No Accident

Jackie Chan's rise to global superstardom is s carefully orchestrated as his action sequences. Choreographed action, some intrigue, a damsel or two in distress - it is especially the first where he stands head and shoulders above the Hollywood physicality with his sheer ingenuity and improvisation. The Accidental Spy builds on the genre with action and intrigue scattered globally. There is also some emotional content to boot. Worth a watch on a Friday night over Coke, popcorn and surely not too much intellectualizing

Dont Ababndon This Till The End





An underrated movie. Or perhaps, most viewers did not have the patience to make it through till the end. Abandon stars Katie Holmes in an unbelievably drab milieu, chasing McKinsey dreams and trying to grow over the shadows of her missing boyfriend, in a super-slow buildup where you practically give up any hope of redemption of the movie. And then, suddenly, over the last two minutes or so, it changes dramatically. It would be fair to watch this movie at 2X forward till the last ten minutes or so - the latter being the only reason that I am writing about this strange movie at all. You will be hard pressed to guess the genre of this movie till the end.

A Thought-Provoking Planet

Though Planet of the Apes is a relatively old franchise, it is quite entertaining in terms of lightly exploring arguments about man coming to confrontation with a comparable intelligence that has travelled along a different evolutionary trajectory, only just. Mark Wahlberg exudes a Matt Damon style thinking physicality but cannot match the latter's intensity. This is not the best of Tim Burton. The "What If" questions that emanate from coming to confrontation with a comparable intelligence are quite amusing at the very least.

The Lesser of 2 Great Movies

Compared to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight has had spellbinding initial commercial and critical acclaim - not least because of the outstanding performances of Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. The script is taut, the action delectable - great to see Hong Kong resplendent!, and the moral agruments for and against a vigilante compelling. The rise of the Joker this time around is not through cheap stunts and barely believable capers, but quite akin to the rise of mafia mob bosses - ruthless, violent and gritty. The soundtrack retains the tension-inducing elements of the previous edition. An unmissable movie, only a fraction short of the previous edition

Raising Eyebrows




Raising Arizona seals it for me - I now count myself among the bonafide fans of the Coen Brothers. Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter are on opposite sides of the law - come together in an unlikely marriage and an equally unlikely heist to snatch a kid from a set of quintuplets. Over sevaral escapades with escaped convicts, bounty hunters, psychotic storekeepers and bosses with questionable morals, the couple are struck by a fit of remonstrance and get round to "doing the right thing". The movie has an undercurrent of morality running through it quite unlike the unmitigated eccentricity of O Brother Where Art Thou. This would be the best starting point into the Coen Brothers for its balance of quirkiness and convention, the latter in exploring conventional themes of family life

Curiouser and Curiouser

O Brother Where Art Thou is an exceedingly peculiar movie even by the Coen Borthers' standards. Three escaped convicts make their way to "treasure that is not the one they seek" through a medley of characters that typify the Depression-era South just preceding the advent of technology and the end of an isolated way of life. Interspersed with much music, including the Johnny Cash "You Are My Sunshine", this is a strange romp through an era in America. You never know quite what to expect next and the ending is just as abrupt.

Han-Cock-And-Bull

It seems that Will Smith's superhero/last-man-standing fixation is not unlike some adolescent complex that started with Independence Day, continued with I Robot, MIB and I Am Legend and has sadly survived stellar roles in movies like The Pursuit of Happiness and Ali. Hancock is a tawdry attempt to invent a hip-hop superhero who forms an unlikely on-off screen pair with - you'll never guess - Charlize Theron - remember her Academy Award for Monster - who too takes a fairly unidirectional nosedive in the quality sweepstakes. This is a truly poor movie that has absoultely no redeeming quality except the now hackneyed special effects - if someone is attempting to create a superhero genre and a great and spellbinding series, they would be lucky to survive their first edition with their fingers intact - much like what happens to the guys who call Hancock a#$hole in the movie

Wild Rollercoaster Ride




Wild Things with its erotic overlay and a plot that has twists so numerous you would have to recapitulate for your benefit once the movie is done, reminds me of the recent Bollywood Abbas-Mustan flick Race which is another slick thriller with an implausible number of twists. It is impossible to guess at the number and the surprising points at which the twists occur - but that is hardly the point. The movie is a swish set Beverly Hills 90210 style sneak peek into glamour and intrigue not unlike a tabloid relay. Its fun, its pretty much pointless, and above all its sizzling in an obvious kind of way. Treat this post as a refreshing break from the heavy fare that precedes (and is likely to follow!)

Fish for Life

Not everything your dad said was a lie. Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks!) has a heartwarning tale of a father who is given to, well, minor exaggerations about his considerably exaggerated life, in Big Fish. This movie reminded me of the fraility of the male ego in Beowolf and its constant need for compliment, as well as a sense of passing through history with insouciance in Forrest Gump. The skepticism of his son, and his finally being convinced, touches the heart. No wonder that feelgood movies are getting increasingly popular in the choppy waters that happen to be our lives and times

Child's Play

While the eponymous Pan's Labyrinth keeps a child's fantasy in its own realm, Guillermo del Toro's latest offering - The Orphanage - is a Shyamalanesque take on the supernatural. Interwoven with many traditional elements of the horror flick (isolated house, seances, dark corridors, unfamiliar attics) is a very human tale of a mother-son relationship gone horribly wrong. The former movie does not cross the line into the supernatural - the latter does. The tragedy of the mother, wrought with a burden that she will never be free of, unless she dies and joins her son, is agony that quickly washes away the horror flick motifs and leaves the viewer with sadness in no little measure. Guillermo del Toro has through two movies carved out a genre for himself - this is not the fairytale of Hogwarts or Narnia, nor the brooding urbanity of The Sixth Sense or The Happening - this is of our childhood morals transcending our adult skepticism

Inside an addiction

We are in the nicotine delivery business. The raison-de-etre of the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, and indeed of any tobacco manufacturer, becomes clear. And it takes a man beyond despair (Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand), to eke out a victory over his former employer, with no little help from Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) - alienated from family, work, the legal system and the general public - in The Insider. The irony of the WSJ, the bastion of capitalism, triggering off a chain of events that led to a $246 billion settlement with Big Tobacco, the largest public action litigation in history, is not lost upon the audience. The movie however stands out not as a morality tale by any means, but on account of Russell Crowe's superlative performance that foreshadows the grim reality of Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man and the shuffling erudition of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Watch this movie back to back with Thank You For Smoking and you may well kick the habit.

Not Quite Beverly Hills

There is sheer force about Oldboy that one would be hard-pressed to find in any Hollywood movie. From consumption of a live octopus, to cutting off one's tongue, to the final terrible secret and the astonishing ending in the context of that secret - it is a psychedelic experience with enormous shock value. I began expecting a fairly simple storyline whose intensity was largely confined to the protagonist's reactions during the long confinement. I was shocked to see that the movie had barely begun at his freedom. There have been cheap imitations - having seen the original now, I believe that such passion would have been impossible to render in a medium like a Hindi movie.

Dark, Dark Continent

One point of commonality of Hotel Rwanda with Blood Diamond is the profiteer, utterly circumspect about business malpractice, and then somehow suitably converted by the sheer force of events. However, while the second is fairly narrow in its focus on characters, the former draws up a wider canvas on the genocide and its antecedents. Don Cheadle intersperses an otherwise good performance with great moments - witness the scene where his frustration with his tie breaks into the larger anomie with what he has seen that morning on the road. Africa at least in pockets has not changed much from Joseph Conrad's the Horror, The Horror... we should be thankful for India and its polity, I suppose, where the incessant chaos does not (by and large) cascade into large-scale insanity! On the movie - the performance to watch for is that of Sophie Okonedo who from a comfortable existence is metamorphosed by the turn of events into the very epitome of distraughtness. An important movie on an important topic. Worthy of noting that the genocide in Rwanda possibly claimed a million lives, while the one at Srebenicza that received as much if not more press, claimed about eight thousand. Yes they are Africans after all, dude

And the Verdict is...

Movies like Erin Brockovich and Michael Clayton explore class action lawsuits well. A movie like The Verdict lends character to the same. Paul Newman is reservedly spirited in his passion - unsure but moving forward with the vestiges of a once-unshakeable discipline and conviction. Victory in the end is equally sombre, at long last after a long grey spell in one's life not the least because of betrayal in love. The lone man, the underdog, pitted against the power and might of a top of the line law firm and its armies of minions - the audience would be, in the classical sense, rooting wholeheartledly for the underdog, except for one fact - this is no protagonist cast in perfection, but a man whose decline and the attendant evils of the same cast a long shadow over his unmistakable talent and passion. This is a movie that is worth several viewings if only to catch the nuances in Pal Newman's glittering performance

Several Excellent Men (and one Woman)

Jack Nicholson plays strong characters - period. And it is a thrill to watch him go head to head with Tom Cruise (and a muted Demi Moore) in A Few Good Men - a movie to be remembered for its passionate performances. Jack Nicholson's misplaced sense of righteousness, honour and duty leads him to a course of action that, eventually, society cannot condone. A great movie for enthusiasts of courtroom drama, not quite so for the gender equality brigade (!). I do not find Tom Cruise convincing as a military man with an unflinching sense of duty to God and country - it is more Jack Nicholson and his little fiefdom in Guantanomo Bay that lingers in one's mind. And the "piece of shit" piece at the end of the courtroom drama was wholly unnecessary. Worth a watch, but not quite a remarkable movie

Parenthood

Today we went out with Rikk to Barista for the first time. He started crying almost immediately. It was only with patience and comforting him, that we were able to get him to settle down. Parenthood is teaching me patience and self-discipline. Kramer vs Kramer explores the pain of divorce and throws Meryl Streep's self-indulgent departure ostensibly for self-discovery in harsh light against Dustin Hoffman's renewal, self-sacrifice and determination. Through a great deal of patience and discipline, the man Kramer develops a hitherto nonexistent bond with the son Kramer, without giving away too much by way of career. In contrast, The Pursuit of Happyness pits Will Smith in an elemental struggle to secure a permanent position in a big brokerage while battling poverty and being a single parent. It is interesting that after a gap of 27 years material success is clearly shown as pretty much an imperative in the latter movie, and is something of an afterthought in the former. Who says times are not getting tougher??

De Niro, Hard

Raging Bull, a Martin Scorcese film of 1980 that won Robert De Niro a Best Actor Academy Award, is the struggle of a boxer against himself and his temperamental nature. Each bout is a struggle against his own elements, his superlative talents shining through even as his personal life falls apart in equally swift sharp bouts of banal rage and wanton indiscretions. At the end of it all, the director clearly wants the viewer to side with Jake De La Motta and his seesawing between unchecked aggression and spells of remonstrance. La Motta's struggle on hindsight seems to be to find peace with himself, to sequester violence to the confines of the ring alone. Great movie.

Minority Report

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, delightfully nuanced, skips clear of being a morality tale, and delivers a dispassionate tale of a black man wronged and perhaps killed in custody, during the Depression. What is remarkable about the movie is that the setting of the context is done through the eyes of children. It is only the trial scene and subsequent events that are delivered without intermediation. Hard times make for a setting of ambiguous relationships and definitions of rightfulness. In contrast, The Green Mile attempts to be lyrical, magic and reality interweaving in a closed world of limited characters cast firmly in black and white. The movie struck no chord with me. I suppose that to a majority this was a heartwarming tale - just seemed a tad fairytale to me - the dumb big black guy that endears us with his powers of healing, the magical mouse - seems to be a cruel joke to those that actually wait on death row, bereft of such magical diversions

Watched Kevin Spacey in 21 - a timepass flick on MIT maths whizzes ruling Vegas, and the victimized nerd finally getting his moral compass in order and going one up on his guru. Give it a miss

Dr Jones Wake Up Now!!!

Watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – don’t waste your time. That is, apart from yet another ageless performance from yet another ageless Hollywood hero, the rest is a hotchpotch of James Bond meets National Treasure meets the X Files meets Tomb Raider. Instead wait for Shia LeBouf’s launch and hope that that is a reincarnation of the franchise of the quality of say a Casino Royale. The one redeeming thing I can say about the movie is that the score is true to the franchise and you will find yourself humming it long after the credits are done

Five Degrees

Crime and Punishment and perdition lends itself easily to the moviemaking medium. Before I begin to sound like the celebrity hosts at the Oscars with their hackneyed one-liners let me quickly say that I just happened to catch up with several movies of the same genre in rapid succession, and cannot currently resist the temptation to rank them in a continuum ranging from the purely amoral to the redemption tales.

Joint #5: The Flock and Lonely Hearts: Do you like your porn served freshly killed and/or amputated? Gorno (gore + porno) is apparently the new rage - with movies like Saw and Hostel running into several delightful sequels. Thankfully movies like The Flock (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473356/) serve as some degree of anodyne. Did anyone notice the resurrection of a leaner meaner Richard Gere? Adventurous war photographer in The Hunting Party, and keeping tabs on crimes of passion offenders in The Flock - this movie shows the lengths of depravity that affection can lead to. Same with Lonely Hearts (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0441774/) - John Travolta, Jared Leto and Salma Hayek light up the screen and make you retch at the sheer inhumanity of man

#3: Zodiac (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443706/): David Fincher in another brilliant movie about an obsessive chase of a serial killer. Watch for Robert Downey Jr as the obsessed detective here. What does one make of the futility of the search, many years on? Little, it appears. A movie with lots of drama and few conclusions. Fincher is consistently brilliant

#2: Cleaner (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896798/): Samuel L Jackson is singularly missing from this blog so far. This movie is about those that clean up post a death in the family. Things get messy as crucial evidence is "cleaned" from a murder scene. The movie goes on into explore the moral ambiguities in the protagonist's past, and the effects on his daughter. It ends with a lot for the small family to clean up, with a little help from a friend. Playing around with shades of gray and degrees of right and wrong, an otherwise hackneyed theme is well executed by Samuel L Jackson, Eva Mendes, and Ed Harris - the last being in a pivotal role

#1 Road to Perdition (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257044/): What is it about Tom Hanks? (Well - there was Paul Newman and Jude Law here too, but, really?!) In Forrest Gump you cry as this man, oblivious to walking hand in hand with history, lives by the simplest of tenets. In Saving Private Ryan, we have no trouble believing that this man is a schoolteacher as well as a consummate leader of men on the battlefield. In Apollo 13, we live the space dream gone horribly wrong and rejoice at survival against all odds. Really, what is it about this man?! The perdition of Mike Sullivan Sr (Tom Hanks) lies in protecting his surviving son from the damnation of hell that is likely to eventually befall all gangsters on account of their chosen path. If I were to attempt to summarize this movie in a single sentence, I would say thus - Tom Hanks is a gangster, is unfairly set upon, avenges his family, and is survived by a son untainted by evil. And having summarized thus, I can categorically say that such a summary completely fails to capture the evocation, the emotional highs and lows, and the superb performances in the movie. This is among the best movies that I have ever seen, period. This is about legacy, about what you are remembered by, about what you live by. In a Depression and in a world of gangsters, and with your hands tainted by innumerable killings in the course of your profession, if you are remembered by your son for your goodness and resolve, you are truly noble. If the Corleones draw you by the sheer thrill of their acts and way of life, the perdition of Tom Hanks actually makes you believe that a gangster can be truly noble at heart
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PS: American high society is pretentious (who isn't?) and flaunts many trappings of Brit high society while never failing to castigate it at the same time. Saw Woody Harrelson in an unexpectedly brilliant role in The Walker (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783608/) where he cleans up his complicity in a high society murder with reserve and panache! And on Mr Hanks - a relatively simpler role of leveraging disgruntled CIA officers (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and high society ladies bored and with nothing to do, really (Julia Roberts) to spark off - hold your breath - a counter-offensive against Russia in Afghanistan(!) in Charlie Wilson's War (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472062/)

Looking at these posts, I cant help feeling that we live in a Golden Age of movies with so many brilliant performers and scripts, both new and resurrected, aided by the greatest heights cinematography and sould editing has ever attained thanks to technology. And that in itself makes maintaining a movie blog (currently with zero readership) worthwhile.