Tomes & Flicks

Flick:Rob Roy

2010-12-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

Released the same year as Braveheart, Rob Roy is in many ways the anthithesis to Mel Gibson's rousing epic.

Rob Roy's issues are personal, William Wallace's public. The former fights to avenge his honour, whereas the latter takes up arms for his land.

Clarion calls of "FREEDOM" have no import in Rob Roy, whose titular Highlander's (Liam Neeson, Jedi Knight in a kilt) most pressing need is the housing, clothing and feeding of his family and clansmen.

It's the early 1700's and the kingdoms of England and Scotland have both been unified, although that hardly lessens the traditional disdain that dandy Englishmen like the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt) bear for their Celtic cousins along with a deep seated suspicion that the Highlands are scattered with Jacobites (sympathisers of the deposed Stuart monarch James II).

When Rob asks for a thousand pound loan to herd and sell cattle to raise cash from Montrose, his scheming nephew Archie Cunningham and aide Killearm (Tim Roth and Brain Cox, both of whom chew and steal their scenes with effortless ease) steal the money by killing and framing Rob's best friend, Andy McDonald (a miscast but mercifully brief Eric Stoltz) for the theft.

When Rob refuses to denounce the Duke of Argyll as a Jacobite on Montrosse's request in exchange for cancelling the debt, the stage is set, like all movies featuring a Scottish hero, for an unleashing of English brutality with all the traditional boxes of large scale slaughter, house burning and female violations dutifully checked. Bloody reprisals on the way to a climactic showdown between Rob and Archie follow.

If it lacks the expansive sweep of Braveheart, Rob Roy more than compensates with a central relationship, that of Rob and his strong wife Mary, that's genuinely moving and engaging. See in this yet another counterpoint to Braveheart, where women (both living and dead) merely function as catalysts for a call to arms and visions of sanity to cling onto in the midst of torture.

Rob Roy is in many ways, the anti-epic. The panoramic vistas and battles are accounted for, but it's struggles are deeply personal and above all, it's a charming love story between a man and his wife.

Terrific performances, sharp dialogues and a memorable villain make Rob Roy a winner.

The Expendables

2010-08-17T21:44:00.001-07:00

Any objectivity I would have had watching The Expendables was obliterated years ago, thanks to a wasted adolescence devouring practically the entire Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Van Damme/Seagal/Norris ouevre of undiluted carnage.

They were simple (ok, often stupid) but they served you their action straight up, unencumbered by pseudo-philosophical ruminations or the need to piggy back on popular comic-book mythologies. It was a time when the idea of Keanu Reeves or Matt Damon kicking ass and taking names (or for that matter James Bond moping for 2 movies over some chick who fucked him over) most likely existed as a stupid joke in my wasted brain.

The Expendables is a glorious throwback to that era and that's probably the only way you're ever going to derive any sort of enjoyment from it.

Needless to say, it effortlessly located my viewing G-Spot and I probably watched it with a stupid grin plastered on my face throughout it's running time.

It, quite naturally fell victim to it's own All Star line-up. There simply wasn't enough time to showcase everyone, but Stallone deserves a solid 'A' for effort. He wisely gives Statham ample screen time (he's the only one in the group with a career trajectory currently pointing north), and gives everyone their 2 minutes under the spotlight thanks to action scenes that exist for no other reason than to have these titans go at it, WWF style (Li Vs. Lundgren! Austin Vs. Stallone!Austin Vs. Couture!).

I wish Sly had eased up on the Mike Bay-style edits thoughs would have loved the fights to linger on my visual cortex for more than 1/2 a second, located somewhere in the movie's numerous fights is a Statham-Li tag team move that I'll have to wait for the DVD to fully enjoy.

And is it just me who thinks Mickey Rourke just ambled over from the Iron Man 2 set to this one?

The one scene that surprisingly didn't work for me (most likely on account of it being built up way too much) was the cameo featuring Planet Hollywood's major shareholders. It all seemed too forced, with Arnie at his absolute smirking worst.

It's cavalier treatment of women is de rigueur for movies like this and I doubt if the writers know or even care about the irony (it's probably too stupid to) of a script that posits a woman as the salvation point for these jaded warriors while also subjecting her to the film's nastiest torture sequence not to mention having Statham's character excoriate his girl for taking up with a loser while he exercises his right to disappear for long stretches of time without telling her.

God, I love the '80s!

Predators

2010-07-13T00:08:00.000-07:00

A good remake should respect all that was good about the original, tweaking the formula just enough to keep it fresh wthout obliterating everything that worked the first time, not to mention the goodwill of returning fans.

As much homage as reboot, as well as a sequel of sorts to John McTiernan's impeccably crafted 1987 actioner, the Robert Rodriguez-produced and Nimrod Antal (Vacancy, Armoured)-directed Predators gets it right.The movie's numerous and respectful hat-tips to the original hit all my viewing sweet spots, thanks to an annual habit of popping the Arnie original into my DVD player for a spin.

-A high jump off a cliff into a river

-An army of bad-asses emptying their formidable weaponry against an enroaching threat (Yup, Ole' Painless makes a comeback).

-A ripped to hell hero smearing himself with mud to avoid detection.

-Said hero crawling in pain after a brutal beating from his otherworldly nemesis.

-A victim making his last stand (although, in this version, he goes down carving a healthy chunk of Predator-meat).

While it's reverential references are largely based on the original Predator, it cribs enough from the sequels to liven up proceedings, especially in mixing up it's motley crew of mercenaries with members of the criminal fraternity (shades of Predator 2) and featuring a dust-up between 2 Predators from rival tribes (from the now hopefully defunct Alien Vs. Predator films).

Parachuted into an off-Earth game preserve, a group of hired killers need to stay one step ahead of the dreadlocked, mandible-mouthed, heavy heat packing and invisible uber-hunters, easier said than done when their de-facto leader has self-preservation high on his agenda and their numbers consist of a Yakuza enforcer, a death-row inmate who dreams of raping women and a doctor clueless in the arts of combat and evasion (or is he?) not to mention Danny Trejo.

Speaking of Trejo, his rather wasted role and a thoroughly pointless cameo from Laurence Fishburne are the only damp spots in this otherwise crackling actioner (you have both Machete and Morpheus at your disposal and all you can give them are dismal cameos?)

The action's good, the effects decent and the acting perfectly serviceable.

Brody's certainly no Arnie.....

...but he brings a thinking man's gravitas to the role.

Predators is a perfect afternoon's popcorn view and rejuvenates a franchise that was pretty much three quarters of the way on the slide to mediocrity on it's way to a blisfull oblivion.

Tome: Shogun

2010-03-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

Shogun by James Clavell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
You either buy into the epic romanticism of Clavell's mammoth (in size and popularity) bestseller or you don't.

Historical verisimilitude isn't the agenda here. You get the trappings of period flavour, but Clavell's 16th Century Japan is mere backdrop to the myriad sub-plots of Byzantine political manueverings, jockeying for prime trading monopolies, war plans and an inter-racial love story strung along the key plot thread of a ship-wrecked Englishman's gradual assimilation into the society and impending battle between 2 rival warlords in Feudal Japan.

Re-reading snatches of Shogun after a 20 year gap still shows it to be an incredibly engaging yarn, and hardly colours my long-time belief that Clavell was a master-story teller with a knack for sustaining engaging narratives over an intimidating length of pages.

The history is there for colour, but what Clavell largely delivers, much like Ken Follett's The Pillars Of The Earth, is pure Medieval Soap Opera.

The dichotomoy of a rigid society of equisitely cultivated rituals and manners with a penchant for sudden vicious brutality is conveyed engagingly enough through the eyes of a befuddled John Blackthorne, later to be dubbed Anjin (Pilot)-San owing to the sheer "unpronounceability" of his English name by Japanese tongues.

But less one feel tempted to castigate Clavell for the exoticism of his subjects, note that while Blackthorne is positioned as the story's token hero, as the book progresses, he becomes one of many pawns on the strategic chessboard of the brilliant and charismatic Yoshi Toranaga as he jockeys for power against key rival Ishido for the position of Ultimate Commander, the Shogun.

Deliriously entertaining for much of it's colossal length, Shogun's still the Gold Standard by which I measure Far East epics for their sheer readability and entertainment factor and Clavell was simply the best at delivering them.

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Flick: Universal Soldier:Regeneration

2010-02-14T23:22:00.000-08:00

I have no issues with fading action stars taking long dormant franchises out of mothballs to jump-start their flagging box-office fortunes.

It's, after all, given us the slightly under-whelming but entertaining Indy 4, the poignant Rocky 6, the visceral Rambo 4 and kinetic Live Free or Die Hard.

And now we have Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, doyens of low-rent actioners for much of the late '80s to mid-'90s cinema( currently doyens of low-rent actioners released directly to DVD) saddling up for a rematch of their burly barnyard brawl in the Roland Emmerich-directed 1990 action hit Universal Soldier.

But fans expecting Regeneration to be the vehicle that finally hauls these ageing Euro Hunks out of the murky depths of DVD Dungeon should check their expectations at the door.

It takes a full hour for Van Damme to swing into action and Lundgren's appearance amounts to little more than a cameo.

As for the much anticipated, hyped and awaited Dolph-Damme rematch?

It's pulverisingly brutal stuff...for all of the 2 minutes it lasts.

The plot, for those that actually need one, is about a disposed Russian general and his army who kidnap the children of the Soviet Premier and hold them captive at the abandoned Chernobyl Nuclear plant (yes, that Chernobyl), threatening to both kill his hostages and unleash a nuclear Holocaust if his political allies aren't released from prison.

The US army is called in to help (big surprise), and they come with an elite cadre of fighting fit men, including 4 UniSols i.e Universal Soldiers; regenerated former corpses tweaked and honed to near indestructible fighting capability.

But their first incursion into the plant for a rescue mission is soundly thwarted, courtesy of the baddies' Secret Weapon: A souped-up UniSol Ver.2 (UFC alumni Sergei "The Pit Bull" Arlovski, displaying the personality of a lamp-post but a brutally efficient fighter), created and maintained by a defecting and mercenary scientist who also has his own "Insurance Policy" against the rebel general, a re-cloned former UniSol Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren).

With a sizeable chunk of their force massacred not to mention their UniSols permanently decommissioned, the military authorities yank their last surviving UniSol Luc Devereaux (Van Damme) out of retirement and some cosy rehabilitation therapy in Switzerland to take out the bad guys.

The filmmaker's decision to ignore events in the second film may sit well with those who feel every available copy of Universal Soldier:The Return needs to be hunted down and burnt along with the original negatives, but as one of the 10 people on the planet who genuinely enjoyed it's absurd cheesiness, Regeneration seems dark and dour by comparison, thanks to a spare, minimalist approach taken by director John (son of Peter) Hyams that echoes the John Carpenter actioners of the '80s like "Escape From New York" complete with a thumping electronica score. It works for the script's sombre mood and complements the fast, furious and effective action set pieces.

But the drawback is you get a Devereaux leeched of much of his humanity (which, after all, was an underlying theme of the first 2 flicks), Van Damme's natural charisma buried beneath a perpetually sullen demeanour that tends to give credence to rumours that he was strong-armed into the role owing to contractual requirements.

And shoe-horning a 10min Lundgren cameo just to insert him into a fleeting fight scene with Van Damme is Fan Bait of the worst kind. But kudos to Drago for investing his all too brief screen time with a delicious reprise of his unhinged soldier, An Andrew Scott re-cloned complete with his homicidal psychosis intact, and more's the pity he didn't get to pull Chief Baddie duties.

For action junkies, Universal Soldier 3 is definitely worth a spin on their players, thanks to Hyams' slick choreography of the action scenes. The fights, executed for the most part by genuine exponents, is thankfully free of much of the hyper-edits and shaky-cam effects that litter action movies nowadays. One hack-and-slash scene featuring a Van Damme on Berserker Mode armed with a Hunting Knife is especially cool. The Pit Bull lays on some lightning fast combos of kicks and punches (but I still miss the hamming Bill Goldberg and the panther-like grace of Michael Jai White from The Return) while the Van Damme-Lundgren bout features some of the best property-destroying mayhem since The Bride and Elle Driver ripped apart a trailer in Kill Bill 2.

The ending blatantly sets up another installment that from the looks of it will star one of the American soldiers (also played by a martial artist whose name I can't be arsed to look up) killed in action and all set to be resurrected as a UniSol.

I'm not looking forward to it.

Put the UniSols back on ice. This franchise is done.

Tome: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2009-12-08T03:22:00.000-08:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Stieg Larsson's first book in the Millennium trilogy is a curious hybrid.

One the one hand, it's a corporate thriller about the attempts of discredited journalist Mikael Blomkvist to expose the shady financial dealings of corporate financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

On the other, it's a riff on the traditional village-based murder mystery canonised by Agatha Christie, as Blomkvist is hired by industrialist Henrik Vanger to uncover the mystery behind the disapperance of his grand-niece almost 40 years ago from the sleepy hamlet of Hedeby.

Meaning, it may be set deep in the Scandinavian hartlands and feature characters with names like Lisbeth, Mikael and Hans-Erik, but at heart, The Girl With The Dragon tattoo is thoroughly English in it's murder mystery and wholly American in it's thriller elements of serial killing and corporate skull-duggery.

Trouble is, it doesn't transcend it's dog-eared antecedents to deliver anything remotely refreshing.

The mystery sets up a deliciously traditional framework of a sprawling, squabling and nasty family most likely neck-deep in collussion in the disappearance of one of their own. But Larsson never exploits this by giving any of them significant roles. The 2 thoroughly unpleasant members of the Vanger clan, Henrik's ex-Nazi brother Harald and Isabella, Harriet's cold and calculating mother are reduced to cameos.

And when the mystery morphs into a serial killer tale replete with torture room basements that climaxes with a most unsatisfactory end for it's depraved antagonist, it's hard not to wonder what the fuss over this book is all about.

Once the Harriet Vanger mystery is resolved, the book then switches gear for the next 100 pages to detail Blomkvist's elaborate plan to take down Wennerstrom, a plot thread resolved equally unsatisfactorily.

What keeps this 600 page tome (barely) afloat are it's 2 leads.

Blomkvist is an amiable protagonist with an enviable talent of getting women, be it much married colleagues, 53 year old headmistresses or rebellious hackers dropping their knickers within days of coming into contact with his genial, easy-going and non-judgemental demeanour.

The titular girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander is deeply scarred, sociopathically obsessed with control and a gifted researcher possessing a violent temper. She is the book's only fleshed out and intriguing character and her troubled past is something I hope Larsson has expanded on in the subsequent 2 books.

Larsson's agenda seems clear given his tendency to open each of the book's various sections with a statistical bulletin on female abuse in Sweden and the fact that apart from Blomkvist and males above 70, men come off as world-class turds in his book. (The book's Swedish tile is "Men Who Hate Women"). But one sincerely wishes that the sermonising came in a more attractive package.

A mystery that never quite engages and a thriller that doesn't quite thrill, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo doesn't kick-off the Millenium Trilogy on a high note.

One hopes the subsequent installments are an improvement.

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Tome: The Cold Six Thousand

2009-12-08T03:00:00.001-08:00

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
James Ellroy's second volume in his USA Underworld trilogy follows the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and culminates in the killing of his brother Robert and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King. Once again told through a 3-man arc (returning American Tabloid alumni Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell and newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr.), The Cold Six Thousand, is a massive, demanding read, hardly helped by Ellroy's pared-to-the-bone prose and a plot that isn't so much labyrinthine as it is a literary hydra, where the closure of one strand merely results in the sprouting of 2 more cogs in an incredibly complex wheel of murky dealings, shady alliances and tangled sexual politics.

Ellroy's massive, grimy canvas now takes in the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the former exploited by nefarious CIA operatives to run a drug manufacturing and exporting enterprise, with profits being funneled into training camps for mercenaries to for yet another planned Cuba invasion to topple Fidel Castro, while the latter prompts the ever-scheming J.Edgar Hoover to launch a cointelpro to discredit the movement.

Mixed into this turbulent stew is Wayne's misplaced hatred of Black people and it's attendant guilt when his wife is brutally murdered by a black felon he let escape, Ward Littell's gradual unraveling by guilt and remorse over his collussion with Hoover to discredit King and the Mob to fleece the reclusive Howard Hughes in Las Vegas and Pete Bondurant's gradually disintegrating marriage to Barb Cathcart.

Not the easiest of reads but a must for fans of Ellroy's revisionist American History and it's deeply flawed facilitators.

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Tomes: The Age Of Innocence

2009-10-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A scathing attack on the hypocrisy and insularity of upper-crust New York Society in the late 19th Century and it's collective effort to thwart a romance between the married Newland Archer and disgraced Countess Ellen Olenska, The Age Of Innocence is not only one of the most entertaining reads you'd get out of a tome slapped with the twin labels of "Masterpiece" and "Pulitzer Prize Winner", it's a testimony to Wharton's consummate skill and narrative control as a novelist that she not only manages to have you race through the pages for a conclusion that's really quite foregone, but effortlessly tells this tale not through the eyes of a woman, as would have been naturally expected, but filters it convincingly through her troubled and introspective male protagonist.

Sped through this in less than 2 days. Sharp,witty, observant and of course, wonderfully romantic in the best tradition of Austen, The Age Of Innocence is a winner, for this reader at least.

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Flicks: Che

2009-10-19T00:58:00.000-07:00

Steeped in authentic, gritty realism, Steven Soderbergh's biopic of revolutionary and guerrilla fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara, filmed in 2 parts, is definitely NOT a lazy Sunday view.

Both Che Parts 1 & 2 demand your undivided attention, with it's docu-drama approach and sombre pacing.

Top marks for a commanding performance by Benicio Del Toro in the titular role, an authentic recreation of teeming jungle locales and shanty towns dotted around it's fringes and Soderbergh's largely unknown cast who bring the harsh drudgery, sickness prone and violence infested life of an impoverished resistance movement to splendid life.

Deduct those same marks for an almost hagiographical rendering of a T-Shirt adorning icon.

There's virtually nothing here for for those seeking events, experiences or even catalysts shaping and defining Che's transformation from ordinary man to extraordinary revolutionary in his zealous embracing of La Causa.

What drives this man, who after a victorious Cuban Revolution, that saw him fight alongside Fidel Castro to depose the ruling regime of Fulgencio Batista and chronicled in Part 1, to then chuck all vestiges of an ostensibly privileged existence in Havana to head south to Bolivia to relive another Hell-ish tour of Jungle Duty in resurrecting yet another Dictator Deposing Cause, depicted in Part 2?

As the movie is adapted from Che's own diaries, the glossing over of less savoury aspects of the man (presiding over numerous executions during his stint in Cuba. for one) is understandable. But this viewer still wanted a little more Man and a little less Icon.

You get Che the Firebrand castigating American Imperialism and it's supporters during a UN Assembly, Che the Leader dispensing discipline and justice, Che the Healer dispensing medication and Che the Writer and Thinker to his group of backwoods soldiers, but what you don't get, frustratingly so, is inside the man's head.

The pace, already leisurely in the first part, gets positively lugubrious in the second, with interminable scenes of the Communist guerrillas in the jungle talking, making camp, hiding and running wit the odd burst of excitement provided by the odd burst of gunfire during the rebels' numerous skirmishes with the ruling military forces.

Given the effectiveness of a cast of relative unknowns in 2 movies with dialogues almost entirely in Spanish, Soderbergh's choice of throwing the odd Famous Face or 2 is perplexing, to say the least. Oh look! There's Franka Potente, a Miss If You Blink Matt Damon (providing more fodder for trivia lovers to say that's 2 leads of The Bourne franchise re-united in this movie) and Lou "Where the hell's he been " Diamond Phillips.

When Che finally fulfills his destiny as a martyr to The Cause, you're left hardly knowing anything about a character you spent than 4 hours of screen time with.

Che the film is always intriguing, occasionally arresting but isn't consistently engaging enough to warrant this epic treatment

KayKay's recommendation: Only for die hard fans of the Argentine revolutionary (with lots of leisure time)

Tomes: American Tabloid

2009-10-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read American Tabloid years ago as a student in Australia. I re-read it recently, largely to re-familiarize myself with the sleazy, murky world of Ellroy's USA Underworld Trilogy, before I tackle his just published 3rd and final installment Blood's A Rover.

Long time readers of Ellroy's books will quickly find out that the USA Underworld books are merely the author painting his hellish world view on a wider canvas; American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are basically the crime and grime of his magnificent LA Quartet(The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere,LA Confidential and White Jazz) extrapolated to Nation Wide scale.

As Ellroy states in his biting Foreward:"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets".

Tabloid sets out to prove Ellroy's maxim that President John F Kennedy "got whacked at the optimum moment assure his saintlihood" and seeks to "dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall".

"They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wire-tappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers."

Tabloid is Ellroy's revision of American History, and like LA Confidential, predicated on a 3 Man character arc: Thuggish and violent Pete Bondurant, Handsome, opportunistic and money-loving Kemper Boyd and the conflicted, guilt-wracked Ward Littell.

To even try to encapsulate American Tabloid's labyrinthine plot within the confines of a review is foolhardy; storylines intersect, interests collide, combustible partnerships are formed and then brutally sundered.

Shakedown artist, pimp and strong arm man Bondurant supplies dope to an increasingly bizarre Howard Hughes while facilitating hits for Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who is under investigation, along with the Mafia he's neck deep in collussion with by a crusading Robert Kennedy, whose McClellan Committee is infiltrated by Kemper Boyd on orders from a Machievellian J. Edgar Hoover convinced the committee's very existence is a slap in the face of the FBI.

Littell, worshipping Bobby Kennedy and his crusade, clandestinely hunts for the Mob's Achilles Heel: a set of Union Pension Fund books detailing illicit transactions of monies to finance numerous Mob-sanctioned enterprises with usurious interest rates charged to lenders, a fund liberally skimmed by Teamster Boss Hoffa for his own underhanded dealings.

Ellroy's clipped,staccato, rapid-fire, slang-coated and hugely profane prose and various epistolary devices (transcripts of phone conversations/memos/Newspaper articles)turbo charges a narrative that sees Bondurant and Boyd get co-opted then consumed by the CIA-Mob funded recruitment and training of a cadre of anti-Castro Cubans for the launch of the disastrous Bay Of Pigs invasion, chronicles the fall and then remarkable ascent of Littell as the Mob's and Howard Hughes' top lawyer even while it hurtles towards the inevitable downfall of Hoover's pet Agent and Kennedy Lover Kemper Boyd.

At the centre of this convoluted spider web of a narrative sits King Tarantula Hoover, the Underworld Trilogy's Primary Villain,as deliciously evil a creation as Ellroy's other Dastardly Wicked Character, rogue cop Dudley Smith in the LA Quartet along with the ubiquitous presence of the Mob/Outfit/La Cosa Nostra and it's Chief Heads Sam "Mo" "Momo" Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.

Tabloid isn't for those whose idea of a fun read isn't spending 500-odd pages with a uniformly unpleasant set of characters and aren't prepared for some of the most unflattering potrayals of certain historic personages in American History (Hoover-Cunningly Manipulative, Jack Kennedy-Sexually Voracious, Robert Kennedy-Obsessively Driven, Jimmy Hoffa-Foam At The Mouth Sociopathic, Howard Hughes-Reclusive and Germ-Phobic)not to mention oodles of blood-curdling violence, which in patented Ellroy style, is pornographic bordering on the surreal : "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon."

My second read of Tabloid was as feverish as the first. Ellroy creates an American hell-hole of deception, violence, back-stabbing, political chicanery and racism that functions like a morphine shot to the veins. I was on a Sleaze high for a week and having turned the last page, am starting to experience withdrawal symptoms. Which is probably why I'm reaching for The Cold Six Thousand directly after writing this.

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The Punisher(s)

2009-10-03T21:30:00.001-07:00

It's a colossal shame that 3 re-boots of The Punisher couldn't launch a sustainable franchise which effectively lumped it in the Failed Comic Book-To-Screen adaptations of Marvel superheroes. It rankles me no end that this means all 3 adaptations now join the mediocre Daredevil and the truly awful Elektra in the failed pantheon of Marvel characters who couldn't make the successful transition to the screen. More's the pity as each successive iteration of the skull-insignia sporting vigilante killer improved on it's predecessor with the 3rd movie finally striking the right balance between comic-book violence and showcasing the utter ruthlessness of one of Marvel's darkest anti-heroes.

Raiding my DVD archives to re-visit all 3 screen outings of the uber vigilante recently, I saw 3 occassionally cheesy, frequently dumb but constantly entertaining actioners that's perfect lazy Sunday viewing, if your idea of lazy Sunday viewing is bullet-riddled corpses, multiple stabbings and large scale destruction achieved through the expenditure of enough military arsenal to launch a foreign coup.

The Punisher (1989)

When cop Frank Castle's wife and children are killed by mobster Dino Morreti, he becomes a driven vigilante meting out righteous justice known as The Punisher. When Yakuza boss Lady Tanaka begins a gang war for control with the Italian mob by kidnapping the children of the Heads of Families, the cunning Gianni Franco enlists Castle's help in rescuing the kids, his son being one of them.

The fact that The Punisher's 1st screen avatar starred Dolph Lundgren (Sweden's premier wood export after Ikea) as the titular avenger doomed it to the DVD dungeons of C-Grade actioners from the get go. Director Mark Goldblatt (ace editor behind The Terminator, Terminator 2, Commando and Starship Troopers) working from a script by Boaz Yakin (the only shocker is that this is the same Boaz Yakin who would go on to helm the engrossing indie Urban drama Fresh), firmly anchors the film in it's B-Movie roots and taken as such, The Punisher is almost as much cheesy fun as Lundgren's other Yakuza-themed actioner, Showdown In Little Tokyo stopping just short of the latter's gleefully racist Asian caricatures, although Kim Miyori's scary Lady Tanaka skirts pretty close to the exotic Dragon lady archetype. Small points are scored by director Goldblatt for having the knife-wielding and butt-kicking female not be an Asian but blonde European Zoshka Mizak (wisely given no speaking lines) as is the casting of the reliable Jeroen Krabbe as the slimy Franco. What Lou Gossett Jr's doing here is anybody's guess (but the fact that he followed an Oscar winning turn in An Officer And A Gentleman with the Iron Eagle movies is a potent clue that canny role selection isn't one of his notable talents).

His Jake Berkowitz, Castle's former partner and pretty much the only one who believes he's alive after the car bomb that wiped out his family is supposed to provide some sort of moral anchor for Castle's revenge-fueled rampage, but anytime he and insipid blonde partner Nancy Everhard are on screen is dead space. It's the action you come for and Goldblatt stages them with enough efficiency to stifle yawns with Castle and Franco's climactic siege of Tanaka's stronghold providing some snappy martial arts ass-kickery (Lundgren's own Karate expertise comes in handy).

Lundgren has the height and bulk to inhabit the leather jacket-wearing, Harley driving and sewer dwelling Castle but lacks suitable menace to fully realise the punishment- meting vigilante. And the skull T-Shirt is conspicuously absent.

Exit Dolph Lundgren, enter Thomas Jane...

The Punisher (2004)

When ex-Special Forces, Ex-FBI agent Frank Castle's wife, son and pretty much his entire family is wiped out by vengeful mobster Howard Saint, he swears revenge on the Saint family and in the process becomes the one man vigilante The Punisher.

Director and co-scripter Jonathan Hensleigh valiantly tried uprooting The Punisher from it's previous B-movie roots by injecting some drama and emotion into Castle's metamorphosis from loving family man to vengeful enforcer of justice and hiring an actor like Thomas Jane as opposed to an action star to essay the role of the titular avenger. It's a hit and miss affair. The Origins approach fleshes out Castle's character arc but also waits until the climactic shootout to showcase The Punisher in full-on take no prisoners berserker mode.

Hensleigh takes as many right steps as he does misguided ones. The roping in of John Travolta as mob boss Howard Saint and Will Patton as his gay and ruthless enforcer Quentin Glass is inspired, but having Castle enact his revenge on the Saint crime family through a series of set-ups and deceptions is not. About the only planning we want to see The Punisher doing is deciding whether to pack both the Colt M4A1 carbine and M203 40mm grenade launcher or just sticking with the Glock 17 with a Strider JW knife for some close-up wet work.

Castle's encounters with some of Saint's bizarre assassins are inspired . Gunman Harry Heck who serenades Castle with a song before trying to kill him borders on the surreal while Castle's brutal apartment-busting brawl with The Russian (Pro-Wrestler Kevin Nash) set to an operatic aria is the the type of no-holds barred mayhem this movie could have used more of rather than wasting valuable time showing Castle's interaction with a trio of outcasts living in his apartment building. They may have been ported over from the comic books but blonde Joan, pierced Dave and fat Bumpo add nothing to the narrative except more fodder for trivia fans who can say 2 of the trio (Rebecca Romijn and Ben Foster) both played mutants in X-Men 3. And while serving to showcase Glass' sadism, the wince-inducing torture of Foster's Dave borders on the repulsive.

Hensleigh attempts to give The Punisher's character some heft (Frank is racked with grief, Frank drinks, Frank contemplates suicide) when what was needed was more firepower. It's a schizophrenic film, veering wildly between lethargic drama and explosive actioner. Rarely dull, The Punisher's second screen incarnation is nevertheless a failed experiment to kick start a franchise. At least Jane wears the skull T-Shirt.

Exit Thomas Jane, enter Ray Stevenson....

Punisher: War Zone (2008)

When ex-Special Forces vet Frank Castle's wife and children are killed by mobsters, he becomes the ruthless vigilante The Punisher. In the course of meting out his own special brand of justice to gangster Billy Rusotti, he accidentally kills an undercover FBI agent. When the horribly disfigured Rusotti, now named Jigsaw and his psychotic brother Loony Bin Jim target the Agent's wife and daughter, a remorseful Castle comes to their aid.

It took ex-Karate Champion and ex-Stunt woman Lexi Alexander directing from a script by Nick Santora, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway starring that Titus dude from the Rome miniseries to finally get it right. Ray Stevenson, the least prettiest of the 3 screen Punishers nails the character with deadly precision. Stevenson plays The Punisher the only way he should be played: as a relentless killing machine.

Alexander re-anchors the series in it's B-movie roots but dials the violence way, way over the top while staging the action scenes with stylish,efficient brutality (this movie would easily qualify for the Record of maximum head shots committed to celluloid).

Starting from The Punisher's assault on crippled crime lord Cesare's mansion, Punisher:War Zone is balls to wall action top-loaded with blood, guts and gore that would repulse anyone not familiar with another Lionsgate franchise featuring a psycho named Jigsaw. But Alexander wisely balances the non-stop assaultive violence by never letting you forget the scripts comic-book sensibilities (Castle fixes his broken nose with a pencil; a free runner is blown to smithereens doing a mid-air somersault). And Dominic West (playing another asshole after 300) and Doug Hutchison (also reprising an asshole after The Green Mile) playing Jigsaw and Loony Bin respectively, pitch their performances to the north of ultra-campiness, complete with exaggerated Noo York accents. The always watchable Wayne Knight is a welcome presence as Castle's arms supplier Microchip but the movie can't avoid some throw-aways; Julie Benz as the bereaved widow (as annoyingly weepy and whiny here as she was in Rambo 4) , Colin Salmon as the dead FBI agent's former partner (valiantly attempting an American accent) and Dash Mihok's Martin Soap, a cop on the trail of The Punisher who nevertheless supplies one of the better closing lines to a movie, "Great! Now I have brains splattered all over me!"

Frenetically paced and thrillingly violent, War Zone is The Punisher movie fans were probably waiting for (with Castle's skull insignia front and centre throughout) , so it's box-office failure is especially sad given that chances of any sequels have been torpedoed as well.

Well, another re-boot is probably a couple of years away. After all, good murderous vigilantes never die, they just get resurrected.

The Shadow Of The Wind

2009-10-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It comes encumbered with the baggage of being compared to "One Hundred years of Solitude" and "The Name Of The Rose", but has neither the Magic Realism of a Marquez nor Eco's frequent digressions into semiotics-influenced discourses on Middle Age politics, philosophy and theology.

What Carlos Ruiz Zafon's gives you is pure escapism. Shadow Of The Wind is pure Gothic Melodrama replete with the heated passions and heady emotions without which the genre itself becomes pretty pointless.

Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in a Barcelona under the Franco dictatorship, Shadow tells the tale of Daniel Sempere, initiated by his book seller father into the secret Cemetary of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten tomes lovingly looked after by old caretaker Isaac Montfort. Tradition dictates that initiates to this forgotten library adopt one book and keep it safe for life.

When Daniel quickly becomes a fan of Julian Carax, author of his chosen book (the titular Shadow Of The Wind)and discovers that a horribly disfigured man who goes by the moniker of one of the book's characters Lain Courbert, is systematically hunting down and burning every copy of Carax's novels, he is plunged into a mystery to uncover Courbert's origins while evading the attentions of the ruthlessly sadistic Inspector Fumero and navigating a passionate but potentially doomed romance with the gorgeouus sister of his best friend.

Scratch beneath it's potboiler surface and some scenes of genuine pathos appear. Shadow is ultimately a novel of unfulfilled longing and unrequited love, with Julian's tragic life at it's epicentre, his downward spiral into sadness, despair, melancholy and ultimately rage at his failed romance with the rich and beautiful Penelope Aldaya fuelling the plot and rippling outwards to envelope and affect the lives of several characters in the book in dramatic and even horrible ways.

As chief protagonist and narrator, Daniel is blandness personified while Fumero never breaks out of the Evil Incarnate sketch he's boxed in. And Zafon proves himself the flip side of Isabel Allende in his inability to write convincingly about the opposite sex. See an echo of Allende's continued potrayal of all Latin men as macho, boorish rapists in Zafon's shading of his female characters as gorgeous femme fatales and nothing more.

So breathe a sigh of sharp relief for Fermin Romero de Torres, the best realised character of the book. Daniels' best friend, his father's assistant, an ex-spy and rakish lover, Fermin's magisterial lectures on women, romance and politics provide some much needed relief from the relentless melodrama.

Spiced with steamy sex, graphic violence, a crackling mystery and passionate romances, The Shadow Of The Wind is the perfect beach/flight/lazy morning/rainy night read. A crackling read as long as you're not looking for Marquez's Magic or Eco's Echo.

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Tome: The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

2009-06-23T01:45:00.002-07:00

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
Relentlessly depressing saga of overweight Dominican lad who's into sci-fi and women and achieves success in neither. Oscar starts the book a loser and ends it dead. With frequent digressions into his mothers's and sister's equally sad-sack lives, large chunks of untranslated Spanish and a whopper of a cheat coda, Junot Diaz' book is a turgid slog through Misery Land. Avoid.

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Tome: Sweet Heart

2009-06-23T01:45:00.001-07:00

Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Proof positive that the most beguilling of serial killers need to remain on the outer fringes of a plot, not at it's centre. The beautiful and evil Gretchen Lowell's dalliance with super-messed up Detective Archie Sheridan is the main thrust here in this follow up to Cain's debut Heart Sick, and not just a tantalising side note, and is all the poorer for it. Only if you have nothing else to reach for for a quick read.

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Tome: Chasing Darkness

2009-06-23T01:44:00.001-07:00

Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Latest Elvis Cole is a gripper after the so-so The Watchman. Pacy narrative, twisty plot and for once after a long time Elvis just gets on with the job without the encumbrance of whiny (ex) girlfriend Lucy hovering nearby to put a damper on things. Bring on the next one, Mr. Crais!

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Tome: The Messenger

2009-06-23T01:43:00.001-07:00

The Messenger by Daniel Silva

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Silva's 6th Gabriel Allon book continues the Master Terrorist plot riff from the previous Prince Of Fire while cribbing another from the first Allon book The Kill Artist: That of using a beautiful woman to trap a terrorist master-mind. Considerable time is taken on the set-up and "prepping the bait". And some effective tension is generated when Allen's undercover operation is blown and neccesitates a race against time to rescue a beautiful Jewish woman before her death at the hands of evil murderous Arabs. If the tone of this review sounds racist, then it's merely echoing Silva's surprisingly Arabo-phobic tone in this book. Granted when one makes a series' hero a top spy for the Israeli Secret Service, you announce where your allegiance in this conflict lies from the get go. But Silva who has so far managed a balanced tone in his previous spy thrillers with the Arab-Israel conflict providing the background, leans heavily on the Zionist angle here, which makes it the lesser entry in the series for me. And having not one, but TWO assassination attempts in the heart of the Vatican over the course of a single book is stretching incredulity.

And those expecting some much-deserved come-uppance for the Chief Baddie will be sorely disappointed in the perfunctory way he's dispatched off (not the first time Silva's had this problem, by the way).

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Tome: The Ritual

2009-06-23T01:42:00.001-07:00

Ritual by Mo Hayder

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Mo Hayder's return to the Jack Caffery series is a mixed bag. Definitely not on par with the hyper-gory Birdman or the disturbing The Treatment, it relocates Caffery to Bristol where along with a new soon-to-be recurring series character, police diver Flea Marley, he investigates the discovery of a severed human hand in the harbour.

The key problem is, the plot which is interesting though hardly outstanding hardly needs Caffery, who could have been substituted by any Detective. Marley's own baggage with regards to the drowning death of her parents and Caffery's encounter with a peripatetic vagabond known as the Walking Man, hardly adds anything to the story

The biggest cheat for fans of Birdman and The Treatment will be Hayder's jettisoning of a key sub-plot running through the first 2 Caffery books: that of the fate of Ewan Caffery, Jack's younger brother, kidnapped by paedophilic neighbour Pendericki.

Writing's still first-rate, and it's an ok enough time-pass, but hardly vintage Hayder. That honour still belongs to the masterful Tokyo.

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Graphic Tome: The Watchmen

2009-06-23T01:41:00.001-07:00

Watchmen by Alan Moore

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
If James Ellroy ever linked his dark, nihilistic prose to pictures, Watchmen may well be the birthed hybrid. A deconstruction of the Superhero mythos, a dark noirish murder mystery, a meditation on Time and Life, a Global Conspiracy shot through with Cold War paranoia (the only aspect of the book that has dated somewhat), Watchmen is quite simply put....Magnificent. Read it. Again and Again.

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Graphic Tome: Persepolis

2009-06-23T01:39:00.000-07:00

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
One woman's escape and return to a brutally patriarchal society. The Kite Runner, if set in Iran, if it's narrator's gender were switched, and told in pictures. A good read though hardly spectacular.

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Tome: A Short History Of Nearly Everything

2009-06-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fascinating science primer that crash-courses Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology and various other scientific branches into a riveting narrative of life and how so much of it and our existence is scarily linked to random chance. Fascinating.

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Tome: The Broken Window

2009-06-23T01:37:00.001-07:00

The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Deaver injects some sorely needed menace into the In-Danger-Of Becoming-Rote Lincoln Rhyme series. The 8th Rhyme book sees the quadriplegic forensic Einstein and red-haired partner and lover Amelia Sachs go against a master manipulator of online data. Solid procedural, and as is always the case with Deaver, a crash course on the dangers of the easy availability of personal info just a mouse-click away in today's digital society.

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Tome: The Brass Verdict

2009-06-23T01:36:00.001-07:00

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Connelly's second attempt to tag-team his series' heroes once again has his more compelling creation get the short end of the stick. Harry Bosch is reduced to a series of extended cameos in what is basically the second Mickey Haller book (after his terrific debut in The Lincoln Lawyer). Haller inherits the case load and a heck of a lot of trouble from a murdered colleague. Bosch proves more of a hindrance than help. Solid plotting from Connelly as usual, but why drag Bosch into this?

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Tome: Bad Luck And Trouble

2009-06-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Marked improvement over Reacher No.10, Reacher 11 has our peripatetic wanderer join forces with his ex-Army cohorts to get to the bottom of the deaths of certain members of their ex-Elite team, and deal out some righteous vengeance. The action is fast, furious and ultimately satisfying.

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Tome: The Overlook

2009-06-23T01:33:00.001-07:00

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The 13th Harry Bosch novel greatly benefits from its truncated length (it was originally serialised in a newspaper). Investigating a murder which quickly escalates into a terrorist threat, Harry re-teams with FBI agent Rachel Walling. Bosch remains compelling, Walling equal parts fascinating and irritating.

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Tome: The Hard Way

2009-06-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

The Hard Way by Lee Child

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
The tenth Jack Reacher novel drags you across 300 pages before delivering upon its much promised action finale. Slow burning and ponderous, this tale of Reacher hired by a wealthy mercenary to find his kidnapped wife and daughter is not one of Child's better efforts.

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Tome: King Of Swords

2009-06-23T01:30:00.001-07:00

The King of Swords by Nick Stone

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Superb follow up to Mr.Clarinet is actually a prequel, chronicling Max Mingus' tenure as a Miami cop and his run in with arch-enemy, the shape-shifting,fork-tongued and drug-dealing boogeyman Solomon Boukman. Violent, exciting and compelling. Read it!

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Tome: Phantom Prey

2009-06-23T01:29:00.001-07:00

Phantom Prey by John Sandford

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Even more tedious follow up to Invisible Prey sees Lucas Davenport investigate the murder of a wealthy socialite's daughter who ran with the Goth crowd. Only die hard fand will be compelled to stick with this to the end.

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Tome: Mr. Clarinet

2009-06-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

Mr. Clarinet by Nick Stone

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Solid entry into the over-crowded arena of thrillers. This first book by Nick Stone sees ex-con, ex-PI Max Mingus hired to find the kidnapped son of a wealthy family in Haiti. With it's depiction of a country torn apart by civil war, reeking of crime, poverty and squalor, this isn't likely to win raves from the Haitian Tourism Board. Dark and compelling. A Must Read.

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Tome: Invisible Prey

2009-06-23T01:25:00.001-07:00

Invisible Prey by John Sandford

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Ho-Hum 17th Prey novel that see Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport investigate a series of burglaries from wealthy homes. By the numbers and a let-down after the previous blistering entry into the series, Broken Prey. Strictly for fans.

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Tome:The Gargoyle

2009-06-23T01:23:00.001-07:00

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lusciously written and gorgeously romantic, Andrew Davidson's debut novel is part treatise on the recuperation of a burn victim, part medieval epic and part Arabian Night's style short story vignette but it's all about the redemptive power of love. Not to be approached with even a dollop of cynicism, The Gargoyle is a must read for die hard romantics.

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Tome:The Power Of The Dog

2009-06-23T01:20:00.001-07:00

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Epic crime saga spanning 30 years that recounts the quest of driven DEA Agent Art Keller to bring down the powerful Mexican Drug Cartel headed by Aden Bererra. Thunderously violent with copious lashings of graphic sex, Don Winslow's blood-drenched novel is James Ellroy-esque in it's examination of America's sordid psyche but stops just short of the latter's all-out nihilism. An absolute scorcher of a read.

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Tome: Map Of The Invisible World

2009-06-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's nice to have your expectations dashed. I started Tash Aw's second book after the Costa Award winning "Harmony Silk Factory" with the same trepidation I approach most tomes that come with the stamp of "literary work by an award winning author". The niggling anxiety that instead of a coherent plot I"m going to be bombarded instead with wordy digressions into philosophical ruminations, that instead of pace you get garrulous asides on 5 different ways to describe "sunlight slicing through tree leaves" or numerous variants on circumlocutory prose that fill up pages but don't advance the story one iota.

The anxiety in this case was heightened because Aw's debut novel, frankly speaking, bored me shitless.

Map Of The Invisible World though, surprised me with a pacy narrative, structured storyline and shockingly engaging plot that to put it bluntly, has me worried that it may not earn the plaudits reserved for books you DON'T take on an 8 hour flight.

After all it resolutely avoids an overtly depressing tone, has the audacity to bring it's myriad plot threads to a fitting conclusion, the gall to wrap up (most) of it's loose ends, and in an act of almost suicidal bravery, dares to end on a happy note. If this isn't Aw's symbolic "Fuck You" to the Booker, Orange, Whitbread or Costa Committee, I don't know what is.

Set amidst a turbulent Indonesia of the '60s, fueled by President Sukarno's purges of Western influences, communist unrest and the country's infamous Confrontation with neighbouring Malaysia, Map tells the tale of orphan Adam, who leaves his small island of Nusa Perdo for Jakarta when his Dutch step-father, painter Karl de Willigen, is taken away by the Army for possible forced repatriation back to Holland. Guided only by a photo taken of his step-father and an American lady, Adam goes in search of her to help locate Karl.

The lady in question, Margaret Bates, Indonesian born with an uncanny knack of blending in and understanding the local mindset, has a past with Karl, and takes an immediate liking and attachment to Adam. So, unfortunately does ultra-radical Din, Margaret's teaching assistant who sees in Adam's naivete and innocence, the perfect tool to execute a dangerous plot to topple the Government.....

And all the while, in Kuala Lumpur, Johan, an Indonesian boy adopted into a wealthy and connected Malaysian family, wrestles with guilt at what he perceives to be an abandonment of his younger sibling many years ago in an orphanage.....

Aw's resort to that hoariest of cliches by now, the Chronological Juggling of sub-plots, thankfully doesn't detract from the pleasure of reading this breezily executed tale of love, loss and guilt.

And Aw's occassional concession to the "I read for the writing" crowd via descriptions of a windowpane shattering over a boy's head as " it had exploded into a million tiny shards that refracted the sunlight-balls of brilliant colour that exploded into existence for a second, like those magical bursts of fireworks that light up for a moment before suddenly disappearing, leaving you staring at nothingness" and the closing of shutters as "light framing the window in thin strips" are brief enough to not trigger my usual gag reflex at such prose-wanking shit.

Map's biggest casualty are it's characters who function as mere plot-drivers and rarely break out of their pre-fab specs: The feisty White Woman, the gutsy and beautiful Indonesian Lass, the shifty CIA spook, the good if weak Gay Journalist, the spineless orphan and evil radical. Even Sukarno, who briefly cameos, comes across as a decadent Autocrat who despises all things Western while seemingly unable to live without it's trappings, which however, I concede, could very well be a spot-on observation of this fascinating Despot.

If anything, Map's most interesting character, guilt-wracked Johan has the misfortune to occupy the book's most superfluous and throw away chapters. The entire KL bound narrative could have been safely excised without interrupting the story and could have actually resulted in an even more taut and disciplined narrative.

But these minor gripes aside, Map is an engaging read you could breeze through in a hazy weekend better spent indoors.

Hell, I'd take it on an 8 hour flight.

Tome: Child 44

2009-01-12T22:33:00.000-08:00

The serial killer tale is, by now, a weary veteran of the thriller genre. Its ubiquitous presence in the Crime section of any bookstore is testimony to the fact that writers , aspiring or established, feel compelled to leave their mark in this sub-genre. For good reason, because, told even moderately well, tales of diabolically vicious sociopaths, marching to the beat of their own twisted psyches and leaving behind a trail of dead bodies makes for page-turning stuff.
The downside to the proliferation of such tales is that, read enough of them, and you can practically etch your own template for its plot machinations: First or third person investigative narrative interspersed with the killer’s point of view, whose identity and motives are obfuscated through a generous smattering of red herrings as the body count steadily stacks up via ritualistic slayings, before a gory, twist-laden denouement unravels the mystery, unmasks the killer and ties up loose ends with a bloody bow.
Tom Rob Smith’s debut, Child 44, while clutching at some of the tropes of the serial thriller, nevertheless manages to cut loose of some of the genre’s restrictive trappings, by anchoring its events at a particular point and time in history, shrouding it in the claustrophobic confines of Stalinist Russia circa 1953.
Starting in 1933, in the famine-stricken Ukraine village of Chervoy “where grown men chewed clods of earth in the hope of finding ants or insect eggs, where children picked through horseshit in the hope of finding undigested husks of grain and women fought over the ownership of bones”, then racing forward twenty years to 1953, when Stalin’s iron grip on Soviet life is at it’s tightest, Child 44 is a gripping thriller of the first order.
The discovery of a young boy’s body on train tracks in Moscow , brings Leo Stepanovich Demidov , investigating officer of MGB, the State Security force, to the house of the boy’s family, who are convinced he was murdered. Far from investigating their suspicions, Leo is there to convince them that their son’s death was accidental.
For to claim otherwise is to acknowledge a rend in society’s perfect fabric, an upset to the natural, precise order of things, for such crimes simply do not take place in Stalin’s Soviet.
Stalin’s aphorism, “Trust But Check”, interpreted as “Check On Those We Trust” rebounds cruelly on Leo when he is asked to denounce his wife Raisa as a Capitalist sympathiser. Refusing, he and Raisa are exiled to a town deep in the Ural mountains. There Leo discovers a similar pattern of child killings like the one he helped cover up in Moscow.
Leo and Raisa’s race to find the killer is white-knuckle reading, because it isn’t merely the lack of resources or access to investigative tools that hamper them, but an entire state that refuses to believe the killings are connected.
Leo’s clandestine investigation of the killings, painstakingly piecing together evidence, clues and timelines runs parallel to the relentless grind of the State machinery to threaten, coerce, beat and torture confessions out of drunks, vagrants, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped. Murder is an aberration, therefore, it’s perpetrator would also be one, goes the official reasoning.
For in Stalin’s State Security Force, the investigator’s creed was “to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered, they hadn’t scratched deep enough.” Leo, growing increasingly despondent realizes “the killer would continue to kill, concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country’s refusal to admit that such a man even existed, wrapping him in perfect immunity.”
Perhaps it’s Smith’s masterful depiction of Soviet life under a tyrannical State, not to mention a fascinating portrait of Leo and Raisa’s often ambiguous relationship, that eventually eclipses the actual serial killer plot, which in the last 100 pages, accelerates into the requisite thrills, spills, hunts, chases and climactic confrontation that this genre demands.
Cloaked in a miasma of oppressive brutality, Child 44 is an absolute scorcher of a thriller, packing a stunning whallop that makes it shine at the quality end of a crowded field.
And that’s saying something.

A slightly edited version is on StarOnLine:

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2009/1/9/lifebookshelf/2524048&sec=lifebookshelf

Flicks: Children Of Men (***)/Babylon AD(*)

2009-01-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

Set designers for a post apocalyptic movie most probably by now have a ready made template to work off:
Burnt out buildings, rusting hulks of abandoned vehicles, heavily armed troops patrolling desolate slums peopled by grimy survivors scavenging for food...you get the picture, especially if you've seen enough of these World Gone To Shit flicks (Escape From New York & LA,28 Days & Weeks Later, Death Race, 12 Monkeys etc). Within these settings, the plot of a Lone Warrior escorting a Chosen Hope of Redemption to a designated Sanctuary has been endlessly regurgitated in countless films, a few actually seeing the light of a cinema hall, the majority languishing in Direct-To-DVD dungeons.
Lifting such a setting above the generic slush pile requires writing of exceptional polish and direction from a deft hand sifting through well trod tropes to extract an additional layer of untapped originality buttressed with unexplored subtext.
Alfonso Cuaron's dark, disturbing and frankly bloody marvellous Children Of Men is what happens when a talented and gifted film maker elevates a script's dog-eared origins to fascinating highs and Matthieu Kassovitz' God Awful Babylon AD is what happens when a no talent hack (see also the equally shitty Kassovitz- helmed Gothika for further vindication on this point) torpedoes what could have been a passable Vin Diesel actioner, sinking it to the depths of unwatchability , earning Diesel his second sci-fi stinker after The Ridicules Of Chronic.

Children Of Men, based on a PD James novel, is set in 2027, in a world ravaged by infertility where not a single humn birth has been recorded for more than 18 years. London, it's totalitarian regime rounding up all immigrants for either deportation or extermination is chillingly filtered through Cuaron's unflinching lenses as Theo Faron (Clive Owen, effortlessly shedding his cool machismo from Shoot 'Em Up and Sin City) is talked by his estranged partner Julian and leader of Underground Rebel Movement The Fishes ( an effective but brief Julianne Moore) into ferrying a young girl Kee (Clare-Hop Ashitey) and her nanny Miriam (Pam Ferris) to an alleged safe haven called the Human Project.
Kee, you see, is pregnant and her child will mark the first recorded human birth in over a decade. When Theo discovers that Kee and her unborn baby will be used as pawns The Fishes' ongoing battle with the anti-immigrant Government, he, Miriam and Kee go on the run, trying to evade Government troops and Julian's coldly efficient second in command Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
Like V For Vendetta, Children Of Men is uncompromisingly bleak in it's depiction of a Fascist England and it's treatment of immigrants, gritty in its lensing of detention camps and sprawling refugee slums and thrilling in it's choreography of explosive, hard-hitting violence.

Special mention: A wonderful Michael Caine as aging ex-hippie Jasper.
An absolute must watch.

Babylon AD takes a near identical premise to Children Of Men, in this case brawny, gravel-voiced mercenary Toorop (Vin Diesel) is hired to transport child prodigy Aurora and her carer Rebecca (Michelle Yeoh) from their icy convent retreat on the Russian steppes to the United States where great things apparently await her. No such luck for the viewer as Kassovitz sets out to systematically botch the telling of this tale and fuck up it's meagre action scenes with jerkily filmed and badly edited shots. Apparently 2 versions of this movie were released, a 90 minute cut for the Stats and a 101 minute cut for Europe, both versions apparently trimmed from a 160 minute Director's Cut that if there is a God, should make more sense than this mess.
Hint: When a director publicly flogs his own work just before its release, that's a helpful clue to give it a skip.

Vin, please Get Fast. Get Furious. Soon!

Blog Resolutions

2009-01-02T03:33:00.000-08:00

1. Blog frequently (a minimum of 3 postings a week)
2. Blog Films Watched within a week of watching them
3. Blog Books Read within a week of finishing them
4. Slot in some musings on flicks I re-watch periodically

Flicks: Quantum Of Solace

2008-11-10T00:25:00.000-08:00

Darkness is in. It's the new cache of cool makers of big-budget franchises trade in nowadays, cloaking their brand-name products in grit and grime, leaching off it's humour, sense of irony and taking tongues firmly off cheek. It's no longer sufficient for heroes to merely be human, they need to be mired in angst. It's not enough to catch the bad guys, but closure to unresolved issues is required as well.

And so, in the 22nd installment of a James Bond movie, we see, for the first time, the remnants of it's predecessor casting a lingering shadow. In Quantum of Solace (henceforth referred to as QOS), the first true sequel to a Bond movie, references to Casino Royale (henceforth referred to as CR) not only litter the landscape (in fact, so furiously and frequently do names like Vesper, Mr.White and Le Chiffre get tossed at you, a re-watch of CR is practically a must), but jumpstart the movie's opener, which is set less than an hour after CR's closer, with Bond kneecapping Mr.White, who as it turns out, is a mere cog in the large malevolent wheel of Quantum,a sinister organisation with slimy tentacles reaching into the highest levels of Multi-National conglomerates and Governments. As Bond (a still steely and menacing Daniel Craig) shoots, stabs and punches his way through ever escalating action set-pieces (this is easily the most breathlessly paced Bond flick yet), leaving behind a trail of corpses, M (Judi Dench, still effortlessly exuding regal authority) worries her boy is out for revenge. But 007 is after closure, and so apparently is Olga Kurylenko's Camille (wearing much more clothing here than in her debut Hitman, much to this viewer's disappointment), pursuing her own private vendetta that sees her bedding down with Bond's nemesis, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric), a billionaire financing the coup of a deposed dictator in Bolivia, for his own nefarious ends.

It's all very glum, of course. This brooding Bond has little time for humour, meaning the glib toss-away one-liners are in even shorter supply here than in CR. You don't even get Bond's trademark self-introduction nor see him refer to his favourite beverage by name, although you get it's precise recipe from a bartender. As Bond villains go, Almaric's Greene is creepily reptilian enough to be effective. And while Dench's rapidly expanded role is welcome, Jeffery Wright's truncated one as returning CIA agent Felix Leiter, is not. And the under-utilisation of Giancarlo Gianini's Mathis, a returnee from CR, is downright criminal. With his cigarette and cognac baritone, Mathis' world weary operative is Bond's voice of reason and provides the movie's sole scene of Bond's compassion. Gemma Arterton's Agent Field's (her first name, revealed only in the credits, is one of QOS' rare concessions to humour), is utterly disposable, although Bond's brief dalliance with her provide the only scenes where the faintest glimmer of an older, rakish 007 can be briefly glimpsed. With it's hyper-kinetic chase scenes, brutal hand to hand combat and brooding protagonist who loses his girl in one film only to spend the better part of another mourning her, this Bond recalls a more recent franchise featuring an amnesiac assassin far more than it' s own 3 decade antecedents. And like Jason Bourne, one can only hope this Bond reclaims his Identity. Soon.

Flicks..in bits

2008-09-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

Writing full-fledged reviews is fast becoming a thing of the past what with my current work schedule. So am going the Leonard Maltin route in keeping my thoughts on them bite-sized. And given the fact that I still average about 5 movies a week, I can ensure my thoughts on them have a fighting chance of keeping up with my prodigious viewing output.

2 flicks revisited recently:

CRIMSON TIDE

Mutiny breaks out on a US nuclear submarine when a partial message triggers an explosive difference of opinion (on whether to launch their torpedoes at Russian shores) between it's old school (think Reagan era Republican) Commander, the fearsome Capt Frank Ramsey (the always intimidating Gene Hackman) and his new school (Clinton type Democrat) XO, Lt. Com Ron Hunter (the always dependable Denzel Washington, doing earnest the way only he can). Tony Scott (efficient but less gifted than elder brother Ridley) ratchets the suspense level up to sweaty palmed levels, the sub's claustrophobic confines greatly aiding the onboard collisions of views, opinions, Management Styles and egos. It's all boosted by a stellar cast that includes pre-Soprano James Gandolfini and pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen.

TROY

When Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) shags and carts off Spartan Queen Helen (Dianne Krueger) to Troy, enraged husband Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) marches to Troy along with power-crazed brother Agamemmnon (Brian Cox). The scene is set for an epic battle, if Agamemnon can only control his most lethal of weapons, warrior prince Achilles (Brad Pitt) and his fighting fit Myrmidons. King Odysseus (Sean Bean) and Prince Hector (Eric Bana) are the voices of reason on the Greek and Trojan side respectively.

Troy, which I re-visit every so often, cause I'm such a sucker for medieval sword and sandal epics, is the Trojan War re-imagined as WWF Smackdown with Killing Machine Achilles, Ax-Wielding Giant Ajax on the Greek side with Noble Hector and Pretty Much Fucking Useless Paris on the Trojan side. When armies of hundreds of thousands actually stand still or pause in mid-fight to play spectators to it's Superstar Warriors (Achilles Vs. Boagrius!Hector Vs. Ajax! Paris Vs. Menelaus!Hector Vs. Patroclus!), with some of the said warriors actually being played by Professional Bruisers like Nathan Jones and Tyler Mane, you keep waiting for the emergence of a referee to do the actual pre-fight announcement (in the blue corner...). And like the best expensive Pay-Per-View bouts, every mano-e-mano hack and slash fest is a build-up to the main event: Achilles taking on Hector after the latter slays the former's cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund). And it is worth the wait, an exquisitely choreographed , sword and shield clanging dust up that lends the sole point of gravitas in this otherwise overblown production. Director Wolfgang Petersen stages the epic battles in style but lets the pace get all sluggish in between. Acting is uniformly hammy throughout with the talented Cox forced to indulge in histrionics bordering on the hilarious. Jettisoning all Gods from the source material, and shoehorning the enormously popular Trojan Horse in when the Iliad ended after Hector's death, Troy makes a reactionary case against the God Believers, what with the dumb as a post Trojan priests giving military advice based on omens and "bird signs" to a dumb-ass Trojan King Priam (redeemed only by a magnetic Peter O'Toole in the role) who yokes the fate of his country and people to his blind belief in Apollo. It's probably the only original spark amidst the proliferation of howlingly bad dialogue, an atrocious performance by Krueger as Helen( back to acting class!) , a perennially weepy Saffron Burrows as Hector's wife Andromache and a lame-ass Orlando Bloom who plays Paris like a petulant (and horny) schoolboy and his transformation towards the end into a Legolas-like wizard with the bow and arrow strains one's already close-to-snapping credulity. Troy is best viewed with one finger poised over the scan button on the DVD remote; see the battles, skip over the war talk, savour the Hector/Achilles battle (twice, if you can), linger on Priam's plea to Achilles to release the body of his son (if only to see a frail O'Toole out-class a super-toned Brad Pitt in displaying serious Acting Chops) and if you must see any part of the cringe-inducing Paris/Helen romance, do so at the start, where they're both naked and do their best work.

Flick Bits: Wanted/Hancock/Drillbit Taylor

2008-08-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

Wanted

Geeky office dork (James McAvaoy) is recruited by a shadowy outfit to off a master assassin who killed his father. Cue brutal training montages as nerd is transformed from pathetic weakling to kick ass killer, then cue uber stylish action set pieces as killer hero and killer villain face-off. With a twist or two and Angelina Jolie thrown in of course to spice up the whole endeavour.

If Russian director Timur Bekmambetov flashed the merest glimpse of action dazzle in his Russian Fantasy flicks Night Watch and Day Watch (which took the courageously un-Hollywood like decision to wrap up a trilogy in 2 films), he stops playing peek-a-boo with his Hollywood debut Wanted, digging deep into his arsenal to unleash some serious cinematic pyrotechnics on jaded cine-goers. Not since John Woo's Hard Target (which incidentally, also marked the US debut of a foreign director), has a movie so blatantly coasted on sheer cinematic technique.

If Hard Target's close-ups of spinning arrows, slow-mo shots of a shattering wind shield followed by one of a spent cartridge spinning majestically into the air after being ejected from a pump action shotgun on top of the ubiquitious Woo-patented two handed gun ballets, is a clarion call by a debuting cine wunderkind, firmly established in his home turf but needing to make his presence felt on a foreign soil, one stating clearly "I know you're jaded seeing umpteen gun fights, chases and explosions, but have you seen it done like this?", then Wanted is Bekmambetov's calling card offering his sevices to up the style ante.

I's all gleefully ridiculous of course. Bullets that bend? One that boomerangs back on the shooter after a brain-splattering circular trajectory? Reversing film to show a bullet's backward journey from target back to gun chamber? Cars somersaulting off each other, running up the side of buses? There's enough eye-rolling moments in Wanted to rattle your optical nerves, but take it all as the rip-roaringly silly ride it is, and you'll have a blast.

Hancock

Hancock is a weird hybrid that never quite gels. Superhero Hancock (Will Smith) who's a derelict bum is given an image makeover by a well meaning publicist (Jason Bateman), not realising he shares a past with his gorgeous wife (Charlize Theron). Part superhero flick, part battle of the sexes rom-com, director Peter Berg can't seem to meld the two successfully. If anything, Hancock's most unique selling point would be the case it makes against mixed-race relations. A Black man and a White Woman can't get together without dire consequences for them both? If a Race Relations commentary on miscegenation in America today was the film-makers agenda all along, then this would be one of the ballsiest and gutsiest Summer Popcorn-er ever to grace screens. We should have more of them. Only with better packaging next time.

Drillbit Taylor

Owen Wilson's slacker charm and lazy drawl is hardly enough to salavage this tale of a pair of high school nerds hiring a bum who they think is a tough ex-army man as their bodyguard against a vicious bully. Wilson's still supremely watchable but the laughs are too sporadic to file this as a Wilson classic like Starsky & Hutch or You, Me & Dupree.

Flick Bits: Meenaxi/Ore Kadal/Anjathey

2008-08-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

A dash of Indian cuisine in my otherwise largely Occidental fare in my movie consumption is a welcome diversion, yielding some undiscovered gems that tickle the palate. My last excursion to the Indian sub-continent for flicks was a mixed bag though:

MEENAXI: A TALE OF 3 CITIES (Hindi)

No one's happier than moi that running parallel to the Bollywood assembly line of Dream Manufacturing Machines is a non-mainstream film culture that tests, challenges and even pushes accepted norms in ideas and narrative. It's yielded gems like the Rajasthan infused noir and intrigue of Manorama:6 feet under and Eklavya, intriguing explorations of relationships via Life In A Metro and the quirky Honeymoon Travels PVT LTD. Hell even mainstream fare like Anurag Bhasu's Gangster have dared to tamper with the time honoured tropes of story telling involving the underworld of crime. M.F. Hussein's Meenaxi, however, is a regretably regressive example of art house posturing at its worst. With it's lush cinematography courtesy of Santosh Sivam and exquisite soundscapes weaved by maestro A.R.Rahman, it's a movie you soak in to indulge your senses rather than attempt to decipher or engage with, thanks to a narrative that makes not a of a lick of sense. It's a long, mastubatory ode to it's gorgeous heroine (a never more ravishing Tabu), who plays muse to a Hyderabadi writer (Raghuvir Yadav), prodding and challenging him to write a novel that excavates her personality. As the writer Nawab spins varying plots, one set in the Rajasthani city of Jaisalmer and one in Prague, his attempts are met with increasing derision, the muse mocking her mentor, causing his downward spiral into despair and depression. As the Nawab succumbs to his debilitating illness, he discovers the key lies in setting his character, Meenaxi free. In the muse attaining freedom, so does the story finally sprout wings and fly. If that little sum up has you going "Huh???", fear not, that would be the general reaction to anyone not belonging in the 0.000005% of the world's population who's tuned into Hussein's flights of fancy. Meandering on a road to nowhere, Meenaxi's a certified bore, having you go rapidly from " What's this about" to "Do I give a fuck". Avoid this misfire, and grab the luscious soundtrack instead.

Ore Kadal (Malayalam)

If Meenaxi is a textbook example on how to bollocks up an art movie, Ore Kadal shows you how to do it right. With the genre's typically langurous pace tied to a cohesive and densely structured narrative, it's a slow burning experience that ultimately rewards. Mammooty's self absorbed social scientist and intellectual and his relationship with Meera Jasmine's fragile housewife is a layered study in human interaction, where the man's disdain for emotional attachment and the woman's increasing need of one to maintain balance in her unravelling marriage proves to be the emotional and psychological undoing of both parties. Terrific stuff.

Anjathey (Tamil)

Given the suspense free zone where most Tamil movies comfortably reside, Anjathey turns out to be a rare beast indeed, starting out as an oft-told tale of bosom buddies turned arch foes before morphing into a solid police procedural that mines some serious sweaty palmed suspense from it's plot involving a ruthless gang who kidnap young girls for ransom. The movie doesn't skimp on the horrifying fate that befalls the victims or the emotional toll it takes on their distraught parents. Director Mysskin nails it by never forgetting the golden rule of suspense: it can only truly be achieved via characters who have been given time to grow, seep into and mold viewer's perceptions, attitudes and expectations of them. Engaging heroes and repellant villains, get this right and you don't stray too far off course. And Mysskin rarely puts a foot wrong. Bravo!

Tome: Gone Baby Gone

2008-08-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

The bare skeleton of any good work of crime fiction is a case that requires solving.

What adds flesh and skin to this skeletal frame is the nature of the case, the myriad twists and turns it takes whikle snaking it's way to a jaw dropping finale.

But to give any tale of this genre some form, some unique musculature, that sets it apart as a specimen to be absorbed and admired, you need to layer it with atmosphere, taut, foreboding and menacing, inducing a sense of unease, a feeling of dread at what's about to unfold even as you tear through the pages to get there with all possible haste.

Dennis Lehane's fourth book featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro is a dark, violent look at the world of abducted children.

A world where "twenty three hundred children are reported missing every day, where "three hundred children disappear every year and never return"

A wold populated by sadistic paedophiles like Leon and Roberta Trett, who kidnap, handcuff, flog and sodomize children before killing them by slitting their throats.

In this world, mothers like Helene McReady, high school dropout, trailer park trash, recipient of three abortions, drug dealer and user, decides to have a child not because she's ready or capable enough to raise one, but to fill a void in an existence devoid of purpose, direction or meaning.

When Helene's 4 year old daughter, Amanda, goes missing, Kenzie and Gennaro are hired by Helene's brother Lionel and wife Beatrice and reluctantly accept the case.

Partnered with Poole and Broussard, 2 detectives from the CAC (Crimes Against Children) unit, Kenzie and Gennaro trawl the drug dens and dive bars of Boston in search of Amanda, an endeavour that proves increasingly complicated when Poole, Broussard and even Lionel may be harbouring hidden agendas of their own.

Even those familiar with Mystic River, Lehane's dark tale of misguided retribution and the shocking finale to his prison drama, Shutter Island, may well feel like showering after crawling through the subterranean underbelly of Lehane's Boston in this book.

Lehane's muscular prose is tender enough to masterfully evoke haunting melancholia as he describes the impact of a missing child on society:

" When a child disappears, the space she'd occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And those people-relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print-create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It's a silence that's two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed"

Kenzie and Gennaro have a sexually charged chemistry that spark off the pages. Partners and lovers, they contemplate bringing a child into a world that is "cement cold and jaggedly sharp".

"The world was filled with monsters who'd once been babies, who'd started as zygotes in the womb,who emerged from woman in the only miracle the world has left, yet emerged angry or twisted or destined to be so"

It's this subtext, coupled with a colorful cast of supporting characters and a plot crackling with tension and whiplash twists, that make Gone Baby Gone a superlative effort in the genre.

Dark, moody and disturbingly current, Gone Baby Gone is a bitter brew, but if you're tired of diluted thrillers, a swig of this murky concoction is a must.

Tome: Gladiatrix

2008-08-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

Russell Whitfield’s debut novel, Gladiatrix, is Chick Lit at its finest….if your idea of fine Chick Lit is a book teeming with finely toned, nubile females who are frequently nude and hack huge chunks of flesh out of one another, when they’re not enjoying carnal knowledge of the same.
Gladiatrix begins the way all good blood soaked medieval epics should; with a scene of brutal combat.
Spartan Lysandra strides alone, walking “through the darkness of the passageway towards the sun-filled amphitheatre”
“The roar of the crowd was a living thing as it assaulted her and she staggered beneath its violent intensity. Row upon row of the screaming mob surrounded her, the amphitheatre stuffed full, as if it were a massive god gorging upon base humanity. Her vision swam as she registered innumerable faces, twisted and distorted , their mouths wide open with howls of lust and anticipation. “
It’s in this charged atmosphere that Lysandra mets her opponent, a stocky Gaul, whom she dispatches with consummate ease in one of many thrilling scenes of gladiatorial combat Whitfield brings to life, with rapier sharp prose and a connoisseur’s eye for action.
In the 1st century AD, during the reign of the Emperor Domitian over the vast Roman Empire, the hunger and demand for gladiatorial combats was huge, and the Emperor’s own need for novelty in the arena had given rise to the Gladiatrix, female gladiators.It’s the sort of climate where Lucius Balbus, “supplier of novelty acts for the great and frequent games of the province- the only lanista (manager) who specialized in the training of women for gladiatorial combat”, thrives.
Into his ludus (gladiator school), comprised solely of female performers, Lysandra, sole survivor of a shipwreck is brought, to further hone her already formidable fighting skills.
But the melting pot of the ludus, where women of various tribes and races, each openly distrustful of the other are thrown together, soon bubble over with tension as Lysandra ‘s haughty and arrogant demeanor puts her on a collision course with Amazonian Sorina, Gladiatrix Prima of the ludus and the Nubian Nastasen, a powerful and sadistic trainer, who like most men who are intimidated by strong women, seeks to humiliate her sexually, as well as physically and psychologically.
Whitfield’s major achievement is in engendering empathy on the part of the reader for his heroine, given that Lysandra is an insufferable snob.
Of proud Spartan stock, and a temple priestess to boot, schooled and skilled in the brutal regiment of Spartan combat training, Lysandra’s derision for her fellow gladiatrices, of various Celtic, Germanic and Britannic tribes whom she lumps under the all purpose slur of “barbarians”, is matched only by her unwavering belief in her own lethal fighting prowess.
But her shattered pride at the realization that she is now someone’s chattel, to be honed and trained to provide entertainment for a baying mob, her gradual coming to terms with her plight coupled with some fairly monstrous obstacles put in her way by the scheming Sorina and the brutal Nastasen, slowly but surely endear her to the reader.
Beside, like the best heroes, Lysandra triumphs over her adversaries with faith, determination and fearsome martial skills.
Whitfield sets a crackling pace, zipping the plot along in between vividly described fight scenes, with sexual tension ( handsome trainer Catuvolcos wants to sheathe his “sword” in Lysandra’s Spartan “scabbard” but her self pleasuring sessions at night are stoked not by fantasies of the muscular Gaul, but of Eirianwen, the blonde and beautiful Gladiatrix Secunda ) and vicious rivalry ( Sorina’s growing hatred for Lysandra reaches fever pitch fury when Eirianwen, a member of her own tribe falls for the lanky Spartan).
There’s an interesting idea bubbling beneath the viscera of shattered bones, spilt guts, and dismembered limbs, that slaves though they may be, the women in the ludus still enjoy a far greater degree of freedom as trained fighters compared to their restrictive roles as daughters and wives, especially in the claustrophobically patriarchal Roman Society.
But such musings are hardly germane to the tone of the book which is first and foremost, an action epic that has you turning the pages so fast, you risk getting paper cuts on your fingers as the plot hurtles relentlessly towards the climactic showdown between Sorina and Lysandra .
And when it comes it’s a tour de force in armed combat description, the fight vividly unfolding in your imagination, as blades meet, strikes are countered and two skilled combatants pirouette in a dance of death.
It’s the sheer velocity of the narrative that help you overlook the linearity of a plot that holds little or no surprises, the broad strokes in which villains like Sorrina and Nastasen are sketched with nary a tinge of grey to give them depth and an ending which screams “sequel”. But given the thrill ride Whitfield takes you on, you’ll have no trouble signing on for “Gladiatrix 2”.
This book contains action aplenty, buckets of gore, copious amounts of female nudity and hefty helpings of Girl On Girl action ( both the vertical and horizontal variety).
What’s not to like?

Dasavatharam

2008-06-26T00:39:00.000-07:00

The lates magnum opus from India's most relentlessly envelope-pushing, genre-experimenting and still it's most prodigiously gifted Thespian is, boiled down to it's very essence, a long chase movie. Yes, that most generic of plot threads is strung along a 3 hour running time upon which Dr. Kamal Hasan's views, opinions, thoughts and musings on topics as diverse as Religion Vs. Atheism Vs. Science, caste conundrums, bio-warfare, Chaos Theory and The Butterfly Effect are judiciously pegged and plugged at various intervals. It's all giddily entertaining, thankfully, as the whole enterprise is shot through with a commercial sensibility firmly anchored by generous heapings of comedy and wittily punning dialogue (penned,like the story and screenplay, by Kamal himself).

As Baradway Rangan so eloquently articulated in his blog, the only problem with the whole Kamal approach to being layered beneath tons of prosthetics, something fans have been treated to for the better part of a decade, is that it inevitably gives rise to a question: Are you supposed to be reacting to the performance or the facial tics, mannerisms, goggle eyed glassed, scars and accent heavy patois it comes bundled in?

Such musings can be swept aside for Dasavatharam as for once, it's the Performances which take the honours, swooping down victoriously and snatching at least 4 out of 10 incarnations from the jaws of Derisive Disbelief on the part of the audience, for the most shocking thing about this high budget Hoopla that has as it's USP the assailing of 10 distinct characters on the part of it's Star, a first ever for Tamil cinema, is the Low Rent Make Up.

If Shivaji's colossal budget couldn't detract from it's low concept,you at least saw the moolah splashed on screen.

Dasavatharam is delightfully high concept (for a masala) wedded, unfortunately, to shoddy make up and schlocky effects.

Kamal as George Bush, CIA assassin Fletcher, a Brahmin Nanogenarian, Japanese Aikido Master and an 8 feet tall Muslim is a disaster where acceptance of how realistic these characters are supposed to look is used as a yardstick but his pitch perfect Yank accent, Brahmin enunciation and Japanese rolls of the "R"s help soothe the ears, tiding over what your eyes refuse to accept, which for the most part look as if white, wrinkly dough was slapped liberally about Kamal's face, hands and thighs.

But the 12th century priest Nambi and Dalit crusader Vincent Poovaraagan are master classes in bringing characters to life. Watch the former cut down a Shaivite King for daring to uproot a Vishnu idol in flawless Chola era Tamil and the latter castigate a sand smuggler in a tongue wrapped mellifluously around a pitch perfect Tirunelvelli accent(which gave this viewer 2 reasons to be thankful of the film's excellent English sub-titling) and you can see why Kamal's still miles ahead of his contemporaries in the acting stakes.

But the doozy is investigator Naidu, the most rib-tickling creation Kamal has birthed since Kameshwaran the Palghat cook mixed Tamil and Malayalam to serve heaping helpings of mirth way back in Michael,Madhana,Kama Rajan.

Mallika's Hot, Asin's Not, thanks to a script that has the latter go from spunky to squealy to outright annoying.

In the end, you need to ask yourself, in the Creative Void where most Tamil movies seem to languish these days, how many films dare even put ideas and concepts in a mass entertainer, and while the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 has been mentioned, crudely in comedic punchlines in most movies, and disgustingly inserted into a song lyric in one, Dasavatharam dares to culminate in its actual depiction. As the mile high waves cascade down and wash people and property away, it ties up plot threads, inter-connects others and bridges a 12th century plotline on religious discord to 21st century musings on Religion and Causality. That takes creativity and guts..in regretfully short supply elsewhere on the Tamil Cine Landscape.

Anbe Sivam's sermons on Socialism and Marxism married to the Road Movie a little too hard to swallow?

Aalavandhan's psychedelic psycho thriller a little too unpalatable?

Hey Ram's reactionary approach to Gandhi's pacifism wedded to art house sensibilities too glacially paced for your liking?

Well, a swig of Dasa may be just what the doctor ordered.

Recently At The Cinemas...Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

2008-05-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

19 years after riding off into the sunset (literally), The Man With the Whip and Fedora is back. Indiana Jones comes encumbered with the twin loadstones of meeting stratospheric expectations while taking great care not to shatter the hazy prisms of nostalgia through which most people still view, associate and cherish this billion dollar franchise with.
After all, taking an iconic character out of mothballs, dusting, cleaning and putting him back on display is a risky proposition. It's a fine balancing act between meeting expectations of what the audience will, naturally, want to re-live from previous installments, while upping the ante with even more inspired writing that takes the character further whilst not compromising on elements that made it resonate in the first place.
The key, then, is to stay true to the spirit of the character/franchise, and you can't go far off the rails.
After all, this is what made the recent resurrections of Rocky Balboa, John Rambo, and John McClane thumping successes in my book. Rocky was always about taking that One Shot life throws at you, Rambo was always heading towards the realisation that he was a machine bred for destruction and there lay his escape from a self imposed exile in Purgatory while McClane had long ago made peace with the fact that he'd always be That Man in the Wrong Place At the Wrong Time, speeding from one escalating action set piece to another.
With Indy, it was about capturing not so much the feel of an era but of an arcane form of celluloid entertainment, in this case, the completely alien (in this part of the world at least) 1930's matinee serials that always concluded with a cliffhanger, thereby guaranteeing returning audiences.
Along with Harrison Ford (effortlessly re-stepping into his iconic role) , Steven Spielberg also trots out the Indiana Jones goody bag of thrills: You have the opening gambit, always the best part of an Indy flick, set in Hangar 51, that mysterious conspiracy shrouded warehouse housing anything from alien bodies to radical technologies. The fact that this warehouse is a dead ringer for the one in which the Ark Of The Covenant was finally wheeled into at the end of Raiders, sets up the giddy nostalgia factor almost instantly. You just know you're going to catch a glimpse of that Famous Face-Melting Pandora's Box and Spielberg does not disappoint.
It's to this warehouse that an older but not necessarily wiser Indy and sidekick Mac (Beowulf's Ray Winstone, here in real life chunky form) are dragged to by the Russian KGB lead by icy cold Irina Spalko (the always phenomenal Cate Blanchett) to retrieve an alien corpse. Indy's subsequent escape, culminating in a nuclear blast is an action tour de force that sets the tone nicely. And from then on, it's back to the tried and truly tested formula that has propelled all 3 previous installments to the giddy heights of entertainment: The hunt for an ancient relic, this time the titular Crystal Skull, that must be found and returned to a long forgotten and buried remnant of an ancient civilization. There's banter, both banal and witty, between Indy and Mutt Williams ( Shia Le Beouf and the filmaker's ode to the Youth market), who accompanies Indy on his quest to both retrieve the skull and a lost Professor Oxley (John Hurt in Mad Hatter mode) who is the key to deciphering the Skull's true purpose, and between Indy and Mutt's mother, a returning Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. No prizes for guessing Indy's connection to Mutt.
There are action set pieces a plenty, culminating in a convoluted chase through the Amazon which functions as the movie's signature Central Piece, like Indy's hijacking of a convoy was to Raiders, the mine cart chase to Temple Of Doom and the tank scene to Last Crusade.
In fact, much care has been taken to replicate elements from the previous flicks. A return of the most engaging of all Indy heroines, Le Bouf's character that functions as a grown up version of Short Round, Mac whose frequent duplicity calls to mind Indy's shiftiest heroine Elsa Schneider from Last Crusade, a spill down waterfalls that's reminiscent of Temple Of Doom, Jim Broadbent's Dean Charles Stanforth who subs nicely enough for the late Denholm Elliott's Marcus Brody while John Hurt's Professor Oxley replaces the older patriarchal figure obsessed with an ancient artifact a la Sean Connery's Henry Jones Sr in Last Crusade. Throw in the various assortment of creepy crawlies, trawls through dank and musty tunnels, a nod to Indy's abhorrence for snakes, a red line streaking through a map denoting Indy's travels from one place to another and a finale that is heavy on other worldy goings on (in this case extra terrestrial rather than Religious Lore) and you'd think Spielberg and Co had tossed in all the relevant ingredients into the stew.
So why then does the resultant broth still taste like something's missing?
Well, try the fact that the entire proceedings here have..well.. a rushed feel to the whole thing. I remember far greater interaction between Indy and Marion in Raiders, far more interplay even between Indy and the annoyingly whiny Willie Scott and resourceful side kick Short Round in Temple Of Doom, while it was The Last Crusade's key strength;Indy's difficult relationship with his father, tempestuous liason with Elsa and familiar camaraderie with Marcus and Sallah.
Crystal Skull seems to be in a rush to get from action set piece to bigger action set piece to Revelatory Climax and Effects Laden Finale.
And since Raiders, every Indy movie has seen a gradual deterioration in it's Chief Villain. We've gone from the reptilian menace of Ronald Lacey's Major Toht , to Amrish Puri's campy but still effective Mola Ram, down to an ineffectual Julian Glover's Walter Donovan and it pretty much reaches it's nadir in Blanchett's Irina Spalko. Blanchett is simply incapable of a bad performance, but by refusing to make Spalko a power mad agent of destruction but rather the ultimate scientist who wants to possess the Ultimate Knowldege, she blunts the edge off the character, robbing it of some much needed menace.
Ironically, by upping the stakes in the thrills department, Indy 4 sacrifices it's core appeal: That amidst it's breathless pace, Indy 1-3 still made time to have you know it's characters as they shouted, screamed,bantered and connected atop rope bridges, mine carts, caves, caverns and deserts.
Crystal Skull updates the Pre-World War 2 anxiety of the previous installments with Post War Paranoia of 1957, replete with Red Menace propaganda, rock and roll, greasy hairs and leather jackets, but the period doesn't sit well with Henry Jones Jr. In fact, given the fact that he's actually referred to by that name more often than his adopted moniker (something he would not have tolerated 19 years ago) , in addition to Gramps and Old Man by Mutt not to mention an ending that suggests..shock! horror!.. the impending Domestication Of Dr.Jones, I am moved to wonder..is this Spielberg and Lucas' sly nod to Indy being gradually put out to pasture to see his Golden Years out in tranquility?
If so, I for one, would have been content to re watch episodes 1 to 3, contentedly basking in the glow of Indy at his prime.
A consistent Trilogy is now an uneven Quadrilogy.
And look no further than Crystal Skull for the mismatch.

Recently At The Cinemas...Iron Man

2008-05-21T03:24:00.000-07:00

Plot: Tony Stark is the complete playboy who also happens to be an engineering genius. While in Afghanistan demonstrating a new missile he's captured and wounded. His captors want him to assemble a missile for them but instead he creates an armored suit and a means to prevent his death from the shrapnel left in his chest by the attack. He uses the armored suit to escape. Back in the U.S. he announces his company will cease making weapons and he begins work on an updated armored suit only to find that Obadiah Stane, his second in command at Stark industries has been selling Stark weapons to the insurgents. He uses his new suit to return to Afghanistan to destroy the arms and then to stop Shane from misusing his research.-Courtesy of IMDB

Iron Man opens with Robert Downey Jr. cradling a whisky glass. It works both as a nod to the film's origins (Tony Stark has a drinking problem in the comics) and it's star. Iron Man is not the first superhero flick to feature a billionaire playboy using his prodigious mind not to mention enviable fiscal resources to fight crime and right wrongs, but it can lay proud claim to projecting one we can readily connect to.

This is in no way a reflection on Christian Bale's essaying of a similar character in Batman Begins, but more to do with a star's ability to imprint his real life in varying shades onto a screen alter ego.

Christian Bale can do intense in his sleep, but he's not the one with a once boyishly handsome visage now streaked with character lines.

Robert Downey Jr. nails the part simply on the basis of his having lived the life of Stark to a certain degree and his face mirrors that of a life lived larger than most and often on the precipice of free fall. It's almost as though his arrest for drink and drug related offences practically branded the role onto him, searing him with Stark's demons, cauterizing Downey into Stark.

It's what makes Iron Man such delicious viewing, even more than it's skewering of Right Wing policies on Weapons Manufacture.

Yes, we know that Arms Maker Stark undergoes an epiphany of sorts when he is captured to make his own weapons for the very people his "products" are supposed to keep at bay, and knowledge of his company's dubious "double-dipping" to arm both their Government and the "Enemy" with the same set of "toys" only strenghtens his resolve to make and keep the "coolest" one for himself.

And the analogy of a heartless profiteer whose gadget-packed suit of armour is essentially scrap metal without a glowing "ticker" to keep him operational, is anything but subtle.

That the CGI on display (much of it cool) aid rather than overwhelm the story and the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow, for once, actually comes across as endearing with her subtle tap-dance of repressed feelings around her charismatic employer, is mere icing on the cake.

The cake itself, and a rich,creamy and luscious one it is, is Downey Jr, nailing the part with consummate ease, whether he's flooring you with his rat-tat-tat one-liners or convincingly etching the potrayal of a flawed man starting on the road to redemption.

Whether this applies to the actor or the character is immaterial. You want to cheer both of them on.

This Tin Man has Heart.

Recently At The Cinemas....The Forbidden Kingdom

2008-05-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

In Forbidden Kingdom, American teenager Jason (Michael Angarano), who is obsessed with Hong Kong cinema and kungfu classics, finds an antique Chinese staff in a pawn shop: the legendary stick weapon of the Chinese sage and warrior, the Monkey King (Jet Li). With the lost relic in hand, Jason unexpectedly finds himself transported back to ancient China.There, he meets the drunken kungfu master, Lu Yan (Jackie Chan); an enigmatic and skillful Silent Monk (Jet Li); and a vengeance-bent kungfu beauty, Golden Sparrow (Crystal Liu Yi Fei), who lead him on his quest to return the staff to its rightful owner, the Monkey King - imprisoned in stone by the evil Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) for five hundred years. Along the way, while attempting to outmaneuver scores of Jade Warriors, Cult Killers and the deadly White Hair Demoness, Ni Chang (Li Bing Bing), Jason learns about honor, loyalty and friendship, and the true meaning of kungfu, and thus frees himself. ---Synopsis courtesy of IMDB

The Forbidden Kingdom, the much awaited, hyped and trumpeted team up between 2 Asian Screen Icons of Martial Arts Mayhem, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, works exactly where War, another awaited (perhaps not as eagerly) team up between Jason "Transporter" Statham and Jet Li did not. And it works for one simple reason: It delivers exactly what you expect from such a team up: Wall to Wall chop socky, once again via the exquisite choreography of ace fight coordinator Yuen Wo Ping. And that is all one really needs from a flick like this. Fights, fights and more fights.

Balls to the wall scrapes, fisticuffs, wire fu and white knuckle stunts, smoothed over by acrobatic agility. Give me that and you've sold me.

The story? Ah...that's where you'd best pay no mind. It's one part Karate Kid (geeky white kid bullied and beaten up, who then gets a crash course in Kung Fu, courtesy of not one but 2 Mr.Miyagis) and one part Shaolin Kung Fu Flick( if you can picture such flicks where characters not only talk English, but spew American Slang like "Taking a Dump" ) , with liberal poaching of elements from Chinese Kung Fu epics of yore, like the Bride With White Hair, evil warlords and Celestial Gods on top of Chan and Li's Drunken Master and Stoic Monk characters while fights staged in tea houses and bamboo forests are obviously more recent cribbings from newer incarnations like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's wu xia flicks like Hero, House Of Flying Daggers and Curse Of The Golden Flower.

Such blatant unoriginality can be easily forgiven, especially when Kingdom even delivers that other thing you expect in a Jet/Jackie team up: One scene where the martial maestros go at it. The Jet-Jackie fight, unlike the Jason/Jet one in War, is not over in the blink of an eye and goes on just long enough to be savoured, a comment that can be eaily applied to the whole movie.

And in this age of bloated blockbusters..it is a blessing indeed.

Love In The Time Of Cholera

2008-03-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

Verbose, overtly descriptive with meagre smatterings of dialogue, irritating flashes forwards and backwards through time, an annoying amount of foreshadowing, inhumanly long paragraphs leading to chapters of unholy length and what is surely the death blow for a love story: Unlikeable Romantic Leads (She's Cold, He's Creepy)-By all accounts, this reader should have hated Love In The Time Of Cholera.

But surely, slowly and insidiously, Marquez worked his magic, reeling me in when I had no idea of being hooked, an Omniscient narrator not so much creating a world, but convincing me that one exists and inviting me to partake of it's peoples' lives and loves as they live through a change of century, civil wars, modernisation and the titular epidemic.

Like Atonement, Cholera is deceptively sly, convincing you that it's a love story, while cunningly suggesting at times, that it's anything but.

Florentino Ariza's unrequited love for Fermina Daza (has there ever been a more brutal rejection of a man's love by a woman in fiction?) , like the best Love Stories, spans decades, but it's apparently no deterrant to various, transitionary liasons with lonely and widowed women (622 in all) culminating in a tragic and frankly, despicable Humbert- like seduction of a young Lolita left in his charge.

But in spite of it, you are carried feverishly along the "will they or won't they" Love Story Suspense Arc , hoping for a joyful resolution to Florentino's 51 year wait.

Marquez masterfully chronicles love in all it's blissfull and painful guises; feverish adolescent passion, the treacherous minefield of tangled and conflicted emotions in a long marriage, fleeting happiness snatched from all too brief affairs not to mention erotic and romantic fulfillment in old age.

If Atonement was metafiction couched in the language of a Doomed Romance, Cholera is a dense meditation on Love and Relationships ensconced comfortably, even deceptively, in the tropes of an Epic Romance.

Sensual, Tragic, Funny, Surreal and most of all, Hearbreakingly Romantic, "El amor en los tiempos del cólera'' is terrific.

4 stars.

The Last Detective

2008-03-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

My introduction to Robert Crais was via Hostage, his first stand-alone book after 8 novels featuring wise-cracking, Hawaian shirt loving PI Elvis Cole and tough and taciturn partner Joe Pike.

Hostage was a crackling read, introducing some pretty nifty twists to the whole hostage/negotiator scenario. It spurred me to pick up LA Requiem, 8th in the Cole/Pike series, but no handicap as they're all pretty stand-alone, barring a few developments on its' heroes' personal front that stretches across a few books.

As Crais himself mentiones in his web-site, start with his stand alone's and discover Cole/Pike via Requiem as it's the book that elevated a series of wise-cracking PI capers to serious Crime Thriller category, ratcheting Crais up to breathe that rarefied air in the stratosphere where heavyweight practicioner's of the craft like Michael Connelly ply their trade.

Like Connelly, Crais's novels are set in LA, and feature a complex hero navigating between plots creeping with tension and increasingly precarious relationships.

When The Last Detective opens, you learn events in LA Requiem have scarred both our heroes;

Tough as nails Joe Pike now nurses a bad arm, a result of being shot in the back, twice. "The bullets shattered his shoulder blade, spraying bone fragments like shrapnel through his left lung and the surrounding muscles and nerve".

And hunting an Alaskan Brown Bear (the largest predator on land) in the wilderness, Joe feels something he's rarely felt: fear

Elvis Cole is navigating an emotional minefield as his relationship with ex-Baton Rouge lawyer Lucy Chenier is becoming increasingly tenuous as she struggles to accept the fact that both Cole and Pike have a tendency to draw violence to them. She wants normal and the self-confessed World's Greatest Detective doesn't do normal.

And things are about to get worse....

Baby-sitting Lucy's 10-year old son Ben while she's away covering a trial, Cole is rail-roaded into every parent's worst nightmare when Ben is kidnapped right under his nose.

Enter the police, with chain smoking Carol Starkey ( a returning character from Crais' stand-alone Demolition Angel) and sex-obsessed criminalist John Chen (from Requiem) not to mention ever reliable and lethally effective Joe Pike to help and Lucy's obnoxious ex-husband and Ben's father, Richard to hinder and obstruct.

Tension mounts as the kidnappers are found to be linked to Cole's past as an Army Ranger in the Vietnam war, who allege Ben's kidnapping is retribution for atrocities Cole committed during his Tour of Duty...

Dodging the police who urge him to stay off the case, incurring Lucy's mounting anger when he doesn't while staying one step ahead of Richard, his oily lawyer Leland Myers and a duo of hired goons, Elvis and Joe race against time to locate Ben.

Multiple viewpoints (narratives switch from Cole's to Pike's, to Ben's and even the kidnappers' and plus an Omniscient overview in flashbacks to Cole's childhood and Vietnam Tour ) keep the plot hurtling along at breakneck pace.

If there's a weakness, it's that the twist in the plot can be figured out early and there's little or no complexity to the bad guys, although the trio of kidnappers, a scarred African and 2 ex-mercenaries are suitably menacing to up the chill factor (especially in a flashback account detailing their atrocities in Sierra Leone).

And my own Pet Peeve is that Crais, like Connelly and so many other writers in this genre, keep saddling their essentially lone wolf heroes with love interests only to have the relationship go belly up a few books later. Why do these women attach themselves to men knowing full well what they do, only to turn around and castigate them later for it?

But Crais redeems The Last Detective with a white knuckle, sweaty palmed, adrenaline thumping showdown that's guaranteed to notch up heartbeats.

A book to be gulped down in one sitting. It's that addictive.

The Last Detective is certainly not my last Cole/Pike book.

Starting The Forgotten Man, the next Elvis Cole mystery.

Keep you posted...

Billa (2007)

2008-03-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

So, is this what it's come down to? A disenchantment so severe at the state of Tamil films that you snatch at it's miniscule positives with the savagery of a parched soul offered a jug of cool water.

I am trying my level best to write about how cool Billa is.

Now, there are differing levels of cool, of course. I'm not talking about the stratospheric type of cool that's achieved through the use of inventive, pop culture laced dialogue and shifting timelines a la Tarantino in Pulp Fiction , or ground breaking visual effects that has the most jaded action fan dropping his jaw in The Matrix or 300.

No, this is cool that is scaled way,way, waaaaaaay down the "hot" index, and contextualised within the colossally rigid tropes of a Tamil movie. This is after all, a genre that spawns endless cookie cutter melodramas that are often loud, obnoxious, misogynistic, simplistic and hypocritically Puritan.

So, to find a film that actually boasts some semblance of style, that actually takes the trouble to coat it's frames with a patina of glossy sheen, dress up it's actors in chic garbs, and have them strut like seasoned denizens of the catwalk, is a revelation.

I mean, the above is by now Standard Issue in Bollywood. But Kollywood??? An industry that still routinely pairs Geriatrics with girls fresh off the cusp of adolescence, passes off Dhanush as a hero and most criminally, still allows T.Rajendar to make movies??

I should be talking about how Billa(2007) successfully updates the old Rajini original( original in the loosest sense, as it was a remake of an Amitabh starrer in Hindi called Don, itself updated recently by Farhan Akthar with Shah Rukh Khan) for a modern audience, amping up the action and suspense while keeping the core storyline of a simple man forced to impersonate a ruthless criminal, intact.

I can't...because the film's a train wreck. And in sifting through the detritus, my meager haul of salvageable material are items that should remain in the background, visible to the eye but never overshadowing what should be the movie's main thrust: it's plot, action and suspense...in that order.

Instead, I find myself, for the sake of not writing a review that completely rubbishes the movie, talking about it's slick cinematography, drenching it's scenes in flashy, strobing monochrome images while trying my best (and failing) to ignore the fact that it's in the service of repetitive shots of people strutting towards or away from one another.

I'd like to tell you, that never before, have the sounds of cocking firearms and gunshots sounded so realistically in a Tamil movie, only to be negated by insipidly staged and amateurishly executed action scenes.

I'd like to tell you, that Ajith has never looked this cool before, clothed in designer couture and shades, but also, that despite it, he remains one of the most blandest actors in Tamil films today. See him deliver a line like "I'm back" with all the enthusiasm of a patient about to undergo triple Root Canals at the dentists', and explain to me how this charisma free, bland and weak voiced "actor" (he's the Tamil Kevin Costner) commands a formidable fan club and is dubbed, among other things, the "Ultimate Star".

I'd like to tell you that Nayanthara, fat and irritating in Ghajini, is now trim and svelte and pretty easy on the eye in a bikini, but that she unfortunately has to share screen time with a beached whale called Namitha.

Billa's biggest causalty is the complete dilution of the original's central concept of an ordinary streetwise man thrust into the high gloss and lethally treacherous world of international crime.

As cheesy as the original was (the multiple somersaults in the climax as each character makes a grab for an incriminating videotape is a sure cure for the Humour Challenged), Rajini's street performer, with betel juice dribbling down his chin, convinced you that even with swanky suits, gangster molls and hired underlings at his beck as Billa's double, nothing beat popping a paan and dancing a jig with his erstwhile cronies.

The current flick deals with the second Ajith's introduction and subsequent induction into a Police Officer's plan to impersonate Billa so perfunctorily you wonder why they even bothered with a song scene that was so skillfully inserted in the original (on the run from Billa's gang who discovers he's not the real deal, Rajini encounters his former friends, muses nostalgically on the simple life he once had, and then breaks into a song).

There's simply no context for the song in the remake. There is no delineation between the 2 roles (further damning evidence of Ajith's severely limited range), nothing to tell you that this is a streetwise pickpocket who'd rather dance in Batu Caves than throw lavish parties at his mansion.

There is an admirable economy in dialogue, a pleasant change from the often verbose fare that assails your ear in most Tamil flicks, and a courageous avoidance of anything even remotely resembling a romance between Nayanthara and Ajith, but a choppy approach to the screenplay makes it's relatively short (for a Tamil movie) running time of 2 hours seem at least 30 minutes longer. It tries to emulate the "Plot Twist" gimmick of the "Don" remake without daring to go the whole hog. So you're left with a weird hybrid that wants to stay true to the original, while jacking up the excitement via some modern plot twists, and failing miserably at both.

As an avid lover of movies (there's the word "flicks" after all in my blog title), I do tell myself every now and then not to limit my cine diet to Hollywood fare. And so I add variety to my viewing palate with a smattering of Chinese there, a grain of Korean here with side helpings of French, Spanish and Italian. To spice up the whole mixture, I should be heaping on generous portions of South Indian fare.

But on the basis of this latest foray into Tamil movies, I'll stick to the bland stuff. It's easier on the stomach....

Guilty Pleasures Part 2

2007-12-27T02:51:00.000-08:00

Ok..so sue me. He's gained a 100 pounds, makes direct to DVD fodder that feature 2 minutes worth of aikido, of which a full minute is probably executed by a stuntman...but I still spend some time during my DVD trawls trying to seek out a watchable Steven Seagal flick with the ardent yearning of a lovestruck puppy hoping for a glimmer of attention from his crush. In vain.Since Half Past Dead, the last Seagal movie to unspool from a cinema projector way back in 2002, he's made about 17 DVD flicks, out of which only Shadow Man, Belly Of The Beast, Urban Justice and Into The Sun managed to extricate themselves (barely) from the dungheap of dreck that Seagal's output has shat out onto the B-Movie landscape these past 8 years. So for a whiff of nostalgic longing for a leaner, meaner Seagal (available only in the first 6 flicks of his career) , I periodically pop in Marked For Death, the 3rd Seagal movie and for some bone crunching, neck twisting, wrist snapping demonstration of aikido at it's most lethal, look no further. Sadistic Jamaican Drug Lord Screwface ( a brilliant Basil Wallace) rubs retired DEA agent Seagal the wrong way, and gets his eyeballs gouged in, spine snapped, thrown out a window and impaled on a stick. After watching his entire posse get wiped out. Don't fuck with an irate Buddhist man...

Another longing, this one for Missed Opportunities assails me whenever I see Brandon Lee strutting on screen. Handsome, lean and athletic, he was poised to carry the Martial Baton from his late father Bruce Lee when death tragically cut him down, via a stunt accident on the set of The Crow.

Showdown In Little Tokyo sees him play second banana to Dolph Lundgren, but Brandon exudes natural charisma and maintains his dignity even when a scene forces him to admire the size of Lundgren's Dong. Showdown is so gleefully unabashed in it's casual racism and sexism and over the top in it's violence , it's to me, an important artifact of the '80s. And like the best Bad Movies you keep coming back to it has a kick ass villain, in this case Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa in full tattooed Yakuza regalia, oozing reptilian charm with his sonorous voice even as he disrobes a blonde escort and fondles her breast as a prelude to hacking her head off..while video taping the whole act. The movie's one charming concept (Scandinavian Lundgren is steeped in Japanese lore while Asian Lee is Californian Clueless) is soon buried under an avalanche of escalating violence as the ass kicking duo take on Tagawa's Yakuza minions.

Rapid Fire was a far more effective launchpad for Brandon Lee, as he now gets to strut his stuff solo, playing the world's least protected Witness under Protection. Invigorating fight scenes, smoothly executed by a very limber Lee, a decent plot and the always reliable Powers Boothe make this a Prime Replay Candidate on my Player.

Jean Claude Van Damme's career arch is scarily similar to the Pony Tailed one, with the exception that he's still kept himself in shape but I steadily bypass his current output and pop something like Timecop in when I need my JCVD Martial Mayhem fix.

It's time travel plot makes nary a lick of sense..but it features some decent ass-kickery from the Muscles from Brussells and it's climactic showdown where the baddies have to contend with both Past and Present Van Dammes is still a B-Movie delight.

The Adventures of Indiana Jones

2007-12-27T02:36:00.000-08:00

So, can I commit sacrilege and actually admit that the much revered, oft exalted first installment in the Indy trilogy is not my favourite? In anticipation of the upcoming fourth installment in this ace adventure series from the Spileberg-Lucas collaboration next summer, I decided to re-visit the Man with the Whip, that along with the fedora and leather jacket, was patterned after the daring hunks who headlined Saturday Matinee serials, an American experience in the '40s and '50s, shorts attached to regular features which ended in cliff hangers, ensuring audience attendance the following week to find out its conclusions. Lucas drew inspiration from the Flash Gordon sci fi serials to make some little known movies called Star Wars Episodes 1 to 6. The adventure epic with a hero constantly in peril became the Indiana Jones films.

Raiders will always retain its place as the franchise kick off, the template and standard setter for not only its gazillion grossing sequels but countless (often inferior) imitators.

But what works best for me in Raiders isn't the movie as a whole but individual scenes and images:

The opener which is a self contained masterpiece of everything you expect in an action adventure epic- the search for an elusive treasure deep in dangerous and exotic territory, blow dart wielding natives, rival explorers, duplicitous aids and booby trapped mazes.

Indy's perfunctory dispatch of a sword wielding assailant

Mischievious monkey and poisoned dates ('Nuff said!)

The sinister Mr. Thoth

The opening of the ark, in spite of some obviously dated effects, still packs a whallop, with melting faces and flesh not to mention bodies drilled with light.

Perhaps it was because my intro to Indy came via The Temple Of Doom rather than Raiders, but it remains my favourite of the three. A breakneck pace that hardly pauses to take breath, Indy 2 opens in a Shanghai Nightclub, with a rousing musical number rendered by nightclub singer Willie Scott(Kate "Mrs. Spielberg" Capshaw ) (in Mandarin no less), while Indy negotiates with shifty looking Chinese Gangsters. One Switch and (poisonous) double-cross later, the action kicks off in high gear as a fight erupts amidst machine guns, gigantic gongs and loads of balloons which climaxes with Indy and Willie leaping out a window, crashing through canopies and landing in the getaway vehicle comandeered by Indy's Asian Boy sidekick Short Round. I use the word climax loosely as, like every other action scene in this breathless installment, the end of one deliriously executed set piece is merely the set up to another.

The nightclub fracas gives way to a car chase that ends with an airborne getaway, which turn out to be anything but as the aircraft is soon without it's shifty pilots who parachute off it, leaving the trio to exit said aircraft on an inflatable canoe, careening down a snowy mountain before careening off it down a waterfall and onto a river, finding themselves in India (Sri Lanka, actually )

There, Indy is put on a mission by a village elder to retrieve the lost Shankara stones, which have been stolen by a vicious Thuggee Cult that still specialise in Human Sacrifices.

If you want to get pissy about such things, there's plenty to get offended by Temple Of Doom. Short Round's pidgin English quickly becomes the movies least contentious exercise in racial stereotyping as you quickly get a grand tour of Exotic India, replete with jewelled and turbaned Maharajahs, whose palace subjects' enjoy feasting on sumptious courses of Chilled Monkey Brains, Pythons stuffed with live, wriggly eels, assorted bugs and eyeball soup, Kali Worshipping blood cults, epitomised by bald and baritone voiced Amrish Puri, spouting gibberish incantations as he rips the still beating heart out of a hapless sacrificial victim.

Or..you could just take it for the harmless fun it all is, although this is the darkest of the Indy movies, and more than the other 2, exudes a real sense of menace in certain scenes that do a better job of convincing you that our intrepid hero is in genuine danger, notably in a scene where he's force fed blood and falls under a spell. In fact, that's probably the only action lull in the movie as Indy goes rogue and almost kills Willie before recovering his senses and donning back The Hat and Whip. And the ride then commences...

For a movie that could justly be described as a rollercoaster ride, it's apt that it's climactic mine car chase is truly that, still a stunner even after decades of advancements in special effects and CGI.

Evil vanquished, Baddies Dipatched to become crocodile fodder,Shankara Stones Found, and Hero and Heroine share a final kiss. Action movies don't, and shouldn't, come much better than this.

And honestly, it didn't as revisiting the third installment, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, I was struck by the fact that it's action scenes , by now seem, by the numbers, with Spielberg and Lucas regurgitating the original's plot point of a religious artifact sought after by the Nazis (Ark in Raiders, Holy Grail here). Hell, it even apes Raiders in its University scenes of Marcus walking into Indy's class filled with adoring female students!There are, however, 3 nice touches, one interesting, one delightful and one bordering on brilliance.

Interesting would be Alison Doody as Elsa Schneider, the Indy heroine who strictly speaking, is anything but. Shifty and manipulative, Elsa beds Indy, then double crosses him and is finally undone by greed. There is some attempt to tone down her Nazi sympathies, but ice blonde Elsa is the closest thing in this serial adventure to approximate a Femme Fatale, which is no bad thing.

Delightful would be prologuing the film with Indy as a young boy (it's a little poignant to see the late River Phoenix as Young Indy), tracing his first encounter with a whip that yield the famous Harrison Ford chin scar, neatly explaining his later dislike of snakes and topping off with him being gifted The Hat. Short, brilliantly executed and concluded, this part in The Last Crusade is the best in the series' that consistently seem to pour most of its imagination and exuberance into it's Prologues. It's leanness merely accentuates the bloat in the rest its running time.

But all that pales alongside the film's Casting and Conceptual Coup, the Touch Of Brilliance: The casting of Sean Connery as Indy's crusty, academic but no less driven father. As the forerunner and very much patterned on James Bond, who better to play Indiana Jones Sr. then the first (and in many quarters acknowledegd to be the best) actor to play the agent with the Licence To Kill. Connery's chemistry with Ford is dynamite with the latter marvellously potraying Indy's by turns irritation, affection and in one sublime scene, genuine respect for the Father who never had time for him.

The Last Crusade scores on the Connery/Ford dynamics even while it flatlines with some of the dullest and least charismatic villains to grace the Indy franchise. Julian Glover's billionaire philanthropist and a Nazi general so generic I've forgotten his name is a pale shadow of the creepy and reptilian Thoth in Raiders and the flamboyantly over the top Mola Ram of The Temple Of Doom.

It's been more than 25 years and I await the the latest Tilt Of The Fedora and the Crack Of The Whip with glee.

As Elsa would say "Giddy as a schoolboy!"

The Big Books

2007-12-27T02:04:00.000-08:00

Call it the anticipation of several days, weeks or even months of reading pleasure to come or the comfortable heft of a meaty tome under my arms but I love big books. They have to be novels of course. Fiction definitely. Epic tales unfolding over decades or centuries preferably. My first large book was Shogun, James Clavell's saga set in 16th Century feudal Japan. I carried that brick of a book around for months, spending many a splendid hour immersed in its riveting tale of a shipwrecked English sailor who gets sucked into the impending war between 2 rival warlords, becoming a confidante of one and the lover of a married samurai noblewoman.

So, it could well have been my pleasant first experience with a hefty tome, but to this day, I still seek out big tales, running well past the 800 page mark, demanding undivided reading focus (I, not belonging to that band of multi-tasking bookies who can juggle up to 3 different books at a time) and generally taking up my reading life for weeks on end.

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove was another source of unadulterated pleasure derived from a long epic tale, this one chronicling a massive cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Vivid characters occupying a panoramic, post Civil War landscape of pure Americana acting out scenes of nail biting tension co-existing with ones of unbearable heartbreak, Lonesome Dove deposited me in Reader Nirvana as I sparingly parcelled out pages to read as the book drew to a close, a desperate attempt to prolong the joy of complete immersion in this spell binding Western.

Not all my encounters with big books yielded Reader's Gold, unfortunately...

Tom Clancy started out writing riveting thrillers that fused state of the art military and surveillance info married to a tight plot laced with geo-political overtones, and they rarely ran less than 600 pages. Then they got even longer (Executive Orders), sloppier( Without Remorse), increasingly Right Wing (Debt Of Honour, Rainbow Six) as they descended from thrilling to average, sliding down to ponderous and finally landing with a squelchy thud into GobShite (Red Rabbit, Teeth Of The Tiger) . The culmination, length wise was The Bear And The Dragon, a 1000 page plus arduous trek through mediocre prose that delivered, in spite of its unholy length, a fraction of the thrills in earlier Clancy novels. I call it The Bore And The Drivel.

And then there was Colleen McCullough's The First Man In Rome, the first in a now 7 book series on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Pre-Julius Caesar and Post Etruscan and Punic Wars, it chronicles the rise of 2 men who would plot the course change of Rome from Republic To Empire; Gaius Marius, low born but brilliant military strategist and leader and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, of high born Patrician stock but penniless.

Novelisations of actual historic events require a deft touch. Especially one as well documented as the saga of Rome. Trawl a bookshop, browse through a library or random search the Net, and you'll be drowning in information deluge on the sheer amount of text that's been devoted to chronicling the minutiae of this once great civilization.

To make the actual reading of it a pleasure requires an adept touch at whipping and stirring up a tale of passion, ambition, treachery, political chicanery, epic battles and sex, elements that were in abundance during this period ( and pretty much any period in history book- ended by the rise and fall of a civilisation, if you want to argue the point) .

What McCullough serves up instead is an academic and episodic saga that never reaches the giddy depths it should. Her research is a Gold Star in meticulousness; Rome is brought alive in geography, people, customs, food and social hierarchy, complemented with a 100 page glossary that covers topics spanning from how long an actual toga was to the complex political machinery of the Senate, a half dozen maps and even sketches of some of the main players.

One wishes McCullough brought the same attention to giving you a riveting historical epic. There are flashes of brilliance, sadly counterbalanced by a sluggish pace, a grave misstep in a book that stretches well past the 900 page mark. The poisonously intriguing Sulla, who sleeps with both his step mother and mistress before murdering them in cold blood is given short shrift, playing second fiddle to Marius, sketched 2 dimensionally as a brilliant general in the opening pages and never attains any depth beyond that for the rest of this long book (although one supposes that Sulla will come into prominence in the second and third book as his friendship with Marius gives way to a bloody feud later.).

Of the 3 key battles dominating this period in the Republic, 2 are given short shrift: the war against Numidia culminating in the capture of King Jugurtha and the final battle against the Germanic tribes which seals Marius' position as the most powerful man in Rome. Peculiarly, it is the middle battle, the Roman armies rout by the Germans that McCullough chooses to flesh out in more detail.

But the book is filled with such idiosyncracies; Jugurtha's capture is perfunctory but a fascinating, though tragically short description of his final march through the the city of Rome before being executed hints at what this book could have been

I took more than a month to finish this book, putting it down twice before picking it up again, gazing longingly at my book shelf at the titles I'd RATHER be reading, flicking to the end ever so often to see how much more I had to go, counting the number of pages daily, longing for characters with simpler names than Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar and Publius Rutilius Rufus, wishing I could speed read, hoping the languid pace would go from canter to full gallop, and finally breathing a hefty sigh of relief as I turned the last page, vowing not to touch another hefty tome for a long while. So, what did I turn to next?

Ken Follet's The Pillars Of The Earth.

Number of pages: 973

Like I said, I love Big Books....

Tag Teams

2007-11-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

Movies that feature high profile leading men sharing centre stage need to perform a precarious balancing act: Both it's high wattage leading men need room to shine, the script needs to play to their strengths while not sacrificing the story in favour of "actor showboating". In the recent trio of big name team-ups, James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (Russell Crowe and Christian Bale) is probably the one that combines all elements successfully while Ridley Scott's American Gangster (Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington) comes pretty damn close. Phillip G. Atwell's War (Jet Li and jasaon Statham) on the other hand, doesn't have a fucking clue as to what do with its butt kicking protagonists.

American Gangster

All gifted directors at some point essay a gangster flick and why not? Where else would you find such scope for epic storytelling, great and violent drama not to mention roles for equally gifted actors to flex their acting muscles?

The awesome versatility of Ridley Scott gets another workout as he attempts the genre conquered by Coppola and Scorcese and De Palma. Pick a genre and it's probably had Scotts's imprint on it at one point or another. Never mind the seminal science fiction flicks Alien and Blade Runner, the man has done fantasy (Legend), period movies (The Duellist and 1492:Conquest Of Paradise), cop thrillers (Someone To Watch Over Me and Black Rain), feminist road film (Thelma and Louise), con capers (Matchstick Men), macho war movies (G.I.Jane and Black Hawk Dawn), revitalised the sword and sandal epic (Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven) and even helmed a Hannibal Lecter movie (Hannibal).

The plot of American Gangster can be concisely summed up:

A Harlem heroin kingpin, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) smuggles drugs into America by American military planes and servicemen returning from the Vietnam War. He is extorted by corrupt policemen.
Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is a detective who works to bring down Lucas.[2] Unlike many colleagues he is not corrupt; once he found a million dollars of drugs money, and did not keep any for himself.
When Lucas is arrested they have partly a common goal: to expose the corrupt policemen who extorted him.

Scott keeps the movie running on two parallel plot lines, Lucas' rise to power, set to the throbbing beats of jazz, soul and the street rhythms of Harlem in the '70s, and Roberts's unravelling personal life while forming and heading an elite drug squad tasked with tracking down the supplier of an almost pure and therefore lethal grade of narcotic on the streets. Scott makes you wait for a full 2 hours and twenty minutes before having his 2 high wattage thesps meet.

If Scott's meticulous attention to detail means the film's authentic recreation of New York in the '70s come as no surprise, then neither do the high voltage sparks generated by Crowe and Russell in their money shot face off in the films' closing scenes. You expect no less from these 2 charismatic leads who are a joy to watch throughout this lengthy epic.

Washington, in his first movie with Ridley (although he's headlined 3 movies by brother Tony Scott) channels his Training Day bad cop, albeit with a lot more style and suave elegance while retaining the lethal menace of his Oscar Winning antagonist.

Crowe (in his third Ridely Scott flick), however, is the real revelation, not only taking a slightly dimished role next to Washington, but playing Roberts' minus the customary swagger you'd expect from a veteran policeman. Make no mistake, Roberts' is skilled and equally dangerous in a gunfight and capable of operating with ruthless efficiency but he's layered with self doubt, terrified of public speaking and as his soon to be ex-wife puts it succinctly during a court room confrontation, a man who returned the drug money "to buy the dishonesty he practices in his life".

Both Crowe and Washington effortlessly convey the contrast of the chaotic personal life of the policeman against the stable family life of the gangster (Lucas moves his ENTIRE family to NY from North Carolina when he's able to afford it; Roberts' can't even prevent his wife from moving away to Las Vegas with their only son).

Action is in surprisingly short supply as is the violence for a movie of this ilk. Scott's mastery in staging action sequences is saved for a climactic shoot out at the drug dealer's hide out. What is in surprising abundance here is nudity, not a Scott staple (this is a director who eschewed filming a orgy in a movie set during the Roman Empire).

And did I forget to mention Josh Brolin's effective turn as the real villain of the piece, a ruthlessly corrupt cop? His rather tame downfall is the movie's few weak points.

Were it not for Michael Mann's seminal Heat that brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together for only the second time after Godfather 2, American Gangster may well have been the shining beacon of star team ups not to mention epic crime dramas.

Gangster lacks the intensity of Heat and despite its subject matter, the all pervading aura of menace of a Goodfellas or Casino.

But Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington in a Ridley Scott directed crime drama. How often do one of those come along?

WAR

Or Rogue Assassin in some places..or A Collossal Waste Of Time that most people who have seen it are going to sub title it, whatever the name, it's still proof positive, that in the wrong hands, it's still possible to fuck up a Sure Thing.

Jet Li and Jason Statham sure ain't no Crowe and Washington, you don't shell out 10 bucks in a cinema (or a lesser amount for a bootleg copy, whichever's your preference) to see Oscar calibre acting and nuanced characters. You expect to see action. Tons of it. Legs and hands working in precisioned harmony to wreck mayhem, balletic martial arts that keep you enthralled and in blissfull self-denial that story-wise, the plot isn't worth the used napkin it was written on. Even if the dingbats responsible for this mess didn't catch Jet's kung fu masterpieces like the Once Upon A Time In China movies or Statham's Transporter flicks, at least a viewing of Tony Jaa's Tom Yum Goong would have awakened some basic awareness that zero or inexplicable plot is excusable in the face of jaw dropping martial arts choreography.

But no, director Atwell (who?) chooses to saddle us with a supposedly intricate plot of a master assassin Rogue (Jet Li) playing the Yakuza and Triads off one another that would have appeared complex only to those who've never seen A Fistfull Of Dollars. Hot on his trails is dedicated cop John Crawford (Jason Statham), out for revenge for the death of his partner and family at Rogue's hands 3 years ago.

Statham fares the best, only because when he's not fighting (and there's a lot of that:No Fighting), he's allowed to peddle his roguish machismo to good effect. It's the one note Jason Statham swagger, you've seen it in 3 guy Ritchie movies, 2 Transporter flicks and the charmingly off beat Crank and Chaos. And he does it well.

Jet, on the other hand is made to Act Cool. Note to director: The Jetster only looks cool when he's unleashing martial arts mayhem. Garbing him in stylish black coats, shades and having him deliver one liners that may have sounded cool if Jet didn't have a propensity for mangling the English language almost as brutally as he does his assailants is NOT.

So,do Jason and the Jetster get it on? Yes finally. Don't blink though. You may miss it.

Talky and ponderous, War most likely sprang from the same heads that thought teaming up a martial arts star with a hip-hop artiste was the epitome of stylish cool and gave us such unforgettable masterpieces like Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds and Cradle to The Grave. The same geniuses now give you two stars who can actually fight in one film and have them do very little of it.

The only noteworthy part of this dreck is a sly twist tacked on at the end that actually took me by surprise. It's actually...clever and doesn't belong in the film, much like it's stars, who would have been much better off filming Transporter 3 or Return Of The Kiss Of The Dragon.

Hell, I'll even settle for Unleashed..Again.

3:10 to Yuma

With Ridley Scott's ambitious and ultimately over reaching American Gangster being a little less than the Perfect Cinematic Crime Drama and War being the latest addition to the scrap heap housing the detritus of over shot, over-cut, over-stylised and severely underwhelming action flicks, it falls to 3:10 To Yuma to pull off that near perfect combination of propulsively kinetic action and intense drama that not only revitalises the Western, but skillfully utilises it's stars' magnetic charisma to boost it.

It works because director James Mangold (Cop Land, Kate and Leopold,Walk The Line) has Russell Crowe and Christian Bale play to their strengths.

Crowe is in full on Swagger Mode, Maximus with a Stetson and Gun, oozing charm and cold ruthlessness with equal measure.

Christian Bale was born to play the Tortured, Intense Soul the way John Wayne was born to play a cowboy and he's in his element here as a tortured, intense rancher struggling to hold on to his farm and family's respect. The onrush of the railroad means his land is worth more with him off it. A chance to earn some much needed cash to save his land emerges when he stands a chance to escort notorious outlaw Ben Wade(Crowe) along with a posse of railroad employees and bounty hunters to the town of Contention to catch the 3:10 train to Yuma where Ben will stand trial and be hanged. But hot on their trail is Ben's gang of vicious killers led by sadistic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster, surprisingly good and menacing. This is the geek who had his piercings pulled off in The Punisher and the Mutant Boy ashamed of his wings in X-Men 3).

And Ben himself will prove to be a handful....

The action is fast and furious, the dialogues simmer with tension and the climactic High Noon style showdown is nail-biting.

Like American Gangster and War (shudder!) , 3.10 To Yuma also features a climactic reversal on the part of its antagonist that, like the other 2 films, don't quite ring true. But after delivering more than 90 minutes of pulse pounding excitement, you're more than willing to overlook it in this case.

3.10 To Yuma calls for a resurrection of the Western. And that ain't no bad thing...

Alice In Zombieland

2007-11-07T20:18:00.000-08:00

Since Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the second in this trilogy of films based on the Capscom survival horror video games, concisely explains the plot of the first flick in 2 minutes flat, this is one of the very few times when I'd actually recommend you skip the first installment which I found plodding and go straight to the sequel, which not only has a clearer plot structure, but makes sense of the first's muddled plot line.

Briefly, the all-powerful and unscrupulous Umbrella Corporation(aren't they all?) is engaged in developing viral weaponry in their underground high tech research facility called The Hive.
The most potent of this, the T Virus, re-animates dead cells, bringing the dead back to life as flesh eating zombies (aren't they all?).

In the first movie, Alice battled hordes of them with the help of an army commando unit, unleashed down on The Hive, after a sabotage attempt releases the virus, infecting the research staff. In the end, Alice and an environmentalist Matt are the only ones to make it out to the surface, only to be captured by the Corporation who subject them to sinister tests.

In Apocalypse, Alice awakens from a lab, ventures outside to Raccoon City to find it over run by the flesh eaters on account of the T Virus leaking out to the surface. Unable to contain a mass exodus out of the city by panic stricken civilians, the ruthless Umbrella Corporation seals the exit out of the city and prepares to "contain" the virus threat by nuking the city.

It's up to Alice, utterly useless comic relief LJ, gutsy and straight shooting cop Jill Valentine and commando Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr, Ardeth Bay of the Mummy flicks) to head to the sole helicopter available to escape the infected city, while battling armies of the undead, not to mention nefarious Umbrella Corporation man Timothy Cain (Thomas Kretchman, chief vampire in Blade 2 and ship captain in King Kong) and his diabolical plan to pit Alice against a now heavily mutated Matt from the first movie, part of a weapons development project called Nemesis. See,Alice is infected as well, but she has managed to "bond with the virus on a cellular level" to become stronger and faster. Cue lots of wire-fu aided, flashily edited martial arts fights and some nifty heavy duty gun fights, which make Apocalypse a non stop roller coaster of high octane action and a significant improvement over the original. The end of Apocalypse saw Alice and friends escaping Raccoon City, but the chopper they're in crashes, Alice re-captured by the corporation and subjected to further tests by the even more nefarious Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen, baddie in Tomb Raider, one here and probably doomed to play one in every movie that casts him.) Rescued by Valentine, Olivera and LJ, Alice escapes and is allowed to escape, as part of the Corporation's plan to activate "Project Alice". An ending like that practically screams sequel and so finally we have...

Resident Evil :Extinction

The third installment is a step back for the franchise, as director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) tones down the high velocity action of Part 2 to give us an uneasy hybrid of the first movie crossed with Mad Max type post apocalyptic scenarios. Cue arid dessert wastelands where the undead roam the lone highways and scattered groups of the un-infected either hole up in dusty shacks or travel in mobile convoys, seeking other survivors. The largest of these convoys is headed by Clare Redfield (Ali Larter from Heroes), along with Olivera and LJ from Apocalypse (whose bright idea was it to bring back the useless comic relief and ditch the babelicious Jill Valentine? Shame on you!)

Also back is the diabolical Dr. Isaacs, now conducting his research in another Hive like facility under ground, still working on developing the ultimate bio weapon under Project Alice, supervised as ever, by the still all powerful Umbrella Corporation (so you now know, in the event of a global catastrophe, only 2 things will flourish: Cockroaches and billion dollar corporations).

Lacking Alice's "pure" infected blood and unable to find her ever since she gave the Umbrella satellites the slip, the "good" doctor is forced to rely on cloned versions that don't measure up, get killed and promptly disposed into a mass "Alice pit".

Plot contrivances assure Alice meets up with Clare's convoy, is re-united with Olivera and sets out on a plan to crash the Hive holdout to transport the survivors to Alaska, apparently the last un-infected place on earth. But not before Alice settles a score with Dr. Isaacs....

Apart from a creepily effective scene involving a gargantuan flock of crows and a zombie attack in deserted Las Vegas, Extinction is short on thrills, regurgitating the flight to safety and mutated monster plot of Apocalypse and even a climactic showdown that re-uses a set from the original. But Jovovich is always good butt kicking fun to watch and for the pervs, rest assured, Extinction does not break with tradition and showcases the requisite Milla nudie shot.

The ending naturally leaves things open for Resident Evil 4, but if you ask me, it's time to leave the undead to rest.

The Matrix...Revisited

2007-10-31T21:25:00.000-07:00

Rewatching films you once loved after a gap is the equivalent of revisiting an old crush. You bring with you a sense of perspective while harbouring acute anxieties about the abilities of your erstwhile object of affection to trigger those same frenzied responses in you.

Such were my thoughts, coming to the Matrix trilogy, a good 8 years after the release of the original and 4 years after its back to back sequels.

I remember watching the trailer for The Matrix on TV, slack jawed with wonder at my first exposure to "bullet time" effects: Accosted by armed policemen, Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) leaps into the air, the shot freezes, while a camera pans around her.

That single image was sufficient enough for me to hunt down the nearest cinema showing the film, as it turns out, a poor one housed in Subang Parade (shut down now), watching it, coming back home in a daze, and spending the next few days hunting down a decent VCD copy of the flick, managing to obtain one, then racing back home to watch it 3 more times.

Fast forward 4 years later, I'm at the office on a Friday, but managed to get through the entire day without getting a lick of work done. How could I, when nestling comfortably in my wallet, were tickets for The Matrix Reloaded for the night show? The day was spent, quite productively, I might add, by scanning sites to catch the latest reviews of the movie (still a weakness on my part I'm afraid).

Then, spending the next month trying to decipher it's convoluted plot vis a vis The Architect's cryptic musings, even as I surfed Internet Chat rooms, where greater (or idle) minds than myself had postulated dozens of theories unravelling the mysteries of The Matrix.

Later that year, I returned to the cinemas to catch the first midnight screening of The Matrix Revolutions. Feeling an exhilarated sense of closure as order was restored, chaos vanquished and peace established between Man and Machine.

Such was my Matrix Mania. So the chance to revisit all 3 movies on DVD during my time off was an irresistible prospect.

The good news is, what made it work, still does. Mainly, the Brothers' Wachowski's ability to throw science fiction, cyber punk, John Woo actioners and Kung Fu showdowns in a smelting pot, adding spirituality, religion and philosophy into the mixture, interfacing it's hardware of cutting edge (for its time) digital effects to the software of its audacious concept of computer code analogies to forge pure high octane entertainment of the first order.

But absorbed and filtered through slightly more matured tastes, my Sweetheart is far from flawless.

Dialogues that once rang with profundity now seem ponderous and, dare I say it, pretentious?

A sonorously voiced Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) now seems like a walking bag of super heated air most of the time, the characters' gravity and dignity only salvaged in the final installment as he watches his once cherished dream of a Messianic rescue of the Human race dashed.

It's quite a pity that the trilogies' ground breaking visual effects and multi layered plot is countered by dialogues notable for the complete absence of anything even remotely resembling wit or originality. While not quite approaching the laugh out loud hilariousness of the Star Wars movies (Episodes 1-3), it nevertheless boasts clunkers of almost equal magnitude, its faux-philosophising, answering questions with another question exchanges between its characters threatening at times to undue some genuinely gutsy writing that dared to make it's final episode the darkest, the slick, tricked up uber-chic of episodes 1 and 2 making way for a grubbier and grungier part 3, as the series left behind its virtual reality simulated pyrotechnics of Reloaded to actually spend substantially more time in the real world in Revolutions. And all this, without the benefits of previously filmed sequels that tied up loose ends (unlike a tale that takes place in a galaxy far, far away...).

Some notable (ahem!) samples....

"It's my way or the highway" says a character in The Matrix.

Patrick Swayze used that line in Road House almost 18 years ago, and it still sounds better coming from him.

Some scintillating examples from The Matrix Reloaded:

Neo: So we need machines and machines need us. Is that your point?

Councillor Hamann : No, no point.Men my age don't make points. What's the point?

Neo: Is that why there're no young men on the council?

Councillor Hamann: Good point.

Profound stuff, this.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Neo: I have to make a choice?

The Oracle: No, you've already made it. You need to understand why you made it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Morpheus: How do you know this?

The Keymaker : I know because I must know. It is my purpose.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From The Matrix Revolutions:

The Oracle: The Architects job is to balance the equation.

Neo: What's yours?

The Oracle : To unbalance it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Matrix may have been a brilliantly self contained nugget and there will always be the nagging thought that Andy and Larry Wachowski should have quit while they were ahead, but they dared over reach themselves in The Matrix Reloaded and even blinded and sacrificed their Chosen One in The Matrix Revolutions , ultimately giving us a franchise that tickled the cerebrum even as it made the heart thump. Bangs for bucks that lodged in the mind even as it ruminated over a plot that plumbed depths few high voltage sci fi actioners were even aware of, what more can a geek ask for?

Thank sweetheart, it was great catching up.

I'll be sure to jack in again.....but not too soon.

The Namesake

2007-09-06T20:39:00.000-07:00

There's a scene somewhere in the middle of Mira Nair's "The Namesake" when Ashok Ganguli (Irfan Khan) turns to wife Ashima (Tabu) and asks "So, why did you choose me all those years ago?". She replies demurely " You were the best of the lot. Better than the widower with 4 children and the cartoonist with 1 arm". To those of us who enjoy being sucked into the swirling vortex of a tempestuous courtship as a prelude to taking the matrimonial plunge, Ashima's response would have all the passion of freshly thawed fish. But their relationship isn't so much based on Sense as it is on Sensibility. Peel back the layers and you'll find a deep bond forged from time, trust and commitment to a partnership shaped and strengthened through decades of accumulated experiences, both good and bad.

It's what made this movie resonate with me, the layers Nair peels away to show you the glimpses of what's lying beneath, because what's on the surface is a tale told in umpteen reincarnations elsewhere. Ashima leaves a close knit Bengali family after an arranged marriage to college professor Ashok to New York, where the newly weds adjust to the immigrant experience and to each other. There's homesickness (on her part), stumbling attempts at articulation (on his part), disagreements and reconciliations (on both their parts), children and a move from cramped apartment to suburbia.

And through it all, you see the couple grow older and into each other, Ashok's initial bumbling and bombastic speech patterns giving way to a gentler cadence polished with maturity and wisdom, Ashima grows into a figure of quite confidence and authority, without relinquishing a shred of her Bengali heritage.

Which is primarily why, the the story of of their son's conflict, both to break free of his Bengali roots and his given name didn't impact me in the same way.

The son(Kal Penn), named Gogol after the famous Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, does what all children do to hack off the shackles of tradition; he changes his name to Nikhil, has a relationship with a WASPish blonde(Jacinda Barrett) and rarely returns his mother's calls when he moves away from home.

His re-integration into his community and re-embracing of his roots, precipitated by a family tragedy, is all top side veneer. You struggle to understand his conflict but his story lacks the intricate nuance accorded to his parents. And it doesn't help that Nair rushes through his romantic liasons and culture frictions, as though coming to a belated realisation, after having spent so much time detailing the Ashok-Ashima bond, that this is, in essence, Gogol's tale and that she better get on with telling it with the little remaining running time left.

Gogol rejects the blonde Maxine because she isn't from his community, but his marriage to Moushumi(Zuleikha Robinson), who is, disintegrates, because it isn't enough that they're both Bengali. These are deep waters to be mined, but Nair merely skims the surface.

Every scene I've taken away from this movie, that's still singing a sonorous tune in my cortex, involve Ashok and Ashima;

Ashok breaking the news of her father's death to Ashima.

Their whimsical exchange in front of the Taj Mahal.

Their breakfast table talk before Ashok leaves for a posting in another town.

Ashok explaining to Gogol the traumatic incident in his life that led to his migration to the States and his subsequent choice of moniker for his first born.

I haven't read the Jhumpha Lahiri novel which inspired this movie, but were I to pick it up, it would be in the hope the novel fleshes out Gogol as wonderfully as Nair does his parents in the movie.

Light years from the usual Bombast and Excess of Bollywood, The Namesake, flaws aside, is that perfect swig of one's favourite brew after a hard day's work. To be sipped slowly as you unwind, with a sigh.

The Road

2007-08-13T23:27:00.001-07:00

A stark meditation on the futility of life when all you know and love has been destroyed. A fascinating trek through a bleak, post apocalyptic landscape. The forging of a bond between father and son as they cling on to the last vestiges of hope in a desolate world.

Well..I'd like to say Cormac McCarthy's ponderous, plodding and preciously pretentious The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bedecked with critical plaudits is all of the above.

I'd like to say it made me ponder on the nature of the world today and how frighteningly close I think we are to the brink of the sort of anihilation depicted in this slim 287 page book that nevertheless took me forever to finish, on account of the fact that eyelids drooping with boredom-induced sleep don't make for fast reading.

Mine was the minority opinion in our monthly Book Club Meet though as most of the other members seemed to have liked it and felt it warranted serious analysis. It scared some, moved others and terrified the rest. The level of analysis and discussion this turgid tale of a father and son trek through a ravaged world, heading south to some imagined utopia while dodging cannibalistic scavengers and staving off hunger, seemed to have engendered in my fellow bookies, is eye-popping to say the least.

This pointless tale is unevenly written, whipping back and forth from evocative descriptions of vast wastelands to dreary dialogues coasting by on the gimmicky conceit of not having quotation marks. For a book that starts nowhere and gets nowhere fast, it ends on a false note of hope that seems to have been tacked on at the last minute.

The disconnect between what I, a reader expected and what this book delivered is a yawning chasm I don' t expect to bridge in this lifetime.

Get off this Road..it ain't goin' nowhere.

Shivaji-The Boss

2007-06-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

How do you a review a movie that isn’t a movie in the traditional sense?
A Rajinikanth film ceased to be just a film at around the same time Rajini himself stopped being just a Star. His elevation to Icon meant his Films became Events.
Brutally self-referencing, the Rajini movie is not for the novice uninitiated in the knowledge of this ex-bus conductor’s meteoric career. A giddy combination of catch phrases, punch dialogues laced with philosophical homilies for the Good and sarcastic put downs for the Bad, the Rajini Film Dialogue aims primarily to reinforce his iconic stature (that is, if the electrifying graphics enhanced top billing he gets at the start of each movie doesn’t drive the point home) even as the Rajini Film Plot relentlessly samples plot lines from his past movies. To see a Rajini hero go from well off to penniless to super rich is to acknowledge a patented character arc that goes back several movies in the past. You KNOW Shivaji’s penurious existence is short-lived because Padayappa before him went from homeless to granite mill owning millionaire in the time it took for 1 song to play out, because orphan Arunachalam inherited real dad’s billions at the Interval point, because milkman Annamalai became a hotel magnate in the time it took for….well, you get the idea.
Let’s face it, even in the bizarre (for the uninitiated) world of Tamil movies, the Rajinikanth movie is in a rarefied stratosphere of its own. Internet chat rooms, blogs and forums buzz with news, rumours and innuendo from it’s first day of Production. Leaked stills are posted, plots discussed and possible screenplays debated months before a single reel of film unspools in cinemas.
Questions like the nature of Rajini’s introduction song, Signature Hand Gesture or Trademark Punch Dialogue is debated with the type of religious fervour normally reserved for Constitutional Amendments.
It all builds to a frenzied crescendo until the day of release.
Then the real mayhem begins….
Scenes of fans breaking coconuts outside and inside cinema halls, pouring milk over a gigantic cut-out of the star and snaking lines of queues outside cinemas hours before ticketing counters open (assuming any are available once scalpers pounce on them to sell it to eager fans with a 400% mark up in price) would make a riveting film in its own right.
In Malaysia, Rajini fans demonstrated the sort of passion that can only come about by a sudden, plunging drop in IQs (not uncommon in situations where large masses of humanity weaned on Tamil Films are squeezed into limited spaces) by breaking glasses, setting fires and beating up a Cinema Manager when technical glitches caused delays in screening.
The expectations, normally high for a Rajini flick, this time sky rocketed to unbelievable heights because, not since Thalapathy has a Rajini film been helmed by a big name director with a style and market of his own.

Nobody does big budget masalas like Shankar. A gifted visual stylist on par with Mani Ratnam, Shankar’s movies operate strictly within the tropes of conventional Tamil Cinema formulas while coating them with a polished sheen of class thanks to an ability to spend the kind of money that not so much require deep pockets as it does bottomless ones.
Like Ratnam, Shankar’s movies are urban-centric, the Chennai of Pizza Huts and cell phones with video streaming but unlike Ratnam’s movies, they never lose sight of an audience for whom the above amenities still remain a pipe dream while delivering topical story lines that crackle with intelligence.
So, it’s a substantial disappointment that this star wattage Actor-Director pairing never takes off to the giddy heights you rightfully expect it to. With a hefty budget, Shankar’s sense of style and a Super Star who’s come to personify that word, this movie should have been a deliriously entertaining roller coaster from the get go.
Instead it gets bogged down by an excruciating first half that has Rajini indulging in some painfully unfunny antics to win the heart of his lady love, and ponderously erratic shifts in pacing and tone. Scenes of dramatic heft where Shivaji’s construction project is thwarted by greedy bureaucrats is followed immediately by him clowning around in Shreya’s house as he and family ingratiate themselves with her parents to win them over. Can this man compartmentalize or what?
The plot is a well flogged Shankar Hobby Horse: Rich NRI Shivaji (Rajini) comes back to Chennai with plans to build a college and hospital for the needy. Greedy politician Adisheshan ( a chunked out and near unrecognizable Suman) with his own money milking university is having none of that and proceeds to put obstacles in our heroes way. Hobbled by corrupt politicians, lackadaisical civil servants and stripped of his wealth, Shivaji fights back with a vengeance, using a plan to rob them of their black money and continue his philanthrophic endeavours.
Rajini’s larger than life image sits uneasily with Shankar’s Every Man hero pitted against a corrupt establishment. Vulnerability is not an aspect of the Super Star’s screen persona. You can believe Kamalahassan’s desperate anguish when faced with bureaucratic hospital officials who demand forms to be filled while his burnt daughter lies dying, and you can easily empathise when Vikram’s straight laced lawyer struggles to convince a man to use his car to transport a dying road accident victim to the hospital, but a Rajini who bows down to pressure and resorts to bribing officials to clear reams of Red Tape because “that’s how things are done in India” strains credulity. This is Rajini, for God’s sake! You expect him to rip the head off the officious fool and shove it up the You Know Where. After saying something cool, of course. But that’s only marginally less painful than watching a Rajini who resorts to painful mugging and love struck antics as he tries to woo Shreya. You believed it when Sada finally fell for Vikram’s pedantic lawyer in Anniyan because it was established why he became that way. In Shivaji, you wonder why Shreya doesn’t slap Shivaji and his entire family with a Restraining Order. There are cringe inducing scenes of Rajini howling in the bathroom after swallowing an orchard’s worth of red chillies in a bid to impress lady love and one of Shreya rushing in front of a train to prevent it running over Shivaji that serves no purpose except to set up a Cleavage Shot. And let’s not get into the Super Star doing a Michael Jackson to whiten himself for his gal. This from a man whose dialogues and song lyrics consistently espouse the virtues of being dark??
So, you breath a sigh of relief when things pick up in the second half and begin resembling a bona fide Rajini flick and it is a guilty pleasure watching him dispatch the baddies with one-liners and oodles of attitude not to mention the now legendary Rajini Spectacle Twirl and a new gimmick involving a coin although I’d like to see how fans imitate the latter as it’s accomplished via graphics. Like Chandramukhi, Rajini doesn’t smoke here, so no flipping of a cigarette into the mouth, although he does the same thing with a chilli or two and a breath mint which as you may well imagine, doesn’t carry the same WOW factor.
Shreya’s the requisite young hottie but even valiant attempts by award worthy make up artists who’ve managed to trim a decade off Rajini’s age can’t quite bridge a sizeable generation gap in their scenes together. Suman makes a passable villain although like every baddie in recent Rajini movies, he’s steadily emasculated as the film progresses.

Shankar’s script, a major plus point especially in scenes highlighting how a corrupt machinery can be dismantled , is diluted here to the point of being dumbed down. And his over reliance on special effects especially during the action scenes, border on over kill. Someone should tell him matrix like freeze frames are old news.

Vivek as always is eminently watchable and the zinger he delivers about other actors imitating Rajini’s finger pointing and punch dialogues is priceless.

A.R.Rahman’s soundtrack is a let down especially after Vidyasagar’s mellifluous score for Chandramukhi. Apart from the gorgeous “Sahana”, the other tracks don’t make an impact in spite of lavishly mounted and superbly choreographed picturisations (always a Shankar plus point) .

There’s a pleasant surprise tucked into this movie somewhere that comes as a pleasant bolt from the blue. No, it’s not the much ballyhooed ”new look” Rajini in the final reels, but a dream sequence that takes place during Rajini and Shreya’s first night. When asked what type of romance she prefers, there’s a delightful montage that shows Rajini spoofing Shivaji (Ganesen), then MGR and finally chief rival Kamal in a rib-tickling send up of their respective song scenes , complete with 70’s style hairstyles, costumes and garish sets.
For a brief moment, you could actually see a star willing to step out of the protective enclosure of his Image to show you the Actor behind the Icon.
But brief is the operative word, and the door soon slams shut on the thespian as the Super Star once again assumes Centre Stage to unleash Pyrotechnic feats to the clarion call of whistles, claps and cheers.

There’s a rabid fan base to satisfy after all.

No Ocean Too Deep

2007-06-11T00:24:00.000-07:00

Watching Ocean's 13 in Mid Valley yesterday, I felt myself sinking down into my seat, sliding down with languid ease as I soaked in this lazily paced flick which is generally entertaining but lacking in any dramatic tension. And it dawned upon me that the Ocean's flicks are an anachronism in this age of big, noisy block busters that seem intent on mining conflict from the simplest acts. It prefers instead to coast breezily along, fueled by star power, witty banter and at this stage, our comfortable familiarity with the team that mirrors their own seasoned association with one another. There are scenes of Danny and Rusty (Brad Pitt) talking and like an old married couple, each finishes the others' sentence and some sentences don't even need completion. They know each other .. and we're supposed to as well.

You know without a shadow of a doubt that Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his industrious cohorts will succeed in making Al Pacino's casino owner pay, and pay dearly for causing the financial and physical collapse of friend and mentor Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould).

There's the old thrill of watching big name starts decked out in designer duds and generally having a whale of a time scheming, joking, planning and executing a heist that, barring a few odd glitches, will come off with clockwork precision.

There are worker revolutions, Matt Damon with a Cyrano nose, cash flow problems which see Ocean's 11 nemesis Terry Benedict (the always watchable Andy Garcia) turn ally (albeit temporarily), Ellen Barkin getting aroused by pheromones, an unfortunate guest's horrendous stay in the hotel , numerous slot machines, card dispensers and dices being rigged, a state of the art security system being thwarted by a mock earthquake and somewhere on the sidelines, a former rival from Ocean's 12 lies in wait.

It all sounds a lot more frenetic than how it plays out.

I missed the intricate and tighter plotting of the original and the combined Female star power of Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones which illuminated the sequel, and the normally fiery Pacino is surprisingly muted ( and not a little tanned) here but outside of a planetorium few viewing experiences offer such a glittering galaxy of stars for the price of a ticket.

Perfect lazy Sunday fare.

Norbit

2007-06-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

Plot: Orphaned Norbit(Eddie Murphy) raised by Mr. Wong(Eddie Murphy) grows up to marry fat and controlling Rasputia Latimore( Eddie Murphy). Stuck in an unhappy marriage, Norbit's feelings for childhood playmate Kate (Thandie Newton) is re-kindled when she moves back to town. But BIG trouble looms in the form of Rasputia and her criminally inclined brothers.

So, does Eddie Murphy hate fat people? Given the fact that Norbit is a relentless 1 joke movie, said joke being Murphy encased and buried under several layers of latex as a gargantually repulsive obese woman who's a foul mouthed shrew and the villain of the movie, one can't be blamed for arriving at that rather despairing conclusion.

Fat characters saved Murphy.

After a heavenly reign at the box office in the '80s, the 90's saw Murphy careening into mediocrity with lack lustre fare like Boomerang, A Distinguished Gentleman, Vampire In Brooklyn and Suck Ass sequels to his career defining flicks like 48hrs and Beverly Hills Cop.

Then came The Nutty Professor....

Craftily re-working the classic Jerry Lewis hit, an odd specimen in the Lewis ouevre for its remarkable perception and depth not to mention a sly parody of one time partner Dean Martin, into a riotous entry in the loud, proud and bawdy tradition of African American comedies, Murphy's remake remade Lewis' geeky, buck toothed nerd into a humungously obese one. Buried and unrecognisable under heaps of mock fat, Murphy's genius was in fashioning a sweet and lovable protagonist we could all empathise with as the titular character faces scorn and derision from a weight obsessed society. Even without all that, the movie still earns its place in my personal Hall Of Comedic Fame by way of a 15 minute dinner sequence that is Pure Gold and a testimony to Murphy's prodigious talent:

Professor Sherman Klump is having dinner with his equally generously endowed family that includes Father, Mother, Brother, Grandmother and Nephew. It takes a good minute of rib tickling jokes before it sinks into your conciousness that with the exception of the Nephew, played by a young boy, flatulent Father, matronly Mother, cantankerous Granny and raunchy Brother, not to mention, fat and lovable Sherman himself are ALL Murphy. That's 5 Eddie Murphys you see, each with his/her own distinctive personality, playing off one another in distinctive voices.

That's Oscar worthy stuff right there, folks.

So it's strange, beyond strange, that Norbit should have as it's central antagonist, an equally bloated caricature of the loud, bawdy Black Woman with none of the warmth and charm of Murphy's first foray into Fat land.

And speaking of caricatures, Norbit is choc a-block of them: Said Fat, Insecure Shrew, 3 Low Life criminal brothers, 2 pimps complete with flashy clothing and skanky "ho"entourage. And that's just covering the Black Stereotype. Murphy also plays Mr.Wong, the Chinese owner of an orphanage cum restaurant who takes in the abandoned Norbit. Mr.Wong openly admits he "sold his first wife back in Shanghai for a yak". Upon being called a racist he retorts, "Yes. I racist. I don't like Blacks and I don't like Jews. But Jews and Blacks like Chinese food. Go figure".

I'm not sure if racial slurs against blacks are made more palatable when delivered by an African American disguised as an Asian, but a film which mines its laughs solely from having grotesquely obese flesh thrust in my face and forcing me to watch it manoeuvre itself into spaces not built to accommodate it is wearying. There's only so much to chuckle at watching Rasputia trying to squeeze into her car, her breasts brushing against the steering wheel, setting off the horn( honking with yer honkers, git it? Hee Haw!), or careening down a slide in a water park, creating tsunami sized waves in the pool and dislodging all water from it.

Throw in a plot with suicidal predictability and seeing Marlon Wayans and Cuba Cooding Jr. slumming in such scrape-the-barrell dreck is enough to send you scurrying to the fridge to binge -eat in depression.

Is Murphy making a commentary on the spiralling rate of obesity in the US (and pretty much spreading to the rest of the world) by depicting Rasputia's perennial state of discontent, bitterness and misery while contrasting that against Skinny Norbit's happily after ending to skinnier Kate. Stay Fat, Stay Sad?

Or is Norbit a rebuttal to all the suffocating political correctness that's permeating modern entertaintment?

Alas, I think Norbit has no such lofty ambitions.

There's take after take of Rasputia jumping on Norbit in a sexual frenzy and crashing into a bed that breaks on impact.

I fear Murphy made this movie so that when someone tells him to "go fuck himself" he can smile and retort "Been there, done that".

Hee Hee Hee...

V For Violence

2007-05-22T03:41:00.000-07:00

I'll come right out and say this: I love screen violence. The bloodier the better. Mind you, I can appreciate bloodless CGI enhanced smackdowns a la The Matrix , Spider Man and the X Men flicks. I can dig hyper stylized wire-fu aided battles as exemplified by countless wuxia epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ( and given an added patina of poetic elegance by Zhang Yimou's recent forays into the genre), but there's no substitute for honest to goodness blood spattering, brain blowing, flesh searing and limb hacking carnage. Of course, there are movies a plenty whose sole existence is the depiction of gore in its various forms. Slasher flicks like Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hostel are "gore porn" in it's most basic form: regular porn exists for the sole purpose of relieving its actors of their clothing to get them engaging in all manner of sexual gymnastics while gore porn relieves its actors of every vestige of dignity to inflict all manner of pain and torture upon them. The former ends with a violent orgasm while the latter finishes with violent death. While I can watch and even enjoy these films, for me violence for violence's sake doesn't hold any long term appeal.

No sir, for me bloodshed needs to come wrapped inside the familiar tropes of an honest to goodness action flick. I suppose what got me ruminating on this subject is the hotly debated topic in the IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) forums on the possibility that Die Hard 4.0, one of the hotly anticipated summer flicks this year may get a PG-13 instead of an R rating. For those unfamiliar with the antecedents of this much loved action franchise, the above statement would have all the novelty of an announcement that the next Harry Porter flick would feature broom sticks and wands.

For those, like me, who grew up watching testosterone laden action behemoths in the 80's and 90's, the scaled down PG-13 rating for what is easily a landmark action franchise of the late 80s to mid 90s is a slap in the face. A kick to the groins. It's the equivalent of making an Elm Street movie with a de-clawed Freddy. Or a Friday the 13th with a socially well-adjusted Jason who frolics with his camp mates instead of dismembering them with his machete.

Ok..... maybe I exaggerate.

But I grew up on and devoured macho action flicks during an era when Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger strode like muscular kings across a dystopian landscape littered with debris from exploded buildings, burnt out skeletal husks of damaged vehicles and corpses of unfortunate sods who stood in the way of their righteous vengeance.

Stallone, The Governator and their lesser incarnations Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal hacked, stabbed, shot, kicked, punched and cursed their way to R-rated glory and everlasting immortality (at least as long as people like me keep dipping into their DVD collections and customers continue frequenting the action section of Video Ezy).

This was before action movies decided to get brainy and philosophical, before some one decided that Keanu Reeves looked cool doing Kung Fu, before blonde caucasian women went on a roaring rampage of revenge, before CGI heralded the age of comic book violence(even when the source material wasn't actually based on a comic) and especially before studios became obsessed with slapping on a PG-13 to any potentially lucrative summer popcorn flick.

See, it's a matter of simple economics:

This rating ensures that kiddies will flock to see this movie (and their parents who will no doubt be springing for the tickets and popcorn) since the rating does not SPECIFICALLY prohibit them from viewing the film. It merely advices that some material may be inappropriate .

Contrast that with:

This rating on the other hand, prohibits the Under-17s from viewing the film unless accompanied by an adult guardian. That means the majority of parents aren't exactly going to make a movie with this rating their first choice for a family outing at the cinemas. Meaning less revenue, where the studios are concerned.

Such a myopic view precludes the understanding that there's a big enough adult audience out there who can and will pay money to see slightly more mature fare. Sigh!

Out of a sense of nostalgia, I raided my DVD collection over the weekend and had me a jolly old marathon of all 3 Die Hard flicks. While certain elements of it are charmingly anachronistic (check out the brick sized cell phones and cassette players in limos), they still remain, in my humble opinion, dynamite action yarns that pack a wallop.

The first, the original and naturally the best, Die Hard, not only catapulted Bruce Willis from wise cracking TV star to mega movie stardom, but practically invented the Hostage-Terrorist sub-genre within action movies. Subsequent imitators like Die Hard on a train (Under Siege 2), Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a ship (Speed 2), occasionally rivalled but rarely topped this dynamite actioner that managed to be exciting, intelligent, claustrophobic and funny without sacrificing its action movie roots via eye-popping action set pieces while still managing to suffuse its hero with an aura of vulnerability. Willis' John McClane, jet lagged, barefoot and tired, has to play a deadly cat and mouse game with high tech European thieves atop a high rise.

He has to stay one step ahead of them while figuring out a way to rescue his hostage wife and convince bone headed police and FBI officials that he's one of the good guys. Via walkie talkie McClane establishes 2 relationships, a warm camaraderie with Al Johnson, the sole cop who believes he's trying to help and an antagonistic repartee with chief crook Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, an actor who should come with a sign saying "Warning! I may steal the movie away from the lead!"). McClane and Gruber are evenly matched, one armed with streewise cunning, the other suave intelligence but both ruthlessly efficient in dispatching impediments to their progress. Their banter, with Willis' American idioms puncturing Rickman's German inflected classical musings is rib tickling stuff. In an era of invincible muscle men,Die Hard dared to let its protagonist get increasingly beaten and bloodied as the movie hurtles towards an explosive finale. In an age of laconic he men who only opened their mouths to spew the odd one liner, Die Hard gave you a verbose and wise cracking hero. For its time, it was an original. And it's rarely been bettered.

Not even by its sequels.

Die Hard 2 piled on twice the action and plot twists galore in an equally enclosed environment, this time an airport where our intrepid hero races against time to stop a band of lethal mercenaries from flying off with an extradited drug baron while ensuring his wife's flight lands intact. It's audacious set pieces includes an horrific plane crash and a final showdown that takes place on the wing of a moving airliner! It's never dull, yet Willis' lack of vulnerability and the absence of a charismatic villain like Hans Gruber makes this a lesser effort in the series.

Die Hard With A Vengeance(DHWAV) opens up the claustrophobic confines of the previous 2 movies by having McClane race around New York city but recycles the original formula of having Euro thieves as its villains, with yet another Brit thespian made to mouth lines in a German accent. Jeremy Irons' character is even made to be the brother of Rickman's Hans Gruber! DHWAV even pays a nod to that other enduring action franchise of the 90s, the Lethal Weapon series, by having the white McClane team up with a black Samuel Jackson. With a few re-writes, they could be Riggs and Murtaugh!

Violent and profane , the Die Hard movies earn their R rating. With a vengeance.

I await with bated breath for the new installment. With the PG-13 tag bound to neuter much of its action scenes, one can only hope its plotting, pacing and intelligence isn't watered down along with the blood letting.

And the swearing. What's McClane gonna say as he dispatches the baddies now, I wonder: Yip-ee-kay-yay Monkey Fellow??

Oh! What a tangled web they weave!

2007-05-09T01:59:00.000-07:00

The success of a super hero tale, be it in the written or celuloid form, isn't so much dependant on an ability to 'shock and awe' us as we stand on the outside gawking at their near celestial powers, but largely on its ability to draw us in by commiserating with an ordinary human being navigating the pitfalls and dangers of his/her new found powers.

The success ( upwards to a billion dollars in worldwide box-office grosses) of Spider Man 1 and 2 with Part 3 set to follow suit,was largely due to the fact that it wasn't so much about high school nerd Peter Parker celebrating his arachnid abilities, but COPING with them. And Sam Raimi's genius, in the opening film , was to depict his hero's transition from young man to crime fighter as a rite of passage to adulthood; after being bitten by a genetically enhanced spider ( an update from the radioactive version in the comics), Parker awakes to find his body undergoing changes and starting to secrete sticky substances, he learns that his great powers come with an even greater responsibilty and he nurses an initial unrequited crush on next door neighbour and high school mate Mary Jane Watson. As Peter Parker juggles crime fighting with completing high school assignments on time, part time jobs to pay the rent and romantic pitfalls over the course of 3 movies, you aren't merely mesmerised by the CGIed sight of a web slinging Spider Man navigating sky scrapers, but sympathising with the all too real problems of an Every Man.

Spider Man

High School science whiz and social nerd Peter Parker is bitten by a genetically altered spider and gains wall crawling and web shooting abilities. Just in the nick of time too, as best friend father Harry Osborne's father Norman experiments with performance enhancers, turns schizo and psycho and riding a jet glider, proceeds to torment our hero. As if he doesn't have enough problems, guilt over preventing the death of his beloved Uncle Ben and a monumentally unrequited love on childhood crush Mary Jane Watson also weigh heavily in our hero's mind...

Apart from working as an extremely well crafted origins tale, what really makes this first entry into an astoundingly profitable franchise is that, at heart, it's an unabashed love story. And that most beloved of all love stories to boot: that of the shy, inarticulate nerd winning the heart of his gorgeous lady love. And with his boyish looks, voice seemingly on the verge of cracking and wide eyed innocence, Tobey Maguire is the most perfectly cast actor to step into a superhero alter ego since the late great Christopher Reeve. His Peter Parker is a pitch perfect study of adoloscent angst and longing. His furtive declaration of love to MJ in a hospital scene is romantic syrup of the sweetest kind; to be indulged without a whiff of cynicism. Which is why the action scenes, particularly Spidey's increasingly brutal showdowns with the Green Goblin is, for me, a jarring tonal shift to its emotional core. Their final climactic fight is especially nasty, with punches connecting with jaws in blood splattering crunches. But it has an air of lethal intensity which the sequels' CGI heavy smackdowns lack. Kirsten Dunst is a fine actress, and her MJ's emotional scenes with Peter carry genuine heft but it's a character that is written poorly. Amazingly flighty, Mary Jane flits from first bully boyfriend Flash Thomson to Harry, then nurses a crush on Spider Man, cruelly dumping Harry before settling on Peter as her main squeeze. It's a flaw that's never quite addressed in subsequent movies, unfortunately and it's to Dunst's credit that we can still believe (somewhat) that MJ's a girl worth getting your webs and hormones tangled over.

Raimi was still finding his footing with this first movie, juggling CGI heavy action with a story that resounded with real human issues of love and loss. Fortunately he found it in the 1st sequel.....

Spider Man 2

Peter Parker struggles to keep a job, attend college and express his feelings to long time crush Mary Jane Watson. Best pal Harry Osborne hates him as he's the official Spidey photographer, blaming the Web Crawler for his father's demise. The stress is eroding his Spidey powers and if that weren't bad enough, brilliant scientist Dr. Otto Octavius mutates into Dr. Octopus when four tentacle-like steel arms are fused to his body when an experiment goes horribly wrong. Controlled by his artificial intelligence infused arms, Otto's bad, mad and wants Spidey's blood...

Critics and the public went ga ga over this sequel and it's not hard to see why. Striking a near perfect balance between awesome action sequences with enhanced and more realistic CGI (although you never believe for 1 second that it's NOT computer generated figures causing computer generated carnage across a computer generated landscape), and an even more emotionally resonant tale, it never loses sight of the fact, that in spite of it's title, this is very much a story about the man behind the mask.

This, obviously isn't good news for action hungry fans who want more Spidey and less Petey. There are 2 major action set pieces, both involving Spider Man and Doc Ock, including an absolute stunner of a set piece on top and side of a speeding subway train. The rest are minor skirmishes and the climactic duel lacks the hard hitting intensity of the Goblin-Spidey showdown of the first movie.

But Raimi nails the human aspects of the tale with aplomb. No scene feels unnecesarily padded or tagged on. Peter's growing distress in juggling his dual life and it's subsequent impact on his relationship with MJ and Harry and his web swinging and wall crawling abilities are wrenching. Sans the powers, Peter could be any one of us; he struggles to get to classes on time, hang on to a part time job, do laundry without having colours running and smearing his whites, pay rent and muster the courage to tell the woman he loves how he feels.

If I have a complaint, is that there's too much angst. Throughout the film, Peter is scolded, chastised, ticked off and harangued by college professors, landlords, customers, best friend and lady love. As Spider Man, his reputation is frequently besmirched in print by hard nosed Daily Bugle editor J.Jonah Jameson ( a superb performance by J.K.Simmons) . It all gets to be a bit much. And when best friend Harry, in a drunken rage, publicly slaps Peter, twice, at a party , and our boy wonder just accepts it stoically, you long to plant another two upside his head for his sickening passivity. And the MJ character is still in full flighty mode, this time latching herself onto the eligible astronaut son of Jameson's, before dumping him, at the altar ( whoever thought that having a heroine who leaves a groom on the wedding day after his parents' have splurged on the event and run out of church in her bridal dress is romantic needs to have all four of Doc Ock's iron tentacles jammed up their ass) to run back to Peter and mouth this execrable line "I've always been standing in your doorway". Retch!

One may argue that Spider Man 2 takes a full 2 hours to basically expound Uncle Ben's "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" philosophy (something the first movie dealt with in far more effective brevity) and it's "hero willing to give up his powers to lead a normal life" arc is a rip off from "Superman 2", but a multi million dollar big budget superhero franchise willing to ground it's high swinging hero long enough to espouse a human tale of facing up to your responsibilities and sacrificing what you love to do what is right in addition to delivering eye-popping action is a rare beast indeed.

Raimi struck a perfect tone in this movie. And then went a little off key in the third and final installment.....

Spider Man 3

All is finally right in Peter's world. Spider Man is beloved by an adoring public, long time love MJ is finally his girl. But MJ's disastrous Broadway debut and a looming romantic rival in classmate Gwen Stacy threaten to derail his romance. With mass adulation going to his head, a still troubled relationship with best friend Harry Osborne and a relationship heading down Splitsville Road not to mention new found knowledge that his Uncle Ben's killer is still at large makes Peter a walking repository for negative emotions, the perfect host for an alien symbiote to latch onto. Add ex-con turned Super Villain Sandman and the symbiote's next host, Peter's photographer rival Eddie Brock who transforms into Venom and Spidey's in for a busy time.....

Given the fact that it was an unholy fascination with piling multiple villains into a superhero flick that practically guaranteed the demise of the earlier Batman franchise (thank you Christopher Nolan for so brilliantly resurrecting this dark Lazarus 2 years ago) , it's odd why Raimi chose Joel Schumacher's fatally flawed concept of "more is better" for this third and probably last installment, (at least for this director) . Given the preponderance of baddies and sub-plots and sub plots, I can only write a cohesive review of this review by breaking it down to its various plot threads.

The Sandman

Thomas Haden Church is an actor I've long admired, from his brilliantly narcissistic turn in short-lived sit com Ned & Stacy to his hilarious potrayal of a womanising soon-to-be married actor in the marvellous Sideways. And he gives Flint Marko's Sandman an aura of melancholia that is almost tragically touching. The Sandman robs banks to finance his estranged daughter's medical bills. And his transformation from flesh and blood man to granular particles is an eye-popping special effects achievement of the highest order. It's easy to see Raimi and team spending a great deal of time and moolah on this character, an acknowledged favourite of the director's. Ditto Sandman's battles with Spidey, stunningly executed set pieces. But with Sandman invested with such gravitas, it's hard to cheer our web-crawler during their many showdowns. If you feel not hate, but sympathy for the baddie, it robs the fights of much needed tension. And re-writing Uncle Ben's demise to involve the Sandman was a mis step even if it feeds into the overall forgiveness theme this movie is built around.

Green Goblin 2

Foreshadowed at the end of Spider Man 2, it was inevitable that Spider Man 3 would see Harry Osborne don daddy's digs to take on Spidey/Peter whom he still blames for his father's death. The first major action sequence is between Gobby 2 and Spidey and it's first rate roller coaster stuff although it sets an unhealthy precedent of having Spider Man unmasked most of the time in subsequent fights. Spider Man 3 brings closure to the Harry Osborne character albeit through a ridiculous contrivance: had a certain character opened his mouth sooner, the whole Harry-Spidey misunderstanding could have been averted way earlier, like in Part 2, leaving this flick a little less cluttered with super villains.

Venom

Pressured by fans and studio in including this much liked baddie, Venom makes an appearance only in the last 20 minutes and his showdowns with Spidey lack serious bite.A clear indication that, unlike the Sandman, Venom wasn't a labour of love for the director. As Venom's alter ego Eddie Brock, Topher Grace is effective but isn't given much material to work with.

Dark Spidey

My favourite bit in this plot crammed movie. After seeing Peter relentlessly bullied over the course of 2 movies, sit back and enjoy as Peter gets in touch with his Dark Side:

Upon being harassed by his greedy Polish landlord for the rent he snarls, "You get the rent when you get the door fixed". Go Peter!

Kicks the crap out of Sandman reducing him to pasty non-solid goo. Go Dark Spidey!

Finally gives Harry the well deserved beating his bratty ass has been asking for. His parting shot to a beaten up Harry "What're you gonna do now Goblin Junior? Cry?" is priceless. Go Peter!

Humiliating Eddie Brock after the latter uses underhanded tactics to cheat Peter out of a full time gig at the Bugle. Go Peter!

Finally shows MJ she ain't the only fish in the pond by unleashing some nifty dance moves in front of her with romantic rival Gwen Stacy. You show her Peter!

Not so cool: Dark Peter's ridiculous Hitler style comb over and Saturday Night Fever John Travolta swagger on the sidewalk.

The Women

Bringing in Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy, MJ's romantic rival was a clear mistake. Not only is her character barely there for a couple of scenes, she provides nil dramatic tension whatsoever, neither as Peter's date nor as Eddie Brock's girlfriend. Oh well, there's always another Night Shyamalan movie for her to look forward to I guess.

And MJ.....predictably she flits from current squeeze Peter to ex-flame Harry at the first ripples in the romantic pond. Apparently a failed Broadway stint and petty jealousy at your boyfriends' hot class mate is all it requires to dash off for breakfast with an ex. Sigh!

Overall, I liked the action and the pace and the darker shades to our mild mannered hero. And I enjoyed the sense of closure Raimi brings to many of the ongoing story lines carried over from the previous movies. But a movie crammed with so many plots show tears at the seams and prevents this last installment from ending on the high note this consistently watchable series so richly deserved.

Umrao Jaan

2007-04-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

In the list of Unreasonable Demands On A Lover, the one placed by Nawab Sultan (Abhishek Bachan) on Umrao Jaan (Aishwarya Rai) pretty much tops it: She is not only to become his lover but must remain faithful, emotionally AND physically as well.

A common requirement in most relationships but Umrao Jaan is a courtesan in 19th century Lucknow, the prized "tawaif" in the brothel run by Madam Khanum Jaan .

Like Geishas in Feudal Japan, courtesans were not whores who slept with the next paying customer, but were accomplished singers and dancers whose virginity was traded for the best price.

Although the Nawab becomes the lucky customer who gets to de-flower Umrao Jaan and she subsequently falls in love with him, the film asks us to accept the fact that she manages to remain chaste even after her penniless lover ( disinherited after a row with daddy who forbids the union) is embarrasingly ejected from the brothel.

The kind but hard as steel Khanum Jaan (a superb performance by Shabana Azmi) accepts no compromises where money is concerned, as evidenced by her cold haggling over the price of a kidnapped young girl who is brought to her, young Amiran who is christened Umrao Jaan and instructed in the art of Pleasure. And yet, after the Nawab's departure, when the obscenely wealthy Faiz Ali ( a perennially under used Suneil Shetty) comes a calling and is rebuffed by Umrao, she shrugs with a "what can you do" air that belies her nature.

And director J.P. Dutta makes a few missteps in updating this remake of the 1981 hit which starred Rekha in the titular role:

In the original, Nawab Sultan leaves Umrao to marry a girl of his father's choice. Faiz Ali subsequently woos and wins Umrao's heart.

In the current version, Dutta plots a "Only One Man For Me" trajectory for his Umrao, who, in the time honoured tradition of Indian Film Heroines, continues to pine for her lover, which unfortunately makes her subsequent treatment of Faiz Ali, selfish and even a tad cruel. Even when Faiz Ali's shady past is revealed and he retaliates against Umrao upon discovering he was being used, one is still hard pressed to sympathise with her.

And when a reunion with the Nawab has him doing a Rama and questioning her chastity, you'd be hard pressed not to roll your eyes. She isn't Sita, you feel like telling the dolt, and if fidelity was high on your list of requirements, perhaps choosing a woman trained to pleasure men for money as your inamorata wasn't really the way to go.

And capitalising perhaps on the growing Abhishek-Ash pairing in real life, Dutta chooses to bring an already langurously paced movie to a screeching halt to focus on the Nawab-Umrao romance.

Dutta does try for substance notably in a few scenes where through Khanum Jaan, he makes the point that the closed in society of the brothel is still far more protective of its people than the cold, cruel world out there. Umrao faces rejection, prison, ostracism from family and derision from her own village but comes back to love and acceptance from her courtesan family and mother figure. But these scenes are too few are far between.

But if you're in the mood, this is a gorgeous throwback to old fashioned Cinema, with eye-cathing sets (most of it shot in and around Jaipur and its various forts and palaces), dazzling costumes and poetry suffused dialogue
And the ever luminescent Aishwarya Rai is always easy on the eye.

They don't make films like these anymore, that's for sure.

2007-04-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

My review of Michael Crichton's Next was published in The Star today. It's always a good feeling to see what you wrote up in print and especially nice when the discovery is made on a lazy Sunday morning, ensconced in a comfy couch sipping your morning cuppa.

Reviewing a book isn't as easy as I thought it would be. To condense a 500 page novel into cohesive thoughts debating its merits and drawbacks, while adhering to a 500 word limit not to mention making the whole endeavour entertainingly readable requires a bit of effort, for this writer at least.

Funny thing is, upon finishing a book or movie, my head is usually bursting with words,ideas, thoughts and views of the item(s) just read or seen, sentences, snippets and soundbites jostling for space in a chaotic mind. And it all happens at the most inopportune of moments, when I'm brushing my teeth, sitting on the toilet or having a shower, activities not exactly conducive to writing. Books and magazine are welcome in my bathroom but I draw the line at placing pen and paper in there.
For one, I'm a wet bathroom kinda guy, you know, the type that covers every square inch of tile with water at the end of a shower( a fact that still drives my Immortal Beloved bonkers!) and a laptop's lifespan would be severely shortened under such damp conditions not to mention the stoutest of paper wilting under conditions resembling a humid Amazonian jungle after one of my scalding hot baths.
And more importantly, I have been known to spend a little additional time in the loo, long after I've finished what I went in there for, if a certain article or chapter has captivated me, sitting on the throne far longer than is practically necessary, until my visibly annoyed Beloved is compelled to stage a coup to topple my reign (switching off the lights and banging on the door being preferred de-throning methods).
So, adding writing to reading in the wash room is a recipe for Marital Disaster.
Therefore, it's a quick dash to the laptop the next time I get a juicy thought or two for a potential review or notebook and pen in pocket when I'm out and about.
Or hope that inspiration strikes me in drier locales....

LA Confidential

2007-03-13T02:10:00.000-07:00

Well, to be honest, the weekend past wasn't all work and no play.

Saw LA Confidential after a 7 year gap, my last viewing was via a less than stellar VHS copy. Seen with renewed clarity via a Remastered Special Edition DVD, it's a joy making it's re acquaintance.

My first James Ellroy book was LA Confidential, my introduction to his dark, murky and twisted take on LA circa the '50s. It has all the familiar Ellroy trappings of bent cops, mysterious femme fatales and truly Machiavellian bad guys circumnavigating the seedy underbelly of the City Of Angels.

Director Curtis Hanson generally stays faithful to the book in his movie adaption but out of necessity, some parts of Ellroy's densely plotted book had to be trimmed out to fit a manageable running time. Even then, the twisty turns its plot takes demands your attention.

A dream cast of Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce and Kevin Spacey flesh out Ellroy's 3-man narrative arc that proceeds on a twisted, blood soaked trajectory as they become involved in cases that intersect, bisect and finally collide in a spectacular bullet-riddled mass. Kim Basinger, Danny De Vito and James Cromwell give able support.

Damn if it doesn't make me wanna pick up the book again.

After my exams of course.....

Swotting Weekend

2007-03-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

Imagine giving up (or, to be perfectly honest) curbing your twin cravings of books and movies. Well, it's a goal I have set for myself, on account of an exam I will be sitting for at the end of this month. Given the fact that my Immortal Beloved is also taking a test this week (tomorrow, in fact) meant the last weekend saw the both of us transformed into regular swotters, hunched over books, taking notes, eyebrows meeting in frowning concentration.

"Aren't you a little old to be taking a test?" went one cheeky sms from a friend. It followed a confession on my part that I hadn't started Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" which is to be our Book Club choice of the month for April on account of my newly imposed book sobriety.

Well, when passing this exam means an extra RM200 in my paycheck monthly, that's a heck of an incentive to hit the books, I say! Not to mention the extra moolah means the odd indulgence or 2 the next time I trawl book shops!

To my Immortal Beloved, best of luck in your test tomorrow ,darling!

The Dahlia Dissected

2007-02-28T19:10:00.000-08:00

Book Club/ Coroners Division.
Autopsy Report DR#65-538-991
[Crime Fiction]
Victim: The Black Dahlia/Novel/ Age:20yrs.
Year of publication: 1987

The scene:

Sri Hartamas/Upper Middle Class/All residential,
A house, large/pristine/ classy.

Coroners number 9.

Dinner: A sumptious banquet, idle chit chat, wine consumed, wings demolished.

Adjourned to the scene of the crime/spacious living room.

Dissection begins:

Lead Coroner KayKay begins dissection on the victim, juiced on its perpetrator, one James Ellroy (born Lee Erle Ellroy) March 4, 1948, Los Angeles, California.

Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, Ellroy was pure LA native, he sifted its data and transfigured its diverse shit. He spun noirish tales of crime, violence and death, looped through the connecting threads of corruption and obsession.

Obsessing over the death of his promiscuous mother, the Dahlia was Ellroy's chance to mourn her death once removed. She betrothed him to crime, the victim his valediction in blood to her.

Chief Coroner KayKay:

First made acquaintance with the victim almost 10 years ago. He revisited her. She still captivates him, her savagery excites him, her tale hyperbolic/ blood drenched/sex obsessed blitzed his imagination. But there are blemishes in the once flawless cadaver: she makes him wait, takes her time to make an appearance, is often hysterical, her female characters slutty, unreliable. Hyper emotional, subtlety sledgehammered into subservience. But...slowly but surely, she reeled him in once again, her prose sharp, its rhythms hypnotic, marching to its own cadence as the killer's blade arced....

Coroner 1: Sharon:

Admired victim,hopped on the carefully constructed caper. It was well written, very dark/atmospheric/ horrifically scary...
Characters come to life...

Ixnay: A Bloke Book, Explicated Explicitness a turn off.....

Coroner 2: Animah

Didn't complete autopsy.

Difficult jargon a hindrance..
Characters defined by dialogue:Good
Explicitness doesn't stoke the imagination. .it butt-fucks it to raw redness:Bad

Coroner 3: Jessica:

Juiced on Tarantino and Scorcese, the dialogue sizzles..
Thrilled to vicarious vivisection of violence...
Images replayed in the mind as morbid, malign montages...
Loves the pieces falling into place,
Loves the gore and accepts the reality of the turbulent times it trawls in.

Coroner 4: Uma

Loved it, wouldn't have picked it up otherwise..
Took it's time, fingering the mind cells to wetness, before ploughing through it with penetrating hardness..

Coroner 5: Sarab

Buckys obsession was impenetrable, the language a mind fuck.

Coroner 6: Parvin Hamidah

A Crime Fiction virgin, The Black Dahlia popped her cherry with vicious violence, jarring jargon and lascivious language...and transported her to another world.

Coroner 7: Sashi

Wasn't what she expected, plot, not the language was the ultimate mindfuck.
Lee's early exit an effront.
Bent blokes and twisted trim...nobody' s straight.

Coroner 8: Renata

Preferred movie to book,
Two thirds was pleasurable before ejaculating a few nice lines and going limp in the third half...

Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here: off the record, on the QT and very Hush-Hush... .........

Hannibal Rising

2006-12-22T00:08:00.000-08:00

Thomas Harris re-boots his mega-bucks franchise with this Origins Tale of thriller-lit's most celebrated serial killer and gourmand,Hannibal Lecter. After all, a back to basics approach worked wonders for Batman and James Bond recently so why not the good psychiatrist from Baltimore, Maryland with a penchant for cannibalism?

Whether Hannibal Rising works or not largely depends on which camp you belong to: the ones who think Lecter works best taken in small doses, a sneering, malevolent figure circling the outer fringes of the main plot(as in the first 2 installments Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs) or those who delight in his elevation from psycho-killer to death-dealing avenger( a la Hannibal). Rising firmly belongs in the second category, with Lecter continuing to occupy centre-stage, charting his childhood and adolescence in a Blitzkrieged Lithuania and Post-War Paris.

The book's slender 324 pages(in hardback) and it preceding it's screen adaptation by a mere 2 months is a telling fact that Hannibal Rising originated as a screenplay for the movie and was then fleshed out to novel-length by Harris. The results are apparent, as unlike Harris' multi-layered and complex plots for Dragon and Silence, and an intricate and knotty meshing of genres in Hannibal, Rising is a pretty straightforward revenge tale, an European Death Wish with Lecter going Charles Bronson on a group of singularly revolting Hilfswillige,or Hiwis (local Lithuanians who volunteered to help the invading Nazis) in the aftermath of World War 2.

"Nothing happened to me ,Officer Starling.I happened.You can't reduce me to a set of influences ," Lecter intones in Silence, and yet this is precisely what his progenitor sets out to do in Rising, charting the events that shaped the Most Celebrated Serial Killer in crime fiction.

Lecter-philes(and count this writer as one of them) will slurp in glee as Harris gives you the origins behind Hannibal's many quirks:

Hannibal's cultivated and exotic tastes in food(oysters,sweetbreads not to mention the odd human liver,thymus and prefrontal lobe), wine( Chateau Petrus bordeaux and Batard-Montrachet) and music(Bach's Goldberg variations) ?
He's of a lineage with European aristocracy,you see. A direct descendant of Hannibal the Grim, who defeated the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald, son of a count father with a title dating back to the tenth century, with a mother, a scion of two famous Milanese houses, the Sforza on one side and the Visconti on the other,not to mention an artist uncle with an elegant Japanese wife. There are also references in Hannibal of a cousin being the artist Balthus, a filiation that's abandoned in this book.

Hannibal's prodigious artistic talents that saw him sketch from memory the Palazzo Vechio from a cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the criminally insane?
A gift from childhood that was nurtured and refined in adolescence, sitting at the back of the class,sketching dissected frogs and watercolour washes of birds with equal dexterity.

Lecter's surgical skills which saw him butcher man and deer identically in Hannibal, removing sirloin,loin and small fillets from both with neatness and economy?
A legacy from being the youngest student admitted to medical school in Paris, nights spent performing cranial dissections in its anatomy lab culminating in an internship at the Baltimore State hospital.

But there are also disappointing gaps in the Lecter psycho-pathology.The Hannibal at the end of Rising is a killer of men who richly deserved their fates, his dead sister's God-less avenging angel but Harris frustratingly refuses to provide the genesis of Hannibal The Cannibal, murderer of 9 victims(presumably inncocent) and crippler of 2 when we first see him in Dragon, killer of a further five upon his escape in Silence.

That and a pedestrian plot that refuses to transcend it's dog-eared origins( something the last installment could never be accused of) makes Hannibal Rising a less than stellar installment in the Lecter tetralogy.

Still, it's a breezy read,boosted by a propulsive pace, vicious baddies whose comeuppance will be savoured with sadistic glee and brought to life via Harris' masterly prose(Notre Dame is described as "a great spider with its flying buttress legs and many eyes of its round windows...scuttling around town in the darkness") although it's one that occasionally turns Purple when describing Hannibal's courtship of his Japanese Stepmother:

Lady Murasaki: I fold cranes for your soul,Hannibal.You are drawn to the dark.

Hannibal: Not drawn,when I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence,silence captured me.

Lady Murasaki: Out of the silence you came to me and spoke to me.I know you,Hannibal,and it is not easy knowledge.You are drawn towards the darkness, but you are also drawn to me.

Hannibal: On the bridge of dreams.

There may yet be life in this series. After all, the Lecter we meet in Red Dragon is near fifty.The young Hannibal on a train to America at the close of Rising is 20. That's a 30 year gap to be filled.
If Harris is hard at work even now on the next installment, may I suggest the rather apt title of "Cannibal Rising"?. There are still rooms to be filled in the Hannibal Lecter Mind Palace,Mr.Harris.

Hannibal

2006-12-21T23:58:00.000-08:00

What happens when you create a fictional character who transcends the written page to enter the rarefied domain of pop culture iconism? The Thriller industry-standard benchmark for virtually every grotesque,ghoulish,malevolent and sadistic killer every aspiring thriller writer(and quite a few old hands) trot out ever so often?
If you're Thomas Harris, you eschew the temptation to bang out yet another Hannibal Lecter psycho thrill-fest and take the character in an entirely different and increasingly bizarre direction.
All criticisms against Harris' move to bring Lecter front and centre are justified. The good doctor loses much of his allure when he's allowed to roam free and his homicidal nature given a motivation(one explored in more detail in Hannibal Rising, reviewed here) and you miss the Lecter/ Clarice interplay as they only meet much, much later in this lengthy book. And the Florence section does drag on.
But credit goes to Harris for refusing to saturate an already over-populated field with yet another by-the-numbers Hunt, Chase and Confront psycho-thriller. Instead we get a dizzying cocktail of Grand Guignol, Revenge Thriller and Love Story all buttressed with Harris' intricate mastery of Criminal Investigative procedures and Forensic Science.
The much reviled ending goes over much better upon a second reading and you realise the Lecter/Starling relationship and where it was headed was foreshadowed way back in The Silence Of The Lambs.
I'll probably have a Lecter-thon of reading all 4 Hannibal books sometime in the distant future, until then there's always the anticipation that some writer is going to best Harris at the thriller game. But I won't be holding my breath.

The Prestige(Book review)

2006-12-03T07:53:00.000-08:00

Oh God! Note to self: The next time you read a book or watch a movie, write the damn review immediately! I opened this post weeks ago when I finished the book and let it lapse. And now all I have are fragments of vague memory to guide me. But I sure as hell don't want to pick up the damn book again and I don't have the heart to delete this blog so will make a go of it to the best of my abilities.
Reading Christopher Priest' novel after watching the movie robs you of the jaw-dropping surprises the twisty narrative takes. But luckily, apart from the central characters and the twists, Nolan jettisoned much of Priests' book for the film, leaving the reader with sufficient material that's new. For instance, the movie omits the present-day plot involving the descendants' of Borden and Angier which book-end the main narrative detailing the magicians' bitter feud. Also, unlike the movie, Borden and Angier never started out as colleagues, the catalyst for their enmity not the death of Angier's wife in the film( here she's happily alive until the end) but a ruined seance ( conducted by the latter, ruined by the former). It's still a terrific tale of duelling magicians, a study of the profession in the late Victorian era and a riveting story of obsessions taken to the extreme. And like the movie, Priest' narrative sleight-of-hand rivals Nolan's cinematic one. And he does it without running timelines through a blender!

The Book of Lost Things

2006-12-03T07:48:00.000-08:00

In John Connolly's world, the dead co-exist with the living. With unresolved issues, they create fissures in the world of the living, never letting go, hovering in their sub-concious.

It's the weight of the dead that the living carry inside themselves that make Connolly's thrillers so much more potent, his heroes somehow more haunted, seemingly straddling two worlds, belonging to both and yet, not quite fitting in either.

His 5 crime thrillers featuring Maine private eye Charlie "Bird" Parker were exemplary works, seamlessly fusing crime procedural with elements of the supernatural in prose of haunting cadence.

Like Bad Men and Nocturnes, his short story collection, The Book Of Lost Things marks a departure for Connolly from his regular series, but he brings the same dark gifts to this fantasy tale. it's 1945, the advent of World War Two and David, the young boy hero of the tale, like Parker, is haunted by his dead mother's spirit, whose voice he hears calling out to him from the shadows of the sunken garden outside his bedroom, telling him she's alive. And there are other voices. The numerous books in David's room speaks to him "in dusty, rumbling tones".

It's these books David takes refuge in, sulking over the death of his mother and his father's subsequent re-marriage, a union that produced, to his increasing dismay, an unwanted step-brother. And to top it all, he sees visions of a bent, mocking figure, The Crooked Man....

When an aeroplane crashes into the garden, David scrambles through an opening in the sunken half and enters a bizarre, fantasy world. It's a world peopled with dark characters and darker events, ruled by an ailing king, his kingdom beset by a vicious horde of hybrid wolf-men called Loups. David must battle them and other strange creatures while tarrying across a dark foreboding land to the King's castle in search of The Book Of Lost Things, his passport back to his world. And all the while the Crooked Man watches. And waits...

Like its chief antagonists, The Book Of Lost Things is a hybrid. Part fantasy quest, part Wizard Of Oz, part coming of age tale, all given a vicious edge thanks to Connolly's cheeky perversions of popular fairy tales. Snow White is a fat, slovenly shrew waited on by disgruntled, Socialist propaganda spewing dwarves, the Centaur legend is given a twisted Frankenstein-ish treatment and The crooked man is Rumpelstiltskin at his most demented.

Those thinking that the violence quotient will be toned way down given the books fairy tale antecedents and a first quarter that hints at a tale geared towards younger readers may well be in for a shock. The book turns increasingly nasty and notches up a respectable body count replete with beheadings, stabbings and disembowelings which may hurt it's marketability somewhat. It's too intense for younger readers and mature,long time Connolly fans may skip this owing to its fantasy elements while awaiting the next Parker installment.

More's the pity, as The Book Of Lost Things is a rollicking good read, re-affirming the writer as a master story teller. Connolly breaks no new ground, but his lyrical prose makes the road well travelled a journey worth taking again.

Booker Bore

2006-12-03T07:45:00.000-08:00

Turgid, over-written, ponderous and depressing, The Inheritance Of Loss re-affirms my eroding faith in "literary" tomes that come bedecked with critical plaudits and trailing awards in its self-important wake.
It's the Umpteenth NRI take on the Indian sub-continent, that's peopled with degenerate natives who still wipe snot on curtains and take to the streets chanting slogans or take up arms to further their cause. Not that this isn't what's happening. Intead, I ask, is this the ONLY depiction we need to keep being treated to? I suppose I should outline the plot, dissect its characters and ponder its message, but honestly I can't be fucked with all that. Instead allow me to direct you to Jim Crace's no-bullshit digested review of it here. Hell, he gives you the low-down on ALL of last years Booker Nominees for those, who like me, will blissfully be giving the lot of them, a miss. Enjoy!

The Religion

2006-12-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

If Tim Willocks' prose were a man, it would be huge, muscular, lusty and frequently caked in blood and gore. And yet, it's the perfect medium to bring to life this epic tale of The Siege Of Malta, one of the greatest mis-matched battles in medieval history, pitting 48,000 troops of the powerful Ottoman Empire against less than 7,000 warrior-priests of the Knights of Saint John who called themelves The Religion.

Anyone who's read Willocks' previous books, the prison-riot best-seller Green River Rising, and the less well received but nevertheless hugely entertaining Southern Goth thriller Blood Stained Kings knows the man doesn't do subtle. The sex is frequently explicit and the violence boosted to Grand Guignol levels.

But the irony is that, while Willocks's books, in their unexpurgated form, would be near un-filmable, his narrative arcs are firmly anchored to the tropes of modern day action adventures.

While The Religion, throughout its hefty 627 pages, details the impact of the siege, the battles, lives lost, and its toll on the tiny island on the Mediteranean in exquisite detail, it's no battle treatise for the military scholar. It's a medieval action thriller, the Siege seen through the eyes of Mattias Tannhauser, warrior, trader, war profiteer and lover.

Tannhauser is co-opted, against his rational misgivings, into the search for a Maltese Noblewoman’s illegitimate son on the besieged island and is sucked into the bloody fray in no time. The fact that said Noblewoman, the Lady Carla, is a beauty with “irises green and rimed, as if with ink, by thin black circlets” wearing a dress that “clung to her body like oil, like lust… buttressed her breasts…into exquisite hemispheres” may have been a persuading factor, along with her exotic, mysterious, Spanish companion Amparo. They are aided by Tannhauser’s blood thirsty and steadfast companion Bors, and thwarted by the fanatical Inquisitor Ludovico Ludovici, plenipotentiary to His Holiness, Pope Pius IV, secret agent of Michelle Ghisleri, Inquisitor General of All Christendom, and father to Carla’s missing offspring.

The Religion is a meaty tome, jam-packed with so much medieval information that to swallow it in one sitting is not possible, neither is it recommended. Willocks paints a broad canvas, doling out Renaissance era politics, battle strategies, love story and the nature of war coupled with larger themes of birthright, redemption, obsession and religion, all shot through Willocks’ blood-spattered prose, with generous helpings of sex and carnage.

And Oh! What carnage! Chests speared, armpits maced, limbs hacked, heads severed, privates stabbed, arteries spraying blood like fountains, swordcut to the thighs, backstroke to the guts; Willocks describes these scenes with such unabashed glee that one suspects he regrets not having been there to witness it in person.

The numerous sex scenes are a welcome respite from the frequent blood-letting as Tannhauser takes time out from battle to couple lustily with Amparo as a frustrated Carla takes refuge serving the wounded. But if Willocks’ prose is flowery during battle, it’s positively Purple in the bedroom. Sentences like “ he was afflicted by a burgeoning tumescence that nothing in Creation could forefend” and “ his yard throbbed monstrously between his legs. He felt it pant like a hell dog on a gossamer leash “call for a moratorium against Renaissance era romps in books.

Mattias, born a Saxon but trained as a janissary to the Emperor of the Ottomans, navigates both worlds with effortless ease, but realizes in the end that “all cults sought only power and the submission of peoples. The people themselves… were no more than grist to their mill.”

In the Knights use of the Lord’s prayer to rally men into battle, and the Turks’ invocation of the “surah” to exhort the Faithful to slaughter, Willocks’ message is an old one : In times of war, men conveniently cover themselves in the cloak of Religion, for to pillage, conquer and destroy in the name of God gives it credence.

But in today’s political climate, it’s frighteningly current.

Crime Spree

2006-12-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

Like I said earlier, note to self: Review a movie AS SOON as you finish watching it damn it! Else, you're faced with what I'm facing now: Having seen all 3 of the above over a weekend or to be precise, several weekends ago, they now exist as random, out-of-sequence snapshots in my head. So, I need to tap into residual feelings and hazy memories in summing up my thoughts of them:

The Departed sees Martin Scorsese back at his gangbusting, guns blazing, profanity spewing best. And yet, it suffers in comparison to its original, HK crime flick Infernal Affairs. I racked my brains throughout viewing this flick, wondering why, in spite of a dream cast that's also perfectly cast (Leo exhibiting intense, nervous energy, Matt Damon in slippery form, Jack Nicholson in full out scenery chewing mode and an incendiary Mark Wahlberg taking over Joe Pesci as The Foulest Mouth On Screen) I was merely entertained rather than shaking with delirious sweaty palmed excitement that Scorcese has abandoned turn of the century gang warfare and biopics of eccentric billionaires to return to familiar turf. It dawned on me later why. The Departed is big, flashy and loud. But the story it seeks to tell is in effect an intimate one.

Infernal Affairs was as much about identity as it was a crime thriller. It's tale of a gangster's man who infiltrates the police department and an undercover cop who weans his way into the gangster's confidence was knuckle-biting cat and mouse stuff which also took time out to focus on its 2 protagonists' angst at maintaining their dual-facade, especially Tony Leung's tortured undercover cop,his mole assignment known only to his immediate superior and living in perennial fear that his cover will be blown. The roof of a building, which is a frequent meeting point between Leung and his superior, also functions as metaphor to his alienation from the life he wishes he had as he frequently stares across it's vacant expanse at the sprawling city below which reinforces his isolation and sense of dislocation.

In The Departed, the roof is merely a functionary device, a backdrop, a setting much like any other. Leo's meetings with Charlie Sheen and Wahlberg(his superiors) could just as easily have been conducted in a bar and his final showdown with Damon could have taken place in a vacant parking lot.

The Departed required subtle brush strokes, but Scorcese splashes paint across a canvas far too big for this taut and intimate tale. But the fact that it's done so by a Returning Master is reason enough for jubilation.

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Michael Mann doesn't so much return as continue his cynical and relentlessly brutal dissection of a dystopian world peopled with hard-edged professionals, be they cops or criminals. It's drenched in his by now patented blue hue, giving it a cold and calculating sheen, much like it's ice-cool characters. But why hobble the movie with a connection to his stylish 80s TV series? For, never was a movie more handicapped by its title. Anyone expecting this to be yet another big screen version of a once hot TV show is bound to howl in rage. The key characters bearing their small screen predecessors' names is about the only nod this movie makes to its original incarnation. Which in itself is a miss step for Mann. Why should this Vice bear any resemblance to the original when this Mann himself bears no resemblance to the creator of a glossy TV show that increasingly sacrificed substance for style.?This Mann is now an ace crafter of cool as ice crime dramas that marry style with substance in ways the show could only have dreamed of. Miami Vice the movie is a logical progression from Heat and Collateral. Its characters could be called anything instead of Crockett,Tubbs, Castillo, Gina and Trudy. It could have been titled anything instead of Miami Vice. While a passing familiarity with the original source material usually enhances the viewing pleasure of a remake, this is one instance when a complete memory wipe of Miami Vice the TV show becomes essential to fully appreciate Miami Vice the movie. It's not merely the deconstruction of a TV show, it's the evolution of Mann.

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And finally Layer Cake, the weakest and yet strangely, the most enjoyable of this trio of blood soaked crime flicks. Matthew Vaughn who produced the Guy Ritchie directed Lock,Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (or as I prefer to collectively title them, The Brits Trying To Do Tarantino Cool) now takes on the helmer's chair for this very British, very gritty and by now very familiar crime drama that seems to come out of the other side of the Atlantic periodically. Like the previous 2 Ritchie flicks, this one features a large cast of characters propelling one central plot which rapidly spider-webs into a dozen others with attitude, humour, menace and copious amounts of swearing draped in Brit lingo and slang which in itself is a joy to hear. The multiple sub-plots are sometimes tightly linked, sometimes loosely connected, occasionally brush off tangentially with one another and rapidly fades from memory minutes after you eject the disk from your player. It's got one major bonus though: a pre-Bond Daniel Craig in top form easily convincing you why he snagged the 007 mantle.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend & Talladega Nights

2006-12-03T07:15:00.000-08:00

Making comedies that feature at its centre, characters who are basically unpleasant require a deft hand. It requires the character(s) to be fleshed out, some explanation as to why they act the way they do, a certain amount of come-uppance meted out to help the audience empathise and supremely charismatic actors to inhabit the rule, digging deep to uncover some intriguing personality facet that notches the characters' negativity a few rungs above loathsome to intriguing. And since the genre IS comedy, whatever bad after taste left behind by the Unpleasant Lead's selfish,moronic or mean-spirited nature needs to be mitigated by hefty doses of laugh out loud moments of inspired humour and brilliant gags.

In that sense, Talladega Nights:The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby works (to an extent) and My Super Ex-Girlfriend fails remarkably.

Talladega Nights (henceforth abbreviated to TN) is a Will Ferrell comedy through and through. And like his previous collaboration with director Adam McKay,"Anchorman:The Legend Of Ron Burgundy", TN takes a tried and tested(and abused) plot-line and zaps it with moments of bizarre,surreal comedy spiced with a nasty irreverent edge that conveniently helps you forget,albeit only occassionally, of its dog-eared origins.

Take, for instance the quote that opens the movie:

"America is about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed"
Immediately after that you learn that the quote supposedly originated from...ELEANOR ROOSEVELT!!!!

Not a frame of film has been seen and it's already elicited one hearty chuckle from me!

It's that kind of perverse OUT THERE humour that keeps TN from tipping over into generic hog wash. For, going by the plot alone TN isn't worth the beer-stained napkin it was scribbled on.

Ferrell is Ricky Bobby,the name and the first scene showing his delivery in a souped up car driven by a Southern-Accent spewing Gary Cole(who's always a pleasure to watch)travelling at top speed on a country side back road effectively signalling its clear cut intention to lampoon all things red-neck.

And what better milieu to stage this in than that most hallowed of all Southern-Fried institutions:NASCAR which is where a grown up Ricky thrives in as a celebrated racer(after taking to heart one of his absentee and frequently high-on-weed dad's dictums:"if you ain't first,you're last").

Digs at Drag Racing, its pervasive corporate sponsorship that has Ricky spewing Chinese to sell Oriental crackers, Ricky's mansion with multiple SUVs parked in front, his blonde,bitchy trophy Wife, foul mouthed sons called Walker and Texas Ranger ("If we wanted 'em to be wussies, we woulda named them Dr.Quinn and Medicine Woman") and delinquent weed-smoking father so consistently take the mickey out of the Red States that it's US148mil gross at the box-office is astounding( did the very people who no doubt formed its core audience know they were being lampooned?)

As mentioned,the plot's about as disposable as day-old soiled nappies.

Since Ricky is an arrrogant,selfish and shallow person,letting his potty mouthed kids insult their maternal grandfather hogging the lime-light while refusing best friend and team mate Cal Naughton Jr.(John C. McGinley) a shot at the title and who sportingly comes in second, part of a routine they call "Shake 'N' Bake" which allows Ricky to win every time, we know come-uppance that sets him on the road to humility is just around the bend.

It comes in the form of a very French and very GayJean Girrard(Played by Sacha "Ali G/Borat" Baron Cohen sporting not so much a French accent as a French Accent Americans think the French have), a rival driver hired by Ricky's team owner to put him in his place. And after a spectacular crash that puts Ricky out of action, that place is in a hospital where Ricky experiences psycho-somatic symptoms of being paralysed. If the last sentence sounds morbid, trust me when I say it's stretched to hilarious form in TN. Beginning with Ricky's imaginary "I'm on fire" reaction to his stripping to his undies(in front of a capacity crowd) and running around yelling "Help Me Jesus! Help Me Jewish God!Help Me Tom Cruise! Use your witchcraft to put out this fire!" and culminating in a hospital stay that sees him stab himself(with 2 knives) to convince his friends he's paralysed, it's Ferrell firing on all comedic cyliners.

Note I've digressed from the plot again and that's because it's simply not what keeps this movie cooking.

YOU KNOW.....Ricky's going to lose house,wife and kids on account of not being able to get behind a wheel of a car and be reduced to a penury existence delivering pizzas.

YOU KNOW..... that the dead beat dad is going to show up playing Obi-Wan to Ricky's Luke Skywalker,helping him overcome his driving fear(by among other tactics, getting him to drive with a live cougar in the passenger seat and after that, riving blindfolded ["you don't need to see to drive son. FEEL the car"]

YOU KNOW.....he overcomes his phobia to race again to reclaim what he's lost.

It's the moments of inspired humour that keep you hooked:

-A dinner table saying of Grace that teeters on the brink of sacrilege.
"Dear 8 pound 6 ounce newborn infant Jesus, hasn't even said his first word yet..."

- Ricky's wife tearfully telling the doctor she's decided to pull the plug, in spite of the fact that he's merely taking a nap

- Jean Girrard earning the wrath of patrons in a bar by playing jazz on the jukebox.
" We don't play jazz here'" retorts an irate patron
"Then why do you have it in your jukebox," enquires the Frenchman
"We keep it there for profiling purposes," dead pans the bartender.

There are many more of such inspired moments scattered throughout this flick so grab a beer , sit yo' ass down and help yourself to a heaping helping of Southern Fried Humour. TN is what Dukes Of Hazzard should have been (and missed by a long mile).

And speaking of misses..

My Super Ex-Girlfriend had all the potential to be a comedic gem. Superhero Angst, while dealt with effectively in its more dramatic incarnations (Hulk,Spider-Man) has rarely been subject matter for a comedy. Which is surprising, for it's a fertile Laugh-Pool to be mined.
Take for example, the premise of a tall,leggy,blond and beautiful super-heroine who is also by turns neurotic,jealous,needy and clingy. The paradox alone, in the hands of a capable director, is potential COMEDY GOLD. And My Super Ex-Girlfriend(henceforth referred to as MSEG) has one with outstanding, albeit dated, pedigree. Ivan Reitman, who gave us the inventive Ghostbusters flicks and 2 superior Schwarzenegger comic vehicles(Twins & Kindergarten Cop) before faltering with the 3rd one(Junior) , is a director supremely suited to the comedy genre and in Uma Thurman, you have one of the most interesting actresses(in my humble opinion) next to Rachael McAdams working today.

So,what went so bloody wrong?

After all, Uma Thurman nails her role,both as blonde superhero G-Girl and her mousy,bespectacled alter-ego Jenny Jones. She especially fleshes out,with sometimes creepy intensity, her characters' deep-seated insecurities which cause havoc and ultimately destroys her relationship with Architect Matt Saunders(Luke"Brother of Owen" Wilson).

Firstly, insecurity in a realtionship is no laughing matter and to transform it into one, one of 2 things need to be accomplished effectively.
Firstly, a credible enough reason needs be there to convince you why a girl who looks like she could qualify for next weeks' Vogue spread, who can fly to and suck the fire out of a burning building all in the time it takes for her date to be convinced she just stepped into the ladies, is so wracked with doubt and uncertainty.

Secondly, the object of her affections and later,her scorned wrath needs to be sympathetic and genuinely likeable.

Neither happens.

G-Girl's self doubt is never adequately explained and it doesn't help that her origin back-story doesn't occur until well after the movies' half-way point and does nothing to shed light on the matter(she's a nerd, touches a crashed meteor, turns blonde,gorgeous and super-powered and is nerd no more.So..is it Delayed or Dormant Insecurity we're dealing with here?)

Wilson's character is an insipid jerk, nursing a crush for a colleague who is attached, latches onto our heroine , then dumps her on the advice of a horny friend and quickly hops into the sack with the colleague once she's (conveniently) un-attached.And in a destestable move later,he even collaborates with the villain to strip G-Girl of her powers! Oh the cad! As a result, we don't quite feel the empathy we should even when she almost fries his pet-goldfish with heat-vision, puts his car on a geo-synchronous orbit into space,crashes through his ceiling twice, ruins his presentation while stripping him naked in the process and tosses a live shark into his living room. (It's Hell Hath No Fury..type Bitchy and Vindictive Woman Stereotype will earn it no kudos among feminists either)

Throw in a lame villain, a lamer love triangle( although the Other Woman is an admittedly sweet Anna Faris) and a limp rag of a climax, and this superhero take on"Fatal Attraction " unlike it's caped heroine,never takes off.

Casino Royale

2006-11-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

Call it irony,if you will. Watching the opening scene of the 21st installment of the latest James Bond flick, I was struck by a scene from an earlier big-budget actioner that was,in essence an homage to Agent 007. I refer to James Cameron's True Lies, the Schwarzenegger vehicle that told of a super-spy trying to keep his true occupation a secret from a long-suffering wife.Not it's plot thread,which was ripped off by last summer's "Mission Impossible 3" along with its famous bridge blowing scene. I refer,specifically to a brutal bathroom brawl between the Governator and an Arab terrorist. After clobbering the swarthy killer,Arnold proceeds to bash him repeatedly on the head with a hand-dryer ripped from the walls and then ramming him head-first into a urinal. A scene whose brutality is tempered in the very next second by Arnold turning on the urinal tap and quipping to the now comatose assailant "Cool Off!". It's the sort of throw away line Bond, in his various incarnations as Connery,Lazenby,Moore,Dalton and Brosnan would have tossed of with insouciant panache.
And yet, Casino Royale, which opens with a similar brutal fight between Bond's 6th Avatar,Daniel Craig and an unnamed antagonist in an anonymous Men's Room,offers no such relief. The scrape ends viciously when Bond drowns him in a sink.The man slinks down to the floor, Bond looks at him and ...nothing. Just grim exhaustion etched on his face.
So, we've come full circle in the now 43 year old franchise. The Bond films,once the hall mark of big budget,high testosterone action, then widely imitated( and subsequently parodied) by movies which upped the budget and boosted its testosterone level by substituting humour with increasing levels of violence,now have to ape its successors' rough-edged brutality to stay current.
That the opening scene is shot in black and white and DOES NOT begin with the famous Opener of Bond staring down a gun barrel to John Barry's signature surf-guitar laced theme is the first warning shot director Martin Campbell fires at you,signalling loud and clear, that this Bond is a very different creature indeed. It's a Back to Basics approach, this Bond re-tooled and re-jigged for an audience far more accustomed to the travails of that other spy who shares his initials. It's James Bond for the Jason Bourne crowd,a Batman Begins-style franchise Re-Boot that not so much invigorates it as wipes it clean of Memories of Bonds Past.
Forget what you know of Bond, is what Campbell tells you. This is a Bond who,as the movie opens has just earned his 00 Licence to Kill via the bathroom and another less messier kill (it takes 2 you see) .As embodied by Craig's tough visage and sapphire blue eyes,this Bond is in the words of M(a returning Judi Dench) "a blunt instrument",a killer just earning his stripes but at this stage already demonstrating the steely determination to get his prey at any cost, as a virtuoso action set piece that opens the film post credits demonstrates superbly.
In Madagascar,Bond gives chase to a bomb maker on foot, not an easy task as his quarry is an expert in the sport known as "parkour" or free running, dodging,jumping and vaulting over obstacles with effortless ease. As choreographed by the actor playing the bomb maker,Sebastian Foucan, it's a stunner of an action set-piece, 100% stuntwork undiluted by CGI.As Foucan clambers over walls,construction sites and mile-high cranes, Bond keeps up a relentless pursuit,ending in an embassy where he cold-bloodedly executes his prey and blows up the building for good measure. That he overlooks the numerous security cameras which lovingly record his "wet work" is the first intimation this James Bond is a diamond in the rough,albeit one who even at this early stage demonstrates the type of collossal cheek we all love,by breaking into M's apartment no less!
Given a dressing down and sent to the Bahamas where he continues to track down the bomb makers contacts, Bond worms his way into the confidence(and arms) of Solange,wife of the shadyAlex Dimitros, and discovers Dimitros' plot to blow up an airliner,which he promptly foils after another explosive action scene. The plane's failure to go up in flames puts La Chiffre,Dimitros's boss, firmly in the red. The fact that the money used by La Chiffre,international "banker to the terrorists", to speculate against the airlines' stocks comes from a homicidal Ugandan warlord means the money must be recovered in record time, leading to a prolonged poker match in Montenegro held in the titular casino where he hopes to win back the lost moolah, and where Bond must beat him at the game to stop that happening.
The fact that La Chiffre(played with oily relish by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen) is not some megalomaniac bent on world domination and is instead a shadowy money man is one of the movies' numerous nods to gritty realism, as is its penchant for putting Bond through ordeals that see him getting punched,kicked,slashed and in the movies' most uncomfortable scene,brutally tortured,his Cojones getting a wince inducing workover.
This Bond is a Bleeder who gets cut and scars that are still visible several scenes later,an effective kiss-off to the perrenially unruffled Brosnan.Thankfully for us, he's also a Bruiser who gives as good as he gets and the movies single biggest success is in depicting his ice-cold determination and pig-headedness that would make him MI6's most lethal weapon in future adventures. Bond may,at this stage, be uncomfortable wearing a tuxedo and NOT give a damn whether his vodka martini is shaken or stirred,but can still brutally dispatch assssins,change his shirt and resume play. He's poisoned to have a heart attack,but is still resourceful enough to stumble to his Aston Martin, retrieve a de-fibrillator from the glove compartment,get shocked back to health,get back to the table and quip "Sorry but that last hand almost killed me".
Bond afficionados,used to ticking off items on the Bond Checklist had best prepare toUN-check a few of them this time around.
With Moneypenny and Q nowhere in sight, Bond is largely Infatuation and Gadget free although the ubiquitous use of cell phones and laptops more than compensate in the latter department. Just don't hold your breath hoping to see the Aston Martin DBS go invisible.
The Babe quotient is way low on the Bond Shag-O-Meter starting from the Female Silhouette free opening credits to 007 only sowing his wild oats with the main Bond Girl, Vesper Lynd played by the beautiful Eva Green, and its not a one night stand but a full blown love affair,one that is tainted by treachery and sets the tone for Bond's rakish behaviour with subsequent women.
Both Craig and Green walk away with honours; one for invigorating Bonds' iconic persona with a rough-hewn and complex edge, the other for giving us one of the most fully realised Bond Girls ever to strut across 007's field of vision, and she does it without once donning a bikini!Vesper is intriguing,smart,complex and vulnerable, the last adjective being the only one previous Bond girls could lay claim to.
There are jarring tones: the movie goes on a good 30 minutes more than it should,made more difficult by the protracted romance sub-plot coming right after the protracted poker game before getting back to familiar territory in an action-packed finale set in a rapidly sinking Venetian mansion.And the odd bleeding eye aside, Mikkelsen's La Chiffre lacks the singularity that marks your traditional Bond Baddie.
Still, the odd discordant note in no way ruins this Re-Energised Symphony of Action,Sex and Exotic Locales.
As the final scene unspools and Bond stands over his fallen enemy and finally mouths the line we've been waiting a 144 minutes for: "The Name's Bond,James Bond" and the Signature Bond theme, heard only in teasing snatches throughout finally erupts into it's Full Throttle Orchestral Roar,we sigh with relief and say, "Indeed you are. Welcome back 007. Looking forward to your 22nd outing"

BOND BEGINS!

THE PRESTIGE

2006-10-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

THE PRESTIGE

Illusion. Sleight Of Hand. Legerdemain. Misdirection. Leading the audience to think or look in one direction while the magician performs the switch or trick or deception in places he KNOWS you're NOT looking bcause he has successfully misdirected your attention elsewhere. It is the basic building block of a conjuring trick.

Successful mystery writers like Agatha Christie practiced such deceptive sleight of hand writing for decades, engaging the reader in deception, making them look at the butler while it was the vicar's wife who was up to mischief.

Today's master practicioner of twisty narratives in books,Jeffery Deaver, so enjoys pulling the rug out from under you, one is liable to experience a concussion from having fallen on ones' back once too often as yet another "conjuring" narrative trick is revelaed.

In films, M.Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" is still the best narrative trick, the shock ending not only knocking you backwards with the reveal, but it's flash-recap of all that took place before also slyly telling you that "Hey, the clues were all there..but you just weren't paying attention" and following at a close second is Christopher Nolan's "Memento", a narrative trickery based on the unreliability of one's memory compounded by it's reverse-order telling of the tale.

Since Nolan's latest flick opens with a voice-over saying "Are you watching closely?" , expect to be misled, deceived and obfuscated by it's diabolically delicious tale of 2 duelling magicians in early 20th-century England.

The 2 conjurors, Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden(Christian Bale) are put on a collision course in professional rivalry when the former blames the latter for the death of his wife in a performance gone horribly wrong.

As each tries to upstage the other( and engage in some very unprofessional sabotaging of the others performance), hatred spirals into obsession especially on the part of Angier when he feels he must, at all cost, find out the secret behind Borden's incredible Transported Man trick, disappearing and then re-appearing somewhere else. It's an obsession that has him "pimping" his lover cum assistant Olive ( a rather plastic Scarlett Johansson) to Borden in a bid to find out his secret, a ruse that back fires when she falls for the latter (On a side note, in these liberated times, why do film makers still think it's engaging to have a female character,supposedly the heroine, flit from one man's bed to another in rapid succession? Doesn't work guys. See Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane from the Spidey flicks and more specifically Kate Beckinsale's nurse in Pearl Harbor).

Angier also travels to Colorado to meet the Engineering whiz behind Borden's famous act, the renowned scientist Nikolai Tesla( a terrific David Bowie) , in a bid to find answers. And here Nolan sets up a similar rivalry between Tesla and that other great scientific mind of that time, Thomas Edison, mischieviously suggesting that rivalry between 2 great minds in a similar field is a given. But there are differences. While Tesla and Edison were possibly equals in the genious department, our battling magicians are not. Borden is clearly the better magician with Angier being the better showman. Borden is cold and calculating while Angier is obsessive. As Tesla warns Angier, "No good can come of this" and he and we know the movie is hurtling towards an ending that is anything but happy. But it's the ride Nolan takes you on that ensures you're strapped in for the full duration.Complemented with powerful performances by the 2 leads, ably supported by the ever reliable Michael Caine, a peek into the world of magic and a narrative arc choc-a-bloc of tricks(like Memento Nolan juggles timelines like the 3rd unseen conjuror of this tale), The Prestige is a must see. WATCH CLOSELY now.....

I READ......

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

A collection of short stories set in Thailand. Gentle snap-shots of a Thailand we don't often see or hear about elevate this collection. Still,one wishes for some resolution to the stories, be it a son's journey with his mother before she goes blind or a Cock Fighter's fued with a local bully. It would have made the tales sting with the spice of a tom yam instead of going down gently like Green Curry.

ALSO SAW....

BLACK RAIN

This 1989 Ridley Scott actioner, remastered on DVD still packs a wallop, thanks to great atmospeheric photography and well choreographed action scenes.

CURRENTLY READING...

THE PRESTIGE BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

The Proposition

2006-10-11T01:35:00.000-07:00

Plot: The titular deal is offered to the 2nd of the Murderous Outlaw Burns Brothers,Charley, by English soldier Captain Stanley: Ride out to the outback, find his vicious elder sibling Arthur and kill him, and in return, he will not hang his younger one Mikey come Christmas day.
Moral conflicts ensue,as Charley is in no mood to off big brother once he finds him, and back home townsfolk bay for the younger Burns blood as Stanley's concience stand in their way....

A slow,languorous pace, lots of wide-eyed vista shots of the arid Australian landscape, close-ups of dirty,unshaven faces,brief bursts of intense violence followed by looooong inert mood-setting scenes of drama punctuated by furtive glances, minimalist pseudo-intellectual discourse scored to dirge-sounding bush ballads: Welcome to the Arty Western, done Down Under style.

It's the sort of movie where scenes of a man being flogged is inter-cut to one of another singing "Peggy Gordon" ,said scene meant to underscore the point that it's not just about violence you see, it's also a lyrical medidation of it; But then.. you get a close up shot of a bare-back ripped to pieces after the whipping and the Whipper actually wringing blood off the instrument and you wonder... why not stick with loving close-ups of the flogging exercise a la Passion of The Christ and leave the Celtic ballads in the new Corrs CD?

I'm in mixed minds about this gritty,brutal but nevertheless well made Antipodian Western. It's a fairly effective study in morality, much like Eastwood's Unforgiven. But where that Oscar Winner had a plodding Mid-Section which was compensated by a powerfully charismatic star-cast, The Proposition often mutes it's equally talented thespians. Guy Pierce, the so-called "hero" of the piece is so low key he only comes alive in the bloody climax. Danny Huston as the Villain spends far too much time in philosopher mode. The extremely talented Emily Watson(as Stanley's wife) is a study of imploding grief and dread when the character could have used at least one Serious Outburst Scene. It's up to Ray Winstone to carry the show, and he does so admirably. His Captain Stanley, who comes across as the villain in the movie's opening scene(especially after a brutal pistol-whipping he delivers) is a wonderful study in conflict, his sense of a Man on a Mission to civilize the barbaric Outback slowly but surely compromised by his resolute stand on Justice, of being a Gentleman who keeps his word,even if the promise was made to criminals, a promise which the town folk and his superior ( a slimy David Wenham, iradicating the dashing Faramir in LOTR once and for all) have no intention of letting him keep.

The struggle to maintain civilized behaviour in a brutal land, as driven home Sledgehammer style, by a scene depicting Stanley and wife, dressed in their finest, sitting down to a Christmas dinner,table replete with the finest cutlery, and exchanging pleasant talk in polished tones, contrasted against the barren landscape outside their homes populated by unwashed and grimy folk and impending violence, is an apt theme for a revisionist Western. But one wishes that these tough 'ole boys would tone down the pontificating a notch, strap on their pistols and let their bullets do the talking.

Listening to John Hurt's erudite bounty hunter gas-bagging about Darwin's Theory of Evolution, one does wonder, if guys really talked as much as these fellers back in those Bad Old Days, they would probably have been the first lot be culled under Nature's Grand Natural Selection Plan, gently nudged along by an Aboriginal spear or two.

A little less Bark and a lot more Bite would have made this Proposition more palatable....

Over The Hedge

2006-10-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

Having bought a whole bunch of animated flicks for my nephew when I see him at the end of this month in Mumbai, the child in me was tempted enough to watch one of them last night.

Over The Hedge, the latest CGI animation from Dream Works , is delightful from the get go.

Plot: A group of animals fresh off hibernation are about to begin storing food for the upcoming winter ( a mere 274 days away) when they discover, to their shock that much of their beloved woodland has been demolished for a 54-acre housing estate that is separated from the jungle by the titular hedge. Verne, the cautious turtle and leader of the animals is quickly upstaged by the appearance of a wily raccoon RJ who sweet-talks the group into going over the hedge into suburbia where food is a-plenty. Verne is, understandably, tail-tinglingly suspicious of the new member. And for good reason as RJ has a hidden agenda.....

While Pixar still reigns supreme in this field, for me the added bonus of a Dream Works offering is their use of high profile stars to give voice to the numerous animal cast. So Bruce Willis' smarmy tones fleshes out RJ the raccoon's street-smart coolness while comedian Garry Shandling is perfect as the straight arrow Verne. Look out also for a hilarious William Shatner as a possum, Nick Nolte as mean bear Vincent and last but definitely not least, a scene stealing Thomas Haden Church as the Verminator, Animal exterminator extrodinaire. And let's not forget the always dependable Steve Carel as IQ challenged squirrel Hammy.Although after a similarly moronic turn in Will Ferrel's Anchorman, playing a moronic dim wit is something the 40-Year Old Virgin could do in his sleep. And there's a Persian Cat voiced by an actor whose name I can't recall who'll crack you up! He's that good!!

There's the usual story-with-a-moral wrap up that is endemic to these films( they are made primarily for kids of course) but with enough in-jokes for the adults, a bristling pace and gorgeous animation, chalk this up as a winner for Dream Works after the less than satisfying Madagascar.

My guilty pleasures

2006-09-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

There are times, I must admit when the philistine in me rears it's unwashed head and I seek out movies that offer not one iota of originality or inventiveness in its narrative, choosing instead flicks that wallow in mediocrity, embracing every cliche with affection and wearing it's B-Movie tag like a badge of honour as it inundates the viewer with plots that could be regurgitated onto a paper napkin by a 5 year old in the time it takes him to finish a bowl of cheerios.

There are also films I return to time and time again, like re-visiting an old friend, that now, seen through older eyes, show the cracks of time, the creaks of technology now obsolete, which nevertheless suck me in on sheer charm and narrative power.

Lastly there are the "Big Dumb Actioners" of the 80's and '90s that continue to enthrall me with the sheer momentum of their pace, never mind the fact that I've seen it so many times, I could tell you that the 4th person in a 30 second, 10 man gunfight has a mole in the upper left corner of his mouth.

So, sit back and relax as I raid my DVD collection to give you a guided tour of my guilty viewing pleasures. Fans of "Memento", Merchant Ivory Flicks and Iranian Cinema need read no further:

ROAD HOUSE

How much do I love this B flick? Failing to get a copy here, I made my Immortal Beloved scour DVD stores on her trip to the US to locate one, which, bless her heart, she did and it now occupies a special place in my collection.

Any movie that starts with pair of long legs attached to a lithe body squeezed into a dress 2 sizes smaller gets my vote from the get go. Said body walks into a night club. Inside said nightclub is Dalton(Patrick Swayze), Man with No First Name, the best bouncer in the business keeping an eye on things.

Dalton is approached by Frank Tilghman(Kevin Tighe), to clean up a bar he's just purchased in Jasper, Missouri called the Double Deuce. "Used to be a sweet deal, now it's the sort of place where you sweep up the eye balls at closing time", Frank says and that's just one of many delicious one-line zingers that pepper the script. Dalton accepts and heads down to Jasper.

His first visit to the Double-Deuce bar is a whopper of a mood-setting piece. I know it's sacriligeous to even consider making a comparison to Coppola's "Godfather" but consider this: That epic masterpiece had a loooong opening wedding scene that among other things set the mood and tone for the rest of the film. At the end of the scene you KNEW 2 things beyond the shadow of any doubt: This was a traditional Italian American family who nevertheless were involved in some dark endeavours. Dalton's initial encounter with the red and rough necked employees and patrons of the Double-Deuce achieves a similar effect. At the end of the scene you KNOW beyond the shadow of any doubt that: Dalton has his work cut out for him; a bouncer recklessly flings an inebriated patron across the room, the performing live band sits behind a caged fence for a reason as audience participation is often in the form of flung bottles, one yahoo offers to let another fondle his girlfriends tits for 20 bucks, a waitress deals drugs on the side and the barman skims from the till. It's a tinder box of violence where "power drinkers, 40 year old adolescents and keepers of Modern Chemistry" come as much to punch each others lights out as to down a pint.

Dalton quickly starts putting things in order and this brings him on a direct collision course with resident Bad Guy and Town Big Shot Brad Wesley(Ben Gazarra), a situation not helped by the fact that our laconic hero meets, dates and beds the town's hot,blonde doctor and the object of Wesley's infatuation (Kelly Lynch) in record time.

In structure,plot and pacing, Road House is a Western in modern clothes. Instead of a cattle stampede, you have a Monster Truck smashing through an auto-dealesrship in one of the movie's many delightfully over the top action scenes. In place of shoot outs, there are niftily choreographed martial arts fight scenes that will have the fan boy in you whooping with delight as Dalton beats the living tar out of Wesley's hired goons. The Western connection is compounded when you realise one of the actors is called Red West and the director's first name is Rowdy!

And I haven't even mentioned Sam Elliot's Wade Garrett, the tough, grizzled veteran of the Bouncing industry. He's Master to Dalton's Grasshopper. Elliott has that tough, leathery,lived in face which, complemented by a sandpaper voice, exudes a menacing,lethal presence that no amount of gym-honed pretty boys can ever hope to match and I for one would have enjoyed a climactic showdown that had both Dalton and Garrett double-team to take on Wesley and his crime cadre. But alas, his character meets a tragic end, a plot point that serves as a springboard for a Dalton Rampage of Rage that sees him single-handedly taking on and wiping out the bad guys in their lair.

Road House is so blissfully unaware of its blatant sexism, that it's a guilty pleasure: Wesley's dumb-blonde girlfriend openly propositions Dalton with the charming line"What say you and I go back to my place and fuck?" , a remark that earns her a black eye from Wesley. She later proceeds to do a strip dance right in the centre of the bar to the strains of "Hoochie Coochie Man". Wade Garrett looks at Dalton's girlfriend and remarks," That girl's got way too much brains to have an ass like that".

And the fight scenes have an air of lethal authenticity to them. They're not overly choreographed wire-enhanced exercises in balletic grace. They're tough, intense affairs, punches and roundhouse kicks delivered to knuckle crunching, wince-inducing effects.

This is one Road House I don't mind stopping over every once in awhile for my predictable meat and fries.

HIGHLANDER

Road House had a line that went something like this:

Upon seeing the legendary Dalton, one smart-ass remarks, "You know, they told me you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck but you don't look like much to me"

To which our hero deadpans, "Opinions vary".

That line aptly sums up the extreme reactions people often have about Highlander, Guilty Pleasure No.2.

Director Russell Mulcahy once commented, "People either see this 6 times or never"

I've seen this sword clanging epic many many times multiplied by 6 but my Immortal Beloved simply cannot see what the fuss is all about.

Seen today, Highlander's effects are hopelessly out-dated(at one point you can actually see Christopher Lambert suspended by wires as he supposedly levitates!), it's numerous sword battles slow and clunky and it's been hopelessly rubbished by 3 inferior sequels and a mediocre TV series.

But it's bold and cheeky concept and director Mulcahy's time altering-narrative still packs a punch. If ever a movie dazzled and continues to do so on sheer story telling verve, it's this one.

How many action flicks can boast of the following opener: A wrestling match that cuts to a spectator walking out to the parking lot, to engage in a sword-fighting duel, at the end of which he decapitates his opponent, experiences an energy-absorbing sensation whereby he blows out the lights and half the cars in the lot and then runs out of the building as the camera pans upwards and onto.......medieval Scotland where aforementioned sword-fighter is now a kilt-wearing Highland warrior!!!!

Sword fighter is Connor McLeod(of the clan McLeod) who is mortally wounded by the Kurgan(Clancy Brown), a vicious warrior during battle with a rival clan. Expected to die, he recovers which is a definite no-no in medieval times when any miraculous recovery is automatically attributed to a pact with the devil. Stoned, beaten and hounded out of his village, Connor meets Ramirez( a very Scottish Sean Connery naturally playing a...... Spaniard) who tells him he's an Immortal, that he can only be killed by decapitation and that all Immortals must fight until ONLY ONE REMAINS TO CLAIM THE PRIZE. Ramirez is killed by the Kurgan who then proceeds to hunt for Connor through the centuries until the final showdown in present day New York.......

Russel Mulcahy's imaginative cross-cutting between past and present, stylish camera moves, a sizzling soundtrack by Queen and one of the most menacing and gleefully over-the-top villains ever to grace the screen(Clancy Brown, you rock!) all make Highlander a delicious viewing experience. Forget the crappy sequels, as the movie's Immortal tagline claims:

"THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE"

DIE HARD 2

It can well be asked why, in the hugely successful Die Hard Franchise, do I commonly reach for the much maligned 2nd part rather than the commonly acknowledged superior original and it's equally well-received 3rd part, whenever I need a quick Action fix in my viewing diet?

Very simply because, by doing away with character arc and needless exposition,piling on relentless action and elevating Bruce Willis' John McLane character from its' "Underdog Caught In Wrong Place At A Wrong Time" to "Rambo On A Mission" persona, director Renny Harlin successfully crafts one hell of a B-Movie on an A list budget.

McLane is in Dulles International airport awaiting the arrival of his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) on Christmas Eve, it's snowing to near-zero visibility levels, and his car's(borrowed from mom-in-law) just been towed away. To add to his woes, a team of ex-Special Forces grunts headed by the vicious Colonel Stuart takes over the Airport's control systems including its plane landing capabilities, threatening to crash one if the Authorities attempt to land any. All runways are to be kept clear for 1 plane, carrying Noriega like General Esperanza, a Latin American Dictator. With planes circling overhead unable to land and rapidly running out of fuel and one of them being the one carrying McClane's beloved missus,he springs into action......

McLane may mouth lines like "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice" but you know without a shadow of a doubt that he's relishing the opportunity to take on the Rogue soldiers and kicking their Military butts. While McClane was hurt and vulnerable in the original, often doubting his abilities to take on 12 armed European baddies in a high-rise, here he's Super Cop on a mission and while Director Harlin sticks to the original's premise of having him get increasingly beat up and bloodied as the movie puts him through escalating action set-pieces, one gets the feelings that all those cuts and bruises are just wearing him down temporarily while he catches his breath before strapping on his armour to do more battle.

Die Hard 2 is hard-core action in glorious R-Rated tradition; its dialogue is laced with enough profanity to do Scorcese proud, it's fight scenes are brutal(see McClane pick up ice pick, see McClane ram pick into baddies's eyeball) and one major action set-piece that sees the chief baddie crashing a plane just to show he means business is something you'd be hard-pressed to find in today's market of neutered PG-13 actioners. How many action movies actually introduce their chief villain doing martial arts moves...in the nude????

Give in to its over-the-top action and hyper-tensed narrative, and at the end of its explosive fueled climax(that takes place on the wing of a moving 747!), you may well feel like echoing McClane's (in)famous catchphrase:

Yipeeekaiyaaaay Motherfucker!!

OTHER GUILTY PLEASURES

COBRA

Stallone goes Dirty Harry(Eastwood side-kick Reni Santoni and Psycho baddie Andy Robinson from that movie are here as well, re-inforcing this flicks' antecedents) and takes on knife and axe-wielding psychos.

Plus Points: Superb action sequences and with a running time of under 90 minutes,it's crammed full of them.

Major Plus Points: Stallone's catch phrase: "You're a disease,and I'm the cure".

Minus Points: Brigitte Nielsen

Special Mention: Villain Brian Thompson. When he salivates while uttering the line "I want your eyes pig!" , it's easy to believe that if he said that standing in front of you in real life, you'd crap your pants in 5 seconds flat!

COMMANDO

Baddies kidnap Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter(future hottie Alyssa Milano) and hold her hostage. The deal:Arnie assassinates the current leader of a Latin American country to enable a coup by Chief Baddie Dan Hedaya and in return they won't mail his daughter back to him in separate pieces.

In one corner: Baddie on an island filled with his own private army and his psychotic right hand man Vernon Wells.

In the other corner: An armed to the teeth Governator.

Poor baddie.... he never stood a chance......

Plus Points: A relentless pace that never let up, balls-to-the walls-action capped with zinging Arnie one-liners ("Remember when I told you I'd kill you last? I lied").

Minus points: Rae Dawn Chongs' annoying squeals for the 1st hour. Shut up bitch!

Special Mention: Vernon Wells as psycho right hand man to Baddie. Any actor who can convince you that in spite of being chunky and pot-bellied he can still give a ripped Arnie a bloody fight gets my vote!

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna

2006-08-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

The Yashraj family gather again for another lavish,big budget,glitzy flick filled with beautiful people who laugh, love, fight,sing, dance and last but not least cry copious amounts of tears as they wring emotion out of every dramatic scene and god knows there's plenty in an Indian movie. If that statement sounded like a rant against the genre, it isn't really. It's just that, for this viewer,personally, an excursion into Bollywood every now and then brings home the realisation that opulent song & dance extravaganzas like this is the cinematic equivalent of a bar of milk chocolate for me: to be indulged in every once in awhile as a guilty pleasure, but too much of it make my teeth hurt, my skin itch and my bowels to move. And at the end of it you know it probably wsn't good for you but...God Damn if it wasn't fun while you were indulging in it!

But I digress. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna(KANK for short)( Never Say Goodbye) is the latest offering of Karan Johar, Bollywood's Box-Office Midas on the strength of 2 previous back-to-back blockbusters "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai"(KKHH for short) and "Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gam". Once again Karan casts his favourite hero(and Numero Uno Star) Shah Rukh Khan who once again acts opposite those 2 lovely and hot actresses,Priety Zinta and Rani Mukherji. And once again,Amitabh Bachan is back as Rani's father-in-law. This gang never play far from each other. After all, Shah Rukh was paired with Preity in her debut Dil Se, she was his heroine in that epic romance "Veer Zaara", where Rani had a supporting role as a lawyer. Preity was also his heroine in "Kal Ho Naa Ho", where Rani had a cameo in a song scene. Rani also cameoed in "Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gaam" (K3G) and was one of RK's heroines in "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" the other being Kajol who re-paired with the King Khan in K3G and then proceeded to cameo in song scenes in both "Kal Ho Naa Ho" and also KANK. Amitabh was SRK's uncle in "Veer Zaara" and his dad in K3G and he's Rani's father-in-law in KANK where he was her teacher in "Black". Whew! No 6 degrees of separation for the Yash Raj gang more like Zero degrees of togetherness.

So what do they all do here? Let's see, SRK is married to Preety and Rani's about to be married to Abishek Bachan when the movie starts. SRK, a soccer player on a winning streak and about to sign a multi-million dollar contract meets Rani on a park bench outside the mansion(No one lives in modest dwellings in a Karan Johar film) where she's about to get married. You see, she's marrying a childhood friend and is unsure if she feels any love for him.SRK and her talk, he urges her to go through with the wedding ,they get up, walk away and then, in slow motion, pause, turn and look at each other only about 27 times before SRK makes it to the gates outside and is promptly knocked flat on his back by a Merc.

Cut to a few years later,and the Khan is a moody, morose grouch with a limp, his career as the Indian Beckham gone up in smoke. He spends his time taking out his anger at his Uber-successful fashion designer wife and cute son. So, an overall ass-hole, in other words.

Rani is married to Abishek, who's a bit of a man-child still into parties and rock and roll while she STILL feels little passion for him. Via a stupid contrivance, Rani and the Khan meet......

Since the starting scene depicting their meeting has all the subtlety of a pail of ice cold water thrown at you while sleeping in the middle of winter in Siberia, you know without a shadow of a doubt that Rani and the Khan are gonna Get It On, finding friendship,kinship and passion, all the things missing from their respective marriages. The rest of this Looooooong movie(clocking in at an endurance testing 3 and a quarter hours) details the impact of this affair on their spouses and their lives.

The extra-marital affair is a tricky thing to do in movies: the cheating party need to be sufficiently sympathetic to earn audience empathy for what is in essence a very selfish act. And Karan Johar stumbles here: SRK's character is thoroughly unlikable, the typical chauvinist who can't bear his wife's success and Rani's character fares little better, an ice queen who cannot muster an iota of affection for a husband who, childishness aside, truly adores her.But lucky for him, the mega-wattage stars manage to pull it off, SRK on sheer charisma and Rani.....God Bless Her..proves once again that she's truly one of the most talented actresses in Hindi Cinema working today, her eyes effectively conveying her anguish as she tries to stay in a marriage she's drifting further and further away from.

Preity's role isn't as meaty but she does well with the few scraps of dramatic scenes thrown at her.

Abishek turns out to be the most likeable of the lot, his character the most sympathetic and in the tense marital face-offs with Rani, hits the ball out of the park. And his scenes with real life Pa, the Big B is sheer magic as only a real life father-Son duplicating their roles on screen can be.

The Big B has essayed many roles in his long and illustrious career, but the one thing the former Angry Young Man of Hindi cinema has never played is the Dirty Old Man.Well, with KANK he can effectively cross that out of his list as well, as Karan J has him cavorting with nubile Blonde babes a la Hugh Hefner. But his later serious scenes and his growing friendship with SRK's mother show why he's truly one of Hindi Cinema's true Titans. The Big B rocks in all his scenes!

Speaking of rocking, that's exactly what the superb soundtrack by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy does! Foot-stomping chartbusters mingle easily with melancholy ballads, yes there are shades of their earlier soundtrack of KHNH, but it's still a solid effort.

Music and stars aside, what finally redeems KANK is the gutsy (by Indian movie standards) ending that eschews "traditional" solutions to marital problems. Kudos to Karan J for this.

All in all, an entertaining diversion for a lazy weekend.

This week I read.....

2006-08-23T02:13:00.000-07:00

The English Assassin by Daniel Silva

Those bemoaning Len Deighton's hiatus from Spy Fiction or Le Carre's excursion into non-espionage territory could do worse than to reach for Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. The first Allon book, The Kill Artist provided all the requisite items that spy fiction fans relish in the genre: A globe-trotting hunt for a terrorist replete with chases, surveillance, exotic locations, double-crosses and a thrilling climax not to mention sex in the form of the beautiful model/agent Jacqueline Delacroix. All spies moonlight in Silva's book, the hero himself being far more interested in his other vocation as a restorer of priceless art.

But while The Kill Artist Sizzled, Assassin fizzles. It certainly starts out promisingly with Allon being summoned to the home of Swiss Banker Augustus Rolfe for an assignment to restore a painting. But what Gabriel Allon discovers after arriving at the banker's oppulent villa is beyond repair: the dead body of the banker with a bullet through an eye. Caught and interogated by a shifty Swiss Inspector, Allon is bailed out by his sometime boss, Israeli spy master Ari Shamron.
Shamron informs Allon that Rolfe had in fact asked for an agent of the Israeli Intelligence, presumably to divulge vital information that certain dark forces will stop at nothing to prevent. What follows is Allon's quest to uncover the truth aided by Rolfe's beautiful and temperamental daughter who's a world famous violinist.

Switzerland looms large in this book although descriptions of the countries' typically scenic locations are offset by the ugly truth that the Swiss collaborated with the Nazis during World War 2; bankrolling their war-time activities in exchange for priceless arts looted from Jewish owned museums.

It's the sole fascinating aspect of an otherwise pedestrian thriller that limps its way to a lame conclusion. Note that I haven't mentioned the titular character, a killer of English origin residing in Corsica. That's because Silva himself doesn't seem too interested about him , his character set up as the hired killer to terminate Gabriel and Anna, who then proceeds to disappear for much of the book and surfacing towards the end to do something completely out of character. Gabriel himself most improbably devolves from cool spy to Angry Jewish Man in the latter half as the Swiss-Nazi collusion becomes more apparent.

I have 3 more Allon adventures on my bookshelves. It was my intention to delve headlong into them right after this book. But I think I'll take a break from the cloak and dagger stuff for awhile as this thriller singularly failed to thrill.

The Kite Runner

2006-08-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

Having done Andre Dubus III's House Of Sand And Fog for our last book discussion, I was struck by it's main protagonist, an Iranian immigrant who fights to retain ownership of his house. Through him, Dubus gives us a fascinating glimpse into Iranian culture and it struck me how similar some of their practices were to Indian customs and traditions. It also hit me how little I know of Middle-Eastern people and their culture, understandable as I hardly read anything written by Middle-Eastern authors. My last exposure to the Muslim world via fiction was several years ago, during my Uni days when I picked up James Clavell's mammoth Whirlwind, a 1000-page plus epic set in Iran detailing the lives of Westen Expatriates and their attempts to get out during the take-over of the Ayatollah. Predictably, the book was from the point of view of an American and Finnish pilot and their "exotic" Persian wives. Characters were drawn in broad strokes with typical ethnic caricatures: Stone- Faced Mullahs and their fanatically lethal soldiers, severely patriarchal families and their subjugated women. I got the picture real quick- Iranian Men: Fanatical Blowhards, Iranian Women: Sultry and Shagedelic!Part of me ignored such stereotyped characterisations as I let myself get swept up in Clavell's phenomenally entertaining epic, an action adventure replete with chases and thrills spiced up the way only a master storyteller like Clavell could. But a part of me longed for a little more meat in the kebabs, so to speak.Enter The Kite Runner, a fascinating novel of Guilt and Redemption set in Afghanistan. Written by Khaled Hosseini, the son of a diplomat who was born in Kabul and whose family was granted political asylum in the US, this is a novel of Afghan characters set for the most part in Afghanistan so there is an air of authenticity in its evocation of places and people.The protagonist Amir, living a privileged life in Kabul, forms a close bond with Hassan, their servant's son. It's a bond that's not so much tested as ripped apart after a vicious incident involving Hassan. Years later, the guilt-wracked Amir, now happily married and a published novelist in America, where he and his father emigrated to after the Soviet invasion of their country, receives a fateful phone call from his father's oldest friend Rahim Khan in Pakistan, asking him a favour, an avenue to purge his guilt. "There is a way to be good again," Rahim Khan tells him. Amirs journeys back to Afghanistan, but the road to redemption is a harsh one....What I loved about this book was the realistic slice of Afghan life Hosseini serves up so expertly. Be it Amir's posh childhood existence in the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood in Northern Kabul, living in a "sprawling house of marble floors and wide windows" with "intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked in Isfahan" covering 4 bathrooms and "gold-stitched tapestries" lining the walls not to mention crystal chandeliers hanging from vaulted ceilings , the "buzkashi" tournaments (throwing an animal carcass into a circle on horseback while other riders knock you off, think Stallone in Rambo III for a clearer picture) , the kite festivals where Hassan's gift for retrieving fallen ones easily earns him the titular monicker or the Kabul Amir returns to several years later as an adult, a city overrun with beggars and buildings with caved in roofs and walls pierced with rocket shells, Hosseini gives you the warts and all view of a once progressive country ravaged by war for the past 25 years.Of course, this being a personal story of Amir's journey, Hosseini doesn't give a historical persepective of events which may cause some bewilderment for those not weaned on Afghanistan's tumultous past. So you may well scratch your head reading a chapter where Amir and Hassan's idyllic evening on July 1973 is suddenly interrupted by gunfire and sirens wailing. The fact that that was the day of the bloodless coup staged by ousted ex-PM Muhammad Daoud to wrest control of power back from PM Muhammad Yusof is never explained. Daoud, cousin to King Zahir Shah who ruled Afghanistan for 40 years, was PM from 1953-1963. Forced to resign over his hard stance with Pakistan, he reclaimed power with the aid of the pro-Moscow communist party PDPA(People's Democratic Party Of Afghanistan). His purging of Islamic parties opposed to him and the assassination of a key PDPA figure resulted this time in a far bloodier coup, the Saur revolution in April 1978. Daoud was killed in the coup and Hafizullah Amin with the aid of the PDPA became the new PM. Splits within the party soon saw Amin at loggerheads with Taraki,leader of the PDPA and another bloody coup in July 1979 had Taraki assassinated. Taraki's assassination angered the Soviet Union who sent troops to Afghanistan in the December of 1979, triggering a 10 year conflict between the Russians and the Mujahideen.It's during this conflict that Amir and his father leave Afghanistan for the US where his father works odd-jobs to put Amir through college. In the Afghan market where they set up stalls to sell knic-knacks, is where Amir glimpses and falls head over heels for the lovely Soraya. Their courtship leading to their eventual betrothal and marriage is an absolutely delightful potrait of the Afghan culture. The chaperone enforced meets, the "what will people say" mentality of Soraya's father and culminating in the lafz( "giving the word") ceremony which bears more than a striking resemblance to orthodox Indian betrothal customs!Hosseini's gift is in sketching characters and their relationships as vividly as the landscape they populate. Amir's guilt, Hassan's devotion and loyalty, Amir's father's strength of character, Amir's relationship with Soraya are expertly conveyed. And in a few short and bold strokes, the writer also manages to hammer home harsh truths, such as the Taliban regime's oppressive hold over a war ravaged country where a woman can be beaten severely for raising her voice. Cheering during soccer matches are not allowed, unless it's for the Taliban executioner who arrives during half-time to stone a couple to death for adultery.The novels' only shortcomings are it's reliances on cinematic devices (especially in the 3rd half)that produces situational coincidences that would make any Bollywood filmmaker proud.But this is a minor gripe in an otherwise searing story of love, loyalty, family and redemption set amidst a landscape often glimpsed only via 30-second video feeds on CNN. Khalid Hosseini opens the doors to his country, people and culture,uniquely Afghan yet endearingly universal. Step in, you won't regret it.

When Nuns Go Bad

2006-08-23T01:35:00.000-07:00

Remember The Sound Of Music? Julie Andrews dancing on a hill-top? Now give her a proper habit, age her a little and shove a sharp stick up her ass to inhibit her sense of humour and exuberant joy of life, transforming her into a mean, spiteful sanctimonious little bitch who terrorises girls in a convent, and you get the basic premise for The Nun,released here in Malaysia as Water Spirit. When the girls get their own back and kill her, she returns years later as a spirit to exact her revenge. Not exactly an original concept but in the hands of a better director, this European production could have generated some chills. Instead, it plods its way to a predictable conclusion enlivened only by an itsy bitsy little twist at the end. Most of the actors are Spanish save for 2 who play Americans but in actual fact are English.Since Europeans obviously think the sole requirement to play an American is the ability to punctuate every sentence with "fuck' , the actor who plays one here does precisely that.So-so bargain bin special effects and a few scenes of gore do not lift this above the "watch-only-if -there's-nothing-else-to-see" category. Definitely a wet blanket.

This week I watched.....

2006-08-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

Took 2 days off last week to spend some quality time with my Immortal Beloved who had the WHOLE week off before starting her new job.As fate would have it,got chop-sockied by the flu virus and armed with antibiotics and a comfy couch and lotsa TLC from my IB,settled down to watch and re-watch movies from my by now gargantuan DVD collection:

Thursday: V For Vendetta Love this Vigorous and occasionally Violent flick about a Vocal and Valorous Vigilante on a Vengeful Crusade against a Vile and Venal Government,aided by a Vivacious Vixen.Verbal Volleys,Vicious Villains and Virtuoso Action.Vunderbah!

Friday:The Sixth Sense Psychiatrist Bruce Willis counsels intense young boy who sees "dead people".M.Night Shyamalan's debut is still his most layered and emotionally honest work to date.With sterling performances from Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment and a wonderfully restrained turn from Mr.Die Hard himself,this slow but never boring supernatural flick is a winner in my book.And it's a great re-watch even after you know the by-now-talked-to-death TWIST at the end.

Friday: From Hell A ripping Yarn,if you'll pardon the pun.An adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel about the infamous serial killer who terrorised the Whitechapel district in Victorian London.Johnny Depp plays an opium-snorting clairvoyant dick investigating 'Ol Jack's handiwork which begins with stabbing a prostitute before graduating to mutilating,dismembering and relieving his subsequent victim's of their internal organs.Gritty,atmospheric and chilling with enough slash and hack to satisfy this jaded fan of the genre,the Hughes Brothers(why haven't they done anything since then?) have produced a compellingly watchable flick.I first caught this on an atrocious VCD copy,upgraded it to a watchable VCD copy before finally adding this to my DVD collection.

Saturday: Total Recall It's double trouble for Arnie all the way here as people start to chase him both on Earth and in Mars while the Governator juggles not one but 2 Femme Fatales and has to outwit evil Ronny Cox and also his vicious Numero Uno henchman Michael Ironside.Ah-Nuld dreams he's actually a secret agent on Mars trying to foil an evil dictator's reign of oppression while attempting to unlock a secret that could threaten the Red Planet's very existence.Then he realises ..hey he really IS a secret Agent.Baddies tell him..no you're dreaming.He knows he isn't..or does he? I LOVE Paul Verhoeven's movies and this follow up after the awesome Robocop is butt-kicking action all the way while tantalisingly teasing you with the is-it-all-a-dream-or-not scenario.Chalk this one right alongside Terminator and Predator as one of the Austrian muscleman's more cerebral action flicks.

Saturday: True Lies Secret Agent doesn't tell his wife what he does.Baddies kidnap someone close to him and there's an awesome action sequence on a bridge...not it's not Mission:Impossible 3 although watching this flick will remind you how much this summer's Tom Cruise Show ripped off this far superior James Cameron movie.

Sunday: Unbreakable If M.Night Shyamalan had done X-Men or Spider-Man this is what it would have been like.Slow,intense but nevertheless gripping,this assured tale of a man slowly discovering his powers and mission in life is compellingly watchable. Ironically,the by-now-patented Shyamalan twist at the end is for me the weakest aspect of an otherwise solidly plotted suspense drama.

Sunday: Underworld:Evolution Kate Beckinsale,tight leather..enough said.Any questions?Oh yeah...somewhere in between the ancient feud between vampires and werewolves continue.....

2006-08-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

MURUGAN LOVES SIEW BEE

The graffitti above wasn't scrawled on a public toilet door or the walls of an abandoned shoplot.I saw it in....hold your breath... Batu Caves!!!Yes, in addition to a gigantic statue of Lord Murugan towering above the temple entrance and a once a year carnival of body piercing freaks masquerading as a religious festival,the Caves can now boast of graffitti,making it one of the hippest places of worship around.It already owns the distinction of being the world's only temple that doubles as an exercise gym for cardio workouts.When I took my mother there last week,the number of track shoes and shorts-wearing Chinese aunties trekking up the 200 odd steps to the top of the cave entrance outnumbered sari-clad women like my mom making the same climb to worship in the temples inside.As my mother and aunt waited inside the temple sanctum for the prayers to finish,my Immortal Beloved and I climbed up the last flight of stairs located inside the cave to another smaller temple above.Bells were ringing,religious mantras were being chanted,the air was heavy with the smell of incense as we walked around the temple perimeter,my thoughts remarkably pure as such places tend to make them,when I chanced upon the undying declaration of love scratched into the walls behind the temple.The odd, infrequent meditations on life and religious faith which were preoccupying me at that time flew out of my mind like bats out of a cave to be replaced with the much more common exclamation:"What the fuck????"
What is one to make of this?It says Murugan loves Seiw Bee.As the temples here are dedicated to Lord Muruga,am I to surmise that the graffitti was a Chinese girl's declaration of her divine love for the deity(not uncommon in Hindu mythology.Mirabhai carried a similar life-long devotion to Lord Krishna) or should I conclude that the caves now function as a catalyst for inter-racial romance? Should I even be surprised that a brother deep in prayer would get distracted by a sexy Ah Moi in micro-mini running shorts relaxing after her cardio workout up the steps.There were enough of them mingling with the worshippers on that day.
So here's an ad for temple committee members in Batu Caves worried about dwindling numbers of devotees when it's not Thaipusam.
Come To Batu Caves:Jog up it's stairs to burn those calories,relax in the cooling confines of it's caves as you cuddle up to your loved one.
Love often resides in treacherous waters.Throw in racial differences and said waters can be extremely difficult to navigate so divine help is the way to go!We've conveniently set up temples inside for this very purpose.So break a coconut ,ring a bell, say your prayers and scrawl your romantic epistle on the walls provided(sharp stones for scratching are freely available) .
Remember:Murugan Loves YOU

Tristan & Isolde

2006-08-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

I love medieval epics.The clang of swords,the woosh of bow and arrow in bloody battles,the costumes,scenery..all these make even the corniest sword & sandal epic work for me .Gladiator,Troy,Kingdom Of Heaven are all must-haves in my DVD collection.Add to this Tristan & Isolde,based on the old Arthurian legend of star-crossed lovers.This movie had so little publicity only a chance visit to the Rotten Tomatoes website made me aware of it.And my main reason for grabbing the DVD was the fact that it's directed by Kevin Reynolds who helmed "Robin Hood:Prince Of Thieves" and "The Count Of Monte Cristo" so the dude has a good track record for films with men in tights.The former is still delightfully entertaining after all these years and the latter still worth a watch thanks to Guy Pierce's slimy turn as the villain.I first came across this story in an old book in my collection called "King Arthur and The Knights Of The Round Table". In the book,Tristan was one of the strongest of King Arthur's knights who falls in love with Isolde who unfortunately is betrothed to the cowardly King Mark of Cornwall.Knowing she could never be happy with the King,her maidservant hides a jug of magic portions on the boatride to Cornwall with the idea that the King and Isolde would each drink from it and fall in love with one another(it's that kind of portion,see).Unfortunately Tristan,who was also escorting Isolde to Cornwall and hence in the boat as well,discover the jug and he and Isolde drink from it,intensifying their love for one another,making his duty to hand her over to the king that much harder.Yes,all very tragic indeed.The movie takes generous liberties with the story chief among which is the complete jettisoning of the whole Round Table business.The England potrayed is one of the Dark Ages,where the Irish reign supreme and the rest of England consists of warring tribes(not unlike Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur last year).The Irish rule with an iron fist,hacking and killing all who rebel.In one such bloody slaughter,young Tristan's father who was planning to unite the English tribes against the Irish are slain.Tristan is adopted by King Mark of Cornwall,grows into a dashing and strong warrior.I say dashing and strong because that's what the filmmakers would have us believe although James Franco looks like he could comfortably step into any of a dozen American Teen Soapies with a change of clothing and a hair-cut.While everyone around him is suitably grizzled,muddy and dirty as befits the accepted standard of hygiene during medieval times,Tristan is clean, shaven & coiffed.It's Rufus Sewell's King Mark who wins points for being the "Real Man" of the epic,even minus 1 hand,as he not only looks tough,but exhibits class,nobility and courage when Tristan screws around with his wife,Isolde.See,during an earlier attack by the Irish which left our hero mortally wounded,thinking him dead,they push him out to sea where he comfortably sails into a deserted beach in Ireland,where,naturally Isolde,the daughter of the Irish king,finds him.Naturally as he's cold from all that time at sea,she strips and cuddles him for warmth.Naturally,she tells her maid to strip as well which,if this were a porn flick,would have led to an excellent 3-way shag-a-thon.But Isolde waits till Tristan is healed while hiding him away in deserted hut,before giving him a taste of Irish "hospitality".Tristan heals and heads home.When he is asked to partake in a tournament to win the Irish King's daughter as a prize for King Mark,our hero is flabbergasted to find that said daughter is none other than Isolde(silly girl didn't tell him who she was,see).So Tristan takes her back to Cornwall,she cries,he pouts and she marries the king.But hormones will be hormones,and before you can say "adultery",Tristan & Isolde are doing the Wild Thing amidst secret rendezvous and snatched moments during banquets.Of course,Isolde,being the dutiful wife she is,also performs her nuptial duties to King Mark at night,which,if this were a porn flick,would make her something of a medieval Jenna Jameson.Later there is betrayal,scheming among the warlords and a final battle with the wicked Irish King all played out very melodramatically.All in all,quite watchable thanks to some breath-taking Celtic scenery,some decent battle-scenes(rendered mild,unfortunately by the infernal PG-13 rating),a great performance by Sophia Myles and Rufus Sewell.