The Prestidigitator

“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.

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?

It’s that time of the year again. The Melbourne International Film Festival is back with a lot less fanfare than last year and unlike last year (when I was broke busy), I plan on catching more films. Two films I’m really looking forward to are the indie sensation ‘In Search of a Midnight Kiss‘ and Guy Maddin’s acclaimed ‘My Winnipeg‘.

Good times ensue.

But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.

The above lines are uttered by a somewhat socially inept homosexual Jew student when the Holocaust is discussed in class. The History Boys is a film filled with ideas and yet turns out to be the funniest film I’ve seen in ages; it treads that fine line between irreverence and seriousness and manages to come off unscathed.

Two teachers — the young Tom Irwin who believes history should be taught objectively (”Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.”) and Hector who possesses a slightly more subjective and emotional world view and cares deeply about how knowledge (no matter how useless) is applied to life — vie for the hearts and minds of a bunch of brilliant yet rowdy students destined for the likes of Cambridge and Oxford. The movie is an excised version of the award-winning play of the same name and almost all actors reprise their roles brilliantly.

The History Boys is not cinema in the classical sense but an occasionally long-winded discourse on the importance of education and knowledge and the differences between the two. To top it off, it turns out to be a lot of fun in the process and not at all tedious like one would expect. There is something about British wryness and self deprecation that exudes a sense of intelligence and class, something you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

The film portrays Hector, a closet homosexual who occasionally gropes his students (and ruefully exclaims, “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.”) in a rather sympathetic yet slightly parodic light. Almost all the characters are caricatures of people you’d come across and everyone has at least one redeeming quality. Character flaws are merely human failings that are to be accepted and not changed. It isn’t everyday you come across a film that stresses more on individualism than social conformism.

The performances are downright brilliant, the energy is infectious and the score, peppered with tracks from the 80s adds to the fun. Even if some of the literary and historical references went over my head, this is a film I’d highly recommend; one that gets better with repeated viewings.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/ 

Don’t believe the hype. Cloverfield is a terrible, nauseating and utterly pointless piece of cinema catering mostly to today’s attention deficit generation. No matter what they tell you, the camera work is not clever, it’s maddening.

Now that’s out of the way, it does have a couple of redeeming qualities (none of which redeem the film as a whole); the set design is tremendous, the ‘monster‘ itself is like nothing we’ve seen before and the theme that plays through the closing credits is brilliant. That’s about it.

3/10

16 dollars down the drain. Frick!

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.

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]