The Prestidigitator

= awesomeness.

This BSG video set to the Beastie Boys track, Sabotage has already gone viral. But to really appreciate its brilliance, you need to compare the original Spike Jonze video and the mashup.

Genius.

“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.

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.

Pulp science fiction rarely gets better.

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. 

6.5/10

Right now, the upcoming Watchmen film ought to be the least of my worries; but I’ve seriously considered not watching Zack Snyder’s apparently faithful adaptation of the seminal graphic novel. You see, a comic geek scorned is a force to be reckoned with.

The first comic book I remember falling in love with was an issue of Batman (a Man Bat story arc) sometime around 1993. Frequent trips to India allowed me to source comics from airport stalls. Ever read the now discontinued and forgotten Thunderbolt? I have. And I remember specific frames from the book. Perhaps it was an escape from my relatively drama free childhood or maybe it was a rite of passage every young boy went through; whatever it was, I never got over the medium.

Third year of college. Holed up in that room, Watchmen convinced me that the comic book was far more than just colourful frames with conversation bubbles. The Comic Book had become The Graphic Novel. Characters had become morally ambiguous all of a sudden, heroes had become fallible and lofty ideals seemed suspicious. The Superhero concept had been deconstructed. Alan Moore joined the ranks of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Dave Gibbons that of Rembrandt and Picasso. (Oh yes, comic book nerds are known to make wild exaggerations.)

I’ve been reading the book again; taking in every frame, digesting every line and assimilating concepts, some of which still strain my primitive frontal lobe. The book is an assault on the senses like no other; a work that perhaps was best left untouched.

However, I am mildly curious to see how Snyder translates something this complicated. 300 wasn’t exactly a brilliant film. If he does pull it off, will audiences be able to sit through 3 hours of an uncaring superman, an impotent vigilante and a masked anti hero who goes by the name Rorschach?

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;  Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.

I remember reading Philip Roth’s Everyman a couple of years ago and then Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores more recently; both of which tell rather morbidly, the stories of old men who after living lives of  regret and philandering are faced with their imminent mortality and unfulfilled desires. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino draws strong parallels to these stories. Walt Kowalski, however, shuts his emotions in and redeems himself in the strangest and, for a film with so much profanity and tongue-in-cheek political incorrectness,  most gut wrenching of ways.

Eastwood plays a tired and lonely version of Dirty Harry or even, Blondie, who finds himself as an antique from a bygone era in drastically different times. Like most scowling old people, Walt Kowalski is an irate old man who feels the world truly went under after the 60s. He invariably ends up helping a young Hmong immigrant find his bearings in a gang infested neighbourhood. Unlike the terrible Seven Pounds, Gran Torino lets us empathize with a character who learns how to finally let go of life. I do realize suicide is an ethically sketchy subject, but rarely has a film tackled it with such grace. 

And that final scene where Tao drives off in the Grand Torino – such catharsis.

8.5/10

PS: Oh yeah, spoilers.

The concept of destiny irks me; that way, I buy into Dostoevsky’s morbid world view. But Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Millions) has intricately woven magic realism into a modern day fable about survival and love; a film set at the center of India’s commercial hub.

Reaction to this film has been intriguing. Critics seem to be spellbound by the rather straightforward screenplay. The film would have never worked weren’t it for Danny Boyle (and his Indian counterpart, Loveleen Tandan). For one, Boyle infuses the proceedings with an overdose of realism; so much that you can almost smell what goes on. On the other hand, he romanticizes the aspirations of the protagonist. Jamal Malik, cares more for his long-lost sweetheart than the 2 Crore (20 Million in the film) Rupees at stake.

Remarkably, the use of HD (SI-2K Mini Digital Cinema Camera) gives a vibrancy and immediacy to the otherwise appalling backdrop. Boyle employs the frantic pace that he used so well in Trainspotting and achieves a structure that few Indian filmmakers have been capable of. Danny Boyle, much like Richard Linklater belongs to a rare breed of filmmakers – those capable of telling a story both empathetically as well as intellectually.

There is so much to say about the film- the characters, the score, some brilliant sequences; but I shall refrain at the risk of coming across as vapid and dense. To the discerning viewer, there are plenty of flaws but the audience at a limited screening I watched this film with burst into applause towards the end. The film is life-affirming without being overly sentimental, escapist without being ridiculous and most importantly, bloody entertaining. Reminded me why I love cinema so much.

9/10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048/

Having watched quite a few Kiarostami films, I ended up going for  Correspondences. It’s one of those exhibitions wherein audio-visual elements take center stage as museum installations; an experience that sometimes turns out to be grating and very very confusing (case in point being ‘replay christian marclay‘ a couple of months back).

However, Correspondences was a brilliantly rewarding and moving experience. Viktor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami apparently never met in person till the exhibition but they maintained a very unique rapport with each other through a sort of creative dialogue that gave birth to this particular installation. Despite being from vastly different backgrounds, these two auteurs found common ground in their visions of childhood, memory and cinema. There are some very powerful images (photographs by Kiarostami especially) and an excellent black and white short film by Erice titled, Lifeline (video link). Two very interesting pieces by Kiarostami included projections of a sleeping couple (Sleepers) onto the floor and another ten minute projection of a sleeping child.

Occasionally, you do feel like a voyeur but then again, isn’t that what cinema is essentially about?

(Cross-posted on Couch-Critics)

Links:

• Letters to the World
• Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences (Paperback)