Film Impressions

DVD REVIEW: Winter's Bone (2010)

A HEROIC TALE

The America you see in Debra Granik's Oscar-nominated Winter's Bone (based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell) is very different from anything likely to come out of Hollywood and hence far more compelling, pulsating and gut-wrenching all at the same time. It's set in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, in a community that perhaps doesn't even exist in the consciousness of mainstream society. Here are crystal meth addicts and people who cook the drug living in shabby run-down tenements with ugly old trucks, litter and waste lying around what would be their front yards, menace and hard lines defining their unkempt faces, and yes, a code unto themselves that the law can't get it's arms around.   

REVIEW: Inside Job

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY

Charles Ferguson, the technology entrepreneur-turned-filmmaker describes what the banking industry did to the US economy through their heedless greed as a 'heist' where the looters didn't walk in with guns, but were the guys running the show themselves. Inside Job suggests that the indiscriminate deregulation of the financial services and insurance industries and the unbriddled spread of high-risk transactions called derivatives, has looted America (and, by extension, the world) of trillions of dollars and increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the country like never before; worse, rather than being prosecuted for their role in this scam, they continue to hold key positions in the Obama administration!

DVD Review: The Sea Inside (2004)

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

It isn't hard to fathom why Sanjay Bhansali took so readily to Alejandro Amenabar's Spanish film, The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro). Both the subject and the treatment run along a thin line between classical melodrama and tear-jerking excess. While Amenabar's film stays firmly on the former side, Bhansali's Guzaarish attempted the latter and couldn't quite deliver even as a self-pitying elegy of a quadriplegic. Based on the true life story of Ramon Semprado who got paralysed in a swimming accident and spent many of the next 30 years trying to convince the Spanish government to let him end his life on humanitarian grounds,  The Sea Inside is a dazzling piece of work which reaffirms human resilience while still making a compelling case for euthanasia. 

REVIEW: Biutiful (2)

THE HEART OF DARKNESS

The Barcelona depicted in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful is the exact spiritual and physical opposite of Woody Allen's vision of the city in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Gaudi's grand gothic architecture, cobbled streets littered with history and a carefree European lifestyle marked Allen's lyrical representation of the Spanish city. Inarritu's film is poetic too. But it's the song of despair, squalour and death set against a bleak working class landscape (magically shot by Rodrigo Prieto) of sweatshops, industrial chimneys, urban ghettos and restless souls looking for salvation.

REVIEW: Biutiful

AMAZING GRACE

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is one of the most exciting talents on the world cinema scene today. Amores Perros was enough to give him a cult following, and he topped it up with 21 Grams and Babel.

His latest Biutiful comes in a blaze of glory, including an Oscar nomination this year.  His star Javier Bardem, has also won a Best Actor nomination. Biutiful is the kind of complex film about a character not easy to pin  -- it weaves together to many strands in the protagonist’s life, has so much to say about contemporary urban life (it is set in Barcelona, but the ugliness, decay and violence could very well be Mumbai).

REVIEW: Utt Pataang

INTO THE MAZE
 
Another ‘disciple’ of Quentin Tarantino jumps out of the hedge, so to say, with a film that runs around in circles, and ends up nowhere. Srikanth V. Velagaleti co-writer and director writes a convoluted thriller, about gangsters,  femmes fatales, stolen money, thwarted love, and a loser at the centre of the cyclone.
 
The device of capturing a moment from various points of view to complete a jigsaw of events that take place in one night would have been exciting to watch, if the characters and what they were going through was interesting or novel.  Every low-budget filmmaker believes that a gangster caper is the way to go. Not everyone can make it tick.

REVIEW: Yeh Saali Zindagi

THIS LIFE SUCKS

It doesn't matter how many times 'newcomer' Arunoday Singh (this just happens to be his third release) kisses his screen wife (Aditi Rao Hydari) or the innumerable cuss words various gangsters and lowly scum use in Sudhir Mishra's Yeh Saali Zindagi. There's nothing provocative, spicy or spirited about the film. It's a limp attempt at an edgy comic caper of the Tarantino-Ritchie variety which evokes hardly any laughs and definitely not enough twists to keep you tangled up. The busy camera work and editing is irritating rather than engaging and the narrative, which tries to cram in too many characters and plots, simply ends up losing its way into blunder-land.

DVD Review: Conviction (2010)

FAMILY TIES

At the moral centre of Tony Goldwyn's Conviction is a very thoughtful question -- how much faith can a human being actually vest in another, and how unwavering can that faith remain in the face of the toughest resistance? Based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters (Hillary Swank, dependable) an ordinary waitress from Massachusetts who spent 18 years of her life believing in her older brother Kenny's (Sam Rockwell, dazzling) innocence on a murder charge for which he served a prison sentence based mostly on circumstantial evidence backed by his erratic, volatile personality.

REVIEW: 127 Hours (2)

TRUE GRIT

In the year 2003, director Kevin Macdonald made a thrilling and terrifying documentary called Touching The Void, about two British mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who went to Peru to scale a peak in the Andes and ran into rough weather due to unprecedented snow storms. On their way down, Simpson fell and broke his leg. The film traces his struggle to battle extreme conditions and climb down the rest of the mountain with a broken leg! It's chilling to the bone and the ultimate celebration of  the human spirit.

Danny Boyle transforms a similar real-life situation into a more audacious feature film, 127 Hours, a rare cinematic experience with drama, suspense, horror, humour, action and special effects blended to perfection and complimented by spectacular cinematography, editing and music. All of it, without seeming overtly showy.

REVIEW: 127 Hours

RARE COURAGE

After creating a sensation with Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle could  either have gone bigger, or made something totally unexpected. He has done the latter. It takes courage and confidence to make a film about a man trapped in a canyon for 127 hours.  The real life story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) is known, since he wrote a book (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) about it.  Most viewers probably know what happens in the end, and how he gets out, but still, you watch hoping that he will escape unharmed, since he is so brave.