Ginger drafts...

I still remember the scene where the main protagonist approaches his brain lying on the railway platform; with a screw driver in his hand, he lowers it into the many furrowed brain. As the train approaches to a halt with its screeching tyres, protagonist squeezes his head tight with both hands, as though great exploding pain is emanating from somewhere within him. This scene indicated the protagonist's state of mind. It is from "Pi". My first introduction to Darren Aronofsky. And the scene where another of Aronofsky's protagonists holds his arm high up and runs the jagged ends of an oiled saw into it - "Requiem for a Dream" haunts you like no horror movie does. And lately, he produced "The Wrestler"; in this, his take on character development approaches that of Fincher's in "Zodiac". Only, the tedium is kept at bay by the rhythmic shuffling of emotions. Now, in "Black Swan", with Portman looking so downright emaciated in som...

The old country and its romantic frills; lonely Jeep slowly rattling through the rickety roads, raising a smoke on its trail and dropping a fleck of dust on gorgeous lassies of the French land. The opening scene where a running tap is filling an open public tank with sheepish looking old ladies sitting atop a platform (gossiping about nothing important) evokes in one, something anachronistic, a feeling of old and arcane act of movie making, as it was in seventies and eighties. Tall buildings with their winter shadows casting on each other as the sun rolls over to the other side of the horizon,   seem to represent the village as a narrow star cornered in a chaotic galaxy. The peoples of the planets that inhabit this narrow constellation, enjoy tranquil bliss that will regress into chaos any moment now. The scene that holds the opening with a semblance of rare quietude is about to find its delusion cracked open. Chaos is incumbent. Lovely Emmanuelle Beart, as a romantic young girl, ...

The revelations in the movie seem to have a life of their own – they are unusually shocking, catatonic (for, it gags your conscience), caustic and self aggrandising.  This movie is an example of daily routine elevated to the proportions of imminent catharsis. We are presented the happily smiling, familiarly nonchalant, abruptly impulsive, casual family members. Unlike other movies (or what common sense would have you believe), no one revelation drops on your plates, the many tentacles of vulgar emotions. Although the stupefying account of revelations stomp raucously through the hallways, kitchen and affects every single guest, the inevitable stay at the hotel makes it possible for a rare drama to unfold. One by one, revelations form tides of invisible emotions, and like the moist gum of a tree that slopes downwards, harden before they can be amended. The scriptwriters marshaled the prickly pungent emotions in a logical order (which is not all together apparent), so the audience ...

If you show this movie to David Cronenberg, he would have felt dispirited that the context was underutilised (could have been elevated to visceral proportions), but he would have (I presume), appreciated nonetheless. There is a sense of isolation, gagging your sense of comprehension. The protagonist is seen, in his depressed state (victim of a breakup), confronted by two gorgeous (with apocryphal impulses) ladies. The apartment itself is tranquil, you will notice the creaking of the floor as occupants trot about; you will also notice the impending loneliness smothering our protagonist of his judgement. He is seen nervously befriended by the two ladies. Hesitance in his lending a hand, unusual preeminent method adapted by the ladies in drawing him into their den, boyish nervousness in the protagonist, and rhetorical mode of acquaintance building – this is a spooky movie that you would have always wanted to see but Hollywood, in its perpetual indulgence of nonsense, never obliged. And ...

Ah,what an opulence! Movie opens with the family luncheon; great hall doors opening to still greater, wider and brilliantly furnished halls with roofs so high up above that the warm air seems to struggle in its attempt to fill the distance, rubbing its back on the tall roof’s ceiling. The dinner table, a mirage of aristocratic splendour; a wide stair case connecting the floor above with the one below resonates with royal charm. Everyone seems to be in great spirit. The scene with top view of the dinner table in the background and the great silver white chandelier hung before our eyes; the one where the maid attentively collects the coats from the visitors to deposit in a room that seems frightfully bright; one of the maid (impeccably dressed in white overall with red stripes) sliding open the heavy doors -scene after scene, we are presented an unforgivable affluence. If it ever crossed your mind to quickly arouse your passions of artistic grandeur, this is the movie to watch. Story ...

Nothing like a good french movie. This one begins with the typical french backdrop; no hurry, no great introduction of either the theme or the plot. Mother phones her son, and we infer that the movie is going to be sort of a family Reunion. French are real charmers; I say this, because, the movie establishes its playground, so to make things clear. Audience finds an indication or two, clearly delineating the plot. We are made aware that the old man is on his death bed and the forgotten son (who shares a truculent relationship with his father) is to rope in old pals. Although, the plot seems transparent enough, it doesn’t settle down silently on the floor of our collective minds. For, the seemingly apparent plot is about to implant, in the most sublime manner possible, trickle by trickle, something of great import. The technique adapted by the makers of the movie is not seminal. It is cliche, for all I can care to comment on the backdrop. But the nagging versatility the french are kno...

“Winter’s Bone” opens up with a chilling old country setup; a gloomy environment, calm and sedative to the point of exhaustion. The family lives in a house overlooking dry grasslands, in the distant neighborhood is a horse stable run by a rather indifferent woman. The surroundings are so evocative of morbid dullness, as if it is upon you and there is nothing you can do to avoid it. The brief shot of protagonist chopping timber before she sets on the journey, to me, is the most definitive; she chops wood leisurely, with an absolute surety of the inconsequential life, it is at once infectious. Unconsciously, audience is influenced by this scene. As the protagonist steps up on the act of finding the whereabouts of her father, the aloofness that the family she represents is more accentuated. The neighbors, immediate relatives all seem to bear upon them, a stigma of isolation. Something underneath seems to rise up in flames that obfuscate the present situation. It is as though the collaps...

“Do you know who we are fighting the war against?” enquires the tall German officer pacing back and forth with a steady gaze upon the pretty Jewish boy in Nazi uniform, and the boy replies Russia, France, England, all of which are returned with a slight nod by the tall German. Finally though, stately, the German officer with his arms crossed against the chest, with an askance glance self correcting to freeze upon the boy, observes “Jews”, and continues “it’s a holy war that we are fighting”. This to me, is the most memorable scene of the movie. A Jewish teenage boy is growing up in Hitler’s Germany. A rare sensibility, movie strikes upon the teenager, whose sister is jealous, for she would have liked it to be the son of the family. Alas, this teenage boy ain't so much a man, he hides in a beer barrel to stay away from the march of Nazis, but gets home late, too late to bid farewell to his dying sister. With these scenes, movie sets up a stage filled with fractured emotions where...

“Solaris” is one of the top ten, greatest, groundbreaking and purest form of movies one must definitely see. I often wonder how it must have been to live in the seventies when scientific paradigms were shuffled ceaselessly. It was a time when the scientific world was indomitably theorising to have found expressions of the unification theory, the one law that explains everything from the atoms to big bang. It is in the spirit of those days that one must visualise, against the backdrop of the culture that was caustically rooted in scientific ecstasy that one must watch Soalris. If 2001, a space odyssey was the celebration of science giving way to inquisition of the nature of troubled human inventions; solaris is an elevation of philosophy, nature of which can only be understood through the movie. Nothing that I can say about the movie would suffice, it has to experienced through the movie. Physical laws governing the universe had been largely understood, we were probing deeper into the n...

Movie opens with an innocuous nude beach scene with Meinhof and her family spending the day out. Meinhof, a lady of great temper is shown to exhibit kind heartedness in the opening scene followed by stately appeal of revolution in the party conducted in her backyard. Brief interludes of students staging a protest and the police lining up before them; it is still innocuous at this point in time. Meinhof is shy, but as she reads through to the passage where the reference to fooling German pride is extolled, she is flushed red in her face, the interludes gradually turn violent. In fact, before you realise, the protest, which was only a gathering with placards turns into a pandemonium with the police beating up the innocent and the ladies. This scene is the evidence of what the viewer is up for. If you are not exposed to foreign language movies, you will find it very refreshing, for the movie is anything but Hollywood. Too many Hollywood action movies preserve the action for a moment to le...

Cronenberg's M. Butterfly is a masterpiece of intrigue. It is as if you have been thrown into China and have to find your way back home. Who would have expected that Cronenberg would muddle the minds of his audience to such proportions. A french aristocrat is seduced by a Chinese singer who sings a version of madame Butterfly that elevates our protagonist to the plateau of love. Decidedly, he follows her to her abode and is stately denied permission, for she is too shy and her culture is buried deep beneath the floor of the current time. 'The french have extolled the virtues of progressive societies to the point of apotheosis, from where they glance at the floor beneath them' the Chinese singer observes. The French man falls for the Chinese woman, the man of heresy finds himself amazed at the shy and restrained love that the Chinese woman orchestrates. So blinded by the platonic love of madame butterfly, he unconsciously confesses the french and US army strategies to the Ch...

"Bright star" is more of an epic poem that is evocative of John Keats, although it is misunderstood as a biography of the poet. In his last days, poet Keats is put up at a cottage that is surrounded with beautiful gardens around it. And, in it, is a rather lonely girl, in her twenties and is fond of sewing. Movie is a lucid play of fractured emotions playing out on the characters until such time that the plump looking Fanny falls for Keats while his friend feels neglected. The closer fanny gets to Keats, more strained the friendship becomes. All the locations are strewn with blissful springtime flowers; a scene in which fanny sits up in the middle of the garden full of blue flowers is at once enchanting. Towards the end though, it is all too melancholic; keats has to leave, for he is not salaried and is terribly ill. Fanny's reaction to the news of Keats' death is one of the best scenes in the movie. Although it’s a poignant tale of love, the mood of the time wrap...

“Have you ever seen anything like this on celluloid?” I kept asking myself this question throughout the runtime of the movie. Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is an elegy to the art; it is something of the director’s mortal brilliance. The movie is the product of his brilliance gagging at him to the point of breakdown, and it appears that Gilliam has stripped all of the virtues of his previous movies and presented what was minimal. The art of minimal is what you get in Tideland. The movie is about a child who is fascinated with Alice from the wonderland, and so, paints her reality with wonderland brushes. She loses her father, meets a rather eccentric woman and her deranged brother. The woman with one blind eye disembowels the father’s body, stitches it up later to preserve the skeleton. Now this is an odd movie. There are shades of “fear and loathing” in this movie. Although the movie is frighteningly absurd, it is enchanting at times, for the viewer is expectant. You will stay expectant, ...

Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is a rare piece of cinematic excellence where wonder and power of imagination meet at the gates of fantasy. If you have seen “Brazil” and have since then, ensconced it up on your all time best charts, then you will acknowledge thismovie’s authoritative step into the wilderness. If Monty python’s Holy Grail is lying somewhere in your DVD collection, and instead of plugging in Scifi metadata on reviews of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, you have plugged in Terry Gilliam, then you would cherish this movie for a long time. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a movie that even the Gonzo journalists passed contentions, that the movie was virtually undoable, but somehow Gilliam and Depp made it possible. Then perhaps, Imaginarium is a frighteningly undoable project and has been, I believe given due credit for the accomplishment. Coming in 4 years after the vertiginous Tideland, Imaginarium sweeps the carpet under your floor, chair under your ...

There is an unbearable loftiness in the movies about movie making, novels or the art of writing itself. We are told a sort of highbrow frill, a play that espouses parallels to other writers or movie makers who might have trodden on this frighteningly monastic path. It is obscurantist, it is polemical and defensive. But not this one; ‘Wonder Boys’ is deceptively simple. A former writer is undergoing a period inimical to no writer; he can’t stop writing. It is not a writer’s block, Michael Douglas is under influence, and hence cannot make choices. Therefore the long winding detailed passages leading nowhere, Katie Holmes observes. She is a student of Douglas and a good one at that. She is enamoured by her teacher, his writings inspire her and she occasionally confronts him with mad passion. Robert Downey Jr., in his usual charm and grace flavours the indifferent voyage through a spinning and dizzying journey that usurps the viewer with its fleeting moments. Tobey Maguire, another stude...

“The Ghost Writer” is an eloquent praise of the sublime. The power of evocation, Ploanski uses it to great acclaim. He alludes to the knots in the thread of the plot; hanging on to the knots, viewers are presented a local chasm in the plot. But what we don’t realize is, we may just as well have been fed the plot as different routes through which to reach the pinnacle of the mountain. Only the director holds the keys to the overhanging car, through which one can visualize for once the entire plot as it is created. Ghost writer McEwan is assigned the task of completing the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Pierce Brosnan. None of the characters are intriguing; they are pure, simple and almost possible. The writer finds himself mugged of his manuscript to begin with, later discovers that there is more to the memoirs than what he was made to believe at the beginning. The muddled history of wars and the prime minister’s involvement in it, the precarious upholstery on which the ghost ...

No spoilers. You can read thru. Freud would have patted Cristopher Nolan’s back. Freud, through his patient analysis of the mind and dreams, has postulated the levels of dreams and the volitional advantage that the dreamer accrues at each level. The subconscious mind in Freud’s words is like the water in a fountain that drops back into the vast pool before achieving a brief hiatus of consciousness while up in the air. Freud in his guile cheerlessness commented “civilisation began when an angry man cast a word instead of a rock”. Nolan embellishes Freud’s word with an emphasis on ‘idea’ that is resilient, overwhelming, incredibly powerful and all encompassing. History points out that the fascination with dreams has inspired men since the dawn of civilisation. Many directors have explored and dabbled with the idea of dreams. Most significantly in the year 1999; the year has seen the release of three movies that takes three decades to forget. ‘Matrix’ explored the possibility of a tricky ...

It’s Jerusalem, Roman Empire. Brian is up for crucifixion and he inquires with the jailor “can I speak to someone, I think there has been a mistake” and the jailor responds “do you have a lawyer….I am sorry, we are in a bit of hurry today, you go on now….out of the door, lying on the left, one cross each” It isn’t for no reason that they call “Life of Brian” the greatest British comedy movie of all time. You only have to watch the opening credits to realise the genius of these men waiting impatiently to explode on the screen, their penetrating eye for comedy. I cannot imagine how the people of Britain and world at large must have felt when they had seen the movie at the release time, back in 79. And Now for Something Completely Different (1971): when I first saw the movie, I had no idea of the pythons. Even today, the pythons’ series wins hands down, unparalleled in uniqueness and unequalled in sheer ability to capture the mood of the time, bottle it up and release it in a manner conce...

“I don’t know if it’s a memory or a memory of a memory that I am left with”, the deceased woman’s husband contemplates. We are shown the view of the railway station with their backs turned towards the camera. In a brief shot, the protagonist is shown bewildered at first and deeply disturbed the next moment. The case is officially closed, but the husband tirelessly pursues, with the discomforting fact that he is beginning to forget his wife. He confesses to the protagonist about how he wished he could hold on to the memory of beautiful deep pink flushed cheeks of his wife glowing in the morning sunlight that slipped through their undulating curtains on the morning of the murder. First thing that you will notice in the movie is the close-up and long shots used alternatively. Shifting between the shots, for instance - you are shown wide range long shot of distant memories of the protagonist; in a flash frame shifts into a bloody violent rape of a lady in her twenties. And, this one is a c...

“If I were to sink my teeth into your eye right now, would you be able to stop me before I blinded you?” Dicaprio responds stately “Give it a try” Four years after “The Departed” , the master comes up with “Shutter Island” . Continuing with his favourite man Dicaprio whom he has indulged in the last 3 occasions before now, master director Martin Scorsese, one of the few men who is capable of enthralling his audiences at times of inconsequential moments of stasis in a movie, delivers again. Not a single frame of the movie was wasted in “The Departed”, Scorsese was uncompromising in the previous one. He, with his impenetrable genius, pulled our nerves taut and relished in the obstruct sound of discomfort produced by the taut string like nerves in “The Departed”. What can you expect after such a movie? “Shutter Island” begins with Dicaprio visiting the island. Background score is reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”. Only this one sounds even more sinister, like two metallic objects...