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.

THE TITLE WITHOUT THE SPIDER PUN

DIRECTED BY MARC WEBB 

STARRING: ANDREW GARFIELD, EMMA STONE, RHYS IFANS, DENIS LEARY, MARTIN SHEEN, SALLY FIELD, CHRIS ZYLKA with IRRFAN KHAN and a cameo by STAN LEE 

There’s no way that I can begin this analysis without talking about my kind of hero (whom I’ve talked about quite a bit before). He’s more of a character, really, but he’s an ideal and hence I call him a ‘Hero’. Anyway, this guy is a conversationalist. He’s kind of like what Ebert called Alvy Singer in his review of ‘Annie Hall’, about how Allen is a man who has his own running commentary alongside life; “a man who lives so he can talk about living,” if I had to quote. 

Except that my hero would’ve taken things a step further. He’d record the conversations he makes, in and out of his profession. He’d work to sustain himself and buy cassettes for his recorder wherein he talks to record and records to talk – a simple case of life as a circle where the explanation ends right where it begins. 

Marc Webb’s ‘the Amazing Spiderman’ is not entirely my kind of hero, but he’s close. And in that way, he’s distinctive from Sam Raimi’s hero who lives to think and thinks to live in a pitiable struggle to externalize. Raimi’s hero (played by Tobey Maguire) loses his strength to contemplation as investment in character-building, his predicament more intensive in the fact that he just doesn’t talk. There isn’t a moment that Peter Parker isn’t in love with Mary-Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), the cause of his frustration, and he thinks he needs to be Spiderman for him to deserve her; for her to ‘give back’. And she’s no Rachel Dawes. 

Peter Parker, in ‘the Amazing Spiderman’, doesn’t ask himself that question. His Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen, about as delightful as Jon Voight in the ‘National Treasure’ series) might not be as head-in-the-clouds as the one played by Cliff Robertson in Raimi’s series, but he’s less ambiguous. “With great power comes great responsibility,” is what Peter was left with, previously, alongside the ever-distressed MJ and Harry, the Prince (James Franco). Sheen’s Ben leaves him with even lesser, which is more. To him, and thus to Peter from then on, the gifted are obligated to share their endowments. If you do good math, you’re supposed to take it forward for the sake of humanity. Will Hunting wouldn’t survive an environment as this. 

But Peter doesn’t mind. In fact, it’s a philosophy that fits his mould. A passive resistance stunt in the beginning tells you he can take some blows. And yet you sense that somewhere inside he bides his time with an alarm set for when it’s time for him to give back. He gets himself out of trouble that he had gotten himself into in the first place. He fixes things that he broke – it’s almost like he has to break things so he’d get around to fixing them later. The entire premise, thus, rests all its weight on him as an existential plot device. Peter Parker doesn’t live his life: He deals with it. 

Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker reminded me of John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler from ‘Say Anything’, the twitchy, fast-talking, good-natured young romantic who wore heart on sleeve as a means to charm. Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy isn’t a bad Diane Court (Ione Skye) herself. Between them is as enchanting and as sensible a romance as we’d never see between High-School students on the space of a screen. There isn’t a thing that Peter wouldn’t talk out loud, and even if he didn’t, Gwen has, in her, potential and care enough to understand. They just get each other, in short. 

So how diabolical is the Spiderman with his lady-problem all sorted out? Remember the scene in ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ where Barry Egan goes head-to-head against the guy at the furniture store saying he “has a love in his life” and how it makes him “stronger than you can ever imagine”? Add a radioactive spider-bite to that confidence and an all-encompassing thoroughness that he puts two and two together faster than Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), the mad scientist at the cross-genetics lab at Oscorp could, and then push himself to atone for that blunder on a course that could very well cost his life – a walk on a tightrope that’s caught fire and he does it barefoot. 

Martin Sheen and Denis Leary are striking fits as Uncle Ben and Captain Stacy – responsible men in their respective realms. They do their share in moving the story forward, but they have their moments in halting the scene as human beings. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that they’re characters written to heighten melodrama and, wherever necessitated, deliver it. Sally Field isn’t as remarkable an Aunt May as Rosemary Harris made her to be, but the little reconciliation that happens with Peter towards the end, as well as the abrupt disappearance of Dr. Rajit Ratha (Irrfan Khan) after passing mentions of Norman Osborn makes it look like a sequel is in order. 

In a season of self-questioning superheroes, we have one who just likes to be. It falls in line with Webb’s ‘(500) Days of Summer’ as yet another convincing anti-cliché. Tom Hansen thought he felt love and then learnt on the move. Peter builds a web-shooter to facilitate. These are boys who turned men in an embrace of fate, made by a man who, I think, learnt to embrace his. This amazing Spiderman is quirky, neurotic; with his mind on his feet and his feet on a skateboard, his nemesis defeated by the human inside – much like Doc Oc. Between them, we have some great stunt sequences. The joy of CGI lies in the coherence of detail and not in streaks of undecipherable action. Very few filmmakers understand that. Marc Webb, excitingly, seems to be one of them.