Am I a little late here?

The blog has been dormant for a while and there have been multiple reasons like the latest socio political developments around the world and an appalling fall in the rate of monsoon in a bitter gourd shaped state in the southern part of India. I haven’t been watching too many movies, reading too many (Or even any) books for the last couple of months, which accounts for the absence of reviews. ‘Dark knight rises’ was the last English movie that I watched in theatre, and I did write a review for that. As I used to do with all of my movie reviews, I immediately sent it out to ‘The Hindu’, annoyed by the constant requests of the editor. But, by some unexpected turn of events, it didn’t get published. The editors had found it really hard to manage the e mails that flooded their inbox, after my previous reviews were published, and now, they are not going to publish movie reviews other than the ones by their own critics. Fair decision. But by the time I learnt that, one week had passed, so I didn’t feel like putting up the review here, because a movie review should never be that late.

Yesterday morning, as I opened Hindu Magazine, I found an article, which was a response to another one published in August. There was a subsequent reply by the author of the first article as well. The hot debate was about nothing, but the ‘Dark knight rises’. Damn! This movie is still being discussed. So why I can’t I put my review as well, in the blog?

First of all, I will provide the links of those two articles, which, I found, to be very interesting. Here is the first article, and here is the response.

I personally feel that, the allegations of Dark knight rises lacking the right political implications is void, because you can never thrust the responsibility of conveying the right ideas upon an artist. The greatest success, for an artist is when his/her work is being appreciated, discussed and digested by maximum number of people. Christopher Nolan could do that, with the story of a comic hero.

So, here comes my review, which is, a very small note, on how excited I was, about the movie. I am a Christopher Nolan fanboy, and especially a huge fan of the Dark Knight series, so it is possible that I have missed out on all the down sides, if any.

Again, all of this doesn’t matter because the readership of my blog is that huge.

Begins. Falls. Rises. Goosebumps!

Trilogy. Prodigy.

Movie : The dark knight rises

Cast : Christial Bale, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gorden Lewitt, Tom Hardy

Expectations, is a double sided sword. It could be an inspiration to go the extra distance, and sometimes, it could burden you, and even beak you down. This applies for films, too. Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark knight rises’, which was hailed as the ‘Most awaited movie of this generation’ arrived last week, amidst the skyrocketed expectations of the movie lovers. As the Villain of the film, ‘Bane’, tells in a memorable dialogue, ‘There cannot be true despair without hope’. But the makers of the film have delivered a piece of cinematic brilliance, which meets our hopes, and saves us all, from falling into the pit of despair.

It has been eight years since the Batman has vanished, after taking the responsibility of Harvy Dent’s vicious acts. Organized crime has been pushed into oblivion and the people of Gotham are having a peaceful time. But as Bane arrives, spreading chaos and fear, Batman has to come back. He has to revamp his spirits, to stand up to the stronger enemy.

There is so much to appreciate in this film, that it obscures the mind on what to mention and what not to. It’s superbly directed, and very well cinematographed. The cast has done well, without anybody falling short of the mark. The adrenaline pumping action sequences are as good as it can ever get. But the film has much more to offer, that the scintillating fights. The emotional depth of the film has to be attributed to the writers. They have created a soulful story, which depicts the inner battle of an individual, while leaving a room for all the thrills and frills.

The movie lacked a villain as good as the Joker, and you cannot be without getting reminded of Heath Ledger’s mystifying performance, as Tom Hardy walks around, as the masked villain. The film, as a whole, doesn’t reach up to ‘The dark knight’, but having a too good predecessor can hardly be a fault.

Bottomline : Worthy culmination of the legendary trilogy. Must watch. Just decide how many times.

When the screen comes alive

Modes of communication is the backbone of our existence as a society, and it has been decades since cinema has evolved as one of them. It has been communicating countless emotions and ideas  that transcends the visuals, and the poetry on screen has flabbergasted us, many a times. Modern cinema has evolved into a form of expression, which can touch your heart, burnish your spirits and revamp your thoughts through the depiction of stories and events.

There are no clear cut rules ragarding the ingredients of good cinema. However, in general, we can say that, it should be a slice of life. According to the legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock, cinema is life, after you take the dull part out. But this doesn’t defy the role of the unrealistic or surreal elements. It only means that, the audience should, in some way, relate the journey of the characters, to some or other aspect of our existence. There are several examples for the not so real elements in cinema, offering us deep insights into life. Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is about the existential crisis and the subsequent struggle of a superhero. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the rings is a fantasy about the battle between good and evil, depicted with the help of stunning visuals. Woody Allen’s Oscar winning ‘Midnight in Paris’ uses an illogical and inexplicable time travel in the story, and still ends up being an excellent film, which tells a lot about human nature and the soul of a city. 

The intricacies that we can relate to life, woven somewhere inside, is what makes all these films special. The most excellent movies are made, usually, using the common things that we see, in life, as raw material.

When we look at Indian cinema, in the same perspective, things are very interestingly poised. People in different regions of our coutry speak different languages, and we have different film industries for each. If we were a country with a single language and culture, our film industry would have been much bigger, with a huge audience, which would have created a room for bigger budgets, and more effort behind each film. The biggest film industry in our country, Bollywood, does not represent our films as a whole, and there are several well made films coming out, in the regional languages. But the bigger audience ensures that Hindi films do better business.

We have a fairly big group of audience for the mindless comedies, logicless hero centric action films, and cliched romantic movies. But apart from all those, which of course, succeed in the business part, do we see enough life on our big screen?

Rather than bits and pieces from their films, what we need to take up from Hollywood, is the way, they adapt true stories and books, into movies. We have seen how smart screenwriting creates a story out of events as simple as a King’s fight to speak without stammering (King’s speech), a grave and mundane book on the economics of baseball (Moneyball), and an unproven theory about who actually was behind Shakespear’s works (Anonymous). We too, have plenty of stories happening all around us, and there are a lot of books, worth being adapted, in our literature. 

 Cinema is an art form, in which, creativiy plays the pivotal role. It assumes it’s mellifluous best, when it draws inspiration from life and literature, and whole lot of creative vision acts on it. That is exactly what we need to see more often, on screen.