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Cinema - Cenacle

The Dark Knight: Standing Tall

July 20th 2008 03:08
The Dark Knight
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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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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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.
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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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Ratatouille: A very ratty dish

September 8th 2007 04:49


Someone on the blogosphere has already pronounced that Remy the Rat is an animated avatar of Howard Roark. Is he?

He does have some beautiful Rand-like aphorisms in the movie:

"Your limit is you soul."

"A cook makes while a thief takes!"

"But humans, they are not content, they create things..."

" Remy, you cannot change nature."
"But nature changes dad,.."

"I am going to walk .... forward!"

(All quoted from memory.)

Remy is the second son of the leader of a rat colony and unlike the rest of his tribe, he is not merely content with scrounging things from garbage bins. He has a highly developed sense of smell and uses that to get faimiliar with human cooking. He also catches the late French chef Gusteau and becomes a self-appointed disciple.

When he is broken up from his family in a well-executed escape, Remy ends up, where else but in Gusteau's restaurant ! The once famous restaurant has since been run down by the adverse notice of a critic and Gusteau died of a heart break. Since then, his good name has been used by an understudy Skinner who is less of a cook and more of a mass merchandiser. Here, Linguini a lanky and clumsy lad is offered the post of a garbage boy. Once Remy stops the boy from ruining a soup which quickly finds its way to a delighted customer, there's no stopping the fate as the rat and the garbage boy combine to pull off a Cyrano De Bergerac of French cuisine.

The movie is a visual feast but there are a couple of drawbacks. The secondary plot used to further the story, Linguing being the son of Gusteau, does nothing much to further our enjoyment. None of the human characters are appealingly drawn and Linguini is the worst of the lot. Remy despite having some choice lines is quite wishy-washy. The best drawn characters are Remy's brother and Gusteau's guiding spirit. Also, except for Peter O'Toole's excellent British snobbery, I did not like the voiceovers of others. Jeanne Garafelo as the love interest is a disaster.

I admit it is quite a pleasant diversion but is it a Randian dish in disguise? Not quite. The whole movie has an undercurrent of elitist distaste for "consumerist" type of capitalism. The setting of Paris itself is suspect. The portrayal of the rat colony is not free from the usual portrayals of the repressed-will-take-over-the- world kind of subtext to it. The motto dished out by the movie, Anyone Can Cook, looks like a mantra of egalitarianism. Also, the snooty food critic, arguably the movie's chief villain, is named Anton Ego; now, in Rand's world that would be the name of Remy. It is small details like this that bother me somewhat.

One thing can be said for the movie though, is that if this is where it is coming from, it does not jam down those "messages" down our throats. It is more of a subtle flavoring.

And that is why, I will not firmly categorise it as one more trashy "subversive" agitprop produced by the Brotherhood. It is a pleasant enough movie but I cannot wholly embrace it either.

I can't quite make my mind over it even though I found it fairly enjoyable.
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I Pronounce you Preachy and Boring

August 24th 2007 10:40
I confess, I haven't seen Hollywood comedies for a while, so when opporunity presented itself to watch I Pronounce you Chuck and Larry, I grabbed it. I also confess, it was the presence of Jessicaa Biel, to whom I am partial to, must have had greater say in luring to the movie.

To say the movie was gross is an understatement. It thrives on grossness. It lives in a world of grossness. Still, I gathered that this must be a pretty lame concoction compare to some other comedies that are doing the rounds there. There is no wit on display, there is no poker faced humour, there is no people throwing cakes into each other. When I mean gross, I do not mean the repeated use of fart as a humourous device. I mean the joyless, leery, toilet-tinted hues that spread over huge quantities of cleavages and obese derrieres slipping in your face like fungus-fested icecream cans. Like an out of focus myopic, it has to gaze and gaze before it can register any sight and beat the scene over and over again before it can register any meaning out of what it wants to say. It has humour only in one way, the malicious humour of clowns who bare thier ugly warts as a dare for you to laugh.

So bountiful that he has to assure us they are real, Jessica Biel


It tries to inhabit the world of Balzac's The Droll Stories and I do not mean that as a compliment. Balzac too was a man festering with hatred for the bourgeiose and wrote hundred little pamphlets which he called novels and wrote the Droll Stories as a diversion,a collection of vaginal hair and breaking wind.

Chuck and Larry combines both those aspects of Balzac; when it is not displaying mounds of human flesh, it is busy preaching in a very finger-wagging sort of way. Chuck and Larry are two firemen who are also best buddies. One is a widower mourning his wife's death, the other is a playboy who romps up with half a dozen Asian girls. When Larry risks losing his benefits, he talks his best friend into faking a domestic gay partnership. The usual culprits act in the usual way. The firemen gang initially show their disapproval but then do the I am Spartacus gig at the court. The postman across the corner turns out to be a closet gay. Yeah, the heterosexual playboy belches out a vomit of a speech about what hearts of gold the gay people have. Even within in the very limited scope of its premise, the movie cannot get anything right.

As for Ms.Biel, she plays the role of an earnest, reprssed lawyer so earnestly that she forgets that while she is serious, the audience should be laughing with her. Still, it is only the display of her miraculous organs that redeems human flesh in this botch job of a comedy.

Picture courtesy:www.fasthack.com
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Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix (the movie)

July 15th 2007 03:41
Not until I saw the movie did I realize how much story there is in The Order of Phoenix. It doesn't strike you that way because the story in the book is hidden in a mass of irrelevant details and sloppy editing.

I am not a book fan first and my movie experience is always clouded by the books. That said, the movie does an adequate job of summarising the story. It makes you realise how much better the books would have been if only Rowling cut it by some two hundred pages, if she had adopted the flat narative style of the first books instead of the heavily descriptive one she chose for this outing. The movie by itself is a drag.

Voldemort has returned in the last installment but the Wizarding world is in denial about it. Harry and Dumbledore are portrayed as conspirators. Harry is frustrated that he is being shunned by Dumbledore and the others. In the opening scenes, a pair of dementors attack Harry and Dudley. This earns him a hearing from the Ministry of Magic where Cornelius Fudge tries his best to have him expelled from Hogwarts. Michael Gambon as Dumbledore comes alive in this scene for the first time in the movie series.

Harry wins the hearing and goes to Hogwarts which has a new teacher, Dolores Umbridge, whose mission is to tame Hogwarts into a Ministry of Magic stand-in. While there, he also has lot of strange dreams about Voldemort. It turns out that he has a psychic connection with the Dark Lord which can give him insights into the working of the Dark Lord himself. One night, he sees his best friend's Ron Weasly's father, Arthur Weasly attacked by a serpent.

There are some moments in the movie where it truly seems to work. The moment when Harry is resuced by the Order of Phoenix and their flight over Thames. Sirius Black is fleshed out really well and so is Dumbledore. Grawp is marvellously realised, even better than in the books ( the first time it has happened.) Quidditich is thankfully left out.

Since the book has been described as darker, the movie tries to emulate that, heavy-handedly, in tones suitable for horror movies. The acting is pretty basic. Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange is miserable. What should have been a counterpart of Lucius Malfoy's codly arrogant evil becomes a disorderly maniacal wretch. Many important plot details from the book are left out, like the Dumbledore's confession to Harry. (Snape's role as the eavesdropper is edited out.) The climax is shoddily done.

The movie also plods along for the most part, becoming interesting in only a few instances. It goes on, not like a theatrical, but like a rehearsal for a theatrical. The shortest movie of all five whcih feels like the longest.
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America, we are ready to love you again!

June 12th 2007 10:10
Ciao America 2002. Starring Vincenzo Amato. Its plot described thusly:

Lorenzo Primavera is an unsettled Italian American college graduate who travels to Italy to coach American football to a team of Italians in Italy’s fledgling American Football League. It’s a league where everyone can kick but no one can catch. While coaching, Lorenzo meets and falls in love with Paola Angelini, a headstrong young music student who forces him to face the same decision as his immigrant grandfather some seventy years earlier. It is a decision, the outcome of which, will decide his very future.




Golden Door 2007. Starring Vincenzo Amato again. Its plot described thusly:

The turn-of-the-century voyage of a poor family from rural Sicily through the "golden door" of Ellis Island and into America. On a perilous steamship journey from his Sicilian village, the widower Salvatore Mancuso encounters a ravishing, mystery-shrouded Englishwoman, Lucy, Amid a harrowing crossing, an unexpected love story unfolds all the way to the halls of Ellis Island, where both Salvatore and Lucy will stop at nothing to make it to the America of their imaginations

America, we are ready to love you again. Just don't elect evil Republicans!
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Pirates of the Carribbean 3; At Wit's End

May 30th 2007 07:06
Pirates of the Carribbean : At World's End


Pirates of the world, unite!

Right to habeas corpus suspended. Right to trial by jury suspended. After the endless litany of woes is read out, the hordes of pirates are hung together. It's the turn of a small child and predictably he starts a singing a song of defiance and the rest of the chained people join in. A British soldier is worried about a possible insurrection and runs to his superior officer, Captain Beckett who calmly tells him to ignore it. The child is hung.

The British Empire, represented by Beckett, is ascendant and rounding up pirates everywhere and promptly hanging, clearing the seas. Beckett has cunningly trapped Davy Jones and therefore, has the services of the Flying Dutchman to squelch the pirate squads. Jack Sparrow is trapped in Davy Jones Locker, a maritime purgatory. Captain Barbarossa decides to rescue him because he plans to raise the Brethren Court, a grand council of the international pirates and all nine pirate lords are required there and Sparrow is one of them. Elizabeth Swann decides to follow him because she is eaten up with guilt. Will Turner wants to rescue his father from the Flying Dutchman. There is plenty of double-crossings, fights and chases, intrigue and action and many parts of it are quite enjoyable and some, like the Calypso episode, are not.

This is the opening scene of Pirates of the Carribean : At World's End and it's in- your-face attempts at commmentary on modern politics is jarringly cringe-worthy. That perhaps is the biggest drawback of the movie. I don't remember much of the first movie but I loved the second one, mainly because, after a prolonged introduction it settled into an uniterrupted romp of thrills, which one could enjoy without bothering oneself with the very knotty story. The third part has some great moments too; like the wedding in the climactic swordsfight which compares favourably with the ballad that Cyrano composed during a duel.

I did not understand the plot of the third movie either and I came back and read the story on the Net, for writing this review even though the story, indeed the very excess of it, does little to elucidate the movie. P3, like the Matrix 3 and the Superman-3 , is dense with story and structure and the architecture of its mythology. Unlike the second part though, this one is awash with allusion and insinuation. Indeed,its painfully obvious subtext forms the cathexis that drove the serpentine narrative.


The British Empire may have had a whole lot of flaws but this movie is a romantic fantasy, not a historical epic, and it is not the history of the Empire but its use as a symbol, not for overbearing authority but for lawful order, that's at stake here. It is true that often unfortunately in romanticism, a legal representative is the villain and the lawbreaker is a hero. From Inspector Javert in Les Miserables on down to the Officer Frank Dixon in the Terminal. And all such infuriatingly stubborn and dense men have the quality of self-destructing at the end. Hugo at least invests Javert with a certain dignity, who commits suicide because the principles that he lived by turn on him and he can't bear the difference. None of the modern directors, whether Spielberg or Joss Whedon or Gore Verbinski can manage that with their villains ( Officer Dixon in The Terminal, the Operative in Serenity and Beckett in P3) and when the villains melt in the time of the crunch, the whole elaborate set up and the boasts seem eminently ridiculous for the audience. Straw men are easy to set up and kill.

The movie is a fantasy of shared subversion and longing for anarchy. The pirates of the world join and unbind Calypso from her human form which will bring back elemental chaose back to the seas. Bring down the empire; let anarchy rule!! The movie is littered with dramatic moments where the emotional lift-off is given by choosing the other side, of soldiers giving up their uniform and joining the pirates. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter! And yes, the hero's tireless search for immortality (a metaphor for permanence of political order), which is still not satiated in this movie leads him to the fountain of Life, the Aqua Vida which is supposed to be in where else but Cuba.

If you have wondered why Left which boasts itself as being a secular, rational, atheistic ideology should join forces with obscurantist ,fundamentalist version of radical Islam, look no further. At World's End is the glorification and romanticisation of the secret fantasy that make such an alliance possible.
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Spiderman 3

May 5th 2007 20:57
Spiderman : Pensively in confict about his new dark side


Is it an elaborate but simple metaphor for America experimenting with the dark side and rediscovering the good side again? Check. Is it the biggest instalment of what is already the bigges movie franchise and creating history in every part of the globe? Check. Is it the symbol of a rejuvenated Hollywood after a lackdaisical two years where it seemed it would be overtaken by Chinese martial arts and Bollywod bump and grind? Check.

Spiderman 3 begins with a very happy Peter Parker : his masked avatar is very popular in the New York City, he is about to propose to Mary Jane and life is one happy spectacle. But, things go quickly wrong. Peter's friend Harry decides to seek vengeance for his father's death at Peter's hands and gets himself a cool suit and some funky gizmos. Mary Jane has a career setback and is jealous at Peter's popularity and insecure about his relationship to a new blonde in the class. A fugitive at large called Flint Marko is roasted in a particle accelerator and becomes the Sandman. Peter later gets to know that Marko was the guy who killed his uncle. An alien substance from a meteorite burst follows Peter; unknown to him it can sense and increase the aggresive side of a person. While Harry at one point succeeds in driving a wedge between Mary Jane and himself, Peter in a fit of defiance uses the dark stuff to transform himself. At the Daily Bugle, there is a new smartass photographer who quickly becomes a rival of Peter for taking Spiderman's photographs. When Peter realises the awful nature of the substance he is abusing he tears his new suit off which quickly finds a humiliated and smarting Edwin as the new host who turns into Venom.

Spiderman has four adversaries in this movie: Harry, Marko, Edwin/Venom and himself. It is the time of the myth, when the hero engagesd with the Dark Side and battle elemental monsters. Some are complaining about Sandman's grotesqueness as a monster but it is a required elemental monster which vanquishing binds the hero to this world. The plot works as a ballet where friends become adversaries and friends again and the whole thing unspools more or less satisfactorily.

So what are the downsides? Mainly acting. Tobey Maguire may have made a homely Spiderman but doing a Jazz dance and looking bad ( he manages to look gay) is completely beyond him. Topher Grace can't play a villain. Thomas Hayden Church and James Franco suffer from wooden roles. And Kirsten Dunst is one ugly chick. Also, the special effects are not consistent. Some are awesome whereas some llike the final battle between Venom and Spiderman are quite badly done.

The second is the climax. It is a big, big copout. It's basically trying to work through the anger and talks itself out of revenge. Petet's job, you see, is to police the streets of New York and not to seek revenge for his uncle's murder and so he should not kill his tormentors but try saving their souls. Such saccharine stuff is beyond my ken for sweet things.

I am told French critics are busy equating Sandman with George Bush (who else?). I know the British critics are offended that there is a big falsh of the Old Gloryin the background when Spdiey returns to his good side and see it as a pandering to the patriotic instincts of the Americans. When I read those reviews I thought they were being unnaturally ungracious. But even for a sympathetic audience like me, the big shot of Old Glory is really jarring. But, I don't think it was pandering; Sam Raimey was making a statement.

In Spiderman 2 , Raimi talked himself out of isolationism and in this movie, Raimi talks himself out of neoconservatism. Now that America has punished the wrong guys in a wrong war, tasted hitherto-unknown power and experimented with the dark side, it should come back to its traditional friendly, neighbourhood vigilante role where it should prevent new upstart powers from dark temptations and learn to understand and forgive world's big monsters ( which if only it forgave would happily sneak away into nothingness) and last but not the least, when the girl has to be saved, the girl who is the anima, the golden fruit or the symbol of power, both the hero and his rival, the two divided halves of a divided country have to come together . There is also a possible throwaway for reconciliation with France in the film's most comedic scene involving a French maitre d'.

That's my take on it anyway.
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Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix trailer

April 23rd 2007 02:34
The extended trailer for the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released yesterday and here are my thoughts. I just realised that the story of the Phoenix might actually work out much better for the screen version. They'd have to edit a lot of stuff and Phoenix was quite flabby. But, imagine all those occlumency lessons, detentions with Umbridge and Dumbledore's Army scenes. Harry's going though quite a lot in this installment and we will all be hooked to the screens.Simply put there is too much emotion in this one, without the unnecessary distractions of the book (Grawp, Grimmauld Place). But judging from the trailer, I didn't think I like it all that well. It seemed to me that it suffers from the same problem the Goblet of Fire movie suffered from. Harry Potter is a world of its own. It's a bit archaic but it is a fantasy world. We want it o be like that. But, they seem to be turning it into a MTV style music video kind of thing. Just look at the scene on the train station where Voldemort appears in a dark pinstripe suit. Voldemort is a wizard, for godsakes, he won't wear that muggle clothing. It's not a faux pas there. That small scene speaks for the whole. It's as if the entire movie is stylised from that perspective. Goblet of Fire was, and that's why I didn't like it. Simply put these movies lack a credible projection of Hogwarts. I might be wrong. One can only tell after watching the movie, but why does it have to release only a week before the last book? Why can't it release sooner to keep us occupied till the book comes?

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300: Prepare for Glory

April 5th 2007 20:03
Gerald Butler digs deep in 300

Truth to tell, I did not like the promos of 300 and was waiting to find out, in sad resignation, whether I would like the movie or not. I knew all the right reasons( call them "ideological") for liking it, but personally I thought I wouldn't. I am relieved to confess; it is not the best movie I ever saw or anything like that, but I did it like it very much.

300 is a retelling of the famous battle of Thermopylae where a couple of hundred of Greek warriors held at bay the huge Persian army that was swooping down on Greek mainland, after conquering the Asia Minor. The warriors had succeeded to hold the Persian army in its tracks for three days. This itself gave a huge tactical advantage for the fragmented Greeks, to join their forces and face the enemy together. It also had become a memorable event in Greek mind, an event capable of rousing the complacent Greeks to battle.

This incident has been adapted many times before and this time it is used by Frank Miller for his graphic novel. I haven't read the novel but 300 is supposed to be a loyal adaptation, using the same technique that went into the making of Sin City and Through the Scanner Darkly. Like all cartoons, the method here is stylization and exaggeration to which Miller adds a few touches of fantastical whimsy. This means that the Greek heroes are all all extreme examples of beautiful manhood; the corrupt and the villainous are fantastically deformed; the Persians are black or brown and lecherous and Xerxes is ten foot tall and effeminate. Both the dialogue and the imagery are pared down to a fundamental distinction between good and evil and that distinction is never compromised.

The story is told by a general of King Leonidas of Sparta who is determinted to take the battle to the Persians who are looming over the horizons, but the political establishment of Sparta is undecided on the matter. Early in the movie, Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy, who demands that he surrender, into a dark well, a scene that propulses the movie into high gear of action. His own wife, Gorga is solidly behind him. When Leonidas doesn't get the required sanction from the Oracle( was it Delphi?), due to corruption we are told, he takes a loyal band of 300 warriors with him. He has a secret plan; with these warriors he hopes to hold the Persian army at bay in Thermopylae. Leonidas knows he won't survive the battle but he goes anyway hoping that their certain death would provide enough pscyhological fuel for the rest of Greece. How right he is!

The rest of the movie is about their battles for the three days and also about Queen Gorga's uphill task to convince Sparta to send any army behind the king.

As I've said, the movie kicks into life in the Persian enovy scene and rarely loses momentum thereafter. I felt the "beautiful death scene" in the climax was a bit too abrupt; Gerald Butler and Lena Headey took time to grown on me, mainly because of their accents but a few minutes into the movie, I really liked them. Butler really digs deep and makes Leonidas quite fascinating and I was even moved by some of his speeches toward the end. As for the visual imagery, one can only say that this is the stuff dreams are made of.

Is 300 a neocon movie? Well, it depends on what 'neocon" means. It's an unabashedly pro-war movie; not just the one in Iraq although that too can be included, but the creators definitely have a wider concept of West under siege premise and the possible confrontation between the West and the East definitely colours their thinking. Neither do they hesistate to draw explicit parallels. Some have pointed out the line, "Freedom is not free," used by Gorga to rally the support of war, as a neocon reference. Actually, a more germane reference would be the line uttered by the corrupt Spartan, " Leonidas is an idealist but I am a realist." Neo-conservatism tried to supplant realism as a politcal doctrine.

The movie goes even farther than any neocon underpinnings when Leonidas says that he is fighting for freedom and against "mysticism and tyranny." There is no doubt that Sparta stands for America and the Persians stand for its Islamofascist enemy and as such, 300 represents the war cry America never made artistically after it was attacked on 9/11. Therefore, the movie is a vehicle for much deeper and more turbulent emotions and philosophy that even the neocon movement has not managed to tap in.

The Brotherhood, of course, went nuts over it and tried to stop it as much as possible. First, there was a widespread hysteria, just before its release, if the movie was a neocon agitprop. One European reporter even wondered if it was Leonidas or Xerxes, who was modeled on President Bush. If that hysteria was displayed by one gang, the other gang immediately stepped in to assure us that 300 couldn't be a neocon movie because it was too darn silly. It made for fine viewing but was just too elementary. When the movie opened, they tried yet another trick. After describing the movie's technique in minute detail, they accused the movie of being too cartoony. That that was the whole point was somehow conveniently forgotten. The usual historicity card was drawn but not played to a great extent.

On the whole, the Brotherhood did sound genuinely confused on how to attack it and hence, they gleefully let Iran cover for them, when it stepped in saying that America was waging pscychological warfare with it. Still, the movie is a big hit and we have one more huge success on the cultural front after last year's Pursuit of Happyness.

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Pan's Labyrinth : Pure Swamp

March 31st 2007 09:45
Pan's Labyrinth

Before I write anything further, let me say it stright away. I consider it a travesty to walk out of a theatre while a movie is still playing on. No matter how bad it is, I have never walked out of the movie midway. Never. It is not an overblown concern about artistic sensibilities but simply, a bourgeoise sentiment about the ticket price. If I have paid for the ticket, I might as well sit it out.

Well, that should tell you how unutterably awful I felt watching a film if I walked out of the theatre in the middlle. To be truthful, I was very tired. But, I was also very tired when I saw The Illusionist and I came back not only refreshed but with this warm glow inside my heart, a sneaky wistful feeling that lasted over two days. So it cannot be that I was tired.

Pan's Labyrinth bored the hell out of me and believe me, I have sat through some of the dullest crap produced on this planet. I had also steadily inured myself to the art crowd blurb but somehow I fell for this one. When they said that the movie transported to an alternate world of fantasy, I fell for it. I forgot that for the Brotherhood, fantasy means Phillip Pullman.

The movie about a young girl who goes to country to meet her stepfather who is a general under Franco's regime. Along the way, she meets an insect-like fairy which leads her to a labyrinth where she meets an old faun who tells her that she was once a princess of a fabulous kingdom and lost her position because she wanted to explore the human world. The faun says that she has to complete three tasks, if she wants to return back to her world. All this is set against the backdrop of increasing violence where her stepfather is clearing up the woods, of the guerillas.

I was told that the movie was difficult to inteerpret, like Hero. There is nothing difficult about Pan's Labyrinth at all. It's premise is as clear as a toilet paper and I started staring at the walls after ten minutes or so. The fantasy elements remind you of ABC afternoon programming and the so called fascist violence is plain hokey.

Since I liked Hero as a movie though I detested its message, I braved through this one just to see how it would pan out in the end. But once the general deliberately likened the philosophy of choice to right wing supremacism, I couldn't stomach it any further and walked out.

Notice the recent brouhaha over 300 which has been slandered as a neocon propaganda vehicle. Conceding that, shouldn't the movie's many merits warrant attention? Of course not. It must be opposed like hell. But this movie, whose aritistic merits are deicdedly inferior and whose watchability is nil, is promoted as some kind of masterpiece, even nominated for Best Picture Oscar. (BTW, why the Oscars are promoting this dumb trash is beyond me; this is the second after City of God which was equally bad.) After all, it's purpose is not to depict the atrocities of the Franco Regime but sneak in the message that individualist movements are essentially fascist in nature.

I am sure that message is invaluable propaganda for the elitocrats but a good movie it does not make.
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The Illusionist : Pure Magic

March 27th 2007 16:30
Edward Norton nails it as The Illusionist


A movie where the hero and the heroine fall in love as children, where she is a countess and he is a poor cabinet maker's son? Do they still make those kind of movies? Happily for us, they still do.

The Illusionist is the love story of Edward, a poor man's son and Sophie, a countess. They were spearated from each other in childhood and only meet after 15 years in Vienna. He has become a notorious illusionist and she is about to be married to the Crown Prince. The Crown Prince is both intellectually curious and morbidly jealous at the same time and as Edward's fame increases, he instructs the police chief to keep an eye on him. When Sophie and Edward recognise each other and renew their affair, things are set for a showdown.

Right from the start, when the evocative music announces the opening credits, the movie transports you into another world--its own. The art direction and photography are not clunky like they tend to be for the usual period movies. The whole ambience has a frothy, neighbourly closeness to it that is quite appealing. The magic tricks might look a bit icky but I have read online that they were based on real stuff done in the nineteeth century.
Jessica Biel as the lovely Sophie

I haven't liked Edward Norton before but he absolutely nails this movie. Jessia Biel projects a certain kind of noble but natural loveliness. Paul Giamatti, as an inspector who is softer than he likes to appear, is okay.

I was a tad uncomfortable with the fate of the Crown Prince but given my beliefs I still relished at the idea that the villain stands for a social reformer,who is made to confess the futility of his utopian dreams, before he gets his due. The hero does not immediately stand for anything but he does emerge victorious against a bad guy who should be a bad guy but is ain't too often. The storybook ending gave me a chidish pleasure,

All in all, a most pleasurable experience.

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