A Mind-blowing Work of Staggering Genius OR Why Kurosawa kicks ass

...with due apologies to Dave Eggers

I’m as nutty as a fruitcake when it comes to Kurosawa’s movies, so kindly indulge me in my hyperbole. This is more a write-up on Kurosawa’s oeuvre rather than any particular film. I’ve used instances in certain of his films as examples though. This turned out to be rather longish despite my most earnest efforts, so we’ll relegate more elaborate discussions on specific films of his to the comments section. So without further ado…

Two things (and the concomitant synergies) going for Kurosawa: master story-telling and brilliant technique. But we’re so used to speech or even sound effects in movies that long stretches of film without either can kick in boredom. (Was it Kubrick who refused to comment on ‘2001…’ saying something about not wanting to take away from what the camera was saying?). The key to enjoying Kurosawa’s body of work then is to think of visuals as a substitute for dialogue. Especially when he gives you so much time to soak in everything in a particular frame. It’s like he knew beforehand exactly what he wanted in each frame of the film. I have probably said this before, but his shot compositions have almost a mathematical precision to them. You can actually count the number of frames in some of his movies. Rashomon, for instance, opens with the camera zooming in on a dilapidated temple and two people taking refuge there from the rain, all done in 4 frames. And the B&W scenes are so sharp they crackle. Rashomon also has a fantastic 3-4-min-long scene of (Takashi) Shimura’s character ambling down a forest trail with the camera occasionally peeking up at the sun from under the forest’s canopy.

I also adore the subtle ways in which Kurosawa shows the oppressiveness of Japan’s climes. Both Yojimbo and Rashomon have gorgeous shots of rain pelting down so hard and rhythmically, it is palpable. And in ‘Stray Dog’, all that Kurosawa uses to give us an indication of a hot and humid Tokyo(?) is Shimura’s character incessantly wiping the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. Halfway into the movie, the heat starts to get onto your nerves too.

Enough about technique. Moving on to the story-telling, for me at least, his movies are utterly engrossing. I didn’t even realize Seven Samurai was that long (about 200 minutes). It had me so hooked! From the despicably pathetic lot of the farmers to marshalling the rag-tag samurai army to planning and strategizing the attack against the bandits. And the climax. Did I mention the climax!
In the very minimalistic Rashomon (there are about 8 characters in all), he uses the story-told-from-multiple perspectives ploy to describe a murder in a forest clearing. We feel much like the bum prodding the woodcutter to continue with the story. No two versions of the story match, with each narrator distorting it to suit his/her needs but also confessing to the crime. The ‘true’ series of events is never revealed, leaving us to mull over the human condition. A naïve priest whose faith in the inherent goodness of man is shaken to the core and an amoral, street-smart bum add to the interesting line-up of characters.
Yojimbo tells the story of a ronin living by his wits in the thick of a gang-war between two gambling clans in a village. And you know what? It’s the best western I ever saw! A very well-knit plot with smart moves and countermoves. And there is even a gorgeous leaf-caught-in-the-wind scene!

And almost all of his movies are peppered with this very enjoyable, often subtle, slice-of-life kind of humor. For instance, in Seven Samurai, the day after the rookie samurai sleeps with a farmer’s daughter, Shimura’s character goes “he’s a man now” and everybody breaks into a laugh. Or the wry wit of the opening scene in Yojimbo, when (Toshiro) Mifune – a wandering Ronin – decides his direction at a fork in the road after throwing a twig in the air and seeing which way it points when it lands. Or the way Mifune and the bar-keep in Yojimbo snigger as they watch from behind a window (with the camera behind them) the village official’s elaborate bribe-taking ritual. Or the hilarious (to me at least) court sequences in Rashomon (each character narrates his/her version of the story to the camera) with the narrating character at the centre of the frame and the other two sitting meek and cross-legged in the background to the right of the frame.

So there you have it – why I love Kurosawa’s movies. My favorites are: Rashomon, Yojimbo, Ran and Seven Samurai (in random order...can’t seem to find it in me to rank them :)…)

Film Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Set aside everything that you look for in a movie. Don’t you just *love* the title of the movie? ‘The long, dark tea-time of the soul’, ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘The winter of our discontent’, ‘The General in his labyrinth’, how the fuck do people come up with names of such endearing, enduring beauty?!

Ok, enough gushing about the title. Let me move on. The scriptwriter (yeah, for this particular movie/theme he’s the man, not the director…) is Charlie Kaufman (of ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’ fame). Unfortunately I’ve been unable to get hold of either of these movies but I heard a heckuva lot about them and eagerly lapped this movie up. And I was richly rewarded for the same.

In a nutshell, the movie tries to give us a glimpse into the incredibly complex inner workings of a mind. It performs this seemingly humongous task by telling us a story which has at least three discernible (to me) layers to it. At the surface, it is the story of Joel (Jim Carrey) who’s trying to come to terms with his break-up with Clementine (Kate Winslet). In the depths of his agony, he finds out from a common friend that Clem has had her memory of Joel systematically erased through a scientific process patented by a company called Lacuna Inc. (the movie is so beautiful that I’m sure you will have it in your heart to grant Kaufman the privilege of suspending your disbelief). He can’t take the depression anymore and decides to go for this operation himself.

At a level only marginally under the surface, the movie works as a comedy with the characters very lovingly etched. But at the core of the movie is the deeper third layer which puts a metaphysical spin on the story. A significant chunk of the movie dwells on the actual deletion of each of the memories of Clem that Joel has in his mind (the science of the process has something to do with creating a map of Clem by scanning Joel’s mind after he’s shown gifts/photos/things that remind him of her, and his responses registered…and deleting this map overnight). Somewhere during the process, Joel decides that this whole deletion business was a bad idea to start with but alas, he can’t stop it now because he’s comatose while the system is performing the deletion. Comedy collides with metaphysics as Joel desperately tries to beat the system while being under its influence.

There are some surprises and beautiful moments along the way but I don’t want to spoil it for you by revealing them here. The ethics of such an operating procedure and the people involved in it could be thought of as another issue that the movie dwells on, but it was never about that. It was really about how incredibly complex human relationships are. And it’s a commendable achievement to concoct a story that captures these complex inner workings of a mind, let alone two minds that want to have a relationship! My only grouse was with the ending which i found a tad disappointing, but its probably just urs cynically.

Film Review: Zatoichi (Japanese)

The blurb on the posters says it all: “Zatoichi can kill Bill in 2 minutes, let alone 2 movies”. The movie was going like a song, until they f***ed it up with the last scene. It was so jarring! Wish I could’ve said it was a great movie. Anyways, here’s a break-up of what made the movie tick and what didn’t:

The Good
The Editing/Story-telling: there are 4 to 5 parallel story-threads going, some even symbolic in their juxtaposition. And nowhere does the editing feel tacky/patchy.

The Swash-buckling: delightful (although gory) samurai sword-fights. There are at least 3 showdowns if my memory goes right, not to mention the numerous one-sided fights. And the post-stab blood-gushing (the only consolation for the faint-of-heart is that the fights are rather short-lived.) is IMO a tad more realistic than in Kill Bill Vol.1 (with due respect to the latter movie, which I absolutely adore).

The Soundtrack: one example that immediately comes to mind is this very cool scene where four farmers plough the soil to the tune of the background score.

The Feel of the movie: I am a sucker for movies that can bring to life the ambience of the period/place they are set in (e.g.:- cinema paradiso, y tu mama tambien etc). The villagers, the roads, the sliding doors, the geishas, the tavern, the gambling dens…the works! The frames/shot compositions are really good and so are the production values. Its also a situational comedy to boot. Some enjoyable scenes are the conversations among sake-savoring bums at the watering hole.

The Bad/Ugly
The climax has alternating scenes of Zatoichi kicking the Ginzo clan’s butt (which are all very slick), and young village folk tap-dancing on a stage (all we’re told is that they’re celebrating ‘the festival’). I personally feel the latter was totally unnecessary and a very bad way of ending an otherwise chic flick. Also, a neat twist towards the end wasn't quite given the pride of place it deserved.

The Story-line
Zatoichi is this blind, old, good-natured wandering masseur whose walking stick doubles up as a deadly samurai’s sword in his faster-than-light moves. He wanders into this village which is plagued by the Ginzo clan’s mafia. The Ginzo clan hires another (seemingly) equally-skilled Ronin to protect their interests and wipe out competing clans. The Ronin has his reasons for taking the path of the un-righteous.A brother and sister duo (both dressed as Geishas), go around avenging the virtual massacre of their well-to-do family at the hands of Ginzo’s men. Zatoichi assists them in their revenge.Zatoichi takes shelter at an old woman’s place in the village. She and her nephew form part of another parallel track. The tavern-owner and the conversations revolving around him are yet another parallel track.

My Take
Recommended for those who don’t mind violence, and enjoy Japanese (for instance, I just love the way the language sounds :)…) and/or Samurai movies (and no, ‘last samurai’ doesn’t count, even though I haven’t watched it...:p).

Cast
I only know the guy who played Zatoichi – Takeshi Kitano (check out his chilling performance in ‘Brother’). He is also the director of the movie.

Rambling: The Nature of my Addictions

Here I am, staring at my notebook’s screen, with a deadline for a report breathing so closely down my neck that I can actually feel the moisture in the whiff, and absolutely devoid of any drive to finish it…and what do I do instead? I indulge in as many of my likes as I can…anything to take my mind off the impending fires of mount doom…I snap my notebook shut and go play pool…I re-read this funny book…and when I’m done with the book and am too weary to start another, I catch up on all the blogs I missed, all the delightfully funny comments that I could think up equally funny (or so I’d like to think…) repartees to but now cannot post because the moment has passed…and then I have this irresistible urge to write…something…anything…

So what better topic to yak about than what’s burning me up right now…the nature of my addictions which I plunge head-first into, to the exclusion of everything I am ‘supposed to do’, with a mad escapist glee…there seems to be no logical explanation to it…I know the consequences of missing the deadline…I know it’d cost me a sleepless night of painstaking effort to make up for lost time…and yet, this dumb streak in me says, ‘its just like those million other times when you pulled it off’…and every time I pull it off, I only give this dumb streak more ammo to lull me into my delusions of grandeur…

And then I realize that the addictions themselves have nothing to do with it…they’re drawing flak merely because they are the outward manifestation of my abject lack of drive…in fact, they’re not addictions at all…I can stop them and I have no withdrawal symptoms (at least not yet…)…I keep going back to them merely because my mind’s down on its knees begging me to do something that interests it…it yearns for that adrenaline rush…

Motivation is one elusive bastard…it has this sneaky way of sidling up and getting to you when you least expect it…might as well go so far as to call it happiness’s less-illustrious sibling…I’ve seen any number of my batch-mates with practically Dillon mini-guns up their butts…its almost as if they’re possessed…at times like these I wistfully long for those scattered moments in my life when I had a bullet up my butt too…but can never reconstruct them again…and so I trudge along on the road of my life, looking for that elusive muse, hoping for some gratuitous handout of serendipity…

PS:- Strictly to be consumed with a ton of salt…I know this phase will pass…its just that this has been a recurring theme of late, and I thought I’ll put it through the catharsis that is Writing (for me at least...)…pardon the rantings...:)

PPS:- also trying my hand at the stream-of-consciousness style of writing :)...at the risk of sounding immodest, i wrote it in one breath with very few changes...dunno if i captured it tho...comments hereon will be much appreciated :)...

PPPS:- A Dillon mini-gun is the fastest freakin' gun in the world...it fires 30-calibre shells @ 3000 rounds per minute...

Film Review: Lost in Translation

One word: Wow! Ladies and gentlemen, Sofia Coppola (the director) has arrived! This movie has awesome cinematography, awesome screenplay, awesome performances and awesome dialogues. Sounds like a dream, huh? Well, read on and decide for yourself…

The first shot, even before the titles roll out, is of the beautiful posterior of a woman lying on a bed, as seen through her translucent undies (not a sexist comment this. Just acknowledging a thing of beauty :)). And you instantly get a good feeling about the movie. Not just because of what the shot shows but also because of the lazy, laid-back way in which the camera gazes at it.

Bill Murray plays a Hollywood actor past his prime (there’s an irony for you!) who’s come down to Tokyo to do a whisky commercial. The first scene shows him checking into a hotel and being helped out by his to-be-escorts from the whisky company. The expression on his face for about the first half hour of the movie is one of extreme disinterest in everything. He is just going through the motions. He doesn’t sleep too fitfully. On a parallel track, we see Scarlett Johansson (it was her posterior in the first shot,you realise...:)) lodging at the same hotel, accompanying her newlywed husband on his business trip to Tokyo. We see that the guy is almost never around, and she’s worried that maybe marrying him wasn’t a good idea. She can’t sleep well either. But this is not to say that this part of the movie is sad. Bill with his dazed face is outrageously funny at times.

Bill meets Scarlett at the Hotel’s bar, both driven down there by their insomnia. Introductions are made, Bill plays the marriage counselor to Scarlett for a while, and they like each other and decide to meet again. And from that point on, you feel the spark between the two. They connect. And you see their previously disinterested faces suddenly infused with life. Suddenly, everything Bill says is funny. The guy’s on a roll! There’s one scene where the two are sitting in this Japanese restaurant where u sit right across the chef and he cooks your food in front of your eyes. Bill is making Scarlett roll on the floor with laughter but the chef’s expression is totally deadpan. And then Bill goes: ‘hey, what’s with the straight face?’ I laughed so hard at that!

Bill’s stay at Tokyo is drawing to a close. He’s done with the commercial. And you see the sadness set in through the beautifully expressive faces of Bill and Scarlett. There is a tragi-comical scene in the lift the night before Bill’s leaving. There’s an awkward silence and when the lift stops at Bill’s floor, he can’t figure out how to say goodbye. The lift starts moving up before he can decide. Both laugh at this and when it stops at Scarlett’s floor, all they can manage is a peck on the cheek and a mumbled goodbye. I won’t spoil it for you by disclosing the ending scene. The word closure comes to mind. When you reflect on the movie later on, you can’t help thinking that the ending is perfect.

A word or two on the technical aspects of the movie…The movie is very slow. My review is positive because I enjoy this sort of movies (consider this a warning if u don’t like slow movies…:)). When the actors are reflective, you know they are reflective because the camera freezes there to show the actors reflecting. I do not know what the technical name is but the camera uses a particular filter that lends a soft hue to everything. This movie is shot entirely with this filter. Everything’s shot with Japan and its vibrant, eccentric (I don’t mean this in a bad way) culture in the backdrop. The camera as well as the actors are just amused by it; they don’t make any value judgments about it. I think it’s a thin line and kudos to Sofia for pulling it off without crossing the line.

Film Review: Irreversible (French)

Solicitous warning: this movie is not for the faint of heart. It has two of the most gruesome scenes that I’ve ever seen on celluloid. I barely made it through the movie by occasionally shutting my eyes tight.

I must confess at the outset that I am a sucker for foreign language films that have something to do with festivals such as Cannes or Sundance (well, it has worked for me so far :)). So when I saw these so-called symbols of good film-making on the posters for ‘Irreversible’, not to mention Monica Belluci in the cast, I assumed any (ahem..) healthy adult’s disposition towards the movie. Little was I to know that the movie would catch me with my pants down, in a manner of speaking, with its unflinching depiction of revenge and rape (in that order). But disturbing as it may be, I really liked the movie. More about why, towards the end.

This is one of those reverse-chronology movies (not many around. The first to use this technique was ‘betrayal’, then ‘memento’. This is the third as far as I know). But the technique fits so well with what the movie wants to say that the story told in the normal fashion would’ve missed the point.

Anyway, as the beginning titles roll out, you see everything in reverse order (the way you’d see words if you were reading something from the mirror). Silly gimmick, you think to yourself. Then the camera pans the depressing face of a building and zeroes in on a window, into a room with two old men, one naked, talking. By now you gather from the shaky and grainy shots, that the camera is a handheld. From the room, the camera moves on to a BDSM club aptly named ‘the rectum’. By now, the camera has acquired a life of its own, convulsing away, and you begin to wonder if the director’s hobbies include lomography. The time’s ripe for the first gruesome scene – the revenge. The camera is after 2 guys who are frenziedly looking for a guy called ‘Le Tenia’. They finally suspect one guy to be him, and one of the two grabs a fire extinguisher and repeatedly pounds the poor sod’s face with it. He goes on and on with his pounding and the camera can’t take its eyes off the face getting beaten to pulp (and you think to yourself, why can’t the fucking camera have its fits now).

Then slowly, the story retraces its steps. So the next scene has the two looking for ‘the rectum’, followed by the two asking for ‘Le Tenia’ and being directed to ‘the rectum’, and so on, until the story comes back to Alex (monica belluci) walking through a deserted subway and accosted by a guy (Le Tenia) and raped. Now this is to put it very simply. The rape scene is about 8-9 minutes long, where the camera freezes on the scene again to unflinchingly watch a woman being mercilessly raped and abused and defaced. Closing your eyes won’t suffice. You’ll also have to shut your ears tight too.

Only after this scene do you come to know that the two guys looking for Le Tenia are Marcus (Alex’s fiancé) and his friend (and Alex’s ex-lover). The movie ends with a very warm and leisurely scene with both Alex and Marcus completely and comfortably nude.

Enough about the movie. Let me ponder a while on why I like it. This is one of those movies that you reflect on. The buck doesn’t stop with ‘The End’. You think about the reverse chronology, you understand why the revenge had to be so brutal, and you try to see if the movie would have the same effect if shot in the normal way. And then you begin to see the beauty of the movie title, Irreversible. You see layers upon layers of metaphor, not to mention irony. You see the irreversibility of the rape and the mad frenzy and thirst for revenge that it sets off. And by reversing that irreversible sequence of events, the director has ended up making a movie that dwells on how threadbare the fabric of happiness is, and how blissful ignorance is (You, as the viewer, however, are cursed with the knowledge of the rape, and value the tender final scene that much more). Shot the normal way, it would merely have been another run-of-the-mill rape-revenge movie, completely robbed of its subtle social commentary.