The Chasing iamb

Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder is one of the most satisfying movies I have seen in ages. This movie precedes Joon-Ho's brilliant monster movie Gwoemul and has much of the same cast. Unlike Gwoemul it's set in small-town Korea in the late 80s.

A group of policemen with vastly varying degrees of competence try to track down a serial killer.
Joon-ho has a true gift for the comic but what amazed me is how much of the incongruous seemed completely plausible to me as an Indian. In one sequence, two cops who had been torturing a simpleton to force a confession are seen sitting in front of the television. All three sit side by side watching television, eating vast quantities of food and commenting gleefully about what's on screen.

The tension is beautifully maintained but with the tiniest of touches Joon-Ho shows that its possible to make a movie about sex crimes without being voyeuristic. He also creates the disquieting but compassionate notion that thinking violence is not the same as doing it. Suspect after suspect turns out not to be the killer but several of them do nurture elaborate rape fantasies. In counterpoint, a policeman (one of the few competent ones in the film) is in a high school talking to a pretty young schoolgirl. She is in the school clinic looking for a band-aid to stick on a scratch on her back. When the policeman offers to do it for her, she balks. The policeman tells her, "Feeling shy, why? You are just a child".

 To me this is the moment in which Joon-ho takes this American genre (in which the policeman must have a lecherous moment or two around a precocious piece of jailbait or a sexually active woman thus supposedly creating moral ambiguity about the violence) and returns it to the world with watercress (or possibly kimchi) around it. Take that, you idiots, he seems to be smirking.

It doesn't hurt that it's beautifully shot.

7 am is a barbaric practice. Paying a 1000 rupees to travel 40 km in a matchbox is barbaric. Journalism is barbaric. Tandoori chicken and its variants are barbaric. This land is meant for___ (insert rude local name for community that your mother looks down upon and you only utter in your most private thoughts)

I want to lie at home and squirm in embarrassment as I watch Manhattan again. If that movie did not have the shaming honest face of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), would it have worked at all? I suspect not. It would have only been what that man in the Telugu movie said, "You dance, I glance", a formulation Schopenhauer would not have been ashamed of.


tt

To stay on the subject of porn and good cheer... The Notorious Bettie Page is a wonderful movie. The original Ms Page was a one-of-a-kind creature. In the 1950s she was famous equally for her cheesecake photos as well as for appearing in bondage magazines. In 7 years she appeared in more magazines than Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford together. She did some Broadway plays, was an early Playboy pinup and then disappeared from the scene. In the 70s she somehow became a punk icon. More recently she is the star of some (rather boring) comics.


Bettie Page                                                                      Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page

                 


Very few of the fetish films she did survive today because of a government crackdown (just after which, she disappeared) but to even see one is enough to embrace her goofiness. A goofiness that director Mary Harron and Gretchen Mol brings to a movie version (shot partly in colour and partly in black and white).  I don't like ingenues but Gretchen Mol who plays Bettie Page is the messiah of ingenues. She reclaims girl-next-door. She is the orange juice and sunshine that would make you shed your black lipstick and Malayalee boyfriend with a rock band. She and a completely sweet cast of characters make a surprisingly heartwarming movie. Not that the director of American Psycho can make a sentimental movie but this is It's a Wonderful World for pomo-addicts.

There have been complaints that this movie ignores the seamier side of the porn business. Harron's interpretation is gloriously free of judgement but it is not Disney. I think it would be a mistake to take Bettie's naivete at face value. It is in the texture of the movie (its ironic use of music, its refusal to create an artifical moral resolution) than in the naivete itself that you see Bettie's courage and in turn Gretchen's courage. JM Coetzee asks in an essay on Clarissa what the appropriate response  is for a man to soul-wrenching beauty? In Bettie's case her geeky photographers are awed and gratified at her ease and enjoyment of posing nude. In one crucial scene Bettie (on an impulse) posed nude in a sunny park for a photographer. Many reviewers' response to this scene has been an identical awe and gratitude to Gretchen Mol.

Gretchen Mol has an unusual story too. She started wonderfully. Discovered by a talent scout when she was a hat-check girl she was catapulted into movies. Woody Allen, Spike Lee, named IT girl, then came a Vanity Fair cover where her nipples showed through her dress. This cover is said to have started a round of gossip which basically translated to 'girls who show skin probably can't act'. And that was that for a good long time. After doing a lot of bit roles came this movie. If you watch her in it, you can't imagine anyone else playing Bettie Page.

A sequence from The Notorious Betty Page



Silly Footnote: Throughout the movie I kept thinking that somewhere Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon must be sticking pins into voodoo doll of Mary Harron. Then I read in an interview of Harron that one of the reasons she made the movie was because she was inspired by the experiences of her actress stepmother Catherine Mckinnon. I choked for one minute then realised that this was a completely different person.

A James Bond movie marathon. Can there be anything more wonderful? All the cheesiness, all the corny pick-up lines, the globe-trotting, the discovery that every house has a man who has watched Goldfinger six times... surely nothing can be a better pick-me-up. In my scheme of things, it has been as good as the afternoon two young ladies and I watched (back-to-back) one soft porn-movie, Caligula and When Harry Met Sally. (However I may outvote Bond after watching five versions of Pride and Prejudice back-to-back.)

Some movies do require more stamina from viewers than the others of course. Live and Let Die is so incredibly racist I was not sure whether I wasn't watching a spoof... Undercover Brother Returns perhaps.  Pierce Brosnan, whom I like otherwise, seemed to have been in the most tiresome Bond movies. Sean Connery is positively villainish. I forgot. Bond-marathon-fun includes all the endless speculation about which Bond was better. I have never particularly cared so far but I came screeching to a halt with Daniel Craig.

Brutish, bull-necked, plainly a prole in a dinner-jacket, changing Bond before my very eyes... forcing a Bond movie to have a narrative. Shocking. With the addition of the most beautiful woman in the world, Eva Green, I vote the new Casino Royale the best one so far... of course there are other Bond movies that are simply more fun to watch, because they are more solidly in the B-movie genre. But decades from now, when I have another bad week that can be fixed with a Bond-movie marathon, I will thank Craig for making me join half the human race. The half that has strong feelings about Bond movies, I mean.

Here is Craig making a very different kind of entry.

Love is the Devil

In the final scenes of Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, new Discworld movie moghuls CMOT Dibbler and nephew Soll watch a huge image of a woman (a 50 foot image, to be exact) carry the Librarian (who is an orangutan) up a tower. As they watch the giant woman carrying the ape, they both remark worriedly to each other that for all its spectacular value, something was not quite right about what they were watching.

I've had similiar feelings about most monster movies. It has been difficult to decide which one is a worthier candidate to despise, Jaws , Godzilla, Jurassic Park or that intriguing turkey of a movie, Anaconda. Therefore, I have largely contented myself by not watching them. (King Kong is different because it taps into a bestial, sexual vein in its loopy way).
Last night, quite by accident, I found myself 20 minutes into a monster movie before I had realised it was one. Gwoemul (The Host) is a Korean movie which elegantly lets you know that Hollywood should shut shop and find other pursuits. Gardening, perhaps.

In Gwoemul a mortician in a US Army base in Seoul is ordered to pour toxic chemicals into the Han river. A few years later, fishermen spot it. Later, an acerbic suicide spots it in the river moments before he jumps in. A while later, the monster, inevitably, attacks. Simple-minded, lazy Gang-du is caught up in the attack and his little daughter is one of the people the beast carries away and is seen eating. Seoul is whipped into a panic by the US and by the media about a virus that the monster carries. Since Gang-du had come in contact with the monster he and his family are quarantined. While in quarantine, Gang-du gets a call - from his daughter. For the rest of the movie, Gang-du, his father and siblings try to get the little girl back.

Gwoemul works on many counts. The beast (large, though not Kong-size) conveys both bestial agility and a degree of intelligence that makes it quite possible for you to scream without embarrassment. And no matter how much airtime the beast gets (quite a lot, and in daylight) you rarely have a moment to register that it looks preposterous or even think cynical thoughts about special effects. Too much is happening on screen for any of that. Gwoemul has the basic monster plot and a fabulous, eccentric narrative. Important, interesting, well-developed characters (people you root for fiercely) die, so you wll have actual reason to panic and even weep, rather than wince. And as if this wasn't enough. Joon-ho Bong, the director also displays a deft hand at introducing a great background score, at pure black comedy and at enough US-baiting for North Korea to give an unprecedented stamp of Commie approval to this, the highest-grossing South Korean movie ever. Bong has thoroughly enjoyed himself making this film. Look at the eyes of the American doctor who comes to talk to Gang-du in the last half-hour of the movie and you will know what I mean.

The first half of Atonement is pretty and inclined to warm the cockles of anyone who likes World War II romances or English countryhouse movies. It's a rare filmmaker who gets golden summers wrong. So we have amidst a lounging crowd of siblings, cousins and guests in a mansion, Briony Tallis, highly emotional thirteen-year old who sees what she thinks is her beautiful older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is being attacked by their neighbour Robbie (James McAvoy). He was after all monstrous enough to use her as messenger to deliver an obscene letter to Cecilia.
 
Of course then things go very wrong. Briony's precocious cousin Lola (yes,yes we get the Lolita bit but did Benedict Cumberbatch have to be such a silly villain?) is found raped and unable to say who did it to her. Briony already inclined to think very badly of her erstwhile childhood hero tells the police that she saw Robbie  doing it. Young Robbie may have gone to Cambridge and be Cecilia's brand new lover but he is still the housekeeper's son. No one has any reason to doubt Briony. Cecilia's acid testimony having been discounted Robbie goes to jail and then to war as a common soldier.

Things also go very wrong for the movie. From the point that Robbie goes to jail the movie become patchy and frequently irritating. The young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a child without much of a sense of humour. But much of that happens in the first half unfairly encourages you to laugh at her. Even the sex-in-the-library scene (an idea I am much in favour of) is less inclined to heat than mockery. The grown-up Briony (Romola Garai) seems distressingly moronic and has perhaps even a hint of sex-starved voyeur. Since the movie sets her up this way, it makes it difficult for us to empathise with what she supposedly is --- a young girl suffering for a single error of judgement. The hospital scenes with marching nurses lean towards absurdity. Just as one warms to Briony's courageous handling of a delirious soldier along comes Matron, looking like Morticia Adams.

Then there are the war-in-France scenes. James McAvoy is perhaps the only redeeming factor in this part which is unappealing to even WW2 suckers like me. The rule that the hero of a war movie must have a wise-cracking, silly companion is faithfully maintained. At the Jaipur Lit Fest, Christopher Hampton said that the budget for the scenes in France shrank considerably until they decided to just have the one long beach scene with a thousand extras. This scene packed with the cruel,grimy and the picturesque becomes short-hand for all the pointlessness of war. But by then one is already fed up.  So even Briony 3 (Vanessa Redgrave) making her much-discussed atonement failed to interest. Atonement is a rather odd combination of short-shrift and over-kill.

Cecilia Tallis' green dress is the high point of the first half of Atonement. You may be a little surprised at how much attention you pay to the green dress but perhaps not. Keira Knightley is one of the most beautiful faces in Hollywood and as much as she is impaired by her marionette-like carriage, in repose, she is dazzling.  What will surprise you is how much attention you pay to costumes as Atonement progresses. The nurses' pinafores, the grown-up Briony Tallis's Joan-of-Arc like clothes at Lola's wedding and at her sister's flat, the clothes of the pile of dead orphans found in a woods in France. While watching Atonement, you occasionally feel like you ought to feel a little more but are constantly distracted -- as if attending the funeral of an relative you don't remember at all.

PS No green dress has ever been contemplated so much since Scarlett O'Hara wanted an apple-green, watered-silk ball dress. If you are truly obsessed with the green dress then here is all the dope.

Anukokunda Oka Roju. I have watched it once on cable without subtitles and once sitting at night on the terrace of a building on Marine Drive with a bunch of people, none of whom understood Telugu.  We all enjoyed it enormously. This time it had subtitles but I think mostly we enjoyed the tone and quality of fabulous English spoken in the movie. It was English at its sinuous, South Indian best.

 

The movie was suspenseful, truly funny and even the cheesy songs were mostly tolerable. I wonder what Sunday, its Hindi remake with spectacularly wierd casting will be like.

Alright so I think its unreasonable that a screenplay writer, born a mere four years before me, wrote Stranger than Fiction and has been engaged to Lucy Liu and now to a minor hot blonde from Lost. But what the hell, its an adorable movie and I have liked it even the third time. And I like all his secret little references.

I am a sucker for newspaper movies and this one was well...nice. I was extremely distracted but even with half an eye and half a pointy ear, some scenes stood out. The windmills, the chase under a canopy of dark umbrellas and the heart-breaking interrogation scene.

Hitchcock's minor characters consistently interest me more than the rest of the cast. Perhaps it is just that they have better backchat. The mother in North by Northwest, the sister in Strangers on the Train and I positively love the heroine's father (played by Alastair Sim) in Stage Fright.

I have come a cropper in my Hitchcock viewing. I watched North by Northwest and was rather bored except of course in the cropduster sequence. And Cary Grant's mother. And the visual puns involving Northwest Airlines signage. Far more entertaining was this.

"Alfred Hitchcock's] film is called North by Northwest. I assume that nobody will swear from that fact alone that we have here an allusion to Hamlet's line that he is but mad north-northwest; even considering that Hamlet's line occurs as the players are about to enter and that North by Northwest is notable, even within the oeuvre of a director pervaded by images and thoughts of the theater and of theatricality, for its obsession with the idea of acting; and considering that both the play and the film contain plays-within-the-play in both of which someone is killed, both being constructed to catch the conscience of the one for whose benefit they are put on. But there are plenty of further facts. The film opens with an ageless male identifying himself first of all as a son. He speaks of his efforts to keep the smell of liquor on his breath (that is, evidence of his grown-up pleasures) from the watchful nose of his mother, and he comes to the attention of his enemies because of an unresolved anxiety about getting a message to his mother, whereupon he is taken to a mansion in which his abductor has usurped another man's house and name and has, it turns out, cast his own sister as his wife. (The name, posted at the front of the house, is Townsend, and a town is a thing smaller than a city but larger than a village, or a hamlet.) The abductor orders the son killed by forcing liquid into him. It is perhaps part of the picture that the usurper is eager to get to his dinner guests and that there is too much competitive or forced drinking of liquor. Nor, again, will anyone swear that it is significant that the abductor-usurper's hencemen are a pair of men with funny, if any, names and a single man who stands in a special relationship with the usurper and has a kind of sibling rivalry with the young woman that this son, our hero, will become attracted to and repelled by. These are shadowy matters, and it is too soon to speak of "allusions" or of any other very definite relation to a so-called source. But it seems clear to me that if one were convinced of Hamlet in the background of North by Northwest, say to the extent that one is convinced that Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History is in the background of Hamlet, then one would without a qualm take the name Leonard as a successor to the name Laertes."

Ye gods! Stanley Cavell!

Following a certain hot woman's instructions, I will now write ignorant lines about the movies I am watching.

Last night I watched Lifeboat. Not a slack moment in the 96 minutes and made reportedly on the tiniest film set ever assembled.

A shipwreck's survivors are all chummy and chins-up until they take aboard a German survivor from the U-boat that sank their ship. John Hodiak opposes this vociferously while Tallulah Bankhead and the others argue for his rights as a human being and a prisoner of war. Shouldn't Americans live up to the standards that differentiate their great nation from that of the 'Nazi buzzards'? In a while this question becomes
academic moot since only the German seems to know how to navigate without benefit of a compass. But is he truly taking them on the right course? Caught in a storm they lose their limited supplies too. And so on and so forth. This is not 'thrilling' by any means but is definitely fun to watch. What dates the film is the fact that realism wore white gloves in Hitchcock's time. (Grace Kelly's crazy grating 'refayned' accent in
'Dial M for Murder' made me cheer on her murdering villainous husband in Dial M)  When the people in the lifeboat come apart at the seams, as shipwrecked people apparently do, they do it very quaintly.

I liked two elements in the film very much. Only familiar with Tallulah Bankhead's epigrams ('I've tried men, I've tried women,there's got to be something better.') I was thrilled to bits that to see that she was the real MccCoy. Perfect legs, eyes always pinned at half-mast, treacly voice to call everyone 'darlink' with and fabulous competence. And why Tallulah works beautifully in this ensemble is because Steinbeck's screenplay has provided her the perfect foil. John Hodiak. Thin-lipped, sexy, barechested,  and working off his blue collar contempt at her frills and furs, he  provides as much old-fashioned sexual violence as was possible in a lifeboat in 1940s cinema.

Apparently the German's character was much debated those days with Hitchcock was accused of being too sympathetic. If only!

What is far more interesting was one long shot in which someone fulminates about 'how you take in people and you are kind to them and then they betray you!' During  the entire length of this self-righteous speech, Hitchcock keeps the camera focused on a melancholy Canada Lee, the black sailor, (who is
made waiter, naive Christian, flute-player and pickpocket at various points in the film). A comment on racism? A dig at Canada Lee who refused to play silly black man and made Hitchcock change his
dialogues in the film ? Or a comment on the MccCarthy witchhunt that had accused Canada Lee of being a Communist the previous year?

 I don't know which one it was.  A  but a couple of years later, Canada Lee was officially blacklisted. He died, broken hearted, at the age of 45. Steinbeck himself wanted his credits removed from the film
because of Hitchcock's treatment of Lee's character.




In that September off
Isle aux Morts
the desultory sea
grew more so through the night

and made one think of
tawny ports,
as aspen tremblin'
in tomorrow's thorough light
and of Tallulah Bankhead
and Canada Lee
somewhere far-off, peaceful, sleeping
and done with acting
(Tragically Hip, Dire Wolf)

The world ought to be divided into two groups. People who have watched the Monty Python series, who want everyone else to watch it and fall in love  AND people who are sidling out of the room murmuring something about having to call their mothers. No I don't think Monty Python is particularly funny. All these years I had been right to pretend to be deaf to the Python praise of every geek I have ever dated.  I do think Terry Gilliams' animation is still fresh and fascinating.

I should not blame Python fans though. I am quite likely to go into paroxysms of pleasure while quoting reels of dialogue from Sreenivasan's films or from the Cochin Kalabhavan sketches of the late 80s and early 90s. A plague on Malayalee men and their ability to make a girl laugh.

No, the world ought to be divided into two groups. People who think that anything is potentially funny (never mind that you choose not to laugh out of politeness or compassion or a desire to keep your head attached to your body) and people who don't. I have a litmus test for this now. It's called the 'Do you know what happened to my saree in Neeti Bagh last winter?' story.  I fantasise about strangling people who fail the test.

Surabhi Sharma's feature length documentary film Jahaji Music is a record of the evolution of chutney music in the Caribbean.

From the mid-nineteenth century Indian labourers arrived in the Caribbean on boats, bringing a few belongings and their music, the beginnings of a remarkable cultural practice. More than 150 years later musician Remo Fernandes travels to the Islands to explore collaborations and create new work.

Jahaji Music is a record of a difficult, if unusual and complex, musical journey. It is an attempt to make meaning of aspects of contemporary culture in Trinidad and Jamaica, even as we witness the nature and possibilities of artistic collaboration. The film endeavours, through it all, to weave a story of memory, identity and creativity.

Duration: 1 hour 52 minutes.

Date: August 9, 2007

Venue for Screening: India International Centre (IIC) Auditorium, 40 Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi 110 003, Tel: 011 24619431

Time : 6.30 pm