I fell in love with ABBA songs again after seeing P. J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding. ABBA, the Swedish group, incidentally was the first whose pop music I bought (and liked). Later of course, it faded and was replaced by the more 'serious' and angst-ridden songs of Pink Floyd and Nirvana. Sscored almost incessantly - and endearingly - to ABBA songs, Muriel's Wedding leaves you humming ABBA again. Muriel and her friend Rhonda do an amazing lip-sync of Waterloo in a talent contest and later hum Fernando looking at the clear starlit sky; Muriel tries on various wedding gowns to the tune of Dancing Queen; and even Muriel's wedding starts with her walking the aisle to the strains of I do, I do.

The movie itself though is a sometimes unsettling combination of pathos, humor and striking cruelty. It is ruthless in it's caricature of characters. Muriel herself is the kind of character you would find in other movies as the hero's dotty fiancee or as the comic prop. Here, however, she's the heroine, portrayed by the astonishing Toni Collette. Collette's portrayal of Muriel is fearless, and it is her fearlessness that lends poignancy to what is essentially a rites-of-passage story.

The movie does not really walk the thin line between parody and misery. Instead director Hogan, who also wrote the screenplay, leaps straight into cruelty. He is merciless to his small-town characters who are all portrayed as mean-minded and mind-numbingly shallow. Hogan never redeems his characters, especially that of Muriel's father, played by Bill Hunter. It's hard to figure out sometimes who is being more cruel: the director to his characters or the characters to each other. But this same hard-headedness makes Muriel's Wedding a movie of substance, unlike say movies like Miss Congeniality, which start by satirizing the beauty-queen culture but ultimately are too gormless to go all the way and end up endorsing it instead.

There are two other female characters. Rachel Griffiths is the free-spirited Rhonda who saves Muriel from her town and her family. In a portrayal that could have gone either way, into gruesome satire or fake pathos, Jeanie Drynan correctly underplays the role of Betty, Muriel's mother, who essentially precipitates the final crisis, that brings Muriel to a better understanding of herself. Now characters have always been functions of plot in movies but Hogan, in self-circular way acknowledges that. In a dialogue of astonishing cruelty, that had me literally squirming, a character calls Betty's death the "ultimate sacrifice for her husband" and says that "betty would have been happy that her life had not been in vain". (Dialogue not accurate).

The equation of marriage with happiness afflicts all the female characters in this movie. The movie's unconventional final act ends not with marriage but with a renewal of a life-affirming friendship. Is Muriel's Wedding an unacknowledged lesbian love story? Maybe. Maybe not. It is however, the best female buddy-movie I have seen!!!

I must say that I've had to eat humble-pie over my previous views on Angels in America. Yet something does seem to have come out of it. It somehow brought home to me forcefully what the main difference between a play and a movie was.

I saw the first part of HBO's production of Angels without having quite any idea of what it was about. At three hours, Millennium Approaches, seemed to me to be over-long and pretentious. Here is what I wrote on it then.

"Angels starts off magnificently in its first hour (titled 'The Millenium approaches'), flags significantly in the second, even more in the third and then in its final fifteen minutes, soars significantly. The ending of the first part makes it imperative to watch the three-hour second one since there seem to be some really important plot developments in store.

Its all a bit too pretentious for its own good, there are all the cliched characters, the gay man dying of AIDS, his self-pitying lover (Ben Shenkman at his whiny best), the self-righteous closetted, conflicted married homosexual Mormon (Patrick Wilson, impossibly earnest and just about passing muster) and his wife (Mary Louise Parker, simply amazing!!!), who hallucinate frequently and have conversations that are elaborately stagey but ultimately lack any kind of dramatic intensity. Surrounding all of them are some really seasoned actors: Al Pacino (who rants with his usual energy), Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. There are times when Angels soars, the highpoint for me being, one particular sequence in which the hallucinations of the wife and the dying man intersect. The result is a brilliant scene and Parker, as the pill-popping wife, is particularly luminous and funny, yet at the same time weighed down by sadness. It all goes steadily downhill after that. There seems to be no particular reason for having seasoned actors like Streep and Thompson play multiple roles except as a gimmick and also perhaps to boost the actors' vanity (You have to give it to Streep; the lady is faultless with accents).

It is to Nichols credit that Angels ends with a bang. The lives of the characters have now been firmly established and it is interesting to see where exactly the movie is heading towards....

Lets see how the second part holds up......"

There it is, right in those words - thoughts which since then I have disowned. "Stagey conversations", "cliched characters" - the fact is - Angels is and will always be a play. I finished reading the play recently (or two plays, if you think of them that way) and I must say - though Kushner would probably object to the word - that it is a revelation. Kushner concentrates above all on his ideas - and everything, including his characters is subordinated. Yet the play is remarkably resonant in it's themes and I, for one, was caught up in it even as I read it. I just wish I had been born a few years earlier to actually watch the play as it was performed. Well, someday!!

Why does the movie not work? I have some ideas. The play is filled with split-scenes which it must have been hard for Nichols to film. And inter-cutting between the conflicts just does not have the same effect as over-lapping dialogue rendered on stage. And the stage!! - which, from some photographs I looked at - is threadbare , with the minimal of props, yet Nichols fills the movie with scenery and ostentatious sets. Above all, there is the fundamental difference beween films and theater. Movies are about plots and characters, the probing camera is capable of seeing much more than the stage can, yet films thrive on a passive viewer. Theater, on the other hand, is gloriously real, much more interactive and above all, it is about the grand inter-play of thoughts and ideas through characters.

Here is an article in Slate on Angels.
The Lector Effect - HBO's new Angels in America gets Kushner wrong. By Dale�Peck

Also A. O. Scott's on-the-dot critique of Angels that he wrote in Slate's annual movie club. (You may have to search a bit, I'm afraid)

But more on this later. :)

Here is David Edelstein's review of Lars Von Trier's crazy parable Dogville
Welcome to the Dollhouse - Lars von Trier's inhuman Dogville. By David Edelstein

After watching the stupendous Breaking the Waves and the wretched Dancer in the Dark, I reached a conclusion about the maverick Lars Von Trier. His movies are not art or even entertainment but cold calculated experiments using the audience as a guienea-pig. Both Breaking the Waves and Dancer were designed to see if an audience could be roused to emotion based on a story that was not only blatantly manipulative not to mention implausible but also astonishingly sadistic. Emily Watson's brave performance in Waves somehow managed to side-step the sadism and the movie, even today, is moving. Von Trier went too far in Dancer in the Dark, which had me closing my eyes with dread with every step that Bjork's Selma took but which also had me hating the director for his sneering sadism. His latest movie Dogville however is different.

While both Waves and Dancer seemed calculated to rouse emotions, Von Trier goes out of his way to drain Dogville of anything even remotely in the vicinity of emotion. For a start, the movie takes place on a huge sound-stage with a minimum of props (the actors even mime the opening and closing of doors, the houses are marked with chalk). However the most important step is that all the characters here, even the heroine herself, are reduced to types, who exist merely to move the story to it's (il)logical conclusion. Now this is Tony Kushner territory, where everything is subsumed to ideology and the characters merely function as cogs in the intellectual machinery. Yet Kushner's plays are so thought-provoking that his characters manage to stand out by themselves. Von Trier, on the other hand, has nothing to offer but his misanthropy which somehow makes Dogville engrossing yet strangely empty. The casting of Nicole Kidman as the protagonist Grace is another case in point. Kidman is a great actress but what probably makes her perfect for the movie (and probably the main reason why she was cast) is how distanced she manages to be from the happenings around her. In the film's latter half, Grace becomes the focal point for all the men in Dogville who start using her for their sexual gratification. Yet even when she is undergoing the most horrible humiliations (which include a dog-collar around her neck), Kidman's Grace never looks less than elegant. This is the final step, that effectively sterilizes the movie and anesthetizes the audience. Don't expect to shed any tears during Dogville.

Yet with Von Trier, one never really knows. I would have called Dogville a hateful movie if I had even the remotest inkling whether the movie is a genuine statement of Von Trier's own feelings. Yet I also had the feeling as I was watching the movie that it was all another one of Von Trier's ghastly joke. I even imagined the director smirking in private over all the hyper-ventilating critics who found his anti-Americanism offensive. (And it would be, if only one knew whether the man was serious!). Dogville, I concluded, is another experiment: to see whether a movie, drained of all emotions could still manage to arouse feelings.

Slate's David Edelstein calls Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the best movie he's seen in a decade. While that may be debatable, Sunshine is definitely one of the best movies of this year. Charlie Kauffman's wondrous screenplay is romantic and literally cerebral, in that it takes place entirely inside it's protagonist's head.

Readers all over are divided on what Eternal is really about. On one hand, it's about second chances, on the other, about the inevitability of fate. (Joel and Clementine are fated to meet, just as Howard and his receptonist are doomed to their own unequal relationship). It's also about love, the way that things about loved ones that seem so lovable at first get so maddenning later. And then, more than anything else, the movie is about memories. As his memories of Clementine are being erased, Joel realizes how precious they are. (An interesting article in Slatetalks about the neurophysical aspect.)

The movie is absolutely rivetting, laceratingly funny in parts and sometimes (well, thrice, to be precise) heartbreakingly moving. In marvellously poignant moment, the last memory of Clementine that is erased is actually the first, the one where they met. Winslet and Carrey are breathtaking here; savoring their first meeting and their ultimate parting at the same time in the movie's beautiful tour de force. Amazing!!!

An actor called Steve Sandvoss is the saving grace of Latter Days (2003), an extremely mediocre film, written and directed by C. Jay Cox, who seems to have written the screenplay by simply by reaching out into a bag full of Hollywood cliches and randomly choosing one. The story is the ultimate gay fantasy, the party-boy who seduces the cute Mormon missionary and then falls in love with him. And the cliches: there's the standard 50 buck bet, a fag hag who also happens to be a hip African-American, the obligatory sex-scene followed by a string of heart-tugging after-bed talk - need I say more?That, in itself, wouldn't be so bad. A standard romantic comedy, gay or straight, must be based on fantasy. The infuriating thing about Latter Days is that it pretends to be something it's not - a movie about the travails of gay Mormons.

It's not a bad movie, really. Cox's jokes are good, even if it makes all the characters sound the same. And Jacqueline Bisset, Wesley Ramsey, and Rebekah Johnson give pleasing performances, even in roles that scream caricature. It is Sandvoss, however, as the missionary Aaron, who gives the film it's spine. As the confused Mormon, he plays a card-board character with such sweetness and grace that it's impossible not to be moved at times. Consider one such scene where he consoles the distraught Bisset (in one of the film's many highly improbable coincidences) who's just pulled the plug on her ailing boyfriend. He elevates lines lines that seem pulled straight from the pages of a Hallmark greeting card, to something sublime, even profound.

Part of the pleasure of watching the movie came from the audience which consisted mostly of gay men. Somehow this is a movie that cries out to be watched in such company. The jokes seem ten times funnier and the movie rises up a notch from ordinary to fun!!

There is a point in Andrew Jarecki's (exploitative?, unforgettable?, somber?) documentary when accusations just keep flying. Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse have been accused of molesting a dozen children in their neighborhood. Arnold pleads guilty and goes to prison. Jesse also pleads guilty but also claims that he was molested by his father. In a later interview with the director, Jesse says that his lawyer Peter Panaro manipulated him into saying that. Panaro (the perfect criminal lawyer, oily demanour and all) , on the other hand insists that Jesse admitted to him that he was molested. David Friedman furiously accuses his mother of being manipulating bitch. And Elaine Friedman, the most puzzling character in the movie, says that she only did it for her son. These interview clips which appear one after another, in rapid-fire succession is when the documentary, only thoughtful and rivetting so far, literally ventures into sledgehammer emotion territory. There seem to be a thousand unanswered questions: Did Arnold really molest Jesse? Did Arnold and Jesse molest all those children? What really was David's point in filming all the events in his family? Why did David agree to give his tapes to Jarecki? And is it really right for us, as viewers who know literally nothing of this family to watch these tapes where sometimes, the emotions are so naked that I had trouble even looking at the screen?

No questions however are answered. The documentary is both haunting and creepy, in a crazy sort of way. But is it really ambigious? To me, there seems to be no doubt that Jarecki at least, believes in the Friedmans' innocence. He doesn't say that out loud but his camera angles tell a different story. As David Edelstein has pointed out, the lone accuser who persists in his charges is splayed out on the sofa like a hustler. Jarecki's questions to him are sharper and his replies (he claims that he first remembered the sodomy sessions during hypnosis therapy) get increasingly preposterous and contradictory. The interviews with the police officers are cut and arranged together to make them seem like over-enthusiastic law-enforcers who got caught in the rising tide of hysteria about paedophiles and concluded that a man was guilty and then set about proving it. Interestingly, Debbie Nathan, who appears in the movie has written an article about it in the Village Voice

Besides the fact that the documentary exposes a gaping hole in our criminal justice system, there is another, though slightly less important aspect. What exactly is the responsibility of the film-maker to his film? What in particular are the responsibilities of documentary film-makers to their material? There are times, at the end of the film, when Jarecki attaches a soulful melody to David's hand-held footage. The effect is definitely emotionally wrenching, but is it right ? Is the purpose of a documentary to leave the viewer in a state of unbridled emotion? Or is that better left to movies? These are just some questions that this endlessly fascinating documentary gives rise to.

After watching The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert S McNamara, I was confused. McNamara speaks in a style, that seems in some sense like pure demagoguery. "Emphathize with your enemy", he roars once, like a particularly odious self-help guru. Yet there are several times when I had a lump in my throat, particularly when he talks about Kennedy's assasination. The most fascinating thing about The Fog of War is that it is itself fogggy: what, for instance, was McNamara hoping for when he agreed to e interviewed by Errol Morris? Was he hoping that this would be his chance for clearing his name? Is the man then simply a great actor? Or is this the case of an intellectual who, after a long introspection has come to the conclusion that he made mistakes? (One of the lessons is "Rationality will not save you.".) And yet, as Fred Kaplan contends in his article in Slate, why does he lie?

While this year's Oscar ceremony was, well...positively tame (remember Michael Moore last year?), the closest thing to a controversy was Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans. Here is a link to Sharon Waxman's article in the New York Times where the victims allege that Jarecki deliberately added the ambiguity (for which his film has been widely praised) when in fact, (so to speak) the Friedman case was really cut-and-dry. Victims Say Film on Molesters Distorts Facts

At the same time, here is an article in Slate that says that Jarecki by maintaining a studiously neutral tone, lost a huge opportunity for saving an innocent man.

I must say, it looks bad for Jarecki. He is being criticized for being ambiguous but from both sides. All said, Capturing the Friedmans is definitely a fascinating documentary, but the well-deserved winner on Oscar-nite was Errol Morris (the worst acceptance speech of the night, topping even Sean Penn's pretentious drawl) for his superlative The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert McNamara.

And oh, Hurray for the Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings!!!!!

Thought of transferring the old blog on my ASU webpage and then, starting fresh. A blog is something I've always wanted to keep, though I doubt if anyone (except me) is really interested in my (well, mostly) cine-rantings. The idea of baring your soul to someone on the internet is a bit daunting, not to mention wierd, but it's attractive just the same. Does that make sense? Well, probably not.

An article on Sex and the City which I read about in August in the New York Times and which I 've been searching for all this while. I finally found it!!!!!!NYTimes.com Review TV WEEKEND; Adieu, Before Wrinkles Show

This is an interesting perspective on Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out that appeared in the Village Voice a while ago. The Village Voice: Features: The Queer Issue: Against His Will by Richard Goldstein Also Ben Brantley's review of Take Me Out that appeared in the New York Times.

Again an article that praises Karan Johar to the skies. I wonder what poor Nikhil Advani must be feeling now. Nobody can deny that Johar is not an adept story-teller. His Kuch Kuch Hota Hai screenplay was a masterpiece, a splendid piece of work, that somehow tells us why mainstream hindi cinema still holds its own. (Contrast this with the situation in Europe, where Hollywood has all but swept the local films away. ) There is a certain joy in watching in watching well-picturized song-and-dance sequences filled with dollops of melodrama that a western audience somehow can't comprehend. Johar's second screenplay KKKG on the other hand was a dud. It was a creaky screenplay that relied too much on star power. With Kal Ho Na Ho, he appears to have come up with another winner. However are we always going to be stuck in this mode? When is Hindi cinema going to think about new things? As long as there are the Karan Johars who make amazing (and not to forget, successful) movies within the same old tired framework, commercial hindi cinema will never change. If only Karan Johar, Sooraj Barjatya and Farhan Akhtar had the same courage to experiment like Ram Gopal Verma.Story-telling the badshah style - The Times of India

There are no ways of describing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; it is quite simply, a masterpiece. Perhaps its biggest difference from the master of suspense’s other movies is that Vertigo is not really a thriller; it is a twisted, almost perverse love story. As a thriller, it is competent, though a little implausible. (The murder plot is impossibly far-fetched.) But it is only after a second viewing that the layers beneath it become clearer. In a way, Hitchcock himself makes that clear when he reveals the big secret halfway through the movie. The emphasis is not on what really happened but how our besotted protagonist (played by Jimmy Stewart, in his darkest role so far) will react when he finds out. (In his book-length interview with director Francis Truffaut, Hitchcock says that everyone opposed him when he decided that the secret would be revealed mid-way into the movie. But he remained firm, just the same. )

So what is Scottie in love with? He’s in love with the image of a woman; a woman who did not exist but instead had been rigorously coached for the part. Consider the way that Hitchcock introduces Madeline (Even the name, Madeline, has just the right air of mystery about it!!). We see Scottie searching the restaurant anxiously for something. Slowly the camera pans the room in silence. Finally it stops. As Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score rises up on the soundtrack, Hitchcock slowly zooms in on Madeline sitting with her husband. And what a sight she is!! Blonde, cold, alluring, and mysterious with just the hint of something carnal (Truffaut’s words) inside. (Personally I think its Novak’s eyebrows. There is just something bewitching about them.) In other words, a perfect example of the woman, that Hitchcock himself was fascinated with. But there is a catch. The real woman has fallen in love with him too. In her real form she is nothing like Madeline; even her name is just plain Judy. She is earthy and beautiful in a rather coarse way (the eyebrows again!). But can he love her? In Vertigo’s most disturbing scene, Scottie makes Judy do a makeover so that she looks exactly like Madeline. He is obsessed; she agrees because she loves him. When she emerges from the bathroom looking exactly like Madeline (she is the same woman, after all) Hitchcock gives the scene the unreality of a dream. This is probably Kim Novak’s best scene in the movie, and it is heart breaking. But of course, Judy makes a mistake and Scottie begins to suspect. In his rage, he takes her back to the tower where Madeline committed suicide. Somehow everything comes together: his rage, his grief, and his obsession. The end, when it does come, is starkly ambiguous, yet fitting.

Vertigo would probably not be the same movie if it had not been for Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful (or is it haunted?) score. Among all the collaborations between them, this is definitely the best. There are long dialogue-less passages in the movie and Herrmann’s score makes up for that, enhancing Hitchcock’s visuals. The love-theme is a motif that appears throughout the movie; Scottie and Madeline are doomed, so are Scottie and Judy, the score subtly emphasizes that.

Funny but bland, Couplings lacks the edginess of Will and Grace or even the sheer charm of Friends. Lets face it. A show about couplings has to have an element of the risqué in it. If network television restrictions mean that a show about sex cannot depict sex or worse, not even talk about sex then it becomes impotent. (Word used intentionally) So what’s left then? Well, there are always the double entendres but really, how far (and more importantly, how many episodes) can one get by using those? Not too many, I fear. The word is that the original British Couplings was a parody of Friends (3 men, 3 women, all of them friends, etc). This one however seems to be a poor cousin of Friends. True, there’s a bit more of sex but it is still steeped in political correctness. All the men resemble each other, so do the women. They all claim to be friends but unlike Friends, they don’t even seem to like each other. What’s the deal here? So far though I am enjoying the double entendres. But its time we had some more political incorrectness and er, sex-talk. Otherwise, this show is not going to get anywhere.

Incidentally why is it that American television makes such a hash of British shows? Just look at the way Showtime bastardized Queer as Folk, Russell T Davies’ splendid 8-episode series, into a long interminable one, turning each character into a distorted politically correct version. The shy, unassuming, good-looking Vince became whiny Michael. Average-looking in-your-face-slutty Stuart became so-good-looking-he-could-be-a-filmstar slutty-but-healthy-slutty Brian. And worst of all, lanky precocious fifteen year old Nathan was transformed into some seventeen year old young-artist-in-the-making with not one whit of the original’s charm. And the less said about the platitude-spouting lesbians, the better.