Sardar Udham

To narrate the biography of a freedom fighter without sounding jingoistic is not an easy undertaking. Shoojit Sircar's Sardar Udham is an understated piece of film making we don't see much in Bollywood in these days of Bell Bottoms, Kesaris and Bhujs.

Vicky Kaushal as Sardar Udham

The casting is spectacular.  Vicky Kaushal is becoming the thinking person's hero,  who straddles the line of commercial Bollywood and alternate cinema with the ease of a seasoned tight rope walker. From essaying a teen to a forty year old, the effortlessness which with Vicky gets into the skin of the character in Sardar Udham is admirable. Did I say I like Vicky Kaushal? He is so quintessentially Indian - could be from North , South,  East or West of India.

The production design leaves no room for finding historical mis-steps. The British characters are not monsters, the subjugated Indian patriots are not embodiment of morality and virtue, all are faulty humans, victims of their circumstances.The cinematography is amazing, it has one of the best depictions of Jalianwalla Bagh massacre ever shown on screen. Even in the imagery representing brutal slaughter of hundreds of people, India is painted with a breathtakingly poignant brush with striking colors.

The movie is a bit of a slow burn, especially for someone like me whose fingers are glued to the forward button on the remote. But I understand,  Sardar Udham is like an episode of Oliver Stone's Untold History of United States India, you think know the story,  but you don't, so you will yourself to watch a skillfully crafted old school film making, word by word, moment by moment as history unfolds. 

Ram Muhammad Singh Azad or the real Udham Singh in British custody

An ordinary Indian guy plans and prepares (flying solo for the most part) for his revenge, on a representative of the British Empire. It takes him 20 years to complete his mission of eliminating his target, his revenge for killing 1500 civilians in his hometown of Amritsar. The British never formally apologized for the massacre, but expressed 'regret' on the 100th anniversary of the event in 2019.

 

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Korean Content : Best Korean shows on Netflix

Like half of the planet, I too am majorly into Korean shows these days. No Squid Game or Korean rom-coms for me. But even if you don't watch rom-coms or fictionalized game shows where characters get killed for money, there are plenty of stars to gaze at in the Korean media multi-verse. Here is a list of my favorite Korean streaming content that I had been bingeing on :

Reply 1988 : 1988 in Korea was not very different from the 1988 in my part of the world, when I had just entered my teens. We had small boxy cars, CRT TVs and sat on the floor and had dinner even when we had a proper dining table. Reply series is an anthology series with 3 seasons. It started with Reply 1997 in 2012, Reply 1994 in 2013 and Reply 1998 is the last season that started airing in 2015-16 and the only one I have watched in its entirety.

All the seasons are disconnected except a common concept that they are all about a group friends and their lives during a particular year, a turning point in their lives. Some of the actors re-appear, playing a different character in a different season. The last one, Reply 1988 is the most popular and by the third season it looks like the makers  of Reply series had perfected the formula for success. Reply 1988 is one of the highest ranked TV series in Korean cable TV history. 

Reply 1988 is the story of 5 families with teenage kids in the same neighborhood of Seoul growing up in the late eighties. The success of the series is the connection you will develop with the characters as it progresses - all fifteen of them. With 20 episodes almost an hour long it is a serious commitment, but once you get hang of it, you wouldn't want to get off that train. I almost gave up after first couple of episodes, but I am glad I did not.

Below is a quote by the female lead from the very last episode of the series. She is the one in the middle row, dead-center.

 “1988. This is the end of our Ssangmundong story. Longing for that time and longing for that street isn’t because I miss the younger version of myself. In that place, where we won’t be able to gather like that again, I regret being unable to say my final farewell. To the things that are already gone, to a time that has already passed, I want to say a belated farewell. Goodbye, my youth. Goodbye, Ssangmundong.”

Stranger (Secret Forest in Korean), season 1 : A police woman and a prosecutor team up to solve a political mystery / crime. The handful of main characters are complex and evolve as the story progresses. If you like detective stories or crime thrillers with a legal angle, a la John Grisham, Stranger is it. It was also featured in NY Times list of top international TV shows for the year 2017.

Hello, My Twenties (Age of Youth in Korean), season 1 : 5 girls sharing a house as they embark on their college journeys, part time jobs and share their growing pains. Been there. Done that. I could relate to it more than I could ever relate to Sex & the City or Friends. Both of those I have only watched sporadically, before the days of Netflix or other streaming platforms. How can Carrie Bradshaw writing a worldly wise weekly column in some New York newspaper afford to live in an upper East side brownstone? What could be more further from reality than her implausible NY life with her craze for Manolo Blahniks?

I was not really sure of Hello, My Twenties during the first episode or two. But once past that, the characters started to grow on me and their struggles and happiness started to matter. I finished the first season in a couple of days, but I couldn't bring myself to watch the second season as they switched out the actor - my favorite of the five girls, with a different actor. Thus my revisit of the twenties ended abruptly with Season 1.

Sisyphus - The Myth : If you like sci-fi, you might like Sisyphus. The lead actor from Stranger is also the lead in Sisyphus, that is what first lead me to it. It is also TV-14 which meant I was able to watch it with my kids. Sisyphus is not exactly the best of the best K-drama and it only appeals to a certain kind of audience. You have to check reality and logic at the door. It was good for a light one time watch.

Chicago Typewriter : I find that with Korean dramas or probably it is the case with every foreign language TV series or film, if I like some of the actors I try to find out if anything else is available on Netflix or Prime that these actors have been featured in and if there is, I give it a try. I started watching Chicago Typewriter when I found from Wikipedia that one of the actors from Reply 1988 was in it and it was available on Netflix. Also the theme of the show looked intriguing - how were they going to establish a Korean connection to Chicago, through a typewriter?  There are only a handful of characters, and it could be summarized as a sort of time-traveling ghostly love triangle involving a typewriter. The three main leads are strong and convincing. You cannot apply human logic to ghostly deeds so even if you have questions you can attribute the lack of answers to the ethereal nature of the story.

A couple of other Korean TV shows I had reviewed are here - Tunnel & Signal. These are the shows which got me started on K-drama, in case you are looking for a gateway drug to Korean content and don't really care for rom-coms.

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Plague64 & Covid19: How Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Year of the Plague foretells our 21st century reactions to the global pandemic

I try to stay clear of fads of all kind if I can. It is a bit easier for me than the general populace because I do not have any social media accounts to be bombarded by trends from friends' feeds, tweets or stories. The only place I might be ambushed by fads are the streaming platforms (Netflix, are you a verb yet?) and books. All I have to do is turn a blind eye to all the pandemic movies, books and documentaries in 2020 or not take a peek at any of the 9/11 documentaries/movies in 2021. I made my first Dalgona coffee yesterday after making sure the Dalgona fad was dead beyond resuscitation. A year after a fad has passed seems a reasonable time frame to check back up on it and not be branded a blind follower if you want to try it out.

Now that the one year self-imposed steer-clear date has passed for catching upon pandemic literature and media, on a mission to elevate my literIQ, I started browsing the classics catalog at our public library's online offerings. Half of which I had to dismiss because I had read the abridged illustrated versions of these in my youth and had marked these off as read. That was when I chanced upon Daniel Defoe's lesser known non-fictional fiction, or historical non-fiction/biography as we call it these days, "A Journal of the Plague Year" published in 1722. 

A note about Defoe before we move on.  Introducing the Penguin edition of the Plague Year in 1966, Anthony Burgess wrote: “Defoe was our first great novelist because he was our first great journalist...because he was born not into literature but into life.” 

Defoe was born into a non-aristocratic family with anti-establishments roots and had a liberal upbringing. He was a trader, a journalist, a pamphleteer, a spy and a writer who preferred modern languages rather than the classic languages that the ' true' writers were expected to write in those days. 

 

He produced an array of various forms of literature from pamphlets to novels under two hundred different pseudonyms. Robinson Crusoe is often considered the first English novel, the work that defined the literary device we call a novel now.  It was marketed as the strange and surprising adventures of a sailor marooned on a lonely uninhabited island for eight and twenty years, written by 'himself'. Defoe was the father of the line of writing which we now categorize as historical non-fiction, crime, pop science and travel non-fiction - the kind Eric Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, Bill Bryson, Jared Diamond, Jon Krakauer and Yuval Noah Hariri excel in these days.

A Journal of the Year of the Plague is in the form of an eye-witness account of the plague outbreak in 1665 London. Defoe must have been 5 years old at the time and had not yet added "De" to his last name to make it more classy. The novel was published in the form of a journal of a person with initials H.F and is presumed to be that of Henry Foe, Daniel Defoe's uncle who had lived and worked in London at the time of the infamous bubonic plague outbreak. Defoe also drew on historical records (broadsides), medical pamphlets and Bills of Mortality published by local parish authorities for counts and tables of plague deaths by parish and by chronology, that appear through out the book.

350+ years - light years in terms of technological advancement, vaccines, Instagram and Ivermectin separate the 1665 London Bubonic plague event from the global Covid19 pandemic of 2020. But as I read Defoe's uncle's journal it feels like our responses as a species have not changed even an iota. 

Here are some of the recurring patterns of human behavior and our predictable reactions, as witnessed during the plague of 1665:

Asymptomatic and symptomatic people bolting to new places to escape the plague, not knowing they were already infected and thus infecting whole new communities : "...this Frenchman who died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was already infected."

Everyone and their dog baking bread and hoarding groceries: "I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold, and which seemed enough to serve my house for 5-6 weeks; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese.."

The plague raged violently among butchers as meat was one of the modes of transmission. So they were using touchless transaction and hand sanitizers even back then:  "When anyone bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher's hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up and odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hand, and all the means that could be used were used.."

True nature of death concealed, fudging the numbers or under-reporting death toll: "and at the Lord Mayor's request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed."

Travel restrictions and negative test results required for traveling which first started as a rumor: "..an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling, and that the town on the road would not suffer people from London to pass for fear of bringing infection along with them.....the hurry of the people was such for some weeks there was no getting at the Lord Mayor's door without exceeding difficulty; there were such pressing and crowding there to get passes and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad, for without these there was no being admitted to pass through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any inn"

Broadway and movie theaters shut down:  "..that all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play or such-like cause of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited.."

Restaurants and pubs shut down: That all public feasting...be forborne till further order and allowance....that disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses and cellars be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague..."

Lock down at home: "as for my little family, having thus, as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter, cheese and beer, I took my friend and physician's advice and locked myself up and my family and resolved to suffer the hardship of living a few months without flesh-meat, rather than to purchase it and hazard our lives."

Trade comes to a halt: "..the trading nation of Europe were all afraid of us; no port of France, or Holland, or Spain, or Italy would admit our (English) ships or correspond with us...the inconveniences in Spain and Portugal were still greater, for they would by no means suffer our ships,....to come into their ports, much less to unlade."

A decrease in the weekly death counts and people throw caution to the wind, ignoring the warnings of 17th century Dr. Faucis: "....people's running so rashly into danger, giving up all their former cautions and care, and all the shyness which they used to practise, depending that the sickness would not reach them - or that if it did, they should not die. The physicians opposed this thoughtless humor the people with all their might and gave out printed directions, spreading them all over the city and suburbs, advising the people to continue reserved and to use still the utmost caution in their ordinary conduct, notwithstanding the decrease of distemper, terrifying them with the danger of bringing a relapse upon the whole city, and telling them how such a relapse might be more fatal dangerous than the whole visitation that had been already;"

A Journal of the Plague Year is an amazingly clear and modern work of literature from three centuries ago, by a man who gave no f**ks what people thought. He was probably the only man who was sentenced to the pillory where everyone who is sent to public humiliation at the pillory is usually pelted with rotten eggs, people threw flowers at him.  The Plague journal, supposedly a fictional work, has been analyzed by researchers and scholars for historical accuracy and they have concluded that it is an honest, factual and realistic portrayal of the 1665 Plague epidemic. They did this by comparing the Journal to the weekly bills of mortality published by the parishes and real eye-witness accounts like Samuel Pepys' diary which was not discovered or decoded at the time Defoe was alive. Color me a Defoe fan.

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Thoreau de la Walden : The Hipster from Concord

Walden is my chill-with-a-book book, my meditation guide, my psychedelic trip without psychedelics. I took that trip again this weekend and I want other people out there in the vast wide world to know that you too can take tickets for the same ride. That is why I am writing about Thoreau and Walden, lying in my backyard hammock at the dark hour of 11 pm, listening to crickets, enjoying the slightly nippy late summer air – it is as much Walden as it can get in the rural Pacific Northwest.

Thoreau, came to me late in life. In my late thirties, I stumbled across Thoreau in my quest for a true American thinker, and found the first American anarchist. I realized that the concept of civil disobedience that I had credited Mahatma Gandhi with and on which much of India’s freedom movement had hinged on, got main street cred through Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience in 1849, twenty years before Gandhi was born. When MLK referred back to Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement to push forward his dream of racial equality, the idea of civil disobedience completed a full circle. A modern American construct, expounded and practiced by Thoreau came back home to roost during the Civil Rights era.

The people who resemble Thoreau the closest in this day and age, to me, is not the Sierra Clubbers (for Thoreau is often credited as being one of the people who laid the foundation of the modern environmental movement) but the Antifa. I often feel that the black hoodied hipster with long hair from Portland (OR) protesting police brutality could be Thoreau, if he was present in the present day. When Thoreau defended John Brown in his ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ before even other fellow abolitionists would take up a stand for John Brown shows he was the original American anarchist and practiced what he preached.

Reading Walden again, I am struck by the timelessness of the work and how contemporary Thoreau sounds even now, almost two centuries after he had penned his masterpiece. Here he is anticipating the meat-free destiny of man kind, the creation of PETA, vegetarianism and alternative meat - “...whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of human race, in its gradual improvement, is to leave off eating animals….” He condemned hunting although he had been on hunting expeditions as a teen. Here is Thoreau again from Walden, “no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

Thoreau sounds relatable because there are a lot of similarities between his day and the times we are passing through now. Whether it is the millennials who cannot afford to move out of their parents’ homes or the matter of black lives being a hot topic again or the polarization of the nation into conservative south and liberal North/West, 150 years hence we are fighting about the same things and feeling their effect as Thoreau and the U.S populace did in the mid 1800s.

Thoreau lived at his family home, he worked at his family’s pencil factory, paid his rent to his family. Later on, he learned surveying to take it up a vocation. He is the millennial brother-in-law, who will baby sit your kids (he did this for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids) while you and your wife goes out on a date in town. He is the same millennial who abruptly quits the rat race to live off the grid in Alaska (Thoreau had to settle for Walden because Alaska was Russia’s at the time), in a tiny home he built all by himself. He was a minimalist, an environmentalist, an abolitionist fighting for the rights of slaves, a vegetarian, a tiny home builder building a home using recycled materials and a disobedient civilian before any of these were considered cool.

He was a white man from Massachusetts, who could quote Vishnu Purana in the 1850s. You have to understand Hare Krishna movement was still one hundred years in the future and Beatles was yet to discover Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation. Thoreau says that Vishnu Purana says (I have to take Thoreau’s word for it, despite being born in India, I have not read Vishnu Purana), “The house-holder is to remain in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.”

Just like us, currently bewildered by shipping delays in Amazon and shocked by empty shelves at Walmart, Thoreau was utterly surprised by where the things for his daily use (in the days before his life at Walden) came from. Most of our stuff in 21^st century comes from China by the way. That’s why the shelves are looking forlorn at big box stores these days, thanks to the Covid triggered supply chain bottle-neck, Chinese govt. restrictions and to a small extent to that minor traffic incident at the Suez canal turnpike. Here is Thoreau again on learning the pots he used at home was made by an actual potter who lived in town and were not the ones passed on down unbroken from our Mesopotamian ancestors, “I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood,” Thoreau could have made a solid career in stand-up comedy if he was alive now.

Many intellectuals classify Walden as fiction and Thoreau as a loser, a cynic disappointed by the system and the order of things. But Thoreau is much more than Walden. Walden is just a field-guide for all the could-have-beens if we were brave to jump off from the gerbil wheel we all are endlessly running on. Thoreau stands tall because we are still talking about him, the issues he stood for and the stands he had taken are still as relevant today as it was then. 

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Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar : A review

After the long drought brought about by Covid19 in 2020, which seemed to have affected Hindi / Bollywood movie industry more than the regional Indian movie industries, I finally saw a watch-able Hindi movie - Dibakar Banerjee's Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar (SaPF).

The opening scenes of SaPF are uniquely NCR-ish with a camera mounted on the hood of a fast-moving car, trained on a bunch of rowdy passengers as they zip past the almost deserted Delhi highways in the dead of the night. The viewer is placed directly into the fight or flight situation of the lead characters right after this high-octane ride meets an abrupt end in the first few minutes of the movie.  And the protagonists - Parineeti Chopra (Sandeep) and Arjun Kapoor (Pinky), decide to make a break for it. Why, What and Where to will be revealed as the movie progresses.

Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar reminds me of a few other movies. I could catch glimpses of Ishaqzaade in SaPF. Ishaqzaade  was Arjun Kapoor's debut movie where he was paired with Parineeti. That too was an us-against-the-world story of escape. I recently watched an exceptional 2021 Malayalam film - Nayattu (meaning the Hunt) which is about a group of three people escaping the system that is trying to hunt them down. SaPF is very similar in its theme with Nayattu. Instead of three almost-strangers, in SaPF we have two hitherto unacquainted persons thrown into a dire do or die situation and fleeing across geographies just as in Nayattu.

The burly Arjun Kapoor (Pinky) is a suitable fit for a cow-belt roughneck who is a suspended Haryanvi cop and a hitman for hire. Parineeti has held her usual bubbly persona in check and comes across competently as an educated and sophisticated woman (Sandy Walia) at the top of the corporate ladder. 

 

By giving a girlish name - Pinky, for the brutish cop and a masculine name for the female character, the title of the movie offers an insight into gender bender roles the director has envisioned for his protagonists. The film and the script also feature several artful instances where these two unconventional leads scrape against the pillars of the patriarchal landscape they flee across.

Although there is predictability at many places, it is while watching movies like SaPF (versus something like Parineeti's previous disastrous outing - "The Girl of on the Train") you realize how much of the actor's output and performance is molded by the director. Dibakar Banerjee is not only able to extract outstanding performances from the lead pair, but the actors who played side characters like Raghuvir Yadav, Neena Gupta, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rahul Kumar are also remarkable in their modest but fully fleshed out roles.

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Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Before Oscars So White Redux (2021) I didn't care much about Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to write a review.  I wished Riz Ahmed would win the Best Actor award, although like most people who had kept tabs on this year's nominations, I knew it would go to Chadwick Boseman and was mostly reconciled to it. After all the incredible human being and actor that Boseman was, he would never again get a chance to be in the Oscar race ever again. Everyone else, including Riz Ahmed, who I hope will have a remarkable career ahead,  will have more chances.

Then the Academy went ahead and did its thing- awarded Anthony Hopkins who was blissfully sleeping in his bed and didn't even Zoom into the award ceremony, the Best Actor award. This made it imperative that I had to write about Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, to make peace with Chadwick Boseman, even though he is at a place where they are indifferent to gold-plated bronze statues of Uncle Oscar and other such earthly knickknacks.

Viola Davis put in a power house performance as Ma Rainey, the so-called Mother of the Blues. But it is Chadwick Boseman as Levee - the trumpeter who steals the show. I did not even recognize him at first in the film. Considering it was shot during the last few months of his life, physically, he was a shadow of King T'Challa he was in Black Panther.  That did not deter him from pouring his soul into Levee. 

Chadwick Boseman as Levee at the center, in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has all telltale signs of being adapted from a play. That coupled with my absolute no-clues-about-blues persuasion didn't endear me to the content of the film much. Ma Rainey also says in the movie that it would be an empty world without the blues. Maybe for you Ma, not for me.

The silver lining for me was Boseman's Levee. Despite his irreverent, go-getter attitude, his was the only character I found myself rooting for. The script gives a handful of theatrical monologues to Levee, knowing that this might be the last time Boseman would have an opportunity to deliver such hard hitting lines. Like this one on death, which considering the circumstances add to the poignancy,

"Now death. Death got some style. Death will kick your ass and make you wish you have never been born. That's how bad death is. But you can rule over life. Life ain't nothing."

The black and white footage at the end brings home the message that black artists didn't get their due and had their intellectual property stolen from them. It is heart-rending to watch white musicians play Levee's piece sans any emotion, while we the viewers know how much the black musicians had poured their souls into their compositions and never got credit.

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Minari : A review

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

 

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

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

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

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Joji : A movie review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear Edward : A book review

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

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

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

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

Inflight info : From London Gatwick to London Gatwick

 

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

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

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

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Recursion by Blake Crouch, a book review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That time when the revolution almost came to America : The Trial of Chicago Seven, a review

It was counterculture Sunday for me last weekend, starting with The Trial of the Chicago Seven.  Then I went down the tube through Prague Spring, hippies & flower children, LSD & peaceniks, protestors and poets, civil rights leaders' and Kennedys' assassinations, Kent State and Jackson State and the great divide of Vietnam war - the timelessness of it all chokes me up. Half a century later those years that I have never lived except through grainy pixels on a flickering screen is deja-vu material. 

There was so much anger, frustration and helplessness seething under the surface and erupting as protests in the last four years that I thought we were living through the worst of times with no end in sight. It felt like the America I knew was unraveling. Then I used to remind myself of the only opening lines I remember, of any novel I have ever read - from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, set before and during the French Revolution. People were feeling the same kind of angst and helplessness as Dickens' opens his novel describing the tumultuous last years of the 18th century, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..."    

The 1960s in the United States was not much different from those last dozen years of the 1700s for France. 1960s takes the prize for Revolutionary Years with the Best Music, with their rocking BGM. Compared to the great anthems that straddled the summer of '69, it has been all downhill for music ever since then. 

The Trial of Chicago Seven takes place during a brief, rebellious and beautiful interlude before most of the Seven grew up and went on to live staid lives in suits as yuppie stockbrokers or unoriginal academics. IMHO, the massive cultural and political uprisings that characterize the decade from 1965 to 1975 was the only time any kind of meaningful change was affected through people's protests in the United States.

Unlike India where I was born and brought up or the UK which has close historical/political ties to India, where people's protest movements brought down sitting governments and modulated the course of the Future, the world's oldest democracy in modern history - the United States' protests movements are weak sauce. The U.S has rarely seen any administration overthrown or have had sustaining and meaningful change happen through people's protests movements, except during the Civil Rights-Vietnam War-Nixon era. 

With the advent and encroachment of social media in our lives, we have become mostly keyboard warriors and slacktivists who dutifully discharge their political advocacy duty through signing online petitions. This is not just the scene here in the U.S but the world over. But in a nation where most of the adult population is classified as "interested bystanders" it has now become even more easier to be an activist. Wonder what the Chicago 7 or Black Panthers or MLK or Malcolm X would say about our activism? 

But there is something that United States' does for protest movements at home and all over the globe, that no other country does (nowhere close) - the Americans make or fund great movies/art/music documenting, giving and extending the voice of ordinary people rising up against broken systems. Watching The Trial of Chicago 7, I was happy for the existence of art, movies and other forms of output of creative minds. They immortalize and provide an account of the times, the events and the people and the struggles and beauty of their lives. I am glad art exists.

An original poster in support of the Conspiracy 8/ Chicago 8

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of Chicago Seven (originally Eight, including Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers) is a very Sorkin subject. The 1968 protest at DNC at Chicago has unconventional leaders breaking new pathways. Sorkin showcases these guys while they are in the midst of creating turning points in U.S history. Sorkin's characters are charismatic and articulate to the point of bringing a collective frisson of optimism and hope in the audience. Sorkin is the writer behind exceptional movies like A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network and Steve Jobs.

The Trial of Chicago Seven has eight intense characters on trial in a courtroom with an unreasonably acrimonious judge presiding. All the eight are the kind of people who are at ease on a podium with the ability to draw people through their words. My favorite is Abbie Hoffman, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. There are some incredible retorts from Hoffman in the movie, during his court room testimony. I found the transcript of the real testimony here and realized that Sorkin has summarized and retained the lines with the most impact without diluting the narrative.

Six of the real Chicago 7 -  Front row, from left: Rennie Davis, Rubin, Abbie Hoffman. Back row, from left: Lee Weiner, Bob Lamb and Thomas Hayden.

Steven Spielberg almost made this movie in 2007, Sorkin was the writer at the time too but the effort was canned due to the Writers Guild of America strike. Coincidentally Sacha Baron Cohen was slated to play Hoffman back then as well. Heath Ledger was to play Tom Hayden and Philip Seymour Hoffman was to be the defense attorney William Kunstler. These roles were played by Eddie Redmayne and  Mark Rylance respectively in the 2020 movie. 

As a lover of words and history with a fondness for cheeky one-liners, Aaron Sorkin's interpretation of the Chicago Seven/Eight's trial is edgy and larger than life. If we read the real history of the trial you would be able to see that the director has taken plenty of liberty interpreting the real incidents for dramatic effect and to shore up certain characters like Eddie Redmayne's Hayden and Joseph Gordon Levitt's prosecution attorney, Richard Schultz. Still it is a movie worth watching because as per the quote attributed from people ranging from  Edmund Burke to Santayana to Churchill, if you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.

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