by ·Comments Off on Ajantrik (1958, Ritwik Ghatak)

Bengali movie with a couple of red herrings. Starts out following a man and his idiot nephew on their way to the nephew’s wedding. They hopped the wrong train and have to take a taxi – the worst, forty-year-old beat-up jalopy, full of holes and loose parts, which manages to get them to their destination safely. But instead of following them to the wedding, the movie stays with the cab driver, the real protagonist. His car is the laughing stock of town, and the movie laughs with them, adding kooky sound effects, having the car respond and telegraph its mood via headlights-as-eyes facial expressions when the owner speaks to it. The comic trappings are another red herring – the movie is a realist social drama in a comedy’s clothing, about the cab driver’s attachment to the car, his financial and emotional struggle to keep it running in spite of its obvious imminent collapse. And I’m so glad it wasn’t the story of the uncle and nephew going to their wedding – looked like The Hidden Fortress all over again.

Not the stars of the film:

The stars of the film (man and car):

Taxi driver is called Bimal, and he calls his car Jagaddal (I can’t figure out the meaning of that name or the film’s title). A boy named Sultan is his friend/assistant/hanger-on, who helps get him fares. The only recurring fare is a young woman who runs off with her boyfriend, then gets a ride some days (months?) later to the train station, alone and ashamed. Bimal judges her, but makes up by buying her train ticket.

I fell asleep in the middle, continued the next night. But first I watched an episode of The Story of Film which gave away the ending – thanks a lot. The only time I’ve ever seen Ajantrik mentioned anywhere, and it’s right in the middle of my watching it. It’s a good ending – the car (which was Bimal’s best friend, making him a local laughing stock) finally gives up the ghost, sold for scrap metal, but Bimal smiles again seeing a child playing with the horn.

This came out the year after Aparajito and Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, all part of the Indian New Wave or “parallel cinema” movement. Wikipedia claims it influenced Ray’s Abhijan (and therefore Taxi Driver) but also the Herbie series, a mixed distinction.

This Just In: an old issue of Film Quarterly gives the English title as Non-Machine.

by ·Comments Off on Aparajito (1957, Satyajit Ray)

Won the golden lion in Venice against Throne of Blood, White Nights and Bitter Victory. Apu’s family gets settled in the big city by the river. Dad seems to be making a good living as a priest, but he gets sick and dies soon after. Mom moves Apu to a small town (doesn’t seem as rural as their home in Pather Panchali) and works for a rich family, sends Apu to school. Years later, new actor College-Age Apu wants to leave home and further his education. He tries to balance career and family, but favors the former and his mother dies of heartbroken loneliness. Apu’s own story is pretty hopeful (he’s still a good kid who loves his momma) but his family is as depressing and sudden-death-prone as ever. I’m guessing Apu himself will become desperately poor then die of a sudden illness in part three, but we’ll see.

by ·Comments Off on The Fall (2006, Tarsem Singh)

Tarsem’s previous movie The Cell had a crappy story and bad acting wrapped around a handful of intensely cool but disconnected imagery. This one has a simple but decent story and good acting, with about half the movie being intensely cool imagery, finely intertwined with the rest of the plot. A quantum leap forward!

The gimmick of not having a gimmick (no digital effects, etc) was distracting as hell. We were always “what country do you think that is” or “THAT isn’t a real place is it” or “aha, that’s GOT to be a digital effect” or “is the little girl acting or not, she seems so natural.” From online trivia we learn it’s a remake of a 1981 Bulgarian film and the little girl was often improvising.

Movie itself is a wonder. In Princess Bride’s framing story, grandpa Peter Falk is reading a great, classic storybook, so the bulk movie has to be great and classic, and it lives up – but in The Fall we have an unreliable narrator, suicidal, heartbroken, wasted on morphine, making it up as he goes along. In a sense this makes the story more unpredictable, but it’s also a huge cop-out because if the writing is poor you can say “oh it’s supposed to be poor, didn’t you get that?” And it is kinda poor. Our hero the masked bandit with his lost love and archnemesis kinda fizzles, and his side characters Luigi (“explosives expert” who only uses explosives once, suicidally at the very end), The Ex-Slave and The Indian just make poses and look beautiful against the exotic scenery, getting shown up by the problem-solving Charles Darwin and his pet monkey. So it doesn’t sound too good and it’s probably not, but if you’re gonna throw out images this nice, I’ll let your thin plot slide. Carried over from The Cell we’ve still got some nightmarish imagery too. When their guide The Mystic is captured, being chopped to death with an axe (barely offscreen), crying and repeating the safe word “googly googly”, small birds flying out of his mouth, that’s a thing that gets stuck terribly in my head while I’m trying to sleep.

Movie ends with a montage of Keaton and Chaplin stunt scenes, half of which I recognized, in a belated homage to stunt men (our hero is one, ended up in the hospital with the little girl by falling badly off a bridge). Weird. Nobody I’ve heard of in the cast, which makes sense. If you’re shooting a self-financed movie over four years in 20+ countries, you’re not gonna get many recognizable actors to sign up. However, Lee Pace (our storytelling hero) is now starring in Pushing Daisies.

by ·Comments Off on Slumdog Millionaire (2008, Danny Boyle)

Kid is on a game show being asked a series of questions to win 20 million rupees. How does he know all the answers? Is it luck? Fate? Or does each question somehow relate to an incredibly depressing detail of his life? Yes it’s that last one, because this is the most toilet-diving, poo-covered, mother-killing, tourist-swindling, prisoner-torturing, implicitly-sexually-violent movie to ever be marketed as the award-winning feel-good love story of the year.

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Jamal, brother Salim, and hot girl Latika live in the Mumbai slums, parents are killed over religion so they hang out together. Join the local beggar group, but the beggarmaster is gonna blind them to rake in more sympathy cash, so the boys skip town and become Taj Mahal tour guides. Back into the city because Jamal is fixated on finding Latika, just in time to rescue her from being sold for sex by the beggar dude. Salim kills the king beggar and joins a gangster group, turns on Jamal and rapes Latika, eventually gives her up as live-in lover to the king gangster. Jamal, meanwhile, gets a straight job as intern at a call center, gets himself on the Millionaire show, wins 10m one day, gets arrested and tortured by police chief Irfan Khan (dad in The Namesake), tells Irfan (and us) his life story the whole next day, then back to the show and wins the other 10m on the final question. Salim shoots his boss, gets killed (having raped the heroine, he has to get killed), but releases Latika who has a happy ending (with train-station dance sequence) with our rich boy.

Boyle got the writer of The Full Monty and Mira Nair’s co-director, and used his 28 Days Later / Millions cinematographer (who also shoots Dogme stuff). The camerawork, along with a high-energy MIA and A.R. Rahman soundtrack and great editing (ooh it’s Edgar Wright’s regular guy) make for a rockin’ good time of a movie, despite the story. Maybe I’m missing something, because Katy loved it, story and all.

by ·Comments Off on Forest of Bliss (1986, Robert Gardner)

Gardner: “Forest of Bliss is intended as an unsparing but ultimately redeeming account of the inevitable griefs and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, one of the world’s most holy cities. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give anyone who sees it a wholly authentic though greatly magnified view of the matters of life and death that are portrayed.”

Gorgeous doc from American anthropologist/filmmaker Gardner assembles this “day in the life” through many days of shooting (either that or he’s the most efficient filmmaker in history), with beautiful artistic shots and editing. There’s a clear plot/progression, as he shows fragments, actions, people, with no indication of who they are or what they mean, then it all gets woven together. The “ladders” being built are stretchers for the dead. The shipful of timber is for funeral pyres. The stone courtyard being washed down is where bodies are prepared. The man bathing in the river is a priest who performs funeral ceremonies. Some shocking images (bodies get dumped right into the river!) but for the most part it’s an awe-inspiring ecstatic film.

Andy opened with Den of Tigers (2002, Jonathan Schwartz), a decent Gardner-influenced short doc from West Bengal featuring people speaking to us in English (so it wasn’t too Gardner-influenced).

by ·Comments Off on Dil Chahta Hai (2001, Farhan Akhtar)

Katy showed me this Bollywood movie to wash away the pain of Partner. This one wasn’t hateful, loud, empty, an extended music-video ripoff of an already-bad Hollywood film, but I didn’t love it either. Katy said the camera work was very good and often beautiful, but I found it uninspired, generic. Music was unmemorable but not bad. One nice music segment when a couple is at the movies seeing themselves onscreen reminded me of Pennies From Heaven. Story is alright, a light romance about three buddies and their love lives.

Akash (Aamir Khan – ice candy man in Earth, main dude in Lagaan) has a little beard patch under his lip, kinda arrogant but becomes a Good Guy as movie progresses. Gets sent to Australia and falls for a girl his parents previously tried to set him up with.

Sid (Akshaye Khanna – played Gandhi’s son last year) has an uneven hairline, is an artist and a Good Guy to begin with, falls for an alcoholic older woman with a kid and an ex-husband but she dies in the end.

Sameer (Saif Ali Khan – once played a character named Jimmy, but not THE Jimmy) has no distinguishing features or characteristics except that he falls in love with every girl he sees.

Also some women with names like Preity and Dimple, but don’t confuse me here.

Was nominated for 13 Indian academy awards, but got trampled by Lagaan.

by ·Comments Off on Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)

Silent World by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle beat it for the golden palm at cannes, but it took the “human document” award. The film print said “grand prix” but it doesn’t even look like that award was handed out in ’56. The print also calls Ray “Roy”, but those two seem interchangeable by the IMDB. Supposed to be India’s Rashomon, the one that brought Indian film to the world’s attention.

Daunting to watch a movie known for 50 years as a masterpiece… well-illustrated when I walked into the room early and saw a bunch of freshman watching the end of Citizen Kane.

Oooh, my fourth 50’s film in a week. This came out less than a decade after Bicycle Thief, its inspiration, and the year after Senso, La Strada, Seven Samurai and Saga of Anatahan.

Ray’s first film, with great music by then-unknown Ravi Shankar. Rich drama, very moving and awesomely shot. I kind of expected to be underwhelmed, but I loved it (probably more than the film students around me who sighed a lot and started fidgeting and text-messaging towards the end) and maybe even cried a little. Some of the students did too, so there’s hope for them.

Little Apu is born to overburdened mom, underemployed dad, always-in-trouble sister and elderly aunt. Sis’s friend is getting married. Apu goes to school. Dad gets work with the landlord but isn’t paid for months. Sis steals a necklace. Mom fights with aunt while trying to make sure kids are fed and staying out of trouble. One horribly powerful fight scene when, after the necklace dispute, mom drags sis out of the yard by her hair, collapses against the inside of the door while through the wall we can see Sis crying on the other side.

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The scene is edited and scored with such force, seems like it couldn’t be the work of a first-time film director working before his country even had a proper film industry. Anyway, Sis gets sick and dies right before father comes home from the big city (he’s barely in the film) bearing money and gifts. Death scene (during a horrid rain storm) is at least double what the hair-pull fight scene was, with the music peaking into the scream that we never hear from the mother. In the finale, the family is moving to a new town to start again, Apu finds the necklace and throws it in a lake.

Movie feels like a masterpiece despite my pedestrian plot description.

When looking for screenshots I found this scene that wasn’t in the print we watched. The parents have a rare conversation about their lives and bring up moving out of town for the first time.
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Ray: “The cinematic material dictated a style to me, a very slow rhythm determined by nature, the landscape, the country. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.”

Ray in ’82: “All artists owe a debt to innovators and profit by such innovation. Godard gave me the courage to dispense largely with fades and dissolves, Truffaut to use the freeze.”

Truffaut walking out in ’56: “I don’t want to see a film about Indian peasants.”

Apu:
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His sister in the rain, celebrating a short-lived freedom:
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Outcast auntie:
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Sad parents:
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Update, Jan 2010: Katy liked it, but says she saw the sister’s death coming.

by ·Comments Off on Earth (1998, Deepa Mehta)

I hate to be so down on the movies Katy picks, but I can’t help myself any more than she can pretend to enjoy watching “ace in the hole” or “pennies from heaven”.

This felt like an obvious and uninteresting adaptation of an alright story about the partitioning of India and creation of Pakistan as symbolized by a conveniently diverse group of friends in Lahore and as seen through the eyes of a young innocent.

The young innocent is rich-girl Lenny-baby (of a neutral parsee family) whose hindu caretaker Ayah (a cover girl from Fire) is one of the friends. Also in there are muslims Hassan The Masseur (guy from Bollywood/Hollywood) and Dil The Ice Candy Man (Lagaan), a sympathetic sikh whose name I can’t find right now, and Lenny’s cousin Adi who has an arranged marriage to a short old man.

I took it as a history/culture lesson, though I had to ask Katy lots of questions because this movie doesn’t spell out as much as Water did for the uninitiated. Had the feeling of a postcard yearning for old peaceful times, so I didn’t see the violent atrocities of the second half coming… turns into a giant bummer.

peaceful days:
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friendly chat:
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an ice-candy betrayal, baby:
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by ·Comments Off on Partner (2007, David Dwahan)

My first Bollywood movie. Idiotically simplistic script, a few nicely played musical numbers (annoying music though), and the most horrible constantly-gliding music-video camerawork. Are they all like this? The slickest, emptiest foreign film I’ve seen since Godzilla: Final Wars, as well as the loudest since Tetsuo The Iron Man adds up to an unpleasant viewing experience.

Apparently this was a scene-for-scene remake of Hitch with a bellybutton-pierced Indian dude in the Will Smith “love doctor” role. 42-yr-old Salman Khan has starred in almost 50 movies in the last 10 years, making him much more prolific than slacker Will Smith, but I’ll take Smith over the mugging Khan any day. Actually there’s no shortage of mugging in the movie so Khan’s antics hardly stand out except when he’s playing an 80’s gangster and lip-synching to “Pump Up The Jam”. There’s no way to look cool wearing a fur-lined coat and mouthing the word “pump! pump! pump!” in close-up, but he sure tries.

Similarly prolific Govinda is the dumpy friend, the screechy annoying “comic” role. You wouldn’t think he’d be such a good dancer from looking at him. Love interests Lara Dutta and Katrina Kaif have been less prolific only because they’re younger than I am.

One of the women has a kid, which is apparently the only detail not stolen from Hitch. There’s also a gay wedding planner (only character I liked) and an ineffectual gangster. I guess the movie fits the romantic comedy mold, though it didn’t seem too romantic.

On the plus side, I only saw the boom mic once. Even Katy didn’t like the movie (much).

UPDATE Aug 25: Yaaay, Salman Khan is going to prison today for hunting endangered gazelle.