Cinema Of The World: Best Of 2012 Part IV

Cinema Of The World: Best Of 2012 Part IV
The Rest... I hope to write about them too, sometimes soon. [Though I doubt it will ever come to fruition.] Anyway, go and watch these films…

Jeff, Who Lives at Home
The Five-Year Engagement
The Miners' Hymns
Domain
Ela Bittencourt
Post Mortem
The Forgiveness of Blood
The Queen of Versailles
American Animal
The Imposter
Almayer’s Folly
How to Survive a Plague
It's Such a Beautiful Day
Goodbye First Love
Room 237
Two Years at Sea
Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present
Your Sister's Sister
Goodbye First Love
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
5 Broken Cameras
Las Acacias
In Another Country
Vamps
Sister
Beyond the Black Rainbow
Crazy Horse
Photographic Memory
Middle of Nowhere
Damsels in Distress
The Color Wheel
The Day He Arrives
Domain
Brave
Attenberg
Girl Walk // All Day
Key Hole
Sleepless Night
Miss Bala
Not Fade Away
The Innkeepers
The Comedy
This Must Be the Place
Extraterrestrial,
Chicken with Plums
Gayby,
The Hobbit
Beyond the Black Rainbow
Jump Street,
Last Ride,
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Tears of Gaza
Goon
This Is 40
Samsara
Ginger & Rosa
Sleepwalk With Me
The Hunt
The Comedy”
Ruby Sparks”
The Dark Knight Rises
2 Days In New York

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to his great ‘In Bruges’, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ may not be as perfect as the earlier film was, but, this movie about movie is filled with film in-jokes which themselves make up for the meandering plot as the film itself lose it in the desert. (For example, the film discusses how in Hollywood action films women are there just to be killed, and how it’s not a good thing, the film ends up doing the same, giving the two leading ladies just one scene each.)

Here, Christopher Walken’s Hans defends the ‘fags’ while defending the importance of dream sequences in the film the central character, Colin Farrell, is writing, saying: “By the way, I don’t think they being called ‘fag’ anymore. I think nowadays, they prefer ‘homos’.
As ‘political correctness’ hangs itself, our psycho character replaces one offensive word with another…

Seven Psychopaths

One of the psychopaths in Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to his great ‘In Bruges’, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ argues how the Mahatma Gandhi saying ‘An eye for an eye will leave the world blind’, isn't correct.

He argues: There would be at least one person with an eye left. How can the last blind guy take the eye of the last guy with one eye left?”

He concludes: “Gandhi was wrong. It’s just that nobody got the balls to come right out and say it.”

As Robert Ebert argued in his review of the film, McDonagh’s Tarantino-inspired script invents extraordinary psychotic characters, real and imaginary, and let them have a field day, and actors have a great time, as Sam Rockwell did, as Billy Bickle, who embodied not one but two psychotic characters.

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to his great ‘In Bruges’, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is less a movie about, well, psychopaths, and more about movies in general, and Hollywood in particular. Here, the central character is a screenplay writer, who, we are told is great, but going though a writer’s block. He needs to write a script and all he has is the title, the aforementioned title of the present film.

To top this, Marty the writer is also an alcoholic. After he’s thrown out of his house by his girlfriend after a drinking binge, Marty comes to accept that he may as well be a drunkard. His friend, an actor turned a dog-kidnapper, who is actually two psychopaths rolled into one, played with brazenness by Sam Rockwell, gives him a pep-talk, staying that it’s not his fault that he’s an alcoholic; it’s after all a part of his Irish heritage.

Says Billy: “It’s part of your heritage. You’re fucked. You were fucked from birth. Spanish have got bullfighting. The French got cheese. And the Irish has got alcoholism.”

Marty asks the next logical question: “And what have the American got?”

“Tolerance,” Billy answer, in a dead-serious tone. And that’s what it makes it so funny!

Flipsyde's Someday

There is something very incongruous about a white person rapping and doing hip hop. It’s a very black domain. But, Eminem changed it. The early Eminem has been my favourite for years. Yet, when one of my friends gave me the cassettes of Flipsyde’s ‘We the People’, I was not really looking forward to something that will blow me away. [We are talking about a time when we listened to music playing from a tape recorder or a walkman! Though, by time this album was released, CDs were already in the market] Anyway, I listened to the album and was really blown away, especially two songs: ‘Spun’, we’re spinning, we’re spinning, we’re spun… and this one, ‘Someday, we’ll dance with those lions…”
Listening to the song after a long time, I am surprised how absolutely I adored the song. Those days I was optimistic, I too had a vision of a future where I had achieve what I had set out to achieve.
Time has changed. Yet, hope floats. We cannot just give up. There’s still a future. There always would be, as long as I am alive and I cannot give up, for, someday “we gonna break free from these chains…”

The lyric of "Someday"

[Chorus]
Someday we gonna rise up on that wind you know
Someday we gonna dance with those lions
Someday we gonna break free from these chains and keep on flyin'

[Verse 1]
They tellin' me it's all good just wait
You know you're gonna be there someday
Sippin' on Jim Beam ok
Gotta get these things one day
Till then do another line you know
Searching for that other high
Stop or I gotta steal then steal
Kill or I'm gonna be killed
I got a sack in my pocket
Conscious yellin' drop it
You know we're gonna lose it someday
And we tryin' to hold it all together but the devil is too clever so
I'm gonna die you gonna die we gonna die Someday one day I said

[Chorus]
Someday we gonna rise up on the wind you know
Someday we gonna dance with those lions
Someday we gonna break free from these chains and keep on flyin'

[Verse 2]
Try to lie but it ain't me Ain't me
Try to look but I can't see
Can't stop right now cause I'm too far and I can't keep goin' cause it's too hard
In the day in the night it's the same thing
On the field on the block it's the same game
On the real if you stop then it's no pain but if you can't feel pain then it's no gain
Rearrange and you change and it's all bad and you try to maintain but you fall back
And you crawl and you slip and you slide down
Wanna make it to the top better start now
So I hold my soul and I die hard
All alone in the night in the graveyard
Someday one day I'm gonna be free and they won't try to kill me for being me
Hey someday

[Chorus]
Someday we gonna rise up on that wind you know
Someday we gonna dance with those lions
Someday we gonna break free from these chains and keep on flyin'

If you know how this is
Gonna see it's not that easy
Don't stop get it till it's done
From where you are or have begun
I said keep on try a little harder to see everything you need to be
Believe in your dreams
That you see when you're asleep

[Chorus]
Someday we gonna rise up on that wind you know
Someday we gonna dance with those lions
Someday we gonna break free from these chains and keep on flyin'

The Song Here.

Foreign Films

Film In Other Languages Than English: 2012

Children of Sarajevo (Djeca); Drama; Aida Begic; Bosnia and Herzegovina
Camion; Drama; Rafaël Ouellet; Canada
Twilight Portrait; Drama; Angelina Nikonova; Russia
Amour; Drama; Michael Haneke; Austria, Germany, France
Rebelle (War Witch); Drama; Kim Nguyen; Canada
Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os); Drama; Jacques Audiard; France
Key of Life; Comedy; Kenji Uchida; Japan
Blood of My Blood (Sangue do Meu Sangue); Drama; João Canijo; Portugal
Berberian Sound Studio; Horror; Thriller; Peter Strickland; UK
The Hunt (Jagten); Drama; Thomas Vinterberg; Denmark
Laurence Anyways; Drama; Xavier Dolan; Canada
Tabu; Drama; Miguel Gomes; Portugal
Barbara; Drama; Christian Petzold; Germany
Himizu; Drama; Sion Sono; Japan
Beyond the Hills (Dupa dealuri); Drama; Cristian Mungiu; Romania
Holy Motors; Fantasy,; Drama; Sci-Fi; Leos Carax; France
After Lucia (Después de Lucía); Michel Franco
The Almost Man (Mer eller mindre mann); Martin Lund
Betrayal (Izmena); Kirill Serebrennikov
Blancanieves; Pablo Berger
Camille Rewinds (Camille redouble); Noémie Lvovsky
The Delay (La Demora); Rodrigo Plá
Fill the Void (Lemale et ha'halal); Rama Burshtein
The Girl From Nowhere (La fille de nulle part); Jean-Claude Brisseau
House with a Turret (Dom s bashenkoy); Neymann
In the Fog (V tumane); Sergei Loznitsa
The Last Step (Peleh akhar) by Ali Mosaffa
The Last Supper (Wáng Dè Shèng Yàn); Lu Chuan
Outrage Beyond (Autoreiji: Beyondo); Takeshi Kitano
Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube); Ulrich Seidel
Post Tenebras Lux; Carlos Reygadas
Vanishing Waves (Aurora); Kristina Buozyte
Cold War
Vulgaria
Love in the Buff
A Simple Life
The Viral Factor
Due West: Our Sex Journey
I Love Hong Kong 2012
Nightfall
Motorway

Amour

The new Michael Haneke film, ‘Amour’, which is likely to garner at least one Oscar statuette the next month, is set entirely in an apartment building in Paris, and the flat becomes an extension of the two main characters, the old couple, Georges and Anne, finally staring at death and at pain.
Once it was all over, their daughter comes to the empty house, yet to fully comprehend what she has lost…

Amour

‘Amour,’ the 2012 French-language film, written and directed by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert, tells the story of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers with a daughter who lives abroad. Anne suffers a stroke which paralyses her on one side of her body.
Here, Georges tries to entertain Anne a story from his youth, the experience of going to see a film. He doesn’t remember the film at all, but he remembers how he felt about the film, especially when his neighbour asked him about it, and he went on to narrate the whole story and started to cry.
Now, years later, he doesn’t remember the film, it must be some banal love story, but he remembers the emotional pull that tugged his heart.

Amour

‘Amour,’ the 2012 French-language film, written and directed by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert, tells the story of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers with a daughter who lives abroad. Anne suffers a stroke which paralyses her on one side of her body. The film was screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or. It has been selected as the Austrian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, making the January shortlist.
More here.

Critics say ‘Amour’ is Haneke’s most optimistic and most gentle film, and considering it’s a Haneke film, it’s saying a lot. Expectantly, at the heart of this love story between a couple who was clearly made for each other and had a long and fruitful life together, comes with its own share of violence. But unlike other Haneke films, or any other film for that matter, this violence is not the payoff, but a predicable conclusion of the narrative.

As the film begins, we are told that something happened in the house, and we see a dead body, which, surrounded by dried flowers, is rotting. Then the screen goes black and the title appears, ‘Amour’, ‘Love’. But, critics are right, unlike other Haneke films, like ‘Funny Games’, or even ‘Cache’, this film is brimming with optimist, even in death… look how the film ends… Wonderful!

Amour

As Michael Haneke's 'Amour' gets at least four nominations (best film, best director, best actress, best screenplay), here is the last three paragraphs of the Roger Ebert review:

Old age isn't for sissies, and neither is this film. Trintignant and Riva courageously take on these roles, which strip aside all the glamor of their long careers (he starred in "A Man and a Woman," she most famously in "Hiroshima, Mon Amour"). Their beauty has faded, but it glows from within. It accepts unflinchingly the realities of age, failure and the disintegration of the ego.

Yes, and to watch "Amour" invites us — another audience — to accept them, too. When I saw "Hiroshima, Mon Amor" (1959), I was young and eager and excited to be attending one of the first French art films I'd ever seen. It helped teach me what it was, and who I was. Now I see that the film, its actors and its meaning have all been carried on, and that the firemen are going to come looking for all of us one of these days, sooner or later.

This is now. We are filled with optimism and expectation. Why would we want to see such a film, however brilliantly it has been made? I think it's because a film like "Amour" has a lesson for us that only the cinema can teach: the cinema, with its heedless ability to leap across time and transcend lives and dramatize what it means to be a member of humankind's eternal audience.
More here.

Hope Springs

Kay wants to bring sex back to their lives; her husband is happy the way things are. One day, they arrive at a small resort town, Hope Springs, to work on their marriage, by seeing a psychiatrist. The good doctor knows his stuff. He gives the cynical couple an example of the nose, sometimes, to clear the nasal cavity so that we can breathe properly, we need to break the nose first. Same is the case with marriages, you must dismember it first to build it all over again.

In Hope Springs, with Maryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones

As the cold wave grips Delhi, makeshift shops selling assorted winter-wear dot the streets. I finally decide to invest in a pair of hand gloves. In stand in front of a shop manned by an elderly gentleman and wave my bare palm. He gets the hint and says: “Saab, aap ko ‘Dastane’ chahiye?” For a second, I’m flabbergasted. “Dastane? Sarang Dastane” I say, “No. Not particularly.” How would I suppose to know that they call gloves dastane here?

Akash Bhora Surjo Tara

Akash bhora surjo tara, a song by Anjan Dutta. Listen to the song in Youtube Here.


The lyrics...

Akash bhora surjo tara
akash mukhi shari shari
kalo dhoway dheke jawa thasha thashi baksho bari
ekhan thekei cholar shuru
ekhan thekei hamaguri
ekhan ta tei amar basha
amar bari

baro tolar upor theke
baro bochor kete geche
iskool ta jawa chhara nama hoyna matir kache
shobar ghorer dewal ta moy
hash murgi onek nache
tobuo ranar chokher bhetor
kothao jeno kanna bhashe

shekhan theke ektu duure
ektu khani egiye gele
ekla thaken nandi babu bondi sheo je boyeshkaal-e
shongshar tar haal dhoreche bokhate tar choto chhele
ek cup chaa diye geche kokhon jani shaat shokale

(radio tar battery ta hothat kobe gelo khoye
khater theke namte mana buker byatha geche shoye) * 2
neelimar maa tai to je aar bhabena shongsar ta niye
edo golir shedo ghore shobi kemon boye geche
ekhan ta tei atke pora ekhan ta tei ghuro ghuri
ekhan ta tei amar basha amar bari

choudhury der ekhush tolay moder neshay uchu golay choudhury der
choudhury der ekhush tolay moder neshay uchu golay jhogra chole gobhir raat-e laaj lojjar bandh bhenge jaay
court kachari onek holo holo na je chharachari shompotti aankre dhore gobhir raat-er maramari

(shekhan theke ektu duure parar morta ektu ghure
oli goli pakostholir bhetor kara gumre more) * 2
(boli holo arekta pran mostan der chhora chhurir) * 2
ekhan ta tei amar basha amar bari shari shari

(chilekothar baranda ta bondhyo keno jano ki ta
ekhan thekei laafiye pore laha barir anindita) * 2
gobhir raat-e tai to keu ar othe na je oder chhat-e
ondhokarer bondhyo ghore kara jeno dukre kaande
shekhan theke ektu duure chhater paachil ta ghure
ek chilte roddur-e te chhoto meye naamta pore
tai to kalo eeter fnaake bot-pataa ta jeev bhyangchay
parar neri bachha take mukhe kore haante shekhay
ekhan ta tei atke pora ekhan ta tei ghuro ghuri
ekhan ta tei amar basha amar bari

Akash bhora surjo tara
akash mukhi shari shari
kalo dhoway dheke jawa thasha thashi baksho bari
ekhan thekei cholar shuru
ekhan thekei hamaguri
ekhan ta tei amar basha
tomar bhalobashar bari

Thanks to: Sayan's Blog http://sayansays.blogspot.in/2011/04/akash-bhora-lyrics-anjan-dutta.html

Dilli, One Month Later

I reached Delhi on the first day of the last month of 2012, twenty days before the world was supposed to end. It did not, but private worlds of scores of people did, including that girl, variously named, Nirbhaya, Damini… and then, I froze… Was it a mistake to shift to the Capital of India, which also happens to be the place that breeds insecure men hell-bent on proving their masculinity by committing crimes against women? But, I shouldn’t complain; this was the idea, wasn’t it, to start all over again, from the scratch… At 35, it’s little unnerving, but what the hell, you have one life to live. And, Delhi will adopt me, it always have, history is the witness, from the days of Sher Shah Suri (I did a trip to Purana Quila, which was allegedly built by this conqueror)… I arrived in Delhi with just a bag (gifted by a dear friend; thank you, Hemant), and nothing else, not even a railway reservation, to a series of uncertainties. Fifteen days later, it was the gang rape that sort of took over my life (being in a newspaper isn’t a good life; things you have to do to eat), like the lives of scores of people in India, people who care. Once this died down, it was the middle of a frozen winter, the coldest day after 44 years, and the year ended, and I took strides to a new life. I got a house, some new friends (not all the way, of course, it will take time), and here I am, unfortunately, the same person… I like to think, I’m changing, but I doubt that…

High Noon

The one thing about the 1952 anti-Western Western, High Noon, which tells the moral dilemma of a town marshal about the face his nemesis, that surprises me is the presence of the Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado). A woman of Mexican origin has no business in a film like this, no less than a central role. No, she actually becomes the moral centre of the film, the only person who understands and supports Will Kane, the marshal of Hedleyville, and witness how Katy Jurado steals the film from everyone else, including the beautiful Grace Kelly, who played Will’s wife Amy.

In Fred Zinnemann’s ‘High Noon’.