Supporting Milk

Milk (2008)
Directed By: Gus Van Sant
Writer: Dustin Lance Black
Starring: Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), Emile Hirsch (Cleve Jones), Josh Brolin (Dan White), Diego Luna (Jack Lira), James Franco (Scott Smith), Alison Pill (Anne Kronenberg)

This is the Oscar month. However, unlike the other years, the hype this year seems very lukewarm. In India, 'Slumdog Millionaire' managed to grab quite a few headlines, and then it fizzled out. Everybody had an opinion about the film, and most of them saw it as pirated copies. By the time it reached Indian theatres, everybody who cared had already seen the film. Sad.
But most Indians, nonetheless, want Slumdog to win the big award. The film is about India after all and it’s the closest we can get to getting an Oscar!
However, I was just thinking, what if, I know, I know, it’s almost impossible, Milk gets away with the Best Film Oscar, something which even Brokeback Mountain could not do. Actually, it’s about time too, in a 'changed' America, with Obama and all.
Milk has several things to its support. To begin with, it’s a biopic, and the Academy loves biopics. But there’s a hitch, it’s a 'gay film' and unapologically so. The entire premise of the film is gay rights movement, as Harvey Milk famously said, if a bullet should pierce my soul, let it break open all the closets in the world. It’s about time, we honoured the memory of Milk and the entire history of gay rights movement, especially at a time when California has banned same-sex marriage all over again, a similar situation for which Harvey Milk had fought.
And we are not asking for awards on sympathy votes. The film deserves it, and Penn deserves an award too. For an actor as established as him, it’s quite a task to change himself completely to look a gay man, with that camp look and act, yet without going into making the character a caricature.
What you see on the screen is someone who looks like Sean Penn but not quite. He’s Harvey Milk, with all his good and bad quality. This is an area where the film scores above all. The film does not try to glorify its subject, but painstakingly creates a historic document which is as close to the real as movies can make. What you see in the screen is San Francisco of the 1970s. The use of the newsreels of Anita Bryant only adds to the authenticity.
'Milk' is the movie of the year, from mainstream Hollywood at least...

Outlander

Jesus Christ is back. This time as a humanoid alien in first century Norway, and for all practical purposes, as an atheist. “There’s no god,” he says, “Only me.” However, as the film ends and the abominable beastie and her offspring is dead, he is declare a god, who came to the earth to help us survive and decided to stay on to rule a Norse village.
James ‘Jim’ Caviezel is back to a starring role after the super-successful 'The Passion of the Christ' (Recently, we had seen him as a demented murderer in Tony Scott’s 'Deja Vu.' But that was a Danzel Washington film.). In Outlander, he plays an alien warrior on a mission to undo the crime his tribe did in another planet. And, man, does he rock? Isn’t he the most handsome man in the world? I did not really care about the movie as long as I could stare at Caviezel brooding. He is just so captivating... I hope you get my drift...
Yes, I am big fan of Caviezel, since I saw Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. There is a scene in the film where a disillusioned soldier, Caviezel, swims underwater with some local kids somewhere in a tropical island. And he looks like a work of art. I have seen that scene for god knows how many times, and still love it. There were some films that did not work for me, like 'The Count of Monte Cristo,' and 'High Crimes.' But he was again in his brooding lost man self in 'Pay It Forward,' a drifter who is given a second chance.
In Outlander, he perfects this lost man look and gives the film an emotional edge. He is perhaps the reason why this film, a mishmash of Alien vs Predator genre with a generous dose of Pathfinder thrown in, works.
Yes, I know, I am getting all hyper, and I am sure I will be biased about the film, just because Jim Caviezel is there. But, frankly, the film is not as bad as some reviews have made it look like. Agreed, this is not a masterpiece or anything like that. It’s just a decent actioner that works, despite too many loopholes in it.
There was a human-like race somewhere in the universe. When their own planet died and decayed, they found another, home to a creature called Moorwen. The tribe killed the Moorwens and settled there. But, there was one surviving beast, and one day he killed the entire tribe but one, Kainan, who made escape on a starship with the Moorwen in hot pursuit.
And where should this high-tech guy land but Iron Age Norway, land of the Vikings. Through his Gizmos, he learns the local language, English, for the benefit of the audience. He is then taken as a prisoner to the village where he meets the king, his daughter Freya, her suitor Wulfric and a rouge enemy Gunnar. It’s takes him some time to convince the villagers that there is a breast in the woods, who shines like light in the dark. Finally, he does convince, a lot of people die and our hero saves the day, gets his girl and a son as well, and becomes a king. He decides not to return to his planet. Happy Ending.
But Caviezel is a treat to watch, and the action moves pretty fast for a two-hour movie. However, most of the happening actually fail to touch you. I mean, it’s not The Lord Of The Rings by any means. You feel bad for Ron Pearlman (of 'Hellboy' fame) in a thankless role as Gunner. And, apart from Caviezel, it’s only John Hurt who manages to hold on his own.
But as long as there’s Caviezel, I won’t complain.

Two films by Kim Ki-duk

Love as pain and pain as love:
Two films by Kim Ki-duk

"A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"
Wrote English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There is something very haunting about this passage from the poem ‘Kubla Khan,’ especially the image of the woman wailing for her demon-lover...
Why does more often than not, love takes a disastrous path with two unlikely pair coming to make each other’s lives miserable? This is the question that has been nagging me since watching two film by Korean’s director Kim Ki-duk, The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001). Both the films are as different as chalk and cheese, but at the heart of them are Kim’s maverick storytelling and that inexplicable attraction between two people which take a violent part both physically and mentally.
Both the films demand attentive viewing and a very, very open mind, especially 'The Isle,' which is violent without being gory, which actually makes it more violent. The film was criticised in the West for animal cruelty, there are scenes where a fish is skinned alive and released in water again, some fishes are given electric shock. But more violent are the human cruelty, the man shallows a pair of hooks while the woman shoves them on her private parts. But what becomes more violent is how instead of using other means (like words for example), how people in both the films resort to their body to express their desires, no, its not sexual desire, but something altogether different.
In Bad Guy, the hero, perhaps a pimp, and perhaps a mute, resort to an elaborate scheme to turn a college-going girl into a prostitute. He succeeds. She protests and finally resigns to her reality. And then, they fall in love, without even uttering a word. Her room in the redlight district has a one-way mirror through which the mute watches the girl entertain her clients, but he never dares to go to her room. While everyone else sleeps with her, he remains the only person who refrains from doing so. Once when he’s drunk, he visits her but nothing physical happens. In the end, in a most unconventional end of a love story, they leave the redlight district on a truck and start a mobile brothel, he’s still the pimp and she is still a prostitute, but they a couple nonetheless.
In 'The Isle,' even this kind of compromise could not take place. We do not know what happened in the end, only that the girl is seen dead and the boy makes an escape. Their love is so strong that they fail to give a breathing space to each other, and as a result doom their love story.
Here, he is a man with a past, who does not believe in love anymore, she is an ‘used’ woman trying to make a living. They meet like two fierce enemies. That’s probably the reason why they are so attracted to each other. He has committed murder for the sake of love, now she too becomes a murderer killing her rival in love with a cold-blooded passion.
The high point of both the films is that there are no conventional methods to express the character’s anguish except for their bodies, and the actors do it with aplomb. What you see in the screen is the rawness of human experience, without any frills. Here’s the thrill.

— Dibyajyoti Sarma