the Times slips up!

Factoid: About two days ago, the pristine New York Times printed desi equivalents of "sister-fucker" and "mother-fucker", not to mention "dick"! Yes, believe it or not, the New York Times said "bhenchod"!!!

Confused? Hee hee. Here's the background: Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games has been generating much newsprint. It was Paul Gray's review in the Times that prompted siddhartha's mischevious post: apparently, reviewer Gray, in an effort, to give his readers a taste of Chandra's prose -- Chandra writes with a liberal dose of desi, especially Bambaiya, words, Bambaiya being mostly Hindi and Marathi -- had included the words -- hold your breath now! -- nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”! Quite a change for the New York Times, don't you think? Particularly since when film critic A. O. Scott reviewed the documentary Fuck, the title of the film was printed as ****, sort of defeating the whole purpose of the film, which was to explore the usage and origins of, well, the word "fuck"! (Scott, in his insightful review, didn't think so, believing that it's only because sainted institutions like the Times eschew use of the word that it retains its capacity to shock. The man has a point. But whatever.)

The story doesn't end here though. I happened to click on the Paul Gray review again today (via this post) and guess what? The words are now gone! Vanished! Here is how it was before:

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words (“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

And this is how it is now:

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

I have a couple of questions:

1) Where's the retraction? It seem like the standard for any web-publications to acknowledge any changes to its text. The Times, as far as I could tell, doesn't seem to have one. But just suppose if they did, what would it say? "The Editors would like to note that the review by Paul Gray, contained expletives, although in a foreign tongue. The expletives themselves, are too shocking even to be paraphrased. We have exterminated them completely from our website. The error is regretted. Indians and Hindi-speakers, do remember to supervise your childrenl, should they chance upon the said edition of the Book Review."

2) What about the print edition? Is there a print edition of the Review floating around with words like "bhenchod" in it? (the horror!) If there is, does anyone have it? And -- this signals my desperation -- if one got hold of it, would it be worth anything?

jude law

This quote about Jude Law strikes me as pretty accurate:

And Jude Law -- what in God's name has happened to Jude Law? When he burst into movies a decade ago, playing a crippled, furious genetic superman in Gattaca, and then Dickie Greenleaf, the murdered golden boy in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he seemed like a throwback to an earlier era, when Hollywood stardom required an actor to be dazzling and deadly all at once. But the hint of danger he brought to those early roles has evaporated, leaving a callow charm that might seduce a giddy woman, but not an audience.

I watched parts of Gattaca again a few weeks ago and Law and Uma Thurman, between them, manage to literally stamp poor Ethan Hawke out.

Daniel Craig, RIP

(No, no, he isn't dead but read on...)

Consider this. There's this obscure and, a not-so-popular one that you think makes great music. You are, in other words, a fan. And then suddenly, this band gets a hit, a chart-topping single and all of a sudden, is the toast of the world. Your friends, who, a day before, wouldn't even have heard of this band are now giddy fans. How would you feel? Happy for the band? Sad? Sad and happy? Bitter-sweet? All of the above?

When it was announced that Ang Lee would direct Brokeback Mountain, most of us who'd read Annie Proulx's short story felt a nice sensation inside: this would be good, we thought. It was better. Commercially, the film did better than anyone expected; best, it became a sensation and Lee won a well-deserved Oscar. Now of course it was everyone's, everyone appreciated it; and it was ours no longer. Overall, not a bad state of affairs too (although I have serious reservations about the way the film was marketed/perceived).

Its deja vu time today as Casino Royale comes out in theaters, with its star attraction, the new James Bond: Daniel Craig. I guess I am one of the few people who've seen many of Craig's films: the harrowing The Mother, the so-so Sylvia, and smashing-good-times Enduring Love and Layer Cake. Plus he was in Spielberg's Munich (proof that his star was rising, I'd say) and the more recent Truman Capote biopic Infamous (which I have yet to see).

What can I say? The man is a brilliant actor, who seems to internalize every character he plays. But more than that, he's an astonishingly feral presence in any movie. Craig is the kind of actor whose sheer physicality -- I was almost going to say animalness -- hits you in the face, even when he's behind the movie screen, enough to make a frission of excitement run down your spine. (The only other actor today who comes close in doing this is Clive Owen -- and to a much lesser extent, Russell Crowe). Craig is like a tightly coiled tiger and his vulnerability (when he shows it) only underscores his lethalness; even when he's down, you only feel sorry for the other guy, because you know that Craig can't be kept down.

If all this resembles how a giddy school-girl might sound, then that just proves how Craig's charms can get though even the most battle-hardened critics (for the record, I consider myself movie-hardened). Most female critics, revewing Casino Royale have outdone themselves -- and I'm not being pejorative -- in describing the Daniel Craig-effect. Here's the relatively restrained Manohla Dargis (who, being what she is, simply cannot take out that note of sweeping dismissal from her voice) talking about Craig in the Times:

attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig ... You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too);...

Sarah Lyall's feature in the Times is even more giddy, it comes replete with admiring references to Craig's torso. One would have thought that this kind of reporting was beneath the Times (No, wait, I was joking, of course it isn't -- remember this article?) but that's Daniel Craig for you.

The crowning achievement is Dana Steven's piece in Slate -- it has a starting paragraph that made me gasp, even as I started to laugh, referring to a certain orifice in Craig's body and what it might be capable of holding. But no, read it for yourself; it's worth reading, with an inevitable paragraph or two on Craig's torso (again, what can I say? that's Daniel Craig for you), it also nicely summarizes his other work. You might want to check them out; for all the chemical reactions he seems to arouse in people, Craig really is a darn good actor.

Which finally brings me back to the epitaph I titled this post with. A year ago, Daniel Craig was the property of a few people, who'd seen and admired his other films, now he's ours no longer. As James Bond -- and now an acclaimed one, so more Bond roles will surely follow -- he's well on his way to being a movie star and god only knows, he deserves to be one.

stephen holden made me laugh

The NYT's Stephen Holden is not normally a movie critic who makes you laugh (unlike, say David Edelstein) so I just wanted to quote this line from his review of "Flannel Pajamas" which had me giggling for about 10 seconds:

The personal issues bedeviling Stuart and Nicole may not be your issues or mine, but the couple’s mild-mannered approach to dealing with them may feel uncomfortably familiar if you belong to the college-educated class of New York professionals that believes in talking things out. You might call it the modern, pragmatic, couples-counseling approach to problem solving, as opposed to, say, primal scream therapy or (God forbid) domestic violence.

oh, so many movies

The New York Film Festival opens tomorrow, with a screening of Stephen Frears The Queen, starring the great Helen Mirren. It continues till the 15th of October. Among the many other films are Todd Field's Little Children, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and Pedro Alomodvar's Volver. The complete list of films and schedule is here.

I feel like going every day and watching a movie but I have some issues:

a) I'm worried about spending too much. Student discount tickets cost $10, which is the standard price for watching a movie in the city. But student discounts aren't guaranteed, they depend on availability of tickets.

b) Some of the movies will definitely be released theatrically, especially the ones I mentioned above. Should I try for the more "commercial" ones which will get released commercially anyway? Or should I try for the experimental/foreign films which I may not get a chance to see again (although they could turn out to be awful, but then again, that's the whole point of going to a film festival -- you go through duds to experience revelation)?

To top everything, today's New York Times has not one, not two but three raves. For The Queen, for Little Children and A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. So many movies!

Existential dilemma of my day: To go for the opening night tomorrow or not?

Aside: Of course, I heartily dislike most of Manohla Dargis' reviews. Even when she praises the film, as she does here, the sneering tone and the all-round condescension just don't go well with me. (Dargis can write lovely pieces of criticism: see her review of Old Joy here and my favorite, her review of Far from Heaven for the Los Angeles Times here).

The Science of Sleep

Go, go, go, see the Science of Sleep. It's both funny and sad, and very very quirky.

Michel Gondry's latest is releasing on Friday. Lynn Hirschberg profiled him in last Sunday's Times Magazine. I was surprised to know that it was Gondry who came up with the idea of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- to my mind, the best movie of the last few years -- and pitched it to Charlie Kauffmann. He must have been galled when everyone treated the movie as a Charlie Kauffmann creation.

Update: David Edelstein says the same thing here. And he gives the movie a thumbs up. Must see it this week.

On an aside, did anyone read the Hirschberg's essay two weeks ago on Vera Farmiga? Now Farmiga may be as talented as Hirschberg says she is -- I haven't seen her movies but I'd like to now, after reading the piece, just to decide how good she is -- but really, comparing her to Meryl Streep -- who I saw last month as Brecht's Mother Courage, "burning energy like a supernova", as Ben Brantley put it in his review -- is a bit much, no? Streep has been acting for decades, Farmiga for barely a decade. And if Farmiga seems to be losing parts -- mainstream parts -- to the likes of Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett (who strikes me as a good candidate for being the next Meryl Streep), then surely, she can't be that good, can she?

what's movielink thinking?

So I went along to Movielink as I often do, idly looking for movies that I could watch and clicked on their "All Genres" link. Among the genres listed were "Paramount", "Twentieth Century Fox" or "Warner Brothers". Hmmm. Since when? Only in the studio-centric world of a studio-run portal, I'd say.

But here's the best part. The same page, under a heading called "Award Winners" (yes, this is now a genre) includes Cannes, Oscar Winners, Oscar Nominees and then astonishingly further down the list: the Razzies! Huh? A movie rental advertising bad films? What was Movielink thinking? (For the uninitiated, the Razzies or the Golden Raspberries are awards that "complement the Academy Awards by dishonoring the worst acting, screenwriting, songwriting, directing, and films that the film industry has to offer" (via Wikipedia)).

Memo to Movielink: Surely it is too much to expect paying customers to rent Razzie-nominated movies? No? Or is there a hidden agenda here?

Come to think of it, do you think people would pay to watch bad movies? More specifically, would people pay to watch movies that are advertised as terrible films? Or do they watch it in the so-bad-that-its funny spirit? Is the so-bad-that-its-funny a new movie genre? One of the thousands of niches in the long tail of the movie-rental world? How many people really admired the knowing, sniggering virtuosity of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra?

Finally, is Movielink just a lame and clueless movie portal or a postmodern pioneer in advertising?

what a wonderful description...

The venerable Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on what he calls the Tower of Pisa Law:

Harari and De Pelegri understand the basic law of farce construction--what I call the Tower of Pisa Law. That tower, contrary to popular belief, did not lean after it was finished: it began to lean when it was only ten meters high, and they kept on building it, logically and well. Good farce writing must start with a canted base and then grow-- grow is the key word -- logically, but at an odd angle. A mere succession of gags is the death of farce: it must move organically, one action resulting inexorably in the next. This is what happens in Only Human.

on film actors and the stage.

I started reading David Edelstein when he was the film critic for Slate; then he left (or they fired him or something) and joined New York Magazine and I keep reading him (and Slate too -- amazing how we become loyal to people and things we never even know). He has a style of criticism I like, intensely expressive and very personal, a style that obviously descends from the great Pauline Kael. (Edelstein calls himself a "Paulette"). It is a style I wish I could write in. Fastidious literary critics don't like the Kael style since it is clearly imbued with what the New Critics called the "affective fallacy" -- the idea that a piece of art can be explored in terms of the feelings or emotions it arouses in a critic (or anybody else, for that matter). They have a point but Kael is such a joy to read -- so thought-provoking, so annoying, so intensely literary -- that one has to fall under her spell.

In the recent issue of New York, Edelstein has an essay on Julia Roberts' first stage performance, in a Joe Mantello-directed production of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. I had the opportunity of seeing Greenberg's Take Me Out on Broadway (also directed by Mantello) and that production, with its magnificent performance by Denis O'Hare, introduced me to Greenberg's style -- talky, literary but where language is stretched to breaking point and where words, simply by their presence and their layering, attain heights undreamt of. Edelstein's analysis of Roberts in her first stage-role is not entirely unexpected: Julia is still, well, Julia but she's not quite at home on the stage.

UPDATE: Reviews of Three Days of Rain at the Post and the Times say much the same thing.

(I had the same experience when I saw Ewan McGregor, the man who lit up Moulin Rouge with his voice and the abosolute sincerity of his performance, in a West End production of Guys and Dolls. It's not the McGregor does a disservice to the play, it's just that he's upstaged by all the seasoned theater veterans around him -- who are so at home in their bodies and so good at making their bodies and their voices lenses into the souls of their characters).

Unforgettable moments...

The New York Times has a section called “Unforgettable Moments” where its three critics, describe what they feel is an unforgettable moment in the movies this year. Manohla Dargis describes a scene from David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, A.O. Scott goes for Jeffrey Wright’s barbecue scene in Stephen Gagan’s Syriana (more on this in subsequent posts) but the tour de force is by Stephen Holden describing, in his own words, a vignette from Rodrigo García"s Nine Lives. I’ve heard a lot about Nine Lives, in particular about the lovely performances of all its leading ladies, notably Robin Wright Penn. But Holden has condensed his unforgettable moment marvelously; he gets its flavor across but also conveys how much more unforgettable it would be seeing it on screen. Read it. (Also read Holden’s review of Nine Lives here). 

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain

To misquote Madeline/Judy writing to Scottie in Vertigo: And so I finally saw Brokeback Mountain . After months of hearing about the movie, after months of wondering how it would be, whether it would work or not, I saw it. It was, as they say, an anti-climax.

The story goes back a year or two. I remember reading, perhaps two years ago, that an Annie Proulx short story about "two gay cowboys" (or rather, their doomed love story) was about to be filmed. There was enormous speculation: which two actors would "risk their images" for the two lead roles? (Clearly this is one of the most fatuous lines of inquiry that I've ever encountered. This Caryn James article is a perfect example of utter silliness). Who would be the director who would add his own name to this enterprise? Would the studios go through with it? What about the sex? How would they film it? Would people see it? And on and on and on.

Sometimes when one's questions are answered, it takes the piss out of the whole thing. There is a "buzz" around Brokeback Mountain now. It's been raved about to death. It's an Oscar contender, perhaps the leading Oscar contender. It's been proclaimed to be a film about "universal love" (as opposed to "simply a gay love story"), even as a "paean to masculinity". Frank Rich wrote a predictable editorial in the New York Times making the "rash prediction" that the movie would play well in the heartland. People around me who would never have heard about Brokeback Mountain now want to see it. I should be feeling happier -- I certainly know I am -- but the feeling remains. Something has been lost. Our film has become simply our film.

It wasn't so a year ago. I read Proulx's short story then, (after hearing that it was going to be filmed). Having never read Proulx before (and I only managed to read one other story in that collection), the prose seemed different, relying almost entirely on formal restraint. Her words fall over one another but they are careful words, always stoic, never sentimental. The story's power was in its afterglow, its capacity to remain in mind long after the words have been forgotten. It was meant to be savored, to be thought about, and perhaps read again. Ang Lee's adaptation is scrupulously faithful to Proulx&# 39;s story in most respects. It also adopts completely Proulx's tone -- her detachment -- that makes the afterglow of her story so poignant.

That is a tragic mistake. Lee does everything: he shoots the breathtaking landscapes perfectly, exacts excellent performances from his actors, keeps the spirit of the story intact but he is never able to make the story come alive, never able to take us into Ennis's or Jack's heads. Brokeback Mountain is too distanced for its own good, far too aesthetic, too controlled, and perhaps even too intellectual. The formal restraint, the careful distance, may be to people's liking but I wish Lee had done it differently. I wish that, like the best of Douglas Sirk's films, he had poured out his characters' repressed emotions into the background score, into the beautiful Montana backdrops and gone deep into them, bringing out in vivid, detailed colors what they only hinted at.

But Lee is a tasteful director. He is also studiously unsentimental, or tries to be. When he lets go, as in Ennis's scene with Jack's grieving parents, the effect is marvelous; the restraint works. Perhaps Stanley Kauffmann has a point: Lee's Taiwanese background and his American training make him uniquely sensitive to filial relationships (his endearing The Wedding Banquet is one of the most lovely portraits of parental grief and disappointment). But in most other scenes Lee's camera only observes, never participates. This is not to say that Brokeback Mountain is a bad film. God, no. But it never moved me as much as it could have. Who knows, perhaps that's a good thing. Emotion is a tricky thing, hard to balance, hard to restrain; perhaps restraint is the best course.

Heath Ledger, who has been praised to the skies for his performance, is certainly restrained as Ennis. Stephen Holden of the NYT compared Ledger's turn to the best of Penn and Brando. As a comparison, this is bizarre. Penn and Brando are flashy actors. If anything, the template for Ledger's performance Nick Nolte's Wade Wodehouse in Affliction . Ledger is good, I'll grant him that and God knows, he has tried hard. But he is less-than-convincing because his persona precedes him. He is always Heath Ledger with the twinkle in his eye and the smile on his lips -- his personality hovers over his character's. The opposite is true of Jake Gyllenhaal, who on first appearances seems to be miscast. He is a far cry from the buck-toothed short jaunty Jack Twist of Proulx's story. But the spirit he has created on-screen, with that woebegone face and the hangdog look, is authentically Jack Twist's. Jack waits for Ennis eagerly, gives unselfishly and dreams radiantly if in futility; Gyllenhaal captures him perfectly. his performance makes Ledger's (well-acted) final scenes truly poignant.

For both actors, even if not for Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain is a triumph.

And yes, if it does manage to win the Oscars, I know I'll be happy.

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach’s 1994 début Kicking and Screaming quickly put me into a skeptical mode—the mannered college types, straight from Whit Stillman, minus the sweetness that Stillman brings to his characters, the witty, too witty dialogue, with its multiple layers of irony; it was all too conspicuously indie—but as the movie moved into its final third, I found myself, to my great surprise, blinking back tears. All along, Baumbach had been working, in his own talky way, to a moment of truth, of post-collegiate life and in the movie’s final moments he hits it, undiluted by irony.

Grover and Jane, in only their second meeting are both intoxicated in a “townie” bar and sharing a moment. As Jane prepares to leave, Grover tells her (apparently she has an appointment with a shrink):
He: I just hope we feel the same way after this moment. After the alcohol wears off. You’ll talk to your shrink; I’ll go back to my friends. I just hope we keep this.
A lovely pregnant pause. And then she: It’s not as dramatic as all that. I mean we’ve got some time. Most of our life, in fact. What do you think if we had a proper love-affair—do you think it’ll last?

This line, in a calculatedly mannered flashback (each flashback starts with a freeze-frame of Jane, since we are obviously viewing her through the prism of Grover’s memory), the fact that the audience knows that Grover and Jane will break up, and be miserable without each other, the perfect pause and the lines themselves weave together perfectly. For me, it was a moment of connection. Later on, Grover decides to join Jane in Prague, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, he has a wild monologue with the ticket-clerk, where he pleads with her to give him a ticket, so that later on he can remember this moment as the time he chose to go to Prague; chose, that is, in full living breathing consciousness, in a spectacular moment of being alive. Josh Hamilton delivers the monologue with his eyes literally shining, his face flushed; when he realizes he doesn’t have his passport and the clerk gently suggests that he could go the next day, Grover makes a bitter face; the moment has passed.

The idea that life is a series of moments, when one is alive is not new and Baumbach’s schematic is a little too structured for my liking. Here, for instance, is Michael Cunningham in The Hours.

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more.

Through some mysterious alchemy, some strange weave of his dialogue and his actors, Noah Baumbach has given this passage a marvelous cinematic expression.

UPDATE: Matt Feeney has an article up on Slate today about Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and Mr Jealousy. About Kicking and Screaming, he writes something that's remarkably close to what I wrote--about why the film resonated with me. Here's an extract from his piece:

In a recent interview in New York magazine, Noah Baumbach says that his new film, The Squid and the Whale, represents a mature turn in his filmmaking: "I wanted to make more emotional movies that were less about being clever." This seems to be a gentle cut at his first two efforts, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997). Baumbach, not unlike the characters in his films, is being unfair to himself. Sure, these movies have a talky, sophomoric cleverness, and they take on the themes—post-college paralysis, romantic jealousy—that apply most to people in their late 20s. You can see why Baumbach, now 37, might view them as artifacts of a shallower, sillier stage of life. But, like the openly autobiographical Squid, Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy are acutely, almost unbearably, personal and emotional films.

And then:

Maybe Baumbach thinks it's just him, but the fantasy of the spunky beauty with the darling overbite who sits across from you in your creative writing seminar and vivisects your short stories but then later admits that they show real talent and then falls in love with you is pretty much universal among male English majors. Baumbach makes this familiar, almost fantastic, story resonate with several deft touches. While the film's primary action takes place in the limbo of the year after graduation, the romance is told in flashbacks of the previous year, styled in a way that evokes the wistful quality of romantic memory. They begin in black-and-white freeze frame, then take on color, and then roll into slow motion before coming fully alive. Baumbach deepens these squirmy courtship scenes with perfect music. (For a time, I wished I were a filmmaker just so I could put Freedy Johnston's "The Lucky One" in one of my movies, but then Baumbach beat me to it.) The nicest touch, though, was finding Olivia d'Abo for the role of Jane. D'Abo's had a checkered career, heavy on straight-to-video action movies, but Kicking and Screaming shows her to be an inventive and charming comic actress. If you still don't have a face to put to your creative-writing-seminar fantasy, rent Kicking and Screaming.

Read the whole piece; I am going to rent Mr Jealousy soon, I think.

Guilty Pleasures

Matt Feeney has a great article in Slate about his "guilty pleasures"--trashy movies that he loves to watch at home when the multiplex gets too funereal. He includes Double Jeopardy, The Devil's Advocate, Cruel Intentions and Wild Things. I haven't seen Double Jeapordy myself but of the rest of three, the only one that I love is Wild Things, with its double-double-double-double crosses and the steamy sex (Aah, Matt Dillon...). I saw The Devil's Advocate in the cinema-hall back in college and I still haven't come around to the view that the movie actually has a point, beyond the grandstanding Al Pacino and the bland Keanu Reeves.

I enjoyed the beginning of Cruel Intentions when the effiminately handsome Ryan Phillipe and the carnal Sarah Michelle Gellar's characters trade sexually charged barbs (yes, as in incest). But once Reese Witherspoon's sanctimonious virginal goody-two-shoes character enters the scene and the movie throws in its lot with her, and the rakish Phillipe actually falls in love with her (as opposed to simply jumping into bed with his sister and having wild incestous sex), I just lost it altogether. The movie that began as great fun--an adult romp--turns melodramatic and all moral. It bothers me--this siding with the moral virgin. After all, why couldn't the Gellar character, with all her appetites, have triumphed? But no, the Ryan Phillipe character is made to suffer moral pangs and so is the audience, whether it wants to or not. Naah, I hated the way director Roger Kumble turned what should have been a blackly comic sexually charged teen-movie (sort of like Wild Things) into a sob-fest.

Enough ranting. Let me move on to my guilty pleasures--movies that I see time and time again simply because I love them. The pleasure isn't actually "guilty" because most of these movies wouldn't be considered "trash" at all. I have a rather sentimental attachment to them and watch them because--well, because they make me laugh and cry. So, without further ado, here's the list

Moulin Rouge
The Last Days of Disco
Shakespeare in Love
The Opposite of Sex
Far from Heaven

The blandness of FlightPlan

On Sunday I trudged up to the Harkins Centerpoint and saw FlightPlan. Why? No reason, particularly—if I said that kind of stuff, I’d say that we were meant to be, FlightPlan and I—just that it seemed to be going on at that particular time. How was it? Hmmm, that’s a question—how to answer that?--well, to tell you the truth, it was extremely dull. Now that’s the first time I’ve ever called a movie dull (simply dull as opposed to say, horrendous) but it’s very hard to find out exactly what’s wrong with FlightPlan. Certainly it’s been made with a lot of attention and detail; unlike the absolutely horrendous (there!) The Forgotten. Also, like The Forgotten, it has an extremely talented actress at its helm, the angular Jodie Foster (not to mention a very similar plot: the disappearance of a son/daughter). What’s with Foster and all the mother roles she’s so into these days? And what’s with Hollywood and all these mother roles in general? Are we so pre-occupied with the loss of children? And the children, why are they either little ethereal angels or irritating screaming shrews (little Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds)? Does the whole post-industrial world bring out some kind of subliminal anxiety in us, which somehow leads film-makers to imagine these scenarios?

Frankly, I have no idea. Some reviews of the movie I read were upset that the movie completely changed tracks mid-way—instead of being a meditation on grief, it turned into a thriller. You know, I would have agreed with that criticism, except that the movie is equally boring in both tracks – just supremely so as an exercise in grief and moderately so as a thriller. It’s just that as a thriller, there’s still some movement of the camera, something to look forward to—the grieving subplot is completely flat. Flat in the sense that there is no remotely palpable sense of loss, no sense of grief, nothing. The movie is like the bland shiny airplane interior it takes place in—bland and dull.

The problem with these kinds of movies is that I can see exactly how they are pitched. It’s like The Forgotten--“Hey, what’d happen if a child just disappeared? Into the blue?”—and bam, a screenplay is produced. FlightPlan has a better screenplay than Forgotten (it’s co-written by Billy Ray, the writer-director of Shattered Glass). Well, better in the sense that it is fleshed out with no gaping holes. But in a way, the writers’ decision to ground the plot around today’s resonating themes (the mother-child bond saving the passengers of an airplane from a hijack attempt) is their worst; it makes the grief sections of the film utterly pallid and the action sequences incredible—and by that I mean not remotely credible.

What’s left then? The actors? Peter Sarsgaard turns up, looking more like a reptile than ever. But he doesn’t really have much to do and his typical under-acting doesn’t help. Jodie Foster? She’s good—as always—but good doesn’t mean anything in a movie like this. It’s a good dull performance in dull movie.

Serenity - a review

With all the extensive coverage that Serenity got on the blogosphere (see these posts by Dan Drezner: here, here and finally here) and Joss Wheldon’s impeccable TV pedigree (Buffy, Angel), I was a little disappointed with Serenity, Wheldon’s movie version of his short-lived Fox series Firefly. Now to be fair, I have never watched Firefly (although people who did keep raving about it). Yet even as I watched Serenity, I couldn’t help feeling: this stuff would be better on TV. No, let me change that – this stuff would be awesome on TV.

What’s the difference between a movie and TV series? Television episodes are heavy on plot and light on action – clearly no one watches a one-hour episode to watch a 15 minute ship-battle sequence. (Also clearly, TV doesn’t have the budget for that kind of thing). The problem is: Wheldon has no idea of how to shoot a space-ship battle. Serenity’s finale has a whopping 20 minute battle and it is easily the movie’s poorest – not even the editor probably knows what’s going on. (I loved Wheldon’s shots of people swaying because of centrifugal forces, no movie I remember has ever had that!).

What Wheldon knows – and knows damn well – are his genres; in Serenity he fuses the western and the space opera conventions remarkably. The result is a giddy Flash Gordon-like adventure story. Serenity reminded me of the first two Star Wars movies (well, episodes 4 and 5, to be precise) – unaffected and completely enjoyable. The problem with Star Wars was that Lucas got bogged down when he started making episodes 1 to 3. Whereas the early Wars movies were fun for fun’s sake, the prequels got mired in their own symbolism, their attempt to be “serious” rather than fun. It didn’t help, of course, that Lucas is a hideously bad writer. (A friend of mine remarked after seeing the Revenge of the Sith: if the first two prequels felt like dying by crucifixion, then the third one felt like dying by poison!)

Wheldon however writes great dialogue (he plays with genre conventions with his quips, the lines in this movie will probably become legends). In the opening scenes of the movie, the exposition, which probably took an episode or two in Firefly, is brilliantly done, with a minimum of shots and fuss. The problem with Serenity is its plot. The kind of suspense that Serenity generates in the first half, when the psychic River has hallucination after hallucination, premonition after premonition, builds expectations up to a breaking point. But the revelation itself – the thing we have been looking for all the while – is a complete let-down; it could have fitted in right at the end of a Firefly episode.

A dense plot would have made the movie too long, and reduced the time for wham-bam action scenes (and this clearly matters to the studios if they want to get teenagers to watch Serenity). So Wheldon probably took one of his ideas for an episode and used that for the movie, with a few modifications. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work. But, hell, I’m going right out and getting my hands on the Firefly DVD set. If it’s anything like Serenity, that’s one hell of a TV show.

Note: This post by Dan Drezner has a got a lot of links, if you want to read about Serenity.

On Spielberg and the Mossad assassin

There’s an aspect of commercial film-making that I dislike intensely and it comes up in this article in the New York Times. The subject: Spielberg’s as yet untitled film on the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at Munich 1972. Turns out that Spielberg’s film only opens with the massacre but is mainly about the Israeli retaliation that followed as Mossad painstakingly and calculatedly hunted down and assassinated persons believed to be among the kidnappers.

The Munich episode has already been effectively captured in a documentary that I saw last year – One day in September. One Day, which is narrated by Michael Douglas, recreates an almost second-to-second account of the hostage crisis by inter-cutting actual footage, interviews with officials, onlookers and the relatives of the hostages. It also incorporates interviews with the lone surviving Palestinian hostage-taker, a man who has been in hiding since then and has escaped several Israeli attempts on his life. That documentary was unequivocal in assigning blame – not, however on the moral implications of the Palestinian actions – on West German officials in Munich who were anxious, at all costs to show that they were capable of dealing with the crisis when they clearly were not. Critics have accused One day of being a “thriller” but I thought that the movie was rather detached; in a sense, the makers wanted simply to recreate the nightmare that was Munich 1972. Beyond highlighting the incompetent West German actions, they clearly did not want to get into any kind of discussion on the morality of the parties in question, since any discussion on the Israel-Palestinian takes only seconds to get inflamed. (At Columbia, where I studied, any article on the dispute in the Spectator meant publishing at least four letters subsequent day with a different interpretation of events).

But back to the offending paragraph in the article:

The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings - Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both in the United States and in Israel.

Yes, it’s called losing stature (the aspect of commercial film-making that I hate). That’s probably why any commercial film-maker will never make a film that engages with politics beyond the superficial. Ridley Scott – a director with magnificent visual skills – made Kingdom of Heaven on the Crusades. Yet his movie is stultifying in its political correctness – both sides are essentially humanists/multiculturalists – and the reason for that is simple: Scott doesn’t want to come across as anti-Christian or anti-Islam. (See David Edelstein’s scathing review in Slate).

Michael Oren (who recently argued in a stimulating New Republic article that the new German film Downfall merely gave Germany and Germans a guilt-free pass) has this to say:

"I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about what they were doing. It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews. I don't see Dirty Harry feeling guilt-ridden. It's the flip side of the rationally motivated Palestinian terrorist: you can't have a Jew going to exact vengeance and not feel guilt-ridden about it, and you can't have a Palestinian who's operating out of pure evil - it's got to be the result of some trauma."

The guilt-ridden Mossad assassin is also the center-piece of the new Etyan Fox movie Walk on Water. As the film begins, we see Eyal, who comes back after a “job” to find his wife has killed herself. Recovering from a depression, he is given a small assignment. To keep an eye on two visiting German siblings – Axel and Pia – who are the grand-children of an absconding Nazi war-criminal. Assigned as a guide to Axel, Eyal takes a liking to the young man (played in a lovely performance by the German actor Knut Berger). He is confused when he discovers Axel is gay and furious when Axel picks up a young Palestinian in a gay bar. Male bonding is clearly Fox’s forte and Walk on Water sparkles in the Israel scenes. The slender waif-like Burger and the tough Lior Ashkenazi are an attractive couple and the actors sparkle in their scenes together which are lovely and unforced (it’s astonishing how physiognomically similar these two are to Fox’s Yossi and Jagger).

Yet when Eyal is forced to follow Axel back to Germany (in a torturous plot twist), the movie self-destructs spectacularly. The tone turns melodramatic and the narrative turns into an archetypal tale of redemption; clearly not Fox’s best genre. The fault has less to do with Fox’s direction but instead with his use of narrative clichés, so at odds with his naturalistic direction. We know that the tormented Eyal will have to choose – between the human being he is and the killing-machine he has become. We also know that his wife’s suicide had something to do with his “occupation”. Yet the finale is wooden and not remotely convincing.

I should admit at the outset that I have rather a soft spot for Fox (Yossi and Jagger is a little gem of a film in my opinion). His characters are clearly like him: idealistic, passionately political and without an element of irony or cynicism. Walk on Water is only a small misstep for him but I hope he keeps on making his kind of films.

Wes Craven's Red Eye

I saw the new Wes Craven thriller “Red Eye” yesterday and Rachel McAdams, the young actress is certainly impressive. I looked up McAdams filmography on imdb.com and apparently, she has had some high-banner movies under her belt including a turn in Mean Girls (which I loved - the movie, not her turn, which was good, not great!) and The Notebook (the trailer was so horrendous that I never quite ventured anywhere near it). I can see why Craven chose McAdams for the role – the girl has a toughness about her, a way of looking directly, arrestingly, at the camera. She’s more than a match for Cillian Murphy, who after Batman Begins, gets to do another creepy role (He is “Jack Rippner” who does “oh, government overthrows, high-profile assassinations, the usual stuff” for a living). And really Murphy is far too creepy for my taste – with those pink lips and blue blue eyes. And this is the actor who first broke into the big scene as an old-fashioned protagonist in Danny Boyle’s 28 days later! Murphy and McAdams are going to go far, methinks.

And the movie? It’s a very well-crafted thriller. Craven can’t quite sustain the tension during the air-plane ride. Instead he looks at the actors in hard close-ups and lets them do their bit. The claustrophobic environs of an airplane are well-captured and I particularly liked the bit inside the restroom. The movie ends with a flourish however, in the kind of scenario that Craven knows inside-out – a slasher with a knife chasing a young nubile girl in a deserted house. Despite seeing the scenario hundreds of times, it’s still astonishing how it still manages to wring you out, when done well.

In the first twenty-odd minutes of Only Angels Have Wings, director Howard Hawks pulls off a miracle. With barely a shot of a flying plane, or the pilot’s point-of-view, he creates a scene, which in its intensity, is more than a match for any special-effects action extravaganza that I have seen.

A young woman has just arrived in a South American port on her way back to the States. This is the time of the birth of aviation, before the First World War. The port has a small air-base which uses propeller-driven airplanes to ferry cargo to and fro. The hitch? A mountain which needs to be flown over and which often gets obscured by fog. The woman is befriended by two pilots, who’re clearly in need of some feminine company. She takes a fancy to one of them, a handsome all-American type; even his name is Joe. He asks her to have dinner with him; she agrees but he has to make a flight and a thick fog has settled in. He promises her he’ll be back soon and takes off; she stays with the crew and the head of the station. But the fog is too much; he cannot reach his destination; the captain asks him to come back and land; but now the airstrip is almost invisible. The crew on the ground try and give him directions by simply listening for the sound of the engine and using their intuition to judge where he is; Joe almost crashes while landing; the captain asks him to stay up till the fog lifts; Joe says he wants to land; after all, there’s a pretty girl he wants to have dinner with; he tries landing again, crashes and dies.

All of this happens in the first twenty-five minutes and it is breathtakingly orchestrated. In complete and supreme control of his material, Hawks introduces the early days of flight, unsafe, and without the instruments that are so indispensable to flying today; the early pilots, pioneers all, who risked death every time they flew and who did it, for the money, for the adventure, for the sheer joy of flight, who knows why! Best of all, he constructs a scene of a plane crashing with barely an aerial shot, where the reactions of the onlookers take us right into their heads (and hearts) and the tragedy that results feels exactly as it would have felt to someone in the situation: disconcertingly sudden, strangely disorienting, and suffused with the kind of sadness that is known rather than felt.

But Only Angels Have Wings is not a sad film. It is a film with a heart of gold, which knows that its asset is its heart of gold and its belief that adversity brings out the best in men, which tries charmingly to put up a tough exterior, but only so much so that it’s golden heart comes through. Do I sound cynical? If I do, it’s unintentional because I genuinely loved this film. It is a superlative example of populist film-making; a film without pretensions to profundity; helmed by a director who knows exactly what he wants and populated by actors who know exactly what their director is aiming for. It works brilliantly.

What would one know? It turns out that the great Ram Gopal Verma is a fan of Ayn Rand. His heroine, Reva, in Naach is a female version of that supreme egotist - Howard Roark. Reva spends most of Naach being insufferable sure of herself, gazing stony-faced at her
lover Abhi or dancing through her steps with a kind of pouty defiance that is supposed to stand for artistic satisfaction but is clearly Antara Mali's failed stab at icy eroticism.

Naach may not be a loony call to individualism as Rand's FountainHead is. It is however Ram Gopal Verma's confessional: where he tells us what drives his work and the constant compromises that he's forced to make working with the Bombay film industry. His critique of Bollywood films is on the dot (and I agree with him on almost everything here): that Bollywood plots are frozen in the boy-meets-girl mode, that we have embraced mediocrity in the way we refuse to experiment even within our framework, and that we lack a small-scale independent movement that can offer a reasonable alternative to the commercial mainstream. The three main characters, offer, at different points, Verma's thoughts. Abhi is Verma's pragmatic side, willing to make compromises to get things done. Reva is what he'd like to be (but thankfully, is not) - uncompromising, unbending, and rigid.

Of course, Verma himself has succeeded in the same industry while retaining his own rough edges although I grant that his status is nothing like whats accorded to upstarts like Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra or old hands like Subhash Ghai (at whom Verma makes a pointedly cheap dig. Whats cooking, Ramu?) or Yash Chopra. Yet Verma has made commercially successful yet highly ndividual films himself. He has made musicals like Rangeela, Daud and Mast, gritty
crime-tales Satya (his masterpiece and one of the best films ever) and Company, and low budget experiments with horror (Bhoot, Raat, Kaun). Granted that there were elements in all these films where he compromised. For instance Satya was conceived as a realist
songless film. Yet when Verma did decide, out of commerical pressure, no doubt, to add songs to he narrative - he arrived at a way to make the songs merge seamlessly with the narrative which akes Satya even more of an artistic triumph. The two songs in Company are hip and stylish - in sync with the movies tone. This, I argue, has always been Verma's greatest contribution. He has orked within the Bollywood genre even as he has successfully tinkered with it. For instance, with his distinctive use of music, he has worked with composers from A. R. Rehman to SAndeep howta - none of whose work is in any way traditional.

Given how personal Naach is, its suprising that it is Verma's weakest film to date. The narrative is flaccid; it proceeds languidly almost like a tableux, but never really becomes interesting. Quickly sketched conversations fade into each other and the characters have no life beyond the artistic. Its a sign of how much I expect from Verma that I took Naach's different "look" for granted. Verma uses hues of blue and black; its a welcome sight to watch a film from Bombay that doesn't bombard us with reds, maroons, yellows and pinks. But Verma's fixation on Antara Mali's body does get a bit too much at times. The camera roams her body in boringly fetishistic detail; boring because Mali and her director concentrate too much on being sensous rather than imply being. In a deeper way, the problem is Mali herself. She's a competent actress but she has always relied on physicality to convey her characters. Reva, on the other hand, is the quiet artist who is supposed to be seething inside (creatively, of course). Mali's acting choices are correct; she underplays but she just cannot convey the artistic turmoil that is raging inside Reva's head. (I'd have preferred Sushmita Sen myself). We are supposed to go into raptures when Reva dances but beyond capturing certain zen-like demeanor and a performer's reflexes, she never comes close to reaching that kind of transcendent grace that at least her director thinks she does. Ultimately this is Naach's weakest link: the dances that Reva creates are as bad (or as ordinary) as the ones she hates. What could be more damning for a movie that celebrates dance?

No two icons resemble each other but I guess there probably won't be another one like Bette Davis. Six years ago TNT India planned to show Gone with the Wind. In the grand build-up to D-day, they had a month of flims that starred all the different actors associated with it. I remember that Davis' Jezebel was screened then although I didn't get to watch it. Davis apparently was determined to be Scarlett (and I think she'd have made a good one) for Gone with the Wind but David O'Selznick had other ideas.

As a trade-off, Davis, got her own Southern vehicle in Jezebel. The movie doesn't stand up to scrutiny but it's amazing what she can do. Her character Julene is supposed to be a misfit, a young woman born ahead of her time but it's hard to see which time she would actually fit in. Julene is petty and wilful and stubborn and she would be trouble in any world, modern or medieval. Julene alienates her fiance Pres (the great Henry Fonda) by wearing a red dress to a ball and he soon enough marries another woman. Her attempts to play off one Southern gentleman against another result in a succession of tragedies.

Much ado is made, of course, about the charming Southern customs like duelling and I would agree with everything the movie said if it wasn't for smug self-superior tone. And the Julene-Pres combination is too Scarlett-Ashleyish for my liking what with her selfishness and his constant soul-searching and honor. But Fonda and Davis are too good as actors and director William Wyler never forces his hand. As much as I hate admitting it, the movie made me cry as it ended, with Julie, humbled and proud as ever, marching off towards redemption.

A different kind of Davis performance: loony, flamboyant, wild, and touching is on display in Whatever happened to Baby Jane?, a movie I'd describe as 75% black comedy, 15% melodrama and 10% thriller. Two old hags live in a claustrophobic mansion - with Baby Jane (Davis) tending to the crippled Blanche (Joan Crawford). Baby Jane has never gotten over the fact that her success as a child-star on the vaudeville stage has been eclipsed by her sister who became a big film-star. As the movie begins, Baby Jane sets unleashes a spectacular vendetta against her crippled sister.

The revelations at the end can be sensed a mile off but as the feverish camera roams around the house, the movie makes one restless. The violence is brutal and shocking; because its perpetrator is an old woman in her sixties who may or may not be mad. The movie allows Davis to hit notes like never before; dressed in what I can only call Miss Havisham gear, she pitches her act perfectly; over-the-top but with a pathos that literally hurts. Baby Jane's longing for her childhood is fierce and naked and pathetic; the movie is fascinating in a frighteningly dreadful way.

Between the callow Jezebel (1938) and the loony Baby Jane (1962) is a perfect Davis performance in All about Eve (1950). As Margo Channing, a great but aging theater actress, Davis seems to be channelling herself into the role. It seems like an effortless performance but it's on a scale that's hard to describe. The movie chronicles the rise of one Eve Harrington, a burningly ambitious upstart, who will one day supplant Margo Channing. Eve's rise is the archetypal tale of an actress: she charms her way into Margo's favors, becomes her understudy and finally uses Margo to fulfill her own dreams.

It's a brilliant film, with brilliant performances. But Eve's metamorphosis from an earnest too-good-to-be-true guardedly ambitious side-kick into an evil incarnate doesn't quite jell. It's strange though, but I liked Eve and I think the movie does too. Even as he becomes more and more ruthless, her desire to be an actress is treated with respect. It's hard to find a film that does that.

There is something in watching a classically structured narrative - a story when an unforseen tragedy impedes on lives being lived. From Here to Eternity ends with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack is addressed as an aside, something that happens outside of the web of the characters' lives yet it is also the harbinger of things to come. As one of the oldest cliches goes, things will never be the same again.

Called by many as the movie that Pearl Harbor wanted to be (but never was, not even halfway!), it is easy to see why Eternity was something of a shocker for its time. In the age of the production code, the film's characters are either prostitutes, adulterers, or misfits. Plus it has the famous (and incredibly sexy) romp in the sand between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. (The moment is so brief that it almost flashes past unnoticed but it's erotic charge is undeniable.) What is more, it deals with these things without cheap moralizing and sanctimony. Director Fred Zinneman has directed Eternity with supreme restraint. Not a shot calls attention to itself (although there is one, during the attack - an aerial shot of soldiers in white lying flat on the ground shot from the point of view of a Japanese plane - that is breathtaking.) Instead, this is an actor's movie with not a single wrong note. Montgomery Clift is the shy, tortured hero and he strikes the right balance between heartbreaking need and tough bravado. So does Burt Lancaster whose looks kept diverting my attention from his performance. And then there are Frank Sinatra (How someone who looks so ugly can have such a divine voice is something I've never figured out), Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed - all of whom, make not a single misstep.

Eternity does not go all the way, of course. James Jones' novel is considerably denser than the movie and Deborah Kerr's character Karen Homes actually has a son. But it has all the things that matter - good, solid writing, character development, a lack of sentimentality and above all, splendid performances. All of the things that Pearl Harbor did not.

I have to say that the bland Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow improves on second viewing. When I saw it for the first time, the movie had bored me after a promising start - I had simply not been able to see what the hype was all about. But I thought it was good fun the second time (which leads to a question: do mediocre movies seem good on second viewing?) and for once, the repeat viewing told me what I had not been able to pinpoint before - in other words, the problem with Sky-Captain. (It's definitely not the actors. Paltrow smirks, smiles, grimaces and frowns to great effect; Law does the same but he's kind of lost his shine these days. Angelina Jolie gives the best pouty English accent that I've ever heard.)

My experience with action movies tells me that they strive for realism. All the millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars that are pumped into the special effects are for the sole reason of making an audience not notice them. A side-effect of this is the palpable sense of danger that results - I know that the plucky heroine won't die despite all the fires raging around her but I fear for her life, just the same. The problem with Sky-Captain is that it forgets the cardinal principle of the same comic books that it wants to cinematize (if such a word exists) - while the story skips along jauntily, comics rarely waste time in action scenes. Sky-Captain does and to its detriment - it's action scenes are too noisy, too incoherent and ultimately fail to convey what action must - danger. When we are with Sky Captain and plucky Polly Perkins playing Nancy Drew, SkyCaptain coasts along like an especially enjoyable comicbook; when we're with SkyCaptain battling enemy aircrafts, SkyCaptain becomes a noisy, unentertaining and tame action movie.

Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve is shamelessly self-indulgent but what a whale of a ride it is! Actually, correction!. It's a whale of a ride in most parts but it peters out early and comes to a huge thudding halt half an hour before it ends. Perhaps because it's because the story is criminally underconstructed but then - who noticed the story anyway? The film's strengths are it's in-jokes, its fabulously glamorous stars, and its jumpy syntax. On the offside, there are too many in-jokes and the jumpy syntax, even if it's constructor is Soderbergh, cannot pull up the movie when it's narrative sags.

I loved the jokes though. At the beginning when the gang gathers to think of another heist, the members object to being called "Ocean's Eleven"; "We were all equal contributors, who made you the proprietor?" someone says. Then there's Julia Roberts who dissapears in about the fifth minute and returns towards the end for a brilliant scene thats almost worth the price of the ticket. The actors attain a kind of movie-star glamor thats rare and the movie shows them off, spectacular clothes and everything. (Which is fine with me, by the way. Sometimes, actors are just more interesting than the characters they play, unless the actor happens to be Tom Cruise when it just becomes irritating.) After Troy, a relaxed Brad Pitt is heart-throbbingly sexy; he and Zeta-Jones sizzle in their scenes together. My own favorite though was Matt Damon, who has perfected an earnest demeanor and geeky delivery, while at the same time, being completely in on the joke. (his delivery of the phrase "you mean .... morally wrong?" brought me down completely). Damon should seriously consider doing some comedy.

All that said, the movie is however 30 minutes too long and wore me out in the end. Soderbergh shoots with a jazzy syntax that he must have had great fun playing with but the last thirty minutes are just too much. Writer George Nolfi must have finally run of ideas. But hey, it was great while it lasted.

Watching the treacly Love Actually, I kept wondering what on earth had possessed me to rent the movie. Well, for one thing, there was the desire to watch something light. Plus the fact that the movie has been written and directed by Richard Curtis, whose movies, so far at least, I've enjoyed. I am not quite sure what Actually's problem really is. The movie is sincere, it's apparent that Curtis is, quite literally, putting himself out on a limb; this is the mushiest movie he's ever written. Its even got a to-die-for all-star British cast with a few token Americans. And the soundtrack is uniformly gooey (but good though) to the point of making one die from an overdose of sugar.

Ultimately though, there's only so much of mush that one can take. Watching no less than nine romantic subplots means that the movie flits from one romantic pair to another. Curtis is no Paul Thomas Anderson - he has no idea how to weave the plots together, to make the tension of one plot flood into another, to make one plot comment on another. Then there's the fact that the characters all speak in Curtisms - in the cute, self-deprecating style (which means blinking charmingly even in the most hideously embarassing of situations) that Curtis has perfected through all these years. But when actors are barely on the screen for more than a minute, it's hard to make a character one's own; the movie has no characters, just props on which to hang it's message that LOVE is all around us.

What happens if a bachelor British prime-minister (and one as foppy as Hugh Grant, no less) falls in love with his, ummm, housekeeper? What would happen if two body-doubles, who make their living by simulating sexual positions for the movie camera, were to fall in love? Could a man and a woman fall in love without even understanding one word of what the other says? It seems to me that Curtis, wrote the movie, with these kind of questions in mind. I enjoyed hte body-double subplot the most even though it has less than five minutes of screen-time. And I kept looking at my watch as Liam Nesson and his consistently slappable son kept having one irritating conversation after another. The other storylines are more or less generic, depending on how much you can stomach the ages old love triangle of the two best friends in love with the same girl, or the happily married couple in the throes of mid-life crisis or the woman professional pining away for her boss.

Which brings me to another point. The portrayal of women in this movie. Two of the romantic storylines involve housekeepers falling in love with their bosses. Laura Linney (who, by the way, is the best thing in this movie) plays a executive meekly in love with her (hunky) boss. What, one wonders, is the message here? The over-all impression of the working female professional in the movie is that of the secretary - no, not just a secretary but a secretary straight from the pages of a Mills&Boon romance (yes, I used to read those) who falls for her boss, a strong bronzed rugged mascular (yes, yes, you name it) alpha-male. I can only presume it's unintentional since a movie like this doesn't set out to offend people deliberately. But considering how successful movies like these are and the fact that they are generally modified depending on how they are received by focus groups, I wonder how much we still like to think of the working woman as a meek, weak, and yes, virginal secretary.

Jawaharlal Nehru used to be fond of saying that behind every Indian, there lay 5000 years of history and continuity. (He even made an attempt to chronicle those in his Discovery of India). Behind every one of us - inside us, even - are the efforts of all those who are dead. We are the products of history and it marches on taking us with it - as passive observationists or as quiet activists. William Condon's biopic of Alfred Kinsey is a great movie - as a movie, as a narrative, as a story of science and scientist (and I won't even begin to contrast it with the dishonesty of A Beautiful Mind) and above all things - in giving us a sense of history, of the giants, on whose shoulders, so to speak, we all stand. It is also tremendously moving and true to Kinsey himself. Like Kinsey and his scientific work, it is non-judgemental, presenting his research, his obsessions, his evangelical zeal to separate sex from morality, his indignation with "morality masquerading as fact" and also his more troubling tendencies (which included having his research assistants sleep with each other and their spouses).

All the rights we take so much for granted now - the right to use contraceptives during sex, the decrimnalization of pre-marital, extra-marital, oral sex and anal sex, the implied right to privacy that forbids authority from policing the private lives of its citizens, the debunking of all the old wives tales about masturbation, sex education in schools - are all related, in some way to the publication of the Kinsey report. The gay rights movement owes much to him - but then so do we all. (Interestingly Kinsey's book was published in 1948, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders in 1973 but it was only in 2003 that sodomy laws were struck down by the Supreme Court).

Which in a roundabout way, brings me back to the movie itself. Condon, who wrote the movie from Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's biography of Kinsey, has found the perfect form for a biopic on Kinsey - the question-and-answer interview. The movie opens with Kinsey instructing his reseach assistants on the art of interviewing the subjects for their sexual histories. As his researchers ply him with question after question and as he answers, the movie cuts back and forth between the interview and Kinsey's life. The structure, which seems clunky even as I write about it, works brilliantly in the movie. Somewhere along the way, the cutting back to the interview stops but the movie is so fluid, that I forget where exactly and we continue along a linear trajectory as Kinsey's life unfolds before us. Condon is true to Kinsey himself, he presents the man as-is, warts and all, in just the way Kinsey encouraged his assistants to document human sexual history without being judgemental. (Condon vividly shows the best-case worst-case dichotomy that I talked about before during Kinsey's chilling interview with a paedophile, Kenneth Braun, when his research assistant walks out, unable to suspend judgement, while Kinsey doggedly soldiers on with the interview.) But movie is grateful to Kinsey, grateful because he spoke out against social hypocrisy, because his criticism of morality disguised as facts is valid even today, because he was instrumental in improving life itself for all of us.

In a lovely interview that closes the movie (and which moved me to tears), Lynn Redgrave as a woman who has found happiness with another woman, tells him "You saved my life, sir" and it is hard not to agree whole-heartedly. He most certainly did.

Postscript: I realized that I hadn't written a word about the actors. Words, in this case, are pitiful to describe the superlative acting all around but I mmust say that Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard are all fabulous. Linney, who can shine even in an outstandingly bad movie like The Life of David Gale, is lovely; Neeson is dogged, committed, and understated; while Sarsgaard, with his reptilian face, keeps proving again and again what a great actor he is. Give them all awards, I say. :)