I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you bitch.
I can see how John Krasinski’s debut feature can come across as shallow and pretentious to some. It’s ambitious and slightly uneven but it’s also one of the most honest interpretations of the male psyche I’ve seen in a long time. The thing about cinema is that while it can convey emotions, it’s also severely limited by the director’s aesthetic. And that’s why this film works; because technically, it’s a lot like Before Sunset or even, Tape. Frames are sparse and apart from the characters, little else fills the screen.
Julianne Nicholson’s character, reeling from a breakup, decides to study the effect of the feminist movement on men, or so she says. She sets up interviews with various men and they open up about relationships, women and sex. Do men really know what today’s women want? The film is funny, repulsive and mostly, insightful. A friend of mine referred to it as ‘Vagina Monologues for Men – Penis Monologues’, which when you think about it, is quite accurate. One scene that really stood out was that of a college professor reflecting on 21 years of being married. After an awkward pause, he muses, “Is it shallow? Does it sound shallow? Or do you think the truth behind this kind of thing will always sound kind of shallow? Everybody’s real reasons?”
Granted, the film is an exercise in vanity and it does have an inherently convoluted logic but I loved it and intend on seeking out and reading more of David Wallace Foster’s works.
“The loss of religious faith is a slow and fragile process, like the raising of continents,” writes Darwin to his wife. That one line from the film resonates greatly with my personal philosophy and is perhaps one of the few reasons I enjoyed this rather ponderous study of Darwin’s struggle with faith and evidence.
The more I think about the film, the more glaring the flaws seem. The film seems conflicted about what caused Darwin’s inability to complete his treatise, On the Origin of Species – the death of his daughter or his accommodationist views on Christianity.
Creationists have long argued, albeit with no documented evidence that Darwin recanted on his death bed. Creation, based on the book, Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes dispels the myth and portrays Darwin as a man with strong convictions even if he occasionally questioned them.
Face it, Avatar was never really going to live up to the hype.
Granted, James Cameron’s return to screen is every bit a visual spectacle as they say; Pandora is unlike anything we’ve ever been subjected to especially in 3D. The environments are lush and Pandora’s inhabitants are stunningly rendered. Visually, the film is brilliant and deserves every bit of praise it gets.
Sadly, the script is overwrought with cliches bordering on heavy handedness. It would’ve been enough if it were simply an allegory for civilizations and their misplaced sense of entitlement. Turns out, it’s also about the environment. Thankfully, the last 40 minutes made up for all the preachiness.
It’s interesting that Cameron never strays from the basics – there’s the three-act narrative, James Horner’s pounding orchestral score and a voice-over. For all the technical wizardry involved, Avatar is a very conventional film and a very good one at that.
Trust Woody Allen to make you sit through a film about an insufferable intellectual who calls children, “submental cretins”. Diminutive middle-aged man constantly ranting about death, sex and existential angst – never gets old. And always funny.
I’ve been drawn to Woody Allen’s shtick since college (there’s a dirty joke somewhere in there); I’m one of those very few people (going by the huge backlash from critics) who think that Allenesque male angst and pathos are as socially and culturally relevant today as they were back in the 70s. And if you look a little closer, you’ll realize that Allen’s philosophy has somewhat evolved over the last 40 years.
Towards the end of Manhattan, Issac Davis speaks into a tape recorder and asks himself why life is worth living. There’s Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and then, Tracy’s face. That scene has always appealed to the romantic in me.
Exactly 30 years later, an older and perhaps wiser Boris Yellnikoff seems to have gotten a little less materialistic.
My story is, whatever works as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filtch a little joy in this cruel and pointless life, that’s my story.
I’m willing to overlook the cinematic flaws for the simple reason that at the end of the day, his films tend to remind you that there’s always clever humor to be mined from meaninglessness and paranoia.
Richard Dawkins’s new book is a strange animal. Marketed as a textbook to illuminate, it turns out to be a polemic of sorts and as a result, is bound to infuriate what should have been his core audience – deniers of evolution.
Being an avowed nontheist myself, I find it a little bothersome that Dawkins refers to creationists as ‘history deniers’ and often places them on the same allegorical boat as holocaust deniers. This is especially funny because Ben Stein and his ilk constantly draw parallels between evolutionists and the Nazis. Tangled web, this.
I’ve been a little wary of the ‘New Atheist’ movement spearheaded by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (with the occasional cracker-defilement by a certain tentacled professor) mostly because they tend to come across as a tad intimidating. Make no mistake; I greatly admire their writings and have spent hours in front of my computer listening to them bemoan the stupidity of our species. However, I’m of the opinion that if one can’t be convinced by reason and logic, he/she ought to be ignored. There is only so much that can be done for people who insist on finding meaning in silly stories. If you believe that virgins give birth or that you’ll be a ‘well-hung billionaire with wings‘ in your next life, you mostly likely spend a lot of your free time away from what we call, the real world. Let evolution take its course, I say.
(See what I did there?)
The book, however, does a lot of things right. Dawkins explains in painstaking detail how evolution and dating techniques really work and dispels myths about the absence of transitional fossils and other such media fuelled fallacies. Personally, I feel very strongly about this; what is at stake here is the grandest theory in history that provides an all encompassing view of life. Despite the abundance of information out there in the public domain, I was asked why a worm still exists (sic) if we evolved from it . Nevermind that I threw a fit at the mere insinuation, it is imperative that one possesses a rudimentary understanding of what one wants to argue against. And for that, this book is a brilliant start. It is informative and dare I say, entertaining.
Dawkins’s book is a clear and lucid case against anti-evolutionists though he does resort to name-calling once every ten pages. If you can overlook that, the book will provide hours of great science reading. Despite being such an elegant theory, Dawkins reiterates what makes evolution truly remarkable. It can be disproved. But it hasn’t. Not by anyone credible, anyway.
Contrary to what Wheeler and Feynman may have postulated, to us lesser mortals, time travel have and will always seem inherently paradoxical. The Terminator films completely ignored the paradoxes involved while the more recent Star Trek sidestepped them by calling on a plot device that could either have been brilliant or just plain lazy screenwriting. But the best time travel films have always been the ones that completely embraced the absurdities involved; case in point being the ultra low budget yet supremely brilliant 2004 indie, Primer.
Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes) is a lot like Primer even though it descends into slasher territory mid way through. Like Primer, it employs a single timeline albeit one populated by multiple copies of the protagonist. Apart from the usual problems involved with time travel, the fun also lies in figuring out whether to root for the original Hector (Hector 1) or the ones that follow him.
Brilliant article by Salman Rushide on what makes a good literary adaptation.
What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there’s no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it’s the thing that gets us through.
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But those who do not know who they are, are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others, comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humourless world, serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humourless, people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new university, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves.
Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them, and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective.
I stand by what I said – Watchmen is an unnecessary adaptation of the graphic novel. As a piece of visual pulp art, the film succeeds. But as an adaptation of Alan Moore’s ideas, Watchmen is a failure albeit an interesting one.
The opening credit sequence is a brilliant slow motion montage set to Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’. This establishes the Watchmen universe – an alternate reality where Nixon is in his fifth term, superheroes are real, a giant blue man wins the Vietnam conflict for America and the Cold War has escalated to a nuclear stand-off. The plot follows a masked anti-hero, Rorschach as he tries to uncover clues to the murder of a former masked vigilante, The Comedian.
Visually, Dave Gibbons‘ frames are perfectly translated on celluloid and despite what I feared, the slow motion shots and fight sequences are quite nicely staged when compared to lazy quick cuts prevelant in action films today. The colour palette suits the dark tone of the film. Dave Gibbon’s choice of colour in the book was unlike those of most comics at the time (case in point, Frank Miller’s revival of Batman) and was an attempt at highlighting the absurdity of masked men running around in tights; that doesn’t seem to have been lost on Snyder.
The plot and narrative lean heavily on Alan Moore’s writing and for most part, doesn’t stray away from the brilliant source material. Where the film fails (and disastrously s0) is when it tries to come up with an original alternative for the ending. There is a huge tonal shift in the third act and character motivations are never obvious to a viewer unfamiliar with the book. Honestly, it was downright silly. However, my favourite bit from the book – Doctor Manhattan’s self imposed exile to Mars – was perfectly done. Doc Manhattan is a naked blue godlike being who has since his freak accident (physics lab accident, of course) become detached from humanity. He teleports himself to Mars after learning he may have been the reason his old friends and lovers seem to have developed cancer. This is perhaps the most outrageous and fantastic arc in the book but it fits right in with the rest of the film.
The soundtrack unfortunately is grating and very out of place. Apart from the opening and closing credits, the songs feel like they were picked out of a Greatest Hits collection from the 80s (Cindy Lauper, Simon and Garfunkel etc). Audiences laughed at what was supposed to be a disturbing sex scene only because Leonard Cohen and a church choir crooned ‘Hallelujah’ in the background. Alan Moore would roll in his grave if he were dead.
I walked out with pretty much the same feeling I had after 300. The film is beautiful to look at but is a muddled mess with flashes of brilliance here and there. Zack Snyder may be a devout fanboy but he may have missed out on what Moore really tried to say – there is no civility in civilization.
