It's raining movies out here

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Behold once again how Ravi aka Crudo Cruox's avarice towers over my significantly more modest haul. Also, what appears to be a deliberate attempt to strain poor Rajesh Balakrishnan's limbs with the load of multiple copies of the same album (see top)

The Tower of Babel in close-up:

Modest haul in close-up (sorry for the flash but on my ancient camera I can't seem to get an non-blurry pic in the evening without using it):

Modest haul in more detail below:

1. I love me my Hammer horror and other thingies. Batman's a digibook and Blade Runner's the 5-disc (3BD + 2DVD) Complete Collector's set.

2. The name's Bond, James Bond.

3. The Criterions - including the most monstrous Criterion release of all time

4. Godzilla in full glory

5. And these came in today from Amazon UK. Return... is a Steelbook loaded with extras. Like I said, it's raining movies.

Freefall - 360

His first and foremost urge was to violently throw up; it was all so delirious and confusing it took him some time to deduce what had happened. When it finally struck, he was overcome by another wave of nausea. He'd gotten what he'd just wished for – he now had 360° vision.

His mind whirled in rage and terror at this new development. It wasn't even as if it was something he had repeatedly prayed for or craved with any consuming fervor, just a thought that had occurred to him as he was walking along the deserted beach. Even though he'd been to this place earlier, he had been once again captivated by its beauty: the wind, the sky the currents white and steel gray tirelessly throwing themselves upon the sands. There was such an immenseness to the scene, his eyes widened in greedy appreciation, wanting to taking in more and more and still more...

As he placed a tentative foot fresh spasms of dread drove through. With such an all-encompassing vision he had no perspective. He could not say what lay before and what was behind him. Distance became impossible to judge. But it was infinitely worse when he inclined his head. In one sweeping move he was looking at both earth and sky, and it felt as though he was being hurled between the two. As a child it had been one of his favorite pastimes to go up to the terrace of his house, lie flat on the floor eyes shut tight, then suddenly open them. At that instant it would seem to him that he was falling toward the sky, like it was some immense ocean. It was a sensation both terrifying and exhilarating. Now he worked desperately to keep his head straight so he would only have to deal with the horrors of the horizontal plane.

He could also see himself from both sides, though in his mind he could not tell front and back. How had this happened? Had he sprouted an extra pair of eyes at the back (and why always a pair), or had his own expanded out of their sockets to cover his entire head. The latter option so disgusted him he felt no urge to ascertain the truth.

It was when it began to rain that he realized the other thing. In all this while he had not once blinked. He willed himself to, concentratedly, but almost like it was some inverted blindness, he could not shut out his horrifically panoramic vision. The splashes of rain blurred and filmed over like water drops against a windshield, and he could not bring himself to wipe or shield what had become of his eyes. Each splatter sent ripples and distortions across the whole of his sight. Then he could bear it no longer and broke into a run.

For a spell he didn't perceive where he was headed, as he madly dashed, stumbling and struggling. It was ironically the chill of the water rocking against his legs that told him where he was. It had been wet weather all through, and the sea was suffused with a barely controlled fury. He tried moving back to shore, but his confusion by now was so complete he could do no more than to helplessly watch as the current dragged him further away. Floating on the back of mad foam-flecked waves his new-found eyes took in both wild sea and stormy sky and he felt as if he were suspended between two infinite depths. He was in freefall.

King Solomon's Slaughter

Call me a politically-correct wuss, but some 50 pages into King Solomon's Mines by Rider Haggard, I'm more than a little horrified by what constitutes heroic adventure here. A trio of white men lead a band of African natives to look for the brother of one of the white men who was last heard of making his way towards the mythical mines. In the course of this expedition, they enter wild country and their first reaction is "Oh look, animals. Let's shoot them all. This brother hunting mission can wait." And it's not like they shoot what they can eat. Not even close. After shooting a giraffe, the 3 white men out of a total party of 10 shoot down 8 full grown elephants from a herd. That's nearly one elephant per man. And the rest of the herd gets to escape only because these trigger happy blokes got tired of chasing after them. Apart from these 8, there's a badly wounded bull elephant who goes on a rampage, finally running blind toward the white man who shot him in the first place. Just when you think that some redemption is at hand, it's not he who dies but a poor native who steps forth to hurl a lance at the beast to save his "I'll shoot me down a brace of elephants" master.

I'm wondering if I should go ahead with this.

Anyway, the book in question being out of copyright, I can safely paste the text that offended me:

Presently we caught sight of the herd, which numbered, as Ventvögel had said, between twenty and thirty, standing in a hollow, having finished their morning meal, and flapping their great ears. It was a splendid sight, for they were only about two hundred yards from us. Taking a handful of dry grass, I threw it into the air to see how the wind was; for if once they winded us I knew they would be off before we could get a shot. Finding that, if anything, it blew from the elephants to us, we crept on stealthily, and thanks to the cover managed to get within forty yards or so of the great brutes. Just in front of us, and broadside on, stood three splendid bulls, one of them with enormous tusks. I whispered to the others that I would take the middle one; Sir Henry covering the elephant to the left, and Good the bull with the big tusks.

"Now," I whispered.

Boom! boom! boom! went the three heavy rifles, and down came Sir Henry's elephant dead as a hammer, shot right through the heart. Mine fell on to its knees and I thought that he was going to die, but in another moment he was up and off, tearing along straight past me. As he went I gave him the second barrel in the ribs, and this brought him down in good earnest. Hastily slipping in two fresh cartridges I ran close up to him, and a ball through the brain put an end to the poor brute's struggles. Then I turned to see how Good had fared with the big bull, which I had heard screaming with rage and pain as I gave mine its quietus. On reaching the captain I found him in a great state of excitement. It appeared that on receiving the bullet the bull had turned and come straight for his assailant, who had barely time to get out of his way, and then charged on blindly past him, in the direction of our encampment. Meanwhile the herd had crashed off in wild alarm in the other direction.

For awhile we debated whether to go after the wounded bull or to follow the herd, and finally deciding for the latter alternative, departed, thinking that we had seen the last of those big tusks. I have often wished since that we had. It was easy work to follow the elephants, for they had left a trail like a carriage road behind them, crushing down the thick bush in their furious flight as though it were tambouki grass.

But to come up with them was another matter, and we had struggled on under the broiling sun for over two hours before we found them. With the exception of one bull, they were standing together, and I could see, from their unquiet way and the manner in which they kept lifting their trunks to test the air, that they were on the look-out for mischief. The solitary bull stood fifty yards or so to this side of the herd, over which he was evidently keeping sentry, and about sixty yards from us. Thinking that he would see or wind us, and that it would probably start them off again if we tried to get nearer, especially as the ground was rather open, we all aimed at this bull, and at my whispered word, we fired. The three shots took effect, and down he went dead. Again the herd started, but unfortunately for them about a hundred yards further on was a nullah, or dried-out water track, with steep banks, a place very much resembling the one where the Prince Imperial was killed in Zululand. Into this the elephants plunged, and when we reached the edge we found them struggling in wild confusion to get up the other bank, filling the air with their screams, and trumpeting as they pushed one another aside in their selfish panic, just like so many human beings. Now was our opportunity, and firing away as quickly as we could load, we killed five of the poor beasts, and no doubt should have bagged the whole herd, had they not suddenly given up their attempts to climb the bank and rushed headlong down the nullah. We were too tired to follow them, and perhaps also a little sick of slaughter, eight elephants being a pretty good bag for one day.

The Cabin and The Rowdy

Went town-side today to catch a couple of films with pals:

Cabin in The Woods was up first. Thankfully I had kept away from the internet buzz about the film, not even visiting the IMDB page before seeing it, because the entertainment value of the film primarily depends upon you wondering what's going to happen next. It works decently enough as a meta-fiction spoof on the 80's haunted house / slasher genre, specifically referencing Evil Dead, Hellraiser and their ilk. It's a geekboy idea that will not stand up to any close scrutiny, being as full of absurdity and contrivance as the horror film conventions it aims to cock a snook at, but first viewing goes pretty smoothly and some moments ahead into the film, which I shall refrain from spoiling, have a lot of heh-heh-heh coolness value for splatter-horror fans.

We were all pretty chuffed with the film, and after that proceeded to a decent if not entirely great lunch at the Indigo Deli. The chilled melon soup was not chilled enough and on the sweet side, not to my liking. Pastrami and Cheese sandwich was alright, though not juicy the way I would have preferred (isn't that how a freshly prepared Deli sandwich should be?). Passion fruit sorbet for dessert was quite lovely, though, and at half the day gone we were generally at peace with the world.

And then came Rowdy Rathore. We walked out at the Intermission, what a waste of time. Action-packed my bleeding ass, the first action scene of any note comes just before the interval, more than an hour into the film and, without going into any details for fear of losing my sanity over the remembrance, everything before that is soul-suckingly inane filler. And the action scene was nowhere worth it, no imagination in the choreography. One would have thought that with Akshay Kumar being a skilled action hero who can do many of his own stunts, we would see some fairly spectacular stuff, but no, it's just haphazardly put together yawn material. It's amazing how once you apply terms like mass and masala to a film, it need not aspire to any notions of pace or grip in the screenplay. Dabangg was a recent film that got the masala formula perfectly with a pacy script, punchy dialog and badass fight scenes. This one, like the numerous Dabangg clones already out or in the making, randomly flings shit at the wall hoping something will stick.

Ugetsu Monogatari + Oyu-Sama [dir. Kenji Mizoguchi]

I like Ugetsu a great deal, although the other Mizoguchi film I've seen, Sansho The Bailiff, was very tedious for me. The film can be described as a parable on the dangers of avarice, but that would make it sound very moralistic and boring. It's a drama mixed with supernatural elements and very nicely done at that. Mizoguchi has an eye for visuals and splicing them together through very deft editing - An important scene of a boat voyage over a lake forms a very memorable part of the film.

The blu-ray from Eureka's Masters of Cinema series is in most part a quality high-definition presentation of the film. Fine detail is evident throughout and contrast is balanced, giving a film-like quality to the image. Unfortunately there is a fair deal of print damage inherent to the source, with some instances so severe it looks like the actors walked into a downpour or stood under a very leaky roof. These moments don't last long but they're not easily ignored. It would have been nice if they could have been mitigated but that again brings the risk of erasing detail from the image, so in retrospect it's a fair tradeoff. The music of the film is very nicely represented in the audio. Apart from a nice booklet which bears some rather garish poster art and contains the original short stories on which Ugetsu is based, the disc houses an interesting video discussion of the film with critic Tony Rayns. The real bonus is the inclusion of another Mizoguchi film, Oyu-Sama. I'll update this post with my impressions of that once I actually see it.

Update:
 There would be those that will try to convince you that Oyu-Sama is a minor gem from a master film-maker. Rubbish, it's nothing of the sort. It's a typical Rajashri Productions melodrama like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, but without the manically cheery song and dance sequences* and Laxmikant Berde, and I'm not sure it's any better for it. At a girl-seeing ceremony, a young man falls for her older sister Oyu. The hitch is that the older sister's a widow with child, and bound to her orthodox in-laws' home. The girl Oshizu has the absurd idea that she and the groom can have a "pretend" marriage while he "makes her older sister happy". In Meiji-era Japan, they apparently do this by taking walks at hot spring resorts and playing the sort of childish games that in adults take on a horrifying tone. Obviously, this leads to a situation where everyone's happiness gets raped, which in old Japanese movies means many scenes where characters face away from each other and bow their heads down to cry, while you scan the screen trying to find something interesting in the decor to alleviate your misery on having to sit through this tripe. Bleh.




*The emphasis is on cheery, there are a couple of ritualized musical performances with some spiffy stringed instrument playing and the quavering eerie vocals typical to the style of the time.

Rocket Singh - Death of A Salesman

...or something like that. Saw this one today. It's not a great movie by any stretch and the running time at 2.5 hours is way, way, way beyond breaking point, but it's the only Ranbir Kapoor film I've seen so far that I could sit through without wanting to repeatedly punch him in the face, and that's something. Perhaps it has to do with his ugly mug being mostly hidden behind the Sardarji getup. Also his demeanor is diffident rather than the usual boorish, which makes him almost affable. It's also nice to see a film pay attention to actors other than the matinee stars and there are some decent performances on show here (Gauhar Khan as the ignored office girl is very good and Prem Chopra does a wonderfully restrained act as the grandpa). But there are no really brilliant scenes or layered characters, only some amusing digs at the cutthroat sales industry.

This is a film that some people will consider "very good for a Hindi film" because it actually tries to adhere to the plot, the drama is dialed down and there aren't any elaborate song and dance sequences. Fine, except that the film is not hugely exciting beyond that. It's nowhere as absurdly fun as a 99 or a Tere Bin Laden, and I wasn't interested in it's characters the way I was for the ones in Khosla ka Ghosla or Oye Lucky. But like I said, I could actually sit through (spread over two sittings, but still) a film with large swathes of Ranbir Kapoor in it, so there must be something good about it.

Movies, movies...

Over the recent years, Marathi cinema, has put up some interesting examples of middle of the road sensible cinema, like Gabhricha Paus, Jogwaa, Valu, Harishchandrachi Factory, Deool etc. Khel Mandala [Viju Mane]...is not one of them. The plot has Dasu, a hereditary puppeteer trying to make a living in big bad Mumbai, finding an abandoned child that is blind and deaf/mute. He raises her in expected Samaritan fashion, and uses her as part of his act, controlling her moments by strings like a puppet. You would imagine that a story like this would involve some melodrama and tear-jerking and it wasn't that I walked into it blind-folded, but the film, at least whatever I saw of it, has little other than cliché and crudely wrought sentiment. Oh yes, I walked out of it halfway. I didn't expect to, I even spent an ill-advised hundred bucks on samosas and coffee at the interval mark, but when early on in the second half Dasu starts having romance song fantasies about the journalist girl who appears sympathetic to his cause, I had an undeniable feeling of having better things to do with my time than sit through this claptrap. Till that point the film was like Mehmood's Kunwara Baap, without the bizarreness that gave its predecessor a morbid curiosity value. I predict the following things to happen later in the film:

1. Dasu gets complete KLPD over his imagined romance, and the journalist pairs up with her rival who runs competing stories about Dasu's “exploitation” of the child to steal her thunder
2. The handicapped child is adopted by the rich childless housewife that bonds with her.
3. Dasu dies of cancer / in a riot in protracted dialog-spewing fashion.

In case any of you see it in full, let me know by how much I miss the mark.

The Avengers [Joss Whedon] last night was pretty much what I expected it to be, a watchable disposable popcorn film (though I didn't have any popcorn). The story is ass, and you have to “marvel” at the need to go through three origin films to culminate in something that essentially comes from a randomized plot generator machine. What mainly works in the film's favor is Joss Whedon's penchant for witty dialog and character interplay – this ain't quite Firefly but it's a decent diversion. The most pleasant surprise comes from Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / The Hulk. What Ruffalo / Whedon achieve here is make Banner interesting enough that you're not just waiting for him to go big and green. I didn't care for Tom Hiddleston's Loki in the Thor film and I don't particularly care for him as the main adversary here – he has too much of a mousy clerk air to really fill the boots of a mischievous God. After a shaky and schizophrenic first third, the dialog and action pick up sufficiently for the film to serve its purpose. The climax is a lot of computer generated imagery and stuntwork put together. I'm sure a lot of skill and hard work went into it but I'm not blown away mainly because the film rarely gives a sense of its lead characters being in any real danger. A classic adventure film, predictability notwithstanding, will attempt to give you some *gulp* moments in its good v/s evil battles. Here, no one seems to be breaking much of a sweat, they're so busy being cool. Anyway, if you like action-oriented comic book movies, you'll definitely find something to like here, just don't expect to find the Holy Grail.

Saw Singham [Rohit Shetty] today with my mum. Having heard so much about the visual quality of the blu-ray I really, really wanted to like this film – if it had been anywhere as entertaining like Dabangg was, I would have definitely bought the BD. But that was not the case. While both these films fit squarely in the masala movie bracket, the difference is that Dabangg took care to see that the script was tight and constantly entertaining – the quirky father-son / brother relation, the attitude of the lead characters, punchy dialog, good pace and humor etc. In Singham everything between the fight scenes drags tremendously. Ajay Devgan (or Devgn or whatever the hell he wants to call himself) has a chiseled physique and he may be better at action but his persona is so dour I don't feel any liking for his character, and in a film like this that's a fatal flaw. Prakash Raj does his usual campy act and he's good but this same role was done with more humor and chutzpah in Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap. Looks like I won't be buying the BD because I can't imagine wanting to see this film ever again.