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Cenacle - In hidden crypts and dark vaults, cenacles of secret religion meet to keep their flame alive.

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The Dark Knight: Standing Tall

July 20th 2008 03:08

The Dark Knight

For the first hour or so into the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, I wasn't buying it. I hadn't seen Batman Begins, so I didn't know how Christopher Nolan's re-invention of this franchise was going to be and I was getting disappointed. First of all, using Chicago as a realistic setting for Gotham was too bad. Chicago looks great and the skyscrapers look towering and solid as only American skyscrapers can but there was no fantasy, Gothic gloss to the city. Absolutely none. Many critics have loved this "realism" but I missed the shiver of entering a fantasy world.

I wasn't buying Christian Bale's Batman either. Bale is too little in stature to be an authentic superhero. When he dresses up as Bruce Wayne, he lacks a certain magnetism and looks lost in the proceedings. I did love his mechanical lisping as Batman though. But, is Batman still a rookie and learning his craft here? Is it why he stumbles so much? I don't know. Because of the realist setting around him, Batman feels like a guy wearing a strange suit to a party not the crusader in a fantasy land. The super hyped aerial shots didn't really make an impact when not seen on IMAX.

My mind was quibbling over these trifles when a character makes a surprising decision and I was pulled into the vortex of the plot. What the Dark Knight lacks in fantastic parpahernalia, it makes up in heavy plotting. By that I don't mean arbitrary twists and turns but intense conflicts generated by strong characters played across a giant canvass with nothing to hold them back.

The story goes like this. Many Batman impostors are prowling the Gotham. Petty crime is down and the mob doesn't know what to do. A new district attorney Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, is intent on curshing the Mob but through legal means. Batman is trying to improve his body suit and armour and his sercet identity, Bruce Wayne dreams of yielding the crime-fighting mantle to Harvey Dent.

But, a new menace called Joker, played by Heath Ledger, arrives and quickly takes over the Mob, intent on taking over the Gotham ultimately. Of course, he runs into Batman and their duel is not unlike of the one between Peter verkovensky and Stavrogrin in The Possessed or Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

Should Batman let Harvey Dent pursue the Joker or should he do it himself? While he is in the crutches of that dilemma, Joker becomes bigger and bigger, like an elemental hurricane. When that force is unleashed against the Gotham, it takes the whole Gotham itself( and not just the heroes) to defeat the anarchy.

Acting wise, everyone shines except for a poorly cast Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has a strong character to play but wrecks it as usual. Heath Ledger's Joker is coming in for a lot of praise but Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent is no less inspiring. Bale's eponymous hero grows on you after a while. But, the best performances that elevate the movie to a very high level and lend it a cracking chemistry are from the supporting chracters. Gary Oldman playing Lt. Gordon, Morgan Freeman playing Lucius Fox and Michael Caine playing Alfred the Butler.

The Dark Knight is being celebrated in some conservative cirlces as a triumph of conservative messaging telegraphed in a major hit. All through the first hour I wasn't sure of that. Bruce Wayne's courting of Harvey Dent remined me too much of the adulation of say, someone like Eliot Spitzer but the political references in the later half of the movie particularly, to torture and domestic surveillance, do seem to favor conservative talking points.

Nevertheless, whether it's conservative or liberal at its core, is beside the point. Unlike hundreds of liberal, anti-American movies we have been forced to watch since 9/11 which advance their themes by gratuitous insults, jarring one-liners which don't belong, blatant editorialism, soprofic narratives, spectacles supposed to induce guilt but which produce boredom, all marketed under the sanctimonious labels of dissent and subversion, the Dark Knight does it the right way. It personifies abstract principles within richly realised characters and then lets these characters thrash it out without imposing any constraints, achieving thereby, not only a critical smash but also a bonanza at the box-office.

That's how it should be done.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Cinema

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Get Smart: Neither Smart Nor Funny

July 1st 2008 10:04

Get Smart

Get Smart is a movie adapted from 60's television series of the same name. Not having seen the television series, I cannot vouch if the movie is faithful to its original but it definitely feels like a television show itself.

Get Smart features Maxwell Smart, an analyst at CONTROL (a spy agency of the US), who wants to be a field agent. Max or Agent 86, is groomed by a very impressive Agent 23 but is held back by his boss who thinks his analyst skills are more important to CONTROL. Once, the CONTROL headquarters are broken into and news comes of nuclear material getting out of hand in Europe, Max is despatched to Russia but under the wings of Agent 99.

The movie is supposed to be a cross between humour and action but it never gets the balance right. The action set pieces are all derivative and the humour is ineffective. Steve Carrell, the comedian gets the longest opportunity for rehearsing his role in the movie itself. All through the first act, it feels like he is rehearsing; only when the movie moves to Russia, it feels like he is acting. Anne Hathaway is too fat to be glamourous. Only Dwight Johnson as Agent 23 and Alan Arkin as the boss manage to get their roles right.

That aside, the overall quality, the tone and the ambience of the movie is so poor, it felt like i was watching some third rate Bollywood concoction. Not a Hollywood movie by any light.

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The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David Anthony

June 10th 2008 06:40

This is an impressive book of scholarship. A book of vast erudition written in accesible, lucid prose that even a lay person with no prior knowledge of lingusitics or arachaeology can follow with little effort.

Sir William Jones, a British functionary,first noticed the amazing simliarity between Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit and postulated that they originated form the same parent language called Indo-European. Today, scholars recognise around 12 main Indo-European lanague families, represented by everything from English and French in the west, to Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali in the East. Over 3 billion people are thought to be speakers of these languages. Not only all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, all the people who spoke them had some disitinctive simliarities in their cultures and religions as well. At one point of time in history, they all descended from a single cultural-linguistic ancestor.

Does a linguistic ancestor also imply a common racial inheritance? Once the existence of Indo-European was postulated, many people jumped to just that conclusion and the study of Indo-European became a minefield of controversies and cultish fads.

Anthony rescues the Proto-Indo-European language scholarship from the morass surrounding it. Anthony despatches with the idea of common racial inheritance at once. A common linguistic and cultural ancestor does not imply a common racial inheritance. Speakers of Sanskrit, Tocharian, Latin and Celtic may share the same language pool but not the same gene pool.

Once the politicising aspects are despatched away, the author calmly but eloquently begins to explain how Indo-European was reconstructed from the daughter languages. Several candidates have been proposed for the homeland of the original language but Anthony chooses the most obvious one, the Caspian-Pontic steppes of modern Ukraine, and makes an unimpeachable case for it. The Indo-European people originated somehwere in this vast steppe. They may not have invented the wheels but they quickly learned to how to design them. With the domestication of horse, the invention of wagons and later chariots, Indo-Europeans quickly mastered the hitherto impenetrable steppe and quickly spread around the world and became the people we know from history: Vedic Indians, Greeks, Celtics, Germans etc. They primarily spread through migrations rather than invasions.

Anthony also describes how the lifestyle of these ancestors can be deduced from a lexicon of a few hundred reconstructed words. They were a caste based people with a warrior caste and a priestly class for whom poetry was quite important. They worshipped a sky god and followed a patriarchal life style.

This is one amazing piece of scholarship. I was hooked onto it from the start. For an interested, head-scratching amateur like me, this book was a godsend. For a casual reader, it should be a revelation.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Non-Fiction

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The Magician's Nephew

May 30th 2008 05:40

The Magician's Nephew by C.S.Lewis

OK, I succumbed to it. After resisting it for a while, I began reading the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis. I saw the first movie and didn't like it much and now there's a second movie and with all the hype surrounding it, I finally decided to give the books a try. I bought the omnibus edition which has all the Narnia novels in it.

The Magician's Nephew is technically the first novel of the series but it was the sixth novel that was published. It is more of a prequel than a first novel. It would have been probably better to start with the other novels. I have just finished it but I can't tell if I enjoy Narnia yet. It just feels like I'm dipping my toes in Narnia universe.

The Magician's Nephew is a creation story. Not only Narnia is created in this novel but Jadis, the witch is woken up from her sleep in another world she has destroyed and pushed into Narnia and so the conflict is set up between God and Satan or the lion and the witch who stand in for them.

This book is heavy on Christian allegory. I didn't mind the creation of Narnia but the forbidden fruit episode came off as heavy handed. I am not sure if I like C.S Lewis very much. There's absolutely no humour in him, nor color, nor drama. Still, this book is like a backstory for fans who have come to love the Narnia oeuvre, so I 'll have to read a couple of more Narnia stories to come to a conclusion.

I knew that both Pullman and Rowling based their novels on this series, though in different ways but I didn' realise that this work would be so central for the latter two. That's perhaps the most interesting excuse I allowed myself on finishing The Magician's Nephew.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Fantasy

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The Children by Edith Wharton

May 6th 2008 06:50

Picture Courtesy: Famous Poets and Poems

Edith Wharton is usually compared with Henry James and usually judged to be his inferior. I find her to be a much greater artist. In her best works, she can play on your emotions like a surgeon carelessly cutting open a heart. The House of Mirth is easily the most agonising novel I have ever read. Nothing happens in it but somehow the plight of Lily Bart put me under some heavy torture of shame and anger.

The House of Mirth is my favorite but I also like The Age of Innocence and The Reef well and Summer, Madame de Treymes and The Touchstone are satisfactory reads too. I began but couldn't finish The Custom of the Country but what I'd read I liked immensely.

So it was with eager anticipation that I picked her novel The Children. It's not usually available in bookstores or on the net but it's been reissued by Virago Modern classics in 1985.

The Children has a delightful plot which promises much. It tells the story of a man in his forties, Martin Boynewho is on a cruise ship between Algiers and Venice. He is going to meet an old acquaintance in the hope that this encounter might turn more romantic. On the train he meets a bunch of unruly children manned by the eldest, the fifteen year old Judith. The children belong to his old friends. the Wheaters, who lead a very Bohmeian lifstyle and Martin is drawn into this gypsy like wonderland.

Wharton usually projected her own fear of sex onto her main protagonists(male or female) and the conflict of her novels is usually between the sexual innocence and the consequential powerlessness of the protogonists and the rapacious power used and enjoyed by those who have knowledge of sex, whether it's the other characters or the broader society. Martin, in this sense, is a standard Wharton hero: virginal, aged and not into that and he is educated by the contact of a fifteen year old who seems to know more about sex and life than him.

This would have been delightful if it had the same limbre, supple touch that marks the prose of The Reef or The Age of Innocence but Wharton was trying out the Jamesian technique of avoiding the important moments and trying to imply things through overwrougt descriptions of the secondary and the inconsequential minutiae. It never worked for James and it doesn't work for her. Consequently, all her characters suffer. She has a gaggle of children to cuten up the proceedings but she can't make any of them stick in memory (unlike say an Ann Tyler would). Her heroine, Judith is more of an intention than a fully realised character.

I knew that as she aged, Edith had become more and more bitter and her writing suffered for it and in The Children, you can feel some heavyhanded bitterness color the portrayal of the Wheater family. Sadly, it is not far off from some caricature you will find in the European media about the American tourists.

The Children should have been a handsome cap to an important career but it only showcases the declining powers of Edith Wharton.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford

January 21st 2008 06:33

The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford

If you are a science fiction fan, you must know about Gollancz masterworks series whose titles include some of the best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. I don't like science fiction as a genre and I am just getting into fantasy, so catching up with this series has been a good way of familiarising myself with the genre's traditions.

Of the books, I've read so far, I loved The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers which is a delightful discovery. I had huge expectations for The Dragon Waiting By John Ford but I was hugely disappointed when I read it. I am plodding through some other books in the series.

The Dragon Waiting has a wonderful premise. The book's got a alternative history setup based on two premises : one, the Rome Empire, basically what we know as Byzantine Empire, has not fallen and two, Christianity wasn't succesful in wiping out the Pagans in Antiquity. With these two assumptions, the European history of Edward IV and the Medicis is recast.

I admit that the second premise is what tugged my attention. I loved it. I thought a contemporary novel with Paganism still ruling the West would be a great idea! The book does have some references to Mithraism but it never fully utilises the beauty of the premise.

As for the story, there is hardly any. Though it's called complex in the blurb, the book's plot is just a loose assembalge of personalities and scenes. The characters are all watery and none registers an impact. In one chapter,a young woman is betrayed, in the other she and a dozen others are crammed into a Agatha Christie style locked door mystery. You never get to know any of the charcters well, nor do you feel for any. As if that were not enough, the author rushes in the trite "Rebels against the Evil Empire" trope even before he has established the conflict. It's one thing to write in a "subversive" trope to service the plot, it's altogether different to depend on the trope to replace the plot and stand by itself. What's achieved is not subversion, it's boredom.

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National Treasure: Book of Secrets

December 25th 2007 14:52

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

When National Treasure was released, it was dismissed by the brotherhood for many reasons but chiefly, as the New York Times put it , for the "frisson of patriotism" that it was able to infect an audience with. That's at least honest. They did not invent a faux excuse of lack of historicity as they did when they loaded on Pearl Harbor. No matter how much they pounced on it, National Treasure broke the quarantine. It became a huge hit and unlike Pear Harbor, did not have to be restricted to a single outing and so, could keep sending those frissons of patriotism again and again.

Theerefore, it's not surprising that when National Treasure: Book of Secrets opened, the Brotherhood descended on it with all its might. But the last laugh belongs to the production team and Disney( more on that later).

That's not to say that the movie doesn't have flaws. It does. It's plot is too thin and it's action elements in particular, are plotless. Those which are not, are not very exciting (like the Presiden't kidnap). The chemistry thing among the characters doesn't work at all. Amber and Ben Gates were supposed to be bickering except that you don't know why they are. Maybe they are following Ben's dad n mum except this couple can't pull it off either. Which means none of the major characters, except for Justin Bartha's ridiculously cool and coolly ridiculous Riley Pool, work.

Matters are not helped by the director adopting a grungy style of The Bourne Ultimatum variety. Except for the magnificent view of New York Liberty in the background, none of the places and artifacts are really idealised, as in the first movie. This was, for me, one of the major aesthetic drawbacks as one of the big pleasures of the first movie was the intimacy and visual glamour lent to the landmarks that were used in the movie. Though it does manage to convey a non-fake respect for history and culture, it also lacks the original's carefree adventurous spirit.

Grounding the plot a bit more in the clue-busting than car-chasing would help matters much more for the next installment in the series. Even better, make Justin Bartha the hero.

For all these flaws, National Treasure: Book of Secrets still manages to be nice entertainment. And yes, those frissons of patriotism are particularly effective.

101

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Cinema

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Officers who are Gentlemen

December 21st 2007 03:53

It is interesting that those who comprise a civilization can't even bother to show up, those who fight for it also strive to know what they fight for. The Weekly Standard published recently a wonderful article about an upcoming book called Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth Samet. She was an English teacher at West Point for 10 years and it's based on her experiences on teaching young military officers some classics of the Western literature.

"In class they read The Iliad, Beowulf, War and Peace, World War I poetry, and also Pope's Essay on Man, Dickens's Bleak House, Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," the curious lyrics of Wallace Stevens, Diderot's plan for the Encyclopédie.

Out of class, they keep at it. Lieutenants in Iraq who took her course three years earlier write back to ask about her current syllabus. Another stationed in Korea tells her, "Someone once told me that 'the most important book you will ever read is the first one after your graduation.' I wish I could remember what it was--I have done more reading since graduation than I would have ever thought possible." Still another writes from Mosul, "I have been rolling through books here at a pretty steady clip," and when he returns to the States, he reports, guiltily, that his reading has slipped.

.....The pressure magnifies the import of Macbeth contemplating the murder of Duncan, Penelope waiting for her husband, Stevens's "Oh! Blessed rage for order"--Samet doesn't have to convince them to respect Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest. The war has done that already. "

What's the status of those who don't fight?

"Compare them to students in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a massive annual study of college kids. Asked in 2006 how often they talk to their professors outside of class, fully 43 percent of first-year students answered "Never," while 39 percent gave a middling "Sometimes." While Samet's students beg her to recommend books, when NSSE asked freshmen how many books they had read on their own in the previous year, 24 percent answered "None" while 55 percent opened a measly one-to-four. "

What an ironic contrast!

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In the Land of Women: Nice Stroll

November 10th 2007 01:30

Adam Brody and Meg Ryan walking In The Land Of Women

I caught this movie on a fluke and I expected I wouldn't think much of it. It is more or less similar to Elizabethtown, a movie I hated. In the end, it came as a pleasant surprise and I liked it much better than I'd initally hoped.

It's the story of Carter, played by Adam Brody, who is a screenwriter in LA. Carter is dumped by his girlfriend and so to get a break, he travels to Michigan, where his cantankerous grandmom lives expecting to die any moment. There in Michigan, Carter gets drawn into the lives of Sarah who lives across the street and her family. Sarah's daughter Lucy is in a rebellious teenager mode, her husband is said to be having an affair unknown to her and she finds she has breast cancer. It all starts when Carter and Sarah begin to take walks and Sarah suggest that Carter take Lucy and her other daughter to movies.

Lucy has her own teenage love problems and she is totally unsympathetic to her mom's plight. She know her dad is having an affair but still can't muster sympathy for her mom. The movie doesn't really make clear why Lucy began thinking like this. (Sarah is a bit uptight but not really bad and the girl who played Lucy can't really act.)

Sarah on the other hand goes through a very understandable panic when she finds out she has breast cancer. The movie hints that Carter was attracted to Sarah even as a boy and during their walks together that attraction does get out into open. It quickly clashes with Lucy's need to find in Carter a way out of her teenage anxieties.

The writers don't really cash on in the dramatic tensions inherent in the plot and everything is minimised and quickly resolved without lending anything much weight and everything is pared down to the level of park strolls that are the movie's basic premise. Still, it does make you care for the Carter and Sarah and that maybe because of Adam Brody and Meg Ryan who play these characters. Meg Ryan is luminously beautiful even when her character takes a hard turn and Adam Brody is an almost thespian. It is he who brings the movie together. When Lucy admits to him that she is not sympathetic toher mother's plight even though she knows her father is having an affair, he says to her nonchalantly ,"Do you think it's fair to her?" It is the quality of compartmentalised attention inherent in that nonchalant rebuke that woke me up and take notice. After all, a few minutes ago he was the confidante of the mother.

Adam is gangly and looks like an awkward teenager himself but as you go on you realise that he is quite mature and capable and that's the quality that's drawing the women around him like moths to light. He is not an adolescent that's growing into adulthood but an adult who hasn't figured out why he doesn't have the fully grownup life he craves for.

The movie ends without major crises. Lucy finds a boyfriend and Sarah does get out of her cancer, though we are left wondering about her wandering husband. The movie ends up with Carter chatting up an engaging waitress, a sign of hope he'll find other women and quickly, even though he is out of the lives of these two.

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Revenge of the Old Europe

October 13th 2007 05:04

Al Bore has won the ultimate seal of global messianism, so what's in it for us?

There is something marvellously ridiculous about Nobel Peace Prize what with Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and some North Korean tyrant I can't name getting it but this is the worst of the lot. There was at least a semblance of argument that those awards were for, you know, peace. But, what exactly this pendulous piece of human flesh done for the humanity?

It is not enough for Democratic candidates to routinely aspire and rarely win US presidency. That presidency is only a preparatory course to Messiah-hood when they become some kind of reincarnate jesuses bestowing benedictions on everybody else. Cut short on the anointed eight years to transform the world and you have an automatic messiah in the making (Jimmy Carter). Give them their eight year run, they will take time to become a messaiah but become they will (Bill Clinton). Nowadays, they are not even bothering to run for the Presidency but directly to Messiah-hood (Barak Obama).

Al Gore was ofcourse denied the preparatory course for the Messiah-hood. But that didn't stop him. I wrote a small tribute to Atlas Shrugged down below. There is an incident in the novel where a Budhist hippie champions soya crops as the alternative to America's dietary ills, managing to kill the agricultural sector of the nation in the process. Al Gore is just such a hippie whose crusade from being a joke has suddenly turned deadly serious when things like the ethanol drive are driving food prices up everywhere. It is one thing to endure sillines like banning of the light bulbs but it is another thing again to submit the world to poverty and hunger. In the last decade alone, capitalism has erased hunger and poverty like no other altruistic, liberal program has in the history of the world. What does the liberal brotherhood do in response? Concoct an elaborate scheme, a grand scheme so stultifying in stupidity that it defies description and bring the world down to the knees again.

There is a cultural underside to this too. It shows clearly that European elites are, for all their pretensions to the contrary, stumpy maidens waiting to be included in the American politcal drama. For years, Gore's supporters have held that Bush stole their election from him and Europe was positively indignant about how their president was cheated out of the top job. How can you restore cosmic order and anoint your messiah? Do the next best thing and award him the Nobel Prize. He's too too good for the US presidency, anyway.

It maybe dying but Old Europe has bit back hard.

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