Black Swan is Darren Aranofsky’s offering this year. Though I have lost touch with him since Requiem for a Dream, he is still supreme. Now this is a film where I felt I was constantly swimming out of my depth. On one level, it is a genuinely scary film. On the next, it grosses out the strongest hearted. It is a visceral, taut psychological thriller with many levels.

From a film making perspective, his attention to detail is worth noticing. The protagonist Nina (brilliantly essayed by Natalie Portman) forever draped in light pinks and whites, while all the other actors are dressed in dark colours. This is only scratching the surface of the mise-en-scene, there are many many more details he has worked into the telling of the story.

The story itself is so intricately woven that I do not feel myself skilled enough to tell it. Let it be said that Aranofsky is a master of his craft, and you only have to watch the film to know more about it.

Country: Iran

Year of release: 2008

Running length: approx 90 mins

Language: Farsi, Azeri

An Iranian film by Majid Majidi, the same chap who showed us Children of Heaven. It follows the misadventures of Karim, a poor but proud man, who lives in the hinterlands of Iran. He is unfortunate enough to lose his job at the ostrich farm, when a ostrich runs away from the farm. In search of other occupations, he lands up in the city where he is mistaken to be a motorcycle-taxi driver, and ferries customers around Tehran. His exposure to the city life makes him a victim of the vices of the place: greed, selfishness and stress.

The story also follows the troubles Karim’s son (age 9) and his friends go through to convert a dilapidated well into a fish pond. As is expected from Majidi, he handles children as well as (if not better than) his adult actors.

The story can be summarized in a few lines: Karim loses ostrich, finds other jobs, and then finds the ostrich again. His son and his friends want to take up an impossibly difficult project, and finish it with moderate success. This trivial storyline is brought to life in vivid detail by Majidi. He shows that he is far ahead in understanding the psyche of the people he is documenting than any other contemporary filmmaker.

Majidi uses the vibrant colours of the village to make a stark contrast with the dull greys and blacks of the city, to make his point that the village folks are indeed better off. He uses short sketches to give a deeper, more layered understanding of Karim’s character.

It’s a lovely, heart-warming watch. If you think that there is only bad left in the world, then you really must watch this film.

What is film appreciation?

Sounds pretty heavy no? Most of us do like to watch films without paying too much attention to what we are watching. Even if we do pay it some attention, there isn’t really any effort to think of it as an art form. But there is a lot of thought which goes into films to make it the finished product you see. The way this thought process develops, and how it results into the film you watch, is the discussion which is integral to film appreciation.

Where do films come from? Its difficult to define one single art form from which films have developed. In fact, films are a seamless merging of atleast 3 different art forms: photography, music and theater. Add to this the oldest art form of all, story telling, and you’ve got films. Another way of looking at it is that it is a medium using both visual and aural forms.

So let’s look at each of these separately.

The visual medium consists of what you see. (Yeah, that wasn’t very difficult.) This may be scenery, shots of people and their surroundings. It could be an insight into their way of looking at the world (even from the perspective of a dog, or a blind boy), their hopes and aspirations (which could materialize as the standard ‘dream sequence’) or something else.

The aural medium consists of dialogue, background music, ambient noise, sound effects and songs. The aural medium is also very important in creating the mood of the film. Alfred Hitchcock, one of the best exponents of the suspense genre, would have complete silence in his scary scenes. The effect this can create has to be seen to be believed. Sholay, a Bollywood classic, uses signature tunes to announce the arrival of the antagonist, Gabbar. All these become a part of the process of watching the film, and hence film appreciation as well.

Now how do you go about deciding whether a film is good or bad? Well, you can start by looking at how well it uses these two forms of media to say whatever it has to say. (An important thing to note is that this is not the be-all-end-all of films. There are always films which destroy one or the other caveats I spoke of earlier, and still are fantastic. But we’ll leave that for some other time.)

Why does SPIC MACAY have to get into FA?

So we had a lot of discussion on this topic when we wanted to have film screenings in our college as a part of SPIC MACAY. This is what I feel about it.

FA is not very different from the discussions we have when a ‘classical art form’ such as Dhrupad or Bharatnatyam is performed in college. Meandering discussions which are technical to some extent, but (mostly) accessible to the layman attending the concert do tend to follow. Words like aalap, raag, taal, mudra are discussed to sensitize the viewer of the basic technicalities of the art form he is about to witness.

FA is similar in these aspects. Films are an art form by itself, merging various different the forms of music, theater, photography, dance and story telling, to come up with a unique form of itself. A typical appreciation of a film will ramble through acting skills, editing techniques, dialogue writing, camera angles, and whatever else caught the viewer’s fancy to build a better and more wholesome picture of the film.

What is wrong with the way we watch films today? There is hardly any discussion regarding the film. If the film is a no-brainer, then that’s different. But a good film needs to be discussed! Just saying, “Ah, the film was good. Where are we eating?” isn’t going to cut it. Sometimes we go up to ‘The acting was terrific. And…’ and we blank out. That’s where FA comes in. It gives you a more detailed idea of what processes go into film making, and that makes the whole thing more enjoyable.

And with SPIC MACAY’s viewing of films? Well, there seems to be an unshakable predisposition towards the ‘classics’. Not that these films aren’t good (they’re fantastic) but they hardly serve as a good introduction to FA. A ‘classic’ is, according to some, necessarily 50 years old. However, current films work much better, as we saw with Harishchandrachi Factory some time back. Maybe it’s time to relook at this policy of ours to shy away from choosing more relevant films which will be easily accepted by our younger viewers? Hey, its not a bad idea to even look for cinematic merit in a Tom and Jerry cartoon!

Although he appears to be well packed for an adventurer, he lacks the sheer brute force required to lift the tonnes of rock pinning down his arm. He’s got a liter of water, perhaps, and a few munchies. The amount of water he has in his bottle becomes a very effective timer of how much time he’s spent there, (and perhaps how much time he has remaining?).

The chap is stuck in a 25-foot deep gully, with nothing interesting to look upon apart from scraggy walls. In the hands of a lesser director, this film would be gutted within 15 minutes of the accident occuring. But this is where Danny Boyle shows his merit. He mixes up the slow, static shots of Ralston struggling to cope with his predicament with sudden rushing, frenetic shots across the canyon, to faraway places with attractive and moving people. This has another effect, that of making you realize even further how cramped and uncomfortable his surroundings must really be, and that he’d rather be somewhere else.

Ralston records a video diary, which also becomes a part of the narrative. The diary is his reason to be optimistic, which also supplies the (much-needed) comic relief in the film. But when the  final breakdown starts to appear, due to lack of water and food, his hallucinations are chilling. Filled with enough hints to keep dream theorists busy for hours, he dreams of his family and friends bathed in a rich golden light (to suggest a golden age gone by), interspersed with shots of him falling down into an abyss, signifying his helplessness. This, along with the tri-split screen which he uses on numerous occasions in the film, gives it its own characteristic language which is very appealing.

James Franco, who plays Arin Ralston, holds up the difficult task of being almost the only actor in the movie with style. The ease with which he carries off his constant banter with the camera suggests a sign of great things to come. This is his second Oscar nomination (his first was for Pineapple Express under the ‘Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy’ category). Since he is the only actor for about 90% of the film, the other members of the cast fade into the background of memory.

Danny Boyle does like to make the squeamish squirm in their seats at some point of his movies, or atleast that’s the impression I get from watching some of his previous work (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire). This time he outdoes himself, but I’d be spoiling the film if I told you what. Be ready for it!

No review of this film can be complete without a mention of the score by AR Rahman, for which he has been nominated for two Oscars.

There, I’ve mentioned it, I can close this review. Watch it for what it is, a thrilling, gripping tale of an adventurer, told in a slick and polished manner. Why should you look for anything else?

P.S.- If you aren’t satisfied yet, I’d suggest you watch “Into the Wild”. Another wilderness story, but a lot more intense. I wrote about it a long while back here.

Mulholland Dr. is one messy, complicated film. Just to build some perspective into this, lets segue into a brief look into film history.

From the earliest films, filmmakers had a very good idea what they could manage to do on screen, and what they couldn’t. The silent films were very important to this reading, since the absence of dialogue led to a huge vacuum which the filmmaker had to creatively work around, or in some cases exploit.

As time went on, and sound entered films, along with many other offerings of technology, films started to get a lot more complicated from the early days of Charlie Chaplin’s capers. Cameras, editing techniques, sound recording, all went through series of innovations to contribute their two cents to making a film more detailed and intriguing.

And we’ve reached today. Where a simple watching of the film isn’t sufficient. Hell, after watching Mulholland Dr., I instantly dismissed it as a lot of intellectual masturbation. But today, after going through a few blogs and reviews, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to it. More on that later though.

For now, I’m going to shed a silent tear for how complicated films have gotten today. That I need to go through a dozen blogs to even make sense of the film. Tsch.

Just happened to me. I was going to shoot off a video of me playing a song on my guitar to my uncle. And I can’t seem to get it right even remotely right! I wonder why this is?

The story is nothing great, admittedly. Aamir Khan is the shy and reticent painter Anil, who has a one night stand with NRI i-banker Shai (Monica Dogra), which ends on a bad note. They remain connected through Munna (played brilliantly by Prateik), who is their common dhobi. With this initial setup, the story meanders through the streets of Bombay (or Mumbai, if you prefer it so) with the love triangle of Anil- Shai- Munna waxing and waning.

In the meantime, Anil moves house and discovers a tin containing a few photographs, a ring, and three tapes marked “Chitthi”. The content of the tapes is a video letter from a newly married girl called Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra) to her younger brother back in the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh. It is her outsider’s perspective to Bombay which seems the most interesting, and ultimately her character stays closest to the heart even after the lights come on.

Aamir Khan is surprisingly flat as the English-speaking cosmopolitan Anil.  Monica Dogra is convincing as the NRI, but the show stealers remain Kriti Malhotra and Prateik. The character of Munna is well-fleshed out, and gives him enough scope for his acting. Maybe its in the genes? He does happen to have Smita Patil and Raj Babbar for his parents.

The video letter from Yasmin to her brother is suitably rendered in low quality handycam, which gives it a proper home movie feeling. What I don’t get is the shaky camera movements throughout the film. Also, since the letter from Yasmin and the love triangle proceed simultaneously, the whole thing could have been tied up better. As it stands, its a little like an abstract painting. It is beautiful, but you can’t really say what is so beautiful about it.

What’s saddening about the whole thing is that its going to be seen as a “Aamir Khan production, with his wife directing”. However, she does pull off a good job. The film has a nice flow to it, and the absence of the interval allows you to enjoy it uninterrupted (albeit with a full bladder towards the end of it).

All things considered, worth a watch.

Its set in suburban America of the sixties. An America going from strength to strength, stamping its air of authority on all and sundry, an proud America. An America where values of hard work, family and love, all meant something. An America surprisingly like the India we grew up in. (Which could mean the America we see and hear of today will be the India 30 years later?)

Each episode, a short gasp all of twenty minutes, has widely ranging themes. Each story is told from the perspective of 12 year old Kevin Arnold (in the first Season) in a style which must have been inspired from the Cine Noir genre and later incorporated into the hospital drama Scrubs; that of the voice-over giving deeper insights into the character. The characters are well fleshed out: from overworked and grumpy father Jack  to the-glue-of-the-family mother, Norma; the hippie oldest sister Karen and the bully brother Wayne, all ring true even though they all belong to a different milieu.

Noteworthy mentions: each episode is generously flavoured with a lot of music from the 60s. (Which prohibits them from being released profitably as a DVD set. Thank god for VHS rips!) Which, when viewed in the light of the episode, gives it a very wholesome flavour.

The editing of the episode (especially the early ones) is also fantastic. Something as inconsequential as a TV program is worked into the main storyline to supplement it. An episode on the crabbed father starts off with a documentary playing on the television. Its about an ape family and their behaviour. It starts with the words “While the female remains with the young, the male ventures forth into an hostile environment to find sustenance. He returns from a unsuccessful foray aggressive and unpredictable. Notice the reaction of the startled mother and her offspring as they begin to sense the presence of the male… The irritable male gives off unmistakable signals that tells the young to keep their distance.” The  episode opens with some visuals of such a documentary, but soon the TV lies forgotten as the family have their own NatGeo moment. (Youtube link)

Even after all these years, The Wonder Years stands strong. Like an American Malgudi days, its got that bitter-sweet taste that is hard to resist.

Trouble is when I come up against an actual gay. Then I get into a mixture of terror and disgust. And how much ever I try to stop this reaction, it just comes up. Like bile after a heavy drinking session.