Supernatural, Paranormal or Time Travel TV shows : Best of Netflix & Amazon Prime 2021

su·per·nat·u·ral  /ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

1. (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

Beyond scientific understanding, defying logic and laws of nature - these two attributes give unlimited freedom to story writers. While I pooh-pooh at the fantasy genre and couldn't care less about the American construct of zombies or their living relatives vampires or werewolves, I cannot explain why I am drawn to the type of supernatural / science fiction shows I have listed below, but I am.

Tunnel (Netflix US): Tunnel was my introduction to K-Drama. I still consider it as my favorite. It is a police procedural about the hunt for a serial murderer with a time traveling detective thrown in. All the Korean stars are young and immaculate - must be the reason why Korean skin care products are a rage everywhere. They are easy on the eyes and glide the narrative along a smooth-as-butter path, even when it is along a dark and ominous abandoned tunnel. Highly engaging and binge-able.

Signal (Netflix US): I was looking for Korean shows to watch after Tunnel when I chanced upon Signal. I almost gave up after the first couple of episodes. But I am glad I did not. Signal get better and stays engaging for the rest of the episodes. While no-one really time travels, there is real time communication happening between past and the present through an old radio.

Dark (Netflix US): Dark is like the German cousin of Stranger Things, where time is the upside-down. It checks my time travel subject box. But the story went into the Matryoshka doll zone in Season 3 - nesting of characters never before seen in the space-time continuum we inhabit. I had to quit watching after a couple of episodes in Season 3. Still Season 1 and 2  are worth the watch and many die-hard fans, especially in millennial age group can't sing enough praises of the series.

Equinox (Netflix US): From Denmark, Equinox feels like Frozen meets Stranger Things, played out on a darker, adult canvas. It starts with an incident where 21 high school graduates go missing, never to be found again and progresses through a sister's search for the truth behind the disappearance of her sibling.

The Haunting of the Hillhouse (Netflix US):: This is one of those rare instances where the show/movie was better than the book it was based on. I went to sleep trying to read Shirley Jackson's original. Although I did finish it almost succeeded in driving me off ghost stories, usually one of my favorite subjects to read, altogether. Unlike in the book where the people who spend time at the Hillhouse are a group of strangers, in the TV adaptation it is a family - that change improves the narrative. If you are looking for a spine-chilling ghost story to scare the living day lights out of you, look no further, you have arrived at your destination.

The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix US): This show is a follow up to The Haunting of Hillhouse, but it is not half as good, not enough spine-tingling qualities and not very scary ghosts. It is more of a gothic romance than a ghost story, if you ask me.

Glitch (Netflix US): Ghosts or the living dead (who are not zombies, not blood-thirsty) who have time traveled to reach the present day. Glitch is Australian for highly binge-able. More detailed review here.

The OA (Netflix US): The first season was addictive with cross-dimensional travel, life after death and blind girls gaining sight. The second season is kind of weird and I am not sure what the producers where trying to do, but then Netflix canceled the show after Season 2. The OA was where I first came across Kingsley Ben-Adir.

Erased (Netflix US): A one season Japanese TV show based on a popular thriller manga series Erased has the protagonist Satori Fujinuma traveling back in time to save some of his elementary school friends. It is a quick and compelling watch if you don't mind watching shows with subtitles.

Intruders (Amazon Prime): Produced for BBC America, you can see a young Millie Bobbie Brown in this paranormal series about returning souls. Ms. Brown is quite an acting powerhouse. The series does have many edge-of-your-seat moments and if you can not get lost in the logistics and timing of soul transfers and mummification is a gripping mini series. 

The Living and the Dead (Amazon Prime): English ghosts in the turn of the (20th) century English countryside in a TV show with excellent production quality - that is The Living and the Dead. During the years 1880s to the First World War, one of the most happening fields was psychoanalysis. All the cool kids were psychoanalytical theorists or psychologists like Freud, Jung, Karl Abraham and the protagonist of the series, Nathan Appleby. Is it schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder or real ghosts from the future and the past?

Truth Seekers (Amazon Prime) : If you love the quirky British duo Nick Frost - Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, The World's End & Hot Fuzz) who usually have been showcasing their talents in movie-dom only, this supernatural ghost buster TV show is their first foray into TV land. If you want a show that is warm, fuzzy, spooky and very British, try Truth Seekers.

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One Night in Miami & The Two Killings of Sam Cooke

All the four paths would diverge after that One Night In Miami. Two will be cut shot prematurely. Two will go on making their contributions to the world of sports and entertainment. It is the two who got snuffed out way before their time, their unfinished stories that well up in my throat. Like Sam Cooke’s last song which was released after his untimely death, we are waiting, we are still waiting…

It's been a long
A long time coming
But I know, a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will

One Night in Miami is what Bob Seger might have been thinking about (well not really, the unromantic in me is taking off on an imaginary scenic route here) when he wrote, “We got tonite, who needs tomorrow. We got tonite baby, why don’t you stay?” Stay they did, the coolest gang of bros who might have ever hung out together in the history of menkind – Malcolm X, Cassius Clay soon to be Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown at a Negro hotel in Miami, on the night of 25^th Feb 1964.

More than three fourths of the movie happens in a hotel room the four friends get together. It makes sense when it is adapted from a play and the occasion calls for it. The four men briefly spend some time on the hotel rooftop and Ali & Cooke make a short stop at a liquor store, but the rest of the time the conversation between the four men happen entirely in the hotel room. An entire movie centered around the dialog four people are having in one room reminded me a bit of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but the similarity ends there.

To write meaningful dialog without taking sides and keeping the audience attention unwavering without any change in background scenery is quite a challenge. Shout out to Kemp Powers who wrote the original play and his debut movie screenplay adaptation. It is also the feature debut for the director Regina King. She has absolutely nailed it. Along with Powers’ powerful screenplay, she has received tremendous support from the crew of four amazing actors who play the four historical figures – Kingley Ben-Adir (Malcolm X), Leslie Odom Jr. (Sam Cooke), Aldis Hodge (Jim Brown) and Eli Goree (Ali) whose paths cross one night in a hotel room in Miami.

It is such a personal moment (or a few hours) for these four guys, but this serendipitous meeting is also a watershed moment in history. The morning after the meeting Cassius Clay confirms that he is joining the Nation of Islam and he changes his name to Muhammad Ali a week after. Malcolm X would quit the Nation of Islam a week after this meeting and make a trip to Mecca, Middle East and African countries to understand more about Islam and get international support and exposure to the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X would be assassinated and Sam Cooke would be shot dead before the first anniversary of this meeting. Ali would go on to become one of the greatest sportsmen in history and Jim Brown would quit football for Hollywood after being named NFL’s MVP for the third time in 1966.

To read more about what happened after that One Night in Miami, here is a BBC article.

After One Night in Miami, I took a peak into Sam Cooke’s life in Netflix’s documentary – The Two Killings of Sam Cooke. It is less of a crime investigation piece and more of a biography of Cooke through the eyes and words of the people who knew him and his music. Like many black musicians at the time he broke into the popular music scene via gospel music then crossed over to the devil's music - pop music and rock & roll.

In One Night in Miami we see Malcolm X exhorting Sam Cooke to take the activist route, considering he had a platform that people listened to - his songs and music. Although the movie gives the viewer the impression that Sam Cooke was not much of an activist, he was in fact at the time risking his career with his activism and earning wrath of big time record companies like RCA. If he had lived we would have an African-American Elvis, the guy had music, looks, leadership and charisma. In an alternate reality where Malcolm X and Sam Cooke could've lived on, I wonder how the world would've looked like? Those two men had so much unfinished business to take care of.😞

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The White Tiger : A review

White Tiger, blue moon, albino alligator, purple carrot, double yolk egg - all these vagaries of nature catch our eye because they are rare. Aravind Adiga's novel The White Tiger bowled over the Booker prize judging panel in 2008. It was a rare page-turner, presenting a tight and perceptive portrayal of the emerging India of the early 2000s. Other than being mightily impressed just like the Booker panel I do not remember much about the story I had read 10+ years ago, that was till I watched Netflix's movie The White Tiger. 

I remembered that even while reading the book it had felt like it was gripping movie material for western audiences if it can be produced in English, the same language the book is written in. Just like Dickensian tales that never tire the audience even after repeat adaptations in different mediums, The White Tiger is like a modern day David Copperfield. It belongs to the same bildungsroman genre with the dark Victorian London substituted by the frenetic and murky 21st century New Delhi and northern India. A dog eat dog world where the poor has to overcome classism (and caste) to make something out of themselves.

And the most important reason why it has to be made in English and not in Hindi or any other regional Indian language is because poverty porn sells well to a western audience. [Parasite, has entered the chat.] It might even have a chance at being an Oscar contender in the regular category (and not in the best foreign film category.) If you think about other foreign films in the recent years that made it to the best picture category you shall see the light - Slumdog Millionaire, Roma, Parasite.

I can't say the poverty and the class/caste-divide The White Tiger depicts is not real. It it is not the India I am familiar with. I got lucky in the lottery of life. Salaam Bombay is real to people who live in the red light district of Mumbai, so is Netflix's recent home-brewed poverty porn classic - Hillbilly Elegy. But how many Americans I know and interact with everyday thinks that the U.S of A is as it is shown in Hillbilly Elegy? Zilch. Ordinary lives do not make interesting movies, we will leave it at that.

Adiga dedicated his book to his friend Ramin Bahrani whom he met during his student years at Columbia University. Bahrani has written the dialogs and directed The White Tiger as faithfully as he could, reproducing the narrative in his signature indie movie style. Bahrani, an Iranian-American director, born and brought up in the US somehow captures the simple and raw humanist docudrama vibes of Iranian cinema in all his films. He is well known for using raw natural talent, many with no previous acting experience as protagonists and placing them in a documentary-like story line (refer: Goodbye Solo) which is exactly what he does in The White Tiger too. It is helpful that Adiga's novel is indeed documentary-ish in its presentation - written as eight long emails from the protagonist, Balram Halwai to the Chinese premier at the time, Wen Jiabao. 

The cast is led by the newcomer Adarsh Gaurav as the protagonist and supported by the reliable and experienced Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. 

Priyanka and Ava DuVernay are also two of the executive producers of the movie. Appreciate your choice ladies, it is a movie that needs to made. While the characters and the background scenery are specific to India, it is a satirical take on neoliberalism, the invisible global economic epidemic, which is normalizing greed and narcissism all over the world.

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Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami : A book review

Race, immigration, stories about the people of color and immigrants have been brimming my reading list for the past few months. Is it because the current state the country prompts more writers to write about these subjects, consequently these books make frequent appearances on the reading radar of the public? Or is it because as a person color I am drawn more and more towards these subjects to understand the present state of affairs? 

Or is it because it is my current special interest topic? Hurtling down the rabbit holes of some peculiar topic which is of no interest to anyone else comes to me naturally. I have devoured pages on reincarnation and biology and diligently followed Dr. Ian Stevenson, consuming every bit of his research and documentation on life after life. Before Netflix started making a killing out of true crime, there was a period when I was reading up everything I could find on serial killers and social deviants. Maybe race, racism, immigrants and life stories of people of color might be my new interest. Will have to see how long will this phase last.

While on the topics of race and immigrants in the US, I recently finished reading Laila Lalami's Conditional Citizens. Lalami was born in Morocco, educated in Rabat and London before finally earning her PhD from University of Southern California, Los Angles in Linguistics. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and she currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. 

Conditional Citizens is a collection of essays on the subject of American identity and citizenship from a non-white immigrant's perspective. Lalami's definition of conditional citizens (in America mostly) goes like this, they are,

• people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy 
• policed and punished more harshly than others by the state 
• not guaranteed the same electoral representation as others
• more likely to be expatriated or de-naturalized. 
  
• living in a terrible reality that their relationship to the state is at least partly determined by the color of their skin, nature of their creed, their gender identity or their national origin. 

She gives plenty of examples from history and contemporary scenes played out in the US of A as to how a constitution written by white men for white men has been instrumental in trampling the rights of all the conditional citizens of this country in its pursuit for white supremacy. If you are interested some of the examples she gives that can be explored further through Wikipedia are - Slave Bible published in 1807 (a special edition of Bible printed for use by plantation owners to preach to their slaves omitted mention of Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt as well as other references to freedom), Bhagat Singh Tind, Expatriation Act of 1907, Richard Nixon's war on drugs launched in 1971 and escalated by successive administrations, United States creating the largest prison industrial complex in the world and other such supporting evidence.

NOTE: Direct quotes from Lalami's book are in italics

Lalami gives a great explanation of the term white privilege - "White privilege doesn’t mean that white people have easy lives – it simply means that whiteness does not make their lives harder. Blackness by contrast has a statistically measurable and negative effect on the outcome of individual efforts in employment, housing and education."

She also dissects the so-called assimilation required of the (non-white) immigrants - "after a period of time, which usually lasted several decades, each group of immigrants was judged to have successfully integrated into the mainstream and become hyphenated: Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans. Because assimilation revolves around power, however, descendants of white immigrants typically skip the hyphenation and are simply referred to as Americans.

.....the settlers didn’t assimilate to indigenous tribes, learn their languages, and adapt to their cultural customs. It was the Natives who assimilated, coercively and violently into the settler’s culture. The same government that wanted to conform indigenous people to white society worked hard t ensure that enslaved people could not be assimilated. In southern states, a slew of laws made it illegal for whites to teach slaves or freedmen how to read."

There are also other essays in the book that touches on topics like Barack Obama, Christine Blasey Ford and the Opioid Epidemic. Some relevant passages are below.

ON OBAMA : Many white people saw in him only figments of their imagination. White liberals treated him like another MLK., a savior who would deliver the nation from any and all ills. Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster is perhaps the purest expression of this view. White conservatives, meanwhile, though of him as a young Malcolm X, a radical who would never compromise on anything. Neither perspective quite captured the fact that Obama was first and foremost a skilled politician, successful at the art of the possible.

 ON CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD : When a woman, a citizen of the republic raises her voice against a man who is being considered for a position as chief interpreter of the laws of the republic, she is met by senators who tell her she must be mistaken. A man’s story is seen as inherently more authentic than a woman’s story. It is disbelief that under-girds the question: Why didn’t she report him sooner? 

....this is a very old trope about the value about the value of a woman’s word and it can be traced back to foundational texts. Under Athenian law women could not be litigants, and if they had cases to put forward they were to be represented by Men. Jewish law mandates that only men can serve as witnesses in court. Although women were among the earliest followers of Jesus, the apostle Paul counseled that women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission. And the Qur’an advises that in case of legal conflict, two men should be brought as witnesses, but if there are not two men available then a man and two women from those whom you accept as witnesses so that if one of the women errs, then the other can remind her.

ON THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA : The opioid epidemic in today’s rural white communities is being treated very differently from the crack epidemic in urban black communities in the 1980s. Back then the state’s response was to expand the police presence and to pass draconian criminal legislation like three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. An entire generation of black men and women was sent to prison for substance abuse. Nowadays, though, the government’s approach to opioid addiction is to treat it as a public health issue, with state politicians asking federal funding for drug treatment and counseling. This is a good development – drug addition should be treated as a disease, but the different response only serves as evidence that despite the fact Donald Trump disturbed the silence on whiteness, white Americans can still largely escape the disadvantages of race.

 

 

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The Great Indian Kitchen : a movie review

The Great Indian Kitchen: the recipe for success as below.

Ingredients

• One measure of the good
• One measure of the bad
• One measure of the ugly

Directions

Turn back the clock a hundred years. Retain electronic gadgets and newer modes of transportation from the current age. Combine all ingredients in a majestic old bowl house and whip them into a frenzy. Rinse-n-Repeat. Each day. Every day. Save the last dance.

The good: Some truths need to be made into films. As many films as you can, to hammer the point home. This movie would have been a decent documentary and could have even made it to a few international film festivals if it was made by a white woman film maker on a noble mission to empower and bring freedom to third world women. As a regional Indian feature film it found the right audience though - the local south (or north, with subtitles) Indian men who have been blissfully living their sedentary lives while their better halves toil from sunrise to midnight in the kitchen. If these wives work outside their home, the toiling continues at their work-place too. The cook-clean-perform wifely duties narration, executed in a minimally perfect style by the director, Jeo Baby, hits the mark. 

The fact that this movie got to be made as a feature film and not a documentary, thus reaching a wider audience, is inspirational. The dialog it has created on different platforms and groups is the ultimate goal of social impact films. The movie has a feminist theme and the female lead is the real lead of the movie with more screen-time than any of her male counterparts. Nimisha Sajayan is perfect as a new bride turned house-wife. Suraj Venjaramoodu has reliable job security as Nimisha's onscreen husband if her career continues on the upswing.

The bad (a tiny-bit frazzling): Why do I feel like Jeo Baby is Blessy in new clothes? Not that Blessy has gone anywhere - can't wait to unwatch Aadujeevitham when it hits the theaters. I am all braced up to re-read Benyamin's novel to get rid of the taste of the movie, which I do intend to watch in order to write a biased review right afterwards.

There was shades of Blessy in Jeo Baby's previous directorial venture Kilometers and Kilometers. The social cause part, a signature of Blessy's films was missing in Kms & Kms, but it made it up with a surplus of the virtuous characters without any real depth.

In The Great Indian Kitchen, the Blessyness comes from its  kitschy moralization, absolute disregard of grey areas and its social justice theme, which only focuses on the extremes. Unlike Blessy whose heroes were always those few good men in our midst who operate in a perpetual God mode, Jeo Baby is more open-minded and trains his camera on a woman, who since she is a woman has not unlocked the God mode. 

Like Blessy with his moralizing movies, Jeo Baby in TGIK, comes across as this self-righteous and principled unicorn crusader against the specter of patriarchy that hangs permanently over Indian woman kind, like grey clouds on a typical Seattle sky. TGIK must have begun its life in the spasmodic vibrations of a tuning fork triggered picking on the preachy sentiments of keyboard activists and social media warriors. The media - social and traditional is lapping up the spirit of revolution Baby's movie has unleashed on the morality militia. It is constructive in a sense, but anything holier than thou is a suspect in my book.

The suspicion proves valid when the audience is asked to believe the impossible. The story takes place at a huge family house spread out like a lumbering, grounded, two-storied jet plane. While it looks squeaky clean (except the kitchen/dining area which resembles a battle-field most of the time) we are asked to believe it does not have any full time retinue of maids or cleaners. Cleaning that house looks like a week long project. The kind of project that calls for project trackers, Gantt charts and responsibility matrices, and should only be attempted as a sub-project before bigger projects like weddings or funerals. But according to the movie, the new bride is expected to clean it every day? 

Then there was a tiny side story injected into the script that was totally unnecessary. The audience would miss the activist episode if they blinked. What purpose did it serve other than incite some fringe religious or political group? Maybe the intent was to create a PR controversy and make more people watch the movie? 

The ugly:  It is about half a century late. The story probably takes place in the early 1900s where they happen to have cellphones, cars and refrigerators. Or else in this day and age, where in Kerala is a woman routinely quarantined for almost a week due to her 'impure' menstrual period? 

There is no subtlety in the way the message of feminism is inflicted upon the viewer. I am as feminist as they come. But this movie is like someone's take on feminism after reading a few WhatsApp forwards on the subject and doing-your-own-research on YouTube. It goes from a dark feminist zero to a blinding hundred without passing through any modulatory gray zones in-between. 

Dance, according to the revelation I received after watching TGIK, is a safe and accepted career choice for female feminists in Kerala/India. Kerala is the highly literate Indian state where almost every millennial adult woman has a Bachelor's degree at the minimum, usually in a STEM field. But as a nascent feminist she will seek her emancipation only through arts or so the movie tells us. Not that there is anything wrong with arts jobs, it just doesn't make it through my ground truthing sensor.

Nimisha Sajayan who does not have a single dance bone in her body looks utterly out of place as a dance director in her new woke life. Even as she is reviewing the final rehearsal of her dance troupe, she is a detached spectator, her body feels rigid, while impassively watching a fluid dance performance which she supposedly directed. 

The last dance: The fusion dance group looks absolutely stunning - a beautiful blend of Thai/Far-east dance with Kerala's kathakali (in looks.)

Jeo Baby, go on make some more movies, now that the conversation has started, let's keep it going. Get this man some producers. 

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Reading in 2020 : The year-end 'best of' list

2020 was/is a year unlike any year we have lived so far for the most of us. In terms of reading,  it was just another year for me though. The only thing I tried to do differently this year was to stay clear of any books or movies related to pandemics or epidemics. As if we don't have enough already.

Since I am not a fan of movies in the pandemic category it was easy not to break down and watch World War Z or Contagion. These would have helped me get an idea about how the U.S. government and CDC mutants in space suits will tackle a global pandemic. Hint:  It is nothing like in the movies. The U.S. government does not watch Hollywood movies as Hollywood is infested by you-know-who, so they had absolutely zero clue as to how to deal with a planet-wide pandemic.

I also gave up on a book half-way through, Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. It was not solely because of the subject - the cholera epidemic of 1854. While it was interesting to read how this epidemic changed the urban geography of the city of London to what it is today, the narrative became repetitive and started straying in different directions. My attention, as usual, was faltering. I will attempt it again next year, once I get vaccinated for my ADHD.

Here are the books-worth-my-time I read in 2020 in no particular order. Only 3 out of the 8 listed below were published this year.

1. Paying tribute for keeping the U.S.A number one in 2020, I will start off with Mary L. Trump's portrait of her uncle, Donald Trump - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020.) While the book feels rushed and could have been put together better, it is an intelligent insider's personal view of her family and her uncle - the man / the President who instigated/is instigating many (failed) soft coups at the American democracy. Read it, if you want to smell out the next Donald Trump in the making before it happens.

2. Of the Civil Rights Movement leaders, I empathize more with Malcolm X than with Martin Luther King. MLK, I have always felt, was promoted because he was a 'cleaner' African-American leader more acceptable to the white majority of the country. This year started with Netflix's documentary series, Who Killed Malcom X where historian Abdur Rahman Muhammad traces and condenses his thirty year of investigation about Malcolm X's assassination into a six part series.  This was followed by Autobiography of Malcolm X:  As Told to Alex Haley (1965), which focuses on Malcolm X's evolution as a street hustler to the charismatic speaker and leader of the Civil Rights era. 

3. I am closing out the year with Pulitzer prize winning author Les Payne's 25+ year labor love exploring and researching the life of Malcolm X, the biography The Dead are Arising : The Life of Malcolm X (2020.) The work was completed by the author's daughter and fellow researcher, Tamara Payne, although the final manuscript was ready before Les Payne's passing. I may attempt a separate review sometime later combining all the Malcolm X books, as they and their eminent and intriguing subject rightfully deserve.

4. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at Time (2012) by Jeff Speck is far removed from the current mental state of the world. It was written at a time when when American downtowns were a bustle of activity, restaurants had not shuttered due to Covid-19 and some people did walk on the streets. But if we were to learn from history and the book that I gave up half-way, Ghost Map, pandemics have the power to upset the status quo which includes the urban way of life among many other things. The effects of it will percolate down to urban planning and how people use spaces. At that time it will be good to have a primer of things we did right and the things we had designed wrong in the past. Speck's works will be worth referring to improve on things when we rebuild our cities and economies after this year's setback.

5. I choose "Asian" when I have to choose my race while filling out forms and applications. Yet I do not identify myself as Asian. Like the rest of the United States, when I think Asian it is the people of east-Asian descent who are Asian. But like Cathy Park Hong points out in her book of essays - Minor Feelings (2020), United States immigration has for centuries barred entry of Asians from the entire continent of Asia, starting from the Naturalization Act of 1790 which made sure that only 'free white persons of good character' where allowed to immigrate to the U.S. While not all of Park Hong's essays from the collection resonated with me, it helped me understand another PoV from a representative of the same racial minority that I am also part of.

6. The Giver (1993) was one of my kids' middle school reading projects that was recommended to me by my kid. YA fiction is not usually my cup of tea, but for sharing the experience of a book with someone I love, I gave it a try. For young readers 10-13 who are the book's primary audience, Lois Lowry's The Giver is thought-provoking, intense, disturbing and engaging at the same time. I am glad I read it, it is a perfect book to discuss with your tween or teen. I appreciate Lowry writing such a powerful book for young audience. It is an oft-banned book, so I am glad for our schools choosing it as reading material for kids at that right age when they need to understand the importance of compassion and altruism, to understand there are many shades and colors between black and white.

7. Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (2006) - I read this in Jan '20 while watching HBO's Chernobyl as a companion piece. The HBO show was 'inspired' by the book and had some excellent performances. The book is composed of verbatim interview material, the voices of common people who were at Chernobyl or thereabouts when the disaster struck. Chernobyl did make a big impression on my mind as a kid, when it had happened in 1986. Then it faded out till the aughts when I chanced upon a website by a girl who documented Chernobyl on a motor bike - Elena Filatova - an Ukranian photographer and biker. Then it went dormant again till HBO came out with the TV show in 2019. Like the title says, the book is an oral history, a much-needed documentation of one of the most suppressed disasters in human history. Don't go looking for a complex literary masterpiece. What it is a simple and stark portrait of a section of humanity, during a dark and senseless hour, in their own words. Kudos to Svetlana Alexievich!

8. How do kids living in affluent western societies get taken by radical Islamic ideologies? Asne Seierstad's documentation of two Somali-American teenage girls from Norway who go to wage jihad in the Middle East is one window to the mysterious realm of teenage and what goes on there, making the kids act like they do. While Two Sisters : A Father, His Daughter and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad (2018) offers no easy answers, it is a book just like the Trump one, that can be used to pick up the warning signals.

My Best Books Lists from the past

• 2019 Best Books List
• 2018 Best Books
• 2010 Best
• 2009

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Nine Hours To Rama : Movie Review

Nine Hours to Rama (1963) was the first foreign film banned in India. It was based on historian and Indophile Stanley Wolpert's novel of the same name and is a fictionalized account about the life of Nathuram Godse - the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. It features a narrative capturing the final hours in the run-up to Gandhi's assassination on Jan 30, 1948, with a few biographical notes about Godse thrown in. This Anglo-American film was directed by Mark Robson who also directed films like Van Ryan's Express and Valley of the Dolls.

The book was banned by the Nehru administration upon its release in 1962 and subsequently the film was banned when it was released an year later. The reason for banning cited by the first Prime Minister of independent India - the liberal socialist Jawaharlal Nehru, was it supposedly portrayed Nathuram Godse in the wrong (better than he deserved) light and that it would have hurt the sentiments of certain sections of the population. That is a credible argument, although banning both the book, which clearly belonged to the fiction category and the movie based on it, was an overkill, especially for a progressive like Nehru. 

The real reason could have been that throughout the 2+ hours the camera was focused intensely on Godse and the Father of India, M.K.Gandhi was just a side character. Adding insult to the injury, for a movie based on an event that was a turning point in India's history, almost every consequential Indian character other than Gandhi was played by white actors.

Valerie Gearon and Horst Buchholz

Godse was played by German actor Horst Buchholz. Buccholz looks very Caucasian with his chiseled face, but can't say he didn't try his best to act his part. The women characters in the movie were also essayed by British/American actors. I appreciate the effort they had put into make them look Indian. The make-up (brown-face?) is excellent, the only thing that gives them away other than the language they speak - English, is their bone structure. The way these ladies carry off their acts in well draped saris and kurtas are some of the best sari-draping I have ever seen on western women. 

The character of Godse is shown as a beer-chugging, hot headed romantic chasing after women, which might have been the farthest from the real life Godse. So it is understandable the conservative Hindu RSS faction, to which Godse belonged, would definitely be incensed by this fictional Godse. Nathuram Godse, the real assassin, was a celibate, religious right wing activist and teetotaler. Here's Godse's letter on - "Why I Killed Gandhi"

J.S. Casshyap as Gandhi, with Robert Morley in white cap

Gandhi in this movie is the best Gandhi I have ever seen on silver screen. The most famous Gandhi on screen, Ben Kingsley's Oscar winning portrayal of the man in 1982 Attenborough film - Gandhi , looked a little too able-bodied, younger and muscular compared to how the real sixty, seventy year old person would have looked. Jamuna Swaroop Kashyap who portrayed Gandhi in Nine Hours To Rama, credited as J. S. Casshyap in the movie, was an excellent choice. He looked and delivered like the real life Mahatma Gandhi. Although one of the reasons Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru cited on banning the film was that the person who played Mahatma in the film lacked dignity. For about 5 minutes of screen time in the entire movie and a handful of dialogues, I would say,  J.S.Casshyap did an amazing job, delivering the first believable Gandhi I have ever come across on screen. His claim to fame in Bollywood though was as a lyricist, from mid 1930s to 1950s. An English professor turned Hindi lyricist, he wrote the songs for Achhut Kanya (1936), one of the early super hit movies of Bollywood that had established the career of actor Ashok Kumar.

This is the first movie I have ever watched, based in India, much of it shot in location in India but the entire main cast of Indians were played by westerners. Delhi police chief Gopal Das was brought to life by an amazing Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac, The Caine Mutiny, Moulin Rouge) Other actors like Valerie Gearon, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews (the Sikh general in the pic, alongside Jose Ferrer) and Diane Baker essayed other Indian characters. It was fascinating to see 50s-early 60s towns and villages of India in color, as there were a lot of outdoor locations in the movie. The only other non-Indian movie which I have watched that showed India of that time period in color is Jean Renoir's The River. A juicy bit of trivia about this movie is among all the inconsequential characters played by Indians or people of Indian descent there was a man named Basdeo Pandey who played a bit part of a laundry man, he went on to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (1995-2001.)

Nine Hours to Rama intriguing movie for a student of history or someone interested in India, Gandhi or Indian independence. The movie opens with the disclaimer that it is historical fiction, but its fidelity in the depiction of India (despite non-Indian actors in all major roles) and the socio-political climate of the times is remarkable.

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Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings : A book review

I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did have the same hyphenated American racial identity, although I personally had never considered myself Asian. Asian for me means the people from East Asia - China, Koreas, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the like. But however I see it, I also understand the common the thread that binds us all - we all have roots in the continent of Asia, whether East Asia or West Asia and we are all outsiders, immigrants hot off the U.S immigration grill in most cases.

Park Hong, a Korean American born and brought up in California, touches this aspect of immigration history in one of her first essays. She reminds us that the immigration policies of the U.S government ever since the first immigration law was enacted in 1790 - The Naturalization Act, was intent on preventing non-white immigration. The 1790 law allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court. This exclusion is especially concerning because 1 in 5 persons counted by the 1790 census was of African descent.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This is the first time a specific group of immigrants are targeted by a U.S immigration law. In 1917 U.S. government decides to be impartial and expands the ban to all of Asia - restricting the entry of Filipinos even, a former colony. Then there is the much-maligned and rightly so, Japanese Americans internment camps during the Second World War. In 1965 under the threat of heightening Cold War, as a part of the PR exercise to revamp its image US opens doors to the degraded Asian people - but only the best and select professionals who already have advanced degrees and were highly trained- engineers and doctors were admitted in. Hong's book made me look this all up as her essays filled the gaps.

She also reflects on the sorry space taken up Asians in daily life. She ruminates thus about her own poetry reading, " I confront the infinite chasm between audience conception of the Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look that part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."

She says when she hears the phrase, 'Asians are next in line to be white', she replaces 'be white' with 'disappear', and that Asians reputed to be accomplished and law-abiding will disappear into this country's amnesiac fog.

While most of her essays resonated with me there were a couple that flew over my head. There was one where she expounds on the merits of Richard Pryor's standup and her appreciation of it. I never really understood Richard Pryor, even with closed captions on. Appreciating Pryor, might be like learning to appreciate dark beer. I need to drink a lot of light, craft and fruity beers to get there. Although many African American comedians I like, like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wayans Brothers consider Pryor the father of African American comedy. Maybe it was because Pryor created that niche for African Americans in the standup scene, where none had existed before. He was the pioneer, the reason why others could walk the trail he cleared. While Richard Pryor made Cathy Park Hong question the kind of audience she should be/is writing for, no stand-up comedian (except perhaps George Carlin) has ever led me down the tunnels of retrospection or life-reviews.

The other essay I breezed and skipped through was the one about her college days, female friendship and art. There was nothing wrong with the essay, it was just not a subject I cared much about. It delved too much on relationships, emotions and people and too less on hard cold facts, logic and info snippets that I tend to enjoy. My bad.

Minor Feelings is a hybrid of memoir and criticism. There were places where I could appreciate the poet in her, writing the essay, but there were also places where her prose dangerously veered into the stiff, incomprehensible parlance favored by academia. I could find similarities in her experiences and her diagnosis of situations that you are exposed solely by the merit of belonging to a racial minority.

In one of her essays, Park Hong mentions an anecdote about an award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, "If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen." Minor Feelings is Cathy Park Hong trying to come clean of her politeness cover, talking about race in prose, it was good to hear an Asian voice on the subject - loud and clear.

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Notes on Jeff Speck's - Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Jeff Speck's paean to walkable, bike-able cities makes me want to plan a city. The only place they allow someone like me to plan cities is Minecraft and I don't even have the patience of my tween who is the resident Minecraft architect-planner. Therefore the easiest way to pay respect to the author and try out his ideas is to walk downtown, which I try to do a few times a week. 

Walkable City is full of interesting facts and statistics. Did you know that car crashes have killed 327 million Americans (up to this point in time), that is more than all our wars combined and is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 34? 

Speck also says pollution is not what it used to be, American smog now comes principally from tailpipes not factories. Asthma related hospitalization reduced by a full 30% during the '96 Olympic games in Atlanta as more residents started walking and took public transit to downtown because of the impossibility of motoring around downtown during the Games.

As any walking enthusiast would have found out from his/her first few walking outing in American downtowns, block sizes affect walkability. Quoting verbatim from the book, "generally speaking the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, ones with the largest blocks are places without street life. The pre-industrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and Lower Manhattan like their European counterparts have blocks that averaged less than 200 feet long. Philadelphia's and San Francisco's blocks averaged less than 400 feet in length. And then there a pedestrian free cities like Irvine, California where many blocks are 1000 feet long."

I remember walking infinite blocks that seemed to extend forever flanking wide 3-4 lane roads in Anaheim, California with four kids in tow because I had a booked a hotel a "couple of blocks" away from the Disneyland entrance. Since it was only 2-3 blocks I was also trying to save money by not renting a car or using a rideshare app. Before this I had only driven in southern California, had never walked. That trip made me realize that southern California's cities and suburbs are one of the unfriendliest urban areas for walking.

The book provides an insight to how the human form and our physical limits affects urban planning, if urban planners would take heed. For example, we walk just under 3 mph hour in warm weather and around 2 mph in cold weather. We bow our heads 10 degrees while walking and we can see a person's movement at 100 yards and recognized and hear them at about 50. If we want to make our cities walkable, they should reflect our physical capabilities and limitations. We should design our public streets and squares smaller. Some of America's most famous public  squares like New York's Rockefeller Center, San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and  San Antonio's Riverwalk are small - only very few are much broader than  60 yards across.

Instead what many of the 'unwalkable' US downtowns have is what is called the missing teeth phenomenon  - where every block of construction is surrounded by three blocks of empty lots or parking  thus rendering otherwise promising pedestrian environments uninviting. 

Speck also warns that smaller cities need to be aware that some big city practices are not made for them,  like the Barnes Dance intersection in big cities where all the pedestrians wait for a full cycle for all  the cars to stop and then are briefly given free reign over the entire intersection including diagonally. In smaller cities this would mean that the pedestrians will have to wait an inordinate amount of time before they get a chance to cross or there are no pedestrians to cross and traffic just idles unnecessarily, during hours of low volume foot traffic.

Speck points out that the planning of streets is as important block-sizes when it comes to walkability. No one prefers walking on the side of 4 lane road where vehicles are hurtling past at 60 mph. Increase in lane sizes result in approximately nine hundred additional traffic fatalities yearly (I forgot the get the reference for this from the book.) He says that increasing lane sizes in the name of safety (for motorists) is like distributing handguns to deter crime.

This is because humans always adjust their behavior to accommodate changes in risk patterns. The behavior is called risk homeostasis or risk compensation - becoming more careful where we sense greater risk and less careful if we feel more protected (wikipedia) It explains why poisoning deaths went up after child proof caps were introduced and people stopped hiding their medicines.

The best risk homeostasis report comes from Sweden a nation obsessed with traffic safety. In a single year in 1967 traffic fatalities dropped 17%. It turns out that March 9th 1967 Sweden switch driving on the left hand side of the road to drive right hand side of the road. Therefore Speck argues that the safest roads for both pedestrian and the motorists are those that feel the least safe demanding more attention from their drivers.

I was reading that while Walkable City pointed out the problems in U.S downtowns it didn't offer any real world solutions. So Jeff Speck came out with a follow up - a resource book of steps or rules to follow to make better urban places for people called Walkable City Rules : 101 Steps to Making Better Places. Maybe I will check that out next.

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Bron | Broen Review

Almost a decade after Scandi noir or Nordic noir  had migrated from books to TV screen, I happened to watch of one the flagship TV shows of the genre - Bron | Broen or The Bridge.  The bridge stands for the Øresund Bridge across Øresund strait that connects the southern Swedish town of Malmo to the Danish capital - Copenhagen. The crime that starts off season 1 of Bron | Broen leaves it dead body straddling the Swedish-Danish border passing through middle of Øresund bridge.

The long and looming, sometimes foreboding Bridge is an omnipresent character in the series. It is a team of two detectives, a Swedish and a Danish one who are given the responsibility to investigate this cross-border dead body / crime. Sofia Helin headlines as the Asperger-y Swedish cop - Saga Noren and the Danish side is represented by the warm and affable, Martin Rohde played by Kim Bodnia. They make an unlikely pair who hit off despite the odds.

Considering the geographical proximity and the cultural overlap of Sweden and Denmark across the strait, the series must have surely explored and presented nuances and references pertaining to the people of the region. Not being very much familiar to the place or the culture except the civil engineering marvel of Øresund bridge, all that was lost on me.

But the one thing that was not unfathomable is the brooding overcast geography and how it influences the people and their behavior in nordic climate. A third of my life was spent north of the 45th parallel in the snowy gray northern lands. My affinity towards Nordic crime dramas is natural. The landscape and the weather are familiar, the IKEA-ish interiors not so much - but that's okay, mega IKEA box stores are working hard at converting the interior-scape on this side of the Atlantic too. As soon as IKEA introduces two-day shipping to Alaska we will be brewing our own home-grown noir in our northern country.

The other attraction for me is the prominent presence of strong, unconventional women protagonists in Nordic noir, starting with Stieg Larsen's Lisbeth Salander aka The Girl with Dragon Tattoo in the 2000s to Bron | Broen's Saga Noren. While Bron | Boren is an engaging crime drama, that evolves into a better version of itself each passing season, I am not really convinced about the way the creators have coached Sofia Helin to play a detective on the spectrum. Then again most characters on the autistic spectrum on TV are stereo-typical, with certain traits exaggerated - the way the majority neurotypical society perceives how a person with Asperger's syndrome should be. As they say once you meet an autistic person, you know one autistic person. Helin's Saga Noren is probably one of the better depictions out there, because I know, I tried watching the U.S version of Bron | Broen.

Bron | Broen inspired a series of remakes the world over in various languages including a U.S one on FX called The Bridge and a French version called The Tunnel. There are also three other remakes take place at the borders of Estonia / Russia, Malaysia / Singapore and Germany / Austria. I almost started watching the U.S one by accident, then I was warned by a concerned loved one to stay clear of it. I am glad such people exist in my life.

But after finishing Season 1 of Bron | Broen, my curiosity got better of me and I sneaked in a fast forwarded S1E1 of the US series. OMG - it was like I had averted a major catastrophe. It was a let down on all fronts. The Hollywoodization of the show made sure that the direction, screenplay, casting and acting went out of the window. 120 lb, 5' 7" waif like Diane Kruger guarding the El Paso-Jaurez Bridge of the Americas against drug lords, coyotes and ICE, sauntering into mob bosses' dens in the middle of the night without backup? Gimme a break. On top of it - a police officer with Asperger's syndrome wearing make-up? I am so done. I like Damian Bichir, but the dialogs and the hamming of other actors were so over the top that Bichir's natural style looked out of place.

I am half way past Season 3. Kim Bodnia said goodbye to the series after season 2 (the rumor was the presence of anti-Semitic elements at the main shooting location of Malmo) and in comes as Saga Noren's Danish counterpart a much younger Thure Lindhart playing detective Henrik Sabroe. He is another broken character like Saga Noren. I have one more season to go after this, we will see how that goes.

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Donald Trump : A Review

 Tl;dr  -  VERDICT : "Tremendously Unfit"

To get rid of the last iota of indecision (ROFL) before dropping my ballot in the ballot box, I brushed up on the biography of one of the candidates - the incumbent Donald J. Trump. Netflix has been kind enough to continue streaming their 2018 four part documentary miniseries - "Trump : An American Dream." It is an outsiders' take on the current President. These were the people who had been close to him from the seventies to his Presidential run in mid 2010s. Originally created for UK's Channel4 the documentary series is not an expose, but a biography up till his candidacy in 2016. 

While watching this series, I was also reading in tandem, Dr. Mary Trump's (Donald Trump's psychologist niece, his older brother Fred Trump Jr.'s daughter) explosive expose on Donald Trump and the Trump family - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. My review of this book is done in Trump-speak and it goes like this - "great, spectacular, brilliant, fabulous, incredible, amazing, fantastic, tremendous, sophisticated, honest, outstanding, phenomenal, powerful, " well, you get the drift.

I will let Dr. Mary Trump speak, the best speaker Trump family has yet produced. Take it away, Dr.Trump. Everything in blue text, is an excerpt from her book, "Too Much and Never Enough"

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Guru Dutt and his movies

 It is a leaden gray Saturday evening, raining dense into the night. I am stuck on Guru Dutt. Pyaasa (Thirst/Yearning) rests heavy on my mind, Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers) is not light as the title means, although this must be the second or third time I am watching these films, but years and life had happened in between.

I scour the internet and read or watch every single piece on Guru Dutt, one of India's legendary directors/actors. I read about his friendship with Dev Anand, I leaf through the chapters of his life with his wife and the singer who lend her voice to the songs in several of his movies - Geeta Dutt nee Roy Chaudhary, his team of creative minds who got together in every film of his - cinematographer V.K.Murthy, director/writer Abrar Alvi, his muse, actress Waheeda Rehman, actors Johnny Walker, Rehman. I find that he lost a ton of money on Kaagaz ke Phool - India's first cinemascope which was a movie he directed to showcase the talents of his cinematographer friend Murthy. How he recouped his losses with Chaudvin ka Chaand. 

The more I read or watch interviews I realize how much Guru Dutt is the poster boy for the temperamental, mercurial artist. For a mind in such constant state of disquiet, who brought his emotions and life translated raw into cinematic medium (referring to Kaagaz ke Phool & Pyaasa), it seems almost unlikely that he would exit through a natural death. Of course he didn't. I read about his last evening with his brother, Abrar Alvi and Shakti Samantha before he committed suicide or had an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. He was 39.

Film schools all over the world teach Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool to the students of world cinema. Kaagaz ke phool is a movie about the world of movies. Its camera is turned inward on a director down on his luck played by Guru Dutt himself. Although now regarded as a classic of Indian cinema, Guru Dutt stopped directing movies and confined himself to production and acting after the failure of Kaagaz ke Phool at the box office. 

Much has been analyzed and written about Guru Dutt's body of work. He would make three or four movies that would appeal to the public and keep the counters ringing before plunging deep into his pet project, like Pyaasa or Kaagaz ke Phool. Guru Dutt the artist, the director, seem to have a real serious case of melancholia, so much so that Dev Anand once remarked after Guru Dutt's passing that Guru Dutt was a young man, he should have made happy films instead of stories about depressed people.

This is the only footage of Guru Dutt in color, the famous song from the movie of the same name, Chaudvin ka Chaand

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Glitch : A series co-produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Netflix

Why did Glitch not show up in any of the best of Netflix lists? Glitch, an ABC show, picked and co-produced by Netflix from its second season onwards is one of the highly bingeable shows on Netflix (US.) I accidentally stumbled on it after watching a zombie series (Dead Set, UK) on fast forward and was looking into more 'shows like this.' In a way it is a zombie show without blood, guts and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. No spoilers, check it out for yourself.

If you have been looking for glitch-in-the-matrix, afterlife or paranormal TV shows, Glitch is it. There are three seasons and six episodes per season. With each episode an hour length, you can probably finish watching the entire three seasons over a weekend if you put your mind to it LOL like I did. There is no fourth season or AFAIK nothing is in the works yet.

Glitch takes place in a fictional town of Yoorana, in Victoria, Australia. A set of people come back from the dead, rising out of their graves in perfect physical shape. They are helped by a police officer and a doctor who first discover them. All characters have a back story and their story lines mature as the series progresses. As viewer I felt invested in the characters though all the actors were totally new to me. Brilliant casting, great acting and a solid story / screenplay bring to us the vision of creators Tony Ayres and Louise Fox and director Emma Freeman.

One of the things that made me like Glitch, especially the first two seasons, (the final one was a washout though,) is it is very un-American. There is no hint of Hollywood anywhere, it is feels like an Australian original. Although in reality, it is not. It supposedly got its inspiration from Les Revenants, a French TV show and a cancelled (after season 1) American TV show, The Returned. I am pretty sure the American show would have been too much plastic for me, call it my confirmation bias. Also I prefer the sunnier Australian outback to the dark French mountain towns. 

While the seasons 1 and 2 were gripping and had good production value for a series produced on a tight budget as Glitch was, the season 3 was below par. It was as if the creators of the show couldn't figure out how to bring the series to a culmination. New characters were introduced, then had their stories abruptly cut short. There were a lot of loose threads with explanations lacking and a very anti-climatic ending. I thought the characters deserved more. It was as if there was only enough money to somehow finish the third season and no more. Therefore they had to set a fire, annihilate everything and bring the series to a close once and for all.

Still, it is worth a watch. Because it is not very often that we come across paranormal or tales about glitches without eerie sound effects, cheesy story and production design and ghosts who are not dressed in white.

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Godless : A Netflix Original (Review)

 I am a fan of movies and TV shows based in the American West. Not all of them have to be Westerns. In fact I have not seen any movies of John Wayne, the classic Western icon. Maybe I will, one day. The message of the glorified cowboy who wins the West and its pioneer trailblazer construct does not appeal to me much.

It was Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy that introduced me to the westerns. These spaghetti Westerns were not classic Hollywood fare at the time. They didn't have just one good cowboy, what they had was a mixture of good, bad and ugly in the same people, fighting each other against a fantastic background score. And these Leone westerns were not even shot in the U.S! 

Places and things interest me more than people. The starkly beautiful, hostile wide-screen landscape is appealing to my eyeballs. The history of the westward expansion was another aspect, how it affected the conqueror and conquered and it all happened so close to the present. I have documented my love for the stories of the West a few times in this blog - here, here, here.

 

Godless is a Netflix mini-series that dropped in 2017. Yes, I am late to the party. But better late than never, right? It is written and directed by Scott Frank (director of Minority Report, Get Shorty) and the executive producer is Steven Soderbergh. The heroes in Godless are ordinary folks fighting their own personal battles and more than half of them are women. Although not exactly the feminist Western the series was marketed as, a frontier town without able-bodied men is a new take. 

The powerful performances by the women actors do justice to the story. Sam Waterson, Jeff Daniels, Jack O'Connell, Michelle Dockery, Merrit Weaver, Scott McNairy play some of the important characters in the series. It seems funny to me that for an American western TV show more than half of the lead cast is from U.K.

The Hollywood cliche trap that even Godless couldn't escape is when there is a powerful female character in a leadership role, she inevitably has to be a lesbian. Have they not seen hetero-sexual leaders like Angela Merkels, Golda Meirs or Maggie Thatchers of the world or our home-grown Kamala Harris ? Or is it done as a symbol of political correctness and inclusivity to make sure they don't leave any minority groups out? I am looking at you Mindhunter (Wendy Carr), Xena and Batwoman. It is almost as if a hetero-sexual woman won't have the balls to take on the leadership role intended for the said character. 

Godless captures the epic scale, wall to wall geography of the West faithfully making even trigger-happy TV remote user like me soak it in and keep my fingers off the fast forward button. As expected from the title, there are no Gods in Godless. It is set in a territory of lawlessness and struggle. Yeah, the struggle is real in 19th century New Mexico. 

 

Edifices dedicated to a higher power are conspicuously absent. The story is mostly centered around the silver mining town of La Belle, NM where a church building is seen to be in perpetual construction state and is never seen finished. All the men of the town perished in a mining disaster, except the grocer, the saloon owner and the sheriff and a few other old men.

 

The series is written as a journey through the lives of the people in La Belle as they advance towards the ultimate showdown (which will happen in La Belle) between two outlaws - Roy Goode and his adapted 'Pappy', Frank Griffin, both gun-slingers and outlaws of the finest kind. Roy being a Goode, the makers of the series are trying to tell us that there is some good in him. Guns play an important part in the show, but the lead character Roy Goode, while he is an ace shooter, sometimes belts out dialogs like he is a spokesperson of a gun control advocacy group, which is okay be me. Goes to show that even among gun-toting outlaws the voice of reason and reality was not always a lost cause.

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