BLACK SWAN (2010)

(Danish and I plan to write occasionally for www.criticaltwenties.in, which is a fantastic site for articles by a bunch of smart 20-somethings, on a variety of topics including politics, sports, philosophy, law etc. This review was featured on C20. To read it there, follow this link.)

Many years ago, I read a biography of the prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova and I was enchanted. I decided that my life’s ambition was to become a danseuse and I surreptitiously practiced (what I assumed were) plies and demi-plies using my bed’s headboard as a bar in the hope that I would soon be invited to train at the Juilliard School. I remember this because no book or movie since has made me yearn to learn an art as much, till Black Swan. Ever since I watched this movie, I have been playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on repeat and doing the “ballet” (if you ask me about this, I will stoutly deny it).

Like a ballet production, this movie has poise, drama, style, emotion and a thundering climax. It has been described as a psychological thriller, but it is so much more. Do you remember the final scene in Billy Elliot? Billy Elliot has grown up and is about to make his entrance as the lead in a ballet. We know he’s talented, but what will he be like as a mature dancer? The moment of suspense is almost unbearable, the crescendo is rising, and then, he soars and he is glorious. That scene still makes my heart stop every single time I watch it. Now, stretch that one scene into 108 breathtaking minutes, and you have Black Swan.

In Black Swan, Nina Sayers is a quiet, timid, young ballet soloist who lives with her overbearing mother, practices every day and does what she’s told. The director of the ballet announces that the coveted role of the Swan Queen in the famous ballet, “Swan Lake” is up for grabs. But the dancer who claims this role must not only be able to play the role of the beautiful, chaste, and frail ‘White Swan’, but must also be able to play the role of the darker, seductive and sexual ‘Black Swan’. Nina gets the role, but everybody knows that while she’s a perfect White Swan, she’s just too virginal to play the Black Swan. And thus, Nina descends into the darkness of her own psyche, to find the Black Swan in her.

Perfection of technique in an art can only take you so far. Take a look at this video (it is less than 2 minutes long). It is of Anna Pavlova performing her masterpiece: The Dying Swan. Then take a quick look at some of the other artists performing the same role. Don’t they seem practiced and self-conscious? With Pavlova on the other hand, I feel the dying throes of the swan. Death has never been more heart-rending and at the same time, beautiful. They say that she was never very good at the ‘gymnastics’ bit of ballet, and yet she remains the most famous ballerinas of all time because of her power to emote. I confidently comment on her performance, despite being barely able to spell ‘ballet’ let alone claim awareness of its intricacies, because Pavlova felt that her art was not to be restricted to the lorgnette/monocle crowd, but must transcend education, class, nationality and language. She enthralled audiences from the hallowed halls of the Mariinsky Theatre to little towns in South America. Art must communicate and not be mired down by rules, she believed. And like Pavlova, Nina too struggles to throw off the shackles of training and morality, and find the essence of the Swan Queen in her.

Many have compared this movie to Rosemary’s Baby. It’s a fair comparison (and a compliment) because one slowly loses one’s sanity as the film unravels. But in Rosemary’s Baby, we are a part of Mia Farrow’s madness and despair, because we don’t quite know what to believe either (till the makers copped out in the end and smashed subtlety with a sledgehammer). In Black Swan, though, we are kept at arm’s length; front row spectators to her existential crisis. It is kind of fitting in a movie about a performance art, and certainly not unintentional.

Edgar Degas famously said, “Art is a vice. One does not take it in lawful wedlock, one rapes it.”
I have always wondered what it must be like, to have such an all-consuming passion for an art, that one needs no other sustenance; to burn from within. How wonderful it must be to love something so deeply, that everything in life, including death, must seem trivial. That’s what being the Swan Queen meant for Nina. The same burning passion we saw in Billy Elliot, in Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose), Van Gogh (Lust for Life) and so many others. I now understand the meaning of the agony and the ecstasy, and I envy them for it.

(The closest thing I have to a passion is StumbleUpon, and I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to die while Stumbling. It would be so horrendously embarrassing to be found dead with a LOLCat on your computer screen).

That Natalie Portman is going to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress is a given. The question is, will she win? Her serious competition for this year (barring any obvious Oscar fodder that releases this month) will probably be from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right, Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole and Hilary Swank in Conviction. Hilary’s got two and Nicole’s got one already, so they won’t be winning in a year when two actors are due overlong for an Oscar. Julianne Moore has been passed up four times, and Annette Bening thrice. Add to that the fact that being gay in a movie is the fastest route to a tearful, “spontaneous” speech at the Kodak Theatre. Which is why this is almost certainly Annette or Julianne’s year. I’d go with Annette because her character was way more compelling.

So what are Natalie’s chances? The Academy does go nuts over pretty movies about elegant things (like the ballet), so that’s in her favour. And the one thing that the Academy loves almost as much as a gay character is a crazy/having-psychiatric-disorders character. And Natalie’s so pretty and put in so much effort. But she’s young, so they’ll probably hand her a Golden Globe for her troubles, a pat on the back and give the Oscar to Annette. Which is an awful pity, because, if these things were objective, Natalie would win this hands down.

Go on, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, prove me wrong.

NO ONE KILLED JESSICA (2011)

(Drumrolls for our guest reviewer, Alok Prasanna who will be writing here whenever the fancy takes him, but you can catch him at: www.criticaltwenties.in where he posts and vociferously comments regularly).

For a movie that claims to be about “power”, the “middle class” and Delhi, No One Killed Jessica is remarkably dishonest about all three.

Everyone knows the story, and for those of you who want the more specific details, you may want to read this, this, this and this. You can read them without fear of spoilers because this is one of those stories whose endings we already know but the path the story takes is just as interesting. Many movies do this, and do it well, and none better in recent times, I think, than The Social Network. In this regard, NOKJ makes an adequately gripping start.

The first half of NOKJ would be standard fare for any gritty thriller; a woman in a failing fight for justice as she struggles to deal with a profoundly corrupt and morally bankrupt criminal justice system. The corrupt cops, the terrified/slimy/self-absorbed-socialite witnesses, all tick the appropriate boxes and after a few gratuitous swings at the police and lawyers in India, the movie progresses to the trial itself. So far, so good.

The second half of the movie triggered off my gag reflex so many times that I feared I would twist a sphincter somewhere trying not to projectile vomit into the people in the row in front of me. To mention the most cringe-worthy moments:

1. The Rang De Basanti inspired consequence-and-effort-free candlelight-march activism that this movie is convinced brought “justice” to Jessica.

2. The little speech on “ethics” that Rani Mukherjee (a thinly disguised Barkha Dutt) delivers which would be screamingly hilarious if it weren’t for the Radia tapes being public knowledge. (I wonder if any modern personality has been so obviously and not so obviously represented in movies as much as Barkha Dutt. Think Lakshya and Peepli Live apart from this monstrosity. If a Barkha Dutt biopic was to be made, of the three actresses who’ve played her, I would only choose Malaika Shenoy of Peepli Live)

3. The obvious look-alikes of Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and APJ Abdul Kalam dishing out pithy homilies about Jessica being murdered; saying just enough to keep the baying middle classes away and trying to get us to believe that they speak for a political class that cares.

I could go on, but my point, as I said earlier, is that this movie is remarkably dishonest about power, the middle class and Delhi and this is why.

Power: As far as the movie is concerned, political power=bad and media power=good, not for a moment reflecting on how both are just tools capable of being used for one’s ends or others. The movie would have you believe that “good” countervailing power of the media can help you overcome the “bad” political power of the Venod Sharmas of the world. Provided of course you are suitably middle class, attractive and female (like Ruchika Girhotra). Never mind that the media’s power itself is used by those in power to lie, betray and cheat the rest of us with the active collusion of the media as we all learned in excruciating detail from the Radia tapes and the paid news scandals.

The Middle Class: The makers of NOKJ want you to believe that the middle class will rise as one to redress injustice, but don’t realize that Jessica’s case itself shows that the middle class will do no such thing when such activism actually involves consequences for the “activists”. It’s all very well to circulate SMSes and turn up with candles and banners, but this is just grandstanding trying to cover up for cowardice. Cowardice that is gloriously on display in not just the character based on the feckless Shayan Munshi (“Vikram Jai Singh”), but also the three hundred people at the party who claimed they saw nothing, and don’t testify at the trial when their testimony could have had Manu Sharma convicted in the first place.

If this was the only way in which NOKJ was being dishonest about the middle class, it would be forgivable since it at least put Shayan Munshi and the 300 “non-witnesses” out there for us to ponder. No, NOJK’s worst sin is to peddle the glorious lie that the middle class cares for such values as justice and equality. It doesn’t and this is where it is most dishonest about Delhi.

The biggest lie that NOKJ peddles is that there is such a thing as a Dilli-wala. There isn’t. There hasn’t been for 153 years since the British de-populated this city. Sure, people live, work and die here, but they generally don’t belong here. No one does really. Its residents have nothing but geography in common. To see the makers of NOKJ try to convince us that some shared values or virtues brought the denizens of Delhi together for Jessica’s death made me gag harder than anything else this movie threw at me.

Delhi’s middle class cares nothing for its urban poor and migrant labour. So many examples illustrate this, but none better than the fact that the treatment of workers in the CWG gets not a hundredth of the coverage that the figures and amounts involved in the CWG gets. So also the way the Aarushi Talwar case has been covered in the media. Never mind that it was a double murder, and never mind that one of the victims was assumed accused until he unfortunately turned up dead. As far as the media and Delhi’s middle class are concerned, Aarushi’s case is terrible because it could be one of them, but people like Hemraj die every day, so it doesn’t bother them.

NOKJ wants us to believe the horseshit that the campaign to get “justice for Jessica” was some sort of transformative moment in the history of India. It wasn’t. And you can, if you live in Delhi, see it around you.

Dozens die every winter in the cold in Delhi for lack of proper shelter and it merits a few inches in the newspaper every winter. A pretty girl gets shot in the face and the nation’s appalled.

I think I’m going to be sick.

TANGLED (2010)

Oh, Disney! Go ahead and take over the world. You deserve to keep us under your beautiful, talented, magical thumb. How is it possible that the same corporation that is responsible for Miley Cyrus can come out with such a wonderful film? How can a company that encourages young girls to emulate a spoiled brat with serious entitlement issues dream up a movie that is so deeply empathetic of the fear and excitement of entering adulthood, and that complex battlefield of a relationship between parents and teenagers?

With The Princess and the Frog (2009) and now Tangled, fairy tales are no longer just idylls that happened "once upon a time" in a "far, far away land". Fairy tales were once cautionary tales for children. But kids today are such demanding snot rags that morals like "always be polite" and "kiss animals, because you never know" just don't cut it anymore. Tangled has all the magic and fantasy of traditional fairy tales, but is also relevant and accessible. Where Shrek (2001) was a tongue-in-cheek satire of fairy stories, Tangled is the re-invention. You actually relate to the characters.

A baby with golden hair is born to the king and queen of a kingdom, but the baby is stolen by a witch who knows that the child has magic hair which has the power to bestow eternal youth. She keeps the young princess, Rapunzel in a tower and brings her up as her own daughter. She constantly reminds Rapunzel that she is to always be in the tower because the world outside is a horrible and dangerous place. But after 18 years of being in the tower, Rapunzel's life is turned upside down when a roguish young thief accidentally tumbles into her tower.

Like all Disney offerings, it goes without saying that this movie was a visual treat (so don't miss the 3D version). I loved the effortless combination of adolescent angst into the original story. Yes, there is a hero. But he's a teenage boy. And like all teenage boys, he is completely convinced of his godlike visage, dreams only of pots of gold and blonde babes, is completely insensitive to emotional crises faced by teenage girls and is obviously utterly irresistible to those teenage girls. Another interesting take was the relationship between the witch and Rapunzel-- Rapunzel is not the traditional prisoner in this movie. She's a daughter. And like most teenage daughters, she loves and detests her mother. Like many mothers, the witch can be self-absorbed, cant resist from "jokingly" criticizing her daughter and knows very well that guilt is a stronger prison than iron bars.

Tangled brought back this wave of memories from my adolescence. Do you remember what it was like to sneakily disobey your parents for the first time? Oh, the weight of the guilt! But the temptation! Oh, but they would be so disappointed if they found out! Ah, but they don't need to find out! Argh, what do I DO! I went through that the first time I got drunk, first time I had a boyfriend and so many other first times. Even now, the indoctrination from my childhood masquerades as a conscience and prickles uncomfortably on certain occasions. I've just become adept at ignoring it and pouring myself another drink.

Where Toy Story 3 was about the pain and sadness of leaving childhood behind, Tangled is about that horrible fear and doubt of growing up. We cant wait to be all grown up and do the grown up things, but when it actually happens, you realize that adulthood is really just a series of nausea attacks.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

For many different reasons I've been thinking about mortality more than usual these past few weeks. Part of this arose from the unexpected recent death of a senior from law school. Part of this is from certain completely divergent career choices I stand to make which will take my life in terrifyingly different directions, the kind that prompt me to wonder if I'm living my life to the so called "fullest extent". Part of this, again, is because I occasionally feel the sense of purpose in my writing fading away, something that I am desperately trying to recapture.

At any rate, I saw this movie with my friend Tejaswi on a laptop with shared earphones in the Nalsar internet centre. As we reached its absolutely unflinching ending, we sat in silence, earphones pulled out, watching the end credits roll, not quite articulating our thoughts - not quite being able to, for a bit atleast. This here is Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. There was a lot I expected from the man behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but absolutely nothing could have prepared me for Synecdoche, New York.

This is an astonishing movie.

If I were to attempt to convey a sense of the plot to you - well, it involves a theatre director/script-writer, Caden (a typically great Philip Seymour-Hoffman performance) setting out to make the production of his lifetime in a massive warehouse that will soon come to house increasingly elaborate stages, buildings, and fascinatingly enough, a zeppelin. The play is going to be about nothing less than life itself - Caden's life.

But wait - this is a Charlie Kaufman movie remember - so all this setup is only a stage for grander ruminations on love, loss, regret, and, yes, life. It starts off as simply a particularly clever piece of cinema, playing with your ideas of how characters like these would be expected to behave. Strange things happen, signs and portents of death begin to appear before Caden, a house remains partly on fire for 40 years, a wiry old man peeks at the camera in almost every other scene, the massive production remains audienceless. Art takes over life, life becomes art, even as our perception of reality begins to falter.

Sound pretentious, bloated, artsy, inaccessible ? Well, it could've been. But this is what the movie made me do - in the course of its 2 hour running time, it made me cycle repeatedly over the different choices I'd made in my life - the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that looked promising only to end in bitter regret - even as I went along with the exhilarating ride of trying to piece together what the different levels of meaning each scene held for Caden himself.

But finally, importantly, essentially - it made me revisit those questions about mortality. I reached no answers, of course - and how could I - but I have a deeper understanding of the questions themselves, about where they're coming from, and finally, why it is important that I constantly keep asking them. Caden himself lives a life of constant regret, of monumental sadness, driven by his art, and forgetting the very life that drives him towards this art.

Art might be immortal - we are anything but.

This movie made me yearn to live.

I can give it no higher praise.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The first time I read about Bettie Page, I immediately did a Google Image search for her (safe search off). And I remember thinking, "That's it? THIS is what the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency got its collective panties in a bunch over? Bo-ring." Yes, I know it isn't fair to see 1950s pin-ups with the unfazed, cynical eyes of one who has spent even 10 minutes on the internet and learnt about Rule 34 firsthand. But for better or worse, nothing is shocking anymore. Even the mainstream magazines have racy BDSM photoshoots with famous actors and their wives (NSFW).

But you'd think that a movie about the Pin-Up Queen of the Universe, the quintessential dominatrix with her iconic bangs, who (probably) was the reason for the Kefauver Hearings and who later became an evangelist would just write itself to Oscar glory. Or, at the very least, to cult film glory. Instead, The Notorious Bettie Page turned out to be an insipid, surprisingly boring movie that no amount of whips and handcuffs could change. I felt like I was watching a Discovery channel episode. All that was missing was the narrator and the token expert opinion.


Nobody watches a biopic for its historical accuracy or to learn random irrelevant details about a famous person. I'd go read Wikipedia for all that. When I watch a biopic, I don't want a faithful chronicle of that person's life-- by all means, skip the boring bits and the inconsequential people. I want that person to come alive for me.They invented the term "artistic license" for a reason, you know. After all, there is a world of difference between a documentary and a feature film. At the end of the day, I want a goddamn entertaining movie.


People who watched The Social Network (2010) and then criticized it for its inaccuracies are missing the point. Romanticizing and villainizing people is all a part of the art of film-making. One of my favourite biopics is Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). Edward D. Wood Jr. was by all accounts one of the worst film-makers ever, and yet, I have never seen a more touching tribute to anybody. Amadeus (1984) is wildly inaccurate about Salieri and the clownish Mozart. But tell me you didn't identify with Salieri and didn't understand his torment (I won't believe you). Even the American Film Institute thinks it's a pretty good movie (yes yes, some of you think that the AFI is composed of a bunch of prissy stuffed shirts who wouldn't know good cinema if it smacked them in the face. We've all read the Wikipedia entry, thank you very much).



Coming back to this yawn-worthy film. As you may have cleverly deduced, it is biopic of Bettie Page. Fortunately, that they don't waste too much time on the origin story and move straight to the hot photoshoots. Bettie is a spunky young woman who was (probably) abused by her dad, gang raped, divorced her husband and then heads to New York City to seek her fortune. Being a knockout with zero inhibitions, she becomes a famous bondage model, among other things. Anyway, blah-bondage-OMG-shocking-nudity-pornography-senate-hearing-outrage-blah happens and then, anti-climax, she becomes a bible thumper BUT she doesn't regret her sexy modelling past. The end.


Oh, whoops. SPOILER ALERT.


The entire cast and crew sleepwalked through the film like it was the most stultifying experience of their lives. Many scenes were irrelevant and the movie just didn't cohere. The filming in black and white came off as a desperate attempt to be edgy, and there was this smugness about how casual they were being about the "graphic" sex scenes. It all came off as very contrived.


The one oasis in this desert of a movie was Gretchen Mol, who was perfect as Bettie Page. She had that natural exuberance and irreverence that the real Bettie was famous for. But of course, thanks to the weak script, she was utterly wasted in this movie.


Those fetish vignettes and burlesque films starring Bettie are all probably better biopics than this apathetic movie.

RED (2010)

So apparently there are only three types of action movies these days:
- sequels
- Michael Bay movies
- nostalgia movies/ vehicles for aging actors eager to revive careers

I am looking forward to the MI sequel as much as the next person, but what happened to the trail-blazing, balls out flicks that blew your mind? Action movies just seem so self-conscious these days, like suddenly they're embarrassed about being all brawn. Man up, Hollywood. Everybody can see that you suddenly realized that if you made fun of the way you regularly take the whole suspension of disbelief thing and shoot it in the head repeatedly, nobody else can laugh at the absurd logic employed in your movies. Ha ha, yes let's have over-the-top explosions and fight scenes worthy of Rajnikanth so everybody knows that we're in the joke too.

Amateurs.

Did John McClane feel silly when he blew up a plane? Did John Rambo blush his way through a game of buzkashi? Did Arnold say "Get to the choppa" with even the slightest hint of irony? HELL NO!

So, Red, as you may have guessed, wanted to be badass but was scared that people may laugh so they threw in a bunch of absurd scenes and over-the-top-obviously-satirical explosions to convince us all that they were in on the joke too. Bruce Willis is an ex-Black Ops agent living his life quietly in a suburb, phone-flirting with a call centre employee when the CIA, led by young gun Karl Urban decides to eliminate him because he was a yada-yada in some Operation Blah-didn't-pay-attention-blah. He joins forces with the old brigade: Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox and Helen Mirren to show the CIA how they roll. Because McClan.. sorry, Bruce Willis can still bring it, and how.

While there are plenty of cheesy, cringeworthy scenes (which the producers will tell you was TOTALLY INTENDED GUYS), I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. What fun it was to watch Morgan Freeman take Bruce Willis to school! And Helen Mirren has never looked classier than behind a sniper rifle. And the whole "We may be geriatric, but we still got it, sonny jim" plot line? Never grows old.

Yes, the plot was thoroughly irrelevant and incomprehensible but you know what, sometimes you need to have a plot just to throw it away with reckless abandon. Yes, this was a vehicle for aging actors to revive their action star careers, and yes, they do play up the nostalgia stuff, but it turns out us audience absolutely love it. Sufficiently badass enough to catch it on HBO whenever it plays.

GOING THE DISTANCE (2010)

The romantic comedy, more than any other popular genre, is one that tends to stick to narrative conventions - formula, I believe is the word - more than most other genres. You have the obligatory meet-cute, the montage set to a Billboard smash/ quirky indie number, the small misunderstanding, the makeup, the big-huge misunderstanding, and of course the chase-scene climax.

This is all fine, really. The familiarity of the structure also serves to make movies that tend to be easily watchable, pleasant diversions. Often, they're mediocre fluff, with precious little to say, and even lesser inventiveness in how its said (note for instance, any of the recent Katherine Heigl/ Jennifer Aniston stabs at the genre).

Imagine, then, my absolute joy in finding a romantic comedy that actually doesn't dissolve from memory even before the end credits start rolling, and actually has something to say. Going the Distance manages by not just being a story about 2 attractive people falling in love, getting into messy situations, and remaining in love anyway - what it has going for it is that it's as much about the relationship that these characters build. The idea of the story is simple - long distance relationships aren't easy - and it delivers that with a great script that refuses to let its characters be stereotypes, or succumb to stupid plot contrivances. If the relationship has issues, its because of the time and place in their lives that these nice people have met, its because of their stakes in their careers - it is thankfully not about their messed up psychological issues, or even worse, because one of them was hiding some crucial piece of information from the other.

What helps - Justin Long and Drew Barrymore share great, effortless chemistry and are aided by an effortlessly hilarious cast, my favourite being Christina Applegate as Barrymore's protective sister. The script is also unusually raunchy - always a good thing.

A great watch this one, and reaffirms my faith in the genre. Now to the next dozen mediocre titles !