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A movie and book review blog

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Jan 27, 2004

  • 1/27/2004 03:04:00 PM
Sometimes quite unexpectedly you come across a brilliant movie, like a shard of diamond in the ashes. Skins, the sophomore low budget indie from director Chris Eyre is just that. I didn't know a thing about Chris Eyre nor anything about the writer of the novel, Adrian.C.Louis, after watching this movie I have decided I am going to find more about the works of these two people.

Before Christopher Columbus came to America in late 1400s, there were 100 million Indians in North and South America combined. At the beginning of twentieth century their size had dimnished to a small group of 3 million, thanks to all the massacres that paved the way for the establishment of the brave New world! Skins tell the story of these 'natives' - actually two Sioux Indian brothers in a very current setting of Pine Ridge Indian reservation, South Dakota,one of the poorest counties in US which could put any third world country to shame.

Rudy the younger brother is a cop, where Mogi the elder one is an incurable alcholic like most of the other Indians at Pine Ridge. The film is an eye-opener about the people of the land, now reduced to nothing, battling the grim and horrible conditions charecteristic of present day Indian reserves. Alcoholism is a major killer of the people with about 75% of all deaths attributed to it, Graham Greene as Mogi has given a heart rendering yet humorous portrayal as an alchoholic Indian. Eric Schweig as Rudy and all the other actors have given true to life performances. This movie could be called a true life 'reverse western', it is time Indians got their due. A masterpiece but don't expect horse chases, burning teepes or indian men in colorful war paints, this is the otherside of US of A, as close as you can get it. Way to go Chris Eyre!

Jan 26, 2004

Gangs of Newyork, Holes and some others 


Recovering from a surgery, kinda lazing around (read bedrest). Saw a lot of movies lying in bed...writing about everyone of them will be gargantuan task for a "patient in recovery" buhahaha. The list of movies I saw in the past week as in-bed entertainment is as follows,

+ + Gangs of New York: A concoction of history, Leonardo de Caprio, the Irish and NY of 1850's mixed in plenty of blood grime, dirt and vengeance. Coming from Martin Scorsese this epic movie is a good entertainer. Daniel Day-Lewis is unrecognizable as the butcher. A bit too long maybe, but then it is a historical movie.

+ + Rear Window: The Hitchcock masterpiece starting James Stewart as a bed ridden man in cast watching his neighbors through his rear window. He suspects that one of his neighbors has murdered his wife. It has far less suspense than some other Hitchcock movies, like Vertigo, Strangers on the Train etc but technically perfect movie nevertheless. Has Grace Kelly in it too.

+ + +Holes: A Disney movie for kids, about a detention camp in AZ where the supervisor believes that the inmates could become better citizens by digging holes in the desert. We do not know the real intentions until later. An interesting movie a lot better than kid flicks like Spy Kids.

+ + Take the money and run: A Woody Allen movie about a career thief. Funny of course but have seen funnier ones from Mr. Allen before.

+ + The Son's Room: The Italian director, Nanni Moretti stars and act in this Palme d'Or winner Italian movie about a psychoanalyst who faces a tragic situation in his own life. It is a no frills flick. which I found quite slow moving at times, which inturn reflects the reality that I'm becoming more of an American movie goer who wants things fast-paced.

+ + Pookkalam Varavayi: One of those Malayalam movies made to showcase baby Shamli in the late '80s. I was thinking while watching the film that had it been in US Jayaram could be sued and tried for child molestation, kidnapping and a lot of other related charges.

- - - Churaliya hai tumne: A pathetic excuse for a movie and two excuses for actors. Makes me feel that even hindi films should conduct entrance test to screen the aspiring actors. Well when lineage is all that matters then we the audience have to suffer. Esha Deol & Zayed Khan, I would give them money if they'd show the grace to leave the film profession and leave us in peace.

Jan 17, 2004

The Hours 

It is an intellectual's movie, sadly I don't fall in that category. On the bright side it is a technically perfect movie - camera work, editing, makeup, music and acting - above average. Three brilliant actresses Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore have given it their best shot, not forgetting Ed Harris. From Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, Stephen Daldry has made a good movie, if only I could understand what it was all about.


The three main characters in the movie, all of them women are tormented by some kind of agony. First there is the writer Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, in 1920s England writing her novel Mrs.Dalloway. Then there is the 1950s house wife, who is supposedly akin to a character, Julianne Moore, depressed about I-don't-know-what and finally there is the reader, Meryl Streep in 2001 nursing her AIDS ridden friend and throwing a party after he wins a prestigious poetry award. The common thread which connects all the three women (in addition to a surprise connection which is revealed at the end) is their endless angst - the root cause of which I could not find out, expect in Streep's case which maybe becuase nursing a friend fighting a losing battle to AIDS for long years could be taxing on the nurse herself.

This is a kind of movie which is bound to be heaped with a lot of praise from the 'thinking' people, most of which the commoner like me or you would have no clue about. What do these three characters have to worry about so much so that, it drives them to suicide or fleeing their own families? What I think is that, these people have never known real worries, that leaves them plenty of time to ponder over 'non-worries' and conjure up imaginary torments and finally dish out a movie about existential angst. Ah...that favorite subject of writers and poets who have exhausted everything else, is now becoming the staple of Hollywood artsy movies?!?!!

Count of Monte Cristo 

Alexander Dumas is 19th century France's raciest author, from all that I know about it (Not much!). A la Sidney Sheldon, John Le Carr, Sue Grafton all rolled into one. I had read an abridged version of Monte Christo when I was a kid, didn't have any recollection of it when I sat down to watch the film today.

This Kevin Reynolds film is an out and out entertainer starring Jim Caveizel in the leading role, Guy Pearce is his friend turned betrayer, Ed Harris as the old priest the Monte Cristo meets during his prison term and who becomes his teacher and guide and Luiz Guzman is the ex-pirate turned right hand man of the Count, once he comes back to Paris as the Count of Monte Cristo. There is betrayal, suspense, intrigue, swash buckling sword fights, kidnapping, pirates and a daring prison escape, there is a love lost and found, and there is a man who who gets a treasure, and a life after 13 years of solitary prison sentence - not bad for a two hour entertainer.

Jan 14, 2004

Micheal Moore is da man. Bowling for Columbine is the one of the best documentaries I have ever seen (the other one is Waco:The Rules of Engagement). Before I go further, tell me what do these things/people have in common? Hitler, Clinton, Columbine and Kosovo? On April 20, 1999 Hitler would have celebrated his 110th birthday. Bill Clinton, the then Commander-in-Chief of United States ordered the largest air raid, the biggest bombing US ever made on Kosovo on the same day. In Littleton, Colorado two Columbine high schools seniors shot and killed twelve students and a teacher and later killed themselves in what came to be known as the worst high school shootout in the history of United States on the very same day. Too much of a day for history to bear, eh?

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the perpetrators of the massacre at Columbine were ordinary students and they did not come from broken homes as is often cited in similar crimes. They went bowling at 6 am of the day of the murder at the neighborhood bowling alley. (That accounts for the title of the film) "Bowling for Columbine", explores a gun obsessed country, where kids have easy access to firearms, bomb making materials and is populated with banks which give out a free gun everytime you open a new bank account (if this is not crazy, what is?). Klebold and Harris did extensive preparation for more than a year before, making pipe bombs learning how to make them from the internet. On the day of the massacre they planted two such bombs in the school cafetaria, which due to someone's wild luck didn't go off. Had they exploded instead of 15 people, the death toll would have been hundreds.

The movie is not a psychological exploration of the killers but rather it is a psychological exploration of a country which has gone berserk over guns and gun control(or the lack of it), a country where people won't enquire or go beyond what they are told. This is a movie that wants to wake everyone from their slumber of confirmation to the majority. It shouldn't take the murder of your child to make you realize what 'they' have been hammering into your minds with torrents of misinformation is wrong.

Micheal Moore tells in an interview, in the special features section of the DVD that there was one part he deliberately left out of the movie. The fact that police and the SWAT teams waited for three hours before they entered Columbine highschool after the first 911 call, they even stopped the people who tried to rush in thru' the barricades to save their children. Why did they do that? Afterall, the information they had was there were two or maximum three shooters, there was an army of law enforcement personnel waiting outside....what were they doing outside, when they could have prevented some deaths atleast, like that of the teacher who bled to death in three hours. And everybody else...including all the parents (except 2 or 3 people) followed the orders, they stood and waited obediently behind the "do not cross" yellow tapes. Meanwhile the killers themselves commited suicide one hour after they had started their shooting spree.

Has Columbine taught us anything? Hardly much, I guess. We need more people like Micheal Moore who'd not shy away from speaking the truth. I have to agree with him when he says, "Democrats are the lamest excuse ever for a political party", or "we live in fictitious times, ruled by a fictitious President" or when he warns the President against the war in Iraq, "when the Pope and Dixie Chicks are against your policies, you should know your time is up." Haven't yet posted the reviews of Moore's Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's my Country. Both real good books, hats off to Micheal Moore.

Jan 13, 2004

Monster:Autobiography of an LA Gang Member 

Donning up my protective gear....today I am going to venture out into a volatile terrritory - South Central Los Angeles. Just breezed thru' Sanyika Shakur's best selling book on LA gangs, Monster: Autobiography of an LA Gang Member. Breezed through because there were too many shootings, beating ups and 'general slaying' involved, too much for the weak-hearted-me, almost in every other page, yet I made it to the end without skipping much.

It is an enlightening book, centered on the gang war activities in South Central LA (or the infamous South Central) of late seventies and eighties, as seen from the eyes of 'Monster' Kody Scott(Sanyika Shakur). Its an eyeopener for the rest of United States and the rest of the world, who thinks all is heaven in the United States of America. Shakur is a better story teller than me and just to give the taste of what his world once was, I am going to copy a few lines from the preface of the book.

Helicopters hover heavily above, staccato vibrations of automatic gunfire crack throughout the night, drowned out only by explosions and sirens. There is troop movement throughout the city, and in some areas the figting is intense. The soldiers are engaged in a "civil war". A war without terms. A war fought by any means necessary with anything at their disposal. This conflict has lasted nine years, longer than Vietnam. Though the setting is not jungle per se, its atmosphere is as dangerous and mysterious as any jungle in the world.

Neither side receives funding from any goverment, nor does either side claim any allegiance to any particular religion or socioeconomic system of governement.There are no representatives from either faction in the United Nations nor does either recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Recruitment and conscription begins at eleven years of age.

The infrastructure of their armies are made up mainly of robberies and extortions(this was the seventies). Whereas today they are maintained from the proceeds of major narcotic deals and distribution. Each army has a distinct territory- the boundaries of some large areas are broken by enemy cluster camps. Each army has a flag, to which total allegiance is pledged. Each army has its own language, customs and philospohy and each has its own GNP. The war has been raging on for 21 years. The death toll is in thousands - wounded, uncountable, missing-in-action unthinkable. No one is keeping a tally.

Other than this, the war has been kept from the world, hidden like an ugly scar across the belly of an otherwise beautiful woman. Under the guise of the showpiece for the world where prosperity is easily found as water in a stream, America, for all her ostensible beauty has an ugly scar across her belly that she has tried repeatedly to suppress from curious onlookers."


There you go, this is not the description of a third world country embroiled in civil war, this was every night in South Central, twenty years ago. Today Shakur says the streets of his old neighbourhood are lined with luxury cars(instead of the stolen ones of his youth), dope dealers in Gucci shoes and troops with AK-47 assault weapons. What was a gang then, is a now an army. Much of the book reads like a novel, if you like being on the otherside of life, to find out the truth why people behave the way they do, this is a revealing read. Have you ever questioned the fact, why is that the assailant is always an "unidentified black male?" and why did many prominent African-Americans(Shakur uses the term New-Afrikaans in this book, in the place of African-American) from Malcom-X and Muhammad Ali embrace Islam? All the answers are hidden in this book, it might not be obvious but it is there, 'cause you are going to live the life of a man who had gone to the edge and made it out alive from the jungles of South Central. There are no better seats for the show other than the one Kody himself has, you got the second best - the book.

Jan 12, 2004

In the middle, In a muddle 

I am reading too many books and watching too many movies at the same time and haven't finished any of them. Currently I am reading Monster:The Biography of an LA Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Marakami, Coming into the Country by John McPhee and ,The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen. Current movies, is a shorter list, Micheal Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Banger Sisters and Tigerland, all in queue, still waiting.

Jan 10, 2004

Ice Fountain 

This is the from where I get my books and movies. Actually, this is the snow fountain in the front yard of Public Library here in town.

Jan 8, 2004

We Die Alone 

What kind of people turns me on? Survivors. Not the participants of that high rated reality show (silly, I'd say. Tribes, clans..woo hoo hoo.....*ROTFL*.....all in the name of pasting your face in the living rooms of other mindless millions). The real survivors are those people who made it back to life, after everything went against them, who had the closest shaves with death that we could never ever imagine and yet came back to live life the way the wanted to, although with much less glory and credit than Jesus after his resurruction. These are real flesh and blood people like you and me, ordinary citizens of mundane everyday human drama, yet they came alive from situations where death was the only option. How did that happen?

If you want to know more, read some of the books that celebrate such journeys. I really dig these books, it started when I was fourteen, with Alive:The Story of Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Reed, which narrates the story of an Urugyan rugby team, whose plane crashes into the remote Andes and the survivors even had to resort to eat the dead bodies of their teammates to stay alive. Yesterday I finished reading We Die Alone by David Howarth which describes a WW2 escape story made by a battered and frost bitten Norwegian soldier, Jan Baalsrud, through the Lyngen Alps, across German patrolled villages and into Sweden, which was neutral at the time. Some parts of his escape seem too incredible to be true, which the author says no one would have believed but for the presence of witnesses, who themselves corroborated the story and aided in his escape.

Jan Baalsrud, was part of a 12 member undercover Norwegian expat militia, who after a long ardorous journey from England to Norway, were supposed to form a counter resistance group against the Nazis, by organizing the villagers in the area. As luck would have it, as soon as the convoy of 12 men alighted on the Norwegian coast, they are ambushed by the German army and all except Jan were caught or murdered. Thus begins one man's epic saga of survival, which includes more than a month entombed in coma inside a snow tomb, hardly bigger than himself and operating his frost bitten toes himself with more precision than an experienced surgeon. All through his journey Jan relied heavily on the help rendered by his countrymen, without which he'd have never made out of it alive. I haven't said anything about the story as yet, if you like this kind of stuff, I'd say go for it.David Howarth, the author is a veteran writer of WW2 tales of escape and endurance, so that means there is more stuff out there for me to devour.

Jan 7, 2004

How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days 

Romantic comedy, as was expected. The hero, is the staple of the makers of this film genre in late ninties and nots, Mathew McConoughey and the heroine is the bubbly Kate Hudson. Not much of a story, then again there were no expectations in that department either. The screenplay was really horrible, actually some romantic comedies inspite of having very obvious plot lines used to have interesting screen plays. This one seems to have run out wise crack dialogues, had it been there it'd have made the movie a li'l more bearable than it really was. Kate Hudson is good for the part, cannot comment this about anyone else. Well then, romantic comedies are like this, right. I didn't like Sleepless in Seattle much either ;) .

Jan 6, 2004

Joe Somebody 

I like Tim Allen movies except when he tries to dress up as Santa Claus. Joe Somebody tells the story of an 'almost'-invisible pharmaceutical company employee, played by Tim Allen, who is a recent divorcee, is passed up for promotion and is considered a nobody at the office. The aim of the movie is to make somebody out of this nobody. I am not going to say how the movie goes about in achieving this seemingly impossible goal. All I can say is the ending sucks. If this is supposed to be a chick flick, I don't understand the workings of chicks' brains, especially the ones in this movie.

Jan 2, 2004

Owning Mahowny 

Owning Mahowny is a gentle movie about a Toronto bank manager who is a gambling addict. Like all addictions this one too can make or break a man, the man in question, the bank manager is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. There is not any adrenaline pumping drama, considering the fact that most of the scenes take place in Atlantic City and Las Vegas in addition to Toronto. It is a character study of an ordinary man, with access to the large sums of money - although illegaly and who channels it to meet his unsatiable addiction with black jack, craps and the such. The pluspoint of the movie is that it is based on real life events, which negatively implies not many high speed car chases and tecnically perfect cons.

Hoffman is brilliant as Mahowny, Minnie Driver in a blonde wig plays his girlfriend - nothing much for her to do in that part. Its fun to know how the casino bosses deal with high rollers such as Hoffman and how much hand luck really has in the whole business of gambling. A comparitvely good movie with no extra gloss.
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