Ozu again ...

The world around us is changing at a pace that seem to get faster day by day.  While watching "An Autumn Afternnon," today I realized that there is nothing more life-affirming to me than watching Ozu.

In the midst of all the turmoil of the world, killings of innocent, outbreaks of deadly diseases, we'll still go on ... struggling, but living, with all our flaws.

"মন্বন্তরে মরিনি আমরা, মারি নিয়ে ঘর করি, এটুকু সামলে নিতে পারব..."

Yo!

I haven't been to their site and was suddenly feeling little urge for Christmas shopping, so I typed in criterion.com in the address bar ... and wow! Their site is totally revamped, and ... what is this ... the Auteurs ...?
Wow! Now criterion screens movies online ... and some of them are free to watch via the Auteurs.
This Christmas will be fun!

Grave of the Fireflies

"It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen" ... 

End of Semester

I have become so lazy... I didn't write any entry for almost a month! Well, semester pressure was on, all right; but it was not too much. It was just laziness to be honest.
Now semester's over and there can be no excuse of academic pressure. So let me list my planned activity for the semester break at least. Day after the exams were over, I went to library and checked out some movies. So now during these few days these are the movies I'm going to watch:

Box office in a nutshell

Here are few movies I watched over last couple of weeks
2010 - Year We Make Contact
I was spellbound by '2001 - A Space Odyssey'. So much a suggestive movie - hats of to Kubrick. The almost three hour long movie might have total talking time of an hour! It leaves a space for the audience. And it creates an expectation for a good sequel. So when I realized I am watching '2010 - Year We Make Contact', I was expectant. But I am disappointed. It has lost all of its flavour. The main reason may be absence of Kubrick. '2010 ...' is just another Hollywood sci-fi. Nothing else.
My Life as a Dog
I heard of this 'weird-titled' movie while surfing Yahoo! Movies almost eight years ago. It had a very high rating. I had watched two Lasse Hallström movies - 'Chocolate' and 'Cider House Rules.' They are good movies. So I was all the more interested in 'My Life as a Dog'.
Hallström has done a wonderful job. Child psychology is so different that the grown ups often miss out the point. The most cherishable part of the movie is acting of all the child actors; they are so natural. A simple but complicated story of a village, young boy named Ingemar, his friends, his ailing mother, his dog, some weird people of the village and the dog Laika who was sent on Sputnic. The thing that makes the movie all the more enjoyable are occasional narrations by Ingemar when he ponders over his miserable life and takes into consideration the life of Lika the poor dog who had no benefit of space research but had to sacrifice her life in space for sake of her human masters. And he always comes up with the positive attitude, 'I'm lucky in a way, it could have been worse.' It is wonderfully positive and fresh movie.
Autumn Sonata
When two Bergmans come togethre on a project which in a way is so much related to their real life, what do you expect out of it? A Sonata in Celluloid. Magnificently supported by Liv Ullman. I already have written something in it!
The Barbarian Invasion
It really hurts when at the end of your life you get to know that you have achieved nothing! This movie really kept me thinking what I am here for. Its a comedy of all the trifling things like politics, various isms, sex, addiction that keeps on invading in your life and makes you confused about your goal. I will like to watch it again along with its prequel, 'Decline of the American Empire'.
Rent
The much waited musical. I wished to watch it on the Broadway someday. But the movie served the purpose for the time being. As a matter of fact, I felt it could have been better as a stage-play only; not the movie. The style is not really suited for screen. It is very good, though, but still... It is well acted, well sung, and indeed well cinematographed but still, the way it is presented, I mean song in every two dialouges, it better suits the stage. But still to me this movie version is lovable. Because I really love the songs of 'Rent'. And the movie is worth of my love for the 'Rent' soundtrack.
Children of Heaven
They say, Iranian directors know how to end a movie. This was my first encounter with any Iranian movie, and I'm bowled over. Kudos to Majid Majidi. A simple tale, brilliant acting by the children and brilliant cinematography and really brilliant closing sequence. I wish to write on it in somewhat more detail someday. So lets save for it. After watching this, it seems the movie could not have ended in any other way. It lost its 'Best Foreign Language Film' award at Oscar, 1998 to 'Life is Beautiful', which is also a wonderful movie. But 'Life is beautiful' seems too artificial after this one! I love this movie.

...and the Seven Dwarfs!

The other day my good old friend Arin was desperate to watch samurai movies! He could recall only one samurai movie - that too because this samurai movie was inspiration to a big-budget Hindi movie named 'China Gate'. So he rented the Kurosawa classic 'Seven Samurai'. Though I had watched it earlier, but how can miss a second screening if its being played in home! We watched the movie together that night. Enjoyed Mifune's (Kikuchiyo) eccentric role play, Shimada's well planned strategy, Kyuzo's cool swordplay.
The next day in the same video store Arin found 'The Magnificent Seven' and readily realized it to be a western remake of last night's movie. Still charmed by the Samurai chivalry, he rented the 'Magnificent Seven' (Mag7). Again we started watching it together along with Benny, who liked Mag7 a lot because it was one of the movies he grew up with. I've heard of Mag7, its an undoubted western classic; and I liked the theme very much.
So we started. And was disappointed.
Mag7 is basically same plot set in Mexico, where poor villagers speak in English only to end the sentence with a Spanish word to let you know that they are actually Mexican! The village, which is basically supposedly a farming village is situated in the midst of arid valley with hardly any greenery surrounded by. The villagers are as dumb as they can ... they don't have any expression at all. In the first five minutes I was getting a feeling this is going to be a bad remake, and I looked up at Arin. He lets out a sigh and states, 'I'm never gonna watch a remake after I had watched the original!'
Well to be honest, we couldn't find out why Mag7 is so great. The acting is poor, the script little shaky, too much of statements in form of dialogs. Whereas in 'Seven Samurai' even the small extras have done wonderful believable acting, the script never loses its focus of defeating the bandits. Mag7 has tried to put some subplots but before the subplots mature they are abandoned (e.g., Lee's nightmare). You wonder why were these situations brought into the movie at all! I'm not mentioning the scene by scene or sometimes word by word copy of the original (e.g., closing dialogues)
The final conclusion was pretty simple. Arin had already spelt it out, 'Never watch a remake after you have watched the original!'. I agree there are some exceptions, but this is the general truth. And as per Mag7, it turned out to be Seven Dwarfs in front of the Seven Samurai.

There is epilogue. Benny now wants to see the 'Seven Samurai' and Arin wants to wash away the memory of Mag7. So we may rent 'Seven Samurai' again very soon.

Good Morning Starshine

Saturday morning. Its unusual to wake up so early at 7:30 AM! With cup of black tea I came to my veranda. Mild sun rays flowing over the fruit-bearing Palash tree is caressing the floor of the balcony. I remembered one song. I played the song on my desktop.
"Good Morning Starshine!"
With the song came the artist's credit. It is Oliver (I don't know the authenticity of this information but I know this is from a musical called 'Hair'). That reminded me of the movie 'Oliver!' I watched on TV couple of months ago during one of week long holidays at home. I liked the movie for wonderfully spirited choreography. That TV channel (Sony PIX) was running a series on orphan movies, and 'Oliver!' was followed by another charmer, 'Annie'. I had planned to write a review on them, But eventually forgot.
After a long time, almost three months, I am at my room on a Saturday and have not planned yet to go out on tour. Yesterday I was just thinking to go out on Saturday to the city of Pune and have some nice montages on my new camera. I postponed the plan for one more day and started to write on 'Oliver!' and 'Annie'.

Here they are.

The Orphan Story Part - I
The Orphan Story Part - II

Crash

Sitting in the veranda under the morning sun of Saturday I was reading a newspaper where I read an article on how human beings are becoming more and more self-centered. The article reminded me of recent movie, which I went to watch in Feb this year after almost four months' stravation of a good movie. And I am glad that I had chosen this one - CRASH by Paul Haggis. It has the weaved a storyline out of some seemingly unconnected persons and incidents. And that again reminded me of another movie seen almost one and half year back - LOVE ACTUALLY, which also had a similar style but on a different background and on a different motif. I might talk about that on some other day.
In very few words CRASH is a movie about racism and us. There are blacks, whites, Iranians, Chinese, Mexicans, Asians ... all of them making their way of life in LA. All of them are human. None of them are bad or good, just human. When one crashes with another, they find what they are, they learn what they are. The point is very simple; its a simplified view of Rashomon effect. We, the audience sympathesize with a victim of racism making the other a villain. But the next moment when perspective changes, the villain is no more a villain for his badness, its the situation that makes him so. Since everyone of us have a different perspective, our sense of good and bad are different, and we are either a victim or a villain. After all, believe it or not, we are racist not by choice.
I don't remember the exact detials of the story. Only thing is that this movie is full of situations that will crash on to each other unexpetedly. But the credit of the screenplay is that it never seems to be manipulative.
I remember the opening dialogue, 'Other places we get brushed past fellow men on the streets. But in LA nobody touches you ... you forget how it feels to touch a human. So you desperately crash on other to have that feeling of intense touch...' (or something like that!)
There is one more similarity between LOVE ACTUALLY and CRASH, despite showing our limitations, our narrowness, both of them have a positive attitude. It doesn't mean that it shows a positive optimistic ending, but it has a warmth of human touch lying beneath its neatly weaved matrix.
And I liked that.