The End Begins

Terminator Salvation (2009)
Directed by: McG
Writers: John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
Starring: Christian Bale (John Connor), Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright), Moon Bloodgood (Blair Williams), Helena Bonham Carter (Dr. Serena Kogan), Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese)

Can you imagine the Terminator series without the swashbuckling Arnold Schwarzenegger? Of course not. Even if the new Terminator movie stars today’s action hero, the Dark Knight, Christian Bale. Therefore, it was imperative that we had a Schwarzenegger lookalike, even for a few minutes, to fight the brand-new John Connor. But this buffed-up Schwarzenegger look-alike Terminator model does not speak. So, it’s Connor, Bale’s turn to speak that immortal line, "I’ll be back." And he says it like a Terminator, though he is the leader of the resistance against the marauding machines of the skynet, the handful of human survivor after the Judgement Day at took place in 2004. So much for salvation!
Terminator fans, take heart. As the film ends, we know there are at least two more sequels in the offing. So, don’t complain if you miss the more sophisticated Terminators of the first three films, especially, Judgement Day. Salvation is set in 2018, whereas the terminators in the earlier films came from 2032 and thereabouts. We are still dealing with T-600 models, and possibly a lone T-800 prototype. There’s still lot of time for T-1000 and time for a lot of sequels, provided this one is able to conquer the box office.
Salvation is a blockbuster, there’s no double about it. It’s an action fiesta, from start to finish. This may be one of the reasons why you still miss Judgement Day. There was an emotional resonance in Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor’s inhuman efforts to alternate what was inevitable. When she wrote "There's no fate but what we make for ourselves," we rooted for her.
The sentence is repeated in Salvation as well, as it must. For one thing, Bale’s John Connor knows the past and guesses the future. In 2018, as a foot soldier for the resistance, he knows he must save Kyle Reese from the machines. If Reese is killed, he would never be born. Hah!

So, he goes in a mission to save his young father, much younger than him, who haven’t even earned his badge. The stage is set for a showdown between the man and the machine. So far so good.
But Connor is not the focus of the story here, despite Bale billed as its star (he actually gets less screen space than Marcus Wright brilliantly played by Sam Worthington. No matter, there would be sequels for Bale to star in.)
There are grapevines that Bale was approached to play Marcus, but chose to play Connor instead. Which is a good thing, and it somewhat saves the film. Worthington, who looks a shade like Heath Ledger (Australian connection!), is more convincing than Bale’s machine-like demeanour. In short, it was a wrong vehicle for Bale after the supper success of ‘The Dark Knight.’
Anyway, Salvation concentrates on Marcus, a human turned cyborg, probably a T-800, who still thinks he’s human. So, instead of killing Reese, for which he was purportedly made, he ends up saving him, and at the end, also saves Connor as well, by donating his heart, prompting Connor to utter the "what makes us human" monologue...
As an action fare, Salvation works well. Till the end, you are not bored, even if you may not really care! The tone is that of a post-apocalypse genre, which, in reality, it is, made famous by all those zombie movies, 28 days... and Resident Evil series. And it works well, even though you have seen them all before.
Looks like I’m taking the film too seriously. It’s very easy to pen a film like this, as so many people have already done, from Roger Ebert to the reviewers of imdb... (I, however, don’t agree with Ebert’s JC, John Connor, Jesus Christ symbology mumbo jumbo... The Ebert review here.)

But, I am a Terminator fan and am waiting for the next film whenever it hits the screen.

Newspaper Readers

I got the list in one of those numerous mail forwards. You may have got one too.

The Times of India is read by people who think they run the country.
The Economic Times is read by people who think they own the country.
The Hindu is read by people who are not sure who's country it is.
The Indian Express is read by people who shouldn't run the country.
The Statesman is read by people who think they ought to run the country.
The Asian Age is read by people who think someone else should run the country.
The Hindustan Times is read by people who think Delhi is a country.
The Telegraph is read by people who think Bengal is the best country.
The Malayala Manorama is read by people who think Kerala is their country, and God's ... zimble !
The Mid-Day is read by people who can't think in this country.
The Pioneer is read by people who think the Brits ran this country better.
The Tribune is read by people who're more bothered about the country-side.
The Dainik Bhaskar is read by people in the country-side.
The Bombay Samachar is read by people who'd rather be in some other country.
The Saamna is read by semi-literates who think, tujhi aiee chi, everyone should fuck off from country.
The Femina is read by the fat wives of the rich in this country.
The Stardust is read by people who care a shit who runs the country as long as she has big boobs.
The PuneTimes is read by some people who think the pub is their country.
The DNA is not read, but used to pack footwear by people going out of this country.

Observations by Prof. Amitabh Dasgupta (c) 2007

Delhi 6 and inspirations

There was a time when the world of Hindi cinema was a parallel universe altogether, very much like our own world, but distinctly differ-ent, without the mundane issues we deal with, but with issues larger-than-life: pyar, mohabbat, izzat, intekam... Then, post-millennium, movies started to become more realistic, more close to our own experience, still maintaining its own parallel universe time-wrap. (Did ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ started the trend? I don’t know.)
Now, Hindi movies are becoming more and more daring, trying to break the walls of that mythical parallel universe. Now, films have begun to talk about themselves (‘Luck By Chance’), or other films (the character Mahi in ‘Bacchna Aae Hasino’ who has seen ‘DDLJ’ for 17 times.), or talk about current issues (‘A Wednesday,’ ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’)...
If Hindi films making jokes about Hindi films were not enough, now we have Hindi films showing television news channels as a narrative device. That’s a punishment, if you ask me. Aren’t we all tired of the news channels at home that we are forced to see them doing their ‘nakhda’ in the multiplexes as well? This was my first reaction as I saw Delhi-6. (It was late in the day, I agree. The reviews were not encouraging. So, I decided to wait till the DVDs are out.)
Back to ‘delhi-6.’ An enormous amount of time in the film is taken by news channels. TV played a pivotal role in ‘RDB’ as well. But there it made sense. This time, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has gone over-board. Okay. We are building the narrative on a grapevine which is being spread by the news channels. So far so good. By why should we be forced to see the events through the eye of a television camera, as in the case when the jelebi shop was vandalised? That’s a bit too much. Tell us a straight story please.
And, please, please, don't show the constantly changing tv channels while a couple makes love with a tv remote on the bed; it's a very old trick, and a tad boring now, if you ask me.
I can’t say, I did not like the film. I think Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra wanted to pay a tribute to his city and he does, with all his sentiments. As a pastiche, the film works wonder. I especially liked the state-of-the-art Ramleela sequences. Most of the minor characters have their traits... (Come to think about it, everyone here is a minor character, the narrator, Roshan, included.)... But as a narrative, the film does not work. It’s not even proper love story.
Okay. I stop. I am not reviewing the film. I am just trying to show-off my ‘intelligence’. There’s two things I noticed which, I am very happy to admit, I could trace to their original source.
The mirror: The so-called psycho keeps showing a mirror to everybody. It’s a major symbol Mehra employs in the film: “We are more important than anything else.” The film closes with the mirror reflecting the characters. Even the music CD cover of the film carries the mirror, which will reflect your face. You too are a part of the film’s world. Very clever and ingenious. Wait. Then I remember, a few years ago, the Time magazine had carried a cover with a shiny mirror-like substance pasted on a picture of a computer screen to celebrate the person of the year: ‘You. Yes, you. You control the in-formation age. Welcome to your world.
The dead: At the climax, Roshan is killed by the mob. Then we see him eating, what else, jelebi, with his father, acting as grandfather in the film. He is dead and in heaven, apparently. Then he wants to make a call to him mother... How smart! Then I remember ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.’ The chapter called 'King’s Cross': Harry dies and meets Damboldore somewhere, and then he’s back to kill Vodermort.
Okay. Okay. I am nit-picking. Sorry.
Tailpiece: Just caught a glimpse of a Hindi film called ‘Chocolate,’ the last scene where Anil Kapoor realises how he was conned. Then he thinks... in a Hindi dialogue clearly copied and translated from that Kevin Spacey gem from ‘The Usual Suspects,’ “You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone...
In chaste Hindi. Imagine.

Louis Malle’s India

I’m not a patriotic sort of person. I often find fault in India and her people. Yet, whenever I hear a foreigner criticising my country, I rise to her defence. I can say anything about India; it's my country; but how dare an outsider point a finger on us.
I'm especially suspicious of Westerners who claim to love India and then go on dissecting her from a sensibility which is Western to the core. That’s why I’m suspicious of William Dalrymple, though I cannot really find fault in him. That was the same problem I encountered with Suketu Mehta’s ‘Maximum City.’ Through the book about Bombay is ostensibly written by an Indian, even though he grew up abroad, the sensibility Mehta applies is out-and-out Western.
This was the same reason I was very apprehensive about French director Louis Malle’s documentary' 'Louis Malle’s India' (apprently, a part of his documentary series on India, ‘Phantom India’). The fact that the series of documentaries Malle did for BBC in 1969, met with severe criticism by the Indian government and was eventually banned, did not help the matter.
Now that I finally saw the film, it has left me with a mixed feeling. (I chanced upon it while surfing the net. It was in Google video, and I could download it easily in mp4 format. I had found a real treasure.)
Like most foreigner visiting India and enamoured by its 'mysticism,' Malle’s India too is rural and poor, still untouched by the spoils of industrial revolution. (If you accuse ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ as ‘poverty porn’ then I wonder, what would you call this one!!)
Narrated by Malle himself in a French-accented English, there is a point in the film where Malle actually compares the post-industrial Western world with the agrarian India, saying that probably the Indian farmer in the midst of nature is happier than the Western man living in their isolated materialistic world. What a cliché?
Seeing in today’s context, in a progressively globalised India, the film, as grainy as it looks, feels strangely eerie. This is not the India we know. No. This is the same India we know, but unlike what Malle claims (that the country never changes!), India has changed. There's poverty still; the shanty town Malle photographs in Mumbai has only increased. Yet India has come of age. India does not need anyone’s pity.
Talking about cliché, the film abounds in it. There are priest and sadhus, temples and ghats, the caste system and the filth... There is an extended scene of a group of vultures feasting on a dead buffalo... the fishermen of Kerala... a man pushing a sewing machine on the highway... You know what to expect. Exotica!!!
Yet, it's heartening to see how Malle refuses to judge his subjects. He refuses to put the people he has captured in his camera into perspective. He let them be and captures what he sees in his travels in India as it is. In the beginning of the film, the narrator, Malle, says, “Everywhere we go, we see the eyes stare. We have come to look at them (the Indians). Now, they look at us. In all this, which one of us is the voyeur? ... Their eyes focused on us, focused on the camera’s Cyclops eye... The Indians watch us watching them, and now they watch you (Malle’s Western audience.)
This is where Malle’s photographic journey of India finds a great leveller. His Western vision is a two-way street; it does not look at India with wonder and awe, as a perennial outsider, but tries its best to be part of it, though the filmmaker fails more than he succeeds. But there’s a beauty in the failure too.

The film is here.
The Wikipedia entry on Louis Malle

Departures: A journey home

Okuribito
Directed by:Yôjirô Takita
Writer: Kundo Koyama
Release Date:13 September 2008 (Japan)
Starring: Masahiro Motoki (Daigo Kobayashi); Tsutomu Ya-mazaki (Ikuei Sasaki); Ryoko Hirosue (Mika Kobayashi); Kazuko Yoshiyuki (Tsuyako Yamashita); Kimiko Yo (Yuriko Kamimura); Takashi Sasano (Shokichi Hirata)

I really don't believe that an award, whatever great it may be, can do anything to a film. If a movie is great, it’s so in its own right. Take for example, ‘Shawshank Redemption.’ It did not win any awards whatsoever. Yet, it's the top film in the IMDB.com list of 250 most-voted movies.
Yet, you expect some films to get their due, because they deserve it. Last year, I was rallying for Ali Folman’s Israeli, animated docu-drama about the 1982 Lebanon war, ‘Waltz with Bashir.’ When the film was nominated for Oscar for best foreign-language film, I expected it win the honour. The film deserved the award. Instead, the award went to an obscure Japanese film called ‘Departures.’ That’s the reason I said I don’t trust awards.
However, after seeing ‘Departures’ yesterday, I'm ready to admit that it was not a wrong choice, after all. Will I call ‘Departures’ a great film, the way I will call ‘Waltz’ a great film? I don’t know. But I will happily recommend it to anyone. It’s a rare gem, glowing incessantly.
‘Okuribito’ is decidedly a small film, like a Japanese miniature, or a bonsai, and it does not lose its focus while meditating on issues of life and death, more life than death perhaps, even though the plot ostensibly deals with dead bodies. The story it wants to tell outweighs the philosophy it tries to impart; there are philosophies nonetheless. Here’s one I enjoyed: “You have to eat if you want to live. Since you have to eat, it better taste good.” Food plays an important role in the film. So is music, so is a desire for a happy family, and other assorted issues of life, and that too when there are more dead bodies in the film than the living creatures. But the film is not about death per se. It's about understanding life through death, and death itself... the beauty of it, and how it shapes the life of those who stay behind. After his ambition to become a cello player fails miserably, Daigo Kobayashi leaves Tokyo to his countryside home with his wife Mika. All his mother had left him was a cafe, which his father used to run before he run away with a waitress when Daigo was six year old. Since then, he has not been able to come to terms with his absentee father. (There are a few sequences between the father and son in flashback, involving stones, which veers towards melodrama; but that’s besides the point...) On reaching the small, desolate town, the first job Daigo applies to is that of preparing the dead for funerals. Daigo is not sure whether he can do the job. He questions if he is being tested for his failure to attend his mother’s funeral. His first job goes really bad. But as the days go by, he finds himself more and more immersed in the job, and his cello.
The extended scenes of Diago preparing the dead, cleaning the bodies, changing their dress, applying make-up, from young girls to old man, can be very unsettling for viewers. But the film exists for these scenes, not vice-versa. The Japanese culture has always been fascinated by death. The film not only reinforces it, but also makes us comfortable with the idea of death.
At one point, Diago asks, why we have to work so hard if we are all going to die anyway? To this, an old man, who works in the funeral home, answers, death is not the end, it’s just the beginning of another journey, the journey home. And it’s Daigo’s job to get them ready for the final journey, and he does it with all the seriousness of an artist. Every job has its dignity, and more so in Daigo Kobayashi’s job.
The several dead bodies that Daigo prepare have their own uniqueness and those small and beautifully created scenes add to the drama of the film. There is a dead crossdresser, a wife mourned by her husband (it’s a small scene, but how the husband cries, 'Naomi,' can break your heart!), there’s a young girl dead in a bike accident, there is a patriarch, who gets kisses from his family members while lying on the coffin, and finally, Daigo must prepare his father for the last journey.
The beautifully desolate town and haunting sound of the cello adds to mood of the film, which is not sombre as it sounds, but forcefully life-affirming.

Our men in Havana

Films:
Before Night Falls
Strawberry and Chocolate
The Lost City
Scarface
El Argentine, Che Part I

In the post-post-modern world we live in, fed with everything American, the small island state of Cuba, just miles away from the US of A remains an enigma. Even after so many years, Cuba means commu-nism, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, and of course, the Havana cigars. Beyond this, the world outside knows next to nothing about the country and its people.
Yes, good ol’ Hollywood has tried its hands in bring Cuba to popular imagination (No, we are not talking about Che Guevera, he is a post-modern anti-establishment icon on his own right; conservative Hollywood has nothing to do with it.), but most of these movies sees the country from outside and portrays it a ‘commie’ state, totalitarian and oppressive. If you want to be your own man, you must leave Cuba, (and come to America, who will give you asylum, of course). So, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) in Brian De Palma’s ‘Scarface’ must leave the country to pursue his American Dream. In films like ‘Bad Boys II’, ‘Miami Vice,’ ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Die Another Day’, Cuba is the breeding ground of drug dealers and mafia.
On the other extreme, it’s the country of lost hopes, which Andy Garcia so succinctly depicts in ‘The Lost City.’ The premise of the film is that Cuba was a great nation until the revolution happened, after which individualism was scarified, so was the arts.
As Garcia’s film bemoans the loss of Cuba, one thing is clear. You cannot have a real picture of the country in films, it’s either black or white — either Cuba is the villain (in which case America will be the hero, from ‘Scarface’ to ‘Before Night Falls’), and if Cuba is the hero (as in Steven Soderbergh’s two part epic on Che Guevera), America is the villain.
Add to that gay rights issues in Cuba, the scene is complicated. A popular document of the gay life and its persecution is Julian Schnabel’s celebrated ‘Before Night Falls, a film based on the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban author and an avowed homosexual who had to escape to America to survive the persecution. Despite Javier Bardem’s powerhouse performance (he was nominated for an Oscar), the film somehow did not work for me. (I cannot find fault in Schnabel either. He is an excellent director. The 2007 film ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ is the ample prove.) For me, the problem was that it identified the revolution and the revolutionaries as the villain very early in the film. You agree with the reality of the situation, but why do you have to rub it insistently. The problem was, the film saw Arenas from the outside, and invited us to sympathise with him, even if we did not want to.
And, the fact that the film is in English, with Bardem speaking with Spanish accent does not help the case either.
This brings us to the other film, which actually prompted me to write this piece. The film in question is ‘Strawberry and Chocolate.’ Called ‘Fresa y Chocolate’ it’s a Cuban-Spanish-Mexican co-produced, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, based on the short story "The Wolf, The Forest and the New Man" written by Senel Paz in 1990.
What’s great about the film is that it catches you unawares, and it never unfolds the way it expects. Diego is gay, slightly effeminate, and a writer and artist. He meets David, who is nursing a heartbreak after his girlfriend is married. Diego tries to seduce David, but the things are not easy as they look. David is a communist, committed to the revolution, whereas Diego wants to live his life the way he wants, reading foreign magazines, drinking red label... As the film progresses we see how the two ideologies, the pro and anti-establishment collide on a humane level and cements the bond of friendship. Diego learns to accepts the rules, David learns to break them... This is where it scores over ‘Before Night Falls,’ which takes a long romantic look on a man’s life, without actually trying to un-derstand what’s going on.
Now, Arenas escapes to America. Even Diego plans to do so. But Diego says he’ll miss Cuba. But for Arenas, US was freedom. But, is it?
Homosexuality is a problem whether its a socialist or a capitalist society. The foundation is every society is marriage and family, something that a queer ideology dismisses, and thus, a queer becomes a threat which must be eliminated.
Talking about the black and white representation of Cuba, even Steven Soderbergh’s near-masterpiece cannot avoid being one-sided. In ‘The Lost City’ the fall of Batista’s fall is a major event. But in ‘El Argentine’ (Part I of the Che movies), this is just a news.
Tailpiece: ‘Our men in Havana’ is an ‘entertainment’ by Graham Greene, which was made into a film in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness. The film was actually shot in Havana.