Four Short Film-Reviews
Apocalypto
It took me some time but I am glad that I watched this film. This is the stuff to be cherished in a DVD collection.
It has ORGANIC, INDIGENOUS & VISCERAL written all over it. Much has been said about the film. The film deserves more resounding applause because of the courage and non-attempt to be perfect.
I would like to add that it worked for me perfectly at the Eclipse scene. It is at that point that it becomes a classic. Just one scene. May be it is a combination of the brewing undercurrent of the basic human emotions that rise like a high tide, or it’s the underplay of mercy, in the film maker’s POV, something that refuses to sympathesize with all the visibly disturbing scenes of atrocity. The success of the film, and like no other in its genre (Powerful scenes, edited like a man, can be put into the league of New World, The Thin Red Line, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now.), lies in its successful transition from Macro to Micro, from dealing with a holistic view of a civilization as it goes through its rise and fall to the small but harrowing tribulations a deserted family goes through. It is through Jaguar Paw’s perspective that the film achieves it wonderfully respectable stature. If not the best, it IS one of the best films to have been made in recent times of ‘cinema without balls’.
300
300 creates new rules for Graphic Novel Cinema, and how!
After First Half
A little disappointed, the film lacks in pathos, something which put Apocalypto in a separate league, lacks in the Sin City poetry, tears and the shock factor, which juxtaposes the tender with the cruel. I am pointing out the minuses because they are few…
After second half
OK..I finally got that feeling climbing down the rolling titles, in true Spartan fervor!
This is it! What else could I want?! Burning screen, Humane blood, Paused Motion, Red against Sepia. Even a text book drama to satisfy ‘them’. Controlled Insanity. Muffled thud of war drums. A play with sexuality-both visceral and phallic. A reason to hope in the craft. A historic clear sky slowly gets dirtied in a rising inferno of an inevitable moment.
A war in soul.
A breathing mortality.
300 achieves that rare combine of comic book crispi-raci-ness and historic beauty. The images on screen are proudly loud; they are comic book characters with a cinematic voice that rips the screen apart. And it is this uniqueness that is making it rewrite film collection history all over. It works with absolutely everyone. It is a fantasy if you want, an epic (seated in a heady conflict-resolution flava) if you want, and a daringly different FILM, if you want.
Thank You for Smoking
Having heard rave reviews about this film, I jumped into watching it with a great build-up working the predictable response. But I was sadly let down.
If you have a black humor film taking Smoking as a subtext, you do expect (moderately, at least) some experiments. They hardly exist in this film. All you get is the same old mundane Hollywood corporate gab humor, speeches dripping with cynicism, self-indulgent characters talking to the screen more than half the time, and a cockiness that sadly doesn’t help the affairs. This is not a bad film, but something that I could not enjoy beyond a point of time.
Rocky Balboa
Sly returns with dignity. A dream treatment, underplay of Heroic lines. A narrative which is more human than superhero (I don’t mean that superhero aint human! But…), and a lingering memory of Rocky makes this a good Sunday afternoon watch. Kinda walk down memory lane. Don’t go expecting lots of punches; you might get a pale ‘Punchy’. But Stallone delivers, equally good as a director and the actor. It’s his words that you love more than his punches (which are few and far between anyways).
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
http://www.wga.org/subpage_newsevents.aspx?id=1807
Just watched Rocky Balboa… not bad, not bad at all… it’s a trip down the memory lane those who grew up watching the Rocky series. I would put this as the second best after the first Rocky. You feel sad for Sly as you do for Rocky… it’s as if they are one and the same… going down the trajectory… of course the movie has flaws, but you tend to forgive them as you see that Stallone wanted a kind of an emotional closure on Rocky Balboa. And he does.
“You feel sad for Sly as you do for Rocky
the message is loud and clear- the indegenous population of the
americas was saved from the oppressive rule of mayans by spanish
conquistadores.
the ending scene is a “happy” one where spanish ships come and save the natives from “oppressive” mayans (with future inquitions and conquests). the truth is spaniards were the worst colonists.
one civilization cannot judge another.
it’s a proof of mel gibson’s racist, white
supremacist, christian, republican, male chauvinist sensiblities.
the film thrives on exotica. they had a regular story. then someone
thought- “hey! no one’s made a film with mayans!… it’ll be exotic…
let’s do it!”. They had the money so they put it in this story.
it is a total “patla sunny paaji in langoti” film. half the film he’s
running in the forests with half naked men running following him with their jiggly asses.
the eclipse scene is copied from Tintin comics
AM, that eclipse scene you’re talking about was from the “prisoners of the sun” episode of tintin, where him, capt. haddock, and calculus (and snowy) are on the pier about to be sacrificed by the incas.. tintin is allowed to choose the day and time of their execution, and he picks that day and time so it coincides with the eclipse.. then he says a few words to the sun just before the eclipse happens.. and sure enough, it does
haven’t seen apocalypto yet.. releases on DVD in may