jive: (Slang) deceptive, exaggerated, or meaningless talk: "Don't give me any of that jive!"
Mostly movie reviews and cinema related.
Do visit Mahabore's Mumblings at http://mahabore.wordpress.com for my non-movie related writing.
By itself, the entire plot and story of Babel probably don't make for really interesting reading. Added to this is the fact that this is probably one movie which I will really find hard to review considering the deftness with which it has been made. For lack of a simpler term to explain the screenplay, I will restrict myself to describing it as 'multi-linear' with a qualification of 'multi-chronological' thrown in. Just to describe these terms further, when I say 'multi-linear' I am referring to a screenplay which does not deal with just one story at one time, and 'multi-chronological' is used to refer to a screenplay which does not necessarily depict events in the order in which they would have probably logically occurred. Having said that, here goes.
The movie begins in Morocco where Hassan Ibrahim sells a Winchester rifle and cartridges to his friend Abdullah, a goatherder. Abdullah's young sons Yussef and Ahmed while testing the rifle accidentally wound an American tourise Susan Jones (Cate Blanchett) who is travelling with her husband Richard Jones (Brad Pitt) on vacation. The chain of events following up to this incident is what forms the crux of this movie.
The movie itself keeps shifting between three locations -
Morocco, where Richard desperately tries to get medical aid to Susan, and where the scared boys distance themselves from the firing incident
America, where the Jones' twin children are left under the charge of Amelia who in turn has to attend her son's wedding in rural Mexico
Japan, where the story of Chieko Wataya, a deaf-mute teenager is told. Her only link to the rest of the characters is that her father Yasujiro Wataya, a game hunter was the one who originally gifted the Winchester to Hussain Ibrahim on one of his hunting expeditions.
The screenplay keeps flitting between these three locations intermittently without necessarily following the logical sequence of events. Viewers are pretty much kept unknown about the fact that the children in America are the Jones twins until one of the last scenes in the movie where Richard is shown talking to them over the phone and viewers are able to tie this back to one of the early scenes in the movie where one of the twins is shown talking over the phone to his dad. It is small twists and incidents like these that make Babel one of my must-watch movies. I personally have seen the movie thrice now and will probably require at least two more viewings to fully appreciate the art of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director. Another point to be noted is that this is the last one of his Death Trilogy, which also includes Amores Perros and 21 Grams, both must-watch movies in their own right.
Almost all the three sub-stories are reasonably intense which makes this a movie only for serious viewers. And each of them have their own graphic depictions of reasonably violent and sexually intense sequences, which once again makes this a movie strictly for adults. However, the message (which the director has mentioned in one of his interviews) - lack of communication is an universal one. His words "On a conventional level (and conventions are sometimes useful to tell stories,) it can be said that BABEL is about miscommunication, but for me, at the bottom line, the film is about how vulnerable and fragile we are as human beings and when a link is broken, it's not the link that is rotten but the chain itself." speak volumes for what the movie is trying to communicate. And this is why this movie has to be seen at least once by all serious cinema fans.
The production notes read thus - "In an instant, the lives of four separate groups of strangers on three different continents collide. Caught up in the rising tide of an accident that escalates beyond anyone’s control are a vacationing American couple , a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager and her father, and a Mexican nanny who, without permission, takes two American children across the border. None of these strangers will ever meet; in spite of the sudden, unlikely connection between them, they will all remain isolated due to their own inability to communicate meaningfully with anyone around them." And if words like these do not pique your interest in this movie, well, what can I say.
Some scenes which stand out in my memory are the ones involving Chieko, where the director smartly turns off all the sounds in the movie only depicting the visuals. These are intended to give the audience a feel of what a deaf person feels in this world. Despite the brightly laser-lit surroundings, and the huge crowd of people who are grooving to the DJ's music, Chieko is still lonely and lost in this crowd. The stark contrast to the joy and ebullience around her to her own loneliness makes for one of the most cinematic enduring images in my mind.
Clint Eastwood just refuses to quit making awesome movies, and this is proving to be very difficult for die-hard fans like me. We are stuck in a quandry as to which of his movies we like the best, as each successive one just proves to be just that tad better than his previous ones. In 2004, when I saw "Million Dollar Baby" I thought that this was pretty much the best movie that he could ever make. He then followed it up with back-to-back movies "Flags of our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima", both dealing with the incidents of 'Battle of Iwo Jima' in WW-II. While one dealt with an American story, the other one dealt with the Japanese viewpoint of the same battle. As if this double-whammy was not enough, Eastwood went ahead and made "Changeling", which in my opinion is probably one of the most hard-hitting movies that could ever be made based completely on true incidents which rocked Los Angeles in 1928.
The movie begins with Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) returning home to discover that her nine year old son Walter Collins is missing. Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) whose only mission in life is to discredit the LAPD ensures that Christine's plight is given enough publicity through his radio programme, that the cops are forced into action. Several months later, Christine is informed by the cops that they have found her son and have arranged for a reunion, only for Christine to discover that the child that the police present to her as Walter is not her son but somebody else.
When Christine protests at the public reunion, the cops fearing negative publicity and bad press force her to take the child home on a 'trial basis'. Later on when she confronts the police with physical discrepancies between Walter and her 'son', the police blame her of being insensitive and shirking her responsibilities. When the Reverend informs her of the corrupt practices of the LAPD and the Gun Squad's rule over the streets of Los Angeles, Christine goes ahead and tells her story to the press. This enrages Capt. JJ Jones of the LAPD enough to send her to Los Angeles County Hospital's psychopathic ward.
In the hospital Christine learns of the plight of other women who have been sent there by the cops only for challenging police authority or rubbing them the wrong way. There she is made an offer by the Head of the institution who promises to set her free if she signs a document absolving the police of any wrong-doing in the Walter Collins' missing case. When she refuses to do so, she is forced to take mood-regulating pills and is declared delusional and depressive.
While all of this is happening, LAPD detective Ybarra in the course of deporting a 15 yr old illegal alien stumbles upon something shocking enough that changes the entire missing children angle completely on its head. What he discovers and how it affects the rest of this movie is not something that I would like to disclose as part of this review. Suffice to say that despite being a true incident, this particular angle to this story is what makes it all the more riveting and interesting.
The themes dealt with in this movie - Police Corruption, Feminine disempowerment, Children and Violence, are all universal themes even today and this is what makes Changeling all the more relevant in today's world, where differences and strife are what make more news.
The movie also is particularly notorious for its no-holds-barred treatment of the scenes involving the psychopathic ward and one scene involving a public execution of a criminal. Eastwood in various interviews mentioned that these were deliberate as he wanted audiences to get a first-hand feel of things that they normally would probably never get to see in their real lives.
Changeling, apart from Eastwood's master direction also includes stellar acting performances by Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich. Most of the scenes involving Jolie are reasonably poweful ones with a lot of human emotions in full display, and to be honest, I was more than just impressed with the apparent ease with which she performs these scenes. But like I mentioned earlier, the riveting screenplay despite the story being based on a true story is what took the cake for me as far as this movie was concerned. The attention to detail paid by the entire crew to replicate Los Angeles of the late 20s and early 30s is truly commendable. This is a 'period movie' in every meaning of the term. The entire crew probably didn't miss even a beat when they recreated almost an entire city and a way of life which existed around 70-80 years ago.
Wonder what Clint Eastwood is going to come up with next. Knowing him, he is probably never going to 'retire' from this wonderful world of cinema. And God bless him for that!!!
Now I had seen and read enough previews, articles and reviews about Australia, that I personally was unable to create any coherent opinion for myself about the movie. However, a few points that stood out in my memory before I finally got around to watching the movie was that (1) it had reasonably long running time (2) there was more to the movie that just the obvious love story between Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman (3) it was probably the best advertisement that Tourism Australia could ever choose for themselves.
Armed with this profound knowledge, I got down to watching "Australia" and man, was I more than pleasantly surprised or what. The movie dealt with much more than just the above three points. The movie begins with Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) coming down to Faraway Downs (her husband's cattle ranch in Northern Australia) to try and force him to sell his holdings and come back to England. However, she arrives only to find out that her husband has been murdered and his manager Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) was responsible for that. Fletcher, in cahoots with Lesley 'King' Carney (Bryan Brown) was trying to gain control of Faraway Downs so that he could become the undisputed Cattle King of Northern Australia. Sarah unwittingly gets herself entangled in the middle of this business spat by just arriving there at exactly the wrong time.
Sarah learns from Nullah (Brandon Walters) that Fletcher was the one who killed Lord Ashley and cleverly accused his own grandfather, an aborigine called 'King George' of the murder. Further, Nullah also tells Sarah that Fletcher is his biological father, thus making him a 'creamy', the local name for a 'half caste' (born of mixed parents, whites and aborigines). Now historically these children were removed from their families by the Australian Govt agencies and Church Missions so that they could be taught 'the ways of God' by missionaries. Some of the real underlying motives included fears of miscegenation and a desire to attain white racial purity. In fact, the current Australian Prime Minister offered a formal apology to all the families who suffered the indignities of the 'Stolen Generations' as recently as 2008. This underlying theme is given reasonable importance in this movie by making Nullah an important character in this movie. Maybe this movie was Luhrmann of paying respect to the struggles of the aboriginals of those days.
When Sarah learns of Nullah's story, she decides to keep Faraway Downs running as her husband would have liked to. Assisted by Drover (Hugh Jackman), she then undertakes a challenging mission to sell 1500 head of cattle to the English Military located at the Northern port of Darwin. Drover himself is sympathetic to Sarah's cause as he is close to the aborigines and is therefore shunned by many of the other whites in the Northern Territories. Assisted by Sarah, Nullah and 3 others, the hotch-potch group of untrained riders manage to get the cattle to Darwin despite various obstacles thrown their way by Fletcher at the behest of Carney. One particular scene where Nullah manages to stop the cattle from stampeding over a cliff by apparently using magic learnt from his grandfather will remain in my memory for some time to come, simply because of the surreal way in which the situation develops and how it is handled in the movie. During the course of this journey Sarah and Drover discover their romantic feelings for each other and end up living with each other at Faraway Downs, which courtesy the delivery was back in profits again. Two years pass, when Fletcher manages to kill Carney and inherit his cattle empire by marrying his daughter. Nullah who wants to perform the ceremonial coming-of-age ritual of 'walkabout' is captured by the authorities and sent to live on Mission Island alongwith other kids of mixed race descent. All of this happens when Drover is out driving cattle to Darwin again to fulfill the military's request for more food. Sarah, who is also working as an Army Radio Operator in Darwin promises Nullah that she will come back to find him and bring him back.
This incident co-incides with the Japanese bombing of Darwin in WW-II. This sets the stage for a montage of scenes where the devastating effects of the war on the Northern Territories is picturized in the movie. I personally didn't quite like this portion of the movie as I felt that the CGI was not up to the mark. Sarah's offices are bombed and so is Nullah's mission on Mission Island. Drover, on his return to Darwin learns of Sarah and assumes her to be dead. Grief-stricken, when he learns that Nullah has been taken to Mission Island, sets out to rescue him and the other kids from the island, if they had survived the attack. How and if Drover succeeds in rescuing Nullah makes up the rest of the story.
As mentioned earlier, this movie reminded me a lot of some of the romantic movies of the 40s and 50s. You have a hero who is romancing a heroine, with a conduit such as a small kid acting as the messenger or the common element between them. Here you have Sarah and Drover who initially cannot stand each other, but then are forced to come together to keep Nullah safe, and ultimately end up developing an affection for each other. Although the movie itself is a love story at the heart of it all, it deals with some inherently Australian themes that non-Aussie audiences might probably not relate with. For example, the whole underlying concept of the Stolen Generations, the recurring motif of 'King George' who seemingly has magical powers and keeps re-appearing to assist Sarah, Drover and Nullah, might not hold too much relevance to all viewers. But then, in my opinion, it is these things that make this movie an 'above-average' and a 'must-watch-at-least-once' movie to me.
Yes, this is NOT a Movie Review but a Movie Preview, a first for mahabore readers. Now, I've been hearing and reading so much about WATCHMEN for the past few days that it had pretty much become all but compulsory that I had to put up a preview of a movie which I am surely going to catch in the closest theatre once it hits Indian shores.
Watchmen, the movie is based on the seminal Alan Moore comic book series of the same name which was published by DC Comics in 1986-87. Now while there is nothing spectacular about remaking a comic book into a movie, the fact that Watchmen was just not any other comic book is what makes it all the more interesting. Wikipedia quotes "Moore used the story as a means to reflect contemporary anxieties and to deconstruct the superhero concept." And if this was not interesting enough, the fact that this comic book has probably the largest number of geek follower-base makes it all the more interesting to see how they will react to this cinematic re-telling of the comic.
Some of the things that the movie has going for it are -
Zack Snyder, the director of '300' one of my all time favorite movies has directed Watchmen
Even if the movie matches 70%-80% of what the comic book managed to tell, in terms of character development and script, alongwith a pacy screenplay, then in my opinion (purely as somebody who enjoys a decent cinematic re-telling of comic books) Watchmen should rock, especially considering that it is shot in the IMAX format
The story is set in the 80s which in my opinion were great days for superheros when they still had to rely on things such as instinct, courage rather than fancy gadgets such as GPS devices and Batpods (sorry Batman, just making a point that's all)
Now if all of the above doesn't make you go and watch this movie when it hits Indian theatres, then here goes some more food for thought -
An awesome article in the Wired magazine about how the movie was filmed
A very well written preview to this movie from Satish Naidu's blog
Wikipedia link to Watchmen - movie. Pay special attention as to how long and hard Hollywood has struggled to make this comic into a movie
Wikipedia link to Watchmen - comic. Read this to understand what it is that makes this comic so hugely popular and path-breaking in its genre
IMDB link to the movie, for good measure. Believe it or not, the movie has hit #188 in the IMDB Top 250 list within one week of its release. As far as I know only The Dark Knight managed to get this high a rating so soon
Expect a review of this movie as soon as I get around to watching it.
