Never a letter, always an ambiguous hieroglyph...

"Doggerel"

2011-08-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote this several years ago, and decided to revive it for this spot. My opinions on literature and books and writers has changed since then, but that's a part of what makes this so delightful to me. Yes, I'm being self-indulgent. Allow me that.

Also, most of the references in this poem are very specific, and if you haven't read the books I read as a teenager, you might be completely unfamiliar with them. This poem was written as a conversation with my close friends, but I'm hoping it's possible for other people to find ways of enjoying it too.
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Doggerel
May 29, 2006

I am asked my favourite writers and works
I accept the self-indulgence; for there are no other perks
And contemplate on how best to pay tribute
To the pilgrimage to libraries, to bring home the loot
To revel in its brilliance, and smile at its quirks.

Rushdie, here, I will not mention
Seth though, will get an extension.
Repute evades his Two Lives ploy
But An Equal Music and A Suitable Boy
Pre-empt all possible bones of contention.

The Golden Gate carried me away
(My first encounter with verse was way
back when I was a mere seven years old
with the Beastly Tales crocodile – “Go away!”, he’d been told.)
“Talk to us, John”, he says – “we will all die someday.”

Hanif Kureishi is a new-found treasure,
Loved and loathed in equal measure.
For this I thank my dear friend’s love
With years of cajoling (and sometimes a shove)
I found not the bloodstream, but in it the pleasure.

Roy merits not a stanza but two
Dizygotic, though, and quite different too.
The first, for Rahel and Estha I write
With them I have lived; in them I delight
‘Naaley’, she says – a haunting, painful adieu.

The second – please see this from where I am –
- For damning the bomb and blasting the dam
For speaking, for seeking to question malpractice,
With words to do it Infinite Justice
For being human, yes – but the best she can.

And him – the Cinnamon Peeler, should I say?
Or simply (in reverence) Michael Ondaatje?
Of Colombo, of Toronto, of Anuradhapura
Of Count Almasy searching for the Zerzura
And the pain in the paintings on walls of clay.

Poetry is in his every word, they tell me
How he loves, and how much, compel me
He speaks of letters like the bones of a lover’s spine
Of scurrying in the ceiling, or a scar’s strange design
“I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife,” he writes, “Smell me.”

There is, then, the ancient Graham Greene
He took me to places where I have been
In the ageless nights and the dying mornings
of A Quiet American; or just the life dawning
on A Burnt Out Case; I have felt it all - I have seen.

Dancing in Cambodia I have been for a while
Saloth Sar’s life, and that of the king, beguile.
With The Imam and the Indian, Malaria in the Bay
And all the wonder of Mandalay
Amitav Ghosh is ahead of many by a mile.

And him, mailing manuscripts to Ezra Pound
Oh, what treasures in Wastelands I have found!
Thomas Stearns: A magician? Well, yet –
There is some magic in the verse of Eliot
With Prufrock on winter mornings, or Macavity gone underground!

Coming to the part where I must close this door
“Another line”, I think, or “Just a few more”
To Haroun I must acknowledge my debt
To those not mentioned – there will be verses yet
(Though Priestly might say “I Have Been Here Before”!)

Some works, of course, are bigger than their makers
Some I could mention, but they would find no takers.
In writing, I have suffered the reader’s curse
Not knowing how to end this tortuous verse
“A dozen stanzas”, I had thought – but make it a baker’s!

I see a ghost!

2011-08-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

Are ghosts always scary?

In the last five years of reasonably vigorous theatre-watching, I've only watched two horror* stage productions, the first in London last summer, and the second in San Francisco this week. Now, I love a creepy, scary story, especially when it comes to films, I'll admit that. I'll also admit, that as rational and non-believing (in all thing unseeable, godly or otherwise) as I like to think of myself as being, watching horror films scares the living daylights out of me. I chatter incessantly and giggle nervously throughout the film, so as to not be visibly startled, or have my heart thud so hard I can feel it in my mouth, or seem to the people around me like a whimpering little girl who can't handle a couple of ghosts. Furthermore, after having watched a horror film, I usually wake up to every sound during the night, and am a wee bit afraid (this is the part that embarrasses me most) that when I get in the bathroom and shut the door, I will find there, standing behind me, reflected in the mirror, the particular ghoul that stalked the scenery in the film I watched that day. Such completely unnecessary trauma notwithstanding, I am constantly dragging friends along to watch horror films, and my Netflix queue of "recommendations for you" is often dominated by this genre.

However, I've seldom watched theatre productions of horror, and watching The Woman in Black in London last year absolutely thrilled me. I was a homestay guest in London, living with a family in Acton, and as I walked home that night from the North Acton Underground, the blood-thickening scream from the play, and the sudden appearances of the spectre were all I could think of. Abigail Dreary, at the Boxcar Theatre last week, scarcely even made me twitch. Of course, there were some very obvious differences between the two productions. The mis-en-scene, acting and production values were all as different as, well, London and San Francisco.

The Woman in Black** has been playing in London since 1987, and at the Fortune Theatre since 1989 (legend has it the theatre has its very own ghost). This is mainstream English theatre at its middlebrow best, not the kind of piece performed in a little cubby at the end of an alley smelling of rancid piss, dotted with little groups of people quietly snorting stuff out of pieces of paper. There is money in this kind of theatre. The actors, the venue, the directors and the crew, all get paid. Ergo, the performance included expensive props, a venue large and versatile enough to explore the machinations of a supernatural being, and some very, very good acting. Abigail Dreary at the Boxcar Theatre in San Francisco, on the other hand, was a much smaller production, playing at a tiny venue, to a much smaller audience. (As I waited in the lobby, I realized that a number of people who came in were friends of the cast/crew/management). Of course, this is by no means an explanation of why I think Abigail Dreary paled in comparison to The Woman in Black. (Although since both titular characters are ghosts, it's tough to say who was paler. Ok, never mind that.) I love small scale, independent theatre as much as I do mainstream, canonical theatre. Besides, it is always more interesting to see the ways in which directors and set designers end up using smaller spaces, because it involves so much more thought and creativity. On this count, given the spatial limitations they were working with, the crew of Abigail Dreary actually did a fantastic job. The difference between the two plays did not lie in the story either - both, as ghost stories go, were as compelling as trite and predictable. We could argue about the degree of predictability, but honestly, once you've spent a childhood reading Bram Stoker, R.L. Stine, and everything in between, it's not all that difficult being two steps ahead of most ghost stories. I would also not fault the acting - in contrast to the professional cast of The Woman in Black, Abigail Dreary was played almost entirely by very young actors who were either amateur, or were just starting out with their training. Jake Sigl as Nicky was a case in point. I do not know much about the actor, but I'm quite certain he is very young, and with very little training. He fit the role perfectly, except for the part that I kept getting the feeling he wasn't acting at all. Nicky is a slightly awkward, but very sweet and sensitive teenaged boy. I would venture, so is Jake Sigl. And I think one of the defining elements of theatre, as opposed to cinema, is the fact that the audience is always conscious of the performance. Not in a Brechtian manner, necessarily, but in a way that greatly contributes to theatre's biggest difference from cinema - its liveness.

A discussion of the difference in production values and acting styles between The Woman in Black and Abigail Dreary, however, would merely be a discussion of the degrees of variation. The real difference for me was a story element that I think is the key to making scary visual representations of ghost stories - the presence or absence of the ghost from the audience's field of vision. The Woman in Black is a mystery - she exists, yet not; we can see her, but we can't be sure. We hear her sometimes, but we don't know if that is the voice of a woman, or the screech of a hurt, wild creature. There she is, on the stage, for that brief moment when a flashlight was turned on her, until she is standing right amongst us, in the aisle between two columns of seats on the theatre floor, staring right through us. The Woman in Black had its audiences constantly on the edge - we sometimes caught a glimpse of the said woman in black, but we hardly ever saw her, took in her features, made a mental image of her. We wanted to, so that we could feel safer, more secure. We wanted to know what to expect when we saw her, and where to expect her, but we couldn't know that, because she wasn't in our control. And that's the kind of thing that scares the shit out of people.

Abigail Dreary, on the other hand, introduced the play before any of the other actors came on. She was wearing a white dress, her face was pale, her eyes were blackened, and she spoke to us with maliciousness dripping from her tongue. Ok, yeah, she's the ghost. Now let's sit back and relax. Abby, as she called herself, walked through the set like any of the other characters, and while it was a part of the story that she suddenly appeared and disappeared, it wasn't a part of the dramatic narration. Everytime she came in, she stayed and she talked and she touched. We saw her walk in, we saw her walk out. Abigail failed to scare because Abigail was familiar and in our control. She was malignant, yes, but not scary.

To a great extent, the same rules apply to cinema too. The scariest films are those where we don't see the ghost, and therefore have no idea what or who it is. El Orfanato (2007) was scary, because we didn't know what the hell was going on, until the scene where Laura gets locked in the bathroom. Ringu (1998) was scary as hell, until the girl-ghost-creature-thingie started crawling out of the television. And I suspect that's the reason why Paranormal Activity (2007) scared people out of their skins. There is a ghost, you just know it. It's in the house, in their room, in their bed. You're dying for an explanation, but you never get one. You're dying to see it, even if that means you'll cover your eyes with your hand, and only peep through the gap between your fingers. But all you see is a set of non-human footsteps. You don't know who or what it is, but you can feel its presence. You can feel it through the screen. Holy shit.

*By "horror," I specifically mean stories involving ghosts. Vampires, German Expressionism and Chan-wook Park are all separate categories.
**The Woman in Black has a film adaptation releasing in 2012, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Ciarán Hinds. Trailer here.

'In Another Lifetime' at the 31st San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

2011-07-29T00:42:00.000-07:00

When you’re giving an account of the holocaust, there can never be too many stories. There can never be too many accounts of memory, or too many artistic renditions of it. There can perhaps never be too many books, novels, and films. Every once in a while, though, there will be a story that pops out among these because it says something unusual or unexpected. It wears the same heavy cloak of human tragedy all the other stories wear, but it also gives us a refreshing glimpse of creativity. I saw one such film at the 31^st San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Elisabeth Scharang’s In Another Lifetime (2010).

An Austro-Hungarian co-production, In Another Lifetime is the story of a group of Hungarian Jews being marched to a concentration camp in Mauthausen, towards the end of the war. They pause in an Austrian village for a few days, where they are locked away in the barn of a farmer who lost a leg and a son to the war. As the Nazi officer in charge of moving them awaits orders to bring them to Mauthausen, they are left in the freezing barn with no food or water. The farmer’s wife (played by Ursula Strauss), decides to take them food everyday, and while she initially does this merely out of a sense of responsibility, the group of Hungarian Jews soon become the only company she has, and ironically, her only source of relief from the reality of the war. She soon convinces her husband (played by Johannes Krisch) to join them in the barn everyday, where the group of Hungarians decide to put up an operetta to thank the farmer’s wife for her generosity. The farmer and his wife take part as well, and in that barn, for a few moments everyday, these people manage to extract themselves from the reality of everything that is going on outside, and dwell in the pleasure of creating something new.

In Scharang’s introduction to the film (read out by someone else; Scharang was unable to make it to the screening), she mentions how the film is more than just a story of the holocaust. It is a story relevant even today, as it reflects upon how we treat our refugees. Also mentioned as noteworthy about the film is the fact that it talks about an aspect of Austrian history that is usually clumsily covered up – that during the war, some civilians in Austrian villages helped the Nazis and abetted the killing of several Jewish people. Both of these are valuable points. The slightest awareness of the status of ethnic minorities in most Western countries is enough to understand the contemporary relevance of this story. It is also true that most popular accounts of that time seem wary of addressing the complicity of civilians in war crimes, just as it is true that this complicity needs to be accounted for.

What most appealed to me about the film, however, was something else, something beyond its contemporariness, and its willingness to address an uncomfortable truth about the war. As Lou Gandolf (Péter Végh), the Hungarian tenor, walks around the barn trying to convince his fellow-prisoners at first to dance, and later on, to sing, play music and perform an operetta with him, Scharang paints a poignant picture of a man fighting hard to keep their spirits – and, indeed, his own – alive. When the farmer discovers his wife is feeding the Jews, and confronts her while she is doing it, Scharang makes us fear for the woman, and makes us afraid her husband might physically hurt her. However, she also shows us the sort of vulnerability in the man that makes us believe he won’t do her any harm. It’s as though there is a hole that was blown right through his being, but his wife is the only one who knows about it. In their fight over what the wife calls “just a few potatoes,” and the revelation of their personal tragedy (“I didn’t ask for the war… you’re a cripple and our son is dead.”), Scharang forces us up against their grief, placing us – for a moment – right there in the barn with them, and with the rest of the Jewish prisoners who are witnessing this fight.

That the story transcends all constraints of context, and has the ability to appeal to people at a universal level is almost too obvious to say. It is a story of survival, a paean to the ways human beings find of coping even with imminent death. In Another Lifetime is not the first film - and most certainly not the first WWII film – that does this. A film that comes to mind immediately is Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), where a father plucks a delicate ruse out of thin air, and invents a game that keeps his son alive and safe from the Nazis. Much of In Another Lifetime’s premise is the same, and even though Scharang refuses to lace her film with any of the thick sugariness of Benigni’s film, this is not what makes her film stand apart. What does make the film stand out is the way Scharang manages to take a story set in a highly political context, and slowly strip its characters bare of this very context meant to define them. In the barn full of Hungarian Jews, the Austrian farmer and his wife, and in their collective practice for the operetta performance, we see individuals helping each other, working with each other and forcing each other to see some form of joy, while still struggling to pinch at a fading illusion of hope. The barn, in a sense, becomes this sacred space that the war cannot touch, and within it, the people are not Hungarian Jews being marched to Mauthausen, or Austrian civilians whose property is being used to hold them. For a few beautiful if short-lived moments in the barn, there is no war or nationality or ethnicity. There are no citizens, just people. As Lou Gandolf puts it right at the beginning, “imagine you’re in another world…” We see glimpses of the “other lifetime” from the title right there, while the war goes on outside.

The characterizations in In Another Lifetime are delicate and intricate, brittle, but hopeful. Ursula Strauss and Johannes Krisch, who have appeared together in Götz Spielmann’s Austrian noir drama Revanche (2008), play their characters with great skill. Strauss plays the farmer’s wife with minimal affect, so that every outburst – there are few – means so very much. Krisch matches her quietness with the demeanour of a man who is angry at having nothing left to lose, but is still vulnerable because of his desperation to have something to fight for. It’s what the film is all about, this brittle yet steely, stiff yet malleable nature of human character. Set against the backdrop of great tragedy.

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P.S.: You must watch the Queer Duck trailer to the film festival:

National cinemas and historical context

2011-03-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

My latest post for Postcolonial Networks is up. I discuss the differences I see between British South Asian cinema and South Asian American cinema. This is closely related to my dissertation, as well as the next post I'm planning on immigrant cinema in Britain, in which I plan to talk about the issue of multiculturalism as raised by David Cameron.

For now, though, here's my post, British South Asian Cinema and the Presence of History.

Snow Stories IV

2011-02-10T17:11:00.008-08:00

Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996, USA)

I confess: I watched Fargo (Academy Award nominee for Best Picture and Best Director, Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay) quite late in life. Three years ago, in fact, at home, on DVD, with a very close friend who was watching it for the third time. When it ended, this friend remarked, "you know, when you wake up every morning and see only snow all around you - miles and miles of white - it must drive you to do crazy things." I'm certain he isn't alone in feeling that way, and it comes as no surprise that extreme winter conditions are often used by writers and filmmakers as the setting for dark, twisted and disturbing stories. So often, that it takes a writer and filmmaker of great distinction to extract this scenario from the clutches of cliché and sculpt out of it an original, compelling piece of art. Fargo is a murder mystery. But in the hands of the brothers Coen, Fargo is a twisted, delightfully dark comedy.

The snow in Fargo is not the kind of vile, treacherous character that it is in Frozen River. It is not the vengeful killer of Yol, or the murderous psycho of The Shining. The snow, in Fargo, is a watcher. A calm, quiet, observer, but one that passes judgment, and lets its opinion be known. It is a passive, but important presence that watches as Jean, in her pajamas, and with a sack over her head, runs through the snowy woods like a blind, scared animal, while her kidnappers, Gaear and Carl watch her with amusement. When Gaear and Carl kill the state trooper, the terrain carefully holds his body in its snowy palm, waiting for the police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, Academy Award for Best Actress) to arrive and take a look at it. Ah, you're here, Marge. Look, I kept the evidence intact for you, now let's look at it together, shall we? We get a close up shot - the trooper's skin now frozen blue, the blood dripping down his face now crystallised. In what it observes, and in what it knows, the snow has the same amount of information as we do. It wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to say that the snow, in Fargo, stands in for us, the audience: when Gaear and Carl murder the trooper and the couple that was driving by, the only ones watching are the landscape and the audience. We know what the landscape does, and what Marge doesn't. And quite like the landscape, we are voiceless observers who cannot share this vital information with her.

However, the snow is more than just a passive member of the audience. It is also a sly trickster who chooses its victims based on what seems like a commonly accepted standard of moral judgment. When Carl learns that the bag he took from Wade - Jean's father - contains a million dollars, he decides to hide it from Gaear, by burying it in the snow. (Like the rest of the film, the attention to detail with the cinematography in this shot is delightful. Roger Deakins uses shallow focus so we can see Carl kneeling in the snow, burying the bag, while around him, all we see is white. To the right is a fence, but we can make out just enough of it to know how far behind him it extends. The fact that the fence is out of focus adds to the illusion of the vastness of his surroundings.) Immediately after this, of course, Gaear, unaware of the hidden money, kills Carl. We know that the million dollars are now lost forever, quietly claimed by the snow, in a dark, twisted execution of justice.

Fargo does not tap into the violent, destructive, soul-crushing and deadly characteristics of snow the way several other films do - no, that would be too obvious for the Coen brothers. Fargo shows us how the snow can be sly and calculating, quietly laughing at us, into the cold, silvery night.

Snow Stories III

2011-02-09T13:03:00.008-08:00

Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008, USA)

There are parts of this world where even the slightly weak-hearted among us would fear to tread. There are parts of this world that the genteel scarcely interact with, that the most enlightened among us do not even know exist. Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (Academy Award Nominee for Best Original Screenplay) walks the treacherous line between the known world of gentility and its Other. Hunt sets her story in a part of a country where the security forces in the employ of the government do not dare. A part of the world with terrain so vicious, it is hard to tell where the earth beneath your feet ends, and purgatory begins. The frozen river, from the title of the film, is this treacherous line between Earth and Purgatory, treacherous not only literally, but also in the last shred of hope it offers Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo, Academy Award nominee for Best Actress), a desperate mother of two boys, trying to put away enough money for the down payment on a double-wide mobile home.

Ray Eddy lives in the harshest depths of upstate New York, close to a Mohawk Reservation and the US - Canada border. We see her for the very first time, emerging from her inadequate mobile home, in a blue and black puffer jacket, the skin on her face dry and scabby where it has been bitten by the cold. Her face is wan, dreary, and tired. There are several things we get to know about her life to which we can attribute her weary disposition - she has two sons, and she can't afford to feed them anything more than popcorn and Tang. Her mobile home is about the only sign of civillization visible in the miles of frozen whiteness around her, and it is not nearly enough to protect her family from the unrelenting cold. Her wastrel husband has disappeared with the money she had been putting away for a bigger, better mobile home. Eddy's face, however, isn't merely a face that won't smile - it's a face that can't smile. It is a face whose muscles have become so used to the snowy winds that blow out from the frozen crevices of purgatory, they have learnt not to move. And her face is just the beginning.

Forsaken by the institutions put in place to help people like herself, Eddy takes to smuggling illegal immigrants across the US - Canada border in her car, driving across the frozen St. Lawrence River, for a sum of $1200. Banking on the relative safety from security forces as long as she stays within the Reservation, Eddy drives through the endless expanse of wintry nights, risking her own life as well as the lives of her passengers. On one occasion, Eddy takes a duffel bag from a young Pakistani couple she is transporting, and throws it out into the freezing night, afraid it might contain explosives. It is only after Eddy unloads her passengers that she realizes the duffel bag, lying several miles behind them on the river's frozen skin, contains the couple's new-born child. Undaunted by this incident, Eddy decides to make one last trip, following which she believes she can buy her new mobile home. Unfortunately, the frozen river also chooses this last trip to give way, trapping Eddy and her passengers on the cracking ice, waiting to be arrested.

The terrain, in Frozen River, is almost sentient. Eddy's problems arise from her desperate need for a better home, one that can stand guard between her family and the punishing cold. When she takes to driving illegal immigrants across the frozen river, it is as though the cold invites her, tempts her, quite like the Devil himself. It seduces her, makes her believe that it will hold steady, solid, as she does what she needs to do, only to pull the ground from beneath her feet in that very last lap, just as she reaches out for the finish line. The frozen river is not only a literal representation of the treacherousness of wintry terrain, but also a metaphor for that dangerous, blurry middle ground between Earth and Purgatory, where you cannot tell solid ground from frozen water, and where your fate is held in the icy hands of a force you cannot control.

Snow Stories II

2011-02-07T17:38:00.005-08:00

Yol (Yilmaz Guney, 1982, Turkey)

Yilmaz Guney spent several of his active years in various Turkish prisons, and it's hardly surprising, therefore, that one of his most acclaimed films was made by his assistant Serif Goren while Guney was serving a sentence, and is about prisoners on a week-long furlough. One of the prisoners in Yol (which, in Turkish, means 'road', or 'path') is Seyit Ali, who returns home only to find that his wife has turned into a prostitute, and it is the opinion of the larger, extended family that Seyit Ali should kill her. Unable to stand up to his family, but also unwilling to kill his wife – either out of lingering affection for her, or out of good conscience - Seyit Ali decides to take his wife along with him on his journey back, assuring his relatives that he will kill her.

Thus begins an epic journey across the wintry, punishing Anatolian plateau. Seyit Ali and his wife need to cross the unbelievable expanse of this plateau on foot, and all there is, as far as their eyes – and ours – can see, is snow. Monochromatic, silent, beautiful, threatening, deadly snow. As the ruthless wind blows more and more snow into their faces, we see Seyit Ali's wife lose her strength. Unwilling to leave her there to die, he carries her on his back, as he continues to walk into the endless expanse of white. Guney spares us no details – the inadequacy of their garments as they constantly wrap them tighter around themselves, fighting the wind's fury, the lines on Seyit Ali's face, where the icy wind slashes across his skin like knives, and the colour draining from Ali's wife's face, all make us almost physically aware of the painful cold. What we can never know, however, and only imagine, is that final moment when the cold clenches its grip over the couple – the moment when Ali's wife dies of the cold. The irony is cruel – Ali's family had ordered his wife to be killed, and while he did not want to kill her, he also could not stand up to his family. As she slowly succumb to cold right before his eyes, he has no choice but to watch it happen, and be with her until she dies. Yol is a narrative that ties together three different stories, and while each of these is heart-wrenching in its own way, the scene where Seyit Ali leaves his wife's lifeless body in the snow and walks away from it, while the wind covers it with snow, is the film's most poignant, beautiful, and cruel.

Class and Colonialism in Chile

2011-02-05T18:00:00.003-08:00

Sebastian Silva's The Maid (2009) is a delightful film that deals with a serious subject: class differences in modern-day Chile. Having grown up in India, the film rang especially true to me. Here's my review on Postcolonial Networks: Thinking of class in postcolonial societies: Sebastian Silva’s The Maid (2009).

Snow Stories - I

2011-02-05T17:48:00.008-08:00

I haven't stepped out since the day of the blizzard, and that was a couple of days back. I convinced the boyfriend that it was a good idea to rent a car and drive about 30 minutes to get gourmet hot dogs. The snow had just started to come down, and the wind was still just stirring. So with all the arrogance that spending five winters in Chicago had given me, I decided that a snow day just wasn't enough to keep me from gourmet hot dogs. (As to why the boyfriend went along with this foolish enterprise is beyond me.) So out we went, in a rented car, driving an hour an forty minutes to get to the hot dog place, only to find that it was closed. Snow-day holiday, hallelujah. Of course, by this time, it was no longer just "snow-day," and bitterly, grudgingly, I had to admit that in my five midwestern winters, I had never seen anything like this. I do not have a count of the number of cars we saw on the way back, stuck in the snow. Why, there was a bus too, one of the longer ones, with a vestibule in the middle - bent at a right angle at the vestibule, its wheels buried almost completely in the snow. There was an eerie quality to that bus, standing bent at the side of the road, with its lights switched off and no one inside. The suggestion of emptiness - even death - in the deep blackness of its interiors, and the stillness of its submission to the snow that was creeping up its tires and clenching its fingers over its exterior, was cinematic.

"The Shining," I said, as we drove past this bus. I said it without stopping to ponder why the film had come to my mind. But I think it was because the scene made me think of films where the snow is so important to the narrative. Important, not just in generating the right mood, or providing the cue for symbolism, but in a way that goes far beyond that. Citizen Kane (1941, and no, I will not add a link to "Citizen Kane," because if you really need to look it up, why, fie upon you!) uses snow to great dramatic effect. That scene right at the beginning - one that has generated a frenzy of academic research - where Kane's mother signs him off to his future benefactor, is a great example. The little boy Kane's sled, Rosebud (yes, I just gave it away. Like I said, if you don't already know Citizen Kane...) is a theme that follows us right to the end, and the presence of snow globes constantly take us back to the moment in his childhood, the moment when he loses everything. Even so, snow, in Citizen Kane, is merely an element of mise-en-scene that catalyzes narrative events. When I thought of The Shining, I was actually thinking of films where the snow is more than just a catalyst. Some films manage to elevate an element of the mise-en-scene to a point where it is no longer just the background for the story, but a living, growing, evolving part of the narrative. Snow, in these films, is more than just setting: it is a character. An active participant who drives the narrative; a character who, like all the other characters, starts out as flat, but grows into a well-rounded, capricious, malicious, willful and scheming character who can actually cause things to happen. Few films manage to do this, and starting today, I will present a list of some of my favourites among them, in no particular order. Here's the first for this week:

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, USA)
But obviously. The Shining isn't The Shining without the crazy twin girls, Shelley Duvall's stunning face that suggests helplessness and a mad will to survive - both at the same time - and Danny Torrance's finger-friend, Tony, saying "Red Rum" in a voice that still gives me the chills. But The Shining would also never be The Shining without the cold, white winter tightening its grip on Jack Torrance's being. The winter is a metaphor for Jack - as it silently creeps deeper and deeper into the tiny, invisible cracks in the walls of the Overlook Hotel, the insanity creeps into the recesses of Jack's brain, eventually taking over completely. It is the snow that causes the phone lines to be disconnected, leaving Wendy, Danny and Jack completely isolated in the hotel. And if the winter is a metaphor for Jack, the maze in the final sequence of the film is a veritable metaphor for his brain. As Wendy tries her best to reach the snowcat in time to rescue her son, it is really up to Danny to outsmart his father, who is chasing him through the maze in the snow. No matter how fast or far Danny runs, Jack will catch up with him, because of Danny's telltale footprints in the snow. If Danny is to outsmart Jack, he has to outsmart the snow - for it isn't just Jack, but also the snow, who is out to get Danny. It is as cruel as Jack himself, but more evil, in its lack of madness. In running backwards in the snow, Danny manages not only to outsmart his murderous father, but also the snow itself.
The penultimate scene, where we see Jack Torrance's head above the snow within which his body is buried, is such a testament to the grip the snow has on the narrative. We are soon to find out that Jack Torrance has been at the Overlook Hotel before. Like a season, he returned, and may return again. Just like the snow, which shows up every year, cold, cruel and relentless.

My personal obsession: cinema, nationhood, and citizenship

2010-09-14T11:42:00.003-07:00

Here's a new website from India, OyeCinema.com, which features original articles and reviews, but is also building a database of the best popular writing on cinema from all over the world. Here's a piece I recently contributed, on Lagaan (2001), Naya Daur (1957), and the situation of the audience as citizens.
I actually began by thinking about early postcolonial Hindi cinema, a great interest of mine. Thinking about Naya Daur, however, led to re-thinking Lagaan, and thus the article.
Lagaan, Naya Daur, and the mesmerisation of a nation.

Yasmin: 9/11 and the lives of Others

2010-09-14T11:24:00.004-07:00

Several things have been happening in this country lately, that have made me think of a film I watched this summer, when I was in the UK, for research. I wasn't planning on watching it originally, but the BFI has installed free mediatheques all over the country. So on a chilly, wet morning in Wales, I thought to myself, "why not? I like Archie Panjabi, I think she's a very good actress. Let's see what this film's like."
Yasmin (2004), directed by Kenny Glenaan, and written by Simon Beaufoy (who then went on and wrote Slumdog Millionaire), is a film predictable in parts, but important all the same, for the direction in which it seeks to divert our perspective. Here's my review of the film on postcolonialnetworks.com, a website launched recently by Joseph Duggan, a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, UK. For anyone interested in Postcolonial Theory, this promises to be a good resource.

Ah, Bollywood of the '90s!

2010-01-09T23:14:00.003-08:00

Slow, lazy Sunday morning. Mother busy in the studio, cats fast asleep. So of course, I watch TV. Catch five minutes of the 1992 film Dil Aashna Hai, directed by Hema Malini. (And if these five minutes are anything to go by, it is rather merciful of her to have directed only one film after that.)

Picture the following scene:

Three college girls played by Dimple Kapadia (with geeky spectacles, and a haircut that was clearly inspired by her husband), Amrita Singh (who is, in the next scene, quite aptly compared to a horse by her suitor) and Sonu Walia (I can be Miss India too), stand in the office of the college principal, played by the reasonably talented, if slightly uni-dimensional Sushma Seth.

Sushma Seth: Maine suna hai ki tum teeno college ke baahar ladkon se milti ho?
Amrita Singh: Nahi, nahi...
Dimple Kapadia: Haan, principal saheba, magar isme buraai kya hai?
Sushma Seth: Nahi... buraai nahi hai...hmm. Achha, kya tum logon ko gaadi chalana aata hai?
All three girls: Haan.
Sushma Seth: To yeh bataao: agar tumhe bina brake ki gaadi chalane ko bola jaae, to kya tum chalaogi?
All three girls: Nahi.
Sushma Seth: To theek isi tarha, jawaani bhi ek bina brake ki gadi hai. Chalane mein maza to bahut aata hai, par agae ek ghalti ho gayi, to uski keemat zindagi bhar chukani padti hai.

At this point, I am beside myself with laughter. Also, I desperately want to point out to principal sahiba, that if jawaani is like driving a car, and the possibility of a sexual encounter is like not having a brake on that car, one must always consider using the hand brake. No pun (or symbolism) intended.

Monster's Ball (2001): Not so "feel good" after all.

2009-04-26T07:32:00.006-07:00

Monster's Ball (Dir. Marc Forster) is a film from seven years back, but I got around to watching it only recently. As a lover of films (and as a student of film) I should have watched it a long time ago, especially because of everything the film came to stand for. It was the year the "Oscars went black," as a number of commentators have said. Best Actor for Denzel Washington, Best Actress for Halle Berry (for her role in Monster's Ball), and a gala hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. It was a series of firsts, and impressive ones too. In certain circles, it had been talked about as the year Hollywood finally and fully embraced its treasure trove of African-American talent.

So yes, of course I was expecting a lot from the film. Unfortunately, not only was I underwhelmed, but when I sat back and thought about it after it was over, I found several things about the film and the hype it generated to even be offensive.

To put it very briefly, the following is the sequence of events in the film:

- Hank and Sonny Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton and Heath Ledger, respectively) are correctional officers in the prison where the black prisoner Lawrence (Sean Combs) is going to be executed.

- Sonny befriends the black kids around the home he shares with his father. Hank threatens to shoot the kids.

- Sonny befriends Lawrence, just before his execution. Hank, of course, disapproves. On the day of the execution, Sonny buckles under the horror or having to put a man in the chair. Hank lashes out at him. This worsens their already severely hateful relationship, and Sonny shoots himself dead.

- Hank shows no overt signs of being devastated by his son't death, but his silence is apparently eloquent in this regard. He quits his job, which provokes his racist father Buck (Peter Boyle, who seems to have perfected the art of playing the bigoted father, whether comedically or otherwise) to heap insults upon him. In a sudden change of heart, Hank actually talks to the black kids Sonny was so fond of. Eventually, he also gets acquainted with their father.

- Lawrence's wife Leticia (a very gangly Halle Berry), on the other hand, is in deep trouble. Over the years she has managed to distance herself from Lawrence, and has accepted the eventuality of his execution, but she has a son with health issues to deal with, and an eviction notice on her home. She takes a job at a coffee shop that Hank frequents.

- One night, when Leticia's son gets hit by a car, Hank, after a brief moment of hesitation, takes her and her son to the hospital. Tragically, her son dies. Hank drives her back home. They meet again, and he drives her home one more time. This time she invites him in. They both get drunk, and she shows him the drawings that Lawrence had made when he was in prison. Hank recognises them, and realises that she is Lawrence's wife. He tells her he understands her, because he's lost a son as well. She begs him to make her "feel good," and they have sex.

- Leticia and Hank get together. She buys him a hat and takes it to his home for him, where she is insulted by Buck. She leaves Hank in a fit of rage and tears. Hank, in turn, reacts by moving his father to an old age home.

- Leticia gets evicted from her home and has nowhere to go. She's sitting on the pavement with all the stuff from her home flung all about her. Her wits and her pockets have been stretched to their limit, when Hank, her knight in shining armour, drives up and takes her home.

- At Hank's place, after a few moments of awkwardly keeping their distance from each other, Leticia finally submits to him, saying that she needs someone to take care of her. Hank promises to take care of her, of course.

- Hank steps out to buy ice cream for Leticia. Back at home, she finds the drawings Lawrence had make of Sonny and Hank, and finally realises who Hank really is. She beats herself repeatedly (literally) and weeps.

- Hank returns. They sit at the door, eating ice cream. Leticia doesn't say a word about the drawings. He asks her if she's alright, and she murmurs that she is. He feeds her some ice cream, looks up at the sky and says, "We're going to be alright." The film ends.

The film's biggest claim to seriousness and artistic consideration is that it talks about race relations in southern USA. Like most other Hollywood films that have attempted to do this in the past, this putative consideration of race relations loses itself in the film's eagerness to glorify the white male. This film is not about Lawrence, played by a wistful, tragic and very sympathetic Sean Combs (Yeah, yeah. Puff Daddy. Who would have thought, right?). We aren't given any context for why he is in prison, or what his relationship with his wife and son was like before he was there. In one of the well turned out sequences in the film, Lawrence is pitiable as Combs makes him heave in panic, on the way to the execution. And then his role ends. The film isn't even about Leticia, who is written mostly as a flat character, one-dimensional in her helplessness, completely wasteful of the potential for complexity in a woman who has just lost her husband, and is struggling at the brink of survival. Berry struggled, cried and screamed her way to the Oscar in this one. While I didn't think it was a great performance by any measure, given that among the other comparisons we have of Berry's work is her abyssmal portrayal of 'Storm' from X-Men, this was quite a revelation.

What the film is really about, though, is Hank Grotowski and his (not so) epic journey of atonement. It has its moments of near brilliance - the deliberately protracted look at Lawrence's execution makes it very real for the audience. I have watched several scenes of execution in cinema, but very few have made me as uncomfortable as this one did. And yet, this gut-wrenching moment is not what 'turns' Hank. Immediately after the execution we see him thumping his chest like a military general who just engineered a clever destruction of the enemy's troops. It is, in fact, the sudden, unexpected and shocking suicide of a son he says he hates, that makes him wonder if all the black people around him might, in fact, be worthy of his acknowledgement. But this is only the beginning. Hank's ultimate object (and I use this word in the most heavily loaded manner), the instrument he's going to use to gain redemption, becomes Lawrence's wife, Leticia. This is exactly where her constant helplessness, her complete lack of agency and the unroundedness of characterisation fit in so well. The first time Leticia and Hank have sex, it's because she begs him to make her "feel good." Later, when she's been thrown out of her home, there he is again, pulling up in his car, sweeping her off the street and into his home. Then he promises to take care of her, and then he feeds her some ice cream, and then he stares up into the sky and assures her that everything will be alright. Well, No, it made me want to say. Everything is not going to be alright because you cannot overwrite everything that has passed just by taking in a black woman.

This is not just the story of Hank and Leticia. It is the projection of a point of view of how races do or should interact with each other. And this is why Hank's redemption seems too quick and easy. His blindness to Lawrence's humanity, and his positioning as the Hero in the life of the powerless, black woman may have been rendered less offensive if in the end, the film allowed its characters at least the recognition of the fact that Leticia knows who Hank really is, and confronts him about it. But no, apparently that's not needed. It's as if the film is trying to say that if only black people can forget about the oppression and racism and just learn to be grateful to the white people, then everything will, as Hank says, "be okay."

As far as the Academy Awards are concerned, of course, I suppose we've come a long way since the time when Hattie McDaniel was given an award for her portrayal of the offensive stereotype of the 'Mammy" in Gone With the Wind (1939). Even so, in the 21st century, when any informed follower of Hollywood knows that over generations, some of the most talented actors have been African American, if race relations are still struggling at a point where a black actress/actor winning the top award in her/his field is taken to be an achievement for the entire community, we still have an enormous distance to travel.
---

P.S.: For those of you wondering what the title of the film means: As Hank tells Sonny the night before Lawrence's execution, and as I found out for myself with a little bit of reading on Wikipedia, back in Medieval England, prisoners were often thought of as monsters, and it was common for jailers to party the night before the execution. It was this revelry that came to be called Monster's Ball.

Being young. With a camera, a recording studio and an editing suite.

2009-02-20T08:59:00.009-08:00

Back in 2003, when I wanted to be a filmmaker more than anything else (well... other than a writer of fiction, a pianist and a poet), I sent in an application to the premier filmmaking school in India. I breezed through the entrance exam, mainly because it didn't take any preparation. It was a series of creatively challenging questions, exercises of the imagination, and I had a great time doing it. The interview, however, was another story. The panel of faculty sitting across the table from me - the women with their kohl-lined eyes and chunky silver/stone/glass jewellery, and the men in their cotton kurtas, smoking their cigarettes - only had one question for me: how many films have you made so far? I, with my eager portfolio of scripts and stories, wanted to explain to them that even if I seemed like I was green behind the ears, I was confident that I would make a good enough filmmaker. But I saw that it wouldn't matter - over the one week that I had spent at the institute prior to the interview, I had taken a good look at the facilities and realised how inexperienced I was, and how lost I would be if I was, say, thrown into an editing suite and asked to edit a strip of film. So I quietly replied, none. They hardly had any questions for me after that, and as a confident twenty-year-old who believed she could conquer the world, I felt more than a little cheated. Six years down, after having acquired some of the skills it takes to create film or video, and having worked in production intermittently, I see the fairness of the interview. I would have been completely and utterly lost if I'd gone there without any experience at all.

Last week, however, I attended a showcase of short films by young filmmakers, an experience very heartening in its demonstration of how things are different. I am wary of sounding like a finger-wagging old woman with folds in her skin by saying that things have changed since the time I was a young punk with zero skills or experience; just the passion for making films bursting through the veins under my skin. It could be that, of course, or perhaps it's just that it works differently in the USA, and has worked like this for a while here. Maybe it's a combination of both, I don't quite know for sure. What I do know is that all these young filmmakers (between 15 and 21 years) brimmed with the sort of confidence that comes not just from blind faith in one's own ability, but from the experience of having seen it in practice.

The young filmmakers' showcase was a part of the Talking Pictures Festival, organised by Percolator Films, from May 1-3. Percolator Films is behind the decade old Reeltime cinema and discussion series, and brought to Evanston (IL) its first ever film festival this year. The young filmmakers shorts (hosted by Boocoo Cafe) featured a number of local filmmakers, so there was the opportunity to interact with them after the screening.

My first observation on the shorts I saw was that there was a significant difference between narrative and technical quality. If I was really an unbiased judge here, I would use the word 'sophomoric' to describe most of the narratives, but having been there myself, I am wont to be more generous in my criticism. Not only were most of the plots and narratives based on subjects that you tend to lose interest in as you get older, but what struck me was that they were typically the sort of things that most people make their first few films on, simply because they're still overwhelmed and blown away by the possibilities of the medium. So ghosts, or possible ghosts, dominated the array of plots. Also featured was death, and of course, the ubiquitous, ever-predictable 'twist-ending'. (It took me back to one of my first video exercises, a three-minute conversation piece revolving around a political assassination, at the end of which was what I then believed to be a stunningly shocking revelation!) The technical quality, on the other hand, was quite outstanding. Take, for instance, The Intruder, by Mikael Kreuzriegler. It's set around the persistent denial of sudden and unexpected death, a plot that's been done to - well - death, in the creepiest, scariest, cheesiest ways possible. The quality of this film, however, was stunning. Mis-en-scene and sound were spot on, but these are among the first things you master as a young filmmaker. What surprised me was the camerawork, and specifically, camera movement that had clearly been scripted for editing. In terms of visual and aural quality, The Intruder was no less than a regular budget Hollywood film.

Then there was the animated short Marshy by Joe Felix, an interesting 'tragedy' of a marshmallow. As for the narrative of Marshy, it almost ended before it really began, but again, the quality of animation was very high. My favourite short of the evening, though, was Token Hunchback by Tim Reckart. This is an animated short, on the life of a hunchback who works as an extra in films. For me, this was the one film that scored highly on all criteria: the animation was very well done, and the narration was funny, quirky, poignant and insightful. Unfortunately, Tim Reckart wasn't present for the post screening discussion.

What actually got me thinking about the exposure and access that young people have to the media and media equipment was The Corner, by Maya-Rose Dinerstein. The Corner is a simple film in both plot and execution. It isn't a great film by any definition, just a really neat video exercise. What is noteworthy is that Dinerstein is 15 years old, and claims to have had no training in film, video or photography, other than being guided by her father (who is a professional photographer or cinematographer, if I'm not mistaken). This information, put together with the fact that Dinerstein's film, though unremarkable in every other respect, was technically sound, held me in thrall. At the post-screening discussion, when she spoke about the 180-degree rule, it was music to my ears. When I first started working with video, this was the toughest thing to master for most of my cohort. Even when I teach, I find that explaining this rule to students is the toughest part. I think, however, that it has less to do with instruction and more with having free access to equipment, to be able to spend hours with it, experimenting and learning by trial and error. (Incidentally, what follows from this is my reason for believing that to be a good film/media theorist, you've got to have worked with the medium at some point. But I won't go into that now. That's a discussion for another time.) Watching these young filmmakers talk about their craft with confidence made the event really heartening.

My first video camera was given to me as a gift when I was 17 or 18, and I promptly used it to shoot about 90 minutes of footage around a 16th century fort in Hyderabad, India. I was keen on having that edited, and took it to a commercial editor in one of the cheaper studios in the city. As he sat there in the cold, white studio, looking at the rushes, and I sat next to him, completely overwhelmed by the the interface of AVID, he started making conversation.
"Who shot this video?"
"I did."
"Hmm. Is it for a school project of some kind?"
"No, I'm doing it because I'm interested, that's all. And I'm in college."
"Hmm... what exactly are you interested in?"
"Filmmaking. Well, I haven't really decided what aspect I want to take up, but yeah, I'm interested in production."
"Well, it's probably a passing fancy. In any case, you'd be better off thinking about more practical career options."

At the time, I was able to brush this off because of the brazen lack of self-doubt that goes with being young. But it helped that I had plenty of encouragement from everywhere else. As for now, I can tell you that there are few things that give me as much pleasure and satisfaction as going through the entire process of production. An all-nighter at an editing suite, for instance, jogging back and forth through hours of footage, splicing and arranging and rearranging and placing things together in a coherent AV segment.

I wish I had started when I was 15.
---

P.S.: For anyone interested, this is a good, short instructional video on the 180-degree rule:

The winners

2009-02-02T17:33:00.004-08:00

Of course the Oscar-hype got to me. I'm always a keen follower of the whole Academy Award ritual (even if I always maintain that the Academy Awards aren't really proof of merit), and this year, I'm keener still, mainly because of the run up to the Oscars and the attitudes towards certain films. The Golden Globes, for instance, was full of surprises for me. Kate Winslet won Best Actress as well as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Revolutionary Road and The Reader, respectively. Neither film has been reviewed favourably, but Winslet has been screaming for an award for a long time now. As Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic (1997), the young Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001), the colourful-haired Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Sarah Pierce (on of her best portrayals, in my opinion) in Little Children (2006), Winslet has persistently put in performances ranging from very good to almost brilliant. This year, she's got two films on her side, and performances that are being spoken of as her best ever. The question is, will they be judged as superior to Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius Beauvier in Doubt?
The other thing that's possesed me is the manic excitement over Slumdog Millionaire. A nomination at the Golden Globes was expected, but as it won award after award after award, it just annoyed me. It annoyed me because everyone seems to buying its telescopic look at the Third World, it annoys me because no one seems to notice how badly written it is, and it annoys me because now I think it's actually going to go ahead and win everything this year.
And then the fact that Doubt, in my opinion one of the best films this year, hasn't even been nominated in the category of Best Film. So I thought, what the hell, let's take a closer look at all the contenders and make some predictions.

Actor, Leading Role:
Richard Jenkins (The Visitor)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Who is likely to win: Frank Langella
Who should win: Frank Langella

Mickey Rourke was stunning in The Wrestler. Having seen him in the kind of borderline B-Grade tripe he used to do back in the day when he had perfect hair and pretty lips, it shocked me to even just look at him in The Wrestler. His aging, lonely wrestler was perfectly played. I don't think he'd win for two reasons, though. Firstly, he's not the kind of actor the Academy favours. This is not the Golden Globes (which are often like consolation prizes for those who are likely to miss out at the Oscars). Secondly, unlike The Wrestler, Frost/Nixon was not a film made tailored entirely to showcase the strengths of its actor. And yet, Frank Langella carried the film. His Richard Nixon was much more than just good make up and voice training, and that tips the balance in his favour.
Sean Penn, of course, is another very, very close contender. His Harvey Milk was brilliant, but it was tailored for him. And he's won before.

Actor, Supporting Role:
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

Who is likely to win: Heath Ledger
Who should win: Heath Ledger

First of all, the guys at Tropic Thunder should be celebrating. An Oscar nomination? Who would have thought? Yes, I did think Robert Downey, Jr. was great, but the film was most ridiculous (I admit I enjoyed it). More importantly, it is not a film stained with tears, or frayed at the edges from age and pain and hardship. It's a wonder the Oscars even noticed it.
As for Heath Ledger: no, he isn't going to win it because he's dead. He's going to win it because each time he appeared on screen, he chewed it all up and swallowed it in one, tiny gulp. Because when he holds up a potato peeler and asks Rachel if she'd like to know how he got the scars on his face, it makes you feel mortally afraid. Because when he pulls his mouth back and raises his eyes to look at the people around him, you can't help a very, very nervous giggle. Because when he flicks his tongue in and out of his mouth like a salamander, he's actually going into the head of this very disturbed comic-book character, not making a caricature of it. And because very respectfully but surely, he pulled the rug from under the feet of Gods like Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.

Actress, Leading Role:
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Melissa Leo (Frozen River)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Who is likely to win: Kate Winslet
Who should win: Meryl Streep

Like Ricky Gervais announced at the Golden Globes, "Do a holocaust film, you'll get the awards!" Let me not be unfair: I haven't watched The Reader. I think Winslet will get it, though, because a: it's a holocaust movie, b: somebody give it to her already!
Now I did watch Doubt, and even as I admit I'm a sucker for good performances, I was held in trance by Streep's Sister Aloysius, who snarls ans spits and roars and cowers, standing as fierce as a pitt-bull guarding its master's home, while betraying, every now and then, a fleeting glimpse of vulnerability.
Then again, she's the highest nominated actor in history, she's won plenty, and she's nowhere near bein done with acting. So Winslet can have it this year.

Actress, Supporting Role:
Amy Adams (Doubt)
Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona)
Viola Davis (Doubt)
Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)

Who is likely to win: Taraji P. Henson
Who should win: Amy Adams

This is possibly the toughest category for me, because everyone was spectacular. Marisa Tomei was perfectly cast as the aging stripper. Penelope Cruz doesn't cease to amaze me these days; I don't know if it's the Spanish in her, but there is an animation to her performances that is unmatched. As the mentally disturbed but ravishing Maria-Elena, she was brilliant. Let's be honest, though, these are not the kind of roles the Academy honours.
Viola Davis was stunning, the only concern is that her role was way to short. The pity is, with everyone's excitement over Davis' work, Amy Adams seems to have been sidelined a bit. Personally, I think she matched Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep in acting. Her naive, quivering Sister James was beautifully subdued, and I think that is a part of the reason why no one seems to have taken much notice of her work.
Which leaves Taraji P. Henson, who did very well too, and had a full length role to compliment her talent.

Animated Feature Film:
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E

Who is likely to win: Wall-E
Who should win: Wall-E

I loved Kung Fu Panda. It was awesome. And then there's the philosophical, post-apocalyptic story of love which lends itself to a postmodern reading as an allegory of the degeneration of the human psyche, and the disintegration of the human race into nothing more than a group of identical, assembly-line, mechanical beings that leaves the cleaning up of its destruction of the Earth to a creature way ahead of its time, a machine who, ironically, is emotional, sensitive and intelligent: Wall-E.
Eat that, Kung Fu Panda!

Art Direction:
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
The Dark Knight
Revolutionary Road

Who is likely to win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Who should win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

In the case of the other four, while the art direction was great, it wasn't extraordinary. It wasn't anything beyond what one has come to expect of a big budget film of each of those particular genres. Benjamin Button, on the other hand, was interesting. It was challenging, it crept across decades, across places, and it kept the visual interest high with every scene (and change of scene).

Cinematography:
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Slumdog Millionaire

I'll give it to Slumdog Millionaire where it deserves it: the cinematography was breathtaking.

Costumes:
Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
Milk
Revolutionary Road

Who is likely to win: The Duchess/Australia
Who should win: Milk/The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Traditionally the Oscar in this category always goes to a period film. As if somehow it's terribly unchallenging or easy to design costumes for a group of men living in San Francisco in the 1970s, or for a subarban housewife of the 1950s, or a New Orleans couple whose journey spans decades, coming up to the present. So while I'd really like to see one of the others win, I'd put my money on The Duchess or Australia.

Directing:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Milk was a personality film, while Frost/Nixon belonged to the editor and writer (even though directors always tend to interfere in those specializations!). While I don't think Benjamin Button was the best film of the year, even a great film by itself, I do believe it was beautifully, and sensitively directed. Slumdog Millionaire was problematic in ways that it does not seem to realise. Is this the responsibility of the director? Of course it is. But we all know it's going to win, and by now, we all know why.

Film Editing:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Frost/Nixon

Again, kudos to Danny Boyle and his crew for being spot-on in all the technical categories. The editing of Slumdog was good, and it won't be altogether undeserved if it wins the award. Frost/Nixon, however, was possible only because of the editing. It was a film crafted out of one, long interview session, and to make that interesting was entirely the responsibility of the editor, who did a brilliant job of it.

Make Up:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Who is likely to win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Who should win: The Dark Knight

If one of the contenders in this category involves taking Brad Pitt's face, making it look like it is seventy years old, and then putting it on the body of a five-year-old, the others can mostly forget about winning.
Really, though, no one ever conceptualised The Joker like this before. Jack Nicholson's Joker played up the legend of the horror behind the impenetrable, smiling face. The Dark Knight gave The Joker his own face. It was a face you could see, and yet a face that was horrifically painted. The red smudged across his mouth, the creases in the white paint where there were creases in his skin, all made The Joker so much more creepy. And, I think for the first time, it was the look that defined his character just as much as the plot and story did.

Music (Score):
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Defiance
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Slumdog Millionaire

The music of Slumdog Millionaire is like the taste of mango chutney on the tongue of a white man. It tastes like nothing he's ever had before, he can't make head or tail of it, sometimes the flavours (oh, SO many flavours in that little drop of chutney!) get too much for him to bear, but he's hooked. He's hooked to the newness of it, the tantalising, heady feeling it gives him when he swallows it, the crispness of the little pieces of poppadums he dips in it, wondering what else he could eat it with...

Music (Song):
"Down to Earth" (Wall-E)
"Jai Ho" (Slumdog Millionaire)
"O Saya" (Slumdog Millionaire)

Who is likely to win: "Jai Ho"
Who should win: "Jai Ho"

To add to what I said above, of course, I do think AR Rahman is a genius. And it's nice that his genius is being recognised, even if just for a fleeting moment, on the international stage. Plus, "Down to Earth," While being a nice song, isn't much different from the inspiring, soaring, touching and truthful songs one gets so often in animated features.

Best Picture:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Milk/The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Grumble, grumble, grumble...
I mentioned, Benjamin Button isn't one of my favourite films, but one of my favourite films from this year, Doubt, never made it to the list (for which I'm still awaiting an explanation). Milk is a great film, no doubt, but I think a large part of its greatness stems from how inspiring the character and life of Harvey Milk are.
And let's be honest, it seems like this year, nothing's going to match up to the glorious tale of destitution that we've all had to take notice of.

Sound Editing:
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted

Who is likely to win: The Dark Knight
Who should win: The Dark Knight

Personally, I don't think any of the films in this category did anything exceptional, but it is an award that needs to be given, nonetheless.

Sound Mixing:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted

Who is likely to win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Slumdog Millionaire

Now this is something slightly more interesting. The other very close contender, I would think, is Wall-E, simply because as a film it depends to a very great extent on the maintenance of interest in its sound. Don't let the simplicity of the sound fool you. Every aspect of the sound in Wall-E, right from the scramble of the cockroach's feet to the soft, quiet and very expresseive sounds made by Wall-E and Eve, were dead right. Slumdog, however, had a lot more going for it (I guess there's just a lot more mixing to contend with when you're shooting on the streets of India, isn't there?). The multiplicity of layers in its sound mixing tips the balance in its favour.

Visual Effects:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

Who is likely to win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Who should win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Gotham was very well done, but very clearly Chicago in the end. And Batman isn't really a superhero, so there isn't the kind of potential one sees in Iron Man. That, in its turn, was very well done indeed, but remember, it's contending with a film about a boy who grows from old to young, and does so stunningly.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay):
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Doubt
Frost/Nixon
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Who is likely to win: The Reader
Who should win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Doubt and Frost/Nixon lose out as far as I'm concerned, simply because of their unflinching loyalty to the plays they are adapted from. There really wasn't much 'adaptation' to do, frankly. Slumdog was just awfully written, frankly. The guys in the film, we're given to believe, speak English as their first language. Anyone who knows an Indian who speaks English as his/her first language, knows that he/she would cringe at somethig like "Mumbai is the centre of the world, and I am at the centre of the centre." It was a problem of translation, to a large extent: Jamal's brother murmuring "God is great" just as he dies, wouldn't have been half as ridiculous if it was said in Urdu.
The Reader will win, I think, firstly because it isn't going to win much else, secondly because I think it's the kind of heavy, bloodstained screenplay that grabs the fancy of the Academy.

Writing (Original Screenplay):
Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk
Wall-E

Who is likely to win: Frozen River
Who should win: Wall-E

Wall-E would have had to have a brilliant screenplay because it is a film that depends entirely on action, movement and mise-en-scene. Writing a screenplay for dialogue-heavy scripts is that much easier. However, Frozen River, again, is unlikely to win anything else, and going by precedent, the Academy likes honouring obscurity (albeit smart/interesting/brilliant obscurity) in this category.

I can't possibly comment on the live action and animated shorts, as I haven't watched any of them. Of the documentaries, I have only watched Man on Wire, which is gripping. A piece on that is forthcoming...

Loving Slumdog. From afar.

2008-12-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

My news feed on Google has been swarming with articles, reviews and news stories about Slumdog Millionaire over the last month or so. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times gave it an impressive review, and Roger Ebert suggested way back in early November that it might land a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars. Now, everyone's talking about it. The film won the awards for Best British Independent Film, Best Director (Danny Boyle) and Most Promising Newcomer (Dev Patel) at the British Independent Film Awards. Way back at the Toronto Festival (which is where Ebert first saw it) it won the Audience Award. Now, with the kind of appreciation the film is getting, an Oscar nomination for Best Picture (and then some) looks more and more likely.

I'm not saying it's a bad film. I just have a few issues with it, that's all.

Somini Sengupta writes from London, on the making of Slumdog. Her first point: Boyle found in Mumbai "what has all but vanished from cinema here at home: life in extremis." Her second point: he also lost control over the process. As she says,

In Mumbai, which is also known as Bombay, thousands of people gathered every time he started shooting "Slumdog Millionaire" on the streets. Permits were delayed, then granted in the nick of time. Sometimes the city morphed overnight, as new construction sites came up and down. Best-laid plans proved useless. India took over. Kindly adjust, it seemed to say. “You have to let go,” is how Mr. Boyle described the experience this month, in an interview on tamed, temperate Long Acre here. “You don’t act omnipotent. You have to let whatever is there get into the film.”

Sengupta's article conjures a vivid, entertaining image of an English filmmaker used to the cool, steel-gray efficiency of studios, harassed in India by the heat, the traffic, the bureaucracy and people. Oh yes, the people - swarming, teeming, spilling into the frame from every direction, refusing to step out. Admittedly, this image may not be entirely inaccurate. For Boyle, the experience of filming on the streets of Mumbai must have been tough as hell. I can imagine how the heat, for instance, can be debilitating for someone used to cold, wet weather. Not to mention an unfamiliarity with the language and culture. It's like taking just a long, deep breath before hurling yourself headlong into the smelly, marshy habitat of the 'Other'. Quite like a scene in the film, where the protagonist Jamal Malik, as a little boy, clips his thumb and forefinger on his nose and plunges into a pit of rotting faeces.

The problem, of course, is that there is little evidence of this plunge in the film itself. The view the film takes is one that comes not from the scraggly gullies of Mumbai, but from a vantage point far, far away, where the smell of faeces does not reach. A place like tamed, temperate Long Acre, maybe?

I'm the kind of cinephile who takes a while forming properly articulated opinions about films. Most often, as I'm stepping out of a darkened cinema theatre, the most I can come up with is a quiet "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." To come up with reasons for either, I need to sleep over it. After watching Slumdog, I mumbled, mostly to myself, "I don't think I like it." I didn't, really, even as I was watching it, but I was befuddled because I was possibly one of three people in the cinema hall who were feeling this way. People around me (white Americans, mostly) were expressing every emotion you could possibly think your facial muscles could contract and dilate into. Watch them seethe with anger at Jamal's torture at the hands of a policeman. Watch them swell with pride at the hundred dollar bill handed to him by American tourists. Watch them cry when he loses the love of his life and then his brother. Watch them cry again, when love overcomes all, and truth and goodness triumph. Watch them give the film a standing ovation.

After an initial discussion, I came up with a number of flaws in the film. The plot was very simplistic. And way too contrived. I haven't read Vikas Swarup's Q & A, the book behind the screenplay, but the narrative of the film fell a little too neatly into place for my liking. Ok, as Boyle has said over and over again (and so many others have said for him) the film is, in many ways, an homage to '60s and '70s Bollywood cinema. That easily explains away the simplistic story, the clean division of narrative space and characterisation into black and white, the inevitable triumph of love, the hackneyed plot point of redemption for a brother gone astray and even the sudden explosion of song and dance with the end credits. What it doesn't explain is the overwhelmed reaction of an intelligent cinema audience. Not to mention the crazed reception of the film across the western world. If a similar homage were made to Hollywood instead of Bollywood, it might still be a box office success, but as film criticism goes, it would find a place in the annals of camp, not highbrow culture. Why has Slumdog turned out to be such an influential film?

I think it's because "paying homage" apart, Slumdog is a narrative about Third World poverty. Unlike other such narratives, though, it is a very, very shrewd film. It touches all the right cords - it knows exactly who its preferred audience is, and it knows how to get to them. It knows what they wish to see, and how. To chronicle Third World poverty is often a part of the white West's process of self definition. Slumdog Millionaire, however, does it the perfect way in that it maintains the right amount of distance. As the camera glides through the filth, the faeces, the slums and the rush of colour of Mumbai, it does so in a manner that aestheticise them. When Jamal and his brother, orphaned and scared, look for shelter in the rain, it is beautiful. When Jamal's childhood sweetheart fails to escape and is recaptured by the bad guys, it is artistic. When little Jamal runs through the tiny, claustrophobic bylanes of the most sprawling slum in the world, it is romantic. The film is beautiful. Everyone's saying it, and I agree. But it's just the sort of contemplative, sanitised beauty that allows you to be a part of another, grueling life while being safely removed from it. That was my only problem.

Not that it matters, though. I really don't think I was the intended audience.