Un Film De Almodovar

'Distinctive’ is not an adjective that gets easily attributed to film-makers. There are those who supposedly make gritty realistic movies, others are famous for making poetic epics; we have the visionary stylists and then others who just about make the popcorn worth it. In the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s, an Italian maestro making movies that seemed straight out of his fantasies and throwing every formula out of the window introduced the word ‘felliniesque’ to the English dictionary. He spawned a great number of imitators and followers though none of them achieved anything close to his greatness until a baby faced Spaniard burst onto the world cinema scene. Pedro Almodovar's sets were brightly lit with all the colours of a garden in spring. His characters were those you would never meet until you had re-created a crazy story in the corner of a sleazy tabloid or had lived for a period of time in an alternate reality or had taken a seriously wrong turn to the seedy underbelly of your city. His women were beautiful, strong, wilful and independent, the men were usually weak or disgusting and his stories were….. Oh yes they were ‘distinctive’.

My first real interest in Pedro Almodovar was kindled by the Cannes Film Festival of 2006 (I think). That year there were some great samplings for the quality craving taste buds of every movie connoisseur. There was Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Wind that Shakes the Barley among many others. Volver caught my attention when I read the story synopsis. It was an impossible script, an absolutely outlandish plot to the point of being silly and yet everyone was raving about it. I finally got to see the movie only in 2007 and was mesmerized, mostly by the nonchalance with which the characters seemed to accept everything happening around them. There is an accidental murder at the start and unlike most movies it’s just a random plot point; no one seems to care much about it. There are so many under-currents running through the movie - Raimunda (played by Penelope Cruz) and her relationship with her sisters, her aunt, their past and suffering at the hands of their men; in short everything  that goes on in an everyday woman-centric world. The wonderfully rustic Spanish countryside adds its own flavor to the proceedings. There is such a celebration of Spanish culture in the routine happenings that to an outsider it’s fascinating. I was pleasantly surprised to see that someone could make such an engrossing movie showing just the characters instead of simply focusing on the crazy plot point running throughout the movie. A lesser film-maker would definitely have succumbed to that temptation (if you are wondering about the ‘plot point’ I am referring to, then let me assure you, ‘it’s different’ in a way even certain Spanish tomato sauces can never be). There is a song somewhere at the end sung by Penelope which is just pure magic, Volver; it’s the return, its redemption.

As I continued my cinematic love affair with Almodovar I turned my attention to La Mala Educacion (Bad Education) mainly because I wanted to watch the movie that is as personal to Almodovar as 8 and a half was to Fellini. The movie is about a film-maker who looks to stories buried in the corner of tabloids for inspiration. We see flashbacks of him at a catholic school where a close friend of his was abused by the head of the school. One fine day his old friend turns up asking for a role in his movie but the film-maker has doubts as to his true identity. Further along we see that the 'real' friend has turned into a highly disturbed transsexual who is looking for money to get breast implants. There are so many small stories, both real and surreal blended together so seamlessly that I was fascinated with the style. So many layers of storytelling in two hours of movie watching was absolutely unbelievable to me. The movie felt like a collage of scenes put together without any thought to cohesiveness and yet I feel this was the only way a story so haunting, disturbing and touching could ever be interpreted on screen. At this point I was marvelling at the sheer courage of this Spaniard and the utter disregard for anything that even came close to the word cliché. I was worried I might have reached my climax of adulation but then not for nothing is Todo Sobre Mi Madre considered his magnum opus.

How many themes can one movie explore with a just a handful of characters. Loss, grief, betrayal, prejudice, adulation, redemption and above all love. In Todo Sobre Mi Madre we see it all. A mother named Manuela  has just lost her son in a freak accident while running on the road to get the autograph of a stage actress named Huma. Unable to handle the grief she flies back to Barcelona, the city of her youth where she used to be a sex worker. She runs into an old transvestite friend of hers named Agrado in what is probably the seediest, shadiest piece of area ever filmed. Almodovar gives us a scene that is in a nutshell; genius in conception and unparalleled in execution. An open air red light area (that’s the closest I’ll ever come to describing it in five words) where people from every walk of life and I mean literally every walk of life have gathered to satisfy their most carnal of desires. Manuela knows this place because she used to work at this very site in her youth. The friend, Agrado is probably one of the most colourful characters I have ever seen in film and all she wants to do is to get another breast implant(she’s had a few before, not to mention a face lift and other such indulgences). She introduces Manuela to a nun, Rosa played by Penelope Cruz (an Almodovar favourite) who wants to go to some remote corner of the world to do charity work. Pretty soon we find out that the nun is pregnant and also has AIDS passed on to her by the same wretch of a man who had gotten Manuela pregnant. Rosa’s parents have serious reservations (being Catholics of course) and hence Manuela starts to care for Rosa at her home. At the same time she finds employment as the secretary of the stage actress who was responsible for her son’s death. There are scenes here that are so heartfelt, filled with such raw emotion, characters of so much flesh and blood that it reaches a very remote place within you and you resonate with the pain of each and every character. There is a scene towards the end where Agrado gives an extemporaneous performance on stage that sounds so true and so rich in life’s lessons that all of a sudden that disfigured face radiates a serene beauty. That’s the power of an Almodovar movie.

There are movies that have surprised me, those that have sent me into raptures, those that have entertained me thoroughly and those that have inspired me to write stories on my own. But an Almodovar movie has always, without fail, opened up a whole new world to me. Not a world that exists in someone’s fantasy or one that existed in the last century or a different dimension but a world that exists right here in the times we live in, a world that we choose to ignore as we are cocooned in our lives. A world full of prejudices, filled with unmatched suffering, heart breaking pain and pure beauty.

This post is an entry to the Reel-Life Bloggers contest organized by wogma.com and reviewgang.com

Movies that deserved a lot more credit......

Sarkar Raj

I liked Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1. Reason – Evolution. If Godfather had Michael Corleone as an upstart, a really smart one at that, Godfather 2 humanizes him. Shows him as a power hungry ruthless cold blooded Mafioso who doesn’t mind killing his own brother. If Shankar Nagre already achieved that by the end of Sarkar, in Sarkar 2 we see him as a do gooder who does anything and everything to do what he thinks is right as he keeps reminding us throughout the movie. Also the power struggle is not just with the outsiders but also in a more restrained manner with his own father. We can see the thin rope that the father-son walk on as Shankar on more than one occasion disagrees with his father and gets his way. Varma has made a brave movie. Luckily he didn’t sit back on the success of Sarkar and let the script take the easy way out. This movie doesn’t have a opening-middle-end kind of storyline. Instead it has some restrained angst, subtle sub-texts and most importantly a great father-son bonding. What it doesn’t have, is a sound editor, a non-cliched villain and cohesiveness. The movie had a lot of highly predictable Varmaisque sequences. The big tea-table meeting, the opening bang with Shankar playing a tape recorder and killing his henchman and sipping coffee, Sarkar waving out to the crowd like a modern day messiah of the masses, the the big project that promises lot of money but Sarkar has reservations, the whole Rao sahib angle and the kidnapping and the hired killer and and and….But somewhere towards the middle of the second half Varma makes a great deviation from predictability, something so rarely seen in Hindi Cinema. This one moment of pure deviation made me love the movie. He has always been brave and idiosyncratic but after watching Aag I really needed him to redeem himself. The rest of the movie I then realized actually plays around this one moment and the whole conventional Hindi movie sequential movement of storyline went straight out of the window. Because here the things you didn’t notice before suddenly become apparent. However the ending summation by Sarkar is a little drawn out and too elaborate for my liking, I still somehow liked the monologue next to the portrait. See there are small things which you like in the movie that stay with you. A movie as imperfect as Gangster would still stay with you for some amazing sequences however short-lived. Same is the case here. Varma overuses his by now famous shadows and thin ray of light scenes and his camera worships his lead actors. He wants them to be seen as great powerful people and yet we see conflicted people all around. Shankar haunted because he murdered his own brother, Sarkar again because he thinks he couldn’t change his son and Anita (played by a corporate attire clad Ash) whose father is more a businessman than father figure. Abhishek walks through the whole movie with a constipated expression. The Sr Bachchan does a little better and Ash is good when she doesn’t have to talk much. But this is a Director’s movie and as is the case with most director movies, the plot is a moot point. The speeches and dialogues tend to get a little heavy at times, but well they are pardonable this time around. Welcome back to form Mr Varma…

Jabbi Cigarette Jalti Hai – No Smoking

Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking is not just an incredibly original off beat film, it's also a wonderful tribute to some of the best artists of all times. The film supposedly based on Stephen King's Quitter's Inc (I wonder if by the time I die every story that Stephen King has ever written would be adapted into a movie) has a lead protagonist by the name of K. Coming from Anurag Kashyap I'm sure he had Frank Kafka's The Trial in mind. Then there is a bathtub scene that is unbelievably brilliant in its conception. I say that because everything you need to know about K is in that one scene. He epitomizes narcissistic arrogance.  Then there is his wife played by Ayesha Takia who doesn't have much to do but gets your attention nevertheless. We see how his smoking drives them to such point of disconnect that she asks for divorce as an Anniversary gift. We have a squint eyed Ranvir Shorey panic at the sight of a cigarette and declares vehemently that he can't smoke because he loves his wife. Then we meet Paresh Rawal. Hitler loving, finger cutting Baba Bengali. We see K walk down and down and down into an absolute abyss which he can't get out of without signing a contract and cheque for approx 21 lakhs( Baba Bengali takes only 1 rupee of that). Oh by the way that run down godforsaken place has a fingerprint analyser that keeps track of all their patients. He is allowed to go with the condition that he is never to smoke and if he does he will start losing things he loves, starting from his fingers to his wife. Then the film gets so arcane and so metaphorical that I'm surprised this movie was released on the big screen. This is a DVD movie with voice over atleast for the second half. It took me about 2 hours after I came out of the movie to completely convince myself that the whole underground sequence was purely virtual and under the effect of some drugs and stuff. Then in the last 30 minutes there is a great tribute to the Schindler's List gas chamber scene and I think also Fellini's 8 and a half. Bob Fosse's Cabaret sequence is shot brilliantly and Gulzar's lyrics; well what more can be said about Gulzar's writing anyway. I was surprised to see such scathing attacks on the movie. The theatre I was in was probably filled with people who expected an easy on the mind film and were hugely disappointed. That's the problem with some Indian moviegoers, they want variety and yet complain even more than normal when they are provided that. I had to endure similar mutterings and crude remarks during Brokeback Mountain. Well that's about that. I liked the movie for being brave and so obviously trying to be distinctive. As Ebert would say 2 thumbs way up.

Eastern Promises

How do you slit a man's throat? Or more importantly how does it look when you slit a man's throat? After watching so many movies where slitting a man's throat happens with one smooth move of the knife i watched something much more believable in Eastern Promises. It is not like cutting butter. It is more like cutting a hard undercooked piece of meat. I wonder if this was done so that the movie opens with a bang or just to show how difficult it is to kill a man in any way. Well the man being killed is a member of the Russian Mafia. The next scene is in an Indian owned Grocery shop in London (i think) where a heavily pregnant girl is asking for some medicines and is leaking blood from you know where. She is rushed to the hospital where she delivers a baby, leaves behind a highly important diary in the hands of a mid-wife named Anna played by Naomi Watts and dies. Naomi Watts is of Russian origin who has just broken up with her lover (who was black) and is living with her mom and uncle. Her uncle is a typical vindictive relative who believes that any inter racial mingling can only lead to disaster. He also has no qualms to say that this was the reason why Anna lost her baby (she was apparently pregnant once). Anyways now Anna wants the diary translated so she can understand what the dead woman has written. She cares for the baby as if she was her own and names her Christina. On the other side there is the Russian mafia. Semyon who owns a restaurant is one of the leaders. Anna goes to him for translating the book and finds herself strangely intimidated by the sweet talking man. His son Kiril is the one who ordered the first scene murder. This brings us to the most interesting character in the movie. His name is Nikolai played by Viggo Mortenson. He is the driver cum Undertaker cum lot of other things. Now he is supposedly an expert at disposing the bodies. So he cuts off the fingers of the dead man and as he is in this process he nonchalantly puts a cigarette to his mouth and puffs on it. Maybe there are real life characters who are so comfortable in the company of a dead body but is it really necessary to show this in the movie. I don't know, well anyways the dead man has powerful friends as well and now the diary is also a problem for Semyon. Turns out Anna's uncle also knows what's in it. This is where the lives of so many people get intertwined and leads to an extremely violent sauna scene towards the end. Atleast the ending is liberating and has some hope in it. Even the most cold blooded people have a heart and have emotions, thank god for that. I really needed to know that after watching No Country for Old Men. There is something very earthy about a David Cronenberg movie. A history of Violence also was the same. I don't know if this is offbeat cinema but it is simple cinema. Nothing flashy or gimmicky about it. The characters are all flesh and blood people and more than anything else they are all a character study than an actual movie. Even after watching A history of Violence I thought there is nothing special about the movie and yet I couldn't forget it in hurry and same with Eastern Promises. This makes me believe more and more that atleast in my case I remember the characters and not the scenes or the plot. Over the last few years I have noticed something odd about the leading men and leading ladies in movies. The men are becoming colder and more detached, less human. The ladies on the other hand much more sensitive. I don't know if this is just an independent observation  but after watching Eastern Promises I can't help but believe so.....

This post is an entry to the Reel-Life Bloggers contest organized by wogma.com and reviewgang.com

May he rest in Peace forever

There have been very few actors who have made me believe in just one movie that they are on their way to becoming screen legends. Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain was one of them. Ennis was a character of few words. Conflicted not because he had emotional scars, he was conflicted because he couldn’t have the freedom to love by choice. He was caught in a time where there were rules about who a man could fall in love with. He was a man of few words and in Heath Ledger he found a face, a voice and a soul. The performance was so remarkable that I completely forgot that I was only watching an actor and they say this is the best compliment you can give to an actor. As he watches Jack’s shirt over his own at the end of the movie we can actually see those remarkable eyes brimming with such love and longing. In Christopher Nolan’s (and let’s not forget his brother Jonathan here) Dark Knight, he is silent no more. He also doesn’t have love or for that matter any traces of humanity. As he expounds his theory of Chaos we realize that this is no one dimensional character. This is flesh and blood and a soul that has been disfigured beyond recognition and I’m not talking about the scars on his face. I was looking forward to this performance for so long now and yet when I watched him I forgot he was Heath Ledger, I really and truly did. What a remarkable actor. He once said “If something is not worth throwing your life into it’s simply not worth it”. He was talking about the roles he was playing and how he gets so obsessed with them. He had just started getting the good ones and he won’t be getting any more of them.
What a remarkable movie!! Where do you begin with a movie like this? So many ideas and Nolan is not just satisfied with hinting at them, he explores each one of them. So many super-hero movies in the past have begun with a lovely idea and then gone back to exploding cars and out of control aeroplanes. But not here. When I watched Batman Begins I was finally happy that my favorite super-hero was in safe hands. Batman is not a super-hero. He is just an unbelievably rich man who is so conflicted with his past that instead of brooding over what he has lost (which he does anyway) he decides to change things around him. In Batman Begins we saw him living among the scum of society, the underbelly so to speak and try to learn a criminal’s mind. We see him make the choice of trying to save Gotham City rather than destroy it. He is no boy scout (thank god for that), nor is he one of those who sacrifices everything for the greater good. And in Nolan’s hands this amazingly rich character finds life. Oh and of course everytime Christian Bale even breathes you believe that no man has ever deserved that bat suit more. The amazing thing about Dark Knight is that there is nothing here, no opportunity or chance that was wasted. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, those rare species of actors who can do wonders with even the driest of lines are used so well here. Aaron Eckhart, an actor who I didn't think much of, shows me again how ignorant I am about the true talents in Hollywood and how a master craftsman(read Nolan) always uses the best tools at his disposal. Gary Oldman, oh why haven’t I seen more movies of his and why did they not use him more in Harry Potter movies. See, some directors know how to use actors and write for them and not just for the main guys. It’s so much more entertaining when you have more characters to remember. And thank God we had Maggie instead of Katie (A good craftsman always corrects his previous mistakes). Then there are the action sequences which are not mindless but so refreshing and entertaining. The two ships on the sea with the inhabitants facing a moral dilemma was pure and unbridled class. The truck chase on the batpod (is it just me or the pod looks so much cooler than the bat mobile). And then there are scenes with the joker in there. The agent of chaos. He is evil not because he can kill people with a pencil or slit them open with a knife. This man is evil because he knows that the best way to destroy a man is to destroy his morality first. Make a good man make impossible decisions and make him live with regrets and he would beg you to slit him open with the knife. “Kill you? I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me”, he says to Batman. And truly, the Joker completes the movie. Ledger moves, talks, sucks on the insides of his mouth, licks his lips, wields his knife and laughs that venomous laugh as noone else in history. The movie asks so many questions that it is tough to believe that this is a comic book movie. Our world with rules, justice and morals and all put to test if we have to make impossible choices. The tragedy rivals Shakespeare, the intensity rivals Dostoevsky and the beauty; yes the beauty rivals a Mozart symphony. Dark Knight truly is an all time Masterpiece and Heath Ledger is truly a Legend……

Mithya

Indian Cinema is going places. People with a good story to say in an Indian context have good buyers now. Actors who may play small roles in big budget commercial movies have a way of making a name for themselves. All thanks to a bunch of convention defying in your face film-makers and multiplex audience who have no qualms about paying 200 bucks as long as they get something fresh every weekend. 5 years ago a movie like Mithya would have a very limited audience and even more limited number of buyers. Now thankfully things are different. Rajat Kapoor has taken a leaf out of the great Kurosawa’s book of greatness and paid a great tribute to his Kagemusha, another film that almost didn’t get made but for the timely intervention of George Lucas and Coppola. I still don’t know how to describe this movie. Dual role: no. I guess living in the shadows of someone else would be better. Ranvir Shorey plays a struggling actor who as luck or in this case bad luck would have it has a great identical twin like resemblance to the current underworld don. Now when the don is shot dead a few of the rival gang members hire him to impersonate him so they can become the de-facto rulers of the underworld. The whole elaborate training schedule is full of fun and has too many quirks which in this case I truly enjoyed. Now here’s the thing. How a man behaves in front of his hench men, outsiders is well known. But how does he behave with his immediate family members. Especially his wife and kids. Now to get over this small glitch we are told that in the accident that nearly killed him our don lost his memory. So now whatever he does is ok. But what is absolutely over the top maverick twist of all twists is that he actually loses his memory in a freak accident in a bar. Now he himself doesn’t remember anything, all the elaborate planning and training has been purged from his memory. We see him adjust to his new family and surprise his wife and kids with a new found tenderness and dare I say love. At some point I even believed that there might be a happy ending for our hero. But then he takes too many liberties with his role and the conspirators who somehow can’t obviously let him live in peace ruin everything by leaking the news. The movie is full such madcap brilliance. Never before I think has a man on celluloid been so confused with his identity. So lonely, so scared and so happy also to finally have people care so much for him. Ranvir Shorey has delivered a masterful performance. Please oh please give him something this year. All the supporting cast must have been so happy with their roles that I don’t think anyone charged any money. I’m sure Naseer Sahab has stopped taking money from these new age film makers on the promise that they would give him atleast some role in their movies. I mean he must be so happy to play roles now that actually use atleast some of his skills. All in all we need more movies of this kind which make movie watching so much fun. It’s not the laugh out loud kind of fun, it’s the oh I want to get out my laptop and start writing a new story kind of mind triggering fun. Just imagine how much fun it is to even write a story like this let alone make a film out of it.

Definitely not for Old Men and not for me too....

Maybe it's a great movie, well it is a great movie, of course it is, who am I kidding, i don't remember the last movie that gutted me so badly. Yes it is a great movie. But in a highly (and i mean highly in comparison to the empire state building) depressing way. I don't know what the Coens are playing at. If they are going to make such a fantastic movie they might choose a slightly less gut wrenching subject. No country for old men is dark in a way that would put Cradle of Filth to shame. There is a character here, Anton Chigurh played by Xavier Bardem who makes Dr Hannibal Lector seem like a gentleman who plays golf and spends weekends with his wife and 2 kids. I mean as scary as Lector was he was still someone different from all of us and not a common man. Anton is common. Well that's what Bardem makes you believe and that's why what he does is so much more chilling. Now we have seen evil men on screen who laugh out loud or exclaim their greatness after commiting a gruesome crime. Anton simply looks on and you would think he feels nothing at that point until on a closer look you can see quiet distinctly the thrill in his eyes. Initially I thought he was playing the cool guy. I thought when he said what he said was actually said coz he wanted to be funny. Then in the gas station when he tosses the coin in front of the owner and asks him to call it I realized with slowly spreading dread that this man would kill just for kicks.This man enjoys every moment of murder. And he has a very innovative way of murdering people. I won't even go into that for it's plain cold and hideous and crude. Of course later on in the movie he uses a gun which gives some semblance of culture to his murderous existence. After that everytime he looked at someone and his gaze lingered for more than a few seconds on that person, a chill ran through every atom in me. I was actually praying in my head, please not another one. And it must be something about Xavier Bardem's performance that he makes even a watcher of the movie, sitting on the sidelines, sit up straighter and in some cases recoil just by smiling slowly. Who is this guy and were was this powerhouse of a performer? Well he is after some money and that money is with Llewlyn played by Josh Brolin who thinks he can out run his hunter. Also we have a sheriff in the form of Tommy Lee Jones who is about to retire and can't understand what is happening around him. He is lucky I would say for he doesn't yet know Anton. The movie opens with the lines, " I once caught a man who had killed a girl. The police called it an act of passion but the man told me that he simply wanted to kill someone and he had wanted to do so for some time". There are sequences that stand out vividly in memory. The gas station coin tossing, the cark park shootout, the hotel cat and mouse chase, oh all of them plain cold murderous. I don't know if this movie had an emotional core at all. Atleast Anton doesn't want you to believe so. But on second thoughts yes there was. Tommy Lee Jones brings it along as he speaks. He has resigned to the events and circumstances. They are beyong his control. He is too old now to control them. As one of his friend's tells him. You can't stop what's coming, and it won't wait for you. Expecting it to wait is just vanity. Again sadness, maybe I was wrong in looking for happiness in this movie. Maybe it was intended to be devastating. I don't know, i just hope i don't live to watch another movie of such "greatness".

I Atone Myself

One of the biggest problems in a movie adapted from a book is this: A book can explain what the character is going through, what he is thinking, how he or she feels about another character, back story and so on and so on. A movie can't do that if a director is only interested in showing how visually creative he is and if an actor thinks that just by saying the dialogues in the movie he will get an oscar. Now English Patient is a movie that comes to mind. Considering that it is my all time favorite novel, i still thought the movie captured the mood of the book well though it did play around with the prominence of the characters. It was still a good movie and of course the fact that i love both the ladies and have the highest respect for the lead actor helped in my perception of the movie. The problem most directors and well a flaw that most of them have is they do not understand that visuals are for hightening a mood and not the mood itself. It is the characters that stay with you after the movie and not the scenes. Blending them to elevate the final effect is what they set out to do and end up falling in love with their camera and the set decoration. Akiro Kurosawa understood this better than anyone else and did this with great success.Sanjay Leela Bhansali on the other hand does it with great failure. I hate it when Guillermo Del Toro is called a visual stylist. No visual stylist could achive what he did with Pan's Labyrinth. Same goes for Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain comes to mind. And then recently I watched Atonement and this is going to be my third example from now on. Before I begin sample this, I got a DVD from the roadside, it was camera print, bad audio quality no subtiltles and hence I couldn't understand what they were saying in french(some parts are in french). And yet I loved it. This could have been a silent movie and i would still love it. The camera doesn't move, it meanders. There is so much time for us to know what the characters are thinking that we do not need dialogue. I mean any person with an ability to feel a semblance of emotion would know that Robbie and Cecilia are in love and Briony also has a crush on Robbie. And then there are scenes seen from different point of views. And this we understand because so many times we have seen things that seem one way but are actually the complete opposite. I guess after the movie i'm supposed to feel sorry for Robbie and Cecilia but I feel more sorry for Briony. The poor thing. How is she supposed to know to control her emotions at 13. She doesn't know how to handle them. And I don't think she's to blame either. James McAvoy is a fine actor. Ryan Gosling has some company at the top for the best actors of the next generation. I need to watch more movies of his. Keira Knightly is a goddess. If I wasn't already in love with her I would after seeing her as Cecilia. She is wonderful in a way that only brits can be. Kristin Scott Thomas, Kate Winslet... they can talk, laugh, cry or be bitches and have you in love with them. Even the character of Briony was played by an exceptionally gifted girl. Just look at her see through the window at Robbie and Cecilia and see the emotions pass on her face. It's one thing to talk and another to be silent. I'm sure silence is harder for most. Joe Wright-the director, masterful. His second big movie and i've loved both, the second one more than the first. If people think Pride and Prejudice is easy to make, think again. Anyone who has heard of English Literature knows the story. So if you can make a movie and still excite people with the great romance of Mr Darcy and Miss Bennet, then it must be special. Same goes for Atonement. It's a dreamy movie and it's so easy to get lost in the beautiful British Landscapes, but no. Instead he gives us a scene to beat all scenes. It's a long shot and i mean this in terms of duration. It's a shot of the Allied Army at Dunkirk. For a moment I thought someone forgot to switch off the camera and then after sometime started thanking that unknown person and then as my mind came out of the reverie i realized, that's exactly what he wanted to do. An absolute nonchalant shot which so wonderfully shows the chaos of war and the people fighting. It's as if someone dropped you right in the middle of an army settlement and you are looking all around you and taking it all in. Magnifique!! Truly amazing cinema. The ending is again so great and haunting, it just illustrates the power of a book. Briony's book, her Atonement.....

Move over Mr Bond, Jason Bourne is here

I guess it was way back in 2000-2001 when i met Jason Bourne in Identity. I have to say here that I am not much a fan of books like the Day of the Jackal and stuff and hence had kept away from the Bourne trilogy as well. Just as well because otherwise I wouldn't be marvelling at the best fictitious super killer (that doesn't quiet say it!!) ever created. Jason Bourne is the greatest, he makes James Bond and his cotorie look like school kids (no offence intended to my 3-4 ft brethren). There are very few roles in cinematic history that you can say an actor was born to play. For instance Tom Hanks was born to play Forrest Gump, Roberto Benigni was born to play Guido in Life is Beautiful and Matt Damon was born to play Jason Bourne. Such is his impact that when I can home after watching Ultimatum I couldn't understand where Damon ended and where Bourne tookover. The supporting cast is great especially the two ladies Stiles and Allen but Damon is a one man army. The reason why I liked him so much was because he is cool without trying to be cool. No snappy witty one liners no weird poses with the gun no heavy gadgetry, just good old fashioned common sense and of course his razor sharp brains. As Pamela Landy says " We are already 9 hrs behind every other agent we've ever tracked". In Identity there is a scene in the cafe when he says " I know the registration numbers of all the six cars parked outside, I know the man sitting over there weighs 215 pounds and can handle himself, i know how many of the waitresses here are left handed, I know the best place to find a gun in this place is the back of that truck parked outside and I know that even at this altitude I can run flat out for half a mile before my hands start to shake." He is not proud of these things, he just knows and he has been trained to use this info if needed. There is a scene towards the end when he enters the CIA office. The scene is so cool that though I had already seen parts of it in the trailor i was still amazed and was automatically clapping along with my fellow watchers in the theatre. Not once does Bourne try to prove that he has outsmarted his chasers. He moves with the sole knowledge that it would take just one mistake from him to finish him off, a mistake that of course never comes. Another thing about him that I loved was the minimal use of fists. He avoids any direct action as much as possible. The scene where he calls the police in Berlin telling them that he has seen a few suspicious Americans and then fires some shots in the air was so hilarious and yet of such genius that you can't help marvelling. I hope Ludlum writes another prequel book as to what training did he have to go through to go from David Webb to Jason Bourne. At the end when u see Nicky Parsons smile light up the screen you know for sure that no matter what happens it is impossible to catch this man. The Bourne series has had two wonderful directors, Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass. It's amazing how two very different styles of filmmaking can yield such consistent results. Of course Identity had the best fistfights but Supremacy and Ultimatum had chase scenes worth dying for the difference between a steady camera and hand held camera. The highlight of the series for me was at the end of Supremacy when Bourne is watching Landy from the rooftop and tells her," Take some rest Ma'm, you look tired". There is just one way of putting this; move over Don, because it should be "Bourne ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi, namumkin hai"