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