Margaret (2011)

Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Writer:    Kenneth Lonergran
Cast:       Anna Paquin, J. Smith Cameron, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon

A young woman witnesses a bus accident for which she is partly to blame, and is caught up in the aftermath. where the question of whether or not it was negligence from driver that caused the accident affects many people's lives.

I saw this film in Film4's list of 100 must see films from 21st century and  it was in the top 20. I hadn't previously heard about this film and decided to watch it to figure out what the hoopla was about. It certainly didn't disappoint. The film is centered around this thoroughly unlikeable 17 year old girl who is bit of a drama queen. She is growing up in what she herself calls as a posh liberal Jewish background and represents the naive outrage that is seen among the Facebook generation. The accident was caused because she herself was distracting the bus driver and him not seeing the light changing to red. She initially tells the police that the light was green and it was an unfortunate accident because she felt sorry for the driver. The case gets closed and she is seen carrying on her normal lifestyle as if nothing major has happened but she later decides to change her statement after confronting several people associated with the accident including the driver. Then it becomes a moral crusade for her to get the driver fired and it appears she is not taking some responsibility for her part in it. This is done in a very subtle manner because she is selective to which people she is telling the whole story. She carries on making bad decisions which include seducing her own fucking teacher and after the sex she seems to be blaming him for the incident. This is a pattern throughout the film and the director is relating this to how the developed world reacts to situations like Terrorism and also why US seemingly don't understand why so many people hate it. This aspect of the film comes through during the various debates the girl has in her school and even the title of the film comes from an extract from a Shakespeare play in which they discuss why God is not concerned with the plight of the humans and to it humans are just like flies which need to swatted. Here one can relate to God as the US which is not concerned about the trail of destruction it leaves behind due to its Corporates and the meddling foreign policy. I just wish director kept his subtle style throughout the film and not spelling it out for the audience with that scene about typical Jewish response.

The film was completed in 2007 but release got delayed because the director couldn't make a final cut for a long time. Finally after several lawsuits this 150 minutes version of it was released, but another 180 minutes extended Director's cut is also available. Many have criticized its running time but it is totally justified to showcase the normalcy with which the protagonist carries on with her life. It is a great watch.

Rating: 5/5

Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013)

Director: Lars Von Trier
Writer:    Lars Von Trier
Cast:       Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LeBeouf, Uma Thurman

A self-diagnosed nymphomaniac recounts her erotic experiences to the man who saved her after a beating.

Lars Von Trier wanted the film to be released as a single one initially, but due to the run time of four hours he decided to release it in two volumes like Tarantino did with Kill Bill. It is the final one in Lars Von Trier's 'Depression Trilogy' with Antichrist and Melancholia preceding it. Melancholia is my favorite film of his from what I have seen. Like in Tarantino films, Nymphomaniac is divided into different chapters with Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) narrating them to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) during their conversation. Lars Von Trier uses the character Seligman as the representative of the audience with him asking questions that come to our mind and also sometimes he represents the director himself by delivering some worldly wisdom and clarifying his anti-Zionist stance which he says is different from antisemitism (Recall the controversy Lars was in at Cannes which got him banned from there). I was also reminded of the Dogme 95 movement in which he was part of when Joe was talking about the club that she founded with several rules.

As she narrates her story from childhood we are left to judge whether she is in the truest sense a Nymphomaniac. For a film that is part of a Depression Trilogy, it is very funny or at least the volume one of it. It is like a philosophical inquest into sex, love and loveless sex. According to Joe, Love is just lust with jealousy and lies associated with it. It is good that even though Seligman is in back-foot most of the time during their conversation, he is not intellectually slouch. The way she connects her story to his tales about fishing, music etc may not sound natural but I think it is intentionally so. Some of the illustrations, especially the geometric ones kind of reminded me of Dogville. Out of all the chapters, I found Mrs. H to be the most hilarious and I didn't even recognize that she was played by Uma Thurman. Fucking hell.

They show some scenes from Vol 2 during the end credits and it seemed more serious and violent. Critical reception was also less flattering for the volume two but I will certainly catch up with it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Locke (2013)

Director: Steven Knight
Writer:    Steven Knight
Cast:       Tom Hardy

Ivan Locke, a dedicated family man and a successful construction manager, receives a phone call on the eve of the biggest challenge of his career that sets in motion a series of events that threaten his careful cultivated existence. He drives of to handle the event which is his baby getting born to an ex-assitant of his and at the same time he is breaking the story to his wife and also managing the big fucking concrete pour that he was supposed to be in charge of the next day. As he says, at the beginning of his ride he had a wife, a home and a job and by the end he may lose all three.

If you go by the poster, it might give the impression that its a very intense film with all of it happening inside a car and no other actor apart from Tom Hardy is shown to us. It is certainly intense due to the situation he is in but it is also extremely funny. I sat through the whole thing with a smile on my face as an exasperated Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) deals with clusterfuck of a situation he has got himself into. He was supposed to be at home watching a football game with his family and going by the timing it must be a champions league encounter though player names that they discuss are fictional and so we cannot pin down the team they are rooting for. Locke, who grew up with his mother after their father abandoned them, want to do right to his baby even though he doesn't have any feelings towards its mother. He is also sincere to his wife and that is why he is informing her which he was anyways planning to do eventually but baby is coming out kind of two months early. He also wants the concrete job to go smoothly because of his love for the building and the fucking concrete which according to him is like blood. He just wants to be the complete opposite of his father who abandoned them and in between the phone calls he is ranting to his father whom he imagines to be in the back seat.

Steven Knight is known for writing David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. The filming was done inside the car which was driven around in an open top truck. It was done almost in real time and the only breaks that they took was for changing the camera's memory cards. The lights from traffic reflecting on the car makes it visually stunning and the soundtrack is also excellent. I even sat through the entire closing credits. IM global which is part owned by Reliance Entertainment was involved with this film.

Rating: 4.5/5

The King of Comedy (1982)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer:    Paul D. Zimmerman
Cast:       Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott

Aspiring comic Rupert Pupkin wants to achieve success in show biz by stalking his idol, a late night talk show host who craves his own privacy.

I was aware that it was not really a straight up comedy film even though the title might suggest otherwise. The first half of film is really creepy and is almost in the mold of a horror film while the second half reminded me of Dog Day afternoon. It is a black comedy on the celebrity culture and stalking associated with it. We are never made to sympathize with the Pupkin character but still we wish nothing bad happens to him at the end. I was really wishing that it was not based on any real life event and was glad to find it wasn't. That makes it even more brilliant because that is exactly how it would have panned out in real life with him also becoming a celebrity and probably ending up in fucking Big Brother. 

In the film there are plenty of sequences where we are being shown what is happening inside Pupkin's head and it could be argued that the entire last act was just him imagining things after his meeting with the talk show host turn out to be futile. I might have to see it again to check if the director is alluding to it but Scorsese himself told he was influenced by Michael Powell's film where the fantasy sequences are not differentiated from reality. Scorsese plants this idea on our minds by making the fantasy sequences very obvious in the first half hour of the film. 

The film is a great watch and I guess the best from Scorsese in the 80s from what I have seen (After Hours, Last Temptation of Christ & Color of Money). Fuck I haven't still seen Raging Bull in full. 

Rating: 5/5

Oblivion (2013)

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Writers:  Karl Gajdusek, Michale deBruyn, Joseph Kosinski
Cast:       Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko

A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.

The film is based on Joseph Kosinski's unpublished graphic novel of the same name. I was not too keen to watch the film because the director was also associated with Tron and it looked like another one of those typically loud Tom Cruise action film. Plenty of people hate Tom Cruise because of his personal life and his perfect portrayal of annoyingly cocky characters  on screen. Am not one of them and I rate him as one of the best to play such characters. People generally remember him for the Mission Impossible films, Top Gun  and for his frequent collaborations with Steven Spielberg in the early 2000s. For me his best roles were in Magnolia, Collateral, Eyes Wide Shut and Rain Man and I need to watch Vanilla Sky again. The thing with him is that if you take out the MI films, Cruise tend to pick some interesting films even if they are of big budgets. This habit of him has put himself in a dangerous position of being nether here nor there in the present day film industry. The block busters nowadays tend to be unoriginal leave your brains out kind and Cruise tend to act in original films save for the MI franchise. The good films generally come from the sub 20 million dollars budget levels and that is why am saying that Tom Cruise is kind of in the middle of these two extremes. It is encouraging that he is still doing some original stuff with Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow but his box office attractiveness in US has waned and both films did better overseas. But am extremely disappointed to see his future projects to be MI-5, Top Gun 2 and Jack Reacher 2. I would really love him to do a McConaissance before its too late.

Oblivion has great production quality and it takes its audience to be intelligent with the sort of twists and turns it takes without being too expository. It is a great watch and you will think about the plot holes only after you finished watching. I don't see any other purpose for cloning a human to just kill all other humans than merely being a silly plot twist. It would remind people of Duncan Jones' excellent debut feature 'Moon'. Overall the film is a real good one-time watch and is certainly better than the reviews it got.

Rating: 3.5/5

Vedivazhipadu (2013)

Director: Shambu Purushothaman
Writer:    Shambhu Purushuthaman
Cast:       Murali Gopy, Indrajith, Saiju Kurup, Anumol
Language:Malayalm

Three friends decide to hire a prostitute on the day of the Aatukaal Pongala (a Hindu festival in Trivandrum) when their wives are busy with the same festival

Film was produced by Arun Kumar Aravind and like in his other films Trivandrum is a major character in the story. The director Shambhu Purushothaman who is making his debut, a graduate from Satyajit Ray film and television institute, wrote the story also. Cinematography is handled by Shehnad Jalal and he should be getting a special mention because the visuals are really good. The film attracted controversy because of its unabashedly frank treatment of the subject and the juxtaposition of a religious festival with adultery would have alerted the overly sensitive moral policing assholes. It was initially denied censor certificate but finally managed to get released with an A certificate.

So finally about the film. It is a black comedy and despite being billed just as a sex comedy, it is one with brains. It is a frank treatment of subjects like arranged marriages which mostly forces people with not much in common into relationship slavery, societal hypocrisy, moral policing in the modern Kerala society and the overall creepiness of the society as a whole where sexual repression manifests into things like misogyny. The acting is good throughout by all concerned which is like a big achievement for modern Malayalam cinema with the general scarcity of talent. The humor is not consistently good with it sometimes bordering into slapstick territory but still there are plenty of genuine laughs. It is a shame that the film didn't do well at the box office since it puts all the supposedly 'New Generation' films to shame with its no holds barred approach. Still the ending of the film again is kind of a moralizing one without being too preachy and in your face.

Rating: 4/5

Left Right Left (2013)

Director: Arun Kumar Aravind
Writer:    Murali Gopy
Cast:       Indrajith, Murali Gopy, Hareesh Peradi, Lena
Language:Malayalam

Interlinked story of  three men (an evil politician, an eccentric cop & a former revolutionist) with different perspectives on life resulted due to confrontation of death in their childhood.

If my memory serves me right this film received quite universal praise when it was released. I decided to watch it after being impressed by the Writer-Director duo's previous film 'Ee Adutha Kalath'. To say that it was a disappointment for me would be an understatement. Am I missing something? Film got some helpful controversies accompanying its release due to its portrayal of the two distinct factions of communist party in Kerala led by VS and Pinarayi Vijayan. Rather than making a point about their ideological difference in a subtle manner, it chooses to do a caricature which is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. It wouldn't have been a problem if it stuck with the character stories like in the first half of the film, but it decides to make the problems in the party its center point with the ridiculous flashback scenes before the climax which had a distinct feel of them just trying to shoehorn all the characters into the revenge narrative.

In my opinion the film wanted to say something about the communist party but they ballsed up big time the way they did it. That is the problem with these multiple character story-lines which can look utterly ridiculous if they cannot pull it off with conviction. For me whatever that can be said about the ideological differences in the party has already been dealt with in Venu Nagavalli's 'Lal Salaam'. It is a political outfit struggling with its ideology in a capitalist world where it cannot operate without contradicting itself. The Mohanlal's character in Lal Salaam takes a sabbatical from the party to set a business up and be financially independent. He find himself ostracized from the party when he becomes rich as he is also classed as bourgeoisie. What is happening now in the party can be classed as kind of reverse of this with the party itself being run as a sort of business. 

Rating: 1.5/5