Author: arnab

kaminey

this is the latest film by vishal bhardwaj, the director of the excellent maqbool (macbeth adapted to the bombay underworld) and the pretty good omkara (othello adapted to rural/small-town politics in u.p). those earlier films were more “serious”, not quite mainstream bollywood. kaminey, on the other hand, is pitched directly at the mainstream but is pretty damned good anyway. it stars shahid kapoor as a set of twins, one a petty criminal, one a do-gooder, whose lives get intertwined with corrupt cops and drug dealers (the bad brother) and corrupt, thuggish politicians (the good brother). a case of mistaken identity brings the two narratives into collision and mayhem ensues. it’s a stylish film–though there are a few unnecessary artsy flourishes, and the editing and cinematography are great. the performances are top-notch. particularly good are the two primary villains–amol gupte as bhope, the politician-thug; and tenzing nima (a newcomer) as tashi, a cool but ruthless druglord.
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george romero’s sleepless in seattle

i learned from this interesting interview/”random roles” with illeana douglas on the onion’s av-club that martin scorsese was originally slated to direct schindler’s list while spielberg was supposed to direct the remake of cape fear. i have to say i can’t imagine what either would have looked like, but i’m pretty sure one would have been better and the other worse.

now i’m trying to come up with other incongruous directorial switcheroos (both directors have to be famous and interesting in their own right, and the films have to be notable as well, and roughly from the same time-period).

john waters, annie hall/woody allen, pink flamingos
werner herzog, tootsie/sydney pollack, fitzcarraldo
pasolini, harold and maude/ hal ashby,salo
john hughes, natural born killers/oliver stone, ferris bueller’s day off

cahiers du cinema’s 100 greatest films

somehow we have managed to not have any discussion of this list published last month in conjunction with some fancy book. lots of fine movies, but also some head-scratchers in both inclusions and omissions. let me say first of all that, for all its blind-spots and excessive emphases, it is nice to see a list that doesn’t have casablanca anywhere on it, let alone in the top 5. on the other hand, they manage to leave out everything by scorsese while finding room for blake edwards’ the party. yes, “birdie num-num” the party. poor jerry lewis must really be upset. other major notables who’re left out completely include herzog, fassbinder, ghatak and malick. chaplin gets five nods (the most for any director, i believe) while most of the screwball classics (plus the marx bros.) get shafted. this is not entirely unexpected, given issues of language–the english language films selected are largely either silent or visual-atmospheric (this also explains manhattan over annie hall as the sole allen), and as you’d expect the heroes of the new wave are represented in spades. hitchcock has three (though i’m not convinced notorious should be in there over shadow of a doubt or psycho) and familiar names from the western and noir canons crop up.

some other surprises are in the rankings. i love the night of the hunter and was pleasantly surprised to see it included, but at #2? we have actually begun to slowly make our way through viewings of films on the list that we’ve either never seen or saw so long ago that we’ve completely forgotten. i’ll post more about these later, but let me note my surprise that vigo’s l’atalante is ranked #5. it’s a nice film, but what am i missing?

more later.

persepolis

we can’t be the only ones who’ve seen this. it came highly recommended by our friends jane and karen in boulder, not to mention the majority of reliable film critics, but i fear i found it a little disappointing. which is not to say i disliked it. the animation is wonderful, and a refreshing change from the pixar-realism of american animation, or for that matter the magical miyazaki style. however, the narrative was a little flat. the film may just be inheriting the graphic novel’s lack of thematic complexity (i have not read it), but i thought there was no real interesting connection made between the coming of age story and the potted history of the iranian revolution. by which i mean that the two were just there together, and neither illuminated or shaded the other in an interesting way. i appreciated the film (and the graphic novel’s, i presume) resistance to the mapping of personal growth onto a journey of salvation to the west, which is all too common a feature of the genre, but it would have been more interesting if the film paid more attention to questions of gender within the iranian revolution. from the little i know of it, i understand that older women, especially from the non-westernized classes were a large, public part of the revolution. and, of course, class itself is mostly elided here. i don’t wish to suggest that the story of a westernized, (presumably) upper-middle class kid cannot be the central story of a critique of the iranian revolution, but it needed to be situated a little more. why does she go to french school in tehran in the first place? how does her family have contacts in vienna and paris? (and, as sunhee asked, why is the film in french to begin with?) how does her immediate family survive in a time when all their radical friends are disappearing?

anyone else?

the kids in the hall

they’re back. mike and i and a bunch of others are going to see them in minneapolis later this month. it will be my third time seeing them live. the previous shows were brilliant adaptations of sketches from the show for the stage. this tour is apparently mostly new material from which they hope to spin off a new show and a movie. here’s an av club interview replete with video.

i have this emotional connection to the kids which i can’t quite explain–and it doesn’t translate to them individually (though i did watch newsradio religiously). it may be that it takes me back to those halcyon days of grad school, when we had no money and theory seemed like something worth fighting drunkenly over in bars. oh, wait, those were nightmarish days. anyway, as intellectually satisfying as the kids’ comedy can be (like a man getting hit in the groin by a football, it works on so many levels) my primary relationship to it, and them collectively, is one of love. i almost burst into tears when “having an average weekend” played at the beginning of the show the first time i saw them live (i think it was at the wiltern–john, pete, did we all go together?). mike, make sure to bring some hankies, and be ready to hold me close on the 26th.

interviews, articles etc.

maybe we should have one place to park links to interesting conversations and articles with/about film-makers?

here’s a great interview on the onion’s av club with alex cox.

AVC: Is it hard to rectify what punk stands for and also make movies that cost a lot of money?

AC: Yeah! I think so. I think that’s right, because the money… we spend an awful lot of money on a movie. Twenty percent goes back to the studio for overhead. Who knows how much is going to get eaten up by the principal actors? Even making Repo Man for $1.5 million seemed like a waste of money to me. We had two guys in a car, and yet we have to have a tow truck, a car trailer, another huge vehicle behind it, police cars in front, motorcycle outriders. The only thing we were missing was a Roman Centurion riding along at the front with a big banner. “Here comes the movie!” And I think it’s grandiose. A lot of the time, this last one we did, nobody even knew we were there. We’d be shooting in places, and people would just walk right past us. You film much quicker and have more fun that way.

bladerunner

from the brief discussion of bladerunner in the film quiz thread, chris:

I think there are four versions released (5, 4, 3 and 2 discs respectively). This was the only version that gave me the new cut (no doubt containing 17 seconds of new material) plus the old director’s cut. Truthfully, I just wanted ‘Bladerunner’ on DVD so I can throw out my old video version. I’ve always liked the movie (a lot) but I found myself teaching a bit of it this past semester, so I thought it would be useful to have it on DVD.

can someone explain to me why so many smart critics (and reynolds as well) slam this movie? i don’t think it is as good as i thought it was when i saw it as a teenager but does it really deserve to be reviled as it so often is, or just faintly praised? here, for instance, is stephen metcalf on the new dvd set, on slate. he has very positive things to say about the film’s stunning visuals and atmospherics, but the review is framed more in terms of the film’s mythos and is finally dismissive. okay, so there are some lame narrative moments–but isn’t this on many levels a visionary film that has had a gigantic impact on its genre?

la cienaga

i’d wanted to watch this argentinean film when it was released in los angeles back in 2001, but it disappeared before i could get my lazy ass off the couch. a friend mentioned watching it recently and so i put it at the top of the netflix queue and watched it last night. netflix lists it as a comedy but it didn’t feel like one to me. it is a claustrophobic portrayal of an upper-middle (?) class family going to seed, in which humidity and heat and lassitude are not just metaphors but almost characters in their own right. a large family is gathered at their decrepit country estate for the summer, and are visited briefly by cousins from the city. family secrets and shame slowly bubble out and much more is hinted at. the story of an indian maid, who may or may not be fired soon (by the casually, viciously racist mother, mecha), winds in and out, seen largely through the ambivalent gaze of a teenage daughter of the house who has a crush on her. the possibility of catastrophic violence seems always very close, and the film sustains this pregnant sense of imminent release quite effectively.

nonetheless, i found the film frustrating in parts–it took me too long to sort out which characters were in which family, for example–and i think because it is so effective in making the oppressive, sluggish atmosphere of the principal characters’ lives palpable, you might need to be in the right state of mind to watch it: it may not be the best choice of film to watch at the end of a long day. that said, i do think the film meanders a little. there’s a parallel narrative with a sighting of the virgin mary that didn’t quite fit for me, and the class/race critique could have had a little more bite. the more interesting characters for me were the indian maid, isabel, and the poorer city cousin, tali, but the director (lucrecia martel) seems more interested in mecha’s family. it didn’t finally come together for me, and i found the ending somewhat arbitrary. but it is an interesting film (and the performances are all great), and i’d be interested in reading others’ takes on it. and i’m going to watch the other film by martel that netflix has: the holy girl.

bow wow wow

year of the dog is very good. probably the weakest of white’s major films but still very good. it treads more on chuck and buck territory than on that of the good girl (the other two major films–the others seem like films he writes to be able to make these films) and doesn’t evoke either the discomfort of the former or the existential melancholy of the latter, but shares with both its comic generosity and refusal to judge or even take up predictable positions on the idiosyncrasies of its characters. as you may remember from the ads, this is about a woman who has few human relationships and all but falls apart when her dog suddenly dies. i’m not going to say too much more about the plot at this point except to note that, among other things, it functions as an antidote to the world view of films such as notes on a scandal which cannot imagine the single, sexually inactive woman as anything but a sociopath in waiting. the protagonist here too engages in some fairly questionable behaviour, but its source is located elsewhere, in an over-abundance of love, not the lack of it.
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