a blog about a lot of things

As always, a giant list. The first 10 can be pretty much interchangeable depending on my mood but the ones below are pretty fixed. Open for debate, of course 31.  Udaan (2010) -   Directed by  Vikramaditya Motwane . Written by V ikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap.  A debut out of immense quality and a film that sticks with you long after you've seen it. The subject matter of father-son relationships could easily go into the overdone or heavily dramatic in a bad way. While remaining a serious and dramatic film, the control over the storyline without allowing any slippage into melodrama is magnificent. The story is not a new one, with the tale of an over-controlling father and a sensitive child, but the performances and the script make it possible to have a fresh feel. 32.  Nostalgia For the Light (2010) - Directed and written by  Patricio Guzman . A very poetic film telling a story about the past, both the recent past and the past so his...

  A Land Imagined Despite my general appreciation for the cinema of Asia, Singaporean films are not my area of expertise. In fact, I think I haven’t seen any at all (at least that I can recall as explicitly Singaporean, though some Indian crime films have had scenes set there when the gangsters are in exile and possibly Crazy Rich Asians ) before I watched “A Land Imagined”. This was a film I was inclined to like and have heavy bias towards because it fit into many categories I appreciate. A film about immigration embedded into a noir mystery, set in a city I have a lot of appreciation for, it was always likely I’d enjoy the film. In the end, my bias didn’t matter because A Land Imagined turned out to be one of the better films I’ve seen this year. It’s a film that starts out with a conventional enough narrative of a detective, world weary and aged, looking for a missing person and having to go to the seedier parts of the city to get information. The story could ha...

Project Gutenberg The thing about Hong Kong crime movies that are filled with action is that I have a hard time being objective about them. Like many people who are in their thirties now (and even older), I grew up watching a steady diet of Hong Kong cinema. For much of my childhood I was convinced Hong Kong was one of the most dangerous places in the world (mostly the fault of Johnnie To and John Woo’s films). I have never tired of the Hong Kong gangster film, much as I have never tired of the Western. And the fairly recent resurgence of quality crime movies coming out of Hong Kong has been something I didn’t even realized I missed until the revival and so I’m even inclined to let a few bad movies slide. However, Project Gutenberg isn’t one of the movies that needs to get a bye since it’s a thoroughly enjoyable two hour ride into the world of counterfeit money creation. With a cast frontline of Chow Yun Fat and Aaron Kwok, the film already comes with classic actors of ...

Have a Nice Day (Hao Ji Le) Some of the best movies are the ones that feel familiar while telling new stories. Goodfellas is thoroughly distinct from any other mafia film but by including familiar themes about “made men”, it allows us to approach the film from a feeling of familiarity. Revionist Westerns also set new interpretations of stories within a familiar setting. And, of course, it’s even possible to take a fairly similar story and place it within an entirely new landscape (such as Avatar). Have a Nice Day is one of those films that seem as though you’ve seen it before and also, remains like nothing you’ve ever seen before. With a storyline that seems to have been heavily influenced by Tarantino ( Reservoir Dogs, in particular) and an animated style that brings to mind Waltz with Bashir, this is a movie that certainly springs out of familiar territory. But influences are only tangential, and the final product is wholly original. It’s a film set in a bleak ind...

La La Land: A review La La Land has recently won 7 awards at the Golden Globes, breaking the record for most wins by a film in a single ceremony. The diversity of the awards it has won at the Globes (if you take awards seriously, which can be a bit of a personal choice) suggests its strong on a number of fronts. By winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay as well as both lead awards for acting and the awards for score and song, it is reasonable to assume there’s quality in every aspect of the film. And this would be correct.  It’s Damien Chazelle’s third film and once again has jazz as one of its central themes. I would love to say that music is the driving force behind this film but because the script and acting is so strong, it’s hard to really make that case. But make no mistake, the songs (it is a musical, after all) and the score play a tremendous part in setting up the world of the film. The film is a musical romantic comedy and it’s extremely rar...

Sing Street: A Review It’s hard to resist comparisons to Once with John Carney’s new film. They’re both set in Dublin and have romance and creating music as central themes. But really that’s where the similarities stop. Once is a film with a limited focus telling a story of two people over a few days. It’s an excellent film because of this limited scope which is then aided by the low budget, home style camera work. Sing Street is much broader in focus. The central story is pretty simple: boy creates band to impress a girl. But there’s a lot more going on in this film. Set against a backdrop of his parent’s crumbling marriage the film also touches on sibling comradery, difficulty with changing schools, the transformative power of music and the limits of possibility in a small city. The film itself is halfway between a gritty kitchen-sink drama and a fantasy story where dreams come true. It doesn’t sound like there should even be a possible middle ground between those realms...

Sausage Party: A Review Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have now collaborated on Superbad, Pineapple Express and This is the End . Every single one of these films can be a strong contender for one of the best films of the year they were released in and Sausage Party keeps this tradition going (only The Interview, while still decent, doesn’t hit the high level of the other films they’ve written). At some point if this output and quality continues, critics are going to mark this duo as a new wave of comedy. Comedy films are underrated to the point where it’s become a stereotype of awards ceremonies that the comedy role won’t win any awards. In Sausage Party (and Neighbours 2: Sorority Rising, the other film the duo wrote this year) there’s been a secondary theme of addressing more serious issues. This can have the potential to derail all the fun of the film, as in Sausage Party, the serious theme being addressed is religion but the writers never allow the film to get away fr...

Jungle Book: A review Many children count The Jungle Book as a childhood favourite, myself included. So my expectations for this film were perhaps unrealistically high, especially as the 1967 film was also one of my favourite films (we had the VHS copy). It’s perhaps impossible to expect any film to hold up against such idealistic standards of nostalgia and The Jungle Book indeed does not match my nostalgic aspirations. It far surpasses them. This is not a film that is grounded in the past and limited by its source material. The movie is instead revelatory in every sense. The movie is revelatory while being faithful to both Kipling’s original and to a lesser extent, the 1967 film. There is definitely a slight feeling of classic spirit about the film which is inevitable in a story which we all know. One of the most striking themes about the film, which I never really got in the original film, was of how much Mowgli is stuck between two worlds. It’s pretty much the central...

With Woody Allen films, at least in recent times, the viewer either gets a movie that’s instantly forgettable ( Magic in the Moonlight, Irrational Man) or instant classics ( Midnight in Paris, Blue Jasmine). Café Society breaks the trend by falling between these two categories by being neither a classic nor unmemorable. Drenched in nostalgia like many of Allen’s best films the movie never really seems to come off as a film instead of incredibly well-crafted idea and so at times it’s possible to lose interest. The movie is theoretically about emotion and passionate love but surprisingly (considering the director) never really manages to find the right chord that makes it seem like this passion is felt. Jesse Eisenberg is the latest actor who seems to be playing the onscreen role of a young Woody Allen and easily nails the role. His scene with the prostitute may be the best Woody Allen scene not actually starring the man himself. The film is separated into two main arcs ...

Richard Linklater’s films always make the viewer conscious of time, whether it’s the years represented in Boyhood or the hours that go by in Before Sunrise. Everybody Wants Some details the weekend before the start of semester for a group of college baseball players. Linklater has stated that he considers the film to be the spiritual sequel to Boyhood but in tone and style it definitely reminds one of Linklater’s 1993 comedic masterpiece Dazed and Confused. The film is quite light on plot but overall follows freshman pitcher Jake as he interacts with his teammates and navigates his first college weekend. It’s extremely heavy on the conversation and as expected for the director (possibly the best writer of dialogue in current cinema?) the characters go over ideas of varying magnitude which seem to be relevant on a universal level. Sure, the characters aren’t discussing the biggest ideas in the world but the philosophies somehow seem to be profound. There’s no real story...

With films that are shot in one take the majority of focus tends to be on this fact and the difficulty of achieving such a feat. This is understandable as the difficulty of achieving this has made the production of any one-shot film an impossibility till the fairly recent past and the development of digital movie cameras. In 2002, critically acclaimed releases such as Russian Ark and Irreversible were released and while there was sufficient regard for the technical aspect of the films being shot in one-take it was only until Birdman ( edited to seem as one take, not actually one take) in 2014 that it could really be said the one-shot entered the realm of regular film criticism. The posters and trailer for Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria regularly reference the fact that this film was shot in one take. It remains an impressive feat even if they do tell us a lot. Filmed in a couple of hours in the Kreuzberg and Mitte neighbourhoods of Berlin during the early hours of the mornin...

Suicide Squad seems to be an attempt from DC to make a film that’s more subversive and nihilistic than its previous releases. It’s inevitable that comparisons with Marvel films be made and the closest comparison for Suicide Squad seems to be that it would try to capture (some of) the feeling of Marvel’s Deadpool. One of the recurring criticisms of Batman v Superman was that the tone was far too dark and depressing. DC seems to have overcorrected in this film by going too much for quirky.   In a film where the squad is meant to be anti-heroes and “the worst of the worst”, it’s telling that the only character who seems even slightly scary is Federal Agent Amanda Waller. Waller, played by Viola Davis and Jared Leto’s Joker are easily the strongest characters in the film closely followed by Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. The problem is that the film is filled with characters all competition for screen time and as most of them are badly written or just caricatures, a lot of ...

It’s been almost seven years since 500 Days of Summer was released. Every year since that release date I’ve watched the movie at least once. I’m still convinced that the film is one of the masterpieces of the millennium and manages to be overcome of the most difficult challenges of any film (or artwork). Namely, the film is both popular and appealing to a wide audience without seeming formless or pandering. Too often films that are made for everyone end up being films for no one. This isn’t the case in 500 Days of Summer. Only in hindsight have I realized it’s a film for everyone. When I’d first watched it, it seemed quite straightforward. Tom was good and hopeful and Summer was evil. This is the kind of analysis I was able to do at 20. And of course, completely lacking the grounding to realize there’s another perspective to the film, I was convinced the narrative I’d seen was right. Much like in Love in the Time of Cholera (another favourite of my teenage self) I’d missed...