(Movie) Black Book/ Zwartboek directed by Paul Verhoeven

The movie works great because it is densely populated by people whose characters are never in black and white, always in grey. This is something that makes the movie and the characters so believable. Because you understand that in an extraordinary situation such as war all that matters is survival. Its just your luck how you end up – least of all whether you end up on the winning side or the losing side.

Its a world war II movie and its about many things. It’s about atrocities, love, betrayals, partisans and a whodunit. And yes, its about survival, by any means necessary. What is refreshing about the movie is that it paints both sides with the same brush. Sometimes you forget that the allies have been ingrained in our psyches as the ‘good guys’ and the Germans as the incorrigible ‘baddies’. You find the same characteristics on both sides and as one of the end scenes showed (in a particularly disgusting and for the same reason intensely powerful scene), the sadism generally attributed to Nazis flows equally well in the veins of the historical victors.

The story revolves around Rachel Stein, a Jew in hiding in Netherlands, who witnesses the betrayal and killing of her parents and brother during an escape attempt. She then joins a resistance group and is given the task of infiltrating the SD (Sicherheitsdienst – a part of the SS) by seducing the SD commander Ludwig Müntze. But things soon go awry, from a tactical point of view as well as from an emotional point of view. It is here that the movie is masterful. The shift in perception is subtle but visible. The grey shade of the character in everyone becomes evident – for better or for worse. The script never lets you perform easy categorization. And this becomes stronger and stronger as we near the end.

The best part of the movie, according to me, is the very end scene. As the camera pans out to the sky, you see men, this time, Israeli colonists taking aim behind barricades to confront what we can assume are displaced Palestinians. It’s a delicious irony shown brilliantly – how easily the oppressed become oppressors. As Rachel says as she breaks down near the end of the movie – “Will it never stop, then!”, the movie subtly lets you know how it never stops.

A richly complex movie that says a lot of things that may not be apparent by a casual view. Its emotionally complex plot is a welcome one – a sign that we re successfully moving away from the “Rambo” image of World War II

Labels: movies, Netherlands, World War

posted by Protik Basu @ 7:23 PM 0 Comments

(Movie) District 9 directed by Neill Blomkamp

One of the best science fiction movies that I have seen. The reason I loved it was because it had the same philosophy as the best tales of science fiction. Peel away the surface and you find a story that speaks not of tomorrow, but of today. The science fiction genre is just a tool to tell an attention grabbing, engaging story.

The movie is told partly in the form of a documentary that seems to talk about some event in the near past (something extraordinary happened, we understand, something not ‘approved’). And partly, the movie is told in real time. The premise is that an alien mother ship got stranded over the top of Johannesburg. The human expectations of finding something exciting (either salvation or doom) in the event (haven’t we all hoped for witnessing contact with extra-terrestrials?) is soon dashed when they find malnourished and ETs, decidedly disgusting in appearance on the ship who seem to be disoriented and directionless. They are ‘rehabilitated’ in refugee camps that soon becomes a cordoned off area, an apartheid zone - as clashes increase between humans and ETs. Zones become earmarked as ‘ETs not allowed’ or ‘humans only’ that does not take too much of an imagination to realize as being a spin off from the apartheid signs of ‘Whites only’ and so on.

As the ETs begin to try and get rights for themselves, protests are triggered all over the city with calls for removing the settlement. That is when a private MNC (MNU) comes to the scene to ostensibly help in removal of the ETs and plan their rehabilitation on the outskirts. However they have an ulterior motive, which soon becomes apparent and forms the core of the story. As the rehabilitation drive begins, our story begins…

It’s a rollercoaster of a movie that can be seen as a action thriller at one level. For me, it never flagged in its pace. Till the end, you keep on guessing how it can end and if it can end happily. I loved the ending by the way. Lets the movie end with a yearning.

But what is really great about this movie is that it raises a lot of issues –  political and social without ever becoming in the least bit preachy. There are no speeches or highly aware individual. That most of are really pawns and can only do and understand so much is what the movie brings out. Small things shown in the movie make a big difference in the whole viewing experience - like the discrimination against the ETs that comes so naturally, the derogatory nicknaming of the ETs by the humans as ‘prawns’ based on their appearance, the involvement of private armies of large corporations (makes you think of Iraq), the dilemma of acceptance of people (in this case – species) who look and act differently, the unlikely brotherhood that can develop between people when they finally understand each other. All things that you can relate to easily.

And because the ETs and the humans differ so markedly in appearance and language makes the ‘message’ of the movie even more apparent. And when the ETs show traits like love, sorrow and loyalty, which ironically ‘humanizes’ them, well, you understand what the movie is all about

It’s a movie that people who love a good story told differently will enjoy. It has a certain grim humour about it that goes with the mood of the movie. I love the movie for what it said but I loved it more for the way it said it.

Labels: human, movies, satire, science-fiction, south africa

posted by Protik Basu @ 7:16 PM 0 Comments

(Movie) A Woman in Berlin directed by Max Färberböck

The story begins where most films about world war end – at the moment when Berlin capitulates. The story is about what happens then, a story that few people have wanted to speak about or put into film. The story is about neither heroics, nor ideology, nor something that would be written in textbooks. The story is about survival when the guns have fallen silent and when the people who remain need to make a new meaning of their shattered lives.

Both the victors and the vanquished.

The story is taken from a diary kept by an anonymous diarist (this diary caused such an uproar in Germany on its publication that the author preferred to remain anonymous) who was caught in the final collapse of Nazi state. Soon Berlin is surrounded by and filled with the Red Army, an army which had gone through hell to get to this victory. An army, more importantly for the inhabitants of Berlin, with a score to settle. Hitler had proclaimed the Slavic people to be untermensch or sub-human, fit only for extermination or slavery and the Wehrmacht (especially the SS) had taken up the task with enthusiasm. The result was that almost every soldier in the Red Army had someone or the other affected by the brutality of the Germans.

This did not bode well for the unfortunate men (mostly old – most able bodied men had been captured or dead or still fighting some hopeless battle somewhere) and the women trapped in the fallen city. It is well documented that the Red Army soldiers went on a raping spree as soon  as the city had fallen. We get an account of that from a woman who experienced firsthand the horrors of being a spoil of war. After the initial horrors, she begins to understand that in order to survive, she must accept the reality of the situation and get some control of the situation. It is then that she makes a morally bold decision, which to a peace-time civilian would seem like a reprehensible decision but which when taken in the context of the situation that the author finds herself in, is a intensely brave decision.

But you would be mistaken to take this movie as a series of brutal acts. The complexity in the situation – both from the German and from the Russian side is something that the author understands and acknowledges as the story moves on. She realizes that the brutality that had been unleashed on the Russians prevents them from viewing the Germans as human and that it is a primitive revenge that is being exacted by the Russians. She also finds that the Russians, contrary to expectations (and German propaganda), can be generous and open-hearted and some of them (like the Battalion commander) worth feeling more than affection for.

The next stage in the movie comes when the German men start to come back. And suddenly you see through their eyes and you realize that they can never understand what the women have been through. Some try to adjust and fail and some simply wrap themselves up in denial. But the women soon realize that they are really alone in this one…

It’s a complex story at its heart, a story about a side of us that we rather not face in our day to day life. Which is what makes this movie so wonderful. It takes an unflinching look and makes us realize how intimately life is not black and white. It takes a look at the decisions that people need to take in a world gone to hell.

But most of all, it’s a movie about intense quiet bravery and of an unflagging human spirit. It’s about a human will to survive and retain something of our own in the most hellish of situations. And this is supported by some of the best acting that I have seen. The actors are able to portray a surreal world, where everything seems unreal. A nightmare world where everyone is struggling to find a place and some meaning again.

This is a movie that you need to see with an uncluttered mind. This will, then, stay with you for a long time.

Labels: germany, movies, World War

posted by Protik Basu @ 7:56 PM 1 Comments

Swing Kids directed by Thomas Carter

Two movies I saw back to back – this one and “Anonyma – a woman in Berlin” (review above), deal with the same subject. They are however separated by a span of about a decade or so. ‘Swing Kids’ takes place when Nazi power is in the ascendancy. The story is about a group of teenagers who are the ‘swing kids’ – youngsters who swear by American music (especially jazz). In a darkening environment where fascist puritanism was beginning to assert itself, this group move from joint to joint indulging in frenzied dance parties.

This peter-pan world is soon to be torn apart by the harsh realities of the time. Through various circumstances and for different reasons, Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Thomas (Christian Bale) join the Hitler Youth, naively believing that they can be Hitler Youth by day and Swing Kids by night. This wishful thing is soon shattered as the whole world seems to turn upside down for them. They are torn apart and soon realize that they have to choose a side.

The story is about those tragic choices that young people have to make in a world gone mad. The easy price of survival is compromise but the question that Peter raises is – is that survival or individual suicide. This is also a story of the consequences of a rigidly dogmatic society that imposes its morality on people – by proselytizing or by force.

The story is well told. The acting by the three main characters is brilliant and brings out the basic personality differences between the three. The changes that happen in them as they slowly choose their side or choose their stand meshes well with the slowly creeping darkening shadow that shatters everything. All in all, a great story well told.

Labels: movies, World War

posted by Protik Basu @ 8:44 PM 0 Comments

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan written by Robert Kanigel

One of the most engrossing biographies that I have read. Not only is it a feat of writing because of the eclectic nature of the subject matter – about a mathematical genius whose area of working can seem very obscure to a layman. But also because, to do justice to the subject, the author had to bring alive a vanished world. A world that we have only tenuous links to. The world of the colonial India and a British empire that was still at the height of its powers.

The best part about this book is that not only is a vanished world brought alive but also that the two men who are the main characters in the narrative – Ramanujan and Hardy, from two wildly different worlds, come across as almost in flesh and blood. And if you are put off by the fear that this book may contain reference to some arcane mathematics – perish the thought. Even if you don’t know who Pythagoras was, you would enjoy the book as much as if you knew who he was.

The story is incredible in itself. An untrained genius waiting to be recognized in the dusty backlanes of Madras, who on his own, rediscovered two centuries of western mathematics working with a slate and a few rags of paper. A man who abhorred proofs, preferring to work out solutions in his head. A man whose astonishing leaps of intuition baffle mathematicians to this day. And a man who eventually would come to influence the modern mathematical world like few following him.

On the other side a man who embodies the best in English education. A man whose talent was recognized early on and who got all the advantages of that time. A man who was considered a genius in his own right. A man who was as eccentric as he was fiercely unconventional.

The unlikely meeting of these two men, leapfrogging geographies and more importantly prejudices, resulting in some of the most exciting and original works is considered a romantic lore in the world of science. And that story is told with love here – right from the genesis to the tragic end

The personality of the two men also determined the way the partnership progressed. Ramanujan, always in need of a hassle free environment and in need of professional validation was tailor-made for the mentorship of Hardy, who was selfless in promoting Ramanujan and who took care to nurture the genius in the Indian.

But the tragic part of the story was also probably largely due to their

As you move through the pages, you are struck by the care and love with which the author has studied the people populating the book; by how much the author has immersed himself in the world that they lived in – from rustic and warm Madras to the ramparts of cold and forbidding Cambridge. You get to know the two men – Ramanujan and Hardy quite well before we come to the meat of the story. The telling of the story never flags in its pace and you can understand the race against time that Ramanujan must have felt when was working in Cambridge. At times the book almost reads like a thriller!

Robert Kanigel puts care in the way he portrays his characters. He does not mythify them and does not try to gloss over drawbacks in the two men. He takes care to nurture the grey part of his characters, which is what mainly makes the story comes alive – none of his characters seem one-dimensional.

The best biographies are those in which you can breathe the air that the characters breathe and you understand why they did what they did, even if you are culturally and historically removed from them. And the best of them are the ones which you enjoy even if you don’t relate to the subject matter. If that’s the yardstick taken, this book would rank right there at the top.

Labels: biography, Books, science

posted by Protik Basu @ 8:40 PM 0 Comments

Kari written and illustrated by Amruta Patil

This is the first Indian graphic novel that I have read (albeit written and illustrated by Amruta Patil who is an NRI). I simply loved it. The storyline and the rough hewn sketches come together to create a visual mood that a simply worded book would find difficult to evoke. Being a novice in the world of graphic novels, one aspect of the genre that I have realized is that, in the hands of a gifted illustrator with imagination, the story told can be immensely compelling. The pictures are like poetry that can speak more than a thousand words – in fact can speak where language fails.

The novel is dark, ironic and poignant in turn. There is an undercurrent of gallows humour in it which prevents the book from becoming foreboding. The setting is Mumbai and contains all the elements that people have loved and hated about it (often the hate and love is about the same thing). The story is about Kari, who works in an advertising agency and lives in a two room flat with two other girls (though it is usually populated permanently with her roommate’s boyfriends). From the dank sewers, sweaty trains and a city that needs to be constantly on the move, Kari’s story is told.

She is a rebel without being one, dispassionate observer and passionate lover in turns, never fitting and knowing that perhaps she never will, drawn to individuals that are abandoned by others. All along is her dark, ironic humour and observations of the life around her and her unflinching honesty to herself about herself. All of this makes up a story which is very urban-contemporary and which contains within itself a multitude of threads; each of us will find atleast one thread that we recognize intimately as our own.

This is a love story, a story of everyone who fits in without really fitting in, a story of death and of ghosts, a story of life in its starkest practicality. I found it a story that gives echo to hidden parts in us, parts that we, like Kari can only explore alone and write our own inarticulate poetry about

Labels: graphic novel, india, urban

posted by Protik Basu @ 12:06 PM 0 Comments

Jarhead directed by Sam Mendes

A movie that is more in the spirit of ‘Apocalypse Now’ than say ‘Saving Private Ryan’ –in fact, a sequence of the former movie is shown within the movie itself. The best scenes, the most savage scenes of this movie are the ones in which there is no fighting going on…the hell that war is, is brought out by the silent memorials to violence, the intense boredom punctuated by self-destructive behaviour, the fact that soldiers are obvious pawns in larger geo-politic games, the burning oil wells that gets us close to a vision of hell on earth. Perhaps the most emblematic scene in the whole movie is when at the end, when war is declared over, Jake Gyllenhaal says with in a rueful voice “And I didn’t get to fire my gun once”.

There are many ways in which you can watch this movie. At many levels, this is an anti-war movie. the pointlessness of the war and its violence is brought out powerfully. The effect that a gung-ho, macho culture inculcated in the marines, has on their perspective (especially their blood-lust) is another indication of the anti-war theme. The scenes of the civilian massacre and the scene of the corpse and the horse amidst the burning oil wells are terrifying in their power to kill the sense of that anyone can have regarding the ‘glory’ of war.

At another level, however, this is a movie about the psychological effect that the war has on men fighting it. Operating in a Kafkaesque world, they undergo behaviour changes, show signs of nascent insanity and constantly fight depression against their helplessness exacerbated by the breakdown of their personal relationships (and some of the breakdowns can be pretty brutal). You get a sense of their world as you  absorb the environment in the movie.

The good thing about the movie is that you don’t get bored. The movie intelligently provides the other view of the war – a war that is fought more by politicians than by soldiers, where a marine is a mere pawn to be moved across a vast desert chessboard…

A powerful movie with no over the top dialogues or scenes. The dialogues in fact are minimal which tends to increase the effect of the environment.

The feeling that you are left with in the end is captured perfectly by the voice over of Jake Gyllenhaal at the end – “all wars are different, all wars are the same”

Labels: anti-war, movies, war

posted by Protik Basu @ 12:03 PM 0 Comments

Inglourious Basterds directed by Quentin Tarantino

A quirky film with signature Tarantino plastered all over it. It is quirky, irreverent, absolutely non-formulaic, action packed both in terms of dialogue and actual physical action. And it takes a fictional look at World War II, a view that is sardonic, funny, taut and serious all at the same time. It takes a very talented person to make a scene seem all four at the same time. And by god, it has been pulled off.

The title takes its name from a group of Jewish-American guerrilla group that forms to give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine (entirely fictional of course). Except as we see, they become not much different from the Nazis themselves. When the baseball bat swings and smashes the skull of the Nazi officer kneeling, you are jolted into realization that the Allies were about as brutal as the frequently excoriated Nazis (for those who need facts to back this up – look up Dresden bombing). Especially when the Nazi officer refused to betray his comrades and replied a few seconds earlier to the question asked as to his reason for getting the Knight’s cross – “For Bravery”. And the next thing you know is the Allied soldier killing a kneeling unarmed man. It can present quite a paradigm shift.

The movie progresses via ‘chapters’, which take up different threads of the main story at different points of time, with the final chapter typing up all the stories. Much of the stories are made up of extended dialogues, the tautness of which never flags, even when the conversation is between just two people for over 15 minutes. The camera work and a sense of danger and possibility of sudden violence keeps you on the edge. The German officer Hand Landa played by Christoph Waltz is both terrifying and charming to a high degree (and his presence overshadows everyone else, including Brad Pitt). His conversations with different people in the movie are truly memorable for their undertone of menace.

The setting, the story, the premise is highly fictional of course. This is no history lesson by a long shot. But you don’t go into this movie thinking of military logic. Nazis could not have been vanquished as stupidly as shown here (the climax though is a bit too much to take and for me, did take away some of the quality of the movie). But then, this is supposed to be a movie that you go along with the flow and enjoy the action unfolding on the screen.

It’s a hell of a ride!!!

Labels: action, movies, other, World War

posted by Protik Basu @ 12:00 PM 0 Comments

Do androids dream of electric sheep? written by Philip K Dick

What is that makes us human? This iconic novel by Philip K Dick (on which the movie “Blade Runner” is based) attempts to answer this by putting us in the future; a future where androids (or ‘andys’) have become a household ‘slave’; a future where earth has become a largely inhospitable terrain due to a radioactive war.

Andys, like any other slaves, rise up frequently against their masters (i.e. humans) and attempt to mesh in with the human populace. And since science progresses to improve everything, the andys have become almost indistinguishable from humans. The only way to hunt them down is through what is basically a empathy-meter. Since andys are not supposed to have this very crucial human feature, they can only simulate it and thus can be caught.

But this basic assumption is questioned at various points in the book, from both angles. Do all humans possess empathy and are all androids devoid of it? the moral high ground that humans take in hunting down androids is itself brought into question.

Rick Deckard, an ageing bounty hunter (who track down renegade androids), decides to take up on last case of tracking down five runaway androids, before retiring for good. As he progresses in this task, he comes face to face with the assumptions under which the murders are made palatable. His increasing doubts about the work that he is doing become apparent as the book progresses.

Finally as the book ends, the reader ask themselves the question – is there anything that makes us uniquely human?

One of the finest books of the golden age of science fiction writing…

Labels: book adaptation, Books, movie adaptation, science-fiction

posted by Protik Basu @ 11:55 AM 0 Comments

3 Iron directed by Kim Ki-duk

This is a movie that would not appeal to everyone. But it has a strange magic in it that would leave a strange attraction in the viewer that sees it through.

The movie has elements of ‘Distant’ in it, in that there is minimal dialogue and most of the movie is one big motion from one place to another. In fact, the two main protagonists don’t speak at all. Everything that is spoken between them is through touch, movement and through their eyes. That gives an eerie feeling to the movie since you have to take in the environment to get a feel of what the characters are going through.

It’s a love story at its core but without the usual elements that would make up the fabric of such a theme in other movies – no lovemaking, only the barest of caresses, no heart-melting words. All that is offered in place of all that is – silence. But the silence is of the quality that speaks with what is in it - the camera does a good work of putting you in the same place as the characters.

The story is of Tae-suk,who breaks into empty houses and lives there till the actual characters come back. He is like a ghost who inhabits the house as if its his own. He does not take away anything, nor gives anything to the place. In one such encounter, he aids a woman ‘’ from her abusive husband. She joins him and they keep on breaking into houses and living there. The movie takes a turn towards the finale when they are caught in one of the houses. The final scene is mystical and is open-ended.

As I said, the movie is for those who are like to take in the environment and the characters and not expect action after every few frames. This movie may stir you and may not – it’s a moody film and how you receive it depends entirely on your temperament and mood. In that way it’s a movie in its own right.

I liked the movie and the vibe it conveyed but somehow the theme and the story left me a bit cold. Possibly I did not identify with the characters. But to each his or her own. I also feel that this is a movie that would evoke different feelings at different time for the same person.

Labels: korea, movies, psychological

posted by Protik Basu @ 11:52 AM 0 Comments

(Movie) Offside directed by Jafar Panahi

A light hearted look at the absurdity of restricting women from seeing football in Iran.

Even though its a concept that seems to be far removed from the people who have never faced social restrictions to any high degree and as a consequence would look at the tribulations of the girls in the movie as a mere curiosity, the fact is that such absurdity exist and perhaps the only way to understand or accommodate it in our world view is to cast humour upon it. And that is done brilliantly in this movie.

The girls in the movie are as rebellious  and obstinate in their passion for the game as anywhere else in the world. And this gives them a charming familiarity that the viewer will readily identify with. They don't give a damn to the bearded ayatollahs who proclaim the game to be unwatchable by women. But rebellion by them is nothing like a revolutionary fervour, nor are they the sorts looking to actively change the society by taking to arms or ballot. All they want to do is watch the game and cheer their country to the world cup.

The most humorous aspect of the movie comes when the bunch of girls are caught and kept under guard. The guards don't have their heart in the job and don't really care for the rules except that their job depends on it. Dig deeper and they probably don't believe it themselves. Most of them are just boys just keen to finish their military service and get on with their lives. To them the girls are a nuisance that they don't really understand and cant really control. The girls themselves keep alternating between threatening, abusing and pleading with the guards for anything between a pee (with the funny situation, there being no women’s toilet) to trying to get a commentary of the game out of guards standing near the gate.

Finally when their team are on the verge of getting to the world cup, everyone forgets their dilemmas and the absurdities…so all in all, a fitting happy ending to the movie

Labels: humour, iran, spo, sports

posted by Protik Basu @ 11:45 AM 0 Comments