Mar 28, 2005

Bhoot

Ram Gopal Varma is the best director to come out of Bollywood in recent times. If Shekhar Kapoor can get Hollywood films to direct, it is high time Varma got a chance. Bhoot is an excellent cinematic composition, taut, no-nonsesnse, a ghost story with just the right amount ghost in it. No Hindi movie I've watched recently comes anywhere near the technical perfection, acting and overall quality of Bhoot. Urmila Matondkar and Ajay Devgan deliver excellent performances, the rest of the cast is also good. Hats off to Ram Gopal Varma

Without a Paddle

This is the perfect movie for a saturday/sunday night with friends. In the simplest terms it is the story of three friends who go searching for a treasure in the Cascades National Forest following the clues left behind by a dead fourth member of their childhood gang. They leave their real life jobs behind and embark upon a journey none of them are familiar with. Its a fun trip.

Half-Baked

Another one for all the fans of Dave Chappelle. It is a not so new movie(1998) which is an A-Z about weed and weed smokers. If you are offended by the overwhelming onscreen presence of marijuana, you should stay clear of this movie. Dave Chappelle as usual is funny, as he is in all movies he co-writes. It is a stupid, full length funny movie about Dave and his three friends on loose and high.

Bus174

This must be the only documentary in which the entire hijack(of any kind) has been filmed live and clear anywhere in the world. If CNN's live broadcast(of shooting flares and dim gun totting figures and tanks) of Kuwait War of 1991 was a major event in TV history, Bus 174 is a major milestone in documentary film making.

Better than a crime thriller, it keeps you on the edge of your street for the whole two hours because you know that the Bus 174 is hijacked for real, the trauma the passengers undergo when one by one each one of them is paraded by the hijacker at gun point is real, there is no hero waiting in the wings for the right moments to kick the living lights out of the hijacker, only the incompetent Brazilian police.

More than an action movie, Bus 174 is also a sociological statement. The hijacker himself a victim of the police cruelty, the inhuman treatment of street kids and the justice system in Brazil turns his wrath on a group of bus passengers on Dec 12th 2000. He wanted to be in the world's eye for one day and wanted to take revenge for the 1993 Candelabrian street kids massacre(he was one of the survivors), hijacking Bus 174 was his fifteen minutes of fame, though it went on a lot longer than 15 minutes. The entire hijack episode on live TV is interspersed with talks with policemen, hijacker's friends, relatives, the hostages(at a later point in time) and the review of the police system, society, favelas and the social treatment of street kids. A very serious, must watch, mile stone documentary.

Eat a Bowl of Tea

The travails of immigrants in the New World - this time it is the Chinese immigrants before WW2. An arranged marriage, the bride comes over to the US and the troubles begin. But wait, it is not a serious film as the issues involved may make you believe. Shot in a funny vein, it is a light look at the serious problems faced by immigrants.

Matchstick Men

Since Matchstick Men didn't make any box office ripples, I didn't expect much from it - but I was in for a surprise. It turned out to be a good one! One doesn't expect this kind of low key movie from Ridley Scott, who is 'prone' to epics. But in my opinion, he did well.

Matchstick Men is the story of two con artists, Roy(played by Nick Cage) and Frank(Sam Rockwell), one of them has Roy has a severe case of OCD. Midway thru' the movie Roy's 14 year old daughter(Alison Lohman) turns up and this changes the flow of the whole movie. It is a very intriguing story, a con with a twist at the end. A good one.

Death Becomes Her

It is a funny, satirical Hollywood entertainers, much in the lines of Stepford Wives. Death Becomes Her stars Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis(in a very different role)in the three main roles. The movie makes fun of the Hollywood's obsession to stay young forever and its repurcussions if someone happens to succeed in doing that, all of course, with a pinch of humor. An entertainer to the core.

Bombay Talkie

For anyone who is interested in the making of movies, it is fun to watch a movie which is about the movie world. In my knowledge there are not many films about the Bollywood of the sixties and the seventies although a lot of Bollywood's best films came out during this period.

Bombay Talkie provides an insiders view of Bollywood, through the lives and times of the young actor called Vikram, played Shashi Kapoor. His real life wife Jennifer Kendal/Kapoor has the role of a western writer who visits Bollywood and falls in love with the married actor, he's married to the beautiful Aparna Sen. Pak, later UK actor Zia Moyinuddeen plays another important role in the movie as a writer of Bollywood movies, and a companion of Kapoor and Kendal.

Unlike the usual Bollywood masala stuff, this 1970 film from Merchant Ivory trio is natural, earthy, informative and revealing. We see rare glimpses of old actors and singers going about earning their daily bread - we can see Helen as Helen doing takes and retakes of dance numbers, Jalal Agha (remember Pan Parag ad, "aur mere liye?") as a young budding actor by the name Jalal Agha, Usha Uthup as the upcoming western singer(the only one at the time) with her maiden name Usha Iyer - for Bollywood afficianados this movie is an unforgettable walk down the memory lane. If this is not all, the film has excellent story line, written ofcourse by Ruth Prawar Jhabhwala which revolves around the young dashing actor, his wife, his writer friend and the 'toofan' which comes in to their lives as the western writer played by Jennifer Kendal. Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kapoor had been married 12 years by the time this movie was shot and in this movie Jennifer plays the other woman.

Murder On A Sunday Morning

A 15 year old black boy is arrested by the police on charge of a murder of a female, white tourist in Jacksonville, Florida. The only witness, the woman's husband is convinced that the killer is the fifteen year old, police botch up the investigation, they needed a criminal with motive, they pick up the first black guy they spotted in a dark t-shirt. The documentary does not take side, but goes on a slow and methodical analysis of the case following the defense lawyers. Powerful.

The Last Temptation of Christ

Well, if this film didn't ruffle the feathers of the true believers nothing would. And sure as hell, it did when it came out. From the acclaimed novel by Nikos Kazantzakis of the same name, Martin Scorsese weaves out a believable yarn(even the satan's fake angel)story about Jesus of Nazereth.

Scorsese's brilliant direction, a beautiful music score by Peter Gabriel, breath taking and contextual cinematography by Michael Ballhouse, a very American script by Paul Schraeder(if you are looking for a classical version of the story this is not it as the name implies, it is American to the core),The Last Temptation of Christ is a revelation. For me it makes Christ a more believable character, ofcourse the American accent and the slang simplifies the matters for an ordinary viewer. Willem Dafoe as Jesus and Harvey Kietel as Judas are two of the quirkiest yet successful cast choices made by a modern day director of a Hollywood film. Brilliant!

The Incredibles

The story idea is cool - compulsory retirement of all super heroes and making them part of the FBI's relocation program. The Incredibles are a family of four, where the mother and the father are ex-super heroes who married each other and had kids with super hero abilities, currently living in some anonymous burb as an ordinary family. Its a funny movie, a bit dark and reminded me a lot of SpyKids, but this is better. But personally my favorite animated movies of the recent times are still Shrek I and Monsters Inc.

1900

From the director of Cinema Paradiso, another movie pulling at the same emotional chords. But this time, an unlikely story about a man who was found on top of a piano, as a baby. The piano itself was inside a passenger cruise ship and the man becomes a master pianist who refuses to leave the ship for the rest of his life.

It is one of those films cast in the sugary idyllic mold, got too sugary and idyllic for my tastes. Btw 1900 is the name of the pianist given to him by his adopted father, a black ship mate as he was born in that year. It is a very Disneyesque movie, in a larger canvas meant for adults.

Live from Bagdad

This is an HBO movie about the first fully televised war in human history - the 1991 Iraq war and the story of a handful of CNN crew behind it. It is a TV movie, starring Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham Carter and has the trapping of a TV movie. Not much of a great film or anything, it'd be good to know the beginning of 'embedding' television crews in the war began.

Spanglish

A great family entertainer and for a change, Adam Sandler is no more the bumbling awkward guy but a successful award winning cook, married and a father of two - a role which suits him well.

The main characters in the story are Paz Vega as Flor- a Mexican woman and her daughter who immigrates from Mexico to United States and after six years of living in the 'latin quarter' of LA, gets a housekeeping job with the Sandler's family. All the character are witty, likeable and real, so are the dialogs. The film opens in the form of a letter the Mexican girl (Flor's daughter) sends as a part of her admissions package to Princeton - "Why she'd like to study at Princeton/Why Princeton should choose her" type letters, the whole story unfolds through that letter. Worth the watch.

Guess Who

Dream of Light

I saw the whole movie in fast forward with subtitles on. It is almost real time picturization of a painting being made by some modern day artist in Spain, who has this impossible task of painting a quince tree and he takes years at it, half hour at a time(ok I am exaggerating, but it is something like that). And it has one 20+ international awards, yeah I am a dunce.

The Secret Lives of Dentists

It is an interesting movie, about two married dentists who have a practise and three daughters together. It is a depiction of a mid-life crisis that happens a li'l earlier than is normal. Campbell Scott and Hope Davis plays the couple in this very believable film directed by Alan Rudolph. Denis Leary has a quirky role, first as an annoying patient of Scott's and then as a representative of his alter ego.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir

An interesting take on ghosts by 1947 standards. Mrs Muir is a widow who buys a haunted house, befriends the ghost of a sea captain who is bent on driving the tenents away and ends writing his biography for him. The captain's ghost albeit very serious has a dark sense of humor.

Another AA movie in my list. AA means Arrogant American movie, the last one in this category I saw before this was Hidalgo. Although in the Last Samurai, Tom Cruise, the disillusioned Confederate soldier who takes up a contract of training soldiers for the Japanese emperor is all praise for the Samurais and their contributions and joins ranks with them against the Americans and the Japanese soldiers trained by the Americans, I found the movie rather drab. Add to it, the ending was typical Hollywoodsy, with the otherwise silent emperor coming to his senses and shifting to Cruise's side.

Before Sunrise

Swimming Pool

French films or the films shot in France makes me a bit wary before watching it, most of them are too intellectual for my taste, I guess after all these years of movie watching, I still like the 'trashy' Hollywood.

Swimming Pool, directed by Francois Ozon didn't confirm to my idea of films shot in France. It is about an English mystery story writer who goes to her publisher's vacation house in France for some peace and quiet to start on her next novel. But her peace is shattered when the publisher's teenage daughter arrives to share the house with her. There is a lot of uncalled for nudity, maybe it is 'called for' to give it the French touch and with a sexy French girl around how could one expect anything else? But all in all it is an interesting story which ruffles its mystery and suspense feathers towards the end, not bad as I had expected.

Lila Says

Love stories have never been my cup of tea, but this one staring Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio bowled me over. It is science fiction and love story woven in to one, with a mind blowing script that saves it from going over that cheesy edge under such circumstances and elevates it to pure entertainment, makes it the thinking man's love story. Ok did anti-science fiction enthusiasts already flee, then you lose, it is romantic movie to the core, but you didn't wait to hear that, didya? Yeah afterall it has Marisa Tomei, did you think she'd fall for the cheesy, un-classy stuff?

The movie also has the best explanation for time travel amongst all the movies I have seen on the subject and the script, more than 75% of the appeal of the movie should go to the the script written by Brad Anderson, who is also the director of the movie. Wonderful!

Osama

If 9/11 did anything good, it was to free Afganistan from the clutches of Taliban. A forgotten country, a forgotten people finally got the attention they deserved from a world that had turned blind eyes to their fate till then.

Osama is brilliant, poignant and earthy. It'll tug at your heartstrings long after you had finished watching the movie. You'll thank your lucky stars for not being born in Afganistan of the eighties and the nineties, especially if you are a female. From the director Siddiq Barmak, comes Osama, his first film, about a 12 year old girl who disguises as a boy in Taliban infested Afganistan, which is a mortal sin and if found out the girl would be stoned to death. All the actors in the movie had no previous acting experience and were hand picked by the director at various places in Afganistan. Watch it, inform and educate your minds, thats the least we can do to the survivors of the cruel and atrocious Taliban regime.

Todo el Poder

Todo el Poder or Gimme the Power is a Spanish movie by Fernando Sarinana set in Mexico city. A jobless videographer upset by the extent of crime in Mexico city goes on a crusade against, which is very much like a toned down Bollywood movie on a similar theme starring Akshay Kumar. To me, technically it looks like a TV serial, like 24 or CSI, maybe it is the lighting, camera or maybe it is the script or maybe all of it.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

It might have been a very topical and relevant movie in 1967, the year which it came out. Starring Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy, it is the story of a day in the life of a rich liberal couple in the late sixties San Francisco whose daughter brings home a black man, she'd like to marry. Katherine Houghton, who is actually Katherine Hepburn's niece plays her daughter in the film.

The movie is like a history lesson, albeit an engaging one, about the people and the racial prejudices that plagued the United States before the seventies. I understand why Sidney Poitier is a great actor. Spencer Tracy died two week after the filming of this movie, so his long and powerful monologue at the end of the movie is a fitting tribute to the great actor he was.

White Chicks

If you are irritated by the antics of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on their numerous reality shows or shopping outings, this one is for you.

Coming from the Wayans brothers, White Chicks are actually black cops posing as white heiresses to foil a kidnapping plot. It is a mindless comedy which you can laugh the whole way through and a zillion times better than Anchorman(which by the way almost breaks your ribs by merciless poking to produce a laugh)which is another comedy I saw recently.

Kalyanaraman

House of Sand & Fog

One of the most original and unpredictable movies to come out of Hollywood in the recent times. All credit to the debutante director, Vadim Perelman.

House of Sand and Fog pits an immigrant Iranian family against a San Francisco resident who loses her house to the county due to the non-payment of some faux tax. Jennifer Connelly plays the lady who is evicted by the county, a situation partly due to her irresponsible life and negligence. Col.Behrani and his Iranian family buy the house from the county at dirt cheap price. Behrani is played by Ben Kingsley.

To start with, it is an amazing story(thanks to the writer of the novel from which the film was adapted, Andre Dubus III), which keeps the pace steady with the right amount of tension and great character development. Then the choice of characters or the actors who played the characters have been excellent. Ben Kingsley as the tough Iranian colonel justifies his Oscar nomination for the Best Actor. Jennifer Connelly and Shohreh Aghdashloo fortify the film with their strong screen presences. A thought provoking movie, a rare occurance in main stream media, a must watch.

The Yes Men

This documentary proves the powers of the internet, more specifically the powers of owning a domain name related to a notorious organization as WTO(gatt.org). Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano are two computer dudes who own a website http://www.gatt.org/ which imitated the original WTO site in form and layout, except that the content they delivered was/is intended to educate the readers about the real motives of WTO and the real meaning of globalization.

The tagline of the film goes, "changing the world one prank at a time." True to the word, when Andy and Mike start getting invitations to talk at seminars and lectures, from people who think they are the real WTO representatives and they make use of the opportunity to bring to light the not-so-noble services WTO delivers to developing nations, through their(Andy & Mike's) entertaining lectures and hilarious props.

The Yes Men is a crusade by a group of people against the evil practices of World Trade Organization in a satirical way so that the real sting is delivered in a sugar coating of humor, but they wish you to know the sting is there nevertheless and it is getting sharper. Yo, citizens of the developing world, this one is for you.

TaxiDriver

Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro is a potent combination that will withstand the ravages of time, as Taxi Driver proves. I saw this 1976 film for the first time yesterday and it is relevant and powerful as it might have been back then.

A disarmingly young De Niro plays a Newyork cabbie, Travis Bickle, the God's own lonely man, one of the many anonymous faces that populate New York city. He's a sleepless Vietnam vet, unstable and looking for company in the city's underbelly. Paul Schrader, the script writer in an interview in 'The Making of Taxi Driver' says that Travis Bickle reflected his own lonely disoriented existence at the time and De Niro plays the role to perfection.

Touted to be one of the cult classics of the seventies, Taxi Driver lives up to its promise. In addition to De Niro, a fourteen year old Jodie Foster and Harvey Kietal play small but important roles. Martin Scorcese's directorial style in this movie has spawned copies ever since. A classic, thru' and thru'.

Garden State

For an avid blogger like me, Garden State is like a blog turned in to a movie. Zach Braff, the novice director-actor-writer of this movie is very much the blogger who blogs about the daily nuances of his life.

Zach Braff manages to get hold of a cameraman, some producers, Natalie Portman, Joe Pesci after a long struggle to get Hollywood notice him and finally when it does we have the Garden State. It is witty in places, kind of slow moving and 'hauntingly' close to real life. I'd not call it a great movie, but it is good to see that Hollywood is opening up to the geeks ;-)

The Truth

The Truth is one of the better films made by Shaji Kailas ,starring Mammootty as the police investigator from Delhi who takes over the murder case of the CM of Kerala. Shaji Kailas has directed all his films glorifying the lone fighter of a cop, I think it is time Kerala Police Dept. conferred an honorary IPS upon him. Whatever it be, had it not been his films the people of Kerala would be largely unaware of the dealings of their corrupt rulers and the names of the big players in the drama which goes by the name of Kerala politics.

Kunjikkoonan

Hulchul

Through Hulchul, Priyadarsan - the visiting director(much akin to a visitin prof. giving a guest lecture) has presented Bollywood with a revamped version of the Malayalam hit of the mid-90s, Godfather. The film stars Akshaye Khanna and Kareena Kapoor in the leading roles and they deliver commendable performances. The role of the Godfather is played by the veteran actor, Amrish Puri, in one of his last major roles, before he passed away last month.

For me, it is Arshad Warsi who stole the show. The man is a natural comedian. Amrish Puri stands the ground with his stern and majestic presence as the patriarch, another actor worth mentioning is comedian and character actor,Paresh Rawal. It was good to see actresses Lakshmi and Farah, after a long absence from the silver screen.

Priyadarshan's direction calls for a lot of primary colors in the frame, bold reds, greens and blues and the shot usually has a very shallow depth of field, maybe to hide the fact most of his films are shot in studio settings. Starting from his first ventures in Bollywood like Muskurahat and Gardish, this latest one too has the indelible Priyadarshan stamp. It does evoke genuine laughter at places and has used a different kind of masala than what is served on the usual Bollywood thali.

Million Dollar Baby

If I am asked to pick a director from Hollywood, just one, the one I like the most, I'd pick Clint Eastwood. His latest offering Million Dollar Baby starring Hilary Swank is a gritty tale of a female boxer. Eastwood himself plays the main male lead in the film as the experienced trainer, Frankie Dunn.

Photography is remniscent of Eastwood's last movie(the one he directed before this), Mystic River, dark, grainy, closeups with ample play of shadows. As a director this film shows yet another stage of maturing of Eastwood, from the westerns of his early days which culminated in the masterpiece,The Unforgiven, to the crime dramas of his later stage like Blood Work and Mystic River and the romances like The Bridges of Madison County and The Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil(which in a way is a crime drama too), in Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood, the director takes on the gritty realities of life in an intense character drama. I wish he was getting younger, so we would have an endless string of movies from this talented director-actor.

Hilary Swank has lived the life of the boxer, Maggie Fitzgerald. One of the most dedicated and true actresses to come out of Hollywood in the recent past, Swank put on 20 lbs of muscle and trained boxing to play the part. The film does not rely on an epic story but rather on the struggles, triumphs and tribulations of its characters, their fights in the ordinary world. Morgan Freeman plays an important supporting role. It is one of the few serious movies to come out of Hollywood in the recent years which has an indie-quality to it, but is a perfect piece of work nevertheless. Only someone like Clint Eastwood, experienced, talented and with a strong foothold and a voice in Hollywood can make such a gem of a movie.

raincoat

Raincoat is like a play, the set hardly changes more than thrice throughout the movie, the number of characters is five, no more no less and it relies heavily on character development and realization.

The characters themselves have fitted snuggly in to their parts. Ajay Devgan as the unemployed guy, who comes to Calcutta seeking the help of his friends to set up a business,has acted extremely well. He has a past and the leading lady of his past drama, now lives in Calcutta, married to a rich man, her role is played by Aishwarya Rai. This is one of the few films where you can see Aishwarya free of her onscreen mannerisms and appears almost believable. Inspired from the O.Henry story, the Gift of the Magi, director Rituparno Ghosh has a slow moving, a very not-so Bollywood movie for the people fed high on a diet of drama and emotions, wonder how it fared at the box-office. My final opinion, a good movie for a rainy day.

Mondo

Mondo is a little boy living off the streets in Nice, France. Like most of the movies which focus on li'l children (Valentin, Bachehe Aasman, Badnoake Safed, Kolya) this one too focus on the instant affection, we, adults feel for the unattainable innocence and poetry of childhood. Mondo touches the lives of some people and disappears, they wait for him knowing very well that the touch of innocence was transient and it'd never return.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This is a high end version of the usual memory-loss movies Hollywood excel in (the recent ones being Bourne Identity series, Memento etc etc). Except that being a Charlie Kaufman story and memory loss being deliberate, Eternal Sunshine.. is tailor made for the intellectual, it does away with the racy element of amnesiac thrillers and is a love story instead.

The film stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as the two lovers, who selectively erase out their memories of each other (because neither of them benefited much from the affair and things were not looking up for them) with the help of an organization which specializes in selective memory erasure. Jim Carrey doesn't indulge in X-treme gymnastic contortions of his face muscles unlike in his usual movies and for a change does well in a serious role. Kate Winslet, is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this role! I cannot remember where she acted, though I have nightmarish visions of her electric blue and agent orange hair colors.

The concept of memory erasure is picturized in an intriguing way, that is the only significant feature I can remember about the movie. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is mainstream Hollywood trying to go artsy, but I'd say, do what you do best guys - morphing and computer animation, nobody can beat you there.

Shrek 2

Shrek 2 carries forward the fairytale-with-a-twist idea which was first introduced in the original Shrek movie. Ok they are just trying to cash in on the success of the original, but if you liked the first movie for Shrek and his bride, you'll like this movie for the Puss in Boots - Antonio Banderas lends voice to the funny feline character in this sequel where Shrek and princess Fiona visit their royal inlaws.(Seems like it is inlaw season in Hollywood, with Fockers and Shrek2 and all that)

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