TAKES ITS OWN SWEET TIME

DIRECTED BY NICHOLAS STOLLER 

STARRING: JASON SEGEL, EMILY BLUNT, RHYS IFANS, CHRIS PRATT, ALISON BRIE, DAVID PAYMER, MIMI KENNEDY, KEVIN HART with DAKOTA JOHNSON and CHRIS PARNELL 

Tom Solomon and Violet Barnes have a five-year long engagement before they break it off and go their separate ways. Their next one lasts for about an hour – five minutes on film. Too long, you say, are the five years they spend together. So long you actually feel the boredom; share the frustration. The next one blows past like a breeze, and you’re scrolling down title credits before you know you are. 

The success of Nicholas Stoller’s ‘the Five-Year Engagement’ (and yes, it is successful as a movie-watching experience) lies in the fact that it shows the long and winding road. What limits its success is, perhaps, the fact that it shows too much of it. I watched the film in two separate sittings. One was before a late morning class. The other was today, a day after Christmas eve. The way it looks, it must have been strategic. Time-out from everyday life, I figured, could’ve made me as intolerant of the film as Tom and Violet were, at one point, of each other. Christmas break gave the right setting to set things right. And it added to the cheer to watch the film do the very same. 

Tom is played by Jason Segel, a role that can very well have been written with him in mind. He’s a chef from San Francisco who can’t understand why there are other places in the world to go to with good old California back home. Violet, who’s played by Emily Blunt, is British and exists to take him away from there – as a person and as a contributor to the plotline. We ask ourselves why she must be British. We answer saying she needn’t. It’s not to Britain that she drags Tom to – it’s just Michigan, after all. 

Violet had earned herself a post-doc in Psychology at the University of Michigan, under the guidance of Dr. Winton Jones (Rhys Ifans), an old Rooster who keeps at it with the crows because he’s still got game. He’s as comparable as he can be distinguished from the character played by Greg Kinnear in Amy Heckerling’s ‘Loser.’ He does nothing to earn your disrespect, and it’s a tad disappointing to see the film do nothing to vindicate him. Like the French cook in ‘Addicted to Love,’ for instance, who deserved his fate probably only because he was crystal-clear in a murky overall. 

‘the Five-Year Engagement’ has its own share of dispensable characters as well – characters who can’t be this dispensable, if you think about it. Dr. Jones is just one of them. On Tom’s side, we have Audrey (Dakota Johnson), a “23-year old airhead, who probably doesn’t know who the fucking Beatles are.” Tom tells her he needs to go back and explore what he had with Violet when he has ‘the Talk’ with her. Audrey goes “Well, she’s an old bitch. There, I’ve explored her for you!” 

I could see writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber smirking at that statement. We all know Audrey is makeshift for Tom. So is the professor, for Violet. That’s how Stoller designed it to be. Neustadter and Weber made no distinction between Summer and Autumn in ‘(500) Days of Summer,’ in spite of the fact that Summer came with a whole movie-load of the good stuff. Autumn would be the next movie, they’d say.

Stoller can be criticized on that count, but lauded on many – including the very same. Tom and Violet have something they haven’t got with any of those other people they’d go on to meet. They have five years of time invested. Five years that would turn six and not four. Violet, we hear, has been in a four-year relationship before. Gideon walks up to her at her Grandmother’s funeral and shows her “what four years look like.” The film is rich with such illustrative moments. To impact you, they require your support. And they earn that support with a draught of promise that asks you to not give up on these people. You find you won’t. 

In its own line of defence, ‘the Five-Year Engagement’ is a ready bite taken into the stale doughnut of life that goes nowhere. You don’t have to find the right place to pull over and park. You don’t need the right van to get your wheels in motion. An old ambulance not beyond repair, you’ll find, would do just fine.

TRUTH BEING TOLD, NOT WORTH IT

DIRECTED BY ANG LEE 

STARRING: SURAJ SHARMA, IRRFAN KHAN, ADIL HUSSAIN, TABU, RAFE SPALL, SHRAVANTHI SAINATH and GERARD DEPARDIEU 

Let me tell you a story. There’s this family of four that relocates to Canada from India, selling their zoo off and taking along a couple of dozen species on a cargo ship as a livelihood option. The Father, the Mother, the Elder brother and Pi. The cook on board is French and compulsively mean, and there’s a Buddhist who offers rice with plain gravy – meat is murder, the family maintains; the cook would kill for food that he serves on the ship. It is a cycle, we presume, only one turn of which we get to see. 

The family goes to sleep. Pi doesn’t. Not only are thunderstorms sources of entertainment, they also save lives. Pi becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck, illustrated in what could be the most glorious shot since that of the Titanic sinking. 3D brings the dark out in the spectacle – we see only 50 percent of what Pi would’ve seen. Ang Lee shows us that the beauty of disaster lies not in scale-up but a close-in: You feel what you experience, you experience what you’re put in a boat with. A cook, a staunch Buddhist and your Mother. 

Besides the fact that Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) has too much water in his life than his lungs can hold, besides the fact that he, when 12 years old, throws his ‘soul’ around like the goats offered to his highness, Mr. Parker; besides the fact that there are so many little details we brush aside to get to the ideological depth of the movie – like how Pi is clean-shaven, Italian mafia-styled, after months at sea with his follicles active everywhere else; like how the faux-Tamil accent, the most ridiculous thing in the world, is used to establish overdone stereotypes – the Father, the Mother, the Older brother, the Dancer girl whom Pi likes and who likes him back... 

Besides all these things mentioned above, ‘Life of Pi’ is the story of a human coming face to face with the spectacle - Pi, before the world, and you, the viewer, before the film. Now, let me give you more of the story before I proceed to comment.

The Buddhist breaks his leg and badly with his jump onto the boat. Its decay is disintegration of whatever humanness might’ve existed otherwise. And it brings the Cook out – the pointless racist, a man who is considered pure evil. Brotherhood is as Brotherhood does, and the Buddhist becomes a three-course meal that Pi and his Mother take no part in as, obviously, they are vegetarians. It’s only about time that the Cook turns to the other two on board, both willing to throw their lives down for the other. 

Anyway, if the Harry Potter books have taught us anything, it’s that a Boy needs to suffer the guilt of having survived to become a Man who doesn’t care for survival – it’s the dawn of morality. The Mother goes down fighting, the Man is unleashed at that. “I did to the Cook what he did to the Buddhist guy,” Pi recounts to the people from the company who, after 227 days of life at sea, aren’t willing to buy this plausible an explanation. “It’s too simple,” they say. “We want an experience, not an excuse. A spectacle, not a solution. We want bizarre – not boring.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. They call it the ‘truth.’ They seek it. 

So he tells them another story, like Poirot does in ‘Murder on the Orient Express.’ The Cook becomes a Hyena, the Mother becomes an Orangutan; the Buddhist becomes a wounded Zebra, and Pi becomes Richard Parker, the Tiger, whom he watches from the side and encounters as both adversary and thickest friend. This time, there are whales, flying fish; a carnivorous island populated with nothing but meerkats. The people from the Company buy it – if Romanticism was truth, they’ve had their share. They leave happy with Pi distraught at having watched the Tiger, a reflection of his own self, disappear into the wilderness without a growl to say goodbye. 

Pi narrates this story as an adult to a writer, a version of Yann Martel, the author of the Booker-winning novel. He is played by Irrfan Khan, an exciting actor (except that his accent butchers language) who paints both sides with performance you can buy. The question, as it seems, is what you choose to believe. Like on the Orient Express, one story has the power of sequences to back. The other is a monologue with the camera closing in, where, in delirium brought out by grief, we see genuineness. On the Orient Express, they choose to ‘decide.’ Is it a decision? If it is, then the film has achieved what it aspired for – to be as ruthless as the Cook in a man-eat-man world. Life has been thrust upon us, it says. So are you, I’d say in return. 

Pi asks the writer what he chooses to believe. I do not think his answer would be the same as that he used in ‘Life of Pi.’ It is not merely a flip of sequence and monologue – it is a decision. Romanticism against bitter truth, which, nonetheless, is also Romantic. The road never forks. ‘Mulholland Drive’ is ambiguous – ‘Life of Pi’ isn’t. The stories cannot be inter-changed unless you have decided to, and your decisions shall suffice. The stories are redundant. ‘Life of Pi’ wastes your time. It is not argumentative. It double-sells a stance that it has already taken.

After having taken the pains to open the oyster, you don’t find the pearl where you’re told its absence is wisdom. Much like this review of mine – after almost a thousand words, I have given you nothing. Except for the fact that I shall take a stance but also tell you about it. It doesn’t make my argument stronger, but I believe it’d make the experience comforting. 

Like the 3D in this film. ‘Life of Pi’ is probably the best of its kind; an incredible human adventure as a Boy who, I think, represents you and does well at that. It is sincere with its rendition of an irksome narrative that wins your attention but doesn't deserve it. It’s a choice made in full awareness of an existing argument happening elsewhere, in a different story. And after two hours invested, you’re a survivor yourself and I’d think you deserve that story. Not this one.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

WRITTEN BY THOMAS BLOM HANSEN

Jason Bourne is a well-trained CIA assassin who, as goes the plot of the series, tries to find out who he really is. What is he looking for, really? In ‘Bourne Identity,’ we find he has a dozen passports under a dozen aliases and a whole world insistent on taking him down for reasons he isn’t aware of. As he looks into why this is happening to him, he goes on a deeper, much more profound quest – for identity. Identity, here, is a question of legality and closure, where Bourne would like to see himself as a citizen again with a single legitimate passport and pertaining documents, a place of residence, perhaps, and people once close to him, whom he would rediscover in the process. 

The journey with Bourne is organic. There is a human being fleshed out even in the ruthless assassin he is, a character that we find we can empathize with and root for. And three films down the line, by which time we get familiar with and fond of Jason Bourne, we, along with the man himself, discover that he actually isn’t Jason Bourne. He is, in fact, called David Webb, an army man adopted by the CIA for an operation and ‘converted’ to Jason Bourne in a training module, where Bourne is a character, an identity that is created and ascribed to the man that Webb had become. 

Now, there are two points where his identity becomes problematic as I see it. The first is when David Webb becomes Jason Bourne, a process illustrated as a classic example of CIA brainwashing. The second is Jason Bourne coming to terms with the fact that inside the Bourne machine is a man who once lived – someone, he learns, is called David Webb, who was ‘transformed’ to Jason Bourne through an excruciating set of initiation rituals. 

Aside from, or perhaps even including, the set of characteristics he had been force-fed with, Jason Bourne is still who he is. Or isn’t he? So he is, in our heads, where we had gotten more than accustomed, through piggy-back rides on his shoulders in chase sequences where we bonded on adrenalin rush. To us, he is Jason Bourne; we shall not be swayed that easy. To himself, however, we can’t say. 

Thomas Blom Hansen, in ‘Violence in Urban India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’ and the Postcolonial city’ writes that the ‘proper name’ is something that, when replaced by a set of characteristics to describe the thing in question, just doesn’t work the same way. The term “a grumpy, cynical, almost worn-out archaeologist with an eye out for adventure and a knack of handling it,” doesn’t do as much justice as calling him ‘Indiana Jones,’ or ‘Indy’ for that matter. But it could very well be because we had been conditioned this way, to an extent that we find comfort in representing him through his name and an uneasiness otherwise. 

I’m aware that my examples have been individuals (and fictional characters, that too!) so far, and I understand that a city can, in no way, have an individual for a metaphor on the lines of the ancient Greek theory of society as an organism. But then I believe the problem has been put on the table, alongside Blom Hansen’s theory on the proper name. For an entity as vast and of indescribable diversity as a city, a proper name or, more simply, the ‘right name’ is practically impossible. You get used to a name through its constant reiteration, most of which has got to be authoritative, as Blom Hansen claims. 

The name, in case of representative naming, is both cause and consequence of what it signifies. In case of a city, as much as the name, if it has to be ‘proper,’ needs to represent the space, historical context and, if possible, the collective(?) identity of all its people, it also would go on to define the same for its people. ‘Mumbai,’ for instance, is not just (‘not even,’ as Blom Hansen would say) a consequence of the ‘Maratha pride,’ but also serves as a cause for the same. As he rightly quotes Zizek here, “the identity of an object is the retroactive effect of naming itself – it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of an object.” Jason Bourne is aware that he is Jason Bourne, where ‘David Webb’ comes in to confuse. As is, unless I’m terribly mistaken, the case with Bombay and Mumbai. 

The fundamental argument of the book, which Blom Hansen spoon-feeds to us, is made clear in the first few lines in a sub-heading called ‘the Argument’ that he writes in the introductory chapter. Let me quote him word-by-word so as to not deprive you of the full blow of his statement that, I believe, I would take away in an effort to paraphrase. 

This book analyzes the historical formation of the political discourses, the identities and the conflicts that changed Bombay from being the preeminent symbol of India’s secular, industrial modernity, to become a powerful symbol of the very crisis of this symbol.

I think he does a world of good in putting across the core idea of his book in four (three, here) lines that give the reader the requisite amount of clarity in proceeding further with it. And he does himself a disservice in that he isn’t being elusive about it. 

As the statement puts across, we find ourselves up against two facets of Blom Hansen. One is the historiographer/storyteller who, like an old mariner, mixes stories of the state and the city with stories on how he collected those, meshing them into a compelling narrative as perceived and told through the perspective of one who was as beguiled as he was startled by what he saw, read and heard about. 

On the other, we have the critic, who could weigh the information he gathered and who doesn’t hesitate to take a stance, as he unabashedly says so himself. In his persuasion to see things the way he’d like to see them (which he has averted to a substantial degree, the fair amount of neutrality that, I think, he has achieved), the critic might have hit a few blind spots, but the historiographer never loses track. There’s a story in hand, it’s compelling, and he’s delightful in his rendition of it. 

All through my reading of the book – and I shall, first and foremost, admit to an equal ignorance of both scenarios – I couldn’t help but try to put Mumbai and Chennai in a tabular column. Both were ‘Presidencies’ during British rule. Post-Colonialism, thus, applies to both, as does the conflict on the ‘proper name.’ Again, I shall restate my ignorance in the lack of an argument to support the existence of such a conflict, but I am, mildly, aware of an amount of nostalgia in the former that has people only grudgingly accept or merely become accustomed to the latter. For instance, I come from an institute that still continues to call itself ‘IIT Madras.’ So does ‘IIT Bombay,’ for that matter, actually. The reason here, however, is a certain pride that the institution insists upon keeping close to. And the ‘brand.’ 

Another similarity I find is in the concept of a Tamil nation (a concept I wouldn’t entirely dismiss either), not far from the situation in Maharashtra, with the identity of the ‘Maratha’ and the heroic notion of Shivaji that has been naturalized through the ages. Tamil, the language, has been the rallying point for political parties as the DMK and more aggressive fronts like the MDMK and the PMK, and even though I wouldn’t peg them alongside an entity as severe as the Shiv Sena, there’s still a certain level of manipulation and opportunism that’s definitely comparable. The cause is indefinite as Blom Hansen’s idea of identity based on language; and trust is a first-class ticket for a plane that won’t take off. 

It’s like the man who feigns drought in Summer in a village so he could make a Rain-God and become priest in a quest for control. If anything, the policy has been Machiavellian; the idea of a ‘Maratha’ is loose, and harmful in that it is exclusive of a whole bunch of people, which becomes problematic in a cosmopolitan environment and, more importantly, in the making and existence of a city of multiple identities that can’t be put in a single bracket. A Tamil nation, in this way, implies the same, where settlements of any other linguistic group will have to be excluded and/or marginalized. Of course, the whole idea is combative against existing or imagined discrimination, but the solution is not as simple as a ‘Do not enter’ sign – which, in the case of exclusionary policies, is implied and not even explicitly stated. 

It’s here, perhaps, that I was most disappointed in Blom Hansen. A collective identity of a city on the whole might be practically impossible. But is it not necessary? Like I said, ‘Indiana Jones’ is not “the rogue archaeologist who wears a hat and cracks a whip” – he is ‘Indiana Jones.’ What can ‘Mumbai’ be, then? ‘Bombay’ was, in no way, better, as has strongly been stated. Under the veil of elitism, modernity and aspirations were intense social, cultural and political anxieties that burst out with the press of a trigger. And ‘Mumbai’ did nothing to make it better, if not intensify it further. 

I agree that Blom Hansen has done well in presenting us with the problem – understanding is the first step towards change. But has that step taken us any closer? 

‘Violence in Urban India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’ and the Postcolonial city,’ deconstructs the name to be an inadequate signifier, at least in the case of calling Mumbai ‘Mumbai.’ Perhaps we have reached the state where we number cities and not name them, with an excuse of ‘starting from scratch’ to tackle the problem of space, historical context and collective identity. But then again, there’d be a section of society that comes up and says that the digits don’t add up the way they ought to. And another that gives a new number that represents them better. The argument is endless, my review is not. I stop right here.

COCKTAILS AND DREAMS

DIRECTED BY MIKE FIGGIS 

STARRING: NICOLAS CAGE, ELISABETH SHUE, JULIAN SANDS, RICHARD LEWIS, STEVEN WEBER, EMILY PROCTER, MARISKA HARGITAY with XANDER BERKELEY and VALERIA GOLINO 

There is an interesting conversation somewhere in the middle of ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ which, you’d think, suggests one of two legs that the film would go ahead and stand on. You know Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) is a writer for Film who’s currently out of a job. Here, he sits at a table with Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute who takes the chance and agrees to have dinner with him. He calls her an ‘angel’, much like how he sighed to Terri (Valeria Golino) when she wouldn’t go to bed with him; much like how he threw lines like dynamite at the woman at the counter at the bank, when he went to cash his severance cheque. 

In front of him is food he can’t eat for he has nothing but drink on his mind. Sera, however, has questions on hers. And Ben has the answers – smart ones, at that. Here’s how it goes. 

Sera: (casually) “Why are you killing yourself?” 

Ben: (monotonous) “Interesting choice of words. (pause) I don’t know. I just know that I want to.” 

Sera: (probes) “Are you saying that your drinking is a way to killing yourself?” 

Ben: (quick, yet monotonous) “Or killing myself is a way to drink.” 

Sera: (smiles) “Very clever.” 

Every critic I’ve read has talked about this conversation as a sort of fulcrum that the ideological whole of the film balances itself upon. ‘Killing oneself as a way to drink’ would be written on flags of existentialism. Two characters come to mind – both from movies fifteen years after, both portrayed by Ryan Gosling. One is the Driver from ‘Drive’ who drives. The other is Dean Pereira from ‘Blue Valentine’ who questions the concept of ‘having potential’ mentioned in the same manner as ‘being talented.’ Both these men would answer questions with questions; perhaps the Driver would rather remain quiet and use a hammer instead. 

I’d like to take a look at Ben’s first response in addition to the second, which appears to be most quoted. Why is he killing himself? He just knows that he wants to. And then we have the classic distinction between the ‘means to an end’ and the ‘end as a means in itself’ to define existence. It’s the vice that splits thought throughout – one renders ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ a sad tragedy of human existence, the other proceeds to glorify the same, speaking of triumph. It’s clear that Ben didn’t start drinking because he lost his job. Is he killing himself for that reason, then? His wife has left him, along with their child. Is that why he’s decided to die? Or had they left him because he had decided to die already and couldn’t deal with a last-gasp scenario? And is that why he goes after every woman he meets, calling an ‘angel’ someone who’d, finally, let him be? 

I try to compare Ben with Walt Grace in John Mayer’s ‘Submarine Song’; it works. Perhaps all he wanted was his own homemade, fan-blade, one-man Submarine ride. And a mermaid who swam with him until the coast of Japan. What do you think?

I have immense respect for a Film that’s Film and not a visual rendition of a novel or a stage-to-screen adaptation of a Broadway spectacle. ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ has been adapted from a novel by John O’Brien, a man who killed himself a few years after having published it. But never does it look like a transliteration of text. Every frame looks measured, every shot seems composed and crafted, but with the roughness of a ‘capture’ – which, of course, takes us right to the aspect of performance. Cage and Shue role-play as Ben and Sera in something like a prank-camera setup. Ben reels and rambles in most scenes. He’s the man who is perfectly coherent in a state of complete cluelessness. He has fixed his destination for himself, where all he needs to do is snake his way through. 

Think about Sera, who’s yet to sign the contract. She has read the terms and conditions, she loves the man. One of the decisions could be to postpone consent. Another would be to post-date it. She does neither. She signs the papers, staggers with responsibility. There are times when she drops it and asks him to see a doctor, because she has needs of her own as well, and desires for a life with him in it. This is frustration that humans are capable of – on the other side of the line that divides acceptance from want. She is human. So is he. But then, he’s one with an escape route, granted that Death gives you face-time with the Goddesses of Love, in which case Ben can still put his octopuses on the table. Sera, on the other hand, has none. 

“I accepted him for who he was. And I didn’t expect him to change. I think he felt that for me too. I liked his drama. He needed me. I loved him... I loved him.” 

Mike Figgis writes, directs and composes music for 'Leaving Las Vegas' - it's crazy how many uses he finds for Don Henley's version of the soul classic 'Come Rain or Come Shine.' He has control of the entire tone of the film, with camera in close cooperation. And he works a miracle in that he casts Elisabeth Shue. Vegas isn’t Queen of the Desert anymore. You’ve seen her fight men in ‘Cocktail.’ Here she fights fate itself, and is glorious in how she concedes defeat, hiding pain in the folds of her brow; and in the little teardrops she can't conceal.

ON THE RIGHT TO CAST JONAH HILL

DIRECTED BY PHIL LORD and CHRIS MILLER 

STARRING: JONAH HILL, CHANNING TATUM, BRIE LARSON, ICE CUBE, ELLIE KEMPER, DAVE FRANCO, ROB RIGGLE with CHRIS PARNELL, PETER DeLUISE and JOHNNY DEPP 

There was a time when I ranked High-School movies based on how they handled Senior Prom. I thought I was past that time, more so because I thought I stopped watching High-School comedies for the heck of it, but then comes '21 Jump Street.’ While a film like ‘Superbad’ and, more recently, ‘Easy A’ could do away with the whole idea of prom happening, '21 Jump Street’ keeps it at the heart of a sequence. I think about it, it kind of makes sense. Prom’s a place where people go crazy, spirits soar high, people go high on spirits. That, or a newfound drug by the name of H.F.S. – an acronym I don’t even have to expand on. 

Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) have been together for as long as jocks had coexisted with boys in retainers. They bond on rejection and an odd sort of concurrence in sense of humour that has happened in any movie that has ever featured Jonah Mister-Bold-Letters Hill. Have you ever thought about it? The only way to be friends with a Jonah Hill character is to be as dirty as he can be. It once was a Seth Rogen thing. He had rendered himself versatile after. 

Together, Schmidt and Jenko speak a lot of words that have either four, five or twelve letters in them. There’s not as much inventiveness in humour, but Hill and Tatum have enough command over timing and share a decent enough chemistry to make the buddy-system work. Did I mention that they end up training at the same police academy and become partners in the force later on? They’re given bicycles instead of patrol cars – which is the thing about an action comedy, I guess. Where you lack in action, you write some lines; you make Jonah Hill say them. 

I had a problem in that I found I'm so used to Jonah Hill that I was dying to have Tatum cut loose and let some lines fly, if not take entire sequences in hand. Hill is too much to take. The man is a spoilsport, I’m not even kidding. Let me give you an example. There’s a scene where Jenko tells a certain individual that he’d ‘beat his member off with both hands’, which is forced humour at its peak and yet works because Tatum keeps his face intact and maintains a level of innocence to render it believable. The man he addresses and some cohorts of his think he’s mad. Schmidt, a.k.a. Jonah Hill, has to step in to clarify. He does what is called the Jonah Hill routine – which means he explains exactly what it means. It’s funny because he can be nonchalant about a clarification as petty as this. It works because he’s Jonah Hill. 

This is a reason that, I find, is becoming unconvincing to me as time goes by. Soon, Mr. Hill would reach what I’d like to call the Michael Cera stage, which is a point of no return. Better comics have known better than to head there. It’s a destructive place to be – for themselves, and for humour in itself. 

Anyway, in what’s perhaps the funniest scene in the movie, Capt. Hardy (Nick Offerman) tells Schmidt and Jenko that they don’t have what it takes to hit the street and are, literally, sent back to school. Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube) takes charge. He’s the stereotype of a foul-mouthing Black cop stereotype who has a few funny lines to deliver. Taking his own course of time through digs at pop-references, he tells the two of them about how a new drug had been found in circulation in the school they’re to enroll in. Their task is simple – “infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier.” Schmidt and Jenko become Brad and Doug McQuaid in an abandoned Korean church. They might as well have been baptized. 

Like any movie with multiple identities, ’21 Jump Street’ sets out to play. On top of the alias, we have another switch. Brad and Doug (whoever is whoever) are interchanged – they’d now have to undergo the additional ordeal of taking each other’s classes. What's sad is that it never ups the game. Jenko gets Chemistry with Ms. Griggs (Ellie Kemper) who, when he tells her he’s got to go to the bathroom, she feels the need to too. And Schmidt gets drama, ironic as it might be. They dread their classes, but they make peace with them anyway – with benefits. To Jenko, it’s friendship with a group of science geeks. Schmidt gets Molly (Brie Larson), who looks a little more realistic than High-School, for a change. Then there’s Eric (Dave Franco) who’s the new kind of ‘cool’ and the gang that Molly’s a part of, which Schmidt infiltrates en route to going for gold. 

Oh, and did I tell you that reliving high-school has the two cops go déjà vu on a popularity contest? That, a test of faith, an empty chase, a severed penis and Johnny Depp constitute the latter half of the film, which ends with the two cops doing what they had initially set out to do – to recite the Miranda rights right. 

Where buddy-cop-comedies are concerned, there have been too many. ‘the Other Guys’ with Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, Kevin Smith's disaster flick ‘Cop Out’ with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan – we even had an 80s TV-to-screen adaptation in form of Todd Phillips’ ‘Starsky and Hutch’ (Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller) – all in under a decade. While it’s fun in case of an action-hero-comic pair and we have the action star trying to come down to the comic’s sensibilities, it’s better when it works. Wilson and Stiller were a gem of a pair, that way. Even Wilson’s successful camaraderie with Jackie Chan in ‘Shanghai Noon' comes to mind.

Which brings me back to where I started. Jonah Hill could even be a bad casting option in that he’s a show stealer. You put him in a movie, you put him alongside someone like Russell Brand in 'Get him to the Greek', who can stretch him on his own ground. Not Tatum, even if he’s not half-bad. He’s quite the revelation, actually. 

In that case, I’d have to stick to my original point – not Jonah Hill. You have the right to cast him in your movie, he has the right to take charge. I reserve the right to remain disappointed – with an evil smile at how Johnny Depp got shot.

TAKE THIS, SHE SAYS; I REFUSE

DIRECTED BY SARAH POLLEY 

STARRING: MICHELLE WILLIAMS, SETH ROGEN, LUKE KIRBY and SARAH SILVERMAN 

‘Take this Waltz’ is a film that promises but one character of remarkable authenticity only to cheat us in the end by reducing that person, that character, to a cameo. In its defence, there have been films that have been more hostile towards their audiences. ‘Addicted to Love’, for instance – that piece of sadism which beat one of its characters to pulp simply for being more mature than the rest. The French might have had to think a million times for a while before they headed out west after that film, post the rush that ‘Green Card’ might have generated, what with an Andie MacDowell waiting for every Depardieu in line. Of course, I mean that figuratively. 

Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) is that woman. Margot (Michelle Williams) is who she isn’t. One talks about dealing with dissatisfaction in a relationship, the other goes through the same. Geraldine is married to Aaron Rubin (Aaron Abrams) while Margot is married to his younger brother Lou (Seth Rogen, deflated). Geraldine has been married for about a year, Margot’s been married for two. From what we see, they have come a long way since. 

Well, Geraldine not much, actually. Her case might be jitters – what she thinks is concern could be called ‘paranoia.’ Margot, in fact, labels it so and it’s perhaps in the fact that she thinks her situation trumps Geraldine’s little problem. Geraldine calls for attention, Margot worries about the fact that she’s running out of love to give. By that, I mean she has lost the spark in the relationship that I find I can argue into being. Margot looks to be the kind of woman who would role-play in reciprocation to the attention she gets. She’s a perpetual Maggie Carpenter without a Gere-shift in place. Lou treats her to a splash of cold water every day as she showers with her eyes closed. She tells him they’ve got to call a plumber. It’s a Rickshaw-puller who, however, comes to fix the situation. 

The whole film revolves around Margot and her trials and tribulations, so let me take time off to talk about Lou for a while. First and foremost – and this is crucial – he is played by Seth Rogen. The humblest I’ve seen of him was as Ira Wright the struggling comic in ‘Funny People,’ where he rejects a girl for having broken rule number one. There’s perhaps a strand that separates Rogen from Ira Wright; Judd Apatow would know. Explosive or not, Rogen is confrontational. You throw a punch at him, he’d throw the F-word in return as he asks you why. Lou, in that way, is a plain-clothed version of Rogenality, and yet has the honesty the actor has always armed his characters with. 

So there’s humility on the one hand, there’s meekness on the other. And I don’t think it’s right to let a coin decide, let alone an antithetical script. 

If anything, it is the template performance of Williams’ that has me bring both films up in the same context. ‘Blue Valentine’ came to mind too often. Both films, of course, have her in the middle, in a similar (if not the same) kind of mess. In both Dean Pereira (Ryan Gosling) and Lou Rubin, we have men who have but a very slight hunch on what could have gone wrong. And there’s only so much that we know they can do about it. Like Daniel (Luke Kirby), the Rickshaw-puller-artist-sexy-beast, points out, all he (Lou) does is cook Chicken. (I haven’t mentioned it already, but Lou is an author of a popular line of Chicken recipes) And then he asks her if she likes Chicken. The answer is obvious.

‘Take this Waltz’, thus, is overstatement of a point that has been made so often it’s a smudge on a wall with dozens of prints on it. The characters are stereotypes who explain themselves as well – I sadly thought of talking Teletubbies. The film not only borrows its title from the Cohen/Lorca song, but also plays it on top of a montage that shows Daniel giving Margot what he so blatantly promises her in the beginning, a time when Lou didn’t want to gouge her eyeballs out. We have about a hundred minutes of runtime on a twenty-minute script – with the star value and the effort that appears to have gone into each performance, we could have had a half-decent short film that promoted tourism in Canada, given how passionate as romantics their Rickshaw-pullers are. 

I haven’t watched ‘Away from Her’ yet, so where Sarah Polley is concerned, I cannot judge. But I’d still like her to know that in a “Grass is Greener on the other side” concept as this, she can’t cast Seth Rogen as a house-cat husband, how much ever of a fabulous job he might do. Unless the grass in question, of course, has certain narcotic properties, in which case he’d be the perfect fit. 

BLADE-IN-CHEEK MADE BLUNT WITH OVERUSE

DIRECTED BY ANURAG KASHYAP 

STARRING: MANOJ BAJPAYEE, NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI, RICHA CHADDA, HUMA QURESHI, JAIDEEP AHLAWAT, PIYUSH MISHRA, JAMEEL KHAN, ANURITA JHA, RAJKUMAR YADAV, ZEISHAN KHAN, VINEET KUMAR with REEMMA SEN and TIGMANSHU DHULIA 

The fact that I’m covering part I and II of Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ together in my analysis is not to say that they’re to be considered together. They are, let me clarify, distinctively separate films and are intended to be so. I shall, however, stick to addressing both films in the same review for the very same reason that I opted to watch both films at a stretch that lasted about 320 minutes of my life – to save myself from the trouble of having to do the same damn thing twice in succession. And if that isn’t irony, then I don’t know what is.

Kashyap has always been one to look out for, what with his intricate sense in shot-taking, framing and storytelling in general, where he could energize a story with sheer treatment. He’s one of the rare Indian filmmakers who bends with the story rather than dictating it through sequences; in his films, I observe sequences that exist without pressure and not more than a slight motivation by the story, giving enough of an invitation for the viewer to engage and quite intimately at that. 

But where there’s entropy, there’s predictability as well – predictability which exceeds the confinement of style and signature. For someone as ambitious with his cinema, Kashyap is painfully limited, incredibly unimaginative; wasteful with his extravagance than wise. He could treat you to 5 and a half hours of an epic adventure and leave you with little felt. ‘Artificial’, I think, is a word that wouldn’t quite cut it, which ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots’ epitomized. In all ways, ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, both parts I and II, are better films in the sense of comfort that the filmmaker has with the story he’s chosen to tell. If ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots’ was bad translation of a text that he didn’t understand, this gangster epic is a transliteration to colloquial text, read out by a bunch of skillful readers in a struggle with timing.

How Anurag Kashyap writes a script almost sounded like a range of Kalki Koechlin jokes that I conceived back when I watched her screw around with acting and writing in ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots.’ From what I heard (which could be my source’s own unromantic notion), he arms himself with a pack of cigarettes and alcohol and the cinema that he likes, and hugs them together at his desk to set the wheels in motion. This, in no way, is to accuse him of being a plagiarist, but it is, nonetheless, a fair idea on how his world shrinks to the space of a screen when he sits it down with a notebook and a pen. An effect that I’ve found to be conspicuous in what I’ve watched of him. 

Perhaps I have too much of bias where intertextuality is concerned. With it, I seem to demand a set of characters who are capable of it; who, at the end of the day, justify the intertextual element and give it a right to exist. Let me give you a not-so-remote example from ‘Ratatouille,’ which I happened to watch over lunch today as it was on TV. Anton Ego, the food-critic, orders for ‘perspective’ and a wine to match. Then he proceeds to ‘give perspective’ when the waiter is baffled and asks him to get something that would go well with a 1947 Cheval Blanc. Chef Skinner, waiting for Linguini to disappoint, says, in a gruff tone to match his disguise, that he’ll “have what he (Ego) is having.”

Think of the scene where Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee) gets killed at the gas station. The reference needs no introduction; we’ve all, at some point in time, seen Sonny get knocked and rather ruthlessly at that, en route to sister Connie’s place in ‘the Godfather.’ At the end of the onslaught is a cinematic treat with three of the best things about the duology in place – sound, camera and performance – as Sardar crawls out of the wreck, gun in hand and holed like gauze with the amount of gunshots on him, and staggers around for a while before he collapses, a piece of Sneha Khanwalkar’s glorious soundtrack in the background, a song that’s potentially a favourite. The scene is as wacky as Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) ear-cutting in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ with ‘Little Green Bag’ playing and him doing a jig to it. Sardar Khan, who is kind of a blend of the hot-headed Sonny and the bum in Mr. Blonde, empowered by a subtle performance by Bajpayee, pulls it off. And yet I was left wondering if the scene should have been there, stretched beyond limit as it was, for the sole reason that it was the last shot of a film that was desperate for a heroic end.

I’ve always considered ‘the Godfather’ films to be a duology where I think the third film exists by itself – as a continuation and a build-up on existing characters than the ascent-to-power stories and a virtue-ethics course that the first two were. It was consistent as a confession where I thought judgement day had long gone by. Granted that, it seems too coincidental (and even more blatant) that ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ was proposed to be a two-part film that covered two generations of an ancestry with cameos by a third and a fourth. There’s as much patriarchy where religious custom comes as a stronghold, the men uphold as much of it as the women provoke, if not more. 

Speaking of women and provocation, we have two spread over the two films who ask for heroes of men they either wed or spawned. One is the acid-tongued Nagma (Richa Chadda), the tormented wife of Sardar Khan and mother of Danish (Vineet Kumar) and Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The other is Sardar’s mistress Durga (Reemma Sen), an import from Bengal who is saved from one kind of prostitution to enter another. They both expect of their sons what they could never get from their husband. To Nagma, in a command of intense passion and devotion that wanted her husband alive, it is revenge. Durga, who never cast as much of a thought on devotion, demands legitimacy and appropriation of power. These things are usually expected of wives and mistresses if cinema’s taught us anything at all. Kashyap’s credibility, in both cases, rests on the strength of performances, and in that he, I felt, was in safe hands.

The third woman of any importance (and in no particular order) is Mohsina, who exists to intimidate Faizal, being as much of a knockout as Huma Qureshi’s debut performance makes her to be – tall and almost smiling and with eyes that speak of mischief. In her I see an exciting new actor along the lines of favourites like Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. Faizal would have to rattle the whole house to get to rattle her, but Qureshi’s Mohsina just needs to sing her pet lyric, one that was used, to my dismay, as much as punch-line in a John Woo movie. 

That these men are defined by the women in their lives is interesting to note. Sardar finds other women because he’s ashamed to face his wife. Faizal plays passive-aggressive in a relationship he holds in the palm of his hands and knows it as well. It also correlates with his fluctuation between strength and vulnerability in a life that goes with the ganja he does. Danish, to complete the picture, is the emotional fool not unlike Sonny Corleone who misses the toll-booth/petrol-pump because his father gets there first. 

Definite (Zeishan Khan), in that way, is arbitrariness – the dotted line on which the film is drawn as the structured end-product. He has no boundaries and is almost unguessable, a fact that irked me in that it was too much in convenience of the writers and director. Definite, in essence, is the undefined and thus is a play of irony. He has the ambiguity of a Catherine Tramell where there’s seduction in not knowing when he times his strike. Or that’s how it’s supposed to be, except that it’s here that I’d take Ebert’s track. Suspense in excess keeps the viewer out than in. It’s exciting in the eve of ample information, wasteful when there isn’t. But I have to admit that the beauty of Definite is that he isn’t even a suspense to begin with. He is, so to say, the Chekhov’s gun of the duology, a realization that asked for a better actor even though it worked in that he was not as conspicuous. 

I’m aware that, up until now, I’ve said more good things than bad things about a film I said I didn’t like – if this was an argument, I'd have lost it already. ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ does dig deep into concepts and I can’t comment on its factual elements, having watched the films like I was a native of Cannes and like I caught it there at the festival than right here in New Delhi, where my alienation came right down to the fact that I need subtitles to understand. This also puts me in a bad position to judge the film on grounds of authenticity on how it captured the region and the dialect and if or if not the performances cohered with the same. However, it wasn't new to see Kashyap’s resourcefulness in capitalizing on history and pop-culture, something I had a sneak-preview in ‘Dev D’ where he made a story out of an MMS scandal that went around a while back. 

I think my fundamental problem with the films (put together) was George Simmons’ dissatisfaction with his own performance on stage in ‘Funny People.’ In his words, “it wasn’t a pee, it was a shit – it took too long.” And it left me with too little, to top that. ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ is mock-Godfather with Tarantino wackiness and a breath of Kashyap's humour that’s crude, distracting and oddly-timed which works when not in excess. There’s an ingenuous sequence where the set of brothers and friends plan and execute a killing that’s almost like untying and tying a knot on your kurta with a phone on each ear and too much cheek to spare. That scene was sheer brilliance. Also amusing are the conversations between Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia, excitingly subtle) and son J.P. who can’t do enough to impress his father. 

Too many characters with too much intersection and with emphasis on too little – makes me want to ask a lot of questions, but I wished to ask just the one. Why ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’? It’s neatly executed, well-crafted and largely entertaining; it’s not 'old wine in new bottle.' It’s new wine in an old bottle that reeks of nostalgia, raises the bar and tastes cheap in the end, contrary to the labels stuck on it – ‘the Godfather’ duology and the Tarantino handbook. Kashyap stands the weight of the films’ hefty performances (by Siddiqui, Bajpayee, Dhulia, Chadda and Qureshi) on a thin crust of soul without a core to support. It’s fancy blade-work in a gunfight that he initiated in the first place - tiresome, futile, but amusing. Or, in his own words, it hits the ‘tangent’ and not the ‘perpendicular’ in a pepper-spray routine than a shrapnel-packed explosion that it tries to be.

THE MAN IN TRAMP'S CLOTHING

“Listen, Matthew! 
When Chaplin wanted a beautiful shot, he knew how 
– better than Keaton, better than anybody!” 

Theo (Louis Garrel) is almost aggressive in his defence against Matthew (Michael Pitt) in Bertolucci’s ‘the Dreamers’ (2003) as they compare Chaplin and Keaton on who was/is the better filmmaker. Of course one could agree to disagree, but would that work for an apple of my eye as opposed the orange on your mind whose citrus, you think, refreshes you? Where it’s human to compare and it’s prudent not to. 

Chaplin is, beyond doubt, the biggest star in the world. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson – they can all vie for his position, but the extents of endearment don’t quite match. Chaplin was and is the epitome of ‘universal appeal’ across time and space, a consequence of him being able to make a canvas out of film-reel and finger-print his way to a masterpiece – in every portrait, every shot; every burst of unimaginable creativity in a performance deeper than the spectacle. 

The comparison between Chaplin and Keaton is almost a comparison between the head and the heart, taking two people with separate realms of influence. Chaplin has long been branded the king of melodrama, the ‘tramp with the golden heart’; the idealistic pantomime act soaked in emotion and spiced with spirit that the establishment was intolerant to, at that point in time. The biggest doubt cast on Chaplin and his quixotic endeavours, thus, is that of contemporary relevance, or any relevance, for that matter, to real world solutions as opposed to romantic notions – a doubt that doesn’t question his greatness but his pertinence. While Chaplin is the world’s biggest showman, Keaton is considered to be more. 

It’s in this line that the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek, plays a crucial role in exemplifying Chaplin as one of the most profound of filmmakers – in whose depths are layers of psychology from a man who understood humans by understanding himself. Zizek, thus, empowers Chaplin with a psychoanalytical perspective brought to those 'beautiful shots' that the world continues to be in awe of, now for more than their visual and emotional impact. 

Take, for example, this shot from ‘the Circus’ (1928), one of the very few films before ‘Limelight’ (1952) with an autobiographical overtone – it can’t be denied that Chaplin slipped in elements of his own life wherever he could, his shots and sequences being statements to a world he couldn’t meet through any other means. Outside, he was the Ladies’ man, famous for his affairs and linkages. But the screen was the space where he could be what he strived to be – an idealist that the world (and himself, as a part of it) had rendered him incapable of being. 

In ‘the Circus’, Chaplin plays his usual Tramp, parked, this time, beside a travelling circus. Merna Kennedy plays the girl on the sawdust waiting for the angel Gabriel to save her from her step-father who ran the circus. The Tramp starts off well, an accidental star in a show he revolutionized. The circus does have clowns, but he’s branded ‘the Funny Man’ in a show of irony. He holds his act as ransom to save the girl from ill-treatment, she reciprocates with gratefulness on her part. 

As is the fate of Chaplin, the die-hard romantic, he construes kindness to be ‘love’ – that which he’s so deprived of. His love has no sexual connotations to it, and in that it is strange how conclusive he is in name-tagging it. His is an attraction without the ‘attraction’; that of being in love with a woman who “don’t even appeal” to him, like Dylan once sang.

The shot comes right after he eavesdrops on a conversation between Merna and a girl-friend of hers, about a man she’s fallen in love with. The Tramp thinks it’s him, does a jig with happy music in the background – another facet of Chaplin’s genius – and buys a ring to propose. Then he hides behind the curtain again and listens in as she tells her friend that it’s the new tight-rope walker – a tall gentleman, perennially suited-up. Reading between the lines, we see an analogy with the silent-talkie divide in a paradigm shift that broke many careers. Chaplin did sustain the turn of the tide to a great extent, though, and is one of the very few rare exceptions, that way. 

The entire film is in fast-forward (Chaplin shot at 12 frames per second and projected at 24), but the action slows down for this shot. The Tramp realizes, with ring in hand, that it’s not what he thought it was. It’s minimalist with himself in the centre, as the man who brought about his own embarrassment. An interesting thing to note is that the embarrassment is not external but is a consequence of self-reflection. He hasn’t lost his face to anyone – he hadn’t proclaimed his love to the woman and been turned down, he hasn’t told anyone else about it. It’s himself who he has let down in his blind pursuit to complete one half of the jigsaw puzzle that he had completely forgotten about the other. 

He bows his head in shame but his eyes assert; they speak of resolution. For a moment, we lose the Tramp as a gentleman shines out from inside the Tramp’s clothes; the gentleman who has always been there and kept reserved for moments like these. For a moment, we see the ‘Man’ outlast the concept – a Man who, in this case, loves a woman who doesn’t love him back. There is disappointment, there is pain, there is anger. And to top it all, there’s a firm resolve in the fact that he can’t do anything about it and that he, in fact, shouldn’t do anything about it. It isn’t like a Man to force anyone’s hand or to beg for the same, and he knows that. 

Chaplin is raw Ego hidden behind a struggle for idealism, which is Matthew’s defence in not liking him. It can’t be denied. He hides his embarrassment behind a screen in this photograph. To the outside world (that is, Merna), he is intact and in constant performance - you'd have to split the curtains to see the man behind. For, needless to say, he is a man who keeps the best of himself hidden from the rest of the world – the side of his which is most beautiful in that it is misshapen, flawed, angry, embarrassed and truly human.

ON HARD-BALL SELLING AND COMPULSIVE TECHNOLOGY

Peter Jackson, acclaimed director of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, was in a bit of a pickle last year when he announced that he was going to shoot its prequel ‘the Hobbit’ at 48 frames per second – the usual and requisite amount is 24 fps. Digital projection systems are programmed to operate at 24 fps, which means that for ‘the Hobbit’ (to be released in two parts, in December 2012 and 2013) to hit screens later this year, they’d need an upgrade to facilitate the doubling of rate of projection. 

In addition, in what he dubs ‘the mega-epic pissing contest’, Film-Critic Roger Ebert (writing for the ‘Chicago Sun times’) takes the case of James Cameron (‘Titanic’, ‘Avatar’) who has come out saying that he’s planning to film ‘Avatar 2’ at 60 fps! He also adds with detail on how almost 17000 screens across North America are ‘already’ potent enough having done what’s necessary and are set to project images at 48 fps with a surcharge to be added to the basic cost of the movie ticket. About 39000 screens, he says, would have to do the same by the end of the year, and they’d all together have to be prepared when Cameron brings his bomb along in 2013. 

If this was a pissing contest, they’re crossing streams; it’s pouring on our faces. 

Now, it’s common knowledge that 3D projection had, by itself, caused a hike in ticket price in the past, for a decrease in brightness and picture-quality – for which you don’t need statistics to substantiate. All you have to do is lift your glasses the next time you’re at the theatre. That should help distinguish to yourself the film you wanted to watch from the one you were made to. 

Worse is the fate of enduring a film that has merely been ‘3D-fied’ as opposed to a film that was born so. There are films shot in 3D (like ‘Avatar’) and there are those which incorporate 3D elements through post-processing (like ‘Clash of the Titans’). The comparison is akin to that between a good photograph and one that’s Photoshopped – there’s something lowly about the latter that you can tell but you don’t have enough to file a complaint. The technology is new, it seems exciting; kids love it, parents don’t seem to have a choice – ‘Schindler’s list’ doesn’t play in theatres anymore. Martin Scorsese has endorsed it, with specific reference to Georges Melies’ idea of Film as ‘Spectacle’ in ‘Hugo’, his own authentic contribution to the 3D universe. 

It’s like the surgical procedure that a Good Doctor showed and the quacks of the world were quick to claim license to carry it out on their own. 

We’re days past the premiere of arguably the most awaited movie event of a decade, made by a man who has constantly turned 3D down with a different plan for grandeur in mind. I say ‘decade’ with comfort because I’m sure they didn’t ‘wait’ for movies, back in the day. Today, people play audience to a Trade Fair at home, on TV sets and the internet and it’s like the title-credits are losing out to pre-release marketing as far as ‘first impressions’ go. Speed-Dating seems to have won the People’s Choice award trumping good old-fashioned meet-cute. Trailers are ‘pleasure Bots’ in this lucid dream that plays out like a Philip K. Dick novel of man causing his own disappointment. 

I was as eager to watch ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ as it hit the screen on the 20th of July. But I hate to think my interest in it needn’t have been my own. I don’t know how much of it was ‘felt’ and how much ‘drilled into’ my head against my will – it’s like second-thoughts in the middle of a leap of faith as a voice inside says ‘suicide’. The film has been around for a year almost, debuting online with a teaser that ‘leaked’ and a Prologue last fall as popularized by director Christopher Nolan, having started it with the last instalment, ‘the Dark Knight.’ 

My opinion on the film aside, there’s no doubt that Nolan, with such impressive films as ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Batman Begins’ to his credit, would come up with (fairly) engaging fare. Isn’t the hype, in that case, a sort of insistence upon a point that has already been made? 

But then Nolan doesn’t believe in 3D. He’s wary of the ill-effects. In a time where the most obscure of family fare comes slapped with the 3D tag like free candy, it almost appears noble that he denounces it. Or is it? 

An IMAX ticket (in a report by Penn Manor High School) costs about $15.50 (for adults). A regular movie ticket costs about $9.50, while a DVD, let out a few months post-release, costs about $15. I don’t even need to point you to the outrage. Of course, this isn’t a move on my part to question the filmmaker’s intentions. He insists on spectacle, where the spectacle exists by itself; it merely needs to be told. He’s someone doing the telling. I understand. I’m a lover of this spectacle and wouldn’t intend blasphemy. 

Isn’t it a semi-fantastic, wishful thought to say that, though, these days? A more appropriate line would be to say that “the spectacle is manufactured and exists to be sold.” The Weinstein Company would counter-sign it with MPAA approval. 

I’d like to close this write-up with a line from Chomsky’s ‘the Common Good’ (1998), the context being how we fancy ourselves to be in an age of uprising against the totalitarianism of institutions, be it a State, an Education system or even the Entertainment industry; how we think nothing escapes our sensibility, even if not our attention. 

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” 

In other words, Christopher Nolan is smart. Peter Jackson is smart. James Cameron is smart; the Weinsteins are smart and so is the MPAA. 

The big question here is “Are we?”

THE SHEER DELIGHT OF WATCHING HIM RISE

DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLAN 

STARRING: CHRISTIAN BALE, ANNE HATHAWAY, TOM HARDY, MICHAEL CAINE, GARY OLDMAN, MORGAN FREEMAN, JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT with CILLIAN MURPHY, JOSH PENCE and LIAM NEESON 

I liked ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ in much the same way that I liked ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II’ and I trust that by saying that I mean no one any discredit. I had always wondered if J.K. Rowling had thought things through to completion before she even began with the franchise – it’s a mystery that has so far been unexplained. But I know for a fact in the case of Christopher Nolan that nothing was preordained. The script to the third film was ‘cracked’ as he puts it; the ends were tied. And it all comes down to how well he could do it. 

So how well has he done it? We shall have to look at the source material for that, regardless of the fact that the screenplay is original and penned by Nolan along with brother Jonathan. The film introduces three characters from various phases of the Batman spectrum as published by DC comics, but the focal point as far as I could see was in the introduction of Bane as a physical counterpart to a fairly weakened Batman. Bane seems to have first appeared in a comic called ‘Knightfall’ where he’s famous for having broken Batman’s back – it was a moment’s half-smile to see the scene repeated on screen, rather religiously. 

Bane (Tom Hardy) breaks Batman’s back, Selina Kyle has his. Nolan has always done a wonderful job of giving comic characters enough human features to inspire empathy in all. Even in the most apathetic character of his – the Joker – he could bring about understanding, if not get us fit our feet in his shoes. Selina, played by Anne Hathaway enhancing the shades of haughtiness we saw in ‘Havoc’, is as capable of vulnerability as Batman wears on bat-suit sleeve. Bane, we see, is capable of some of his own as well. All these people are humans behind their masks where not all who are unmasked are as human as we might see them to be. We had Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) and Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy, who returns for a rather pointless, but exciting, cameo) in ‘Batman Begins’ as examples. In ‘the Dark Knight’ we had Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). That we have yet another in ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ is all I shall say at this point in time. 

Why I felt the need to consult source material was to show the ropes of responsibility that seem to have tied Nolan to the wall as he wrote this screenplay. For all you know, the ropes could be his own, where he wouldn’t want to do injustice to the film from two angles very dear and extremely competent – the previous two films on the one hand, the comic books on the other. There are two loose ends that he’s tied together with fond recollection and a lot of nostalgia inspired by means of spirituality that goes back to ‘Batman Begins’. There’s also a vague rekindling of the Joker’s famous social experiment from ‘the Dark Knight’ that doesn’t work as well the second time around. 

Nolan, thus, looks over his shoulder with a perpetual eye on the past as he makes his way ahead. The result is a heavily-directional pile of sequences that do little but propel the story forward. One of the most fundamental of reasons as to why I liked ‘Batman Begins’ was the power of its scenes where every single one of them stand out. ‘the Dark Knight’, I thought, was a close match, and it is in this aspect that ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ is a little bit of a letdown. I’ve always seen Nolan to be a man capable of bursts of genius alongside constant action so that the bar-chart doesn’t hit a low anytime. But ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ is a little too active for its own good. It’s like he shot a lot of scenes and found a way to fit them in on the editing table. 

Of course this doesn’t imply a complete lack of glory. Batman contributes to ample heroism in the limited screen space he has (Bruce Wayne dominates, even though not as convincingly as he did in ‘Batman Begins’). Selina Kyle does justice to a cameo stretched to the limit with one-liners that thrive on Hathaway’s grace. Bane has his moments in that, as I mentioned before, he’s almost a sort of body double; someone who could match Batman blow-by-blow. There is suspense that’s kept alive right up to the end and there is ambiguity, some cheeky stuff as well, which Nolan has proven, time and again, to be capable of. And then there are scenes that cry for attention as though they’ve been compelled to exist – like the one snapshot that’s supposed to sum up the spirit of the film on the whole, which looked posed and arranged than natural. That didn’t stop me from screaming myself hoarse at it, though. 

I disapproved of Nolan the last time he tried his hand with a big haul of actors (‘Inception’, to be specific). This isn’t to say he didn’t manage to ‘pull it off’ but to say that he does just that. In ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ we have too many characters with too little time – to an extent that one of them has to sleep with Mr. Wayne in a show of desperation. If it’s not fair on part of the characters, it’s even worse on the actors’ front. Aside from regulars Michael Caine (whose Alfred, this time, lacks the usual spice of sarcasm on a melodramatic high), Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox, who looks too composed for one put in a spot) and Gary Oldman (Jim Gordon spends too much time on a comfy hospital bed as the rookie runs around), we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Det. John Blake who interns with the Batman before recruitment for a permanent job. And we have Miranda Tate, a pioneer of Fusion Energy at Wayne Enterprises, a role that Marion Cotillard, I thought, shouldn’t have been cast in. 

 If there’s one thing I’d give Nolan total credit for, it’s that he knows his action choreography. Ben Affleck ('Gone Baby Gone', 'the Town') is the only other name that comes to mind when I think in those terms. ‘the Dark Knight Rises’ has more than usual – some too dull at times to put on the same pedestal as the man behind them. I could deal with that, though. This is, after all, a two-and-a-half star movie that gets three for the show. Except I’d give it four because I love Batman like that. And for Hans Zimmer and for the love of cheese.