Seeti Maar- Diary of a Movie Lover

Oscar Blogathon-Amadeus

2012-01-30T20:53:00.000+05:30

The 3rd in the Oscar Blogathon, a movie that showcases the eternal struggle between mediocrity and quality. Of how envy often ends up destroying the very soul of a person. Of a genius called Mozart, whose prodigal talent would turn out to be his own worst enemy.

Amadeus swept the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director(Milos Forman), Best Actor( F.Murray Abraham), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume, Best Art Direction.

O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.- William Shakespeare, Othello

E-N-V-Y, 4 letters that more often than not, have the power to bring about the downfall of a person. It was Duryodhan’s envy of his cousins, the Pandavas, that led in a way, to the ultimate destruction of his entire Kuru dynasty. The Bard referred to it as the Green Eyed Monster, which proves to be the catalyst for the downfall of Othello. Quite often envy of a person more talented than oneself, can cause tragic repercussions. There have been countless movies, that revolved around the jealous sibling, seeking to wreak revenge on his brother/sister, as he considers them a threat to one’s own self. Envy in fact can be a positive attribute, if one uses it to motivate one self to do better in life. But the fact is most of the time, Envy becomes the “green eyed monster”, that feeds on one’s insecurities, jealousies, and ends up destroying the person, who sought to unleash it on his rival. The person obsessed with envy, does not look at the damage it causes to him, he does not care he is destroyed as long as the person he is envious of is destroyed himself.

It is this envy, that   slowly destroys   Antonio Salieri( F.Murray Abraham) in the 1984 movie adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s   play Amadeus. I have not seen the play, nor do i really have much knowledge of    the history of   Salieri or even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart( Tom Dulce) for that matter, except the fact that he composed   some lovely music. So it’s beyond my scope to comment on how faithful the movie was to the play, or about the historical accuracy of the movie.   Also before we jump into conclusions, Amadeus has nothing to do with Baiju Bawra, that movie was about the titular character   seeking a duel with Tansen,   some form of revenge, for his father’s death.   The movie to me was more about the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart. Actually I would not exactly term it as a rivalry,   in   this case, it was more about Salieri’s obsession with Mozart,   that led to his eventual downfall later on.

When the movie is so much about Salieri, why has it   been titled as Amadeus?

I think the answer goes right back to the opening scene, or rather a specific moment there.   The movie starts off with Salieri,   pleading forgiveness from the Lord for having killed Mozart.    Salieri is in some form of delusion,   repeatedly pleading with God,   screaming out about his guilt, his sin. Not even the entreaties of his Valet or his Italian cook, nor the promise of a nice dinner, manage to divert him.   Finally he cuts his throat, and is then admitted into the hospital, where a priest Volger visits him for his confession. As the priest is trying to get Salieri admit to his guilt,   here comes one of the best moments. Salieri plays a couple of tunes , claiming to the priest he wrote them. The priest however shows his ignorance in both cases, stating he is not too familiar.    And then he plays Mozart’s   famous tune,   Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.   The priest nods, smiles,   and even hums a bit of the music.   Even to many of us,   who know zilch about Mozart or Western classical music, i guess this tune would be quite familiar, especially in some of the ringtones.

Volger: Oh, I know that! That’s charming! I didn’t know you wrote that.
Salieri: I didn’t. That was Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. You know who that is?

I feel this one moment, put into context the importance of Mozart to the entire story. In spite of Salieri claiming that he “wrote 40 operas alone” and “he was the most famous composer in Europe” when the priest was still a boy, he is not a known figure outside the world of music. And yet the minute he plays the tune of Mozart, even the priest, who is otherwise not shown to be a music aficionado, immediately perks up, hums the tune. The fact here is Mozart had become central to Salieri’s existence, he sees Mozart as some one he wanted to be, but could not. It is the form of envy you feel, when you see your more talented colleague at work, doing well, while you feel for all the hard effort you are putting in, it simply does not pay. The relationship between Mozart and Salieri is not just of envy, its a more complex love hate relationship. Where director Milos Forman, comes out trumps is the way he delineates the relationship between both of them.
Though Salieri, is the villain of the piece, he is not completely evil. He loved music, was ambitious, a man of virtue, and in fact reasonably successful in life. Born into an Italian merchant’s family, he desired to be a musician, much against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to join the business. In fact when he narrates his flashback to the priest, Salieri claims that his jealousy towards Mozart, was not just due to the fact, that he was already a child prodigy, whose fame had spread even in the small Italian town, he was in.

I admit I was jealous when I heard the tales they told about him. Not of the brilliant little prodigy himself, but of his father, who had taught him everything.

Salieri’s father was not really into music, in fact he contemptuously dismisses his yearning to be a musician as “Why?Do you want to be a trained monkey”. And then what he calls by a “miracle”, his father has a sudden death, he is left free to pursue his passion, and then he ends up a court composer to Emperor Joseph II( Jeffrey Jones) of Austria. But right before the scene, where his father dies, there is that moment, when praying at the Church as a boy, he pleads with God to make him a famous musician, and in return he vows chastity and hard work. The way the character of Salieri is set up in the initially sequences, bringing to fore his motivations, his ideology, his ambition, makes us understand his character much better in the scenes later. It is this set up that actually gives the depth to the feelings Salieri has for Mozart later on.

And that brings to another great scene, the first time Salieri encounters Mozart. To date, Salieri has only heard of Mozart, heard his work, but never seen him face to face. He goes to seek him out at the Archbishop of Salzburg’s residence, where Mozart is schedule to play his music. Salieri feeling that Mozart would be some one respectful, dignified, scholarly begins to seek him out. He gets the shock of his life, when he learns that the person whom he had earlier sneaked upon cavorting and flirting with a lady, is Mozart himself.

So that was he! That giggling, dirty-minded creature I’d just seen crawling on the floor. Mozart. The phenomenon whose legend had haunted my youth.Impossible.

And then when he hears Mozart play, he is transported to another realm. As he tells to the priest, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God”. And this is where the envy deepens, a more complicated form of envy. Where earlier Salieri was merely envious of Mozart, for being such a genius, he finds it hard to accept, that the person whom he admired, was something he was not. He was flirty, he was carefree, indisciplined, wanton, everything he was not. For years Salieiri had worked hard on his music, abdicating the pleasures of life, taking vows of chastity, devoted to God, and yet he finds that this man who is everything he despises, fools around with women, acts like a fop, and then produces some of the most amazing pieces of music. He finds it inconceivable, that someone who is so pleasure loving, undisciplined, audacious could actually produce such divine music.

Why? Would God choose an obscene child to be His instrument? It was not to be believed! This piece had to be an accident. It had to be.

Also i feel Salieri’s insecurity was the fact that Mozart seriously challenged not just his music, but his own value system. The challenge to his music, was something he could handle, because he was aware of his own “mediocricity”, and that he could never rise to Mozart’s level. It is the challenge to his value system, that shook him more . It was if Mozart was consciously mocking at his values, his beliefs, and that made him insecure. It made him obsessed with Mozart, the more he hated him, the more he became obsessed with him.

Another very interesting scene, is the one where the Emperor inquires about Mozart’s capabilities, from Salieri and his courtiers. The divergence comes between, the librarian Baron Von Swienten and Count Orsini Rosenberg, the Opera director. While Von Swienten, has high appreciation for Mozart’s latest opera, Orsini does not think too highly of it. As both of them argue, the Emperor, suggests it would be fine if they could get Mozart to do an opera in German, something which shocks Orsini, for whom Italian is the natural language for any opera. While the movie does not project it much, i feel this and some of the other moments, do give an indication of the Austro-Italian rivalry, present in that period. Something which Mozart himself alludes to later on in the movie, when he finds that he has to submit samples of his work, for review, just to teach the Emperor’s 16 year old niece. He openly accuses the Italian lobby in the Court, claiming to surpress him.

They hate my music. It terrifies them. The only sound Italians understand is banality. Tonic and dominant, tonic and dominant, from here to Resurrection! Show them one interesting modulation and they faint. Ohime! Morbidezza! Morbidezza! Italians are musical idiots and you want them to judge my music!

I feel this points more to a rivalry between the Italian composers and the Austro-German composers, two races who have dominated and influenced Western classical music to a large extent, followed by the Russians.

One more thing that really works in the movie, is that while Salieri is the principal antagonist, Mozart is not exactly the pure as white, perfect hero. Sure he is the musical genius, whose music has the capacity to transport listeners to another world. But there is a lot that is wrong with him. He has a troubled relationship with his father, Leopold, the person of whom Salieri was equally jealous too. But ever since Mozart leaves Salzburg for Vienna, he feels troubled. He feels his simple minded son, would be corrupted once he is in Vienna and most of all he disapproves his son’s marriage with Constanze( Elizabeth Berridge), whom he feels is nothing better than a “Viennese slut”. Apart from the Salieri-Mozart angle, the depiction of the troubled father son relationship, is also another excellent feature of the movie. Mozart feels Vienna, would be the passport to the fame he is seeking, fueled no doubt by it’s reputation as the City of Musicians. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie, is when Mozart’s father visits him in Vienna. By then Mozart is in deep debt, having squandered away his money, the way he tries to convince his father, that everything is fine, and also the way Leopold expresses his disapproval of Constanze is top notch. You could feel the tension between the characters.

It is these weakness in Mozart’s character that Salieri   begins to take advantage of.   Knowing very well, he could never compete with Mozart, on musical terms, Salieri   uses   his influence, his position to play around with Mozart’s   life and career.    This is where the envy comes out in full display, as Salieri tosses aside all his ethics, his beliefs,   he is just obsessed with the end goal, Mozart’s destruction.   The obsession shows up it’s ugly side   when Constanze, meets   him to help out her husband’s career, and he takes advantage of   the situation, asking her to come for the tonight. And yet when   Constanze actually bares herself before him, he is unable to bring himself to seduce her.    The rivalry between   Mozart and Salieri is not that of a hero-villain, in fact though Mozart mocks at Salieri, he does not have any real hatred for him. It is Salieri’s   envy for Mozart, that however consumes him like the green eyed monster.   Every step he takes to destroy Mozart, ruin him, is actually a step   further to his own destruction.

It is often said that academics can never make good movie makers.   Milos Forman, proves the theory wrong, originally from the Czech republic, he   fled to the US, to avoid the Communist rule, and later was a professor of film at Columbia University.   In 1975 he took Ken Kesey’s novel about a mental asylum, and made one of the most memorable movies of all time, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Two of his movies One Flew and Amadeus   swept the Oscars, and both of them deserved every prize they got.   He also made some other great movies too The Man in the Moon,   People vs Larry Flynt, Ragtime.   Setting the movie in his native Prague, he constructs an epic that is vast, sweeping, and yet at the same time does not allow the grandeur of the settings to overwhelm the characters.   The detailing is excellent, the grandeur of the Emperor’s court, the stark simplicity of   Salieri’s residence, the dark, drab atmosphere of the hospital, the frivolity of the Masked dance   everything is captured so beautifully.   And yet the movie does not lose focus on the   relationship between Mozart and Salieri, and by delineating the characters wonderfully, we are drawn into their world. What i particularly loved was the humane treatment   given to the characters,   so that while we do not approve of Salieri’s   villainy , we still empathize with him, and while we root for Mozart, we are also consciously aware that he had played himself straight into Salieri’s hands.

What also works for   Amadeus are some excellent performances. Among the supporting cast for me it would Jeffrey Jones as the Emperor, regal, majestic and imperious,   Roy Dotrice as Leopold wonderfully bringing out the father’s anguish and   Elizabeth Berridge as Mozart’s wife Constanze.   Tom Hulce does a fairly good job as Mozart,    though i felt his American accent did jar a bit. The finest performance hands down would be F.Murray Abraham, who gets a complex role as Sali, and does complete justice to it. Not going over the top, nor ndulging in wild gesticulation, he manages to convey the feelings of   jealousy, envy, bitterness, pathos in a very restrained and subtle manner.

Oscar Blogathon 2012-The Pianist

2012-01-27T12:23:00.000+05:30

This review was earlier published by me in 2005, when I had wrote it on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Just republishing this again as part of the Oscar blogathon, with some slight modifications. The Pianist remains one of the best movies on the Holocaust, absolutely, searing and hard hitting.

Awards Won: Best Actor-Adrian Brody, Best Director-Roman Polanski, Best Adapted Screenplay.
(Spoiler Alert: Some key scenes in the movie are discussed here).

    First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists,    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade         unionist.
    Then they came for the Jews,    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
    Then they came for the Catholics,    and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.
    Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

One of the memorable poems composed on the Holocaust by the German pastor Martin Niemoller, actually it was more against the way German intellectuals cowed down before Hitler, during the Holocaust. . I think along with Schindlers List, The Pianist this is one of the best movies related to that topic. But there are differences while Schindlers List dealt with the attempts of one man to save Jews from extermination, The Pianist deals with the struggle for survival of a Jewish man in Warsaw.

The real life Wladsylaw Spilzmann

The movie is the real life story of celebrated Polish pianist Wladsylaw Spilzman who recorded his experiences of survival during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Spilzman has a happy family comprising his father( Frank Finlay), mother(Maureen Lipman), his sisters and his brother Henryk. The movie begins with the German occupation of Poland in 1939 and slowly unfolds the horrors of the Nazi regime. Spilzman and his family find their lives getting progressively worse.

The Nazis start off with restrictions forbidding Jews from entering restaurants, walking in the parks, as he tells his girl friend Dorota, who is shocked at the absurdity of the rule. And then Jews are not allowed to keep money in their home beyond a certain amount and what they eat is also decided by the Nazis. But all this is just a prelude to Hitler?s Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews to the last man.

The Jews are then herded into the by now infamous Warsaw Ghetto and then the Nazis start to execute their Master's orders, as Spilzman says "Each is trying to be a better Nazi than Hitler". Families are executed on the flimsiest of grounds, Jews are deported to hard labor, and comes the hour of reckoning, when all the Jewish families are deported in the cattle cars to the death chambers of Auschwitz.

Its during this time that Spilzman is separated from his family with the help of a Polish Jewish inspector, Stern and he is all alone left to fend for himself. The movie know entirely deals with Spilzman's efforts at survival in a city which is scarred and destroyed beyond belief. The later half of the movie concentrates mostly on Spilzman and his mute witness to the ravages of the war. He is finally helped out by a kindly German officer with a conscience, with food and shelter.

The Pianist is a movie that hits you straight with the impact of a sledge hammer blow. I was familiar with the Holocaust having read many books on it, and I had also seen Schindlers List, but nothing prepared me for what is show in this movie. Roman Polanski the director, was himself a concentration camp survivor, and it shows in the movie. What he shows is pure unadulterated reality of the Nazi horrors and there is no attempt to gloss over it. Some of the scenes which reveal the utter brutality of the Nazi goons:

The Nazis march into the house of a Jewish family and orders every one to stand up, one old man is invalid and he cannot stand. So they just take him and throw him to his death casually over the balcony. And then they bring the family out onto the streets, and orders every one to run, and start to shoot them.

Spilzmans father is walking along the street when two Nazi officers stop him and bark at him, why he did not bow to them. He apologizes but the Nazis still beat him up, and they order him to walk in the gutter as Jews are not allowed to walk on pavements.

Jewish men are ordered to stand in a line. The Nazi commandant randomly picks up men from the group and shoots them without any reason or remorse, as if they were just shooting targets. When he comes to the last man in the line, his bullets are over. He coolly picks up another pistol and shoots the man dead.

But for me the most shocking scene in the movie is when an old Jewish lady is carrying her meager ration of food, and is knocked over by another man. Her food falls on to the ground, and a Jewish man so hungry starts to lap up the food, while the lady tearfully fights to get him off. This one scene is enough to highlight the horrors of the Nazi rule. It was not just the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the tortures, it was the fact that they stripped an entire community of their dignity and made them turn into animals.

Also the scene where Spilzman is forcibly separated from his family at the railway station, Jewish prisoners shot in the head by the Nazis, and Spilzmann's running through the streets of Warsaw, distraught and weeping.

Even in an otherwise bleak story, there are some scenes that are truly heartwarming, such as Spilzman playing an impromptu piano tune for a Nazi officer who helps him out. The irony though hits in the climax, when Spilzman walking through a liberated Warsaw, now sees the Nazi officer, a prisoner of the Russians. They sure were some good men among the Nazis, but either there were a minority or just were helpless in the face of tyranny.

As you watch this movie only one question crosses your mind, why didn't the world lift a finger to prevent it?

The self proclaimed defender of freedom and democracy, US, sat on the sidelines till Pearl Harbour. Another self proclaimed democratic nation Switzerland used its neutrality as an excuse, and sat idly while Hitler's goons were rampaging through Europe and in fact allowed its banks to store the loot of the Nazis.

As for Russia, it willfully participated in the loot, until Hitler attacked it and then all of a sudden the so called Imperalist War turned into a people's war. The Allies keep crowing about how they saved freedom and democracy, but did it take the deaths of millions of people for them to do that. Jews were not the only ones who suffered under Hitler, the French, the Poles, gays, gypsies, Dutch every one and any one, who didn't measure up to Hitler's standards was exterminated by the Nazis. Warsaw is the appropriate setting considering that Poland was the country which suffered the maximum being looted by both the Russians and the Nazis. Warsaw suffered as a result of Hitler's scorched earth policy, when it was firebombed, as soon as it was known that the Russians were approaching. The city was totally destroyed and the entire later half is set against the ruins of the city.

The Pianist belongs to Adrian Brody who truly gives a totally award worthy performance. With his lean and sensitive frame, Brody slips into the character of Spilzman wonderfully and his transition from a handsome young pianist to a totally haggard, shattered survivor foraging for food in Warsaw,is brilliantly depicted. Truly did he deserve the Oscar for this.

One a last note, Hitler is dead and Auschwitz is liberated. But his legacy still lives on in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka. The world looked on when the Jews were massacred by Hitler and nothing seems to have changed since then. It looked on in Bosnia, it looked on in Rwanda, and looked on in Darfur. The great powers intervene only when it suits them. Nothing seems to have changed and our world leaders have not learnt one bit from history. When are we going to liberated the little Aushcwitzes we have built in our heart and mind?

Oscar Blogathon 2012-Gladiator

2012-01-25T17:19:00.000+05:30

As a part of an Oscar Blogathon series on movies that have won one or more of the Big 5 Oscars-Actor,Director,Actress,Picture,Screenplay, I am starting this with a piece on Ridley Scott's Oscar winning sword and sandal epic, Gladiator, was submitted to be my William Johnson . In his own words he moonlights as a writer for his website 'Secure Immaturity' which he likes to pretend he gets paid for (technically he does because sometimes he'll work on it at work when no one is looking). An excellent piece on Gladiator, and by Will here,giving his personal perspective.

Gladiator-Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design, Best Sound

I won’t lie: sometimes, in the heat of the moment, you utter the phrase ‘genius’ or ‘the greatest film ever’ when you’ve witnessed something of, well, true genius or saw ‘the greatest film ever’. But do these phrases really ever live up to those unexpected, emotionally driven utterances? In most, if not all, cases, no. When I was a freshman in high school my top two films of all time were Face/Off and The Fifth Element. . .in that order. At some point in my life I literally, with a straight face, said Face/Off was the greatest film of all time. No, really, I did.

So, when I was a junior in high school, I rented Gladiator, watched it, got off my couch and proudly proclaimed, ‘genius’. I may have even thrown about the words ‘greatest film of all time’ somewhere in there as well. No matter my mental state or level of insanity I (wisely) said, after viewing the film, ‘that movies blows Face/Off out of the water’! When your artistic heights are so low I’m sure Elmo in Grouchland blows Face/Off out of the water. But at that time, to see something better then Face/Off was quite the ballyhoo.

Gladiator followed me throughout the years. Since it was such a task to watch (depressing, violent and long) I only watched it a handful of times for the next nine years which, in ways, preserved the feel of the production and prevented over saturation. Gladiator, sometimes years in between viewings, was still ‘genius’ and one of the ‘greatest films of all time’.

But now, you see, I am a jaded, joyless soul and things that filled me with wonder have failed to do that much these days. It’s no wonder the ‘genius’ films of yesteryear were so wonderfully ridiculous and pure escapist fare for me: because there was still a young man yearning to live the unbelievable and aspire to the face-taking-offing future! The fifth element was love, man! But if anything hasn’t changed in the nearly ten years since Gladiator graced our cultural zeitgeist, it’s that Gladiator is a ‘genius’ piece of film history and worthy of the sentence ‘greatest film of all time’ (or at least on a severely biased, ridiculous Greatest Film of Mankind List).

I’m not going to say Gladiator is god’s gift to writing (though it ain’t too shabby) nor should history teachers quit their day jobs but Gladiator succeeds in two areas: being engaging and being fun. In a way, while Gladiator did a lot for the epic film (really, where did these kind of films go) it also kind of ushered in the end of its line. Though that sounds contradictory, it makes sense. Gladiator was the film that, really, shouldn’t have won Best Picture at the Oscars. . .but did. Gladiator was not taking itself too seriously. It let its images speak for themselves and let the exuberant awesomeness of itself into the hearts of the audience. That’s why the very simple film (you have to dig pretty deep for layers) ended up with the big prize: it didn’t TRY to be epic. . .it just was. And, in the end, it showed that epic is fun and fun is good.

Since then, films have TRIED to be what Gladiator is and failed. Have films like it been close to it. . .sure. But with them was a packaged ’seriousness’ to it that weighed the film down. Troy, though an awful movie, TRIED to be the next Gladiator. There is this self important vibe to it that screams: ‘look at me. . .I am a historical epic and serious about it. ENJOY ME!’ Movies like Troy almost made Russell Crowe’s Maximus, in the film Gladiator, fictionally prophetic: ‘are you not entertained. Is this what you want?’ It was as if Gladiator begged studios to cry for more blood. . .and we got it. But could it ever really be as good as before?

Gladiator is probably the easiest plot synopsis I will ever have to write: Maximus (Russell Crowe in an Oscar winning performance (deserved)) has successfully led Marcus Aurelius’ Rome to worldwide success. When Aurelius wants Maximus to become emperor, pretty boy and mentally unstable Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix in an Oscar nominated performance (should have won)) doesn’t really like the idea and kills pops before the official word can get through. Commodus tries to kill Maximus too but Maximus is a savvy mofo and escapes assassination. Commodus, the little bitch, kills Maximus’ wife and kid and Maximus, near death, is forced into slavery. As a gladiator in Africa Maximus rises through the ranks and eventually gets to Rome where he, you guessed it, reveals his name and intentions to now-Emperor (and creepy guy) Commodus. It all, naturally, leads to a final confrontation. Two sworded dudes enter, one incestuous weirdo falls, one HERO leaves.

This plot line, I’m sure, has been done a billion times before. But what makes the film tick and feel ‘new’ is the nuanced production. To start the acting is some of the finest in cinema. When typical, two dimensional characters can be given the breath of a three dimensional being that goes full credit to the actors. Russell Crowe got some flack for winning the Oscar here but. . .the dude pulled it off. Maximus could have been played by The Rock in a bad production. But Crowe, with his meticulous studying techniques and raucous script writing demands, made the role both believable, lovable (though the guy never smiles) and equally bad ass. Maximus is the ultimate hero. If real, you’d follow. Over time his ‘template’ has been given the 300-yelling-guy treatment. . .but Maximus is cold and calculated. He doesn’t scream, he just stares. It’s more effective then given credit for (well, besides the Oscar and all. . .).

Joaquin Phoenix got the Oscar shaft here. Instead of being diabolical, Commodus is both logical to his time and his batshit crazy head. If we weren’t rooting for Maximus we might, maybe, see where Commodus is coming from (in historical terms). But Phoenix is so creepy and just off that you can’t help but be simultaneously repulsed and attracted to his twisted charisma. Add a super sexy Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, the sister of Commodus and ‘did she/didn’t she’ lover of Maximus and Oliver Fucking Reed as Proximo, Maximus’ owner and later-friend, and you have a solid core of characters. Reed, especially, is delicious as a ball-grabbing but honorable former gladiator. Too bad he died during production. He is a gem in this film (for those not familiar with him and his hilarious/tragic career).

But even the side characters get the cream of the crop here: Djimon Hounsou plays the noble gladiator who steadies Maximus’ ship throughout the film; Derek Jacobi plays an altruistic senator; Richard Harris plays the ailing but truly living Marcus Aurelius; finally German Ralf Moeller plays a quite buff but likable, uh, German. . .I guess. The cast is first rate. And it all couldn’t be put together without the marvelous directing skills of one Ridley Scott who never seems to just crap a film out from time to time. Almost every film he makes is magical, artistic but real and addicting to watch.

The production values are also superior to most. Unlike today’s special effects world in which a sign is placed on the side of the screen that says, ‘look at me, I’m CGI god damn it!’, Gladiator blends its visuals into the background where they belong. Gladiator is about the Gladiator in a specific world. . .not a world that just happens to have a Gladiator in it. In many ways, the visual effects feel like documented pieces of the puzzle as opposed to computer 1s and 0s trying to make us go wow. Of all the many glorious ’set pieces’ and ‘visual’ moments, a scene involving Maximus fighting a gladiatorial veteran all while avoiding Tigers has to rank up there as one of the greatest ‘action’ scenes ever filmed.

Hans Zimmer’s score, which I am listening to as I type this, is breathtaking as well. I used to lift weights to the score of this film. It, like the film, is simple in bringing about simple themes. When the film is full of energy and excitement, the music fits appropriately: you want to get up and slice open a German’s gizzard! When the film turns dire, the music wants you to grip your seat in fear. And when the heartstrings get plucked, so do the appropriate strings on the instruments. Gladiator can have you going from cheering to crying in a few seconds flat. Who can’t have a happy tear in their eye when Juba says, ‘but not yet. Not yet’ with a smile on his face?

I really could go on and on about the film. It’s that amazing. I can’t quite place it on the top of the all-time list but it definitely fits there in the top 10. Gladiator is effortlessly genius, a word I am not afraid to keep uttering. On Blu-Ray, the film holds up astoundingly. The lush impressionistic colors make for a living painting on your flat screen. The extended edition of the film does require a bit of patience as Ridley Scott tries to flesh out the universe a bit. Some secret meetings with senators slows down the proceedings but over 10 minutes of tiny character moments (mostly in the first 40 minutes of the film), make you root for or hate certain characters a lot more. If Crowe won an Oscar for what you got in the theatrical edition he should earn it all over again for the bonuses they added in the extended cut: he actually smiles twice and you get to see more spit come out of his mouth when he finds his family crucified (as some small, tongue in cheek, examples).

So do me a favor. Put all your expectations aside (whether they are the ‘Gladiator sucks’ or the ‘genius/greatest film ever’ kind) and re watch Gladiator. For one, I can at least guarantee you a good time. I woke up this morning (I watched the film last night) and kept thinking about how great the film felt. Good movies bring good memories but great (or, ahem, ‘genius’) films bring about great feelings. It’s been a long time since I felt something good about the idea of a film, let alone when I was watching it. It may be nine years old but Gladiator will stand the test of time as something worth watching in any time period.

Cary Grant-The Suave Charmer

2012-01-19T11:46:00.004+05:30

This article was already published by me at CinemaaOnline

Watching Cary Grant, do his charming, suave playboy act, wooing and flirting with an already engaged Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember, or when you watch him turn up the heat with Eva Marie St in North By North West, here seems to be a man born to play the archetypal Mills & Boon romantic hero, the tall, dark, handsome dream lover, suave, charming and gentlemanly. But beyond that glamorous, screen persona of the charmer, who made the woman want him and the men wanting to be like him, was a rather unglamorous Archibald Alexander Leach, born on the other side of the Atlantic, in a working class suburb of Bristol. For a person who charmed millions of women on and off screen, he had a lonely childhood, his mother hospitalized when he was just 9. For a person who seemed to embody the wealthy, cultured British gentleman, in reality his earlier life was that of struggle and poverty.

But Cary Grant’s enigmatic nature, extended more than just his rags to riches story. A fervent Republican supporter, he however was an outspoken opponent of Mc Carthyism, and did not approve of the way his close friend Charlie Chaplin, was then blacklisted, owing to his liberal views. A person who was one of the biggest stars of his time, whose name was box office gold, he also became one of the first actors to go “indie”, breaking away from the studio system, dictating who should be his directors, co stars, and choosing his own scripts. And also one reason, why he was never given the Oscar during his career. Ok he did get the Lifetime Achievement Award, but then that for me, is more like a “Sorry, we did not give you the Oscar you deserve, so we will make it up now”. Actually going indie during the studio dominated era, would have been professional suicide, but such was Grant’s charisma and personality, that he could get away with it. For a person, who most often played the Clean, Nice guy, who you could take home to Momma on screen, off screen, he had a stormy personal life, and had experimented with LSD, and was also rumored to be bi sexual.Not that those events in any way effected his popularity or status.

But one thing i feel unfair, is overlooking his status as an actor. Being a lover of classic cinema, i quite often have these discussions with people about the stars of Hollywood’s Golden period. While Grant’s super stardom, his charm, his popularity is widely acknowledged, there seems to be a reluctance to accept his acting abilities. The consensus is that James Stewart, Robert Mitchum are better actors, while Cary Grant is more of a star than an actor. It also does not help that most of Grant’s filmography is studded with rom coms, love stories, screwball comedies, in effect the not so serious cinema. But then this was the only actor, Alfred Hitchcock ever loved in his whole life, he should be knowing, he had after all directed him in 4 movies, and then the unforgettable shot of Cary Grant, running from the crop duster plane in North by North West. Aah North by North West, who can ever forget the crop duster scene, the final chase at Mt. Rushmore and last but not least Eva Marie St, surely one of the sexiest femme fatales ever on screen. But then here was the catch, after the rather lukewarm reception to Vertigo, Hitchcock wanted to do a more escapist, racy, action thriller. It was to be a straightforward man on the run movie, free from the symbolism, psychological complexity that quite often characterized his earlier movies. Even among die hard Hitch fans, North By North West is taken as the lesser movie compared to Pyscho or Vertigo , it is considered more of a masala movie, but a good entertainer nevertheless. And on top of it there were rumors that Hitch choose Grant, over his original choice, James Stewart, as he was not satisfied with the latter’s performance in Vertigo.

Rumors, nonetheless they did give weight to the impression of Cary Grant, being a matinee idol

kind of star, good for escapist entertainers, while it was people like James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy who were the real actors. Even if it was a masala flick, North By North West, to me still stands out as a masterpiece, not just because of the crop duster scene, but also the initial encounter between Grant and Eva Marie St, in the train, where Hitch manages to wink at the censors, in what must be one of the most erotic sequences in movie history. Cary Grant, perfectly fits in the role, essaying the man on the run, with aplomb and grace, and sheer effortlessness. He played the suave charmer to perfection again in To Catch a Thief, his another collaboration with Hitch, Grant playing an ex burglar, John Robie, who needs to clear his name, when a series of copy cat burglaries, point the needle of suspicion to him. He decides to catch the thief, using his old style, and takes the help of a rich heiress, Frances Stevens( Grace Kelly) in his endeavour. Smooth, charming, debonair, Cary Grant is again a delight, here, as the suave burglar, and his chemistry with Grace Kelly, lights up the screen.

With Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief

With Ingrid Bergman in Notorious

But it is Hitch’s Notorious that shows there is much more to Cary Grant, than just being a suave charmer. Grant plays the American spy, Devlin, who asks, Alicia Huberman( Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a former Nazi spy, to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring in Brazil, taking advantage of the fact that one of the gang members Sebastian( Claude Rains) is hopelessly in love with her. This again to me is one of Hitch’s most complex and layered movie. Grant breaks away from his usual suave persona, to depict a more grayish, neurotic character. Torn between his love for Alicia, and his professional duty, he is neurotic, he feels tormented that he had sent her to doom. And then his final dash to save Alicia, from the gruesome tragedy she is facing in Sebastian’s home, his performance when he encounters her at the mansion, was brilliant. Mostly Grant, had this carefree, subtle approached to acting. He could easily slip into the character without ever trying too hard. Watch him in the final scene, when he confronts Sebastian while carrying Alicia out of the mansion, nothing over the top, just a firm voice, a steely expression, as he says

I’m taking her to the hospital to get the poison out of her…How’d you like your friends downstairs to know? They’ve yet to be told…You haven’t forgotten what they did to Emil, have you Sebastian?…You’ve got your chance here and now. Tell them who she is.

What was fascinating was the relationship between Alicia and Devlin, she is not the perfect woman, she had a rather shady personal life, she is feisty, independent, and yet the love between them is overpowering. Inspite of being deeply in love with Alicia, he requests her to seduce Sebastian, just to get the information. It was a relationship quite bold for it’s times.

With Audrey Hepburn in Charade

And then he also acted in the “best Hitchcock movie which Hitch never made”, the 1963 thriller Charade, opposite one of my favorites, Audrey Hepburn. Audrey plays Regina, who finds her husband murdered, in a mysterious fashion. The plot gets into a major twist, when she is informed by the CIA director in Paris, that her husband was a double crosser, involved in a theft during WW2, and the persons who killed him, were his ex partners in crime. Regina gets deeper into a tangle, as she befriends a charming stranger Peter Joshua( Grant) who promises to help her out, though in reality he is not what he seems to be. Mixing up comedy, thriller and romance, the movie is one fast paced entertainer, with a whole lot of twists and turns. Hepburn is first rate as the damsel in distress, and Grant as the mysterious stranger who keeps playing the charade, conveys the enigma, the charm, the dapper attitude needed for such roles. It is this kind of charm, that i found missing in the rather bland remake The Truth About Charlie. While Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton are good enough performers, they just don’t have the Grant-Hepburn charisma, that makes us sit through some rather silly looking scenes.

As a comedy star, Cary Grant was one of the best, especially the whole host of screwball comedies he has acted in. While i have not seen all of them, i did manage to catch some really memorable ones. Arsenic and Old Lace, is classic, one of the best in the black comedy genre, i have ever seen. Grant plays a successful writer Mortimer Brewster, in this Frank Capra movie, some one who does not believe in marriage. He however soon falls in love with his next door neighbor Elaine, and marries her. The twist in the tale, comes when he visits his old family home, he has to deal with 2 whacked out elderly aunts Abby and Martha, who have this habit of ending the lives of lonely old bachelors by serving them wine spiked with arsenic and a bit of cyanide. And his brother Teddy, who has a delusion that he indeed is the person, his namesake, and the former President of the US. To make matters worse, there is his another brother Jonathan, a psychotic murderer seeking to dispose off the corpse of his latest victim. As he tells his girl Elaine

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

The supporting cast that makes up Grant’s own Addams Family is brilliant, especially the women who play his two loony aunts. And Grant is brilliant, with an impeccable sense of comic timing, as the hapless Mortimer, whose own marital bliss is threatened thanks to the antics of his brother. Watch him in a scene, where he sits by on the sidelines, as he watches his brother Jonathan, get into a fist fight with the cops, casually lighting up a cigarette. Go on — fight, fight. I don’t care. And then when the cops try to bring his brother down using a shoe, he tells em it never works, and when his brother finally collapses, the parting quote What do you know? it worked!.

The classic pool side scene from Philadelphia Story, along with Katherine Hepburn and James Stewart

He had a great pairing with the other Hepburn- Katherine, acting in a series of rom coms- Bringing Up Baby, Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday and the most famous of all The Philadelphia Story. George Cukor’s famous adaptation of the screen play, is a deliciously mounted satire, poking fun at the Philadelphia high society, without ever getting too preachy or moralizing. The story centers around a rich Philadelphia socialite Tracy Haven( Katherine Hepburn), who divorces her husband C.K.Dexter( Cary Grant), who though belonging to the same social class, is deemed as not a suitable husband, owing to his drinking habits. She chooses to marry George Kittredge( John Howard), a self made millionaire, man of the people kind. The love triangle gets complicated when a snoopy tabloid reporter Mike Connor( James Stewart), barges in along with Dexter, to get exclusive details of the high society wedding, while Tracy finds herself falling for Mike’s charms, and Dexter wants to get back Tracy at any cost. While Hepburn and Stewart have the more meatier roles, and the better lines, Grant still manages to hold his own as the suave, debonair ex, acting as a wonderful counterpart to Stewart’s more acid tongued character.

Cary Grant was one of the true legends of the silver screen. A suave, charming gentleman on the screen, and a great human being off the screen. Ian Fleming had Cary Grant as 007 in mind, when writing Dr. No, but he turned down the role, as he felt he was too old to be an action hero. He was not sure of romancing Audrey Hepburn, half his age in Charade, and requested the script to be re written to make it look, as if Audrey was pursuing him, honestly though i felt, he still was as charming as ever. He had this habit of turning on the chemistry with his female co stars, though his personal favorites were Audrey Hepburn , Deborah Kerr, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. Like most of the British actors of his time, Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Alec Guiness, he was not a big fan of method acting, in fact he contemplated retirement, when Marlon Brando’s style became more popular. Grant retired from movies, when he felt that his kind of feel good comedies was not having any takers, as he said once.

There is no doubt I am aging. My format of comedy is still the same as ever. I gravitate toward scripts that put me in an untenable position. Then the rest of the picture is spent in trying to squirm out of it. Naturally, I always get the girl in the end. It may appear old-fashioned. There seems to be a trend toward satirical comedy, like The Apartment(1960). Perhaps it is because young writers today feel satirical living in a world that seems headed for destruction.

Cary Grant has departed the world physically, but his influence and legacy lives on with us forever. To date the unforgettable images of Cary fleeing the crop duster plane in North By North West or the romantic encounter with Deborah Kerr, will forever be embedded in our memories.

A Tribute to Steven Spielberg

2011-12-16T22:17:00.000+05:30

Before I became one of the cyber coolies, I had this dream to be a movie director. And one man made me dream that way, Steven Allan Spielberg, a director who was my icon, my role model. Over the years I grew up, discovered more and more new directors. And yes had also seen the critical shellacking Spielberg often got from critics and movie lovers, over what they called his emotionally manipulative movies. I know friends of mine who are hard core critics of him. To each his own, I would say, but for me he still remains one of my idols and inspirations. On the occasion of his birth date, a series of posts written by me on Spielberg movies here.

Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind

One of the biggest mysteries along with the Bermuda Triangle and the Lochness Monster, is the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects, or better known as UFO’s.Do they or do they not exist? Is there life in outer space? Are we alone in the universe? Well questions which to date have not found any definitive answer. In 1972, Dr. J.Allen Hynek, an astronomer and UFO specialist, came up with the concept of close encounter, where a person witnesses an UFO. Hynek classified these encounters into different categories.

Munich

After Schindlers List, this was Spielberg’s second movie i think with a Jewish background. But the task was more difficult here. In Schindlers List, the enemy was the Nazis, and it was fairly easy to make a good vs evil movie. While Oskar Schindler had shades of grey, as he was in fact initially more of an oppurtinistic wheeler dealer, Amon Goth was some one in which you could hardly find any reedemable qualities, unless you happened to be a Neo Nazi or an admirer of Hitler. But when you take the subject matter of Munich, here there was no black or white. Yes the fidayeen, were evil men, but their cause had a legitimacy in most of the intellectual circles in the West. While not many agreed with the fidayeen attacks, there were many who sympathized with the cause of a Palestinian homeland. It is one thing to show American soldiers going in and beating the crap out of Nazis, but trying to show an Israeli-Arab conflict in the same manner, would have made it a caricature. Yeah you had those Delta Force series of movies, where Chuck Norris goes and beats the shit out of the bad Arabs, but who takes Chuck Norris seriously in the first place?

AI-Do Androids dream of love?

Artificial Intelligence has often been described as the science of making intelligent machines, or trying to make computers understand human intelligence. Ok, the rather Wiki-esh definition aside, trying to define A.I. or formulate it’s principles has still been a work in progress. The basic concept of A.I. is that computers can replicate human intelligence, and perform the tasks in an intelligent manner, as opposed to robots which basically perform a series of actions, dictated to them. But then that does beg the question, what form of human intelligence is purposed to be recreated? And if a machine can be programmed to think like a human being, can it feel the basic human emotions? And if a robot is capable of showing emotion or feeling towards a human being, does the same reciprocal emotion come from a human? No easy answers, here, because when we talk of intelligence or emotions or feelings, we are just getting into a subjective gray territory, where the answers are contextual, where nothing can be the right answer.

Schindlers List

Sept 1939- The Nazis invade Poland and take over the city of Krakow. The Jewish population in the city is herded into a large ghetto. The purpose is to deport “able workers” for concentration camps and those not fit for work, to be disposed off. Jews from the countryside were forced into the Krakow ghetto. After massive deportation from Krakow, the remaining Jews were systematically disposed off, to make the city of Krakow clean from Jewish vermin. But even in the middle of such inhumanity, 1100 Jews were saved by one man. He was a German industrialist, a profiteer, a womanizer and a wheeler dealer, a very unlikely hero. But history would record the fact that when people choose to look the other way, he put everything on the line to save people whose only fault was that they did not conform to the perfect vision of a megalomaniac dictator. The man was Oskar Schindler. Based on the book Schindlers Ark by Thomas Kennealy, Schindlers List directed by Steven Spielberg is one of the most powerful and disturbing movies made on the Holocaust.

Jaws

The cop Brody is shoveling a mixture of fish parts and blood into the ocean, hoping to attract the great white shark. And suddenly the shark appears out of nowhere, snapping, before it disappears back into the water. As the shark circles around the boat, Brody along with his mates Quint and Hooper watches it in fascination. Brody mutters “You are gonna need a bigger boat”.All the 3 people on boat are stunned, and so was the audience, including myself, when I first saw Jaws on the big screen way back as a kid. Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws was a landmark in many ways. Majority of the “creature vs man” movies had been B movie stuff, with a host of unknown actors, half dressed females screaming at top of their lungs, cardboard characters, clunky dialogue, and no script at all, barring a few like Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds . Jaws was one of the few A list movies in this genre and it also catapulted Spielberg from a talented director to one of Hollywood’s hotshots, as he followed this up with other big hits like Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET .

In our quest to appear wise, intelligent and matured, we are unfortunately forgetting how to enjoy life. If we do something, its not because we love doing it, but because we want to be seen doing it. Maybe its time to awaken the child in us. We might not have choices in certain aspects but even when it comes to things like movies, music and books, do we have to put on an adult façade. We want to be seen liking serious and dramatic movies, else we are afraid, we might risk being called dumb. Now I don’t have anything against watching a serious movie, but is there a rule which says that just because you are an adult, you must not watch or appreciate a kid’s movie.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

He wears a hat, has a stubble. He dresses in soiled jacket, rough jeans and equally soiled shirt. His only weapon for protection is a whip and a small pistol. He is afraid of snakes and most of the time he keeps running in and out of trouble. Yes I think you got whom I am talking about, Indiana Jones, the hero of 3 Hollywood blockbusters directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and by far the best of all, the 1981 classic Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A tribute to Walt Disney

2011-12-05T17:46:00.000+05:30

On the occasion of his birth anniversary, a tribute to one person whom I always admired, a role model to me, the man who made kids all over the world happy, Walter Elias Disney, aka Walt Disney. This is a 2 part series on him I had written some time back in 2010.

It was all Started by a Mouse

Hermosa is a pretty much non descript area tucked away in the North Eastern side of Chicago. There is the Consul General of Honduras here, but the most important building of note is located at 2156 N, Tripp Avenue. No it’s not one of those gigantic skyscrapers that dot the Chicago skyline , nor one of those Gothic buildings of the past, in fact on the outside looks pretty much like any other suburban American home. Except that in this very house, at the turn of the century in 1901, was born a certain Walter Elias Disney, aka Walt Disney aka Uncle Walt. Forget about Disney Land, forget about Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Fantasia. And for a moment lets just keep aside his hard core right wing politics.

Disney's Folly that made History

Precisely 70 years later in 1937, another kind of Folly, hit the theaters. Walt Disney, after being successful with a talking mouse, a hot tempered duck, a goofy dog and a whole host of characters, set his sights higher. There is a difference between a merely great director and a pioneer. The former creates great cinema, win’s awards, the latter creates great cinema, wins awards and makes history. To call Walt Disney as a great movie maker, is to understate the obvious, he was a man, who created history, a pioneer. He was the one who cut the bushes, laid the trail, created the road to the top of the mountain, others followed him. Today you have Pixar and Dreamworks, comming out with some stunning animation features.

Brian De Palma special

2011-09-08T21:07:00.000+05:30

Brian De Palma has always been one of my all time favorite directors. From gangster dramas like Scarface, Carlito's Way, The Untouchables to action thrillers like Blow Out, Body Double to horror movies like Carrie to war dramas like Casualties of War he has covered it all. Add to that some stunning visual montages be it the Odessa steps scene in The Untouchables or the pool room shoot out in Carlito's Way. Here is a tribute to the director with some posts of mine.

Blow Out:Only the Paranoid survive

Ted Kennedy, Chappaquidick incident, Conspiracy theories, all of them making me recall Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller flick, Blow Out. While Blow Out, is not based on the Chappaquidick incident per se, the movie contains numerous references to the political events in the era, with a conspiracy thriller background. In fact the 80′s was the time whenHollywood and Capitol Hill, two entities with no love lost for each other, came together, with a movie actor, Ronald Reagan entering the White House. 1981 saw John Hinckley Jr making an assasination attempt on Ronald Reagan, in LA, to make an impression on Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed ever since he saw Taxi Driver. Come to think of it, a guy making an attempt to assasinate a movie actor turned President, to impress a heroine, who acted in a movie, which incidentally was about a loner, obsessed with the heroine, plotting to assasinate a Presidential candidate. This surely has to be one of the craziest coincidences ever, a collision of the real, the reel, the political, whew.

Casualties of War

Quite often when i go through some of the best anti war movies that have been made, i can’t help noticing one thing, in a vast majority of the cases, the anti war movies come out after the actual war is over. I take a look at some of the more well known anti Vietnam war flicks, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and then i see that all these movies have been released after the end of the war, post 1975. Even when anti Vietnam war protests were raging across the US, and many Hollywood stars voiced their opposition to the war, there were actually no significant anti Vietnam war dramas comming out from Hollywood. The only Vietnam war drama released around the time was John Wayne’s propagandist The Green Berets, which tried to drum up public support in favor of the war. Is it due to the fact that Hollywood was afraid of adverse audience reactions, some kinda backlash? Then again i see the slew of movies about Iraq in recent times,In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, Jarhead, Redacted this while the war in Iraq still shows no signs of an end. Was it that Hollywood finally took up the courage to take a stand? Were the stridently anti war postures of Sean Penn, George Clooney, Jane Fonda, Nick Nolte having an effect? Would want to think so, but a catch here, most of these movies started to come, only in the later half when the war went horribly wrong, the American public’s mood turned against it, more against the Bush Govt’s mishandling of the situation. One more interesting thing i notice is that most of Hollywood’s anti war dramas center around Vietnam and now Iraq, rather than WW2, barring some like Catch 22. Again i feel its cause Vietnam and Iraq, make it easier, both of them wars in which the US has lost badly, not too popular with the public, so easier to weave an anti war message around them. Just some thoughts in the head, as i started to draft out my take on Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War.

Carrie

To just look at the tale of Carrie, as a ”scorned woman” taking revenge on the world, would be to overlook it’s deeper meaning, its rather unsettling look at the ”normal” world, and how we treat the ”different” and ”others”. Carrie is not just another ”horror” flick, its Brian De Palma’s look into the minds of people, a look at the world through the eyes of Carrie. In a superbly filmed opening scene, De Palma, plays the voyeur, allowing the camera to wind it’s way through the girl’s shower room, lovingly gazing at the nubile bodies of the young nymphets, some of whom are half naked, and some of whom are fully nude. The camera tracks in deeper, the voices of the young women, shots of their naked bodies, the steam and mist, giving it a dreamy effect, as the credits flash on the screen. Away from all the other girls, is Carrie White( Sissy Spacek), taking her bath all by herself, soaping herself up, having a rare moment of hapiness in her life. And then she begins to bleed, the blood trickling down her legs. As she screams out in shock, clutching her towel, running for help, one of the girls gives her a tampon to stop the bleeding asking her to “Plug it up”. The girls around seem to revel in Carrie’s plight, as they chant in unison ”Plug it Up!! Plug it Up”, as Carrie by now becomes hysterical.

Body Double

In Scarface Brian De Palma took an ironic, twisted up view of ”The World is Yours” funda, tracing the rapid rise and fall of its lead character. In Body Double, Brian De Palma, takes the tagline ”You Can’t believe Everything You see” and crafts a thriller where nothing is what it really seems. And the fact that the entire movie is set against the ”illusionary” movie world backdrop, adds that much more meaning to the tagline. Body Double is not a masterpiece, nor is it the kind of mind bender thriller, where you could spend your time figuring out everything and still not be clear. In fact at the end of the movie, when you join the dots, everything seems plainly obvious. What Brian De Palma has done here is to take all the standard Hollywood cliches, pack them together, and layer them over with dollops of cheese, giving us a movie that screams out every moment“LOOK AT ME, I AM CHEESE”. If you are seeking subtlety, understatement you sure won’t be finding them here, but then Brian De Palma has never been associated with such virtues.

Carlito's Way

In 1983, Brian De Palma and Al Pacino, came together in Scarface, a movie that polarized critics and audiences alike. After his turn as the suave Michael Corleone in The Godfather Series, Pacino, again lit up the screen as Tony Montana, a foul mouthed, hot headed, illiterate, cocaine snorting gangster who makes it to the top, and has an equally sudden fall. A decade later in 1993, Brian De Palma, takes up the issue, “Now what if Tony Montana wanted to go straight?”. So he gives Tony Montana, a makeover, renames him Carlito Brigante, and again gets Pacino, who by now had become to the gangster genre, what John Wayne was to the Westerns. Ah yes Tony was Cuban, and Carlito is Puerto Rican. Incidentally the book on which the movie was based was called After Hours, but De Palma had to change the title, to avoid the confusion with Martin Scorcese’s 1985 black comedy of the same name.

Scarface

Between April 15 and Oct 31, 1980 there as a mass migration of people from Cuba to the US. It was called as the Mariel boatlift after the name of the harbor from where these people departed. Ostensibly done by Cuban President Fidel Castro to improve relations between US and Cuba, it was ended when President Jimmy Carter , realized that a large number of the refugees were jail inmates or those from asylums. By that time, 125,000 Cubans had migrated to US, or more specifically to Florida, which even to date has a large Cuban population, especially Miami. Of these exiles, around 2% were discovered to be violent criminals, whom Castro had released from Cuban jails. And these people would make Miami the center of a profitable drug trafficking network.Just as New York is famous for it’s Italian Mafia , Los Angeles for it’s Mexican mafia and San Francisco for it’s Chinese mafia, Miami would become the center for the Cuban mafia as well as the notorious Colombian Gangsters .This incident is the backdrop for Brian De Palma’s 1983 Gangster flick Scarface , which centers around the Cuban mafia .

The Untouchables.

In the 1920’s and early part of 1930’s, prohibition in US, led to the rise of illegal liquor or what is called in common terms as bootlegging. Mafia gangs fought pitched battles for the control of the trade, and none more serious than Chicago , which emerged as the focal point. The notorious St.Valentine’s Day massacre highlighted, this dangerous trend. The law enforcement agencies choose to look the other way, as gangsters merrily plied their trade. And of all the gangsters, one name struck terror alike in the hearts of cops, civilians and rival gangsters alike. Alphonse Gabriel Capone or more commonly known as Al Capone .The Untouchables is a 1987 movie that takes its inspiration from a real life story of a Fed agentEliot Ness who along with his incorruptible team, took on Capone, and managed to nail him for tax evasion.

Lagaan- A Decade Back

2011-06-15T09:57:00.001+05:30

This post was earlier published by me at Cinemaa Online

It has been close to a decade since i watched Lagaan, way back in 2001. It was at a Chennai theater, and i remember the entire theater turning into a stadium in the last 20 minutes. Also I guess it came at a time, when I was in a depressed mood, having lost my job, thanks to the dot com crash, and finding a new one was hard. The movie’s feel good inspirational nature was just what the doctor ordered. And yes considering that more often than not the average Bolly movie then, generally left me depressed, for other reasons of course, it was so refreshing to watch a movie that promised to entertain and did. After that things settled, I got a job, had a career, got kids, life was fine, and i still watched this movie either on TV or DVD. The fact is even 9 years after watching it, why does the movie appeal to me still, why does it not feel dated or obsolete. Why is it that i still rate it as one of my favorite movies of the Noughties? Well maybe many reasons, and that is what this post is about.

My rule of thumb for watching a movie is simple, i don’t care what genre it is, and i don’t care if it is post modernism, surrealism, impressionism whatever, whatever. That is for the critics and analysts to break their heads about. I am just an ordinary movie lover, who is passionate about movies and loves to write about it. My take on a movie is not about what –Ism it represents, or what –Isive it is. I just look at one aspect- How well did the movie engage me for it’s entire length?

If i felt like walking out right during the Interval time or i felt my entire time was wasted watching this- The Movie Sucks.

If if felt the movie was good, but do not really think about it much later on- Movie was Good, nothing great.

But if i just could not forget the movie even after watching it, and wanted to go back to the theater again, or watch it again and again- Fuck, this movie is classic.

Lagaan was one of those movies which motivated me to do so. Is it predictable? Yes, like most of the sports movies are. Is it not too realistic? Guess so in some places, but i am okay with cinematic licence. But what i know for sure, is whenever I watch the movie, it just hooks me from start to end. And it is not just the cricket match, it is the way Ashutosh Gowarikar sets up the dramatic tempo. The way he brings in every character, setting up the main conflict, Bhuvan taking on the challenge, his attempts to convince the villagers, how he builds the team, and yes of course the final cricket match. Not to forget the ego clashes, the back biting, the treachery. You know what the end is going to be, but at every moment, you are curious, you become involved with what is going to happen, you feel the tension, the drama, and that to me is the movie’s greatest achievement. The writing by Ashtuosh himself, Kumar Dave and some brilliant dialog by K.P.Saxena, gives the movie it’s strength.

Another factor is the cricket match itself. Most of the earlier sporting movies had reduced our national obsession to a joke, where the hero is some kind of superman, who comes in and hits 6 sixes in an over. But kudos to Ashutosh and Aamir for treating the game in the right spirit. Some of the aspects of the game like LBW, Mankading, match fixing, sledging have been well covered. As also Kachra’s weird bowling action, which bears resemblance to some of the spinners i have seen. But most important, while Bhuvan is the hero who wins the match, he is not shown as a super hero, who does everything by himself. The way he builds partnerships with other team members, the strategizing, the placements everything is just how it would be as it is in a cricket match. To Yash Raj, who made a mockery of the game in Dil Bole Hadippa, and to whoever made that other stupid movie Victory, take that you guys, this is how you show a game on the screen. Lagaan to me proved just one thing, to entertain audiences, you don’t need to treat them like Idiots.

One more great aspect about Lagaan, was the character building. To me a great movie is about it’s characters, and not just the main characters, but even the side ones. Godfather was not just about Don Corleone, Michael and Sonny, it was also about Tom Hagen and Luca Brasi. While Jai, Veeru, Gabbar, Thakur are the main characters of Sholay, we still remember Soorma Bhopali and Asrani’s jailor character. And can we ever forget Bhiku Mhatre, Kallu Mama, Chander, Bhau and Inspector Khandilkar from Satya. Lagaan had some of the most unforgettable characters ever in recent times, apart from Aamir’s Bhuvan, there was the village Bard Guran( Vivek Rajesh), the hot headed blacksmith Arjan( Akhilendra Mishra), the farmer Goli, the doctor Vaidya, the chicken farmer Bhura( Raghubir Yadav), the sly, duplicitous Lakha( Yashpal Sharma), the potter Ismail( Raj Zutshi), the Sardar Deva( Pradeep Rawat) and the untouchable Kachra. Also most of them had worked with Aamir before, too, Akhiledra Mishra, Srivallabh Vyas, Pradeep Rawat all acted in Sarfarosh, Raj Zutshi has been Aamir’s long time friend, Aditya Lakhia who played Kachra was assistant director for Akele Hum Akele Tum. But it is not just the cricket team, even the supporting actors be it the Rajah( Kulbhushan Kharbanda) or Ram Singh( Javed Khan) who acts as the go between for Elizabeth and the villagers, the village head( Rajender Gupta) have their parts so well etched out. It was as if every part had been carefully etched out, placed in the right position, carefully thought out.

To me this was of course one of A.R.Rehman’s best albums ever. Be it the folksy “Mitwa” ,the rain song “Ghananan Ghanan”, the inpsirational ditty “Chale Chalo”, the ras Leela Number ” Radha Kaise Na Jale”, the soulful duet “Oh Re Chori” every song is just brilliant. I sincerely miss the Rehman of those times, of late he has become more of a technician, than a composer, anyway that is a different topic altogether. Also the detailing was spot on, be it the village, the king’s palace, the cricket field, pretty much realistic, and at the same time not too opulent.

“Sach aur sahaas jiske man mein anth jeeth usi ki hogi”, goes one of the songs. At a time when Hindi movies was being reduced to a host of Boy Meets Girl in US/UK/NZ/Aus Love stories, chock a block with designer sets and designer emotions, Kudos to Aamir and Ashutosh for making a movie, that combined the elements of the Indian narrative tradition with a story that was as rooted to the soil, as the dark brown earth in the movie. I don’t care what Aamir does as a marketer, but I can say for sure, this is one man, who walks the talk. I don’t care if Taare Zameen Pe was too simplistic a portrayal of dyslexia, it made more parents aware that there was something of that sort, but more important, it touched every part of mine. And while it may not have won the Oscar, all i can say, is that 10 years after watching the movie, i still can watch it again and again, without feeling bored. Thanks a lot Aamir and Ashutosh, if i have not given up on Bollywood, it is because of guys like you.

Clint Eastwood is THE MAN

2011-05-31T10:14:00.001+05:30

If I had to define courage myself, I wouldn’t say it’s about shooting people. I’d say it’s the quality that stimulates people, that enables them to move ahead and look beyond themselves.-Clint Eastwood.

PS: First things first, this article is by no means a look at Clint Eastwood’s filmography, or an analysis of all the movies done by him.This is my personal take on a man whom i admire, the movies of his which touched me the most.

THE MAN

In his life, Clint Eastwood has been many things- an actor, a director, a Mayor, dabbling in Jazz and a fitness evangelist. But the impact Eastwood had on me personally, as a movie fan, was beyond what he did. It was something more, there are actors you like, actors you admire, and then there are actors well who just go beyond admiration. You can’t exactly describe the feeling, but these actors, can pull you into a movie, just on the basis of their name, and make you sit through it all. You are willing to sit through some real crappy stuff, just because of the man on the screen. He just has that kind of presence, which makes you say “Screw the screenplay, script, who cares about logical errors, just let me see this guy on screen, and maybe i will think about that later”. It is like being so deep in love with the girl next to you, that you don’t really care for her silly giggles, or that she is pretty much of an airhead. Some love affairs do not last long, the same traits which you found so endearing early on, begin to look juvenile and childish later. But there are some long lasting love affairs, that age well with time, and primarily, because the object of your affection, does not behave like a giddy teen, and matures with time.

A good man always knows his limitations-Clint Eastwood

My adoration or fan boy love or whatever term you choose to give it, for Clint Eastwood, started off right as a kid. For most of us kids, he was “The Man”, but more than anything else, he was the one who defined “cool” , in fact would say, he was the perfect epitome of the “Uber Cool” man. I could never imagine Clint Eastwood being Moses or William Wallace, the larger than life figures exhorting their followers. I could never imagine him being a Hamlet or Othello, reciting the long monologues, showing the intense angst needed. Nor could i imagine him doing an impassioned court room speech a la Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. But he was the man i aspired to be, or at least fantasized about. The lone man, all by himself, silent, drifting about, and coolly shooting down the bad guys. My first movie of Clint Eastwood was not the Good,The Bad and the Ugly, it was the 60′s WWII pulp adventure movie, Where Eagles Dare, to date one of my favorites. Richard Burton had the more dramatic parts, but it was Clint Eastwood who took all the seetis and taalis from the audience, yours truly included. Gunning down scores of Nazis, without batting a single eyelid, remorselessly, rigging up the entire castle with explosives, and all the while, appearing so calm and unruffled. And the best scene of all, a Nazi guard asks him for his ID, he coolly picks up the gun from the brief case, and shots him. Clint Eastwood became a byword, a synonym for “Cool”, and then later on caught The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Again while Eli Wallach, had the more author backed role as Tuco “The Ugly” and in fact the best line in the movie(“When you shoot, shoot, don’t talk”), Clint again made an impact, in spite of the fact that he speaks very little. Cigar in mouth, the rough stubble, the scarf, the hat, he manages to convey everything just through a glance, or look. No better example than in the climax, when Eli Wallach cries out to be released, he turns back, just a glance, raises his gun, and for an eternity, just looks, pushing up the tension, and then..

For A Few Dollars More

I feel Sergio Leone’s style of movie making, was something that suited Clint Eastwood perfectly. Leone generally let’s his characters speak through their eyes, their expressions, and puts that against a backdrop of rousing music, long silences. In fact the characters in Leone’s movies do seem to take an eternity to act, but that is a technique he deliberately uses to push up the tension. Clint’s laid back, talk not much, willingness to get dirty fit in perfectly with Leone’s characterization. It can be seen in the Mexican shootout climax of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, where for close to 10-15 minutes, the 3 characters, do not speak a single dialog at all, the camera keeps flitting from one face to another, you see the contrasting expressions, Eli Wallach all nervous, fidgeting, Lee Van Cleef hard and cruel, and finally Eastwood, calm, unruffled. And Ennio Morricone’s BGM just pushes up the tension levels one notch higher. The same approach can also be seen in the climax of For A Few Dollars More, Clint Eastwood again playing the Man with No Name, and Lee Van Cleef, as another bounty hunter, hunting down a bandit, for personal revenge. The climax again is vintage Leone, with both Lee Van Cleef, and the bandit El Indio( Gian Maria Volente), facing each other, for what seems to be an eternity, Morricone’s music rousing in the background. But just before the shootout, Clint Eastwood again, puts himself in the frame, when he hands over his revolver to Lee Van Cleef, and coolly steps back, saying “Now we start”, like a spectator watching a prize heavyweight championship bout. Again in the same movie, Eastwood has one of the best entrance scenes ever, when he walks up to the lodge door of a wanted outlaw, slips in the “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster that has the outlaw’s name on it, we don’t see anything, just the voice of the outlaw angered, who slips out of the window, and then Eastwood again tracking him down.

Clint Eastwood was unlike most of the other Western characters played by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, more of a taciturn lone ranger, a man all by himself, not really caring for concepts like honor or duty, and if he is in the action, it is either for personal revenge or his own personal benefit. Interestingly in both The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and For a Few Dollars More( have not seen A Fistful of Dollars), Eastwood is more of the supporting character. In the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly it is Eli Wallach who is obsessed with finding the money, Eastwood’s character is more of a reluctant bystander, dragged into it, he is otherwise quite happy bounty hunting, sharing the spoils. Again in For a Few Dollars More, the story revolves more around Lee Van Cleef, and his quest for revenge, with Eastwood again doing the support act, the man in the background, helping Van Cleef, seek his revenge.

The lone ranger person was carried over into his next couple of Westerns, notably Hang Em High, which immediately followed the Dollars trilogy, and his first home production. Clint Eastwood is Jed Cooper, a cattle rancher, who swears revenge on the 12 men who had lynched him earlier, on a false charge of theft. The film is primarily about his quest for revenge, and his conflict with Judge Fenton( Pat Hingle), who does not want him to become a vigilante. Essentially a revenge movie, it does delve into the issues of private and public justice, about the perils of vigilantism, and add to that some really gruesome action scenes. Though Clint by now was no longer with Leone, the elements of the Sphagetti Westerns did carry over, the violence, the close ups, the long pauses, though by now Clint had got a name, and he got to romance the heroine.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

However to me the best of the post-Dollars trilogy for me was The Outlaw Josey Wales, a highly under rated Western, IMO, and one of Clint’s best directorial efforts. Clint again retains most of the elements of the Sphagetti Westerns, that had made him famous, the long shots, the silences, the crisp dialogue, to come up with a classic. Eastwood again reprising his loner on a revenge mission persona, this time his target being a group of Jayhawkers who have raped, killed his wife and burnt down his farm. This i guess was one of the few Westerns of that time, which showed native Indians in a positive light, and i feel in a way, this movie laid down the path for more revisionist Westerns like Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven later on. Another great Western directed by Clint was High Plains Drifter, where Clint again reprises the Stranger with No Name character, this time protecting a town against rogue gunfighters. Again Clint’s intro, being the best part, riding into the town, in typical lone ranger fashion, being stalked by three local guys, who attack him in the barber shop, and the best part, one of the bullies, swivels him around, and bang. The movie has again a great ending, pretty much a twist, which i would not rather not reveal out. I have not seen Pale Rider though, so can’t really comment on it.

I know what you’re thinking — “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But, being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?- Dirty Harry

In 1970, Clint Eastwood carried over his gun slinger image from the Wild West to the more urban surroundings of San Francisco. Harry Callahan aka Dirty Harry, was the typical Bad Cop, whom most of us love to adore. The man who cares a damn for his seniors, is a law unto himself, does not bother about legal niceties and rules, and who believes criminals are the scum to be dealt with. He does not mind breaking rules, as long as it helps to catch the crooks. Dirty Harry, was one of the best in the vigilante cop genre stories, and unlike his earlier movies, where Eastwood remained silent most of the time, here he gets to mouth some real kick ass dialogs. One of the best scenes in the movie is his confrontation with the City’s Mayor, when discussing on how to catch the serial killer Scorpio, who has been terrorizing the city. As he tells him “when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard; that’s my policy”. Again watch out for the final confrontation in the stadium, sadistic, brutal, ruthless.

While the following 2 sequels of Dirty Harry( Magnum Force, Enforcer) were nothing too great, my other favorite in the series would be the 3rd part, Sudden Impact, directed by Eastwood himself. This was the darkest and most violent of the series, Harry Callahan, this time having to deal with an avenging angel, Jennifer Spencer( Sandra Locke), who is out to get even with the men who had gang raped her and her sister. The culprit Harry is tracking in the movie, is some one a mirror image of himself, a vigilante, seeking to take her own personal revenge. Or in more simpler terms, a vigilante hunting for another vigilante. Of all the movies in the series, this has to be the most unsettling one, especially the repeated flashbacks of the rape, Jennifer and her sister had, the psychotic, loony tune bad guys, and one rather gruesome scene, where one of the bad guys falls on a unicorn statue in a carousel. The best Eastwood moment is the part, where he dares a crook to shoot a hostage with the now immortal line “Go ahead, make my day”. It was the Man with No Name series and Harry Callahan, that made me a life long fan of Clint Eastwood, the cool, quick thinking, no nonsense action hero, who was my icon.

I ain’t like that no more. I ain’t the same, Ned. Claudia, she straightened me up, cleared me of drinkin’ whiskey and all. Just ’cause we’re goin’ on this killing, that don’t mean I’m gonna go back to bein’ the way I was. I just need the money, get a new start for them youngsters.- Unforgiven.

It was quite ironical though, that after building up the cool, taciturn, gun-slinger image, the mysterious loner, who talks more than he shoots, Clint should go around and parody that same image in The Unforgiven. I mean for almost 2 decades in your career, you built up this image of the man who was the best shooter in the business, ruthless in revenge, quite often cold and unfeeling, and now you just go around dismantling it. Why? To be honest i never liked The Unforgiven when i saw it first time, this was not the Clint Eastwood i had idolized, this certainly was not the cool, unflappable, gun slinger, who rarely missed a shot. What i got to see was an old, worn out veteran, who could not even shoot straight. Will Munny( Clint Eastwood) is the former aging gunfighter, who has been asked by a young upstart to help him in capturing two wanted outlaws. Will Munny is a character, who goes completely against Eastwood’s gun slinger persona, he falls sick, gets kicked around, he however comes through in the superbly shot climax scene, in heavy rain, dim lights.

But more than his Dirty Harry and Man with No Name persona, what makes me admire Clint Eastwood is his track record as a director. The lone ranger, gun slinger persona, is what made me admire him as a star, an icon to look up to, something for the heart purely. But it is his record as a director, that is something to die for. This man has been directing movies from the 70′s onwards, which is close to 3 decades, and in every decade he has held on his own. Be it the brat pack brigade of Coppola, Spielberg, Scorseseduring the 70′s, the indie gang of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Gus Van Sant in the 90′s or the Soderbergh-Nolan-Arronofsky in the last decade, he has maintained his own niche, his own space, not really competing with any of them, more with himself. Like Sidney Lumet, Eastwood is in his own league, some one you can’t really compare to other directors. And as a director, he has not been restricted to a specific genre. In his 3 decades as a director, his movies have covered genres ranging from Westerns( Unforgiven, Outlaw Josey Wales) to serious crime dramas( Mystic River) to war epics( Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of our Fathers) to sporting dramas( Million Dollar Baby, Invictus) to romance( Bridges of Madison County) to comedy( Space Cowboys), this is one director, who has covered every genre of his own.

It is not just his unyielding passion to churn out one great movie after another, but also the way he keeps reinventing himself with every movie. He goes and parodies his own cowboy gun slinger image in The Unforgiven. And then for some one who made fame, out killing Nazis by the dozen in Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes, he goes around and gives a rather cynical take on the War in his double Iwo Jima feature, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Flags of our Fathers takes a look at one of history’s most iconic photographs, the men raising the US flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. But while celebrating the heroism of the ordinary soldiers in the War, Eastwood’s movie does not spare the administration and the business lobby, who leave no stone unturned in exploiting the tragedy for their own selfish purposes. But even more brilliant than Flags was Letters from Iwo Jima, after a long time, one gets to see a Hollywood war movie, where the other side is not made to look like clownish buffons. It is a movie, that touches, moves, and makes you see that the enemy is as much human as we are, as it looks at the resolute stand of the Japanese, in defending the island. For me these 2 war movies were significant, as not too often, movies have come out, where two different perspectives of the same event were present.

My daughter was murdered. They put a gun to her. As we stand here, she’s on an autopsy slab getting cut open by scalpels and chest spreaders, and you’re talking to me about domestic fucking responsibility? Good to see you, Theo.-Mystic River

It is again this clash of perspectives, that make Mystic River the great movie that it is.Eastwood’s grim, dark and brooding crime drama, revolves around 3 childhood friends, Jimmy, Sean and Dave, whose worlds come into conflict with each other. To me one of Eastwood’s best works ever, as he tackles a complex, multi layered tale, where none of the characters seem to be what they are. Each of these men, have their own personal demons, Jimmy an ex con having to face the death of his daughter, Dave a victim of child abuse, and Sean, now a cop, but dealing with a failed marriage. When their own lives collide, they also have to confront themselves. Moody, atmospheric, Mystic River to me was a fascinating mix of morality play, character study and crime drama. And add to that, solid performances by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney and Lawrence Fishburne.

As a kid i adored him as a star, some one to be copied and imitated, growing up i admired him both as an actor and director, and now i am entering 40 and Client will be turning 81 soon. I can only give a salute to the man, who has grown, re invented himself, and has been able to come up with consistently great cinema. Not too often, is it possible for a person to satisfy both the entertainment seeker as well as the connoisseur, this Man, has done it, and is right now in his own league, incomparable. Yes Clint Eastwood is THE MAN.

The Memorial Day Special

2011-05-30T09:47:00.000+05:30

Being a big fan of the war movie genre, I had been wanting from long to day a Memorial Day special post on my blog. I did not want to do a Top 10,20 kind of post, the last thing I want is people squabbling over what should be there, what should not be there. So what I decided to do is to publish in a single post, the reviews of the war movies I had posted over the years on my blog.

So here is a compilation of war movie reviews on my blog, and it includes even reviews posted by others as part of blogathons I had organized on my blog. Most of the movie reviews I have compiled are of World War II movies with couple of Vietnam and Civil War movies too.

Judgement at Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial

There have been movies on the Holocaust, in recent times, most notable Spielberg’s Schindlers List, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. A vast majority of these movies, generally look at the period through the view point of the victims, the ones who were sent to the gas chambers and concentration camps. But what of the men, who actually signed the orders? The judges who ran those Kangaroo courts? The ones who ordered the Jewish deportations? Were they merely doing their “duty” or did they felt anything was fine in the name of the country.

Das Boot

While I did hear of the U Boats, and the famous Wolf Packs, that traveled the Atlantic, my first exposure to them, was Alistair Maclean’s novel HMS Ulysses( his first and to date his best one too). The book deals with the story of a British naval convoy and how it has to fight its way through the U Boats. And that’s when I could manage to get some more material on U Boats. U Boat is the short form of Unterseeboot, meaning “Under Sea Boat” in German. Though used for military operations, their main aim was to cause economic blockades of the allied nations, by sinking merchant ships. U-Boats gained fame with the sinking of the commercial liner Lusitania in 1920, and they would be a part of military folklore during the Battle of Atlantic in the Second World War.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Though the Americans ultimat\ely won the battle, they had to overcome 35 days of fierce resistance from Japanese, and loss of more than 6000 soldiers. The movie starts off with Japanese archaelogists exploring the tunnels built on island of Iwo Jima and finding a series of letters. And cuts into flashback mode to the year 1944. The movie tells the battle from perspective of Private Saigo( Japanese pop music star Kazunari Ninomiya ), a baker who has been conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army, and he is grudgingly digging trenches on the island. As he curses for digging the trenches, and wonders why they dont hand it over to the Americans, he is beaten up by his overseer for making unpatriotic speeches. Fortunately the arrival of Lt.Gen Tadamichi Kuribayashi( Ken Watanabe), who fortunately does not believe in the rough neck methods of his fellow Japanese officers saves his life.

Flags of Our Fathers

On Feb 23,1945, 5 US Marines and a Navy corpsman, raised the American flag on Mt.Suribachi, on the island of Iwo Jima, in the pacific. The photograph of this event, taken by Joe Rosenthal, an American photographer, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for this, would become an iconic image among American public.This photograph would take its place among other photographs like that of Che Guevera, and the Vietnam War survivor, as one of the most famous 20th century pictures. It became a symbol of American victory during the War. And this photograph would also be the basis for the USMC War Memorial sculpture in Washington DC.

The Power of Schindlers List

But even in the middle of such inhumanity, 1100 Jews were saved by one man. He was a German industrialist, a profiteer, a womanizer and a wheeler dealer, a very unlikely hero. But history would record the fact that when people choose to look the other way, he put everything on the line to save people whose only fault was that they did not conform to the perfect vision of a megalomaniac dictator. The man was Oskar Schindler. Based on the book Schindlers Ark by Thomas Kennealy, Schindlers List directed by Steven Spielberg is one of the most powerful and disturbing movies made on the Holocaust.

Patton

And in that line comes the 1970 movie Patton , a true story of Gen George Patton , one of the most controversial and remarkable characters of World War II . Along with Douglas Mc Arthur, James Doolittle he would be regarded as one of the greatest American war heroes. Making a movie on Patton would never be an easy task. For he was one of the most complex, controversial, larger than life character in real life. As a war hero, he was one of the greatest, he led the Allied Forces to victory in key battles in N.Africa, Sicily and Germany . Yet this man was a bundle of contradictions. He was a scholar, and well versed in military history, he devoured books on Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Alexander , and studied their battles in depth.

Tora, Tora, Tora-Climb Mt.Nitaka

Well many questions still left unanswered, and there have been many attempts to answer them. Not many movies are there on this event. Spielberg’s 1941 , was more of a comedy about the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, while the 1953 classic From Here to Eternity was about the relationships between characters at that place. But if you want to really know the reasons behind Pearl Harbor , and the assault, then the best movie I would recommend is the 1970 movie Tora, Tora, Tora. Though Tora means tiger in Japanese, in reality, the words are derived from the Japanese code word totsugeki raigeki , which means a torpedo attack. “Climb Mt. Nitaka” the title of my review, is the Japanese code for this operation. Now coming to some of the questions, this movie, does provide some very clear and plausible answers.

The Dirty Dozen

With the advent of D-Day, the US Army has come up with a plan to interrupt German chain of command. Raid a secluded mansion where most of the high ranking Nazi officers come to party with their mistresses and kill every one there. It’s a suicidal operation, and so the army decides to make use of convicted criminals who are either on death row or facing life imprisonment. It’s a win win situation, if they die, they would have the honour of dying on the battle field, it they survive, their life sentence would be commuted.Gen Worden( Ernest Borgine) the operation in charge chooses Maj John Reisman( Lee Marvin) for this thankless job. There is a hidden agenda here, Reisman has never been liked in the Army for his I care a damn attitude, and he is assigned this job, ostensibly to get rid of him.

The Guns of Navarone

One of the best war movies to come out has been the 1960's movie The Guns of Navaronne. Now hold it, Guns is not a WW2 classic in the league of Bridge on River Kwai, Saving Private Ryan and Paths of Glory. Nor is it a holocaust epic like Schindlers List or The Pianist. The Guns is more a straight forward tale of "guys lets get together and conduct an operation". It was a very popular genre in the 60's especially, when you had movies like Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, The Train to name a few. The formula was simple, get in some big shot names, come up with a story of a derring do plot on a Nazi base, show them as idiotic, brainless goofs and add in the obligatory female company. In that aspect The Guns of Navaronne is no different, but where it strikes out, is the movie has a sensible script, good enough twists, strong character development and enthralling action sequences.

Casualties of War

Glory

The Civil War in the US was fought between the Union( comprising the Northern and Midwest) and the Confederates(South and Southwest) over the issue of slavery. The Civil War had its own heroes like Gen Thomas Stonewall Jackson, Gen Robert Lee( Confederate) and Ulysees Grant, William Sherman(Union). However one of the most significant features of the Civil War was the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. Along with the Ist South Carolina Volunteers Regiment, this was one of the first professional Army Regiment made up entirely of Black Soldiers. And this regiment gained prominence when it mounted an attack on the strategic Fort Wagner located in South Carolina. This was also the first instance of Black Soldiers taking part in full scale combat.

The Great Escape

One such all time favorite of mine is 1963’s The Great Escape, based on the real life story of the escape of Allied Air Force Prisoners from Stalag Luft III in 1944, a high security POW Camp built in such a way, that tunnels could not be built easily n.The movie begins with the prisoners arriving at the camp to the tune of Elmer Bernstein’s wonderful background score. The camp is manned by Col Von Luger( Hannes Messemer) which he claims to be escape proof and that none can escape from there. Most of these POW’s have a reputation of being escape artists, and the most dangerous of them all is Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett( Sir Richard Attenborough), on whom the Gestapo have put a shoot to kill, if he is found escaping

The Pianist

As the world observes the 60th anniversary of the release of Auschwitz,I thought it to be appropriate to review one of the finest movies related to the Holocaust, The Pianist . I think along with Schindlers List this is one of the best movies related to that topic. But there are differences while Schindlers List dealt with the attempts of one man to save Jews from extermination, The Pianist deals with the struggle for survival of a Jewish man in Warsaw.The movie is the real life story of celebrated Polish pianist Wladsylaw Spilzman who recorded his experiences of survival during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.

The Last King of Scotland

2011-05-05T20:52:00.000+05:30

This review was earlier published by me at PassionForCInema:LastKingOfScotland .

One of my favorite genre of movies is those based on real life events or biopics dealing with lives of famous persons. I guess maybe my interest in politics, and current affairs, makes me biased towards those movies. Actually making a biopic or a movie based on a real life person, is some what a walk on the edge. You have to strike a balance between being factual and being dramatic. Too much emphasis on facts and accuracy, neglecting the drama part, could make it a History Channel documentary, and playing around with facts, and trying to force fit into some kind of drama, could make it end up as a caricature, Pearl Harbor being the best example. Unlike in the West, where movies based on real life events are popular, that genre has not taken root in India. Most of these movies require a good amount of detailing and research, which need money, and effort. Well quite a lot of our movie makers have the money,but then most of them are busy seeking inspiration from DVD’s of foreign movies. Anyway thats another topic of discussion.

There are movies based on real life events, that do strike a balance between factual representation and drama. Now for me the key to a book or movie, is based on to what extent it can involve me in it. The Last King of Scotland is one such movie, which deals with the fictional story of the relationship between a young Scottish doctor and Idi Amin, the notorious dictator of Uganda. The movie starts off with Dr. Nicholas Garrigan( James McAvoy), chosing to work in Uganda, basically to escape his humdrum life at home, where he has to work as a village doctor along with his domineering Dad. Just as Nicholas arrives in Uganda, the incumbent President, Milton Obote is overthrown, by Idi Amin( Forrest Whittaker) in a military coup. He arrives at the clinic of Dr. Alan Meritt, who treats the poor villagers, along with his wife Sarah( Gillian Anderson).

Garrigan happens to see Idi Amin at a rally near the village, and is instantly attracted by Amin’s charisma, and his vision for the nation, though Sarah is sceptical, having seen a lot. A chance encounter where he treats Idi Amin, has the dictator impressed by him, and when he claims he is from Scotland, he is even more impressed, telling him that “if he were not born in Uganda, he would have loved to be born in Scotland”. Idi Amin asks Garrigan to be his personal physician, and for some time, he is impressed by what he sees as Amin’s desire to transform the nation. Amin also makes him his personal advisor, and he lives a life of luxury.

Garrigan however slowly discovers that Amin, is now becomming delusional, paranoid and erratic. He has an affair with Amin’s youngest of wives Kay. And then he begins to learn the horiffying truth about Amin’s regime, the mass murders, the opression. But try as much as he can, he finds that getting out from Uganda, is not easy. He has become a prisoner of Amin, in another sense, and he now faces a desperate moment of crisis.

There are times when an actor’s performance so dominates the movie, that you in fact tend to overlook any faults. In fact so mesmerizing is that performance, that you see it as real. You dont really care about technicalities, you just are hypnotized by it. Al Pacino in Scarface, Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Antony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs are some examples, honestly when i was watching There Will be Blood, i did not even care to analyze the movie, Daniel Day Lewis, did not allow it. I just said “To hell with everything, just lemme watch Daniel Day Lewis”.

And Forrest Whittaker’s performance as Idi Amin, belongs to that category. When i first saw Whittaker come on screen, and deliver that speech to a crowd of villagers, my first thought was “God man, this guy is Idi Amin himself”. To call that a brilliant performance would be an understatement, it just goes beyond any superlatives.

Forrest Whittaker does not perform, he lives that role, you see Idi Amin on screen. Be it his accent, his mannerism, his expressions, this actor takes you straight into the heart of evil.Africa has a history of military dictators, but Idi Amin, was one of the most famous, because he knew how to play the media. Be it his speeches, his antics, in most of the Western media, he was seen as a buffoon, an idiot, an African version of Dr. Strangelove. And that is where Whittaker brings to life. Idi Amin, was not a cold blooded murderer like Hannibal Lecter, who executed his schemes, he was a delusional, paranoid man, who took pleasure in torturing and executing his enemies. And the most frightening part was that he actually believed what he was doing was not evil, it was for a common good. One scene is enough to show the impact of Whittaker’s performance, in his first encounter with the doctor. He is furious with the doctor for shooting a bull, and talks to him menacingly, and when the doctor mentions he is from Scotland, he suddenly changes to a more friendly tone, and in fact even exchanges his uniform for the doctors Scottish jersey. Just watch the way he modulates his tone, and expressions to effect that change, it is a master class in acting. Forrest Whittaker totally deserved the Best Actor, with due respect to other nominees,his manic intensity, his larger than life presence made sure, that the Oscar was his.

The other interesting part is the relation between Dr.Nicholas and Idi Amin. The character of Nicholas is established in the beginning of the movie, itself where he is shown as a playful adventurer. He wants to go to Uganda, just for some excitement, and he gets it on his first night there, when he has sex with a local girl. He tries to flirt with Sarah, but however she backs out due to the love for her husband. His affair with Kay however is what gets him into real trouble. In a way, Nicholas is the typical white guy, who comes to a Third World country to have some fun, and make best use of everything, so that he could boast of his adventures back home. He is least bothered about Amin’s repressive rule, because he is happy in his own world. In fact he becomes Amin’s partner in crime, when he feels that what Amin is doing is right to establish order in the nation. Pretty fair indication of how the West thinks, as we can see in the way US supported Pinochet just because he was not a leftist.

It is only when he learns the truth that he had been responsible for death of an innocent minister, whom he snitched upon to Amin, that the horrors of his action, dawn on him. By then however it is too late, trapped as he is in a one way street with no escape. Movies like The Last King of Scotland are in a way more teriffying than any horror flick. When you watch a zombie flick, you tell yourself, that its a movie,see it and enjoy it. But when you watch Amon Goth in Schindlers List or Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland, you simply can’t say its a movie, because these people are real life characters, the very fact that they were there makes you even more scared.

It is to the credit of director Kevin McDonald, that he actually gets you involved in the movie. Even if you have no idea about Idi Amin, or African history, you are still drawn into this potrait of evil. You flinch when you see Garrigan being tortured and you are scared because you know what will be the fate of the doctor and Kay. Also the director, deliberately employs an in your face approach, more over the top, and i guess that is due to the fact that Idi Amin, was a more flamboyant person who loved to play to the gallery. But as i said, all these analysis gets forgotten, whenever i watch Forrest Whittaker on screen, and thats when i feel like saying “Screw the analysis, just watch Forrest Whittaker”.

Michael Mann Blogathon- Day 5

2011-02-14T21:56:00.000+05:30

Off the Map: Freedom vs. Control in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies

by Niles Schwartz

"The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living."

- Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1965)

Michael Mann's Public Enemies may have been anticipated as the capstone to the career of a film artist born in Chicago, whose work has been primarily focused on criminals and law enforcement, an abstract relationship that mines the broader theme about the disharmony between private and public selves. But the dialectic between cop and robber, between family man and working man, was dealt with in a fully "definitive" manner in Mann's Heat back in 1995, to such an extent that Richard Combs, in a Film Comment article on Mann (March 1996) concluded that the filmmaker may never find the crime film a comfortable fit again. He had brought a cosmic weight to an otherwise tired subject, crafting a fulfilling and dense ensemble on an immense canvas of postmodern urban decay and technology run amok. The end of Heat, with Moby's "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" on the soundtrack, feels apocalyptic and tragically blank, whatever new life being birthed here in this electrical and ether-ridden Genesis being the Post-Human. At 170 minutes, Heat is exhausting and spectral, and the audience feels much like obsessed RHD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), having survived and accomplished his professional goal at the cost of being spiritually spent, craving sleep (just earlier on this climactic night he tells his fellow detectives that he's going to shower and "sleep for a month") and burdened with the knowledge that nothing has really changed. T

Heat Presentation - A Message of Hope in a Dark World

By Mann Fan

I gave a talk earlier in the week to about 40 people presenting a message about Heat. I showed several scenes from the movie, these being:

LA shootout (after main bank heist)
The Conversation (between Vincent and Neil)
Vincent telling his wife that after seeing three dead bodies he can't be concerned about burnt chicken and being late home.
Neil returning to his empty, minimalist home looking out to sea.
Vincent discovering his step daughter following a suicide attempt and taking her to hospital.
The final shootout and the ending of the film. Moby's music finished it off.

In my talk I presented these two men to people who the majority had not seen Heat before. I tried, in a very short space of time, to represent these two characters as men that had somehow lost their way in a very confused world. The LA shootout represented the "badness" of Neil, out to kill whoever gets in his way - and Vincent, the relentless hunter of an elusive, intelligent prey.

Come On & Buy a Bottle of Twister Wine

by Clyde Crashup

JERICHO MILE is a film about a mustachioed runner. I should explain that I have an affinity for films about mustachioed runners, and the fact that there are more than a few of those is a topic for another post. Also, the absence of a moustache should not prevent me from covering MARATHON with Bob Newhart in the future. Anyhow, the man in question is called Murphy (Peter Strauss), and all he does is run. The film begins showing everyone on the yard, doing what they do to forget that they are on the yard in Folsom. Mostly they work out in one form or another, but still others play cards, read comics, dance with their boom-boxes, get stoned on pruno. One guy makes a top hat out of a paper bag.

Michael Mann Blogathon- Day 4

2011-02-11T20:39:00.000+05:30

The Keep

By J.D.Lafrance

Let’s get this out of the way – The Keep (1983) is not a good film. It is, at times, an interesting one that has its inspired moments, but it is a narrative mess with lackluster performances. It is the equivalent of David Lynch’s Dune (1984) – a big budget folly beset by production problems and an uncaring studio that butchered the film before its release. And like Lynch, the experience was so painful for Michael Mann that he has never revisited it since. It’s all George Lucas’ fault. The success of Star Wars (1977) motivated all kinds of directors to dabble in the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres. For example, in the year The Keep was released, Peter Yates directed Krull, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg tackled Stephen King adaptations with Christine and The Dead Zone, respectively, Tony Scott’s directorial debut was the gothic vampire tale The Hunger, and there was also Something Wicked This Way Comes. These films, however, were overshadowed by the third installment of the Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, which dominated the box office.

Michael Mann Blogathon-Day 3

2011-02-10T18:10:00.001+05:30

Michael Mann Remake of Searchers

by Jeff Pike

It's notably outlandish even to speculate on the prospect of Michael Mann attempting some species of reboot of John Ford's classic John Wayne western, The Searchers. For one thing, Mann has shown remarkably little interest in the western genre for a director so preoccupied otherwise with hypermasculine material (crime, cops, gangsters, boxing, things blowing up). About the closest he's ever come was 1992's Last of the Mohicans, which misses the target era by well over a century, not to mention the target geography by a good 1,500 miles.Nor does he seem the type to take such a flier at one of the most formidably established and canonized of all films. Maybe Jim McBride and Breathless. Maybe Alfonso Arau and The Magnificent Ambersons on the A&E channel. Maybe even Gus Van Sant and Psycho. But Michael Mann and The Searchers? Never.Think of this, then, in the nature of a thought experiment.

Michael Mann Blogathon- Day 2

2011-02-08T21:56:00.000+05:30

The Insider

By Ratnakar Sadasyula

What happens when big corporations try to cover up their misdeeds, by invoking confidentiality agreements, and try to influence the media? What happens when a man puts his life and career on the line, for the sake of truth? What happens when the media instead of being a watchdog of society, starts to become a pet poodle of the big business interests, forgetting it's objectives?

Heat: Clash of the Titans

by Ratnakar Sadasyula

What do you get when you take two actors, who specialize in scene stealing and scenery chewing, both of them equally volatile, both of them experts at playing emotionally intense characters, and ask them to face off on screen? Think John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg dueling on Wimbledon, Ayrton Senna and Michael Proust burning up the Formula 1 tracks or Mohd Ali vs Joe Frazier in the boxing ring. And then imagine Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the same frame together. Or much better Travis Bickle taking on Tony “Scarface” Montana. When you have two great talents facing off each other, and a director like Michael Mann( who already had an impressive resume with Last of the Mohicans and Manhunter under his belt), the expectations would be sky high. Could this movie live up to it’s hype.

Mann Handled: A Michael Mann Profile (Part 2)

By Trevor Hogg

With the arrival of the 1990s, Michael Mann experienced a creative renaissance that would place him on the A-List of Hollywood directors. In 1990 he produced the Emmy winning docudrama Drug Wars: The Camarena Story which was inspired by the life of assassinated undercover DEA agent, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who exposed a major marijuana operation in Guadalajara, Mexico; his murder sparked an investigation into corruption within the Mexican government. Two years later a less acclaimed sequel Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel was released.

Michael Mann Blogathon- Day 1

2011-02-07T21:47:00.000+05:30

It would be because I would like you to :Manhunter

by A.Joseph

It all begins with pictures. Pictures being made and pictures being shown. “Do you see?” indeed. The “Tooth Fairy” has parked his boogie van, complete with moonroof (“Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black.”) outside of the suburban home of the family he is moments from slaughtering, but not without waking them with a floodlight and camera, blinding them while making his visions of their deaths permanent. Seeing such awful pictures made, we are then not out of line in assuming that the pictures being shown, by Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) to Will Graham (William Petersen), will be the standard grisly crime scene photos. This is only reinforced by the pale, corpse-like knee of knotted deadwood that Crawford slowly eases the pictures across before taunting Graham a little with details. “If you can’t look anymore, I understand.” The photos turn out to not be gore at all, but rather of the family, happy, alive and together.

Mann Handled: A Michael Mann Profile (Part 1)

by Trevor Hogg

For a city that gave birth to the legend of Al Capone, it is not surprising to discover that Chicago is the hometown of a movie director who is known for his visceral depictions of criminals and law enforcement officers – Michael Mann.

While studying English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mann experienced an epiphany upon seeing Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear war satire Dr. Strangelove. In a recent L.A. Times interview Mann stated: “It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time.”

Michael Mann Blogathon-The Mann Himself

2011-02-07T16:40:00.002+05:30

This post was already published by me earlier at Passion For Cinema: Michael Mann.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.- Jean Luc Goddard

If i had to pick one movie that was completely representative of Michael Mann’s style of direction, for me it would be The Insider. For quite some time, Michael Mann, was seen as a director, whose movies were stylish, containing some exemplary camera work, brilliant graphics, use of long shots and close ups. But then most of the movies that Mann had directed earlier were urban crime thrillers( Heat, Manhunter, The Thief), or epic period dramas( Last of the Mohicans). Heat was praised for being visually stylish, but lacking in proper content. And while critics were unanimous in their praise for Last of the Mohicans, many felt it was more an epic fantasy, nothing else, in fact one of the critics while praising its style, called it an “MTV version of the James Fenimore Cooper’s classic”. The fact is like Brian De Palma and David Fincher, Mann was seen more as a stylist, whose movies had some great visual work, and were engaging but pretty much nothing else.

The Insider was Michael Mann’s first shot at a serious subject, that was based on a real incident. It was the story of Dr. Jeffrey Wigand( Russel Crowe), who revealed the malpractices indulged in by the top Tobacco firms in US, to Lowell Bergman( Al Pacino), the executive producer of CBS 60 Minutes show where he promises to air Dr. Wigand’s testimony, live on TV. However concerned about the damage this could result to their image, the tobacco firms, pressurize CBS to edit out the interview, and in turn run a smear campaign against Dr. Wigand. Considering the seriousness of the topic at hand, and the subject matter available, would Mann sacrifice his trademark visual style or the heated exchanges the characters in his movies often have?

And that is where one of the best scenes come into the picture. After CBS edits out his interview, and Bergman is forced out of the show, by the TV bosses, Dr.Wigand is devastated. He had put everything on the line, his career, his family, his future, his reputation, and all of a sudden the world around him had collapsed. Believing Bergman to be the cause of his misfortune, he books himself into a hotel room, and sits alone. A very poignant, serious moment, and how does Mann depict it? As Russel Crowe sits alone in the hotel room, the entire background morphs into a surrealistic display of images, abstract art, whirling around with trance music playing in the background. Crowe sits devastated, a man who has lost everything, as images of happier times flash by, his wife, his daughters calling out, his nice little suburban home, intercut with a swirling mass of visuals. In a way Crowe has cut himself off from the world, his thoughts being reflected in the images swarming around him. And then Mann intercuts with images of Pacino desperately trying to reach out for Crowe. Now again consider the backdrop for Pacino’s sequence, the vast blue ocean, Pacino standing in the waters, trying to reach Crowe, the whole screen taking on a bluish hue. Pacino finally gets to the hotel staff, who open Crowe’s door, and find him in a daze. They are afraid to disturb him, and then he asks the staff to tell him to get on the “fucking phone”. Watch Crowe’s reaction here, furious, seething, says nothing, just grabs the phone, and then blurts out in rage “You manipulated me”. The way Crowe blurts out, the words, slow, but you can sense the rage, rage maybe at having been jolted out of his dream, the only hapiness he has in life now, or maybe the rage at the feeling of being manipulated.

You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now – staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it’s all dark except for the tenth floor. That’s the legal department, that’s where they fuck with my life!

That seriously has to be one of the best movie sequences i have ever seen in my life. Depicting the mental state of a person, through visuals and abstract graphics, is not an easy take. Wrongly done, it could end up as a cartoon, but here Mann perfectly balances the brilliant visual effects, with the context of what is going on. The Insider has some excellent visual moments, the first meeting between Pacino and Crowe in a Japanese restaurant, shot in dim light, camera zooming around the table, inter cutting between the 2 characters, and yet at the same time, wonderfully setting up their motivations, their characteristics. Crowe, calm, composed, thoughtful, Pacino, aggressive, hyper, crusading. The Insider to me remains Mann’s best effort to date, it is the perfect amalgam of style and substance, while the movie is visually stylish , it ensures that the visuals don’t overshadow the subject or the characters. We are as much entranced by the surrealistic images swirling around Russel Crowe in the hotel room, as we are by his fight against the corporates. It proves that one can make a socially relevant message oriented movie that can engage and entertain. And add to it, the powerhouse acting from Russel Crowe and Al Pacino, though i must say that this was one movie where Crowe actually overshadowed Pacino. Not a mean feat, considering that Pacino has a reputation for chewing up the scenery.

Quite often it is said, that movie makers are a product of the environment and times in which they

grew up. They generally tend to imbibe the characteristics of their neighborhood, and that is reflected in their films. Mann grew up in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a place that was notorious in the 70′s for it’s Puerto Rican gangs, street fights, crime and violence. Growing up, in the 60′s, the movie that influenced him the most was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. For him it was the kind of movie that could wow the critics as well the average audience. In fact i feel the highly visualized nature of story telling, that is feature of Mann’s movies, does show a strong influence of Kubrick, especially the abstract, surrealistic imagery that quite often comes across. Also the fact that his counterparts in London, where he worked as an ad movie maker, were Adrian Lyne, Ridley and Tony Scott, directors again noted for their highly visual style of story telling. While i have not seen Mann’s earlier movies The Thief, The Keep , or his made for TV movie Jericho’s Mile, i did catch some episodes of Miami Vice. In reality Mann was only the executive producer for the iconic TV series, but his distinctive style came through in it ‘s episodes. Starting out in the 80′s MTV era, where the emphasis was on style and music, Mann bought in his own style , especially in the choice of colors used, or the 80′s rock and pop music soundtracks. As one of it’s producers remarked, this was a crime series for the MTV generation, where the emphasis was on imagery and the flow, rather on the plot and content.

Hannibal Lecter's prison cell In Manhunter

The Serial Killer Dollarhyde from Manhunter

Much before The Silence of the Lambs, Mann bought the Hannibal Lecter persona on to the screen with Manhunter in 1986. While The Silence of the Lambs, has become the definitive Hannibal movie, and the best in the series, Manhunter to me has not got as much acclaim as it should have got. I have not seen the 2002 on screen adaptation of Thomas Harris Red Dragon, but Mann’s adaptation of the novel, was excellent for me. I feel maybe the movie suffered in comparison to Silence of Lambs, while Antony Hopkins portrayal of Dr. Lecter, was more flamboyant, more like a modern day Count Dracula, who hogs the frame, Brian Cox’s portrayal of the same character, was more subtler. Mann’s visual kinethestics come into full play, as in the scene, when the Fed Agent Will Graham( William Peterson), makes a visit to Lecter’s prison cell. The white antiseptic nature of Lecter’s cell, contrasts with the discordant colors that reflect Graham’s confused state of mind. Or the glass prism shot that shows a grass lawn at close quarters, reflecting the disoriented world in which the characters exist. Again the serial killer Dollarhyde( Tom Noonan) here is shown to have a more humane side, his love affair with a blind woman Reba( Joan Allen), whom he imagines to be the same woman that appears in the famous William Blake painting. Manhunter is a movie to be watched, if not for anything else, just to see where Mann is coming from. His belief that a movie has to be watched, and experienced, as he takes us into the dark recesses of the human mind, of people confined in their own little prisons, trying to break out.

From the stiffing, claustrophobic environments of the bleak urban landscape, Mann goes back in time, and into the open countryside in his 1992 screen adaptation of Last of the Mohicans. Based on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, the movie follows the adventures of Hawkeye( Daniel Day Lewis), the adopted White guy who grows up as an Indian, who has to guide a team of Britishers consisting of Major Duncan Heyward, Cora Munro( Madeleine Stowe) and her sister Alice, to the safety of Cora’s father Col. Edmund Munro, the commander of a British garrison. Hawkeye has to guard the Britishers from a fierce attack led by the Huron tribe chief Magua, who has his own personal revenge against Col. Munro. And during the adventure, a passionate romance flowers between Hawkeye and Cora.

The Last of the Mohicans, is exactly the kind of movie that Hollywood quite often does well, the epic historical drama, and it has all the necessary ingredients to make it a sure fire blockbuster, passion, romance, jealousy, heartbreak, tragedy, revenge, honor. With his imposing frame, flowing looks, and his ability to slip into the larger than life kind of roles, Daniel Day Lewis, makes for an inspiring Hawkeye, while Madeleine Stowe is perfect as the fair white damsel, who finds herself losing her heart to the rugged native. Be it the shots of the North American forests, the battle scenes, the passionate smooch at the waterfall between Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe, the camera work is brilliant. Mann proves that he is as adept at making period epics, as he is at gritty crime dramas. The detailing is excellent, the period settings are perfect taking us right back to the days of the British-French-Indian wars in the countryside. And while the Indians are the villians, Mann humanizes the main antagonist Magua, by bringing his background into detail. Don’t expect too many insights into the nature of the Franco-British wars or the exploitation of the native Indians though, this is hard core Hollywood pop corn( or masala) entertainment, and on that level it works well.

1995 saw Mann returning back to his favorite urban crime genre, with his highly stylized rendering of the classic cops and robbers tale. Heat got the maximum attention for the two lead actors, two actors who dominated and scorched up the screen, from the 70′s onwards with their sheer intensity, their acting styles, their charisma. Two performers who by themselves had the habit of chewing up the entire scenery, dominating every frame of the movie, two people who answered to the name of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. With movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, And Justice For All, Raging Bull, Scarface these powerhouse performers had redefined acting, created their own niche, and hit a level that would be quite hard to touch. Heat was billed as the “Clash of the Titans”, while Pacino and De Niro had earlier appeared in the second part of the Godfather trilogy, they had no scenes together there. Heat would be the first time, they would appear face to face. Now putting this kind of an effort is sort of a double edged sword, the movie could either end up as a memorable classic or it could turn out to be one big clunker( the other Pacino-De Niro collaboration Righteous Kill was that). Mann fortunately does not let the reputation of his co stars awe him over, while giving ample space to Vincent Hanna( Al Pacino), the obsessed, hyperactive cop and Neil Mc Cauley( Robert De Niro), the cool, calculative robber, Mann ensures that the support characters get ample space too be it Mc Cauley’s associate Chris( Val Kilmer), Hanna’s neglected wife Justine( Diane Venora), his step daughter Lauren( Natalie Portman). What actually pushes Heat a notch above the standard cops and robbers story, is the vast amount of gray that Mann explores. Hanna is not the White hero, in fact there seems to be nothing really heroic about him. He is neurotic, insecure, fidgety, and his personal life is one royal mess. His wife from a 3rd marriage feels neglected, he has a strained relationship with his step daughter, and only his work life keeps him going along. Not that the personal lives of other characters are any better, Chris has a stormy relationship with his wife Charlene( Ashley Judd), and she seeks refuge in an extra marital affair. Ironically its Neil, the reclusive loner, who has a fulfilling love affair with a graphic designer, who is unaware of his real identity.

The much awaited Pacino-De Niro encounter, makes one of the best scenes in the movie, where the two characters meet at a restaurant. Interestingly for two people who are constantly at loggerheads, on the opposite side of the law, who have no love lost for each other, their encounter is quite civil. In fact it seems more like a tete a tete, than a fiery, no holds barred fight, that we expect it to be. But this I feel where Mann scores, he puts it across that the men have a sort of hidden respect, just that they are not on the same side. The difference in their outlook, their own lives, shows up in the moment, when each tell about themselves.

Vincent Hanna: My life’s a disaster zone. I got a stepdaughter so fucked up because her real father’s this large-type asshole. I got a wife, we’re passing each other on the down-slope of a marriage – my third – because I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. That’s my life.
Neil McCauley: A guy told me one time, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a… a marriage?

The obsessed cop, with a screwed up personal life, and the cool robber, who is smart enough to know when to get out. Hanna is the man who believes in going on even when the ship is sinking, his ethics in that sense are old fashioned. Mc Cauley on the other hand, believes that when the ship sinks, jump out, he does not believe in going on and on. It is the way these 2 characters are delineated, that to me is the greatest strength of Heat. Something i believe was lacking in American Gangster, while Denzel Washington’s character was well developed, Russel Crowe’s character was too sketchy to generate interest. Heat also has one of the finest action scenes picturized, a gun battle between the cops and the robbers on a crowded LA Street, that lasts for around 10 minutes, bullets flying around, pedestrians cowering under fire, glass windows shattering, no music here, just the sound of the gunfire and the cars, giving the whole sequence a raw, realistic feel, it gives you the feeling of being right there. One brilliant shot, shows the car windows being shattered one after another by the bullets, excellent. Also the climax shootout at the airport, is again shot brilliantly, with the shaded lighting, and the final shot of the plane zooming over.

There is quite a lot to cover i feel about Michael Mann, his style of storytelling, his visual aesthetics, his characterization. I would be having a look at Mann’s movies this decade- Ali, Collateral and Public Enemies( have not yet seen Miami Vice, the movie), some time later.

Disco Dancer-Prabhu Leela ki Jai Ho

2011-01-14T09:47:00.002+05:30

There are movies, then there are movies of “Prabhuji” and then there is DiscoDancer. If i ever had to pick one movie of Mithun Da, that signified his transition from a mere actor to the cult godly ”Prabhu Jee” status, it has to be this. Disco Dancer was released in December 1982 to considerably less hype and not much expectations. Amitabh Bachan was still the Shahenshah, with Namak Halaal, Khuddar, Satte Pe Satta, all rocking the box office, though the clash of titans between AB and his idol Dilip Kumar , Shakti , one of AB’s best IMO, underperformed at the box office. Mithun was not yet in the big league, seen more as a “poor man’s Amitabh”, but he created a kind of niche image Gunmaster G-9 image of his own with movies like Suraksha, Saahas, Wardaatat the same time working in other genres like rom com( Shaukeen), social dramas( Hum Paanch), thriller flicks( Dhuan). Director B. Subash had a couple of rather forgettable flicks prior to this, and the heroine Kim was one of those numerous 80′s starlets, seen in side appearances. And while Disco songs were popular in the 80′s, i still recall Bappi’s “Disco Station” in Hathkadi, not many were willing to put their bets on a movie that seemed to revolve entirely around “Disco”.

When Disco Dancer was released at fag end of 1982, i was around 13, a High School in Vizag, a port city down South, where the only Hindi movies that ran well were those of Amitabh Bachan. Neither did the stills of the movie look anything great at all, and not many were really willing to give it a chance. It seemed to end up the way most Hindi movies, usually did in my place, run for a couple of weeks, and then get shifted to some other seedy theater. The initial talk was nothing too great, though the songs had become popular. And then it started. Slowly people started to like the movie, no actually not just like it, they went crazy over it. Every scene in the movie began to be discussed, i knew friends of mine who knew not one word of Hindi, and yet they saw this more than a dozen times.

The movie became one of the very few Hindi movies that ran for more than 100 days in Vizag. But more than the numbers and records, it was the fact that Disco Dancer became a kind of cult phenomenon. It cut across all barriers of class, caste, religion, race to become a universal favorite. There was my friend, convent educated, who mostly watched Hollywood flicks, ended up watching this movie 20 times, and knew the songs of this by heart. At other end, there was my servant, who knew not a single word of Hindi, but who would religiously, watch this movie, whenever he could. The songs of this movie became the first choice of those who were eager to show off their singing skills or dancing skills during school functions, and Mithun Da’s hairstyle became the next in demand across saloons. Conversations in school inevitably began with “Have you seen Disco Dancer?”, and if you happened to say no, you would get the kind of look, making you feel you had just landed on Planet Earth straight from Mars. “I am a Disco Dancer” blared out from every wedding, pandal, shop, saloon, public gathering fair. “A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat”was passe, first time came across a new alphabet

D se hota hai Dance
I se hota hai Item
S se hota hai Singer
C se hota hai Chorus
O se Orchestra.

Now while schools did not officially switch to the above alphabet, school kids all over began to take to it.

Disco Dancer with our Kaka Jee( Rajesh Khanna), singing on the streets of Bombay, along with the little kid Anil, “Goron Ki Na Kaalon Ke, Duniya hai Dilwalon Ke,Has ke Jiye, Has Ke Mare”. Basically that was the first time i had heard of that “Pewwww” sound, yeah i mean thats the only way i can describe that sound, patented by the patron Saint of Indian Dishko Music, Swami Bappidananda Maharaj. Actually credit should be given to Swami Bappidananda Jee for patenting the exclusive formula for Indian Dishko music, it would be something like a lot of “Pewwws”, and noises going “Turiya, turiya, turiya” or ”Kuriya” or “Puriya” in background, and on screen something like big strobe lights, babes in satin shorts or mini skirts, all engaged in some kind of rythmic gymnastic exercise that was yet to be invented, and in midst of it our own “Prabhujee”. As ”Prabhujee Jr” and his dear Momma continue to play on the streets of Mumbai for their ”Do Waqt ki Roti”, a sweet, young rich girl likes the “Pewww” ”Pewwww” sound and invites Junior to sing again. Its a mystery though how with just a drums, the “Pew” sound still manages to come out, but then again i guess such are the wonders of “Prabhu Leela”.

Anyway little girl’s rich Daddy, Oberoi( Om Shivpuri) is not amused with all those “Pewwwwww” sounds, and the funda of “Duniya Dilwalon Ke”, when it actually should belong to “Daulat Wallas” like him. Also i wonder why the bad rich guys in Hindi movies are always Oberois, Singhanias, Singhals only? Anyway now it is apparent, that since Oberoi is the Daulat Walla, since he is Om Shivpuri, he can’t be a Dil Walla, but more than that he turns out to be a real Kaminey. In order to teach the Mom-Son duo for disturbing his peace with all the “Pewwwwww” sounds, he frames them for the theft of a plastic toy guitar no less. Ah the Maa- Beta angle, now while Hindi movie Maa’s always care for their beta’s, the Maa here actually takes the “Ma Ke Haath Ka Khaana” saying literally, hand feeding him as a kid, and even in prison. But then “Maa Ke haath Ka Khaana” still continues even when Prabhujee is 18, and during a party, in front of the heroine, again its ”Maa Ke Haath Ka Khaana”. Sigh, and to think that my Mom was always asking me to grow up and eat properly with hands, life is not just fair. To get a better update of the “Maa Ke Haath Ka Khaana” funda, check this here.

Anyway after comming back from prison, cries of ”Maa Chor, beta Chor” are heard, and Maa-Beta decide to leave big, bad, wicked, heartless Bombay for Goa. Not a bad deal, considering that ”Prabhu Jee” has fun doing what he likes( singing and dancing), getting paid for it, and yeah his “Maa Ke Haath ka Khaana” as a big bonus, seriously what would any of us not do for such a life. So ”Prabhujee” is enjoying a happy life in lovely Goa, singing wedding songs, even serenading a fat woman who has married a midget. And all the other time, he practices “Disco Dancing” in Ekalavya style, this time his“Guru Drona” being a poster of “John Travolta” in the famous ”Saturday Night Fever” pose, a poster that often sold like hot cakes, during that time. Thankfully though, Travolta has never seen Disco Dancer, had he seen it, one does not know what kind of Guru Dakshina he would expect.

On the other side of town, in Big Bad Bombay, the Bad Rich Man’s kiddos too have grown up. The sweet, young girl is now a hot pants wearing snooty, snobbish miss, Ritu( Kim), but its Bad Rich Man’s son Sam( Karan Razdan)who is now the reigning ”Disco Champ”. Karan who? Well he was the guy who played Priya Tendulkar’s husband in Rajni, and of late has come out with some masterpieces in the ”Soft Porn sleaze” genre, like Girlfriend, Oops to name a few. So our desi ”Rock Disco star”, jives to the sounds of “Koi Yahan Aaha Naache, Naache”( yeah I know its inspired from “Video Killed the Radio Star”, but leave that for another day). Actually it’s hard to decide which is worse, Sam’s dancing that looks like a cross between a totally sloshed out guy lumbering on the street and some one suffering from a bad ear infection. But if we are to believe that Sam is indeed India’s version of ”John Travolta”, what is worse is asking us to believe that he is the kinda guy over whom ladies go crazy, to the extent that two women keep following him for autographs, and then add to it, he manages to get a babe into his sack every night. It is at such times of Ghor Kalyug, that one raises a prayer for “Prabhujee”. Anyway see this to believe it.

Sam’s manager David Brown( Om Puri), is clearly not amused, can’t blame him, considering any 1 would be pissed off seeing Karan Razdan ”dance” and then on top of it, watch him snuggle out with every available female on the couch. When Sam is furious with David for interrupting one of his ”couch snogging” sessions, and blows at him, he walks out vowing to find a new star. Aah the moment which all “Prabhujee” fans have been waiting for. And it comes when David sees ”Prabhujee” dancing under the Goa street lights, blinking like a disco lights. Actually something i generally noticed in some of the notable ”Dishko” songs of the 80′s, hero dancing on the street, and street lights glowing like some kind of strobes, yet to see such kinda lights anywhere though. David is in bliss, he has seen “Prabhujee” up close and live, the chosen one.

So now Prabhujee is all geared up to sing at his first show, and who should be heckling him. Its that sweet little childhood pal turned snooty snobbish rich Miss, in hot pants, leading a bunch of hot pants wearing babes, booing ”Prabhujee”. Lovely bit of dialogue here, Rich Miss throws a slipper to Prabhujee, Prabhujee catches it, and then says “Throw another, will be getting a pair”. And thenPrabhujee goes “Eeah Oooh Aah, Aah Ooh Ahaa, Zara Mudke, Mila Aankhein, Aaya Hoon Main tere Liye” with ample dosages of ”Kuriya, Kuriya” and “Pewwwwwws, Pewwwwww” in the background. And before you can say “Grease”, the audiences are swaying to ”Prabhu’s Disco Leela”, which involves among other things, rolling on the ground, kicking his feet up in the air.

And voila before ya know it, the “Prabhu Jee” legend has begun. “Will ya sing with me”, “Yes”, say the crowd. ”Will ya dance with me”, “Yes” say the crowd. And then Prabhujee gets the audience into the alphabet recital “Say Deee, Say Iiiii, Say Yessssssss, Say Siiiiiiii, Say Ooooo, Dishko, Dishko” and then the affirmation of the legend “I am a Disco Dancer”. The start of the ”Prabhu Leela”, the beginning of a new religion, the creation of a cult, “Jai Ho Prabhu Leela Ki”.

“Krishna Dharti Pee Aaja Tuu”, intones Prabhujee in an all white outfit, with large wings, band around his head, truly looking like some mythical character. In the meanwhile though Rich Bad Dad is not pleased, Sam has become a junkie, and to make it worse, daughter dearest, Ritu has actually fallen in love with Prabhujee, and after a failed attempt by his lackeys, Vasco and Bollywood’s favorite phirang baddie, Bob Christo, Bad Guy comes up with a fiendish plan to get rid of Prabhujee, by fixing up a guitar with 5000 Volts, to kill him with a shock. Actually a pretty dumb guy, considering that even current can do nothing to Prabhujee, he is God after all. However Mama dearest now, makes the ultimate sacrifice, touching the deadly 5000 Volts wala Guitar, leaving Prabhu Jee devastated. Without “Maa Ke Haath Ka Khaana”, Prabhujee loses interest in music, and his career goes down. But then considering ”Prabhujee” can never lose, he sure regains it back, and the how has to be only seen on the screen, just to understand why Prabhujee is well Prabhujee.

The Michael Mann Blogathon(Feb 7-Feb 14)

2011-01-13T16:26:00.000+05:30

After the good response to the Ridley Scott Blogathon, organized on this blog during Sept-Oct 2010, time has come to host the 2nd Blogathon on my blog.

This time the movie maker is some one who like Ridley Scott, has a name for being a visual genius, and quite often like Scott has been criticized for "style over substance". Now while his movies have often ranged from outstanding to disappointing to plain mediocre, one thing is for sure whenever you see his movies, you take home the brilliant visuals that are a trademark of his movies. Yes the topic of the Blogathon is Michael Mann,director of Heat, The Insider,Public Enemies, Ali,Collateral and Manhunter.

From Feb 7-14, this blogathon would seek to explore not just his more renowned works like Heat and Insider, but his lesser known ones too like Manhunter.

You can do your bit for the blogathon, either by sending a piece to ratnakar.techie@gmail.com or providing a link to any post of yours on Michael Mann, or by just using the pictures here as promos on your Blog.

Looking forward to your contributions in any manner.

Judgement at Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial.

2011-01-06T02:17:00.000+05:30

This was earlier published by me at Judgement At Nuremberg:Furious Cinema

Being quite interested in the History of World War II, the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, some questions always used to cross my mind.

“How did Hitler manage to convince an entire population of his ideology?

Why did ordinary German people, get carried away by his demagoguery?

Was Hitler tapping into a latent anti Semitism feeling prevalent in Europe?

Was Hitler just a product of circumstances, some one who took advantage of the chaos in Germany, post World War II, and positioned himself as a savior?”

This is where the Nazi Party held their rallies, isn’t it?

Stanley Kramer’s 1961 classic Judgement at Nuremberg to me remains one of the most powerful movies ever dealing with the Nazi period. The backdrop here is the Nuremberg trials, where the Allies tried most of the Nazi officers and lower ranked officials. Kramer’s movie is an ambitious look at the trials, that covers various issues, related to the period. The main protagonist of the movie is Judge Dan Haywood( Spencer Tracy), who comes to Nuremberg to preside over the trials of complicit officials. The setting of Nuremberg for the trials was quite ironic, it was the same city where the Nazis conducted those massive propaganda rallies. It was also the city, where Hitler passed the notorious Nuremberg Laws, which revoked German citizenship for all the Jews. So the trial of the Nazi officers at the city where they strode in pomp and splendor, was a kind of poetic justice.

The movie’s opening scene shows the bombed out remains of the city, in a way the city’s state is a metaphor for the Nazis. Once proud and powerful, now fallen into ruins, and on trial. The character of Judge Haywood is set up in the opening scenes itself, not a man given much to pomp and pageantry, he is uncomfortable, with all the trappings and the formality around him. Haywood’s task is not made easier by the pressure he has to face, with most of the top Nazi leaders having committed suicide or sentenced to death, the general public somehow just wants to get over with it. In other words, many feel that the trial of judges is not something really warranted, they were just doing their job.

The trial is set in motion with the 4 judges, Emil Hahn (Werner Klemperer), Friedrich Hoffstetter, Werner Lamping and the highest ranked of them all Dr.Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), being called. The charges against these 4 men go beyond just constitutional violations, the prosecution holds them as guilty as the Nazi officers of the genocide. And as per the prosecutor’s argument, they were much more culpable than the impressionable youngsters who were brainwashed into believing Hitler, these men were more educated and experienced, they should be knowing better. But again this is something we have seen, education by itself is no guarantee against bigotry or racism, after all it was a Noble Prize Winner Dr. William Shockley, who came up with that wholly dubious theory of Eugenics. The main question being addressed, “Does being educated, actually have a meaning, when you are not able to exercise your sense of judgement?”.

A judge does not make laws, he carries out the laws of his country.

This is where the movie’s most memorable part comes in when the defense attorney Hans Rolfe (Maxmillian Schell), counters the prosecution argument, stating explicitly, that the men on trial have to be judged not just on the basis of mere evidence, but also the circumstances, quoting the U.S. juror Oliver Wendell Holmes. And that is where he takes up the case of Ernst Jannings. The character of Jannings was loosely based on the real life German jurist, Franz Schlegelberger, shows him as a brilliant legal mind, who framed the Weimar republic constitution, and one of it’s foremost intellectuals. Rolfe, feels that judges can’t be held accountable, as they only execute the laws, they don’t make the laws. And this is where he skilfully juxtaposes the “My country right or wrong” argument, saying that it if it is fine for Americans, why not for Germans? The fact is Jannings could either carry out the orders or refused to do so, and be declared a traitor.

Does patriotism entail looking the other way, when oppressive laws are framed, in the “interest of the nation”? Or does real patriotism involve standing up to the law that rob a citizen of his basic freedom?

No easy answers for the questions, reality is often too complex. Haywood seeks to study more, going through the books written by Jannings as well as the Weimar constitution. Again another memorable scene follows, when the Judge walks around the battered city, taking in the sights. One of the best moments is when Haywood goes into the auditorium where the Nazis held their rallies, and then hears the echoes of the distant past. The trial again goes into the complexities, when one of the witnesses states about the forced sexual sterilization techniques used by the Nazis, the counter argument by Hans Rolfe is equally chilling, much before the Nazis, the U.S. State of Virginia, had recommended the use of sexual sterilization for better offspring. So was Hitler just putting into place what was already there? The Nuremberg laws were distinctly offensive, but similar kind of Anti Semitic laws had been passed in numerous European nations, notably Eastern Europe, which ironically suffered the worst under Nazi rules.

The movie also gives the perspective of ordinary Germans, during the Nazi period, especially through Haywood’s driver Schmidt. The conversation between Schmidt and Haywood, clearly gives an idea of what went through ordinary Germans, people not connected to the Nazi party. While many were distinctly uncomfortable of Hitler’s Anti Semitic policies, many actually were not even aware, and even if they were, there was nothing they could actually do about it. Also the Feldenstein case, which again is loosely based on the real life Katzenberger case. The case is significant here as it showcases what the Germans felt about the non Aryan races, and introducing the concepts of “racial pollution”. The basic concept of racial pollution being any non Aryan cohabiting with an Aryan , is liable to be sentenced to death. Not much different from the mass lynchings indulged in by the Ku Klux Klans of Blacks, whom they believed to be defiling the white race. The way Hahn forces the elderly Feldenstein, of confessing into having a relationship with a much younger German girl, Irene Hoffman (Judy Garland), shows to what extent justice had been corrupted. The recollection of the trial clearly shows the difference between men like Hahn, who was a bigoted fanatic, and more learned men like Jannings. The Heldenstein trail was a fitting example of what happens when reason ceases to exist, and madness sweeps over human beings. The authorities see it a fit case for propagation of National Socialism ideals, a laughing mob no better than the Roman mobs of yore, seek the blood of the innocent Heldenstein.

Judgement at Nuremberg is a movie that deserves to be watched, not just for it’s recreation of the Holocaust era, but also the issues it raises. Of how learned and wise men, can fall prey to madness, when it sweeps the nation. The conditions in Germany after WW1 were just right for Hitler, a defeated nation in chaos, population facing hardships, rising inflation. And then comes Hitler, craving to be a messiah, who can solve the problems of the nation. And like many dictators chooses a scapegoat for the troubles- The Jewish population. It was a madness that even learned men like Jannings had no chance against, either they could swim with the tide or go against it and perish. Many choose to swim along, hoping that Hitler could be the messiah Germany needed. But it is not just of Hitler, many dictators follow the same pattern, they thrive on chaos, because that gives them an opportunity to say “See how bad things are, I shall lead you to the Promised Land”.

The movie does not spare the Allies either, most of the West wants to quickly get on with it, so that they could use Germany as a key ally in the Cold War. The arguments raised by Hans Rolfe, while seemingly seeking to juistify the Nazi acts, actually blow the lid off many Western powers. The U.S. looked the other way, while Hitler was running all over Europe, and only Pearl Harbor forced it to act. Churchill for all his “Blood, Sweat and Tears” bravery, initially was an admirer of Hitler. The Vatican stuck up an egregious pact with Hitler, where it could have it’s own rights , also i guess partly due to the Catholic Church’s long standing animosity towards the Jews.

Director Stanley Kramer, comes up with a memorable classic, that examines the issues of race, loyalty, patriotism and duty in a hard hitting fashion. This is a movie that seeks to answer the question “How did the Germans react to Hitler”, and does it in an epic manner. The movie is also helped by some sterling performances. Spencer Tracy, a long time Kramer favorite, is brilliant as Judge Haywood, wonderfully bringing out the dignity and composure needed. Burt Lancaster goes against his traditional tough guy image, playing a person, whose conscience is torn apart by his own actions, and Maxmilllian Schell’s award winning act, as the defending lawyer, is worth a watch.

Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind

2010-11-19T12:48:00.000+05:30

This post was already published by me at PassionForCinema:CloseEncounters earlier.

Close Encounters of First Kind- Sighting of a UFO or any other alien objects.

Close Encounters of Second Kind- An encounter with an UFO, which leads to effects like radiation, intense heat, damage to terrain etc.

Close Encounters of Third Kind- When human beings actually observe or come in contact with an alien.

The 3 encounters were suggested in Dr. Hynek’s book The UFO Experience.

In 1977, following the runaway success of Jaws, Steven Spielberg, choose the book as his subject for the movie, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Spielberg took on 50′s alien encounter movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still and Plan 9 from Outer Space, as his influences for this movie.

The movie opens with a medley of scenes, showing various encounters in different places.

In a Mexican desert that is in the midst of a sandstorm, 2 fighter craft that have been reported missing in 1954, make a mysterious re appearance, and are discovered by Claude Lacombe( Francois Truffaut), a French UFO expert.

In the night skies above Indianapolis, a near fatal mid air collision is averted by Air Traffic Controllers, and pilots of both planes, tell about a bright mysterious object in the sky.

In the small townof Muncie, Indiana, a kid BarryGuiller, finds all the toys in his home mysteriously operating by themselves, and his home enveloped in a kind of unearthly glow. His mom, Jillian( Melinda Dillon) rushes out to stop him from going out of the home.

In Muncie itself, power plant worker, Roy Neary( Richard Dreyfuss) , is summoned due to a mysterious power outage all around, and he is driving down to another town, he encounters mysterious flying objects.

In the Mongolian desert, local nomads, and a UN military convoy find a huge freighter COTOPAXI stranded from nowhere.

Some where in Dharamshala, India, Lacombe listens to devotees, chanting a mysterious mantra. It is a combination of 5 notes that is chanted over and over again.

Roy is fired from his job for irresponsbility, much to the dismay of his wife Ronnie. He however is now obsessed with the UFO’s and keeps getting visions of a mysterious mountain somewhere. Barry is abducted by aliens inspite of Jillian’s best efforts. And back at the observatory Lacombe discovers that the five note sequence which he had picked up in India, and is now using it as an attempt to communicate with outer space, is getting back cryptic responses.

Close Encounters to me remains one of Spielberg’s more underrated movies. Though not as popular as Jaws, Raiders of Lost Ark, ET or Jurassic Park, i would rate this much higher than all those, and also one of the best sci fi movies made. It was released in same year as Star Wars, and while equally succesful, it has been somehow eclipsed by the visual razzle dazzle of Star Wars. I guess the fact that Star Wars was pure masala stuff, where you had the good guys, the bad guys and lots of action scenes. Close Encounters on the other hand is a bit more cerebral, and much more intelligently done.

In sharp contrast to other alien movies, which generally depicted them as nasty, scheming monsters, Spielberg actually breaks ground here by showing them as friendly and of course he takes it further in E.T. by showing the bonding between an alien and a young boy. Actually in a way the fascination for UFO’s and aliens, is a reflection of average American paranoia. During the cold war it was of course those Russians. So this constant fear of the other, could be Russians/Germans/Japs, some how explains the plethora of literature and movies dealing with aliens attacking planet Earth. Of course the extreme manifestation of this paranoia could be seen in movies like Independence Day. James Cameron again attempted a similar theme of human-alien bonding, in The Abyss, but there it went a bit deeper, with the aliens warning Earth of destruction, if the arms race was not stopped.

The most fascinating thing about Close Encounters for me was the way Spielberg uses the 5 note sequence as the central motif of the movie . John Williams in his career has given some memorable scores, but what he does here is something else. Interestingly, the 5 note sequence was choosen at random, there was no specific thought process behind it, Williams just experimented with many combinations, and finally both of them settled on this, as it looked good. We hear it for the first time, in the Mexican desert sequence, then the people in India chanting it, and finally Lacombe playing it on his synthesizer. The scientists using the computer to transmit the 5 note sequence to outer space,is a sort of reference to Spielberg’s family background, his father was a computer engineer, and his mom a pianist. On other level, it also reflects the age old relation betweenmusic and science. Scientists from long have been studying the differing tones and frequencies in music, and Spielberg using that as a means of communication with the alien species, just underscores the fact.

One interesting thing also which i did observe in the movie.In the first scene, when a Mexican peasant is asked about the events he says. El sol salio anoche y me canto!(The sun came out last night and sang ). Again in the sequence set in India, when a holy person asks the assembled gathering where does those tones come from and all of them point upwards. If one goes back earlier, we have those mysterious Nazca lines in Peru, and then the Mayans, Incans, Aztecsin South America were famous for their astronomical skills. Back home, India has a hoary tradition of astronomy dating back to the times of Bhaskaracharya. Now was this mystical belief borne out from earlier astronomical observations. Some how always felt fascinated by the connection between Indian philosophy and science fiction, there are many similiarities there, but thats another point altogether. What i want to say here is where the West, uses elaborate scientific apparatus to communicatewith aliens and prove their existence, mystic cultures like those of India and the American Indian tribes already seem to have a knowledge of it.

One thing i really like about Spielberg’s movies, is the way he develops the characters, and etches them out. Jaws was elevated from a standard creature feature, just because of the way he developed the 3 major characters. In Close Encounters also, the way Spielberg develops the character of Roy, andthe strained relation with his wife Ronnie, is quite significant. Roy is an odd ball character, he is not bothered by the fact that he has been fired from his job, he is obsessed with the UFO, and he dreams just about that. His wife Ronnie on the other hand is materialistic, and concerned about her husband’s weird behaviour. She does not share his childlike enthusiasm for the UFO’s. Jillian on the other hand is looking for the UFO, just to trace her son back. Interestingly both Roy and Jillian use images to give shape to their dream. Roy builds a mud model of the mountain, while Jillian conceives it by drawing. Spielberg also makes a critique of the US Govt’s obsession for security, when they make that area out of bounds for the public. Spielberg explores this theme in much detail, later in Minority Report, which was a statement against Governments infringing on the rights of individual citizens in the name of security.

The special effects are brilliant as usual, and considering that the movie was made in 70′s, were really way ahead of time. The scenes where the UFO’s attack Jillian’s house, Roy’s first encounter with the UFO’s on the highway, Barry’s abduction are brilliantly shot. Of course the final 15 minutes, is just awesome, and the effects there are mind blowing to say the least.

The movie does not have big stars, but Richard Dreyfuss who earlier appeared as the biologist in Jaws, does an excellent job as the obsessed Roy, as does Melinda Dillon as Jillian wonderfully capturing a mother’s anguish over her missing son. The interesting thing is director Francois Truffaut making a cameo appearance. Now generally most of the directors of the European New School, especially Goddard were heavily critical of Spielberg. Many of the European directorssaw Spielberg as a sell out to commercial interests . Truffaut however was one of the rareEuropean directors who actually admired Spielberg, and was a big supporter of him. I guess maybe due to the fact that most of Spielberg’s movies havea strong focus on relationships. But some day i do want to come up with a post on Spielberg-Truffaut, would be quite interesting.

Munich

2010-11-19T12:28:00.000+05:30

(This piece was published by me at PassionForCinema: Munich on Dec 4,2008, right after the terrible 26/11 attacks in India, that explains the first paragraph)

The last one week, I have not been really watching movies. I have been just tracking the news, or watching the news channels, as i was first shocked and then outraged. Anyway as i was looking for some DVD’s, just glanced at Munich and happened to watch it again. Well watching a movie on terrorism, that too during a time like this, might seem a bit odd. But maybe i felt it was topical, or the fact that it happens to be one of my favorites, made me watch it.Also, it happens to be one of my favorite Spielberg movies along with Schindlers List and Saving Private Ryan.

Couple of reasons too. I have this interest in Jewish history, Israel and the Middle East from quite a long time. I got it from my father who admires Israel, and in fact dinner time, would be spent listening to his accounts of Israeli history. And when i was around 12 yrs old, i watched Raid on Entebbe, a movie about the Israeli attack on Entebbe Airport, to rescue its hostages from Arab terrorists. That really sparked a curiosity and as i grew up reading books like Exodus, Oh Jerusalem it just fuelled my passion further. The infamous Munich massacre where the Israeli athletes were killed by a fidayeen attack during the 1972 Olympic Games, was something i had read of in newspaper reports and clippings. And so when Spielberg came up with a movie on the incident, it really ignited my interest. So this is not a review per se, but just some random ramblings of mine.

While opinion about Munich, is divided, i rate it as one of my favorites, because of Spielberg’s approach. Instead of taking the easy way out, Spielberg tries to balance both sides of the conflict, and that is the toughest thing to do in the world. Being a moderate, with a centrist political view myself, i have found myself accused of being “Leftist” as well as “Rightist”. Walking the middle road, can often make you feel quite lonely, because you dont really belong anywhere. And i am sure Spielberg must have felt the same way, as he was attacked by both Jewish and Arab community leaders, as well as by many movie critics.

Munich remains the kind of movie, which polarizes people depending on what your view point is. Also because of its tendency to go into a more gray zone, trying to show the moral dilemmas the assasisn faced when executing the killers, the movie did not work with the general public too, who would have preferred a more straightforward “Bruce Willis going around killing all the bad Arabs” kind. Post 9/11, the anti Arab sentiment in US was high, and somehow American public could not really take to showing the Arabs in a more humane manner. Munich was not meant to be a movie that could make every one happy, the very subject nature was polarizing, and whatever is the kind of balancing act, you do, there would still be people not happy. But as a movie it does make you think, does make you question what you believed in earlier, whacks you out of your comfort zone. You may or may not like it, you may or may not agree with its content, but you can’t ignore it either. And there in lies the triumph of Munich, as it does not make a spectacle of a real life tragedy, but makes the viewer think about it.

“Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster”-Nietschze.

The main theme of Munich revolves around the quote. Though the movie is about a group of 5 assassins on a mission to track down and execute the perpetrators of Munich 72, at a deeper level, the movie examines the transformation of those men, their feelings. The most chilling scene in the movie is the one in the Cyprus hotel. Avner Kaufman( Eric Bana), the leader of the squad, checks into a room next to that of one of the targets, Hussein Abd Al Chir. Earlier the group had planted a bomb under his mattress, which would detonate when the target sleeps on it. Avner is standing on the balcony, as he hears the sounds comming from the next room, of a newly married couple making it out. If we see Avner’s expressions, it is he feels fascinated, by the sounds next room , desperately wanting to be a voyeur. It could be the fact that he is away from his wife, who has just delivered a daughter. But the best part is when the target comes out and has a brief chat with Avner. And then Avner goes back to his room, and gives the signal. That scene just hit me straight in the face. One minute you are talking normally with a person, and then the very next second, he is gone like that.

Another favorite scene of mine, is when the group ambush 4 PLO members in an Athens safe house and claim they belong to various European terror groups like ETA, Red Army and ANC, as one of their members Steve( Daniel ’007′ Craig), is a South African. The dialogue between Avner and Ali the group leader, Ali’s stating his desire for a homeland. When Avner counters him saying that violence, would not help the Palestinian cause, Ali shoots back, giving example of the Irish and the Jews. In fact he makes a pertinent observation that the West German Govt, helps Israel, to assauge its guilt, and he asks “But did my ancestors send one of yours to the gas chambers?”. One of the best moments for me, is when the Greek porter in Cyprus, whom they have kidnapped, after the assault, is shocked at what he sees the brutal murder. In fact when one of the group members Carl, hands him money to silence him, he just spits on it and walks away. They might have succeeded in their mission, but they have lost something in their own selves. To the Greek porter, they are no better than thugs. And when Avner finds that the guard he had shot dead, while making an attempt on Salameh, the group leader, is just a teenage boy, he is totally dispirited and disillusioned.

Munich is Spielberg’s up close and personal look at the man who undertook the operations. It takes us into the minds of both the hunters and the hunted. Much as you hate the Arab terrorists, every time, when one of the targets is gunned down, you do feel a remorse, because, just moments earlier, he was another normal man on the street. Or was he really, i mean if they indeed were the brains behind the murder of Israeli athletes, it was just retribution. But then Munich provides no easy answers. You could watch the movie, many times, but still it does leave with you questions unanswered. Also Spielberg’s approach is totally understated here, in sharp contrast to his more in your face style. Even the explosions are shown like with a dull noise, not the usual high octane stuff, you see in standard Hollywood movies.

Also the detailing is really good here. For instance when Avner, meets the Mossad accountant, he is called as a Yekke, a term for German Jews. And later when Avner discusses it with Eprahim(Geoffrey Rush), he takes pain to emphasize he is a Sabra, a naturalized Jew born in Israel. Generally in Jewish society there is a distinction between Yekkes and Sabras. Also Jews of German descent, are not looked upon with favor by Jews of East European origin, especially those from Ukraine or Russia. Again when Avner tells his wife, Daphna, about moving to US, and she tells him that she does not want to be another “homeless Jew”. This again showing the attachment Jews all over have for Israel, as also the fact that Daphna was born and bought up in Israel, and she does not really relish the prospect of living her life in US. Again when Avner tells the group, that his wife is expecting, the other members say “Mazeltov”, which is the Jewish word for “Good fortune”. . Also Spielberg brings in the 70′s political scene, with references to ETA, Red Army, as also the West German Govt’s decision to release the arrested fidayeen, after terrorists hijack an airliner.

Well much as it was balanced, i feel that Spielberg could afford to do so, since he was a Jew himself. Inspite of which he received a lot of criticism for being a sell out. I am sure had the director been Catholic or Protestant, he would have been accused of not understanding Israel, and no Arab director would have even dared to make a movie out of it. Also i dont understand why Mossad would not want to get involved in this operation. Generally Mossad takes pride in dealing with enemies of Israel, and is not apologetic about its actions. Somehow the reason that Avner is not a field operative, and so the targets would not be as alert, as he is unknown, does not sound too convincing to me. Munich is not the perfect movie, i dont think Spielberg intended it to be, it has its flaws, and the pace slackens at times. But at the end it is movie that does make you think, and evaluate, and that in itself is something.