Minari : A review

You could have watched several K-dramas but you might not still acknowledge that a real flesh and blood Korean family is nothing like in those K-dramas. Flawless, mother-of-pearl twenty somethings who inhabit Korean TV shows is a far cry from reality. Minari, is the first time I've seen a depiction of a real-life Korean family on screen, ones who are not funny 24/7 like the Kim family in Kim's Convenience. Although they are a close second as far as authenticity is concerned.

 

Minari is an autobiographical sketch of a Korean American family that moves from the west coast to rural Arkansas to purse their dream of setting up a family farm. The director Lee Isaac Chung is setting a new path for immigrant film makers in the U.S where they make movies in their native language and English, in a setting that is quintessentially American. I see it as a harbinger of a new genre of U.S immigrant films recording the varied experiences and life reflections of all the peoples who call United States their home. 

Minari proceeds as if a camera-man is following the daily life of a Korean-American family in Arkansas boonies with a camera. The actors don't feel like they are actors. The time period is early eighties and the family of four - mother, father, daughter and son live in a trailer in the woods / potential farm land and are later joined by their spirited grandma.  This movie like Joji I watched recently is also about subtle nuances, where exceptional nuggets of everyday scenes are strung together to make a visual poem. 

Even though the family is Korean, there is plenty of evidence and presence of the rural Arkansas landscape the family inhabits. The water dowser, the cross-dragging (only on Sundays, that is his church and penance) Pentecostal neighbor and the chicken factory where the parents are employed as chicken-sexers. While all the actors have done exceptional jobs, I liked the wacky-ass grandma the best, the one who brought Minari (a Korean herb used in cooking and medicine) and found a home for it and made it thrive on the banks of an American creek.

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Joji : A movie review

Joji is an operatic movie about a dysfunctional family, set in Erumely. The director Dileesh Pothan is on his way to becoming the Bard of Kerala's malanadu (the foothills of Western Ghats) - the Kottayam-Idukki border lands.

I was on a K. J. George rediscovery trip during 2020 and Irakal, one of K.G.G's path breaking movies I watched a few months ago is still fresh in my mind. Joji is very similar in setup and composition to Irakal than Macbeth which Dileesh Pothan acknowledged he was inspired by, in his movie announcement poster.

Joji is a 21st century version of the K. G. George's 20th century masterpiece.  Then again, I have not read Macbeth, except as an abridged comic book, thirty some years ago. Pardon my Shakespeare.

If Joji reminded me anything Shakespearean, and it does with its operatically wailing violin BGM, it is King Lear. I had to sit through repeated screenings of Grigoriy Kozintsev's Russian B&W classic Karol Lir from 1970 at an impressionable young age of 8 or 9. All I remember of that King Lear movie is that the King had 3 adult children and they were all plotting/waiting for him to die, much like in this Dileesh Pothan classic half a century later. 

Joji is a socially detached loner, the youngest son of a rubber estate owner. His American equivalent will be the 30 year old son living in his parents' basement, surviving on Cheetos and video-games, without a job in sight. While the youngest no-good son of a rich plantation owner living in a joint family is the common theme in Joji and Irakal (there are more similarities which I am not going to explore as I don't feel like going into thesis mode today), their greatest contrast is in the treatment and exploration of this theme. 

Irakal in 1985 presents you a Gen X-er dealing with his powerless position, taking matters into his own hands and exerting his independence. Ganeshan in his debut role as Baby, the youngest son - engineering college drop-out and black sheep of the family, is very much a product of the turbulent 70s (ref: declaration of emergency in India in the late 70s) when he came of age and is a seething angry young man with some psycho-social tendencies thrown in for good measure.

Joji meanwhile is a millennial and he inhabits a movie reflective of our current times. He is laid-back and lacks focus, but acts too cool to care. The writer, Syam Pushkaran, the master of minutiae, reveals every one of his characters and their psyches through layered yet succinct dialogue. Shyju Khalid's camera is instrumental in capturing the fine nuances of the characters and the location in a film that relies very much on subtlety. 

There are only a handful of characters in the film, and the story and camera are tightly focused on them. There is the iron-fisted patriarch Panachel Kuttappan (V. P. Sunny), who is in better shape than his three sons and does several push-ups, too many to count, every day. He is served by his two older sons - the divorced elder son Jomon (Baburaj) who loves the bottle and the meek second son Jaison (Joji Mundakayam) who manages the family businesses with the trickle of money released each day by the patriarch. Between them is Jaison's wife and the daughter in law of the family, Bincy (Unnimaya Prasad), and finally there is the title character - the lazy dreamer with half-assed plans - Joji (an almost emaciated Fahadh Fazil.) Other significant characters are essayed by Shammi Thilakan as Dr. Felix - Panachel family's friend and physician, Basil Joseph as Father Kevin and Alister Alex as Poppy, Jomon's teenage son.

Joji's transformation from a detached sleep loving loafer who spends endless afternoons with a fishing rod that catches no fish (the fishing rod or the fishless pond might be the problem here) to the person he ultimately becomes is a bit incomprehensible for my Gen X brain. Unlike Baby in Irakal who had all the makings of a psychopath from scene one and whose character arc was predictable, Joji's metamorphosis has shades of implausibility. Despite this flaw, the technical harmonization of all the elements of the film - script, camera, acting and background score makes it a treat to watch.

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Dear Edward : A book review

Dear Edward is the story of a boy - Eddie Adler, the sole survivor of a passenger jet crash that killed 190+ people, written by Ann Napolitano. It is fiction and not a real-life incident although the author says she did draw inspiration from the Afriqiyah Airways 771 crash at Tripoli in 2010 where a lone 10-year-old Dutch boy survived. 

The weather conditions used in the crash of the LA bound jetliner from Newark airport in the book are modeled on the conditions of an Air France passenger jet crash over the Atlantic in 2009.The final minutes of conversation between the pilots in the novel is taken from the black box recording of the Air France carrier.These acknowledgements by the author led me to spend a few hours on YouTube watching documentaries on these particular plane crashes before I moved on to several types of Top 10 crash lists - like top 10 deadliest airplane accidents due to pilot error, top 10 crashes where an octogenarian survived, top 10 worst air disasters due to bird strikes and other such morbid compilations. Like everyone who has flown on jet-liners, there has been fleeting micro-seconds before a flight when I have doubted the airworthiness and reliability of these flying tin cans. Then that brief moment of doubt is wiped clean by science and statistics (more chance to die in a car crash than an air crash yada yada)

There was one time in the recent past though that made me question my faith in air travel. Two summers ago, right after Boeing 737 Maxes were grounded the world over due to their faulty MCAS, we got on a Boeing Dreamliner flying from London to the U.S. The name Boeing was still freshly suspect in our minds with all 737 Maxes still grounded everywhere when we got on that Boeing-made plane run by one of the best budget airlines in the business.  The airplane was brand new, must have been built around the same time as the grounded Maxes, I thought, as we took our seats, towards the middle of the aircraft.

We were seated a row in front of the galley, the plane was cruising westward over the Atlantic. Two hours into the flight we noticed all the cabin crew quickly putting back the food trays which they had taken out to serve the passengers and talking in hush hush tones huddled around the phone in the galley. This went on for a few minutes. Through the window I could see the blue-black inky stillness of the Atlantic below. Then the captain's voice came on, "we are experiencing an electrical issue and we are returning to Gatwick," I experienced a minor heart attack right then. Immediately after the announcement the power was cut off to all electrical outlets and the interior lights were turned off which added to gravity of the situation.

Inflight info : From London Gatwick to London Gatwick

 

We were about a fifth of the way to our destination and the pilots have decided to turn back - this was a sign of something serious. Should have only gotten tickets on the airlines that had Airbus fleets instead of Boeing, I reprimanded myself as I checked the in-flight map showing our location. Faroe Islands will forever be etched in my memory, that is where I saw our plane making a 180 degree turn, planning to return to our port of departure. The islands looked lonesome out there in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean. There will be sheep grazing on the islands who couldn't care less if an aircraft burst into flames overhead, I thought, as I looked over at my kids. They are too young to die. All the way back, I who didn't believe in any God, tried to make our case with the universe to let our airplane travel back without any electrical hiccups and land in one piece.  Thankfully it did. After about a couple of hours waiting, the airline put all the passengers back on another Dreamliner which made its way to the US without any problem. I am yet to make an overseas flight after this incident, mainly because of the Covid19 pandemic and not because I've sworn off air travel.

I picked up Dear Edward for the same reason our mind cheers the triumph of indestructible human spirit in the worst tragedies or rejoices seeing a dandelion poke its bright yellow head out of a crack in the pavement. The central character Eddie Adler is a sign of hope and jubilation amidst disaster and death. Like most humans I find it uplifting to read about hope. I find myself eager to know the ways and worlds the hope that is Eddie will grow into.

On the basis of this triumphant survivor rationale, I was expecting a heart-rending gut punch, some hairs-on-end reunions or revelations but the novel overall had a lukewarm effect on me. It could also be that my expectations are misplaced after not having read fiction in a long while. The chapters switch between Eddie's current world and reminiscences of a handful of passengers on that ill-fated flight. The recollection chapters are styled as characters thoughts during the last few hours of their life, before the crash happens, not knowing the fate that is awaiting them. All in all it is an okay read, but there is some key ingredient missing that could have transformed it from mediocre to phenomenal. I don't know what it is.

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Recursion by Blake Crouch, a book review

There are movies made from books after the book creates a current and a following of its own and catches the eye of an actor or a director. Then there are books written to be movies, like Recursion by Blake Crouch. Never heard of him before, I blindly picked the book from my public library's Overdrive, sorted by 'Most Popular at the Library', filtered to 'Available = Yes' and then read a quick blurb to make sure I can finish it off in a night or two. I was in a fiction reading mood after years, can't let that slip.

Blake Crouch is an interesting name, my thoughts went a full circle from William Blake to Crouching tiger tiger burning bright back to Blake, W. Maybe this Blake will be exciting. The blurb had enticing statements about a time travel/memory puzzle box.

Recursion has Christopher Nolan written all over it. There are three main characters - an NYC cop named Barry, Helena a neuroscientist/inventor and a billionaire technocrat - Marcus Slade. These characters embark on several repetitive cycles of time travel using a chair (which can also be considered a character) invented by Helena. The outsiders, which is everyone except the primary players, consider this groundhog day years as a syndrome called FMS - False Memory Syndrome. Helena was Helena Bonham Carter and Slade was Elon Musk in my mind the whole time I was reading the novel. Russell Crowe could be Barry.

The first 1/3rd of the story is amazing, the second 1/3rd is alright, but things are starting to venture into a Nolanesque maze of multiple timelines and the characters are glitching out. The last 1/3rd is the reader realizing none of these timelines matter, as we say in Indian Sanskrit, sarvam maya = everything is an illusion. Overall it is a fun ride, if you don't try to make sense of the groundhog years.

Further research into the cinematic prospects of Recursion brought up news stories that Shonda Rimes and Matt Reeves are adapting the novel to a movie and a series for Netflix.

....and then I watched the movie Boss Level. Its story line is extremely similar to Recursion except Boss Level has a video-game skin on top. In Boss Level it is only the day that repeats endlessly just like Bill Murray's day in Punxsutawney, not several years as it does in Recursion. Will review it as a separate post.

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