New Years back at home/college were usually heralded with drunken musings or solemn reminiscing. This is probably the first time I’ve been part of such a loud and bombastic New Year Celebration. Tens of thousands of convulsing human bodies reeking of alcohol counting down to another year…things don’t get any better do they?
Have a great year ahead!
I love the way this country smells. I’ll never forget it. It’s kind of spicy.
Wes Anderson, in many interviews has stated that this film was intended as an homage to Satyajit Ray (and even inspired by Jean Renoir) and that’s exactly what hits you from the first frame; a poignant, stylized and funny opening sequence shot somewhere on the streets of Rajasthan. A character (referred to in the credits as The Businessman) played by Bill Murray rushes to the railway station in a cab and chases a train that has already started moving. Enter Adrien Brody with a couple of bags, cue slow motion and the track, ‘This Time Tomorrow’ by The Kinks. If you’ve seen a Wes Anderson film, you’ll know this is a sign of good things to come.
Wes Anderson, pardon the cliche, is one of a kind. His worlds are inhabited by people born into decadence with quirks and eccentricities that seem far too unreal but still manage to exhibit emotions and oddities that are quite humanistic. The Darjeeling Limited is hardly concerned about conventional plot mechanisms but flits across many familiar themes; sibling rivalry, love, family, oedipal conflicts and of course, closure.
Three brothers who have fallen apart over the years meet up on The Darjeeling Limited under the insistence of one of them who feels they need to feel something on the lines of a spiritual awakening. As they visit temples, meet people, share adventures and embrace the culture, they come apart at the seams. One of the more beautiful scenes is when the youngest brother Jack wonders if they would have ever been friends if they weren’t brothers (I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people.).
Ever since Rushmore, I’ve been a huge fan of Anderson. While critics think his films are more stylistic than anything else, I think that’s pretty much what Anderson strives to create, that and characters who in spite of their inherent weirdness still manage to redeem themselves. Anderson’s choice in music is impeccable. The score features tracks composed by Satyajit Ray himself and obligatory punk rock songs from the 70s.
The cinematography by Robert D. Yeoman is as usual very Andersonesque; wide angle lenses and some pretty inventive shots. The settings and locations are a tad bit over dressed but this isn’t unusual considering the man at the helm. The casting is near perfect too. Apart from the main characters, it will be criminal not to mention the beautiful Amara Karan who I intend to immediately hunt down and propose to. She has an amazing screen presence and oozes with sensuality.
Of course, India is portrayed as exotic (to Anderson, India doesn’t seem to have changed since the 1970s) which isn’t such a bad thing since he points to Ray as his inspiration. Also, some of the Indian characters have very noticeable Yankee accents; all forgiven, mostly because I feel Anderson has created his best film to date, moving, heart warming and stupendously beautiful to look at.
9/10
PS: Hotel Chevalier is a mandatory companion piece to the film.
2007 has been a great year for cinema what with a number of films that managed to successfully combine both art house sensibilities and general appeal. Following is a list (in no particular order) of films I loved this last year.
Zodiac: David Fincher
Brilliantly photographed and very atmospheric. David Fincher redeems himself from Panic Room.
Ratatouille: Brad Bird
One of the best animated films ever. Amazing animation and a very very appealing story.
Sunshine: Danny Boyle
This was as close to a science fiction masterpiece as it gets and remains criminally underrated. The film had some brilliant visuals and a plot rife with moral and philosophical dillemas.
The Bourne Ultimatum: Paul Greengrass
Kinetic.
Michael Clayton: Tony Gilroy
Tom Wilkinson delivers one of his best performances in this brilliant morality tale. George Clooney plays an ethically conflicted attorney who grapples with truths about the firm he represents.
No Country For Old Men: Ethan Coen
I can’t say I’ve fully understood this film yet but I was blown away by Roger Deakins’s photography which induces a sense of claustrophobia in spite of the barren landscape and Javier Bardem’s chilling portrayal of Anton Chigurh who will go down in history as one of the greatest cinematic villains.
Control: Anton Corbijn
Perfect; the very moving and gut wrenching true story of Ian Curtis who battled epilepsy, rose to rock stardom, eventually gave into the trappings and finally committed suicide at 23. The black and white photography, brilliant soundtrack and wide angle scenes make this far superior to almost every other biopic.
Worthy mentions: Eastern Promises, Stardust, Waitress, Once, The Good Shepherd, Into The Wild
Yet to see: Juno, There Will Be Blood, Gone Baby Gone, I’m Not There
The Vatican has outdone itself this time. After the Ten Commandments of Motoring and declaring itself as the one true church, the dark empire has denounced The Golden Compass. For the uninitiated, The Golden Compass is the (children’s) film based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books and from the looks of it, the film will lose millions of dollars in revenue thanks to obedient sheep all over the world.
The Vatican on Wednesday condemned the film “The Golden Compass,” which some have called anti-Christian, saying it promotes a cold and hopeless world without God. -Reuters
I keep forgetting that in spite of wars, famines, disasters and Uwe Boll, the world is still a warm and fuzzy place. And, out of the thousands of films churned out over the years, it had to be The Golden Compass that promoted such blatant blasphemy.
“In Pullman’s world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events,” the editorial said. -Reuters
Am I the only one who finds irony in the above statement? I’d really like to know what the church has to say about the last time God controlled situations and dominated events. Even the most pessimistic of speculative fiction writers would not have imagined that even in the year 2007, religion would enjoy the freedom to air such tripe and worse still, that there would be enough people to actually enforce it.
Damn global warming and nuclear arms, religion may very well end up being humanity’s undoing.
PS: Piss off the Spaghediety and you’ll be hearing from me.
“I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” -Woody Allen
A recent article on Wired points out that Sirtrius Pharmaceuticals treated diabetic mice by slowing their metabolism or simply by slowing down age related cellular breakdown. There have always been an umpteen number of articles on anti aging research in the past thanks to people’s obsession with death and fear of aging.
The drugs apparently work on the Mitochondria which over time accumulate damage and cause cellular breakdown; so Mitochondria rejuvenators (in lab animals) have halted diseases and extended longevity. So you basically reduce suffering before death but in spite of this it’s still known that animals inexplicably drop dead at the end of their traditional lifespans.
No matter how well anti aging drugs work, death still is an inevitability…but what had me really interested was another Wired article that ponders on how anti aging research will change the way we die thereby altering the way we live. Would we live life more fully if we knew that death was an inevitability that came without warning as opposed to long disease ridden miserable lives that preceded death (thanks to medical advances and all which in effect does nothing more than stall)?
The jury is still out but this is all very mighty interesting stuff.
Christopher Nolan’s follow up to the brilliant Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is well over half a year away from hitting the cinemas but the first trailer (apart from the teaser) made it’s way online via one of the zillion viral sites promoting the film. The last time I watched a trailer so many times was over 3 years back when the first film was released.
The rusty brown feel of the first film has been replaced by a metallic blue hue, accentuating the cold and menacing tone what with the nemesis being nothing less that Batman’s biggest foe, The Joker. The trailer does give a little too much away (I would have preferred if they downplayed the Joker a bit before the film came out) and does give far too much importance to the explosions and action scenes but fans will be blown away by Heath Ledger’s performance (from the two minutes we get to see) as The Joker…creepy and throughly maniacal. This could very well be every fan’s ultimate wet dream.
Harvey Dent is conspicuously absent from the trailer as is Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow…here’s hoping it’s worth the wait. In Nolan we trust.
Go here for the trailer in all it’s glory or feast your eyes on the embedded vid below.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=tkT1wdRePco]
I’ve just spent the last nine hours watching 3 near perfect films, back to back; the cinephile in me couldn’t have asked for more.
Gegen die Wand (Head-On): Faith Akin (2004)
One of the best foreign films I’ve watched so far this year; a tale of self destruction, love and rage. Faith Akin’s brilliant Turkish/German venture is as brutal and cynical as they come. The story is of a suicidal young Turkish woman who marries a 40 something widower to escape from the clutches of her overbearing parents and slowly finds out that even freedom comes at a painful price. Great performances and a mind blowing soundtrack make this one hell of a gritty experience.
Eastern Promises: David Cronenberg (2007)
Disturbing, violent but oddly uplifting. His earlier work, A History of Violence was a film that I’ve often debated with people about. Cronenberg’s characters and their moral ambiguities are often accused of being artificial but I cannot disagree more. Like David Lynch, Cronenberg allows the viewer to piece the fragments of the story and characters themselves. Eastern Promises, while being less subtle still packs a much more powerful punch than AHoV in my opinion whilst still managing to entertain, in a sick twisted way of course.
Once: John Carney (2006)
This little Irish gem (filmed for less than 150K $) is the kind of film that reaffirms one’s faith in humanity and it’s ability to love. It’s impossible to remain unaffected by a film such as this. The characters are people you could come across in real life but what makes this more than an average love story is that music takes precedence over conversation. Whenever a film gets labeled as a love story, it’s natural to not expect much, but this story of an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant is unsentimental yet profoundly moving and perfectly executed.
“I’ve had a total recalibration of my mind, you know. I mean, it’s like, I’ve been banging my head against this 19th century type, um, what? Thought mode? Construct? Human construct? Well, the wall doesn’t exist. It’s not there, you know. I mean, they tell you, look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, there is no tunnel. There’s just no structure. The underlying order is chaos.”
-Slacker (1991)/Richard Linklater
If you don’t like the story your culture is writing, it’s not enough to rail against it or say you don’t subscribe to it. You have the obligation to be writing your own story– To be a contributing author of your own culture.
This is exactly what David Mack seems to be doing through his groundbreaking Kabuki series; a powerful comic book series that defies all precedents in the genre and succeeds in creating a visually arresting world like never before.
What jumps at you when you flip through the pages for the first time is the artwork. Unlike traditional comic books, it’s not just pencil and ink that adorn the pages, it’s an amalgamation of various styles ranging from paint to magazine clippings. The story telling too is far from ordinary; characters take up more space than the plot per se. The plot is merely an excuse for rich ideas and musings on consciousness, philosophy, deceit, knowledge of the self and love.
Kabuki is a girl driven by vengeance who dies after massacring The Board of Directors of an evil front called Noh. She is brought back to life and to a mental rehabilitation facility by the Control Corps, where she is reprogrammed but takes on a new identity and flees when she learns that her former associates are after her life. Over the course of the book, the plot hardly moves; Kabuki: The Alchemy is a more of an introspective tale than anything else.
Intellectually and artistically, this book is like nothing I’ve ever come across before. Kabuki is a sort of postmodernist counter culture defying all known rules of story telling and goes to show what a powerful medium the comic book has become over the years.
[Pictures sourced from www.davidmackguide.com]
A couple of hours back, I had the chance to play around with the Lego Mindstorms NXT Robot (Alpha Rex) and was blown away by what I saw. I vaguely remember a toy I had as a kid; a robot that had a button on it’s head and made noises when pressed. That was close to 20 years back and boy, how times have changed!
The central part of the kit (also sold separately) is the NXT Intelligent Brick that houses a 32 Bit ARM7 processor, an 8 bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, 4 input ports, 3 output ports and an LCD display. The beauty of the kit is the fact that you can fiddle around with an umpteen number of accessories and build a number of little robotic contraptions. Programming isn’t too difficult either; basic programs can be written directly using the menu on the brick and more complex ones can be downloaded using the USB port. I was told that you could also do it from your mobile phone thanks to Bluetooth connectivity.
The bundled programming software, NXT-G v1.0 allows the user to write a number of simple programs like performing calculations, working servo motors and programming light and sound sensors. The kit comes with 3 identical servo motors and 4 different input sensors; touch, sound, light and ultrasonic. While the majority of us got to play around with Lego blocks as kids, today’s thumb suckers get to fiddle around with exponentially cooler stuff. Pangs of envy are unavoidable.
I’m seriously considering shelling out 379$ to get the Alpha Rex robot. The kid in me has been outed and you can’t coax him back in.
