Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things are.

These three films collectively caught up with the child within us. Their handmade craft and quirky imagination shows us a world which is not Pixer perfect. Films like Walle and Up are great, but un-child-like, they are films by adults (and I dont mean it as a compliment). One of the biggest eureka moment of my movie watching career was a realization after watching Kiarostami's Where is my Friend's Home. I realized that none of the adult in that film understood our little hero's state of mind, and that was the whole point. He was like a zombie cruising through an adult non-caring (When I say care, I certainly dont mean food, clothes and general nagging by moms and dads) world. Kiarostami treats him as a full grown human being with his own world around. His world is not incomplete, its just unlike ours. Max of Where the Wild Things are is one such creature too, with a different world and imagination, and his journey into the wild is his own exploration into his own imagination. Director Spike Jones gets that. Second thing about this trio is the hand crafted quality which is infinitely innovative (Mr Fox is so story-book-flat and its so amazing that way) and endlessly spooky (could Caroline be so spooky if it were pixered? Could Mr. Fox be so playful and rollicking otherwise, Could Wild Things be so child-like wild in an adult animated world), and to a kid, this craft looks somehow achievable - sew a button for an eye, make a puppet to dig a burrow, make a monster deadly but not without the possibility of friendship. How can an able child match the perfection of an able adult, that is cruel. Up has perfect balloons and chubby baby, quantum of nostalgia (or are they just fucking cute) for me and you, but plain quotidian for a different world. This trio is all about prolific puerility, a blue pill for the kids.

Bright Star

Bright Star is about Keats (Ben Whishaw) love affair with Fanny Browne (an excellent Abbie Cornish) during his last 3 years (Keats died at 25 of tuberculosis). Bright Star is an oddity, old-fashioned, apologetically romantic - about dreamers and their heartfelt love. Any sniff of wits is of no use here. The brightest moments in the film are where the lovers are together and feel the bliss, sometimes reading poetry and sometimes doing nothing, these quite moments of romantic ecstasy are deeply felt and treasured by lovers. Jane Campion creates elaborate period details without fanfare and her use of nature (all four seasons, bees, butterflies, flowers, fruits, lush trees, lakes, snow, rain, countryside, sounds of the nature) and poetry as a backdrop gives it a distinctive contemplative mood, a whiff of immortality (Fanny walks and disappears in woods as Whishaw read Keats' poetry in the last reels) to this unusually passionate and brutally short love affair.

24 City

24 City chronicles 9 first-person recollections (out of which 4 done with professional actors) of their lives and times in a state-run military factory complex in Chengdu, China that is being demolished to erect luxury futuristic apartments (eponymous 24 City). Jia Zhangke, a master of composition, records passage of time by juxtaposing the old and the new - a lady retelling an old story as the new constructions overlooks in the background, a modern young girl in designer clothes chokes while telling about her parents, getting a breath and strength by saying "I am the daughter of workers". Also Jia Zhangke takes notice of how fast landscape of China is changing. One thing which cinema is good at doing is preserving past. It should be noted that where as in Still Life Jia Zhangke was trying to preserve a collapsing landscape though camera, here in 24 City, it is mostly memories (untold and soon to be forgotten) attached to the factory complex. And when you deal with memories there is always a re-creation of past, and which involves imagination. So it is no wonder that 4 of the 9 interview are fictional accounts. It is not a post-modern approach to make it a pseudo-documentary but its like connecting unfinished story segments (Jia Zhangke took numerous interviews) and use fiction and imagination to fully comprehend and convey the feelings of the people involved. It also connects with the Jia Zhangke's use of pop culture to evoke collective memory of their times. Also, Jia Zhangke does something which I coined as "moving portraits". Moving portrait is a shot created when a subject stands for a still portrait but the portrait is captured as a moving image. The worst thing about photography is its lack of depth in terms of time, usually I am more interested in the space and time before and after the pose. Jia Zhangke does exactly that in his "Moving Portraits". It captures the sublime - the uneasiness, the pre and post-pose person, and by definition if camera lingers, it invariably captures some truth. The pose in the moving portrait is a hint of unreal but it helps reveal something real. Jia Zhangke’s 24 City too reveals more than it shows.

You, the Living

You, the Living is the big mama of A Serious Man. While A Serious Man opens with a zoom in, it ends with a massive zoom out. Like Roy Andersson's last masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living is a collection fifty absurdist, loosely connected long shots of Swedish life. What emerges is, to use a cliche, bigger than sum of its parts - a sincerely-sad, bleakly-funny and enlightening human concoction. Something here to be said about how bleakness of vision not translated into screen dullness like last year's Synecdoche, New York which totally failed to do so. This year both You, the Living and A Serious Man showed us how vital emotions like sorrow and humor are connected with a dotted line.

The Silence of Lorna

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, is a part of a immigration scam - a sham marriage with a Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier) with a plot to get rid of him to marry a Russian mafia-boss to get him Belgium citizenship and her lots of money so that she can marry her boyfriend and start her own business (a snack bar). The plan goes almost alright but our heroine gets all weak and human. Here the director duo follows the cracks of humanity in an otherwise perfect scheme, which as the title suggests, opens as Lorna's moral and human silence breaks away slowly. More suited for my taste, Lorna's silence is more static than handheld (unlike Dardenne Brother other films), helping us to understand our heroine's psyche and her slow inner change, and her final (almost dreamlike) act of revolt and redemption. There is something painfully true yet consoling in the Lorna's journey of humanity and liberation showing a slight hint of madness.

35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis' tone poem observes a father-daughter duo, with the knowledge that she has grown up and will leave. Denis films the routine of their lives so precisely that this upcoming transition is almost a new world order for both. Characters talk about trifle but images talk otherwise. In the films finest scene, in a rainy night four main characters end up in an Afro-bar and start to swirl to the tune of music. Dance, like alcohol is a cinematic equivalent of x-ray in the hands of able artist. So not only we get little under skin of each of them, but also the insight of ethnic-urban tensions of the scene. An excellent visualist, Denis works her way though daily life short sketches up to a roadtrip (before her going out, they both should go together) and earns the emotional power of the their bond. The final shot of two rice cookers might be the most economical image of the whole year (Ozu did the same with the ending image of old man peeling a fruit by himself in Late Spring, inspiration for 35 Shots).

Bergman's Hour of the Wolf

Hour of the Wolf is a film, which falls in the category where you can't decide anything from reviews whether they call it a minor effort or masterpiece if you don't see it yourself, its just too personal to let anyone decide for you (Fellini calls it Bergman's 8 1/2). Hour of the Wolf has the same mix of intense personal and critical thoughts (which are invariably brutally-honest in a Bergman film) about art, artist and his space, like those about God, faith and followers in Winter Light, only that it doesn't have that dour and austere look, its more visibly horrifying. But we don't know for sure, is it a horror film, or a surrealistic document about the existential dread, or about the inescapable trauma of an artist in trouble (about past-demons, creativity, sexuality, genius, madness ?) or about the swamp of an artist's relationships with his/her surroundings and the loved ones. The film changes shades as we view it from the eyes of Johan (Max von Sydow) or Alma (Liv Ullmann). Here is what Bergman has to say about about his film and why it is so, and as usual, he is little hard on himself.

[..] the whole picture is half-spoken sentences (the last unfinished dialog
here). It is ... an unsuccessful attempt. [..] She (Alma) is infected by him.
She is really an earth mother, but she becomes infected and will never return to
her former self. [...] The difficulty with the picture is that I couldn't make
up my mind who it was about. Had I made it from her point of view it would have
been very interesting. But, no, I made it the wrong way. After it was finished,
I tried to turn it over to her; we even reshot some scenes, but it was too late.
To see a man who is already mad become crazier is boring. What would have been
interesting would have been to see an absolutely sane woman go crazy because she
enters his world of unreality, and that infects her. Suddenly, she finds out
that she is lost. I understood this only when the picture was finished.

Moon

Although a good sci-fi is about a sci-fi concept, but it usually tells about the human experience in the wake of it. Its like changing a parameter in the equation of human existence and then dipping a human fish into those waters. It sinks, it swims, it flaps or it survives because it evolves. But as we know them, human needs and emotions are much more complex and the human equation is unimaginably elaborate. And wait, what about dreams and memories - the signposts of being. A good sci-fi movie can tell us the privilege of a deceptively simple human experience by altering these variables. Moon takes place in future when earth power sources have run out and a company (appropriately named Lunar Industries) sets up a base on Moon to extract Helium-3 there and bring it back to the earth. Sam (Sam Rockwell in an great solo(?) performance) is on 3 year contract to look after the base leaving behind his wife and daughter on earth. The good news is that his contract is ending in few days and he will be back to earth, but there is more he should know before it should get happy about it. Sam experiences a new reality, and acts in its wake. Moon is not a bleeding style sci-fi. With all the moon stations and gadgets, it does not look much different present reality, Is it saying that future is same, but just little more out of our control.

A Serious Man

A Serious Man starts with a quote - "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you", but our luckless hero (Larry Gopnik - Michael Stuhlbarg in an absolutely brilliant performance) dares to ask what if he does and still be miserable, and yes, our poor hero is text book miserable kind - with his student black mailing him, his son is smoking weed, his daughter stealing his money for a nose job, his jobless brother living with him and getting in trouble and to give an extra kick, his wife having an affair with his best friend and asking for a divorce because its the "reasonable" thing to do. Given this unusually downbeat plot, its a wonder how Coen brothers keep it up so strongly that there is not a dull moment. A Serious Man can be easily mistaken for a smart guy making fun of somebody in utter despair, but for the Coens undeniable empathy for Larry and their sincere quest to find an answer to his misery gives this film both its soul and its humor. Although there are no answers to our hero's plight, but Coen's lends a hand of understanding and reflection to their bleakest comedy (their beautiful vision of God expectorating on us). After Larry's search, is he wiser now or is he more hopeless (because he is wiser) is Larry's new dilemma. He should, as a rabbi advised him, "Accept the Mystery".