRK or Big B would be the villain this time.

I can only hope that Sanjay Gadhvi gets it right the third time around. But I'm not holding my breath.

Bhagam Bhag

2006-12-28T13:03:00.000+05:30

This seems to be a bad time for me to consider watching a Hindi movie. Consider the last few movies I've watched:

1. Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna: I was on a bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore and they played it during the journey. I've never really considered jumping off a moving bus before, but I came close that night. I mean, heck, isn't there something in the Geneva Convention that bans this sort of punishment?

2. Vivaah: Nothing happens in this movie. I mean nothing. The best thing I can say about it is that the term "comfortably numb" applies well to it. It doesn't make you cringe as often as Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon, if that's any consolation.

3. Baabul: Same as above, but with more melodrama, although maybe I should spell it "mellow-drama". What the heck is happening here? Did the National Association of Insomniacs go petition the big Bollywood studios or something?

4. Dhoom 2: I remember reading somewhere that the most popular reason for making a sequel is that the first film made money. Unfortunately, in most cases, that's where reason bails out and the suits take over. Dhoom 2 is one such debacle, a perfect example of form replacing content.

And now Bhagam Bhag, a comic caper I had pinned much of my hopes on. Paresh Rawal, Akshay Kumar, Priyadarshan at the helm, Govinda making a comeback... it all sounded good on paper. I should've read the signs more carefully: when the makers decide to include a "rap number" featuring the heroes at the last moment, it is usually because they saw the rushes and realized that the rest of the movie was crap.

The movie basically involves a troupe of performers in London to do a show. The heroine bails out at the last moment, so they search for a replacement. The replacement turns out to have suicidal tendencies, and immolates herself one night. But then it turns out that she's not dead. And then... do you really want to hear the rest of this?

Now, I have no problems per se with the idea of a screwball plot that piles one contrivance on top of another. What I do have a problem with is this: the movie is simply not funny. I don't remember laughing even once. I chuckled a couple of times, but that's about it. Govinda appears desperate, trying to replace comic timing with perpetual annoyance. Paresh Rawal has precious little to do, and he does even less: as performances go, this one compares with Satish Shah playing a dead man in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, but with none of the comic potential. Only Akshay Kumar looks moderately alive - he's the pick of a bad lot.

I guess the basic problem is this: the makers probably decided on the star cast first, and were so enamoured by the comic possibilities inherent in such a cast that they forgot to actually make the movie. Somebody's got to remind these idiots that they have to do something in order to be funny, they can't just exist and expect people to laugh.

The best movie posters of 2006

2006-12-16T13:49:00.001+05:30

Sam's Myth: TOP FIVE: 2006 Movie Posters

Not my pick, since this isn't a category I follow. But this is a good list, from what I can see.

Freeze Frame #19: Pulp Fiction

2006-12-16T07:25:00.000+05:30

The soul of Pulp Fiction lies in its dialogue - profane, literate, whimsical and incredibly well-delivered. In fact, the dialogue is so important to the movie, its characters are a lot more interested in what they're saying than who they're shooting (or being shot at by, for that matter). This is an extremely interesting choice, in my opinion. It has been my experience that most people with a loaded gun in the movies have nothing to say other than plot points. The chief pleasure of Pulp Fiction is in listening to its characters talk. What happens is besides the point.

The scene that encapsulates this particular value for me comes early in the film, when two hitmen named Jules and Vincent (played by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta respectively) have a conversation on their way to a job. The topic is their boss Marsellus Wallace's wife Mia, whom Vincent is supposed to take out to dinner that evening. Jules tells him about one of their acquaintances whom Marsellus threw out a window because he caught him giving Mia a foot massage. They're right in the middle of an argument about whether or not a foot massage means anything - whether touching his wife's feet and sticking your tongue in her holiest of holies are in the same ballpark, to use Jules' words - when they reach the door of the apartment they're supposed to enter. Jules looks at his watch, figures they still have some time, and they go down the corridor to finish their discussion.

Think about this:

a) They have a fairly long conversation about something that has nothing to do with the job they're there to do. The purpose of the exchange is to set the scene for Vincent's date with Mia later that evening, but that would've been achieved by simply mentioning what Marsellus did; the argument thereafter served no real purpose.

b) There's nothing that happens in that apartment after they enter, that they couldn't have done earlier. They just took their time about it, so they could finish talking. I especially love what Jules says when their discussion is over: "Come on, let's get into character." Then they go into that apartment, play the hard men, and kill a few people.

Exactly how often does this happen in the movies?

Freeze Frame #18: The General

2006-12-16T07:24:00.000+05:30

How many of you have seen a Buster Keaton movie? He's not as well-known as Charlie Chaplin, but his comedic talents are no less prodigious. He was also an amazingly courageous stunt man - not only did he do his own stunts - some of them quite amazing - he even used to be a stunt double for some of the other actors in his films. Knowing this fact makes it all the more impressive when you see his films. A stunt I was particularly impressed by is one in Steamboat Bill Jr. where he's standing before a house and the wall comes down on him, but he goes right through an open window on the wall. Roger Ebert mentions in his essay on Buster's films, that he didn't rehearse that scene because he trusted his crew and his planning and was confident it would go off well.

However, my iconic Buster Keaton moment, the one that immediately springs to mind every time his name is mentioned, is from The General. Buster has just been refused an opportunity to enlist as part of the Confederate army in the Civil War, since his skills as an engineer are considered far more valuable. His girlfriend, however, refuses to listen to his explanations, and declines to talk to him unless he is in uniform. Dejected, Buster goes back to the railway yard and sits on the crossbar of his engine, wishing he could solve this problem. Unbeknownst to him, his assistant has gotten into the cab of the engine and started it. The scene ends with the visual of Buster being carried along on the cross-bar, his thin frame carried up and down with its movements.

Freeze Frame #16 & #17: Iruvar

2006-12-16T06:13:00.000+05:30

My favourite Mani Rathnam movie of all time. Yes, even more than Mouna Raagam, Nayakan or the movie I just raved about in an earlier post - Kannathil Muthamittal. I can't quite explain why.

Iruvar is the story of two men, both destined to shape the future of Tamil Nadu politics. One is an actor, the other a writer. They start out as friends, then become comrades in the political arena, then rivals, then just a couple of old men with a lot of baggage but not enough energy to carry it anymore.

Two larger than life protagonists, both played by great actors. A story whose broad outlines most Tamilians with a grasp of recent history can recognize. Little wonder that the women don't have too much to do. Yet, my two favourite scenes in the movie both involve the women.

1. Tabu plays Senthamarai, a school teacher in a village in Tamil Nadu who catches the eye of Thamizhselvam (Prakash Raj in the Karunanidhi role) when he is at a protest rally. He writes to her and asks her to come to him. And she does. He is a married man, and the concept of a divorce is not only alien to the culture of that time, but would also mean political suicide. She asks him, "Who am I here? What is my position?" And he replies, "My darling. My lover. My friend." He explains with his eyes what that list does not contain, and why it can never contain it. She processes this, ponders for a moment and smiles, eyes shining with unshed tears.

The next scene shows the couple on the floor on the bedroom after their coupling, while the lines Unnodu naan vaazhntha ovvoru maniththuliyum, maranappadukkaiyilum marakkathu kanmaniye (Every moment I have lived with you, I will never forget to my dying breath) are uttered in the background. It's a beautiful poem, very well rendered, quite poignant. But I think it would've been far less powerful, had it not been preceded by that sublime moment between Prakash Raj and Tabu.

2. After he becomes the chief minister, on the way home, Selvam changes his mind midway and asks his driver to direct the car to Senthamarai's place. One of his aides calls up his house to inform his wife Maragatham (played by Revathy) of the change in plans. She is in the middle of some housework when the call comes. You don't hear what is said - you just see her face. She listens, her face falls for a moment, then with a resigned look, she goes back to her housework. Revathy has about 10 minutes of screen time in a three hour movie. Most of it is nondescript. But in that one moment, without a single line of dialogue, she captures the essence of her character.

Freeze Frame #13, #14, #15: Kannathil Muthamittal

2006-12-16T05:29:00.000+05:30

One of the recurring themes in Mani Rathnam's movies is that of an individual or a family caught in a social maelstrom. Kannathil Muthamittal is one such, depicting a little girl's search for her biological mother in civil war-ravaged Sri Lanka. For the most part, the movie is, I think, pitch perfect. It overdoes it right at the very end, and it's kind of a glaring flaw, but I'm inclined to forgive that - to paraphrase what Einstein once said t Wheeler, he has earned the right to be wrong occasionally.

Three scenes stand out in my opinion. The first is well-known and quite often mentioned by reviewers. The second is not often mentioned, I think. And the third is the big payoff.

1. There's a scene where a village is being evacuated before the Sri Lankan air force bombs the place. An amazing song - Vidai Kodu Engal Naade - plays in the background. (Amazing how A. R. Rehman picks an unconventional but absolutely perfect voice to render some of his songs - this one is by M. S. Viswanathan, and simply blows me away every time I hear it.) The standout moment involves the old temple priest in the village who refuses to leave the place he has lived in all his life. You see him standing there, defiantly ringing the temple bell as the bombs explode all around him. Poetic.

2. Right at the end, the girl Amudha finally gets her wish - she meets her biological mother Shyama. And she asks her, "Why did you leave me? Why did you never come to see me?"

Shyama had gone back to Sri Lanka soon after giving birth to her in Rameswaram over ten years ago, and joined the ranks of the LTTE. Her husband is dead, she has probably seen many of her comrades, friends and family members die during these years, and has trained herself to concentrate single-mindedly on her chosen purpose. This unexpected meeting with her child, and that question, leaves her sandbagged.

She pauses for a moment, and simply says "Tarunam appadi." (Loosely translated, "The circumstances were such.") It is a testament to Nandita Das' acting, and to Mani Rathnam's skill, that those two words are all we need.

3. This one involves Simran. For years, her function in the movies was to look pretty, and she did that admirably. The sole blip on the radar was Vaali, and I felt even that performance was overrated. When I watched Kannathil Muthamittal for the first time, I noticed the performances of Keerthana, who plays Amudha, and Nandita Das, who has about 10 minutes of screen time and uses it exceptionally well.

The second time around, I concentrated on Simran. Hers is an interesting role: she plays Indira, Amudha's adoptive mother who, along with her husband, searches for her daughter's biological parent. She never really verbalizes it, but there's a feeling of insecurity that comes with that search. It comes out in little ways, like when she has little fights with her daughter. And watch how she winces almost imperceptibly every time her daughter mentions that they're in Sri Lanka to look for her "real mother". (That's why I've been using the word "biological" ad nauseam, by the way.)

Right at the end of the movie, when Shyama is walking away after the big meeting, Amudha turns and gives Indira a big kiss on the cheek. To the girl, it's probably just a way od saying thank you, for helping her find her mother. But to Indira, it means so much more, and you see her face light up.

When I watched the movie for the first time, this moment didn't do anything for me. But on the second viewing, I was concentrating on Indira, and Simran did such a great job of conveying the character's inner turmoil while staying mostly in the background, that the last kiss totally made my day.

I realized then that the movie was not about the girl, or about her search, or about the Sri Lankan conflict. All that is just the backdrop for Indira's story. And the title of the movie (translated to "she kissed me on the cheek") wasn't trivial - Mani was trying to tell you what he was trying to do, and what to look for.

Freeze Frame #12: Fiza

2006-12-16T05:10:00.000+05:30

There's a reason why my choice for the best screen mom of all time is Jaya Bachchan in Fiza, and the reason is this scene. (Before you ask, no, I haven't seen Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, so I can't comment on that one.)

Her son was lost years ago during some communal riots in the neighbourhood - he grows up to become a terrorist. His sister finds him and brings him back home, and it seems for a while that he has left that life behind him. His mom, who is learning to smile again after so many years, is reverting to her old playful self.

And then, he gets into a fight with some local goon who harasses his sister and goes to town on the guy. The incident also precipitates his revelation to his mother and sister about having joined a terrorist group again.

Watch Jaya Bachchan's eyes as she takes all this in. She dies soon after (by her own hand, if I remember correctly), but the actual time of death is in that scene. Watching the light go out of her eyes when she sees what her son has become is among the most haunting moments in this interesting yet flawed work.

ps: Soon after Jaya dies, there's a song picturized on Asha Sachdev who plays Jaya's flirty neighbour Ulfat. It goes Na leke jaao mere dost ka janaaza hai and is sung by Jaspinder Narula. A lot of the other songs in the movie became popular, but this is the real gem in that album.

Love Mugam

2006-12-15T23:25:00.000+05:30

I was discussing Tamil and Telugu movies with my bro-in-law Goutham, and he told me that Siddharth is now one of the hottest properties in the Telugu film industry, thanks to two superhit movies where he plays the romantic lead (Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana and Bommarillu).

Goutham's way of describing it was: the guynow occupies the position Madhavan did in Tamil movies when Alai Paayudhe came out. He has the "love mugam" (literally "love face"). I'm not sure if I've heard a more succint, crazy-sounding, brilliant description of the chocolate hero stereotype, and I doubt I ever will.

Here's to you, Goutham: that little phrase of yours just made my day.

Baabul

2006-12-15T11:38:00.000+05:30

Watched Baabul yesterday night. Ravi Chopra seems to have made his choice of genre clear - the family melodramas of the eighties, the type that Visu used to be well-known for. (For a brilliant rant on the subject, check out this piece by dingchak).

Now, while this may not be obvious from my earlier posts, or my general preferences for movies, I don't have anything against the genre per se. If it's done well, I'll watch it, and even enjoy it. While I wasn't completely sold on his previous venture Baghban, I thought it had a few good moments. The final speech by Amitabh was, I thought, quite well-delivered.

This one, on the other hand, is dead in the water. And I use the word dead in every imaginable sense. Nobody, and I mean nobody, displays even the tiniest hint of a spark throughout its running time. This is a story about how a widow's father-in-law is willing to forgo every relationship he has to get her remarried. Not a bad plot for this kind of movie. And many scenes are set up in a way that gives the actors ample room to go ballistic. And yet, nobody seems to take that chance. I like understated acting (see my earlier post on the subject), but there's a world of difference between understating and being a lawn ornament.

Rani Mukherjee basically has to look pretty, look happy, and then weep for the rest of the movie's running time. She's the one getting remarried, but she never seems totally sold on the idea. She comes across simply as a device to demonstrate the protagonist's nobility of character. While it is true that the plot revolves around the father-in-law, his entire struggle makes no sense if the person he seeks to help doesn't seem to want it.

This is a quieter, more dialed-down Amitabh than we're used to seeing. This itself is not a problem, had he managed to convey a certain degree of intensity. This is a man who has lost his only son, and now is possessed by a fierce desire to see his daughter-in-law happy again. The plot tells us that. But his eyes tell us nothing.

Salman basically just has to appear as a random romantic hero in the first half and die at the end of it. The only good thing I can say about his performance is that the cringeworthiness per unit screen time has gone down marginally from Baghban. Which isn't saying much, considering that he has more screen time in this movie.

Hema Malini, John Abraham and Om Puri basically just occupy space and do little or nothing of note. I can forgive John for not being capable of much more than that; I'll even forgive Hema for the same reason, sacriligeous as it might sound to some (she never impressed me as an actress). But what Om Puri is doing (or not doing) in this dreck is beyond my comprehension.

On the whole, this is one of the most sorry-ass excuses for a movie to come out in recent times. That it boasts such a star cast only makes it even more of a tragedy.

Freeze Frame #11: Almost Famous

2006-12-14T18:55:00.000+05:30

Kate Hudson won a richly deserved Oscar nomination for her part as Penny Lane in this movie. Penny is a free spirit - a groupie to the rest of the world, a "band-aid" in her own mind. She in love with Russell Hammond, the lead guitarist of Stillwater. William Miller, the boy reporter who follows the band during its tour and the protagonist through whose eyes the story unfolds, has a crush on her. He sees that Russell does not love her, does not regard her as much else other than a convenient fuck-buddy while he's on the road.

Watch this crucial exchange between Penny and Will where it all comes to a head:

Penny: Maybe it is love, as much as it can be, for somebody...
William: Somebody who sold you to Humble Pie for fifty bucks and a case of beer! I was there! I was there!... Look- I'm sorry.

Watch her face as she reacts to this piece of information. The tears that come unbidden, held back for a moment, the brave smile, and the response: What kind of beer?

If that doesn't deserve an Oscar nomination, I don't know what does.

Freeze Frame #9 & #10: Good Will Hunting

2006-12-14T14:47:00.000+05:30

A movie with some very smart dialogue, delivered by actors who clearly relish the material. Standout examples include Will's monologue about why he shouldn't join the NSA, Sean's speech about regret, the scene in the bar when Will blows away a cocky Harvard student... the list goes on. However, my two favourite moments from the movie both involve no dialogue.

The first is a scene with Matt Damon who plays Will Hunting, and Stellan Skarsgard who plays Gerald Lambeau, a mathematics professor who takes Will under his wing. One of the movie's plotlines is about how Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), his shrink, and Gerald Lambeau, both try to play a father figure in his life, in their own ways. Gerald believes that Will has great potential which he must actualize, and pushes him in that direction. Sean believes that Will first needs to learn how to trust, open himself up to the possibility of both love and hurt, and learn to be happy. The more obvious side to take is that of the shrink, so the more obvious ploy would've been to make the professor some kind of impersonal, pushy jerk. But the movie smartly sidesteps that ploy, and the way it does that is to add a simple five second postscript to an otherwise ordinary scene.

Will and Gerald are working on a proof on the board. It's mostly silent - the communication is through equations on the board. After a particularly nifty piece of math, they both sit back, satisfied, and look at what they've accomplished on the blackboard. And while they do that, Gerald reaches out and ruffles Will's hair. To me, that simple gesture is what humanizes Gerald beyond all measure.

Aside: You have to understand: ever since I read To Kill a Mockingbird, ruffling someone's hair has been, for me, the de facto expression of one's affection. So, while I find it a very significant moment, it might not be so for others.

The other great moment comes right at the end. In a scene that comes shortly before it, Will tells Chuckie how he doesn't see why he shouldn't be a bricklayer all his life. Chuckie's response to that is beautifully put:

Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way. In twenty years, if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house to watch the Patriots games, still workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill you. That's not a threat. Now, that's a fact. I'll fuckin' kill you.

A little later in the same scene, he says:

Every day I come by your house and I pick you up. And we go out. We have a few drinks, and a few laughs, and it's great. But you know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds, from when I pull up to the curb and when I get to your door, cause I think, maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. No goodbye. No see you later. No nothing. You just left. I don't know much, but I know that.

It sets things up for the last scene, when Will finally gets his act together and goes off to California, and see if he could maybe win Skylar back. And Chuckie finds out about it the way he wanted to: he goes to Will's house one morning and knocks on the door, and he isn't there. No goodbye. No see you later. No nothing. The camera just stays on Ben Affleck's face for a few seconds, as he processes this, realizes that his friend is gone, and celebrates and mourns it in equal measure. The movie gives these two people enough time together to build up to this moment; this is a fitting payoff, and well-earned.

Vivah

2006-12-12T23:50:00.001+05:30

I just finished watching Vivah, Sooraj Barjatya's latest venture into feel-good territory. It's an interesting experience, sort of like watching The Princess Diaries - you figure there's an audience for this kind of movie, but you have no idea what that is, or why such an audience would even exist.

Vivah is, as the tagline says, a story of the journey from engagement to marriage. It involves Poonam, a girl whose parents are both dead, and has been brought up by her uncle. She gets engaged to Prem, a Delhi boy from an extremely rich family. They get engaged, get to know each other, and eventually get married after two hours of sweetness and light and half an hour of lightweight complications. Standard Sooraj Barjatya formula, three movies old now.

It's interesting to see the progression of this guy's films. Maine Pyar Kiya had something of a plot, a healthy disregard for reality and a palpable enthusiasm evident in the actors. Hum Aapke Hain Koun did away with the plot and kept everything else. Hum Saath Saath Hain did away with most of the enthusiasm as well (save for Saif, who actually seemed to be having a good time). And now Vivah, which does away with whatever was left.

Now I'm trying to figure out what the guy can do next. Probably something called Mahurat, which is the journey from the beginning of a wedding ceremony to the end. Or better still, an Indianized, happy-families version of Groundhog Day, where a happy, filthy rich family relives the same happy day over and over again. Only, in Sooraj Barjatya's version, they're likely to want to relive it the exact same way each time around.

In mathematics, there's the concept of an existence proof. Frankly, the only existence proof for Vivah is that, otherwise, it's bloody difficult to explain what happened to two and a half hours of your life.

Romantic Comedies

2006-12-12T23:22:00.001+05:30

I was watching The American President on HBO tonight - a wonderful movie, by the way - and got to thinking about formulae.

There are many well-known recipes in the film industry, none more often used, I think, than the romantic comedy. You get a man and a woman to meet cute, then spend the better part of ninety minutes making it difficult for them to go ahead right away and spend the rest of their lives with each other. You do this by one of the following methods:

Make them annoy each other, for whatever reason. Then melt the ice slowly.
At least one of them is in a position/profession that makes it difficult for them to act on their impulses.
A series of misunderstandings making one of them believe that the other is a cad/adulterer/whatever.
Give at least one of them another love interest, and confuse the heck out of them.

There are a few others, but you get the general idea. It can't take you more than a few minutes to come up with examples of each of these plots. It's all standard stuff, tried and tested a gazillion times over.

And yet, there aren't too many truly great rom-coms out there. There are some decent ones (You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping etc) and some dreary ones (Serendipity, Look Who's Talking, Kate and Leopold)... it's a standard formula, yet it's not so easy to get it just right. And I got to wondering about why.

I think with rom-coms, it's primarily humor. Make 'em laugh, as Donald O'Connor sang, and you'll get your audience where you want them. Most of chemistry is about having two actors with excellent timing. There is, beyond that, something else that elevates certain pairings - I won't deny that. But for the most part, if the leads get good dialogue and get their timing right, most of the battle is won.

Look at When Harry Met Sally - surely one of the best rom-coms of all time. Both leads get moments where one is breaking loose and the other is playing it straight. And they both get it right, all the time.

America's Sweethearts - this is a movie with big stars, a good script and the potential to be great. And yet, it falls short of that mark, and one big reason is that Julia Roberts isn't on John Cusack's speed.

Vanilla Sky - not a rom-com, but one of the movie's singular pleasures is the chemistry between Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, and most of it has to do with great dialogue and wonderful timing. (This is one of Cruz' few good English language performances, by the way.) Then again, any movie that has a line as quirky as "I'll tell you in another life when we're both cats" has a permanent claim to my good side.

The thing is, if you just get two good looking people to smile at each other on screen, you're assuming that the audience will be satisfied with that and believe that these two characters are made for each other. You're not doing any of the heavy lifting, and neither are your actors. You expect the audience to simply accept a romance because you say it is so. It doesn't work that way.

Spend some time on creating an actual - preferably playful - relationship among the leads, have them talk about things other than the plot, invest some time in writing actual dialogue instead of just showing montages of the two talking... then you have a romance between characters that the audience will care about. It's not so difficult. Certainly easier than most movies make it out to be.

John Cusack

2006-12-10T23:57:00.000+05:30

"I'm paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage."
-- Eddie Thomas (John Cusack), America's Sweethearts

In most John Cusack movies I have seen, the man plays the same kind of guy. Smart, articulate, funny, and an ability to seem serious and sincere while spouting nonsense. And guess what? I don't mind. If this man never does anything different in his entire movie career, I for one will not complain.

I think I first saw him in the wonderful High Fidelity. He spends most of the movie talking to the audience directly. And trust me, it's a lot of talking. He's not a particularly nice guy in that movie, and you wish he'd grow up a bit, but you end up rooting for him anyway. Then I watched Grosse Point Blank, a movie funnier in the imagining than in the seeing. What I liked about him in that movie was how he played it really straight, and that's what made it funny. It's like watching Buster Keaton - the funniest thing about Buster's movies is how extraordinary things happen around him and he's totally stone-faced.

There have been quite a few others - Runaway Jury, America's Sweethearts, Serendipity, Max, Being John Malkovich, Con Air, Must Love Dogs... No, I haven't seen Identity. I will, eventually.

But I guess if I had to quote one important role that I think defines his screen persona, itwould be Say Anything. Cameron Crowe's directorial debut starring Cuack, Ione Skye and John Mahoney is the best teen romance I have ever seen. It has an actual plot that isn't about the boy and the girl kissing in the end. In some ways, the Cusack character is only incidental to the movie's main subject, which is about the honesty that exists (or doesn't) between a father and his daughter. But he is the one that gives the movie its soul. Definitely a must-watch in my book.

Freeze Frame #8: Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge

2006-12-08T16:42:00.000+05:30

Towards the end of the first half, when the trip to Europe is over and SRK and Kajol are saying their goodbyes in the railway station, Kajol asks SRK if he would come to her wedding. And SRK simply smiles, shakes his head as if to say no, and walks away.

Aditya Chopra sets that scene up well: he's spent half the movie getting them to fall in love. A few scenes earlier, SRK proposes to Kajol and, seeing her shocked expression, laughs and says he was joking. He builds it all up to that moment in the railway station - in that one look, without a single line of dialogue being spoken, he tells her that the earlier proposal was no joke, he really does love her. Beautifully done. The rest of the movie is standard, albeit well-made fare for its genre, but for one moment there, the movie has more intelligence than the average glossy romance.

Freeze Frame #7: Ice Princess

2006-12-07T19:57:00.001+05:30

Plot: A talented youngster overcomes parental opposition to shine in his/her chosen field (ice skating) but despairs that the parent hasn't seen what she could do, and whaddya know, the parent lands up in time for her all-important final performance.

I'll give you thirty seconds to name at least seven movies with the same premise. Your time starts now. Go!

The thing about formulae is that they provide the filmmaker with a safe zone. To use an ice skating analogy, it's like the compulsories: you nail all the jumps and the lifts and whatever else, and you're through. When you sit down and watch a movie like, say Kate and Leopold, you can see that principle in action. That movie does absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for a romantic comedy, but doesn't misstep too often, and has a couple of personable stars that you could watch for ninety minutes without cringing.

The problem is, if the maker plays it safe, a guy like me begins to get a little antsy. I wouldn't bemoan the loss of ninety minutes of my life, but I'd sit there wondering whether the guy could've done something more with it. If you're gonna ride the shoulders of giants, the least you could do is jump. Otherwise, what good are you?

The good news is, Ice Princess jumps. And lands on its feet. (Which is more than I can say about my sole experience on a skating rink in Gdansk two years ago, but that's another story.) The way it does this is pretty smart too. Conventional (this is a Disney movie aimed at a specific demographic, after all), but smart nonetheless.

See, one of the problems I have with this particular formula - the crusty coach who supports the talented youngster versus the parent who is horrified that his/her child is deviating from The Plan - is that these characters simply exist at the convenience of the script. You don't see them as people, just as The Mom or The Coach. The way you escape this trap is by doing what you can to humanize them in the audience's eyes.

This movie takes an interesting approach to doing that: it creates a mirror image. So you have Joan Cusack playing the driven mother of Michelle Trachtenberg (the girl is a genius and is all set to go to Harvard, but wants to skate), and on the other side, you have Kim Cattrall playing the mother of Hayden Panettiere (mom's the skating coach, has big plans for her daughter, but the kid just wants a normal life).

The other interesting thing it does is with the Hayden Panettiere character. Usually, this one is written as the snobbish bitch who gets her comeuppance in the rink in the final competition. And when you see her in the beginning, the shoe seems to fit. And then, in a scene of uncommon depth for a movie in this genre, the Trachtenberg character gives her some tips on how to skate better based on a computer program she's written, and they become friends.

I like the way that scene is shot: Hayden finishes skating, and finds that she's doing her jumps better than she used to thanks to Michelle's advice. When she finishes skating, you can see the wonder in her eyes: she has just had a glimpse of perfection in her own work. And Michelle tells her: "The computer doesn't make the jumps. You do." That is, I think, the moment where the movie skips ahead of its formula and charts its own path.

Now why am I here...

2006-12-07T14:45:00.000+05:30

I haven't spoken on this to Ramsu, but I got an invite, and now I'm here. Some people, like me, feel compelled to say something.

I don't know what I'll say here. Maybe I'll say something about the (perceived) fact that Abhishek Bacchan would lose his power if he shaves or takes a bath (please plot unshaven movies like Sarkar or even Refugee against shaven movies like ...what? you don't even remember? ...like Om Jai Jagadeesh...eesh!). Maybe I'll go on to say less is more in his case, and the more understated he gets in his acting and dancing and romancing, the more the beard obscures his face, the more he covers up - like maybe wear a burqua in the next movie, the better he'll become.

Or maybe I'll wander on to topics like does Rakhi Sawant need an asset management company, does Shakti Kapoor need 'professional' help, was toneless singing the origin of Rap and so on. Maybe I'll also put down a few words on how for everyone, leaving on the right note is a desire but that does not really happen everytime (remember Aaj Ka Arjun / Jadugar / Toofan / Lal Badshah / (Ramsu will kill me for not mentioning this) Ajooba)? Maybe maybe...

For now, I just meant I'll write about anything when I feel like saying it, treat it like a disclaimer if you will.

Abhishek Bachchan

2006-12-07T14:33:00.001+05:30

There's this long-forgotten sub-genre of movies that can be classified as Indian fantasy. I realize that this sounds like a website featuring dimly lit videos, but I'm referring actually to movies that used to involve princes and swordfights and evil magicians. The villain (or his most powerful henchman) usually has his life hidden inside a parrot or precious jewel or something like that: destroy the jewel and you destroy the villain.

So here's the question: if Abhishek Bachchan shaves, will he lose his power?

"A little less," said Wilder

2006-12-06T11:49:00.001+05:30

Directors often ask actors to underplay closer shots, because too much facial movement translates into mugging or overacting. Billy Wilder once asked Jack Lemmon for "a little less'' so many takes in a row that Lemmon finally exploded: "Whaddya want! Nothing?'' Lemmon recalls that Wilder raised his eyes to heaven: "Please God!''

-- Roger Ebert, in an essay on Dr. Strangelove

Sometimes I wonder about the term "over-acting". There are so many examples all over the place. The scenes that I find really effective most often are the ones where little is said or done, but much is accomplished. The scene in Deepa Mehta's Earth that I spoke of in an earlier post is a prime example. You don't see Aamir Khan doing much. And yet, he leaves you shaken.

And then I think about someone like Arjun Rampal. Most of the time, that guy does nothing as well. What's the difference? Why is Aamir Khan's nothing better than Arjun Rampal's nothing?

I guess the difference lies in two things. One, when Aamir does nothing, it's a contrast to the scenes where he has done something and done it well, so we interpret it differently. The other big difference is in the way a scene is set up. When Lenny betrays Shanta unwittingly to Dil Navaz, everything else we have already scene or heard lets us know the magnitude of the situation. If the audience already knows what to feel, getting out of the way and letting them feel it themselves is far more effective than actually trying to "do" something. That is why, for instance, I was less than impressed with Kamal Hassan's antics in the railway station in the closing moments of Moondram Pirai - I felt he had destroyed all that had come before it by trying too much.

Freeze Frame #6: Earth

2006-12-06T11:31:00.001+05:30

Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man is one of those rare instances where the movie makes wiser choices than the book. The most important of which is to end the movie when the story reaches its emotional climax. The book goes on for a while after that, but by then it has lost its tension.

The story is set in Lahore in 1947, in the days just before India and Pakistan became independence. It is told through the eyes of Lenny Sethna, a little girl from an affluent Parsi family in Lahore. A good bit of the movie is about Shanta (Nandita Das), her ayah, and her suitors - Dil Navaz (Aamir Khan), the ice candy man, and Hassan (Rahul Khanna), the masseur. Dil Navaz is the colorful one, more obvious about his affections, while Hassan is quieter but has her heart.

And as this little drama unfolds, a bigger drama is unfolding in the background. Trains full of butchered bodies come across the border - Dil Navaz' family was in one of them. Rumblings of a fundamentalist nature are heard all over the city. Non-muslims are either fleeing the city or converting to Islam to escape the ire of the rioters.

It comes to a head on the fateful morning when Hassan is found murdered, and a mob of militant muslims attacks the Sethna household. Dil Navaz is with them. Shanta, a Hindu, is hiding inside the house, and the family tries to protect her by lying about her whereabouts. But Dil Navaz knows better - he goes to Lenny, the little girl who has always been charmed by him, and asks the fateful question. In her innocence, she tells him the truth.

He straightens up, walks to the mob, tells them that she is inside the house, and sits in a corner smoking a beedi while they drag her out. She kicks and screams and cries, the mob jeers, the little girl, having realized the magnitude of her betrayal, cries that she lied and tries to make it all untrue. And he sits there, smoking.

Not so long ago, when his family was found dead on the train, he had talked about the raging beast that lives within each man, and how we do our best not to let it out. You sit there in shock, wondering if you were seeing the beast in him. But this, this air of nonchalance, this stillness, is more frightening than the rage you had expected to see. This is not anger - this is hate.

Freeze Frame #5: Million Dollar Baby

2006-12-06T00:20:00.001+05:30

One of the most emotionally wrenching movies I've seen. I felt drained when it got over. It doesn't put a step wrong anywhere during its running time. The story is about a woman who wants to become a boxer, and the crusty old man who becomes her trainer, her mentor, her friend, everything. There's a moment when Maggie says, "I've got nothing but you, Frankie." And he replies, "Well, you've got me."

As it turns out, it's a prophetic statement. Maggie gets injured in a freak accident that leaves her paralyzed. She doesn't want to live this way, and wants to die. And she wants Frankie to help her do that. He isn't for it, obviously, but he can also see her point of view.

There's a phrase in Gaelic that Frankie uses to call her - Mo Cuishle. Her Irish fans pick up on it, and they chant it before every match she is in. He won't tell her what it is, though. She tells him she could look it up. He agrees that she could, but they both know that she won't - she'd rather he told her what it means.

Right at the end, Frankie decides to help her die, and goes to her hospital room in the middle of the night to pull her plug. And just before he does it, he looks at her and says, "Mo Cuishle means: My darling, my blood." And the camera stays on her face for a moment while he sets about disconnecting her life support. She's got tubes all around her, most of her face is covered by a breathing mask, so all you can see is her eyes. It is enough.

Freeze Frame #4: Before Sunrise

2006-12-05T23:59:00.001+05:30

My favourite movie of all time. A man and a woman meet on a train. He is an American, on his way to Vienna to catch a plane back home the next day. She is a student, on her way to school in Paris. They start talking, and find each other quite easy to converse with. He convinces her to get off the train with him at Vienna - they could spend the day together, he'd board the plane the next morning, and she could get on the next train to Paris. She agrees, they get off the train, and spend the day together, until sunrise the next day.

That's it. No plot. No scenes to two lovers being separated by various misunderstandings until it all clears up and they kiss while the soundtrack plays Somewhere over the rainbow. No scenes involving the man running after a moving train trying to win the woman back and giving up, only to find her sitting on the platform. Nope, nothing of the sort.

The movie is simply about these two people walking the streets of Vienna, talking, sharing a day of their lives with each other, and falling in love. Falling in love with a movie like this is pretty much like falling in love. I still have (hopefully) many more years to go, many more movies to watch and love, but I know that none of them can replace this one in my heart. They could come awfully close, yes - they could topple a few others off my top ten. But this one will always be Numero Uno.

While there is no scene in this movie that I consider below par, my favourite is a moment when the two of them are on a tram. She's talking, he's looking at her with a little smile, and you can see how he's slowly falling for her. An errant lock of her hair falls across her eyes, and he instinctively reaches out to brush it away, but stops just before she might notice. It was a quick, throwaway moment, but to me, when I think of that movie, this is the first scene that springs to mind.

Interestingly, there's a mirror image of this scene in the equally brilliant sequel, Before Sunset, where she reaches out and pulls back before he notices. Which, I suppose, means that the scene mattered to the maker as well.

Freeze Frame #3: Mudhal Mariyadhai

2006-12-05T23:47:00.001+05:30

I consider Bharathiraja to be one of the finest directors Tamil cinema has seen. Sure, he can be quite melodramatic, and there are times when he doesn't know where to stop, but consider what he has managed to do. After 16 Vayathinilae, the village film would never be the same again. Movies that came after it simply followed the rule book that he wrote.

My favourite scene from his movies is from Mudhal Mariyadhai. The plot involves a middle aged man (Sivaji Ganesan in one of his great performances) and his relationship with a young woman (Radha). The man is married to an absolute harridan (Vadivukkarasi), and his friendship
with the younger woman is what sustains his soul. On one occasion, when his wife is on yet another of her rants, he loses it and talks about what a slut she was when she was young, and how he married her when she got pregnant by someone else, simply because her father begged him to help save face. At the face of it, it is simply a scene that allows him to lash out at a woman who has been making his life miserable for so long, but it sets up a later scene of poetic simplicity and power.

One morning, the village is abuzz with the news that the young woman has killed a man. The man, his wife, and many others get to the edge of the river where the body lies, covered by a cloth. The young woman stands there, mute; she has refused to offer any explanation for her actions. It begins to drizzle, and just at that moment, a gust of wind blows away the cloth covering the dead man. And Bharathiraja doesn't stay on the man's face but cut's to the wife's expression. As you see the shock and comprehension in her eyes, and the sudden unbidden tears, the rain slowly wipes off the sindoor from her forehead. And you realize, without anything having to be told, who the dead man was, and why the woman must have killed him.

Casino Royale

2006-11-30T21:21:00.001+05:30

*ing Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench

Like most other Bond fans, I've watched every Bond movie made so far, with the sole exception of the earlier Casino Royale. And like every Bond fan, I've worshipped at the altar of Sean Connery. I rate Goldfinger among the best movies I've seen. It was a perfect example of the Bond formula - gadgets, gorgeous women, a megalomaniacal villain, a great climax, memorable one-liners and oodles of style. To me, everything that followed it simply tried to repeat it, with minor changes and mixed results.

So you will understand how much it has taken me to say this: Of all the Bond movies I have seen, Casino Royale is the best. And of all the actors who have played Bond over the years, I rank Daniel Craig's interpretation to be the best. Yeah, even better than Connery. If you have a problem with that, go read someone else's review.

There, I've said it. Now I can actually review the movie.

After twenty movies, the makers decided to reboot the Bond franchise. And to do that, they went back to the superspy's origins, in Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale. It is an interesting move, not only because it gives them the freedom to break a few rules, but also look at Bond as an actual human being, not a lawn ornament in a tuxedo with things going bang around him.

One of the best indications of this comes right at the beginning, in a low-key opening sequence filmed in black and white. The editing rhythm, the dialogue and the gritty look make you wonder if you walked into a different movie altogether. You expect Guy Ritchie or Steven Soderbergh to make something like this, not in a Bond movie. And yet, it is effective in introducing both a new Bond and a new actor in the role.

The story involves a terrorist financier named Le Chiffre, who has set up a high stakes poker game at the Casino Royale in Montenegro. M sends Bond, apparently the best poker player in the service, to compete against him. Not without misgivings, mind you: Bond isn't exactly the flavor of the month in the MI6 right then - his effectiveness seems to be matched by his lack of subtlety. At one point, M says, enraged by his latest faux-pas, "Earlier, when one of our agents did something this embarassing, they at least had the decency to defect. God, I miss the Cold War!" (Thank heavens they retained Judi Dench - where would a line like that be, without her to deliver it?)

The first act, which sets up the plot, involves two well-executed chase sequences. Both longer than necessary, both saved by the fact that they're well done. The first one involving what is, I believe, called a "free-running sequence" is especially splendid. The last few Bond movies had crossed the line from live action to cartoons. It was good to see something relatively plausible. The rest of it is standard stuff - cars, women, beaches... no surprises.

The second act involves a lengthy poker game, interspersed with violence. Low-key stuff, mostly. Interesting, but not thrilling. The more interesting parts here are the interactions with Vesper Lynd, the woman sent by thhe Treasury Department to keep an eye on Bond. And for the first time in the series, you have Bond engaging in an actual conversation with a woman - not about plot points, not about trading innuendoes, but about each other. The dialogue, while not great, is a few notches above the pedestrian. Heck, one conversation on a train goes on for so long, I kept wondering when the makers would lose patience and blow something up.

The third act is where the meat is. For one, it involves a lengthy torture sequence that might serve to explain why Bond's definition of safe sex involves not a condom but a Walther PPK automatic (see Goldeneye for an explanation of that comment). For another, it spends a considerable length of time on Bond and Vesper. And most importantly, this is where you see Bond as a human being rather than as an action hero or a ruthless spy. You see him fall in love. You see him change. (I must add, in all fairness, that this is also the segment where you hear some really bad dialogue. There were moments where it compared with the tripe that Anakin and Amidala exchanged in Revenge of the Sith. Yeah, that bad. But if you can get beyond that, you will find that this is a pretty good concluding act.

Since this is a movie with more focus on plot and character than on action, much depends on the performances. Thankfully, there isn't any seriously weak link. Eva Green plays a perfect foil to his character as Vesper Lynd, the woman Bond falls in love with. The actress, once described by
Bertolucci as "so beautiful it's obscene", brings charm, sass and vulnerability to a role that has traditionally been ornamental in the Bond movies. She's given some phenomenally ripe dialogue to utter at times, but manages not to make you cringe too much. And of course, it does help that she really is so beautiful it's obscene. Judi Dench plays the tough-as-nails M as well as one would expect. Mads Mikkelsen is just about adequate as the bad guy, but since he's not after world domination, he manages to get away with an understated performance.

Which brings us, finally, to Daniel Craig. And to the question of why I consider him the best Bond ever. So here's why.

For anyone who is familiar with the franchise, the idea of a Bond origin story automatically brings back memories of the first Bond film, Dr. No. While Goldfinger has long been my favourite, I am quite fond of this one for one simple reason: it showed Bond as a resourceful, yet fallible spy. To me, Dr. No represents Connery's finest work as James Bond - he actually had to act, and create a character that audiences would love. After that outing, the last part was a given, and he simply had to embody the part. Sure, you can see him evolving through the first three movies, but these were mostly incremental changes.

Daniel Craig faces a similar, yet different challenge here: He has to create the James Bond who could've plausibly evolved into the Connery of Dr. No, and yet, he has to do enough to make the role his own in the future. It is to his credit that he absolutely nails it. He brings dimensions to the role that none of the others even suggested. By the time you hear him uttering the immortal line of introduction ("The name's Bond. James Bond."), with the John Barry theme playing in the background, you feel exhilarated.

There has been much hoo-hah on the Internet about the unsuitability of Daniel Craig for the role. Some even started a website called danielcraigisnotbond.com. Folks, I dunno what you're having for dinner, but I think humble pie for desert is in order.

Freeze Frame #2: Pride and Prejudice

2006-11-29T19:17:00.000+05:30

I quite loved the latest Jane Austen adaptation starring Keira Knightley. I thought it had a lot of life in it, and featured a great performance by Knightley as Elizabeth.

P&P has never quite appealed to me as a book - I found it to be nice, in the way that Hum Aapke Hain Koun would be nice if you went into the movie hall expecting nothing. It was obvious that there was a lot of social commentary there; I just didn't find myself captivated by it. Watching the movie, however, changed some things. And it was this little, barely noticeable pause, that did it for me.

There's this twit called Collins that wants to marry Lizzie, and she says no. Obviously, Mrs. Bennet finds her refusal unacceptable, so Lizzie turns to her dad for help. And the dad says, with trademark wry humor, "An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day on, you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

Back when I read the book, this scene seemed to play for laughs. It's a good line, and conveys the father's support of his daughter at a crucial juncture. And Donald Sutherland is the kind of actor that can deliver a good line like that as well as anybody else in the business.

But no, what made all the difference for me in the movie was, after Lizzie has thanked her father and run off, and Mrs. Bennet has stomped off, the camera holds for a moment on Sutherland's pensive face. He has just given his daughter the support that she deserves, but in doing so, he has also quashed hopes of a financially advantageous marriage for one of his five daughters. It was the right thing to do, maybe, but not easy.

Freeze Frame #1: Insomnia

2006-11-29T19:10:00.000+05:30

There's a scene in Insomnia where Al Pacino tries to get some sleep in his hotel room, but since it's daylight 24x7 in Nightmute, he can't get any sleep. So he papers all the windows so the light can't come in, but it still keeps streaming in through the gaps.

Background: Pacino plays a cop who has been called to Nightmute, Alaska on a special assignment, to investigate a homicide. Back home, there's an ongoing Internal Affairs investigation that might well lead to his doorstep. And to complicate everything, he sets a trap for the killer, and while chasing him through the mist in a forest, he shoots his partner accidentally. He covers it up by blaming the killer, but the killer knows the truth and blackmails him.

The movie is all allegory: Pacino is in a place where it's always day, and he can't get any sleep. But the condition referred to in the title is not of his body, but of his conscience. And I thought the scene in the hotel room brilliantly encapsulated it.

You don't see there, a man who can't sleep because the sunlight is streaming through his hotel room window. You see there, a man who can't sleep, and wishes it were because the sunlight is streaming through his hotel room window.

Freeze Frame!

2006-11-29T19:08:00.000+05:30

This is going to be a series of short posts about specific moments in movies that I loved. Sometimes it's the way it was set up in previous scenes, sometimes it's the acting, sometimes it's the unsaid stuff that speaks volumes... mostly, though, it's me feeling kicked about what I saw in that scene, or what words I found to describe it.

The Holy Cow of Bond movies

2006-11-20T11:39:00.000+05:30

I watched Casino Royale a few days ago. awesome movie, with a mesmerizing performance by Daniel Craig in his first Bond outing. There were a lot of dissenting voices when he was first chosen, but after this movie, I can't imagine anybody still objecting.

I have this long-overdue rant about Sean Connery as James Bond. Everyone talks about the actors who played Bond other than Connery, and the verdict, even at its most flattering, is that the guy was the best since Connery. Why is that?

Take Daniel Craig, for instance. The guy's delivered a brilliant performance as Bond in his first outing. he's given the role additional depth, and really made it his own. and yet, NOBODY ever
says, "He's the best Bond ever." Taste is subjective, and the guy definitely delivered a brilliant performance - there should've been at least a few who thought he was better than Sean Connery. But no, everybody tiptoes around that possibility, for fear of desecrating some superspy holy cow. I'll admit that Connery was damn good. I'll also admit that, despite my line about the subjectivity of taste, Roger Moore was godawful in A View to a Kill, no matter which yardstick you use to measure performance. But is Connery unbeatable by default?

Personally, even after a single outing, I prefer daniel craig over all the other Bonds *including* the venerable Connery. For me, the difference is this: Connery basically had to embody a particular personality, and you could see it evolving over time, movie after movie. Whereas with Daniel Craig, he's had to do a lot more heavy lifting in this outing - he has an actual character arc, an almost unheard of phenomenon with Bond movies. The guy has the looks, he has the talent, and he has the ability to convey the aspect of a predator.

Part of this is a matter of chance. Casino Royale was the first Bond novel - like a superhero origin story, it described how Bond came to be the Bond the world knew from then on - so it has a lot more focus on the character. But then, Connery had the advantage of being the first in the role (barring an ill-fated tv adaptation earlier to that), so it kinda evens out. Both Craig and Connery had their advantages, and they used it well. And at the end of the day, I think Craig did better. I don't expect that everyone will/should agree with me on this. But it's statistically
impossible that nobody does. that's what gets my goat.

On the new Don

2006-11-10T00:45:00.000+05:30

Note: This isn't really a review. In fact, if you haven't seen the movie, I suggest you don't read this post, coz there be spoilers!

You have been warned. Now, on with the post.

Generally, when I review or rate a movie, I do it on the basis of the following question: Did it achieve what it set out to achieve? Not that asking this question makes my review any less subjective. It just allows me to love both Citizen Kane and Main Hoon Na without feeling all conflicted about it.

With remakes, there's an additional layer to that: How does the movie rate, if you did not know that it is a remake? And, how did the maker of this movie view it, in the context of the original? I'm distinguishing here between remakes and rip-offs - this post is about movies where the maker acknowledges what inspired him/her.

But with Don, despite the fact that it shares some major plot points and dialogue with the Amitabh starrer, I'm not entirely sure I could call it a remake. It's more like, Farhan Akhtar has taken some of the original movie's ingredients and added things of his own to the mix. And since what he has added is significant, you can no longer look at it as the same dish.

SPOILER ALERT!!

For one thing, the Iftikhar role is redefined. Boman Irani seems to be rehashing the same role up to a point, and then it is revealed that he has his own agenda. That he is not really a conscientious cop but a drug lord in hiding, using Vijay to eliminate his arch enemy in the business.

It adds an interesting layer to Vijay's struggle to prove his innocence, until we realize, right at the end, that it's not Vijay at all - there's been a double switcheroo, and we've been watching Don playing Vijay playing Don all this time. Nice little trick, that.

The surprise ending now makes you wonder: since the movie more or less followed the same broad outline as far as SRK's charcter was concerned, is it still consistent given the final twist? As in, is every one of SRK's actions justifiable, given that he is actually Don playing Vijay playing Don? I can think of only one weak spot: after SRK's escape from the plane, he goes back to meet Priyanka and tries to prove his innocence. Why woould he want to do that? As far as he is concerned, Boman Irani is dead. And as he mentions right at the end, there was nothing in the disc he gave Boman in the first place. So he might as well just escape.

The plausible explanation for this would be, I guess, that he wanted to get away clean - prove his innocence as Vijay, then stage his own death so that no loose ends are left. The problem with that explanation is simply this: If he wanted to do that, why did he reveal his identity to Priyanka through an oblique clue right at the very end? He was clearly smart enough to know that it would give the game away. Was it just him showing off? Or was it the writer showing off?

Apart from that, I think it's a good twist. And when you look back on it, you see a lot of scenes where he's given you little clues to the truth - like when he goes to visit Arjun Rampal's kid at the school and initially doesn't seem to recognize him, and so on.

But to me, the more impressive thing is the way Farhan Akhtar recognized a crucial choice in the script and chose wisely. Boman Irani reveals his true identity at the end of the first half. And until the major players (Arjun Rampal and SRK) get to know this, there seems to be no reason for this to be revealed to the audience. It seemed at first as if he had spoiled what could've been a major surprise by telling us early.

But here's why I think he did it: By telling us about Boman, and getting us to focus on that twist, he kept us engaged on that front while quietly preparing us for the surprise ending. The fact that
the man who we thought was Vijay is really Don, is a bigger surprise than the fact that Boman was actually a drug lord. By sacrificing the latter, he made the former more powerful. Smart piece of decision making there, I thought.

Review: Monster's Ball

2006-10-18T21:27:00.000+05:30

*ing: Billy bob Thornton, Halle Berry

Stated simply, Monster's Ball is among the best romances I've ever seen. However, it is not a love story. It is about two wounded people reaching out, and discovering, in the process, that they are still capable of love.

Hank is an executioner at the local penitentiary. His father was a cop, his son is one too. The old man is an irascible bigoted sonovabitch who probably treated his son like scum when he was growing up. The son has grown up with the same behaviour traits, but you can see that he knows the words but not the music. There is a scene where Hank's son asks him, "You hate me, don't you?" And Hank replies, "Yes. I've hated you all my life." But he doesn't say this with spite, he says this with almost a sense of wonder. It's as if he just realized it himself, and is wondering how the hell it turned out that way.

Leticia is a waitress. Her ex-husband, whom she hates for the pain he brought her, is a convict on death row. They have a son, reasonably talented but grossly overweight, and that is a source of annoyance to his mom. The last time they meet before he is executed, his father tells him, "You're the best of me." Just before he is led away, he says to Leticia, "For all the times that I've hurt you, I'm sorry." You can see that this shakes her composure a bit - she was more prepared to go through life hating an unapologetic man who hurt her. Hers is a life on the edge of sanity and solvency - she's about to be evicted from her home, and she's just been fired from one of her jobs.

These are two people as clearly defined as you can ever hope to see in the movies. They are brought together by tragic circumstance, and drawn to each other by the grief that's eating both of them alive. After they make love for the first time, they tell each other, "I needed that." To them, it's like grasping at a last chance at life.

I suppose I should mention here that Leticia is black. It is an issue and a non-issue at the same time. Hank is a man who has been brought up to be bigoted, but an early exchange with his black neighbour establishes his level of discomfort with that particular role. His relationship with Leticia unfolds in such an unforced manner that he is given to wonder what the whole black-hating argument was all about anyway. You never hear him talking about it, but you can see him begin to build bridges in simple ways. This is not a man who goes through bigotry and emerges on the other side as a tolerant person. This is a man who was just waiting for a chance to sidestep his bigotry altogether, and Leticia simply provided that chance.

It's a quiet, deliberately paced movie, whose silences are as eloquent as its dialogues. Since this is a movie driven not by plot but by character, especially by characters who carry a lot of baggage, it requires the dialogue to convey a lot. That it manages to do so effectively with hardly any long, introspective passages is a thing to be seen to be believed.

The script is an amazing piece of work - it has the kind of depth that you won't see in more than a handful of movies in any year. It would take a good writer reams of paper to describe what some of those simple, precisely written scenes convey. This is the sort of movie any reviewer would hate, because he would have a million things to say about each of the important scenes in the movie and yet have to rein himself in because the viewer's payoff is in figuring it out for himself.

Billy Bob Thornton turns in a marvellously understated performance as Hank. You see in him, a man who has learnt to suppress emotion to the point where he doesn't even know how to express one anymore. And then, as his relationship with Leticia develops, he learns to feel once more. Watching his character evolve through the movie is like watching a baby learn how to walk.

And Halle Berry's performance in this movie - the one that won her a Best Actress Oscar? Let me put it this way: Have you read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead? When Gail Wynand realizes that the statue of Dominique Francon he has in his museum was the one built for the Stoddard Temple, he asks her, "Was the building worthy of the statue?"

And Dominique replies, "The statue was almost worthy of the building."

Review: Wonder Boys

2006-10-18T20:57:00.000+05:30

*ing: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes, Robert Downey Jr.
Directed by: Curtis Hanson

Grady Tripp, the narrator and central character in Wonder Boys smokes a lot. Not normal cigarettes - he smokes joints laced with weed. This is an important observation, I think, because watching this movie gives you the feeling that the scriptwriter was high when he wrote it. It moves slowly, everything seems out of joint, things get wierd before they get normal, and then they get wierd again... The wierdest thing is, despite all this, it makes a helluva lot of sense.

You see, while the specific events seem wacky (and I do not use that adjective lightly here), the characters aren't. They are consistent (even when they are inconsistent), often articulate, and we get a clear sense of where they're headed even if they don't. In fact, the slightly off-kilter tone only adds to the effect, rather than confusing things.

The movie chronicles the happenings in the life of Grady Tripp, a rather dowdy-looking professor of English at a snow-covered campus, over the span of a three day literary event. When the movie begins, Tripp is having a rather bad day. His wife Emily has just left him. His editor Terry Crabtree is due to arrive that evening, and is bound to ask about the book he's been woking on for the past seven years. (His earlier book, a critical success titled The Arsonist's Daughter, made both their reputations. The way this one is turning out, it might break them.)

It gets worse: Sara Gaskell, the chancellor of his university and the wife of his department's head, also the woman with whom he has been having an affair for a while now, tells him that she is pregnant. And one of his students, a delectable young thing named Hannah Green who also rents a room in his house, has a major crush on him and would very likely jump his bones the first chance she gets.

And then there's James Leer, his most brilliant and most difficult student, in whom Grady probably sees himself as well as a chance to guide someone to greatness. Leer isn't easy to deal with - he seems aloof, doesn't communicate half as well as his stories probably do, and is a compulsive liar to boot. When Tripp spies Leer standing outside in the snow near the Gaskells' home where a party is in progress, he takes him in to show him a prized piece of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia that Walter Gaskell keeps in a safe in his bedroom.

Why does he do that? I think it is because he is sure Leer would react emotionally to it, and he wants to see that. Then the big event happens. The Gaskells' blind dog Poe, which doesn't like Tripp much, decides to take a chunk off his leg for dinner. And Leer, seeing his professor struggling with the dog, shoots it with an antique gun he carries around.

This is clearly the point where a lesser movie would have turned into a fast-paced screwball outing, with professor and student desperately trying to hide the dead dog, and complicating matters further in the process. One of the pleasures of Wonder Boys is that it neatly sidesteps that route. What happens next isn't important, not from a plot point of view anyway. The movie is more interested in its characters, and so was I.

Every performance in this movie is a gem. Michael Douglas, who has made a career out of being suave and sexy, manages to look so unkempt that it seems like an achievement in itself. Watching him potter around in a pink housegown that probably belongs to his wife is nearly as funny as watching Charlton Heston play a Mexican in (the otherwise brilliant) Touch of Evil.

One of the important characteristics of Grady Tripp is that his cynicism, while evident to those around him, has not gotten the better of his amusement or his desire to be a good teacher. Bringing that out takes effort, and Douglas shows a willingness to go the distance. His is the central performance in the movie, and he succeeds in evoking our sympathy and our amusement at the same time.

Robert Downey Jr. and Frances McDormand have particular roles that require them to display an understanding of Tripp that goes well beneath the surface. McDormand's Sara Gaskell clearly loves Tripp, but has also pegged him exactly right, as a man who has lost the will to take initiative - that makes for an interesting dynamic. And Crabtree - well, Crabtree is something else. Intelligent, articulate, with an eye for a good book, and gay to boot. Robert Downey Jr. conveys his preferences in the plumbing department in such a manner that, it seems analogous to someone preferring Steinbeck over Hemingway - a matter of personal taste, not a lifestyle choice.

There is an especially nice moment in a restaurant when Tripp and Crabtree are sitting together and creating a character out of thin air, on the basis of a stranger they see sitting across them. There is both creativity and a parody of popular literature mixed into the description they come up with, but the best part of the scene for me was the easy timing. Hearing them speak in overlapping sentences, anticipating each other's thoughts, was a wonderful experience.

Of the younger cast, Katie Holmes as Hannah Green has the easier job. Given the fact that she has a crush on Tripp, she could've easily become a plot device, but she manages to make herself a little more than that. This is a good performance - not a great or a noteworthy one, but the sort of supporting performance that unobtrusively fills in the gaps.

And Tobey Maguire... ah, the pleasure of watching him play James Leer! His is one of the toughest characters in the movie. He's enormously talented, but he's also enormously moody. He's a congenital liar, but he also manages to tug at Tripp's heartstrings with moments of touching candor. And to top it all, he has a sense of humor that elevates the movie. Tobey Maguire is perfect for the part, with his boyish looks and a lopsided grin that makes you feel like there's a lot more to the joke than what he's just told you. While Douglas' performance is the one that anchors the movie, his is the one that enlivens it.

Director Curtis Hanson, whose previous venture, L. A. Confidential had people salivating for his next venture, has chosen to make a totally different movie, and succeeded admirably. He keeps the proceedings going at exactly the right pace (which, for the kind of screwball activity that goes on, is a little slower than usual), but doesn't allow any slack. He populates the cast with a bunch of wonderful actors who are obviously in love with the project, and comes up with a sweet ensemble comedy that manages to make us smile more often than most of the scatologically-obsessed, juvenile teen comedy trash products put together manage to do.

In its own offbeat, distracted, drug-addled manner, this movie manages to say more about writing and writers than most other movies that tread the same path. Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester, for instance, was also about an older writer grooming a younger one, but had far less to say, and was far more interested in sticking to genre conventions. That one was a product, not a movie. This one is populated with real people who have something to say, and say it beautifully.

Disclaimer

2006-10-18T20:50:00.000+05:30

I have this habit of writing reviews of movies I've watched, and I'm gonna post a bunch of them, written over the years. But before you go on, I should put a little disclaimer here first. A long time ago, I wrote a review of a movie called Jaanam Samjha Karo and posted it on a mailing list of my friends from my undergrad college. One of them pulled my leg about it, so I replied in a similar vein. That paragraph is probably the best disclaimer I can provide, so here it is:

Leg-puller: General writing does not a review make, either. Hows that? :)

Me: General writing *does* a review make, dude. That's the whole point of a review - write anything, make a few literary allusions to prove your erudition to an audience that doesn't care either way, add a generous dose of sarcasm wherever warranted and maybe even where it isn't, and you have a review. Oh yeah, try to make it look a bit technical - add a few references to the screenplay here and there. Junta doesn't know what a screenplay actually contains, so they'll think you know what it's about. A few stock phrases like "tight screenplay", "innovative lighting" (with reference to some particular scene, even one that is simply shot in broad daylight) and so on add to the effect. But underneath all that crap (as underneath all *this* crap), it's just general writing.

Nothing like a good dose of sarcasm to brighten up one's day, is there? Now, on with the reviews. You have been warned...