The Prestidigitator

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.

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. 

…

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. 

[Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle and Kalafudra]

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

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/

Ten minutes into the film and you’re certain you’ve chanced upon something rare; a film that is truly an auteur’s labor of love. The Fall is not so much about imagination as it is about childhood innocence.

In a hospital in early 20th century Los Angeles, Roy Parker (Lee Pace), a depressed and suicidal stunt man paralyzed from the waist down befriends a free spirited young girl, Alexandria (played brilliantly by Catinca Untaru, who at the time was only 6 years old) secretly hoping he can charm her enough to get a bottle of morphine. He proceeds to tell her a story that he makes up along the way and the audience is privy to a sumptuously visual tale calling into action colorful characters ranging from an angry slave to Charles Darwin and his pet monkey.

As Roy becomes progressively more depressed in the real world, his story gets darker and immerses an innocent young girl into the recesses of the mind a man on the brink of suicide. As Alexandria starts getting emotionally involved, she goes to great lengths to keep the story going, to keep Roy going, all the while hoping for a happy ending. The third act was so emotionally engaging that I have to confess, I think I may have shed a tear or two.

Shot in some 25 countries, the film is an eye-popping travelogue and the compositions of a few frames are so ridiculously brilliant that you can’t help but marvel at what goes on inside the head of the director.

The characterizations and the plot itself are deeply flawed mostly because the director pays too much attention to visual detail but you’ll be hardpressed not to overlook that. You have to hand it to Tarsem for his audacity; he shot the film over four years with his own money and never allowed studios to touch a single frame. This is evidenced by the lack of a truly uplifting ending.

For me, the film was an immensely personal experience taking me back to my childhood when bedtime stories played an integral part; perhaps the reason why I tend to go off on tangents so often. Escapism, you see, is a beautiful thing.

9.5/10

(Cross-posted on Couch Critics)

(I’m going to try my best to limit the use of superlatives here but in all likelihood, this write-up will seem biased. But then again, I’m the kind of Batman fan you’d stay away from – the kind that owns all the landmark graphic novels, books his ticket a month in advance, queues up at the cinema two hours beforehand sporting a Batman t-shirt and foams at the mouth during the screening. Blame it on Stendhal I say.)

The Dark Knight is by far the finest cinema experience I’ve had in the last few years. It’s a rich, dark, complex and compelling crime saga told so brilliantly that you’ll have to remind yourself that it’s based on a comic book character who runs around in a cape and cowl. The film surpasses it’s predecessor on almost every level. A lot has been said about the performances but what struck me the most was the solid writing. The screenplay is outstanding and borrows heavily from The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns with lines that never seem forced and are sure to elicit some sort of debate on vigilantism and surveillance.

Every successful comic book film has to have unforgettable villains and TDK delivers there. Heath Ledger’s Joker is a maniac – an absolute that runs rampant through Gotham. He has no motives and no back story; he simply refers to himself as an ‘agent of chaos’. Ledger’s performance can hardly be called a performance; it’s more or less free form improv. I cannot imagine any other actor inhabiting a character that psychotic. It will go down in history as iconic. Period. Harvey Dent’s character arc is fantastically realized too. Dent is the white knight as opposed to the morally ambiguous Batman; a man Bruce Wayne wishes he was but cannot be. Dent’s transformation into Harvey Two-Face…well, the less said, the better.

Despite taking comic book liberties, the film explores serious themes; mostly dwellings on the nature of heroism and our innate need for heroes. Not once do you feel like it aspires to be something that talks down to you. For once, a comic book film takes itself and the audience seriously and treads that fine line between pulp art and reality.

Sadly, The Dark Knight does have flaws that keep it away from masterpiece territory. The James Gordon arc felt a bit forced at times and the sequence at the beginning with the copycat Bat-men felt like it belonged in a different movie altogether. However, at the end of the day, this is fantastic and mind-blowingly brilliant pop art – a film that raises the bar so high that it’s next to impossible to follow it up with something this good.

9.5/10

(Oh and I have tickets to a double-bill screening of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight for this Sunday. Be jealous.)

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror: F W Murnau (1922)

German Expressionism, it is said, rose not because of an artistic revival but because German film makers found it hard to compete with the extravagance of their Hollywood counterparts; so they resorted to symbolism and darker subtexts. F W Murnau’s Nosferatu was one of the earlier expressionist forays into film making and is widely considered a masterpiece. It is not the plot per se that strikes one, but the imagery; beautifully shot in black and white (well, they didn’t really have a choice there) and a genuinely creepy performance by Max Shreck as Count Orlock.

One of the primary reasons I watched the film was thanks to 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, where Willem Dafoe plays a fictionalized version of Max Shreck. At 78 minutes, the film is quite easy to sit through and for a 1922 silent era film, quite entertaining too.

Say Anything: Cameron Crowe (1989)

If there’s one genre that’s well and truly dead, it’s the romantic comedy genre. What passes off as romance these days is mostly crammed with fart jokes and gratuitous sex. What happened to the days when the hero was an upright, optimistic and by and large ethical gentleman? Say Anything, Cameron Crowe’s (Jerry Maguire) 1989 directorial debut is a surprisingly smart, adequately mushy and thoroughly quotable gem. John Cusack plays (a younger version of a role he would play in High Fidelity) an extremely average, kickboxing enthusiast of a 19 year old grappling with career choices et al when he falls hook, line and sinker for the over achieving Ione Skye. I could say that it’s devoid of cliches but the fact is most later films in the genre have lifted something or the other from this one.

Cameron Crowe’s films have all had amazing soundtracks and this one’s no exception. Add to that a very likable couple, a great scene involving a boom box and some very memorable lines; almost as good as High Fidelity. Almost.

Nobody thinks it will work, do they?
No. You just described every great success story.

Links:

• Scene from Shadow of the Vampire
• Nosferatu: Entire film