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Hi all

I have opened a website http://www.sridharsubramaniam.org. Henceforth, this site will serve as my blog, my place, the source for all my work. You will find this site better organised and more accessible.

As of today, the blog Reviews - Hollywood remains closed.

- Sridhar

Last Train Home

Cast: Changhua Zhan, Suqin Chen, Qin Zhang, Yang Zhang; Music: Olivier Alary; Direction: Lixin Yan

Lixin Yan’s Last Train Home has the quality of a home video production. Its actors are mostly amateur performers who seem to think they are in an annual day school play. It lacks a coherent plot. Yet, what a spectacular emotion it evokes!

Every year in China, migrant workers in the cities visit their native places for the Chinese New Year. More than 140 million people travel during this time, making the largest human migration in a span of two weeks. These workers are merely cogs in the massive wheel that spins around China’s urban centres: the factories that manufacture all sorts of goods for the consumption of the West. So there’s a factory that produces jeans, another produces tennis racquets. The workers live in squalid conditions, not because the pay is less but because they want to save every Yuan available to send back home, to send their children to schools. Their grandparents raise the children.

Children don’t know their parents because they see them only once a year. So they don’t know their parents and even resent them for not being there. They hate the countryside, which is dull and filled with the aged. On the contrary, the city life must be exciting because there is action and money. Surely their parents wouldn’t have left them and gone there if it was not an exciting place?

They don’t even know what their parents go through to just visit them during the Chinese New Year. With 140 million travelling, it must be next to impossible to get the tickets and even if you did, you will have to elbow fight with hundred others to get into the trains. The ticketing process and the train journey shown in the film make Indian Railways look like Eurostar service.

The movie works like part-documentary and part-feature. The characters talk to themselves, apparently in an attempt to explain their situation, as if a press correspondent is sitting next to them with a mike. These soliloquy sessions are important in establishing the story for the non-Chinese audience. The camera is even self-consciously present at some scenes where the characters talk straight to it, with one character shouting at the camera, ‘Don’t you have better job than filming me?’

This filming technique is new. And it works as an essential tool for Lixin Yan to present the story with as neutrally as possible. There is no one to blame for the problems. Nobody is a villain and nobody is a victim. They have their own choices and make their own life decisions. Except in using profanity in front of one’s father. Then you get a good, tight slap. Yours truly being one of the victims, he can totally identify with that scene!

Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel; Music: Clint Mansel; Direction: Darren Arnofsky

Black Swan is an interesting film. And that’s just that, and nothing more. It has an interesting premise and a very clever script that makes the viewer conscious that it is being clever. Unfortunately, all that cleverness couldn’t hide the fact that the film is painfully predictable. The only plot revelation in the film becomes very clear to the viewer in the first two reels. And it is supposed to be a twist in the very end of the film, and to make you gasp in shock, only ends up making you weary. The rest of the film simply goes through the motion of delaying the end ‘revelation’ as much as possible.

Nina, Natalie Portman, wants to become a successful swan queen in the ballet Swan Lake and has a mandate to do the white and black swans, the good and evil. Once this is established, she is now surrounded by the usual suspects. The tyrannical but brilliant opera director, the concerned but domineering mother, the rival dancer who is sexy and more sensuous, the yesteryear’s swan queen who hates the director for retiring her and now you know the drill. Nina is terrified that she is going to fail on the stage and the director only makes it worse by constantly reminding her of how stiff she is, how her dance lacks the required sensuality, how terrified she is (as if Nina or the audience haven’t realised it by the end of the first feel.) The rival dancer, Lily, is obviously sensual, warm, relaxed and performs the dance routine with the ease of a seasoned courtesan. And Nina is insecure. If I were the director, I wouldn’t waste my time on Nina and would have cast Lily straight away. Her mother is domineering and doesn’t help matters by constantly reminding Nina of the travails of failure. There is no explanation of why Nina is tolerating her mother, worse still, at 23, why she should still live with her.

And whoever thought Natalie Portman deserves Oscar for this performance? When concerned, she looks like she’s suffering from migraine. When dancing she is truly stiff. It might be a natural performance, the one that the role required. Unfortunately even in the climactic, and mandatory, performance on the stage where she is supposed to be at her best, she isn’t any better. And her black swan routine is scary whilst it is supposed to be dark and seductive. I would have considered a supporting actress nomination for Lily for aptly giving migraines to Nina or the mother for being disgusting and reprehensibly melancholic, again, aptly required by the role.

The end is neither unexpected nor convincing. Black Swan works neither like a horror nor a psychological thriller. If anything, it works like what Roger Ebert termed it. In his review, Ebert called it melodrama. That’s actually a four letter word in India. Melodrama indeed. 

Adaptation

The famous screen writer Charlie Kaufman is known to mess up with your mind. And in Adaptation, to our delight, it is Kaufman who gets messed up. The story of this film is a bit difficult to define , and, after some deliberation, you conclude it is pointless, and even unnecessary.

In a nutshell, tasked to write a screen adaptation of a book about rare orchids, Kaufman goes into writer's block. Understandably so, because how do you write an interesting or meaningfull movie about orchids. And who would watch it?

This is not a background information but indeed the actual story. Well, we learn that even in real life, he underwent the same trouble and decided to circumvent it by writing a screenplay about 'the travails of writing'. So the film has Charlie Kaufman as one of the characters, played by Nicholas Cage. It is doubtful even Kaufman would have done a better job! So starting with the witer's block, the film journeys onto actual story about flowers, blending in multiple angles and stories, finally culminating all into one.

Using his imaginary twin brother, Kaufman mocks at all the 'run of the mill' screenwriters of Hollywood. He doesn't want to write a cliched script and ridicules his 'unemployed' brother who is just leatning to write screenplays. He scoffs at screenwriting workshops his brother attends. Then his brother writes a 'hollywood thriller' and wins a movie contract! Dismayed, we see Kaufman signing up for the workshop hoping to find answers to his Orchid Conundrum.

Adaptation is not just about screenplays although they are the most imaginative parts in the film. It is also about flowers and how they can adapt to different environments and plays with one of the characters, the orchid hunter, who, like the flowers, adapts to situations.  And is juxtapositioned with the New Yorker reporter character, ably played by Meryl Streep, who finds it difficult to adapt.

With so many layers and its staunch refusal to cow to mediocrity, Adaptation is so wonderfully complex that in the end it is your mind that gets messed up, with the suffering screenwriter having the last laugh. It is not very often you get to say 'you have never seen anything like this'. But here from multilayered script to complex characters to intriguing plot development to mind games to intellectual hubris, you would not expect see such a delightfully messy film for a long time.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2

J. W. Eagan once famously said ‘Never judge a book by its movie.’ If he has watched Lord of The Rings trilogy, he would have thought differently. Unfortunately, more often than not, book after book, as Hollywood decimates the literary world with its insipid high-octane action-oriented films that ruin the experience for the avid reader, Eagen is proved right. Again and again.

There are good exceptions though. The spectacular example of LOTR aside, I recently saw The Namesake, a very poignant film by Mira Nair, adapted from an equally simple and earthly novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. In every sense, the movie was a fitting tribute to the emotional depth the novel evoked. Watching the film, you knew that Mira Nair had the same experience as you whilst reading it. If that can be true of Nair, if that can be true of a culturally and emotionally complex novel like The Namesake, what could go wrong with Harry Potter, you would wonder.

The difference is, simply, the director. Yates isn’t Nair. His only credit being that he was signed up to do Potter films when no director worth their salt would touch Potter with a ten foot pole. Don’t ask me why. That analysis may require a separate article by itself.

Armed with nothing but a huge budget from Warner Brothers, David Yates delivers just that: a high budget spectacle. The movie utterly lacks the charm, the emotional connection, the tension, the love, the anguish, the banter, and finally the triumph of good over evil of the book. The triumph wasn’t easy, if you will. It took 3400 pages of countless adventures, overcoming unbelievable barriers, winning several battles, big and small, and finally an audacious quest for the horcruxes that seemed absolutely impossible when Dumbledore first proposed the idea to Harry. Whilst reading, I literally screamed out aloud, ‘You’ve got to be joking, professor!’

Well, to everyone’s relief, the battle turned quite a cakewalk in the movie. We all knew Harry would make it, what with millions of dollars from WB and countless CG artists at your disposal. So how does it matter that in the book every tiny bit of plot strands were sewn together carelessly to make such a quest possible and every second turn, Harry was left to face a block of wall that stalled his progress, (where his friends helpfully came to his aid, depending on what was required, whether Ron’s wit or Hermione’s erudite snippets). That she was the Google of magical world never came through the movies. Ron never uttered a memorable line, except ‘You’re mental’ which also he had forgotten in the final part. Understandably, with such an enraged war breaking out in the background!

Those who have read the book quite ardently had their own varied reactions to the films. From the final climax, the much awaited battle between Harry and Voldemort to the secret of Elder Wand to....people keep rueing over the much loved plot revelations that they were excited to discover in the books. The movie recklessly ignores all of them and delivers a B-movie experience from Hollywood that’s reminiscent of those assembly line superhero films you get during summers, that neither has emotional connection nor has a clever script. They are there because someone in Hollywood thought that people are eager to watch action spectacles in summer. Why? Don’t ask me.

In my view, personally, Harry Potter is one of the greatest achievements in English literature. That one writer could hold the attention of the readers for nearly 3400 pages over a period of ten years and finally succeed in satisfying every one of the readers, closing every loose end, answering every question the characters (and readers) had and produce some of the most loved fictitious characters, is incredible. Harry Potter, Ron Weasly, Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore, Reubus Hagrid, Sirius Black, Neville Longbottom, Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood, well the list can go on. As someone who has just finished writing a novel, I know what it takes to write a book. Writing seven books of the same story, requires superhuman achievement. Frankly, I am saddened that somebody as ordinary as Yates had to take up this monumental challenge which would have been hugely challenging even for the stature of Steven Spielberg. Thinking on these lines, it’s futile to try to criticise Yates for this fiasco. He is clearly unfit for this and (perhaps) tried his best to deliver what he could. If anything, Warner Brothers must be blamed for its lust for profits and its urgency to make the most of the hype. They could have waited for the right director to come along. At the top of my head, Guillermo Del Toro of Spain would have been an excellent choice but he works at his own pace. That doesn’t bode well for the profit hungry assembly line mentality of Hollywood.

On the consolation side, there's a thought though: not many would know that a small-time director called Ralph Bakshi made Lord of The Rings at the budget of $8 million in the late seventies. No one was amused. In the light of Peter Jackson’s mind-boggling trilogy, it’s totally forgotten now. My hope is, there would be one remake of Harry Potter in another ten to fifteen years’ time. Hopefully, by a highly talented director with a deeply enshrined love for the book, just like how Jackson started with his love for Tolkein more than anything else.

Then, that love might translate into a really impressive movie.

Avatar

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang Music: James Horner Direction: James Cameron

What more can you write about Avatar? From what you’ve read from Roger Ebert, to various domestic reviewers (in this case, London papers), to Rotten Tomatoes (84% Fresh rating), to Ram Gopal Varma’s blog, it is irresistible to not write anything. In a way, it is better not to write anything about Avatar simply because there is so much to write, more so there’s so much to experience rather than write or speak.

Avatar is not your everyday film. Granted it employs groundbreaking motion capture animation. It has innovative ‘surround, perspective’ 3-D. It is from Cameron who has broken cinematic and technical grounds earlier with incredible success. He has shown frames that you had not seen earlier. In that respect, as Varma pointed out, he was in a way god-like. The lush rain-forest, the breathtakingly huge mother tree, those floating hills, the valley, the Eyowa tree, the customs of the Na’avi, even the cold aggression of the marine chief seems new to us. Beyond the energetic visual treat, the action, the envious imagination of the creator, the mind-blowing 3-D perspective technology, lies something much more than mere entertainment.

If Avatar does not make you question about ecology, the sustainable development, the insane greed of the West (read America), then it has not succeeded as a film. Actually, the film makes you reminisce a lot more than that. From colonialism, oil wars, terrorism, recent credit crunch due to greedy, arrogant, stupid bankers, everything comes to our mind. It must have been a coincidence that Copenhagen almost collided with Avatar’s release because even that came to our mind. Even in the Indian context, it became far more relevant because the Avatar reminder is happening exactly in central and north-eastern Indian states such as Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh where the ancient tribes and villagers are being displaced, ruthlessly, often using force, for the mineral wealth that lies under their villages, hills and forests. Rainforests are being torn down mercilessly by huge corporate companies such as Vedanta, who are ravaging our mountains and forests and indigenous people with the help of central and state governments. I recently learnt that the central government has even formed a special force called Industrial Security Force whose objective is to ‘tackle’ and ‘manage’ the groups that are fighting to defend their forests and mountains. Avatar can’t be more relevant today in Jharkhand than anywhere else. Play this film there to those tribes and they may not be waxing over the motion capture technology; instead you’ll see tears in their eyes.

It is not easy for a filmmaker to pack in so much of emotion, social concern, and such a detailed sub-text in a movie that is supposed to be a mainstream Christmas blockbuster where $300 million is at stake. No other filmmaker possibly would have so much of audacity as James Cameron. Perhaps the only compromise he has had to make was that it has a happy ending. The victims of the greedy bankers, of the oil companies, of Vedanta didn’t have. That’s where the line between fantasy and reality is drawn. That still doesn’t become Cameron’s fault. What he offered there was hope. A willingness to look at issues differently. A willingness to even consider these problems as our own. That fact that he has managed to do that while entertaining you immensely has what made him the king of the world.

Recommendations: Gran Torino

‘I would like to grow up to be like Clint Eastwood. Eastwood the director, Eastwood the actor, Eastwood the invincible, Eastwood the old man. What other figure in the history of the cinema has been an actor for 53 years, a director for 37, won two Oscars for direction, two more for best picture, plus the Thalberg Award, and at 78 can direct himself in his own film and look meaner than hell? None, that's how many.’

Roger Ebert wrote the above words in his review of Gran Torino that precisely defines your own emotion. How in the god’s name does this old man manages to pull off feats like this is something we’ll probably never understand. George Orwell wrote about James Joyce that ‘he makes me feel like a eunuch.’ My point precisely.

Gran Torino tells a story of a racist, bellicose ex-service man and an autoworker who befriends an Asian family in the most unlikely turn of events. Despite the story, direction or emotional depth of his work, two things always nagged every time when watching Eastwood films: Doesn’t he use any of the latest editing software at all? And doesn’t he hire any composer for background score? The first suspicion was perhaps unfounded but the second one is increasingly getting stronger. Clint Eastwood himself wrote music for his previous film Changeling, and his son Kyle Eastwood has written music for Gran Torino.

Especially after watching endlessly noisy, rapidly cut and edited, hurriedly paced Tamil films, Eastwood is like retreating to an oasis. You’ll understand this when you watch not just Gran Torino, but any of the Clint Eastwood directions. They tell you that great films are not about speed of editing or racy presentation or deafening music. They are about great stories and great acting and confident themes. Watching Eastwood films are like meditation. They calm you down so much to restore your faith in humanity.