While the past three months have brought nothing but chaos and stress, I’ve managed to regain some sanity with an infusion of books and films. And with this first post in weeks, I suppose things are getting to normal. So briefly here are a list of films:

The Insider: Spike Lee’s latest. Its good, competent, and delivers what it promises–a good bank robbery film. The opening song is A.R. Rehman’s Chaiya, Chaiya, which was a good match for the film, though the lyrics have nothing to do with the movie but never mind. There is also a Sikh character which was another surprise, and he wasn’t a cab-driver either (no disrespect to cabbies), though there was cab joke in one of his scenes, so the film did acknowledge that particular stereotype. Anyway, I wasn’t demanding my money back after the show.

Hard Candy: Which is about a pedophile and his fourteen year old supposed victim. Typical indiewood fare. Supposedly character driven, but saturated in the flatulent emissions of its own importance. Full of cute little quips in the dialogue, with characters so uni-dimensional it makes you scream. What makes it even worse is that the characters are given the blandest, shallowest motivations you can imagine. How do these movies get made?

Friends With Money: This one is a character study of a group of friends, I couldn’t care less about. They are all neurotic and more or less unhappy, which should have been interesting, but isn’t. Tepid and bland. Plus its hard to put the fact out of your mind that Jennifer Aniston is a “Friend.” To be fair, there are moments when the film gets to an interesting place, but doesn’t pursue it further.

The Notorious Bettie Page: By far the most interesting film I saw recently. Thankfully Mary Harron doesn’t even go near psychology in that annoying way that seems to be obligatory for everyone who has come out of an MFA film program. I just wish the film had been on a bigger scale. In the Q and A session at the screening, Mary Harron said how she was really interested in the fifties, but from the film it looked that she had to scale down her ambitions. A pity.

The Sentinel: I can’t even be bothered to say why this one sucked.

Thank You For Smoking: This one was enjoyable, even though the filmmakers felt compelled to make the main character likable by giving him a son he cared about. Where, oh where do you have to go to get some good, honest to goodness satire these days?

We are leaving in a few minutes for India. Posting will be even more sporadic than it has been. Hopefully, I’ll be able to blog about how the production is going.

After a back-breakingly relentless schedule, I was finally able to get eight hours of sleep and go to the movies. I got to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie and Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Both good choices for someone in need of good movie experiences.

I wonder if Wallace and Gromit is particularly liked by people who were brought up on P.G. Wodehouse, and therefore find comfort in silly British aristocrats. Its hard to admit to finding comfort in those English-y certainties, considering present day England is probably nothing like that, and God knows if that Englishiness actually existed in the first place, and if the “Non-English Subjects of the Queen” are even allowed to partake in the pleasure of ideal Britishness. Oh well, I suppose the Colonial encounter continues to be complicated.

The Cronenberg film was something else entirely. Pleasurable and appalling for quite different reasons. If you enjoy being told how the narrative is being constructed, even as you are watching it, this is definitely the film. Not to mention the joys of movie violence, the film doesn’t have “History” in its title for nothing.

Finally, what I have been waiting for, an animated movie in Punjabi. An engineer and his friend in Sas Nagar, Punjab dipped into the internet and read a couple of books and created, Sahibzadey: A Saga of Valor & Sacrifice. The Indian Express reports:

Recalls computer engineer Navnit Singh: “We were griping about the youth being ignorant about religion when my friend Sukhwinder Singh Sekhon suggested that animated films could bridge the gap.”

You can watch a trailer of the film on their web-site (kind of a slow download). From the trailer the film looks like quite the promoter of the myth of the martial races. I wonder if the sequels the duo have planned will have some of the great sufi aspects of Sikhism.

In a bizarre twist to the insurgency in Northeastern India, the BBC reports:

Rebels in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura are making pornographic films to raise money for their separatist campaign.

This phenomenon seems to have been around for just a couple of years. It seems these films are dubbed in Bengali, Burmese, Thai and Hindi. I wonder if it has anything to do with horrible incidents like the murder of the two women in broad daylight in Bombay. Not to say that porn causes violence, but Northeastern women occupy a peculiar place in mainstream India, and I am sure porn made under coercive circumstances does nothing to help that.

Tribal women in the northeast, have been the target of abuse for a long time, and not only from the insurgents (BBC). Society in the northeast is much less sexist than the rest of India, and the abuse of women used to be rare. So these reports of violence by rebel outfits are very disturbing. The NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura) had started recruiting more women, when their reputation for sexual abuse got out of hand, but stopped when some of their recruits developed relationships and wanted to drop out and lead normal lives. So now they are back to oppressing them.

The rebels may have legitimate grievances, but once they make the bodies of innocent people their battleground, they lose any moral right to address those grievances. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Land of the Dead (2005) by George Romero. The Pittsburgh auteur does it again. This is a good zombie movie. The world is in shambles, the zombies stumble through it, and the few decent humans try to do their best. I particularly liked the violence, its neither sadistic not aestheticized. Its more like medieval versions of hell, and actually quite beautiful, without trying to be beautiful. Its really well-cast, the stars don’t take over the ‘aura’ of the film. Romero’s sense of humor is intact and the zombies are hungry, very-very hungry.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) by Vincente Minelli. Lauded as one of the greatest MGM musicals ever, this one gave me a tummy ache. I completely understand why Judy Garland became a drug addict.

Street Fight (2005) by Marshall Curry. The documentary was about New Jersey politics in the form of the 2002 mayoral race in Newark. This one made for great viewing; it was better than the average political-race documentary, which gets so caught up in the “characters” that it forgets to think about anything else. New Jersey’s politics are quite like Bihar’s–if an elected official is in jail, his wife or son takes over, pork barrels galore, and other unsavory things. Street Fight looked at the political process when an older African-American Democrat mayor is challenged by a younger Yale educated African-American councilman, also a Democrat. NPR has a short interview with the filmmaker.

The past week or so has been spent in a gluttonous haze of watching films. Sometimes two or three in a day. Work in piling up, and I should cook instead of eating take-out and cereal, but somehow I can’t stop. Not that there is any logic to what I am watching. Here is a selection.

Rope (1948) by Hitchcock. I didn’t expect it to be as engrossing as it was. Those long-takes are pretty engaging. It almost felt as if Karl Rove had written much of the script, except the part where the murderers get caught. Lots of talk of, “We do what we want and create the reality we want, because we are truly powerful, while the rest of you are wussy members of the reality community.“

Crash (2004) by Paul Haggis. Some critics seem to have a problem with it (Village Voice, Daily News, The LA Times, etc). They don’t like the multiple story-lines and coincidences in the film that resolve all those story lines, and a lot of them hate the dialogue. They seem to think that the film is about “real” things like racism, and therefore must be “realistic.” There seems to be very little tolerance for any kind of stylization, even though the film does a good job of setting up how you are supposed to read it. Perhaps they are just uncomfortable at being asked to enter a universe where their senses aren’t lulled, and the narrative resolutions don’t really close off that universe for you–after all we are beyond the age of melodrama, which I would think is a strong point of the film. Interestingly most critics mention the racist cop played by Matt Dillon, who gets a chance to redeem himself at the end (don’t want to spoil it for you), as somehow being an example of complex characterization. Nobody mentions the young cop who loses his idealism and innocence or the Upper Middle Class African-American TV director who embodies race, class and gender in a very complicated way. After all too much “realism” is a bad thing too.

Key Largo (1948) by Howard Hawks. This was gripping in the way old fashioned drama is. Lots of dialogue, a lot of it anti-war. It turns out that Maxwell Anderson, the writer of the play, on which the movie is based lost several jobs for his anti-war views during World War I. IMDB has a short bio of him. Great pre-McCarthy era fare.

Batman Begins (2005) Finally a decent Batman film. The film spends a lot of time on Bruce Wayne’s childhood, his relationship with Bats, and the trauma of losing his parents. Move forward fifteen years, he still feels the same; just like in popular Indian Cinema, where twenty years are nothing, and characters feel the same way they did now as then! The orientalism in the film was different from what one usually sees, I’ll wait for Kerim to blog about it, meanwhile he did tell me that audiences in Taiwan burst out laughing when Bruce Wayne spoke Chinese.

I have been catching up on movies and reading. One of the films I saw this week is The World of Henry Orient, based on a 1958 novel of the same name by Nora Johnson. It is a teenage girl buddy movie about Gil and Val, two upper middle class fourteen year olds in New York City, who develop a crush on a famous pianist, Henry Orient, played by Peter Sellers. Comedic and not so comedic adventures ensue, and by the end of the movie, the girls are delivered to the threshold of adulthood.

Other memorable female bonding movies I can recall are Thelma and Louise, Heavenly Creatures, and if you look for something closer to the Henry Orient era, The Trouble With Angels by Ida Lupino. In the previous two the women end up dead, or lesbian criminals, and in Angels one of the characters decides to become a nun, not a pathological event, but noteworthy for its eschewing of the world of makeup and boys which would be considered “normal” or at least usual in most movie universes. The girls in Henry Orient despite their problems are very healthy and normal. This lack of pathology usually associated with female buddy films is quite fascinating in itself, and may be due to the fact that the characters don’t deviate from a hetero-normative path. However, the villain of the film is one of the girls’ cold, cruel mother. So female pathology is responsible for some of the narrative drive of this film after all.

The world of the girls reminded me of the neurotic yet understandable teenage universe of Salinger, without the angst though, and much more like the melodramatic universe of Douglas Sirk, he is the man who made all those movies in the fifties that look like Hallmark cards. Todd Haynes paid homage to him in his movie Far From Heaven. Anyway, how this normalcy in the characters achieved? Mostly through the character of Henry Orient, who is an exotic dark creature with a vaguely Italian and Indian accent. In keeping with Henry’s character, the girls go as far as to pretend they are Chinese slaves and run around in peasant hats and light candles in front of some heathen God. This is all in the spirit of playacting, as they stalk the hapless Orient, who is trying to seduce a woman from Connecticut! One of the girls is a talented pianist and adores Henry because he is a famous pianist, but it turns out that he doesn’t practice and performs quite badly. Now before you dip into your Edward Said to talk about the film, you should know that Henry Orient is really from Brooklyn, and even loses his exotic accent at a stressful moment. He is playacting too, it allows him to indulge his favorite sport-skirt chasing, and the image seems to work for the persona of a famous pianist.

This rather enjoyable film manages to be subversive and conventional at the same time. And it is well-made in that fifties kind of way. And God knows what else it can tell us about the fifties, feminism and race relations.

The answer is Thelma Schoonmaker, the editor of such Martin Scorsese triumphs as Raging Bull (for which she won an Oscar) and Goodfellas. Schoonmaker was interviewed on Fresh Air, on May 31. A good interview not only for filmmakers, but also for those who love films, especially fans of Raging Bull.

Due to an difficult work schedule, blogging is light these days as is everything else. But we did manage to see the Enron documentary this weekend, with the director in attendance.

Its a good documentary and worth watching. Though I have some minor quibbles with it. It spent way too much time on the macho corporate culture, and too little on how that culture actually works. Kind of like how reality shows manage to naturalize their participants’ bad behaviour, even as they set up the conditions that make that behaviour mandatory. The film could have withstood a more detailed explanation of what it is that the executives were doing and what the rules were that they were “gaming,” audiences are nearly not as dumb as what producers sometimes think they are. Spending so much time psychologizing the Enron fraud was kind of a waste of valuable film time.

I usually skip the question and answer part at screenings, but the one with the director of Enron was very good and illuminating, he talked about the ways in which Enron was a very innovative company, and how they weren’t actually breaking any rules technically, which is something I would have liked to know a lot more about, because there is something wrong with the way things are set up which allow for an Enron to happen, rather than the testosterone poisoning of business its executives (that too, but it only has so much explanatory power). The film did suggest it, but didn’t argue for it strongly enough.

My favorite section in the film was an account of the energy crises in California. It pulled together all the vectors that went into that particular drama. Finally, do go see the film and support it, its worth seeing and supporting.