Short Notes on 2008 Disappointments and a Recommendation !

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt). Very honest and one of the most serious films of 2008 but so cold that it could not even justify the use of medium. The stack of stark images does not bundle up into something that seems to strike an emotional chord here or there as if the director is scared of emotions. I am more disappointed here because it is otherwise a glorious attempt in a sober voice.

Milk (Gus Van Sant). In preparation to watch Milk, I saw Rob Epstein's excellent documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk and in the commentary track of the documentary the director says that they consciously did not name it The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, because they wanted to capture the struggle in times of Milk not his life per se. The motion picture Milk tries to capture both and thats where it fumbles because it is not necessary that the personal life of a person be as interesting and important as his political life.

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin). For me, Guy Maddin's films work when he mixes nostalgia not only with genuine sadness but with irony, surreal humor and perverse fantasies that are uniquely his. My Winnipeg works great in pieces but what spoils the whole experience is Guy Maddin's overemotional voice over, it pampers and plunders the images and their irony. You never know what to believe, Maddin or his images.

Alexandra (Aleksandr Sokurov). I am not too sure about this film but this is definitely Russian version of hate the war but support the troops, which is nothing wrong, but the grandmother character is overly patronizing and when we get the feeling that she is actually supposed to represent both mother Russia and director’s alter ego, the whole exercise, even if heartfelt, looks not only nationalistic but rather simplistic.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog). This is one attempt where from the very beginning director promises to explore the other side of the world "differently", there is supposed to be nothing usual here (Herzog himself says that he is not here to film penguins) but even if it is not arrogant its immodest promise and more length of the film is devoted to ridicule others than to show us things with new eyes. It is definitely a minor effort from Herzog. May be thats why it was nominated for Oscars.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant). Van Sant use of Christopher Doyle's excellent photography, Nino Rota's music and a cryptic narrative seems to cancel out each other in their stylistic excesses. It is one example where a bunch of good things does not result in anything better.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan). Self proclaimed harbinger of chaos and menace, the anti-establishment Joker's big-budgeted explosions looks meticulously planned and staged. In a strictly back and white sensibility, Joker's irrational lunatic evil does not go hand in hand with the bigness of his sophisticated misadventures or vice versa. Its just too layered. On the other hand the two face metaphor is overly clean cut, The face, the coin, the film divided in two halfs. And thats the problem with this film. You just can not have it both ways. Also, the cut after Joker's fall was too abrupt.

Dear Zachary (Kurt Kuenne). This is a heartfelt personal documentary but highly manipulative so much that one starts feeling that the director does not trust his audience's emotional responses and so he packs them with enough arsenal to illicit a powerful but expected response.

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman). What you will think of a person who fantasizes of staging an artsy-fartsy funeral for himself. Thats exactly what I think of this film. Its self-indulgent in a very morbid way. But Samantha Morton's performance is quite good.

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas). This is essentially the textbook of art house cliches. This film reminded me of Cartman's Christian Rock Album cover where he asks Token to point away from camera because this is how album covers are. Also, the director should go to confession for trying Dreyer so poorly.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle). My biggest problem with this film is the end dance sequence. Its so shoddily choreographed, its worse than mediocre - a half-hearted sham, lip service to Bollywood.

Now the recommendation, Abdel Kechiche's The Secret Of The Grain is long and intense family drama that brings different ends of a family together when it engages in opening a couscous restaurant. And look out for marvelous Hafsia Herzi. Ebert compares her to Isaballe Huppert.

Best non-2008 Films seen in 2008

This is the list of films seen in 2008 which I found very impressive and satisfying. In my opinion, a film like Beloved is 24 carat gold, a masterpiece of highest degree and cinema as piece of history and heart. Most of the films in this list unpretentiously strike a balance between the aesthetics and the reality in cinematic art and form. A film as film-scholarly as Who's Camus Anyway, tells more about human beings than about cinema and in its most sublime moments suggest them to be one and same manifestation. The documentary - The House is Black, To Be and To Have, Baleros and Near Death - either observes human condition with honesty or take part in it to evoke action. The Camp of Showgirls and Pussycat, and of course of Mike Kuchar's shorts is more telling, honest and probing than the seriousness of everyday Hollywood. In a Lonely Place, a film I saw several times last year, may be most profound film that examines love (or rather its impossibility) in the guise of a noir. As my personal change in trajectory of film-watching last year, I became more and more interested with the concept of films as therapy and for their humanity like in Ray's Devi and Sembene's Moolaade. I care less about lot of things which I used to care before. Awkwardly paced and clumsily acted but deeply moving, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein would have never gotten a nod from me before. What remains constant are the films that can make reality look like dreams and vice versa, some sort of poetry - films like George Washington and Killer of Sheep, and to some extent Nobody Knows - the films that transform music and image put together to breathtaking beauty. And there are some terrific performances here - the star performance of Holly Woodlawn in Trash, Dirk Bogarde in The Servant, Doomed beauty Gillian Anderson in The House of Mirth, Celia Johnson's housewife-in-love in Brief Encounter and many others. All these films are highly recommended.

1. Beloved (Jonathan Demme)
2. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad)
3. George Washington (David Gordon Green)
4. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
5. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
6. The Servant (Joseph Losey)
7. Who's Camus Anyway (Mitsuo Yanagimachi)
8. To Be And To Have (Nicolas Philibert)
9. Balseros (Carlos Bosch & Josep Maria Domènech)
10. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembene)
11. Trash (Paul Morrissey)
12. Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella & Pablo Stoll)
13. Freaks (Tod Browning)
14. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven)
15. Careful (Guy Maddin)
16. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)
17. The Intruder (Claire Denis)
18. Brief Encounter (David Lean)
19. Near Death (Frederick Wiseman)
20. Devi (Satyajit Ray)
21. Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi)
22. Mike Kuchar's Shorts (Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Secret of Wendel Samson & The Craven Sluck)
23. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (John Gianvito)
24. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer)
25. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies)

Pic: A crucial scene from Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri.

2008: Year in Film !

Here is the list of my favorite films of 2008 (I tried my best but I am never sure of the order). I am late as usual and the excuse (as usual) is because I wanted to catch up with few films and revisit some. Please recommend if I am missing any good films of 2008.

1. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
Amidst the chop-shop of marriage and personal conflicts, the moments of reflection and reconciliation comes at the right time making the film an exercise in compassion, not in bitterness. Demme understands that narrative logic is not the soul of images, their emotional order is. With the backdrop of a faux-Indian musical wedding, past and present unveil and collide, moments are stolen, lived and lost, with the quicksilver performances of two daughters (Rosemarie DeWitt's elder Rachel and Anne Hathaway's Kym) and their mother (Debra Winger), the movie becomes a therapy of sorts. Demme sees the therapeutic power of confrontation, but also knows that sometimes words fall too short and there are times when nothing works. When Rachel gives Kym a shower after a rough night, it is not only a moment of reconciliation, but also a reflex of sibling love. Demme understands that familial bliss is somewhere rooted in selective amnesia - you forget mistakes of those you care - and somewhere in involuntary bond between family members. Rachel Getting Married is definitely the most soulful film of the year.

2. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
One of the reviews of Mike Leigh's Naked wrote that the film "tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Margaret Thatcher claims does not exist". Leigh's oft-miserable characters living at the fringe of society are just trying to survive but even then one can virtually smell the human warmth off his characters owing to Leigh's compassion for them. In few respects, Happy-Go-Lucky's heroine Poppy (amazing Sally Hawkins) –non-judgmental, intelligent and caring for people – is onscreen Leigh showing genuine understanding and respect to his characters. Poppy's zest for life and empathy for others is born out of clear heart and understanding. There is no strand of smugness to it. She is one of those persons who get truly moved by other people troubles and offer a helping hand. (Do not confuse this with Bollywood goodness of heart where happiness of one man cruelly breaks in the safe sadness of others). Poppy is not naive like Fellini's Cabiria but has her resilience. If we overlap the penultimate scene where Poppy pensively walks after having a heavy argument with her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) and the last scene where she takes a boat ride with her friend, we can feel something akin to the last scene of Nights of Cabiria, and it is no small feat.

3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
This film, like its muse - a red balloon - is free and floating. It is absolutely liberated from any notion of making a sensible narrative or any life changing epiphany. A dreamer duo - a curious child (Simon) and his baby sitter (Song, a passionate film student) - create a canvass on with reality taps in the form of child's mother (animated Juliette Binoche's Suzanne) and is absorbed within the calm of the canvass. Flight of the Red Balloon builds an awe-inspiring fantasy around the matter-of-fact reality, without trying too hard because it knows that it might break the spell. There is certain musicality to the whole film with calm of the dreamers and the resound of life outside their fantasy. Flight of the Red Balloon touches the idea of cinema as a tool to preserve past (Suzanne's asks Song to transfer her old 8mm movies to DVD) and also the idea that it reminds us of things and emotions forgotten ("Your film touches on very deep things I thought I'd forgotten," remarks Suzanne to Song after seeing her film). Emerging out of these basic ideas are notions of cyclic nature of cinema (you preserve and you revisit and you preserve again to revisit, its memory and past both) and its oddly magical way of connection and conveying emotions and ideas (Somebody preserves past, and someone else experiences it). Flight of the Red Balloon gently captures the crux of these ideas.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)
Still life is set in a small village of Fengjie, on the banks of Yangtze River which is the site of infamous Three Gorges Dam Project. Jia Zhang-ke mixes fiction to this backdrop with story of two people (Shen Hong and Huang Mao) searching for their spouses. The social, political and emotional ramifications of the dam are filtered through lives of the fictional characters. With Zhang-ke 's excellent, almost uncanny, gift of composition, the backdrop and the fiction fuse together as a sensitive portrait of the history in making and unmaking. His unforced compositions have irony (shot of a demolished building collapsing in the cityscape behind the reunited husband and wife, a couple dancing with the backdrop of Yangtze), light-hearted humor (Workers sharing beer, cigarettes and toffees) and supernatural/absurd (A building like a Chinese alphabet becomes a rocket ship, a UFO flies over Yangtze River, the circuit board shorts as Hong Shen bandages an injured worker). But most importantly, Zhang-ke is talking about the power and control of money on the lives of his characters. People are moving away from their homes for money, there are debts to be paid, people changing after having a taste of money. In the biggest joke and irony of the film, workers show each other that their part of China on the banknotes. On the surface, Zhang-ke does not look very interested in the politics of dam (rarely in film we see any discussion about the dam), but the overwhelming rubble of a landscape is ubiquitous. Almost every scene has something going on in the background. Its like a play staged with a slowly disintegrating backdrop, everything here takes a new meaning.

5. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Steve McQueen's Hunger may look like "protest cinema" because it documents Bobby Sand's Hunger strike in Maze Prison. Also because of the same reason it might even fall into "issue cinema" trap. In both of these labels - protest and issue - come before cinema and therefore Hunger, although about protest and issues is neither of them. With Hunger Steve McQueen joins the group of directors who know how to shoot human bodies and how to put them together to mean something bigger than the pieces. We all know Bresson did it again and again; several assorted shot of hands and pockets meant more than picking a pocket. But McQueen goes political with Hunger. Shots of bloodied knuckles of guards, corridors of Maze prison, wounds in skull, dark tiny prison cells, beating, shit smeared prison walls, stiff limbs, naked battered bodies, dirty fingernails and voice of Mrs. Thatcher are used to evoke a situation or rather how people are dealing with a situation. With these dispersed visual installments, McQueen captures the complexity and brutality of the situation on both sides. McQueen said in one of the interviews that his primary inspiration for the project was Goya and how to make the worst images engaging (nor sexy or numbing). As a testimonial to his success, the killing of a guard, in its shock, beauty and brutality will do both De Palma and Argento proud and the humanity of that scene is undeniable. The second act of the film is a brilliant argument (this argument reminded me of Pere Portabella's brilliant short El Soprar) between two ideologies - Bobby Sands and Father Dom Moran. The argument is about the new path for Republican's cause and the validity and need for hunger strike. Here McQueen hits all those questions head on - The questions that Bobby and Father ask each other, Is hunger strike heroic?, Is this good for the Republican cause? Are there other ways around and the questions which a viewer have in their mind, What is the ideology of the film? Does this film romanticize the terrorists, what is the moral center of the film, Is this film a protest or anger or frustration to a situation. Act three is the actual hunger strike and its brutal physical manifestations. Although dealing with a piece of history, McQueen works like an artist not a documentarian, and hence is freer. In his last minutes, Sands recalls a childhood memory of running in woods - a mysterious evocation of childhood freedom and fear, and is followed by a shot of birds flying at dusk - although a cliché of soul being free - becomes an simple expression of both exhaustion and release.

6. Reprise (Joachim Trier)
Reprise feels like a first film for all the good reasons - fresh, original, experimental, spirited and personal. With the audacious beginning sequence of pile of would-have-beens, the film establishes its tones of hit and miss, inspiration and block, success and failure for our two young writers (Erick and Philip), in their professional and personal lives. The film has an amazing insight into human mind and how it processes, remembers and uses information. If this film is a mess of if-then-else loops and what-ifs, the director understands the impossibility of sorting some things out and he also acknowledges that its style will work only once, after that the cult will be quotidian (which might save it from being a Hollywood fodder). Hovering all over is the young men’s aspirations and strive for professional success (the intro sequence even establishes that, although they want their success not to be the famous type but a cult-case) in writing which in some ways is against their passion for language and writing (Their favorite author, Sten Egil Dahl ,tells Erick that never to discuss art on TV) so in the film there is always a friction between creativity and fame (our heroes get writer blocks once they get famous). The added twist is their life outside their writing world - the reality in which they live in, their friendship and love life (Erick breaks up with his girlfriend so that he can devote himself to writing vaguely reminds of Kafka's love letter to his girl friend that writing is his first love), which provides an amazing flux of scenarios of joy, awe and sadness. We only hope that our young writers will someday balance their multiple worlds.

7. The Witnesses (André Téchiné)
If any film this year understands and captures the sentiment of loss in essence, this is it. This film understands loss (without ever turning bitter or melodramatic or morally rigid) because it understands its power on people's lives and it understands the human perseverance in the wake of it. Novelistic and classical, in all its lightness and vibrancy, the film feels like a heartfelt remembrance of people and a passage of time, not just a bunch of regrets and sobs of the time lost. André Téchiné fast and urgent narrative - divided into three chapters, "Happy Days,” “The War” and “Summer Returns” - has a fleeting power, and is directed delicately not because the memory is thin, but because it is subtle and still alive. If images of Manu drowning, Manu touching Mehdi’s back, ailing Manu asking for a kiss from Sarah, Manu kissing Sarah, Manu dancing with Sarah and Adrien, haunt us, we understand what his friends and lovers have gone through and on a larger scale what an era has gone through. Téchiné film feels like a whiff of fresh air from past, loaded with life and loss.

8. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín)
In the City of Sylvia not only likens the act of watching faces, forms, people and poses to the art of filmmaking but it also plays out as the struggle of an artist to make sense of the rich and chaotic world around him. A quintessential romantic and artist type, El (Xavier Lafitte), visits cafes, wanders, and as we come to know, he is looking for a girl named Sylvia whom he has met in a nearby bar 6 years ago. The first third of the film is a very confident experiment in point of view, framing and composition. Shot in broad daylight, this sequence is extraordinary because it balances the reality and ordinariness of the real life and the romance and desire of a human heart. It is the same balance that an artist needs to strike - the balance between aesthetic and the psychological. This part ends in a high note when El spots a girl who he thinks is Sylvia. The second part is a hit and miss romantic chase which end in a disappointment. The chase is purely of a lovelorn wanderer kind, with only a little thrust of libido. The third part (my favorite) is the bar sequence which - for one - is the camp version of first act with cafe replaced by a bar and violin by Blondie, and also a fitting closure to a daydream where the director finally deconstructs male gaze into desire, disappointment and inaction.

9. Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris, tries to find the truth behind Abu Gharaib's infamous images through interviews with the various players, his signature recreations and dissection of images as never done before. Errol Morris is the most scientific and fact-based film-maker working today and his investigative zeal is not guided by a pre-determined goal or agenda (it is not to say that the film is crafted without foresight, but one can tell that the investigative research for the film was open-minded and unbiased). Morris is not quite interested in big questions like banality of evil or but in small-specific questions like "why was a portion of photo cut out", "who took the picture" and "what happened before and after the picture". Step by step, through such small questions and examinations Morris deftly crafts a portrait of morality, responsibility, corruptibility and truth, and takes us to a surreal climax where few of the most shocking images are marked Standard Operating Procedure by a US Official. In an effort to explain himself, the official says "People who have not been to places where I have been, I don’t expect them to see them in the same way", hitting right in your head that these procedures really are some sort of standard and routine in other such infernos. Standard Operating Procedure suggests that what happened in Abu Gharaib may not be the exact scheme given by top officials to these kids to operate but it is evident that they were sanctioned enough support and freedom (and of course \cover-up) for enough time with pressure of non-specific goals (like to get intelligence information for a Iraqi civilian) that one thing led to other, responsibilities of actions ("We were just following orders") were diffused and immoral humiliation and torture became the standard operating procedure. Haunting, persuasive and objective, SOP is an extraordinary example of building a big picture with small but precise stokes.

10. My Father, My Lord (David Volach)
The film told so gently and patiently as if its a tender past remembered with images, but at the same time so observant and compassionately close to its characters as if its meticulously conceived with feel of a dream. It must be little bit of both like any personal film is. Contrary to his own experiences, when young Jewish boy, Menahem is told by his father that animals do not have any souls, film gently suggests a betrayal to humanity by those who are trusted to protect it. The tragic climax becomes more hurting because one fears that pure experience and curiosity might have been drowned in the sea of rusted ideology in the name of faith.

Honorable Mention: WALL-E, Be Kind Rewind, Let the Right one in, Boarding Gate, Redbelt and Burn After Reading

Not Seen: The Wrestler, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Class, A Christmas Tale, Profit motive and the whispering wind, The Last Mistress, The Edge of Heaven, Trouble the Water, and My Blueberry Nights.

Notable Performances:
Sally Hawkins, Happy Go Lucky
Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky
Juliette Binoche, Flight of the Red Balloon
Sami Bouajila, The Witnesses
Sean Penn, Milk
Josh Brolin, Milk
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married
Frances McDormand, Burn After Reading
Michael Fassbender, Hunger
Asia Argento, Boarding Gate

Disappointments and Letdowns (of varying degrees): Wendy and Lucy, Milk, My Winnipeg, Alexandra, Encounters at the End of the World, Paranoid Park, Dark Knight, Dear Zachary, Synecdoche, New York, Silent Light and Slumdog Millionaire. I will try to put my thoughts down soon on some of these.

Hindi Films: I really liked Mithya, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and A Wednesday in that order. I will try to write about them in a separate post. The most amazing performance of the year is Amrita Rao's (YES) fifteen minute scene in less-than-mediocre Shaurya. She makes tea and talks about her dead husband in horror and repulsion. Neat!

Synecdoche, New York

No doubt, Charlie Kaufman is a fertile mind, but in films, fertility is not the richness of ideas, but it is the richness of images. It is sad that a film about exploration of a complex artistic mind and his obsession with death and decay, is so devoid of color that the only color I remembered as I came out of theatre was green - the color of poo in one of the scenes. One does not expect death and decay to be vibrant but toning all the colors down so that it all looks like everything happens in a glare of white light is sterile. In films, Kafkaesque does not translate to black and white, nor seeking truth translate to a character shouting "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth". Its a classic trap where darkness of an idea translates to aridity of images. Synecdoche, New York is a film where images are sacrificed for ideas.

It might be something personal but I am not very comfortable with films obsessed with self-obsession of an artist, especially when the central character is supposedly director's alter-ego. The only thing that saves such films is not honesty or truthfulness or brutality of self-examination (how bitter can an artist get), but irony and humor. That is why I am not a big fan of 8 1/2, but that film has anecdotes, images and irony, not just a bundle of ideas.

To its credit, Synecdoche, New York has many of Charlie Kaufman's brilliant themes which he explored in his previous screenwriting efforts. There is a very clear idea of the baggage of body that we carry with our mind and soul. But here too, Kaufman missteps because he forgets that he is dealing with film medium where images of faces and body are the index of ideas, if we do not take an easy way out of reading monologues and voice overs. And in the first 30 mins or so, Kaufman uses faces and bodies to show characters inner traumas, like a blister on the skin doubles for anxiety or decay. This ideas of body and mind, of self image and projected image, and their superimposition, become much more interesting later in the film where Kaufman use a cinematic device of using several actors to play a single character thus creating a playful drama, and pumping his big ideas in between.

I think, Synecdoche, New York has an excellent material for a film, but it is not such a good film. There are several moments of brilliance, like the episode where stories of two daughters merge (I do not want to give more details and spoil it) together so that we examine the life of one of the characters again, a character that we have written off long before because we were so into the central story, which in turn tells us the pitfalls of being self-obsessed, and ignoring the complexity of other human lives.

Do not be deterred by what I am saying (it is a very personal opinion), Synecdoche, New York certainly deserves to be seen at least once. I am just wary about the idea of film about ideas where images are considered secondary. Its like when you close your eyes after watching a film, what comes to you - an image or an idea. Even in Bergman's many monologues, the camera shamelessly scrutinizes the images of faces. A slight quiver or grimace on Liv Ullman's expressive face is more telling than the potent voiceover. Needless to say, I am not talking about shocking or pretty poster images, I am talking about the moving close up of Vera Drake sitting with her whole family at dinner table, when she comes to know that she is charged with a crime. I am talking about the end sequence of Suspiria where our heroine enters the mural maze. I am talking about the back view of Maggie Cheung as walks down the stairs in In the Mood for Love. I am talking about all the joys and zest of moving images surpassing words or explanations.

Koi Yeh Kaise Bataye

Random Notes and Updates

I am seeing fewer films now. Last film that I saw was WALL-E and there too I missed the beginning and ending so it does not even count. Last week I saw Mithya which I think is very good. I need to see it again to write about it in detail but I am already impressed by its handling of familiar Bollywood themes and narrative devices in a new way, and beyond that managing to be a moving (and sad) love story. Few months back I saw Hitchcock's The Birds and since then I am thinking on and off about it and mostly how Hitchcock manages to have two parallel films in one film - one narrative and one psychological - and what is amazing is that he never sacrifices one for others benefit, that is to say he respects all his audience and thats where I feel some of films lose confidence in cinematic medium by either mellowing it down heavily for audience or making assumptions that audience would never get that so why even try.

It is not the question of finding a middle ground. What Hitchcock shows is that both can be achieved. I understand that it is not applicable to all type of films but at least noirs and thrillers are tried and tested ground. I might not be making much sense, but I am just blown by The Birds, and I also saw Marnie few months before it and it was great too, but I am still not very sure about its end. It was too much explaining which I thought belittled Marnie's emotions and her past, and also the complex sexual relationships that the film builds. It almost came out as a Freudian medical document for a while. But visually it was flawless and then there are those great Hitctcockian scenes like the one where Marnie rides a horse and when it breaks its leg after falling, she shoots it. That is again an excellent example of what I stupidly referred to as 'parallel films'.

I was also reading Andre Bazin's book on Orson Welles with foreword by François Truffaut and an introduction by Jean Cocteau. It is very precise study of Welles' film, philosophy and legacy. I thought Bazin would be very scholarly and dry but he always keeps it interesting. Also, one more thing that I liked a lot is that Bazin never try to be an authority on Welles like these new age film writers who after writing a book on any famous director, and giving few DVD commentaries try to own the director. While explaining Welles cinema he freely quotes from other critics and directors. Along with it, I was reading Godard on Godard. It has collection of articles by Godard from his Cahiers de Cinema critic period and also essay on his films and on film medium in general. A very knowledgeable and critical book, time and time again, even without saying, it emphasizes to know history of cinema to really get it. Its involve pasts - of persons, of nations, or culture and of art itself.

Being one of the youngest art forms it gives us a unique privilege to see cinema grow in front of us and it is indeed a prism through which we can try to understand the growth of any cultural medium and how it encompasses both - the cutting edge crap and the ultimate beauty. I have not completed the book but reading the reviews by Godard excites one about possibilities of cinema and it definitely paints a portrait of a young man in love with cinema. His reviews are enthusiastic, sometimes even using hyperbole, especially when he passionately writes about films of Nicholas Ray (Those famous quotes “And the cinema is Nicholas Ray” and “If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to”). I, myself, am quite vary of over-enthusiastic reviews – reviews where critical facilities are either blinded by, or defensively used to justify personal liking (beware of the fanboys). Those reviews often seem to be exercises to prove reviewers opinion of the film – as if merely stating the opinion and supporting it logically is not good enough (Read reviews of last year’s No Country for Old Men and this year The Dark Knight might be the film). More often than not, Godard’s enthusiasm is for cinema and so quite healthy.

When we are at that, let me go little overboard and write something about the type of critics and criticism I like. My idea of a critic is foremost a moral being – it is a mandatory requirement – everything else follows next. If he is not moral, he will end up praising a Nazi Propaganda film because it is cinematically spectacular. Related to being a moral being, that person should have a strong and open heart. By strong and open heart I mean, he does not get carried away by emotional trickery but he does not miss the right note, when it strikes – no matter how low it is. It is that proverbial heart that cuts the crap and get the gem out. He should know the medium well – its history, its technique and its power – and to know it, he should be very diligent – read, eat and see films all the time. Also he should be able to foresee a film’s brilliance. It is an outcome if the critic has all the prior qualities and it is also to do with a critic’s ability to be brave and say what he feels like and his refusal to be part of “critical consensus” and admire the film for the right reason. And of course, he should love the medium.

As you must have noticed by now where I am going. In my stupid opinion, a film critic must be all moral, all knowing, all seeing entity, and if I may call him so without scaring folks, a god-like figure. And that’s where I fail, what where I forget that we are in a world which is run by people not gods. And that where I set a high bar and look up someone to give me opinions on how I feel or I should I have. Its little more tricky than this, you may like a bunch of critics or artists, which may collectively become god to you, the one who knows all, the one who sees all, the one who feels all, but it is certain that your god will fail you sooner or later, and it is same for you too. As one sees/reads more and more, he might think he raised his standards artistically, but most of the times we are just intelligent enough to distinguish between cinema verite and candid camera. Because of this itch to "get" the film sooner, most of the times, judging comes first, and feeling next, at least for me. I hope I can reverse it.

Along with it, I am seeing lots of South Park, and I really like it. I did not like the South Park film much which I then thought was quite uninteresting in second half, but few of the episodes are "super awesome", to use Cartman's phrase. I think two of the best episodes are about sports - Stanley's Cup and The Losing Edge - both of which satires the team spirit, sportsmanship and associated public hysteria for sports. My other two favorites are about our obsession with video games and its characters - Good Times with Weapons and Make Love, Not Warcraft.

Coming back to film, few weeks back I saw Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie. May be I saw it wholly in a Hitchcock frame of mind and therefore thought of the whole plot as McGuffin. The director uses the whole plot as an excuse to show Paris and to show his idea of romance and romantic city. A beautiful woman, Regina (played with old Hollywood grace by Thandie Newton) is in Paris and gets involved in the criminal past of her recently deceased husband and the money he left, where she is helped by a mysterious man whom she falls in love without knowing his identity. Again this film falls in 'two parallel films' theory but here one of the film overpowers the other. The suspense and the thrill doesn’t hold up to the romance in the air, or may be its just for me. Looked to me as if Demme’s whole heart is in romance and he was just cheerleading the thrills.

And at last I saw Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic Showgirls and it is indeed an excellent film. I was so impressed that I saw two more of Verhoeven’s films – Starship Troopers and RoboCop – both of them are good, Robocop slightly better than Starship Troopers, but none of them is as good as Showgirls. All of them are parodies not so much of current culture of show business, media hype, nationalism and militarism, but of story ideas bred out of these concepts, so these films can even be considered as parodies of our ideas of narrative, where things fall in places at odd moments to augment our emotional responses and to give us a feel of a story. Like Showgirls is a parody of the story idea “a star is born” or “that sexy go-getter bitch”, RoboCop is of “a hero savior” and Starship Troopers is of “the world is ours” or “shoot that alien”. What Verhoeven does it to add lots of humor into it and its that kind of humor which is considered sick and enjoying it more so. During the audition scene in Showgirls, one of the male manager asks a topless girl “I am erect, why are not you?.” The sex and nudity of Verhoeven’s film is not without purpose, they are obviously for titillation and he does not mask his intentions. I think, he is one of most shameless and fearless directors we have, but if you watch carefully his parodies are not without moral center. Last year I saw some of his more open Dutch films. The Fourth Man is very good and some sort of a homoerotic version of Basic Instinct. Soldier of Orange is quite good too. I also saw first 20 mins of Black Book but I don’t feel too keen to complete it.

Other than that, I saw three short films by Mike Kuchar. Mike Kuchar is considered the master of camp by many and his films are act of Vandalism, a form of good natured sabotage, as he explains his idea of camp in an interview. It will take long to discuss his films and whatever little I saw of his work, he has some resemblance to Guy Maddin's work. It may not be at a thematic level but somewhere they both cross their paths and even walk together for a while. A good write-up on him and his brother George Kushar here. After seeing his films I tried to read Susan Sontag's celebrated Essay on camp, which did not make much sense to me, mainly because my basic idea of camp is a way to fight intellectual dissection of ideas and when Camp as an idea is intellectually dissected, its looks like homage to Bresson by adapting his film for theatre. Also, I recently watched Terry Zwigoff's thought provoking film on R. Crumb. I am now trying to get some Crumb comics in my library (I doubt it though) or internet. More on that later.

Pic: Illustration by R. Crumb. Image source.

Paul Taylor's Eventide

Few weeks back I saw Matthew Diamond's Oscar nominated documentary, Dancemaker, which takes a look at ace choreographer Paul Taylor and his dance company. It has few amazing dances and their behind the scene stories. This one is called Eventide and is my favorite. I also like Paul Taylor's commentory during this dance.



The other favorite from the documentary is here. After seeing this docu, I also felt how criminally underrated Altman's The Company is. In the recent films which I have seen, none captures the pains and the pleasures of a Performance, on and off the stage, as The Company does. Now Dancemaker stands on the same podium. One more film about dance and music which is an absolute favorite is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes.

Jaur Se Baaz Aaye...

Jaur Se Baaz Aaye, Par Baaz Aayein Kya ?



One of my other favorite here. Lyrics here.

mujhe hum-safar bhi mila koi tu shikasta haal meri tarha
kai manziloo.n ka thaka howa, kahee.n raaste main luta howa

Hiatus... and Films...

Its been over a month that I have blogged and in fact I never even thought of any need or felt any urge to blog. This sufficiently tells us the weak foundations on which this blog rests, or rather sleeps. Last time, when I started to write something to post with urgency but quickly discarded was about a brilliant film that I saw almost by accident. I had seen Who's Camus Anyway? laying in Chicago Library racks for long but never picked it up (now I think of it, I attribute this to its title (which in my opinion is the weakest thing about the film). I thought of it as an intellectual pseudo-serious student film). I am glad that I read Ed Gonzalez's (one of my favorite critics, he is thoughtful, incisive and unafraid to go wrong) praises of this film and I picked it over Makhmalbaf's The Silence (Nice film but little too beautiful, I should not say this I even smelt some bad breath of Theo Angelopoulos in few scenes).

One of the main reasons for not seeing as many films as I see and thus not blogging at all is the turbulence in my professional life. Since things were related to work, it was easy going, but also time consuming and uninspiring. As shameful as it seems, I did not even see 10 films in March, and I was always meek in my choices, trying to see easy going comedies or re-watching things passively. In the course of events, I left Chicago two weeks back and came to a small town in Indiana, thus further reducing my chances to see good films. Chicago, though not New York, was a place for film buffs, where every international film sooner or later hits either Gene Siskel, Music Box or Landmark Century Cinema, and backed with big Harold Washington Library DVD section, one can cover a lot. Gene Siskel was a great place and I saw three great documentaries there last year- Into Great Silence, Lake of Fire and Manufactured Landscapes - I liked them in that order.

Actually I liked them so much that I saw each of them twice. Lake of Fire turns brilliant in its last reels where director raises the film above pro-life/pro-choice voices and shows us how a woman going through abortion given all the support of the father of the child (at least at the time) and the care of the doctor feels. When after undergoing an abortion, she bravely starts weeping in front of the camera, pro-life/pro-choice merge and evaporate into something which is beyond such questions - the human trauma of being a mother in such a situation. Similarly, in Manufactured Landscapes' brilliant opening tracking shot of a Chinese manufacturing unit assembly line brings the main voice of the film - although highly beautiful and tightly composed these landscapes are manufactured and underneath them lies something free and natural. In one of the episodes which shows the construction of the biggest dam project in China and how it displaced thousands of people, the irony comes forth in a matter-of-fact way when people who were evacuated gets job for livelihood to break and clear away their own houses, to create these manufactured landscapes. Also, the pitch perfect photography of the documentary - anything from colorful landscapes of area overexploited for natural resources to the stack of computer waste piled like a modern art piece - makes us wonder what beauty means to us when we see these pictures segregated from their context.

On a visual level, Into Great Silence creates a space of peace and tranquility, and aligns itself to the rhythm of its subject, whether it is the repetitiveness of their day to day activities or their minimal interaction with each other. Into Great Silence, to me, is a possibility of such existence, which is very life affirming. Seeing this film second time (when you are not seeing it for anything but experiencing it on visceral level) was one of the highlights of my 2007 film watching.

Coming back to my favorite film this year (2008) yet, Who's Camus Anyway?, its film about a bunch of students trying to make a film on Camus' The Stranger. This film is as much about Camus' existential themes, as it is about film making, and to complete the arc, as much about the players involved in film making, on and off the sets. As you can see, all this gives the director, Mitsuo Yanagimachi, enough freedom to explore the idea of fiction, reality and their relation to film-making. In Fassbinder's minor effort Beware of the Holy Whore, he was more concerned with the manipulative master-slave relationship between the disinterested cast and sadomasochistic smug director and to some extent about how films are reflection of that but not how films represent reality or even better, how reality and fiction are inseparable when we talk about films. There are several high points in Who's Camus Anyway?, the first is the opening tracking shot which not only reminds us of Altman's The Player but even talks about it, and obviously the climax where film plays an is-it-real-or-not game with the audiences while the most crucial scene of the film is shot. It becomes scary and reliving breath by breath and I started questioning why I even liked the lame and one dimensional provocations of Haneke in Funny Games. The director of Who's Camus Anyway? is not punishing his audience or not even condescending them, but at that same time, with enough cinematic power, showing how the images lie but also how they are the only truth you have when you see a film - a free form experiment of both the powers and limits of cinema.

But my favorite scene from the film comes midway. Here one character playfully starts to read some sort of psychoanalysis report of film's lead character (based on The Stranger’s Meursault) and after few seconds other voice (this time a grim voice of a girl, with little music in the backgroud) starts to read the opening paragraph of The Stranger and slowly, with the dual voices reading symptom and analysis, the camera moves where a bunch of students are playing cello and flute and all these voices converge into a scariest snare, as the camera move towards darkness. For me, this scene works purely on cinematic level, it has no relation to the narrative or the character arc, but I must say this was my cinematic high of the year, yet to be topped.