Desicritics Author: Cine Cynic

A Reviewer's Dilemma

Cine Cynic — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:06:41 EDT

While critics often garner our respect for their insightful analysis and interpretations of works of art, reviewers have their share of distress while reviewing. Unlike critics, reviewers do not have much liberty in choosing the books, movies, or albums. Reviewing something which they feel strongly about (especially negatively) is when reviewers may tend to get into trouble.

Jeevi of IdleBrain.com is the most popular Telugu movie reviewer on the Internet. He used to review almost every single movie, straight or dubbed, immediately after its release. A couple of years ago, he skipped reviewing a big-budget movie called Bangaram. The movie turned out to be the worst movie in hero Pawan Kalyan's career and the grapevine was ripe with speculation that Jeevi might not have written the review only because it would've sounded a death knell to the movie's meagre chances.

Earlier this year, Rediff's Raja Sen revealed the climax of Race in his review, and after some controversy and debate about whether a review can or can not reveal the ending of a movie, half-heartedly apologized to the film-makers while justifying his actions.

Around the same time, Maxim's David Peisner gave a 2.5/5 star review to the Black Crowes album Warpaint without actually listening to it. It blew into a high-voltage drama that ended with Maxim's president releasing an official apology.

These instances, and perhaps most others which have created controversies, originated from a reviewer's strong feelings, which he or she is entitled to have. The reviewer may find a movie god-awful and might feel dutiful to advise the readers against watching it. The trouble comes when the god-awfulness ebbs over the objectivity. And even Roger Ebert wasn't immune to it.

Last week, Ebert gave a 1 star review to an indie Tru Loved after watching only eight minutes of the 102-minute movie! He made a full disclosure in the review itself, though that might not usually be enough to avert a controversy, especially for a reviewer of Ebert's stature.

But there isn't much controversy over it. His actions in the aftermath have been truly exemplary. Being the honest and wise man he is, he poured out his thoughts into his widely-read journal. He listened to the reader's comments, pondered even more, admitted his guilt of affection for his prose, watched the whole movie this time, and reviewed it again. (The 1 star remains.) The man who perhaps has contributed more to film criticism than any other single individual showed the path, that more than a review or a movie or readers, it is the plain truth that deserves priority.

However, this doesn't end the debate nor the dilemma. Can a reviewer skip a review to help his friend-filmmaker? Can a reviewer reveal a climax? Can a reviewer walk out of a movie and still review it? If yes, can he review it watching just the promos? If no, where is the tipping point, the time after which it may be allowed?

It won't be futile for every reviewer to face these questions, and more importantly to answer it in his or her own manner.

Movie Review: Happy Days - Romanticizing College Life

Cine Cynic — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:52:42 EDT

Happy Days is the only Telugu hit in over a year. The people involved with the movie are still basking in its success, giving interviews and appearing in various TV shows. In an interview before the release of Happy Days, its director Sekhar Kammula said that he was struck by the absence of a genuine Telugu college film in the last decade. Surprise, because for over eight years all the South Indian film industries have been churning out teenage love stories, usually set against a college backdrop. It all started with Teja's Chitram and K Vijaya Bhaskar's Nuvve Kavali becoming trend-setters in 2000.

People hoped that Sekhar meant something more than a love story by a college film. More so because he decided to "romanticize college life" according to that interview. Though mistaken as a classic director, Sekhar is laudable for the sensitivity with which he handles his characters. Only four movies old, he has carved for himself a distinct name especially among film critics.

Sadly, his attempt to romanticize resulted in romance almost exclusively. The only major differences are that most of the scenes of the movie are set in an engineering college and instead of one pair there are four pairs here. Those who've embraced the movie have argued over and again about the inevitability. "Do you want to simply see students attending classes or fighting over college politics?" they asked.

Do they have a point? Are romance and politics the only noteworthy features of college life?

I tried to look back into my own college life. Unless one counted discussing the tumultous love lives of friends of friends and giving word of mouth publicity to acquaintances who contested in elections, there was neither romance nor politics in my college life. What else then?

Freedom. To many if not most students, freedom is the condition that intoxicates them time after time. Depending on the oft-changing priorities, the young minds indulge in various activities. This, in fact, continues long after college days until people somehow "settle down".

Some try out a wide range of hobbies, zero in on one of them, and pursue it with a rejuvenated passion. Some network incredibly and devote a major part of their time to arranging college festivals. Some get addicted, say to the Internet, and play truant stretching the rope till it snaps. Some, to their own surprise, discover a love for their career paths which had been initially chosen under parental and/or peer pressure. Some do a little of everything. Everybody invariably spends time in what are called "fart sessions" to varying degrees. The pleasurable activity not only binds new bonds, but also shapes perceptions about topics which otherwise would have not occupied any space in their minds.

Underlying these umpteen activities is a gestalt of confusion and uncertainity that resurfaces every now and then and sharply towards the end of the phase. Have I wasted all these years? Should I have done it differently? Am I good enough to survive the harsh future? Will I make it? It may take years for them to appreciate that they've come out wiser, having unconsciously learnt lessons that serve a lifetime.

These are all aspects of college life which it is possible to sketch using stereotypical characters. And they are as interesting as romance or politics for a movie to be made about.

Sekhar too in this movie used stereotypes: the confused boy, the studious boy, the nerd, the playboy, the tomboy. It is just that all of them had their first loves as their major complications. Another great opportunity wasted.

To Leave or Not To Leave

Cine Cynic — Tue, 7 Oct 2008 14:37:45 EDT

A year and a half ago, particularly inauspicious planetary positions conflicting with my time of birth have made me blurt out "Pune", in a choice of destination between Chennai and Pune. I should have stuck with my old and old-fashioned Tamil da's and dei's. Today, when a PMC bus conductor gives me a ticket, it becomes all the more painfully clear.

My grandma used to tell me in my childhood that nobody can cheat an educated man. She remains unhappy of not having "higher education", and I figure she will be unhappier if I told her that it didn't matter. I have what she considers "higher education" and am cheated daily by those who don't have them.

I fell in love with Pune when I reached here: the slightly sweet cuisine in the over-crowded restaurants, the vibrant art scene reverberating in the newspaper supplements, the trekking destinations all of which seem the same, the coldness of winters that forced new jerkins against my body, and the mysterious women wearing colorful masks outdoors.

I forgave the auto-driver who threatened me with dire consequences, the Pune drivers who have what is called "traffic nonsense", the pothole-ridden road which gave me my worst accident making me bed-ridden for months, and started calling the apartment I live in "home".

When I see the bus-ticket with Marathi letters and numerals, I'm reminded of my foreignness. The conductor doesn't reply to my enquiry about the ticket's cost, nor does he return change. I love the auto-drivers now, especially the eight-seater guys. Not only do I get a seat, free banter in Marathi or Hindi, and preferential stops, I also have an idea how much the journey is going to cost.

Not so with the buses. Yesterday it was six rupees, the day before only three. On most days, it is five. Today was a particularly bad day, so ten. I once asked a conductor about these rates, and he assured me that the rates were changed only that morning and suggested I walk towards the front, because my journey is only two bus-stops long. Who am I to argue that? He is in that line of business and is the most-informed.

You might wonder whether I don't have problems worse than PMC buses. Until recently, PMC harrassed residents in my area in the name of laying roads for the Commonwealth Youth Games. This lasted nine months. All they did was dig them, let people fall in this pothole and that, and finally fill them up with cement or tar, whatever they could lay their hands on. I hope they didn't bury anybody in the potholes.

Then there is MSEB. We have no power for hours, sometimes half-days at a stretch. First, they blamed rains. Then, the roads. Now, it varies from the price of the power to the absence of engineers. However, we now have power failures only for a couple of hours a day. Thank you, MSEB.

Had this been any other city, I would have filed complaints in the respective departments and written publishable rubbish to the newspaper editors. I know that might not be of much use, but it has the advantage of assuring me that I've done my duty. In Pune, thanks to a gentleman called Raj Thackeray, I keep mum and inaudibly mumble desperate nothings. It has been months since he and his sena have chased out thousands of blue-collared workers from the city. But I'm constantly reminded that I could be next, along with the other south Indian "immigrants" making a living here.

I am thankful for the feeling of a second-class citizen; there is a chance I might not have experienced that feeling in any other Indian city. The new city commissioner is especially strict, what with his first priority being to remove the masks off the women's faces. He wants as uniform tans as possible.

Now I must think if I should shift to Chennai, or even better, Hyderabad.

DVD Review: Remember the Titans

Cine Cynic — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:39:12 EDT

"Based on a true story" is one note that tunes our minds to suspend disbelief more willingly than we normally would. We have come to accept that truth is stranger than fiction, at least when books are written or movies made about them. As an outsider from a different place and time, I have no idea how true Boaz Yakin's Remember the Titans remains to the original events. The reality may have been harsher, definitely less cheesier.

In 1971, Alexandria, Virginia, blacks and whites still referred each other as "they" in public and worse indoors. It was easy to distrust a fellow human based on his or her appearance. A new court order, to everybody's dislike, forcefully desegregates the T.C. Williams High School. I like the movie already. There are wonderful movies like Paul Haggis' Crash, but they are set in a period where racism has already been acknowledged as incorrect, at least politically, unlike here.

Herman Boone (Denzel Washington), a black, is hired as head coach for the school's football team to replace Bill Yoast (Will Patton). The onus is on him to show what a coach, black or white, is to his team and the town. One "mistake" might get him fired; it had happened before. Yoast doesn't want to play second fiddle, but reluctantly complies to overlook the future of the white football team that was under him. Two football coaches and two teams. One black, one white each. To win as one team is their goal. The team comes together by the end of the camp, but there are more conflicts, some of them appearing only after a previous one had been overcome and with a potential to erase their previous achievements.

What is fascinating to see is not how Boone inspires and bonds the team, nor how Yoast sacrifices his cherished dream for the sake of the greater good. The young, adrenaline-filled players quickly realize that they are on the brink of changing history. They learn what it is to be human, "to trust the soul of a man rather than the looks of him." Here is where Remember the Titans succeeds in giving us hope. Gerry Bertier, the captain of the team, e.g., willingly loses his girlfriend, his old best friend, his mom, and his community to stand up for his newly-learnt principles. He wins them all back again, and it is not very surprising.

People distrust another race only because of a misplaced fear of the unknown, because of how they have been brought up. Another wonderful example is Sheryl Yoast, the assistant coach's nine and a half years old daughter. She is the first to change, from telling Boone that "the coach is busy" to telling the players, "Y'all are acting like a bunch of sissies!" She does what the adults she looks up to do. Hayden Panettiere steals every scene she is in with this character.

At the end of the movie, I am the little man jumping out of his seat clapping. I rate it above Shimit Amin's Chak De! India. With very well-crafted characters in a formulaic genre, this movie deals with a greater issue that cripples mankind to this day.

Remember the Titans was released eight years before today.

Taare Zameen Par - Is Every Child Special?

Cine Cynic — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:28:54 EDT

Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par is a wonderful movie, but for its tagline. "Every child is special," has now become part of the Used-Taglines-List which has been growing with each movie. I will wait for the day when our film-makers no longer feel compelled to contribute to the list.

If you think about it, Taare Zamee Par is about a special child in various senses of the term. Dyslexia is Ishaan Awasthi's curse and also his gift (if we go by the Davis Dyslexia Association International). Ishaan's gift, in a more direct sense, is painting. That gift makes him prodigious, not just special. The movie proves the specialty of that child to the rest of the world, not just to his parents.

A movie that fits this movie's tagline is yet to be made. That movie would be about a normal child without disabilities nor special talents, a child who is not specially abled either in the literal or in the euphemistic sense, and if things need to be made worse, is plain mediocre. But then, how will it really work? It perhaps won't.

"Every child is special," is a trite remark that we are all obliged to believe. It has been so often used, without meaning it, that we don't stop to think if it's true, nor to think if we believe in it. Even if someone stops to think, they are haunted by guilt and fear that proving it, justifying it, rationalizing it, or even questioning it may be heretic.

There is a proverb in Telugu: kAki pilla kAkiki muddu. A baby crow is special to the crow. Not to every or most or many crows, but to the parent crow. Children are special to their parents. To the rest of the world in most cases, especially to the parents of other children, they are simply other children.

That's alright. Every child need not be special to everybody; adults are not. Though it would be nice to have more, any person needs just one other person to make them feel special.

DVD Review: Taare Zameen Par

Cine Cynic — Sat, 9 Aug 2008 13:11:13 EDT

The DVD of Aamir Khan's Taare Zamee Par hit the Indian stores recently. Aamir wrote in his blog that Walt Disney, which bought the distribution rights in U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada, will however take another three more months to release in these countries.

In school, I had a classmate who could never read without making funny mistakes. He drew pencil sketches and painted better than anybody else in the class. None of the students and teachers were mean to him. I confess, however, to have laughed at him during most reading sessions along with other students. I now wonder whether he was dyslexic. Dyslexia, the inability to learn to read, is surprisingly common and does often go undiagnosed.

Ishaan Awasthi is an eight-year-old boy with a vivid and peculiar imagination, and with a "crippling" disability to learn in the traditional manner. This disability—which some of the audience might guess as a textbook case of dyslexia—alienates, torments, punishes, frustrates and ultimately pushes the young soul towards suicide.

This takes place in a gradual progression over a period of 150 minutes and is something that we won't complain about. How the boy gets rescued and his happiness restored forms the rest of the story. Filled with vibrant colors and well-used CGI, Taare Zameen Par is a movie that keeps our hearts heavy even days after watching it.

Darsheel Safary has a potential to become a great actor. Apart from pulling off difficult scenes like holding back tears from spilling out of his brimming eyes, it is his understanding of Ishaan's character that is most commendable. Sachet Engineer as Dada is good too. A big brother who is protective, supportive, but mostly helpless owing to his own young age is a very realistic and well-played character.

Personally, having a soft corner for mother-child relationships, Tisca Chopra made a special impression. She provides solid support to the movie as Maya, Ishaan's mother, making us feel the plight of every loving but concerned mother, without going overboard. Darsheel and Tisca were able to extract copious amounts of water from my eyes in every scene they missed each other (which is the entire second half).

Aamir Khan donned the hats of director and Ishaan's god-sent teacher Ram Shankar Nikumbh. While directing, he was able to use his own experience as an actor to milk out memorable performances from the cast. I only wish that someone else played Nikumbh. However well Aamir might have acted, I could sense the undeniable presence of a star power, especially glaring itself through the hip costumes. An actor without such star presence, who could look more like a teacher, would have filled us with hope that there are teachers in our schools who care.

Full credit goes to Amol Gupte and Deepa Bhatia. It is their brainchild, their labor of love. The couple shared the roles of writer, creative director, researcher and editor.

The movie has its cheesy elements but is still very original, starting with its theme concerning a dyslexic child. It succeeds on a very important level in that it makes us think, not just feel nostalgic. My only complaint is the movie's tagline, but let us take that next week.

Indian Movies - Very Much Without Verisimilitude

Cine Cynic — Sun, 3 Aug 2008 11:52:03 EDT

Last week, I pondered about the director's need to research about a subject that is an important aspect of his or her movie. Extending that thought process, I feel that verisimilitude is a quality that lacks in most of our movies.

Everyone is doing a good job with railway stations. But take a police station, for example. I have only had the opportunity to see them from outside so far, but the friends who have been inside assure me that they are nothing like what they show in our movies. Walls are not painted in red on the lower half, and white/off-white above. Cells are not always visible from the first room where most of the cops sit.

This was perhaps true about stations in the olden days (pre-Independence?). The sets in our studios erected decades back may have been renovated and repainted but not rethought about. Today's stations are usually dilapidated independent houses which have been furnished to suit a work environment for cops. I must say that Bollywood is doing a good job here, considering the sets in the multitude of cop tales being produced. Telugu film industry remains far behind and blissfully ignorant.

And what about the jobs? Novelists and short-story writers take pains to glean tidbits and jargon about various jobs, especially the jobs of their protagonists. Arthur Hailey was hailed for taking years for each novel, and oft-quoted as an epitome for researching.

Film makers, however, are exploiting the 20% rule to satisfy themselves and the audience. The 20% rule, say in animation, suggests developers to ignore 80% of a fast-paced action and to concentrate on the take off and landing of the animation. Like in a sequence where Tom chases Jerry. The chase itself is shown as a blur but the initial and final microseconds are crystal clear.

I recently watched a nondescript movie where the hero repairs a car that broke down. We have all seen it a number of times. The camera shows a closeup of the hands, then a closeup of the heroine waiting, then a longer shot of the sweaty hero collapsing the bonnet, and finally a closeup of getting some water to wash his greasy hands. The entire activity is not glossed over because it is a trivial issue; it is glossed over because our film makers aren't patient enough to clearly define that car problem and find out (theoretically) its solution.

When I learned driving, my driving school skipped the theory class where I was to have learned changing tires, pouring water in the carburetor, and making minor repairs. I always wish one of our movies imparted a little such knowledge.

Showing details about the above activity would make a greater impact when the character has a job of a car mechanic or, umph, engineer. People among the audience who really have that job feel proud and thankful for showing a snippet of their everyday lives, and the remaining who are in obscurity have an 'aha' moment.

Today we take for granted the omniscience of our protagonists whether in driving and fixing vehicles, or wielding and defusing weapons. The conflict, if any, faced by the protagonist no longer carries that high tension among us had we known that the protagonist is like one of us, without all the knowledge about the universe.

Verisimilitude is not an end in itself, rather a means to increase our belief and tension in the story.