Category Archives: Movies

Movies

The Perils of Owning Multiple 1TB Hard-drives

So there is an inordinately high number of movies on my hard drives. Most of them were downloaded over the last year, some from hearing a passing mention on some blog, others based on suggestions from friends, and yet others because of the primal urge to own 27 Gigs of Stephen Chow movies. They stay arranged in a folder called – duh – “movies”, and loosely grouped under categorical sub-folders called Anime, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and H.  Yes, “H” – which used to be called “Hollywood”, until I downloaded a Harry Potter blu-ray rip collection and found out that the filenames were long enough for the subtitles to not extract themselves into the location I wanted them to be in, and only after I removed “ollywood” did I manage to get things done the way I wanted them.

The sad thing is that there is hardly time to watch movies nowadays – I seem to have run out of free time, period. (The blog has not been updated in 6 months. You need more proof?) Dinnertime is about the only portion of the day I get any time to indulge in anything, and a TV episode beats a full-length movie every time. On top of it all, the obvious fail-points about a list of downloaded MKV/AVI/m4a rips: after a point of time, the names tend to blur against each other as the numbers increase. Until you forget that Mary and Max was the claymation movie and Lars and The Real Girl was the story of the blow-up doll, and most of the names are just….names. When I want to watch something, I would be like – “what the hell is this movie all about? When did I download this? Wait, did I download this at all or just copy it in some mass dump from someone else’s drive?”  At times, I even took to deleting the movies I was sure I would not watch. I mean, really, The Condemned?

The other problem is that of choice. You know how it is – you want to watch an action movie or whatever, and the only ones you want to see are the ones you’ve seen already. Or the one you want to see is in a DVD and that’s in the wardrobe and you’re too lazy to walk over and find it. (Ironic, because that was the reason I stopped buying DVDs in the first place.) The more the days pass, it becomes harder to justify why exactly I keep the movies still on the drive.

Anyway, I have arrived at ( what I think ) is a sane conclusion to this mess. I have moved everything into two piles – “seen” and “unseen”. The unseen folder will be the one I hit everytime I want to watch something. By December, if there are still movies in that folder, I will delete the lot. I figure that means there is some element of urgency to it, a bit of self-encouragement, for me to watch things that I have not seen yet.

On a side-note, I seem to be headed towards an ailment called NoMoreDownloaditis, caused by over-saturation of media.

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Toons

Steamboat Willie, Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney

Steamboat Willie, for those who came in late, was the third Mickey Mouse short developed by Walt Disney and his two-man team of animators after they were kicked off the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. The first two, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho were fairly straightforward gag reels. In the first, the cheeky little mouse tried to build a plane, succeeded and asked Minnie to ride with him. While in the air, he tried unsuccessfully to kiss her, a somewhat disturbing sequence because you don’t really expect to see the iconic character forcing himself on his soon-to-be-constant girlfriend. Galloping Gaucho has Mickey as a cowboy ( riding a bird, which wikipedia tells me is a rhea, and not an ostrich as I believed), encountering arch-nemesis Peg Leg Pete for the first time, as he abducts bar dancer Minnie. Cowboy Mickey sets off in hot pursuit on a thoroughly-sozzled bird, indulges in a stylish swordfight with Pete and rides off with Minnie into the sunset.

The two failed to evoke much interest because they were too similar to other funny animal cartoons of the time. Disney therefore began work on a third Mickey Mouse short, ambitiously decided to add sound to it, voicing the lead character himself in a falsetto that jars the first time you hear it. With Mickey as a jaunty sailor aboard a steamboat, it had recurring characters Peg Leg Pete as the ill-tempered captain and Minnie as a musical-minded passenger. Though billed as a “talking toon”, none of the characters have much to say. Minnie and Mickey squeal at opportune moments of distress and astonishment, Pete brays in anger and a mischieveous parrot laughs sarcastically at Mickey’s ill-treatment at the hands of the captain. What must have captured the popular imagination at the time, because Steamboat Willie was a roaring hit, unlike its predecessors, was the seamless use of music in the narrative. That, and the zany humour of Ub Iwerks.

Iwerks was one of the animators who stuck with Disney after the botched Oswald deal. Willie is billed as ‘a Walt Disney Cartoon, drawn by Ub Iwerks’, and it’s without doubt Iwerks’ magical hand that makes for much of the charm of the cartoon. At the peak of his career, he was rumoured to be drawing more than 600 figures a day, with Disney and Les Clark both chipping in, of course.  While Disney is creditted with coming up with the Mickey Mouse character, after a pet mouse named Mortimer he had, Iwerks was the guy who fleshed out the familiar iconography – the circular ears, the short pants, the scraggly tail. Biographers portray Disney as the ambitious extrovert, the business-minded brains of the organization, while Iwerks was the sturdy work-horse artist chained to his table, demanding the most of his apprentices as Disney Studios began to expand.

A lot of weirdness pervades the six and a half minute Steamboat Willie. Pete barges in on the happy mouse whistling a tune to himself, infuriated by his carefree attitude at the rudder, he pulls at Mickey’s midriff, stretching it out like rubber. Which Mickey stubbornly rolls and puts back in his pants. Pete chews a wad of tobacco, a tooth magically slides open to allow him to spit the juice out, and the spittle richochets back into a hanging bell. Much amused, Pete tries it again, turning to the bell to see it ring again; the juice lands squarely on his face. Seventy years later, the sequence still manages to make me ( and the eleven-year-old son of a friend, who is watching it with me ) double up in laughter. Much unpolitically-correct hilarity follows when Minnie boards the boat – actually, Mickey helps her board with the help of a rather bashful hook, and a goat chews up her sheet music. The scene then becomes what Disney productions would soon be famous for – their song and dance sequences. Mickey proceeds to make music out of the most unlikely instruments – a washboard, squealing piglets, a cow’s teeth, even by whirling a cat by its tail.

The groan-worthy bit is that Disney evidently found that the song and dance sequences were more crowd-pleasing than the completely irreverent humour in the short. The flurry of Disney shorts that followed – sixteen in 1929, with twelve of them featuring Mickey, including The Barn Dance,The Opry House, When the Cat’s Away, The Karnival Kid – were all productions that showcased some musical set-piece with the characters. In most, notably The Opry House and The Barn Dance, the music was the only glue holding it all together, the gags far apart and  added almost as an afterthought. They evoke an occasional smile, but do not enthrall you the way Steamboat Willie did, with its frenetic pace and no-holds-barred humour. Needless to add that Mickey Mouse, having become the official “face” of Disney, would no longer be the rascally Iwerks version he was in Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie. Ultimately he would become a mouthpiece for energy conservation ( in a free comic distributed by Exxon in the late 1970s) and even a presidential candidate. One might argue that Disney’s clear-cut, family-friendly animation that kept the American cartoon industry stuck in a rut until the 90s, until the likes of Groening, Lasseter and Parker/Stone made the medium relevant again with their seminal vision, but financial success never eluded Disney and his legacy well until the eighties.

Ub Iwerks had a fall-out with Disney in 1930, just two years after Mickey Mouse came into being, when he chose to found a short-lived animation studio of his own with the help of a financier who was on the verge of bankrupting Walt Disney. Nothing much came out that venture, while Disney went from strength to strength. Over time, it’s not even evident that Mickey Mouse was a co-creation, not just one man’s vision, especially because latter-day releases on video and DVD avoid Iwerks’ name altogether. Iwerks did return to the Disney studio later, and worked on some visual effects for the company, but a host of talented newcomers had taken over most of his old ground.

This is one of the failed collaborations that bring to mind ideas of what might have been had the two friends remained partners – would Disney have come out of the song-and-dance template that it sank into in the decades that followed, had Iwerks been around?Or would Iwerks have faded into obscurity anyway, the way non-business-minded halves of partnerships seem destined to be? ( think Kirby/Ditko and Lee, Waeerkar and Pai).

( thoughts brought about after downloading a 36 GB gigatorrent of Disney shorts)

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Comics, Movies

What makes a comic-book adaptation work?

The glut of movies based on comics, in recent times, has added substantially to my View Queue. Reminds me of times I would scour second-hand magazine shops for the odd Cinescape, Cinefantastique or SFX for tidbits about the possibility of this actor playing that superhero, if this comic ever came to screen; which storyline would make for the greatest adaptation ever; would this little-known indie title fare better if it made a silver screen debut. And now it looks like every other 2 or 3-issue-old title has either been optioned, or is in pre-production already with the writer having banged out a first draft in two months and the artist involved in production design. Fuck, I realized that nearly every comic I know is being made into a movie.

One of the biggest changes in Hollywood dealings in recent times is the greater emphasis placed on the creator’s vision ( in case of non-corporate comics) and on the reliance on the overall back-story with the old-school mainstream superheroes. Sharp contrast to the times when auteur vision would take over – yes, Ang Lee, I am looking at you – with occasional scraps thrown in for the geek crowd, and the final product would leave me on the verge of tearing out my hair in rage. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City did unbelievably well, and suddenly Hollywood woke up to the joys of the templated comicbook movie – the precise translation of panel to screen.

So, coming back to the deluge of newer and newer film productions devoted to adapting comics, it is evidently still not clear what will succeed and what won’t. Why does an Iron Man and a Dark Knight work at the box office, while a Punisher War Zone and a Spirit die ignominious deaths? Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X-Men 2 made mutants epitomise comicbook coolness, so why did Superman Returns explode like a planet near a red sun? I have some thoughts on those – maybe they’re not all the points that contribute to the success of an adaptation, but I think these are the most obvious.

1. Getting the Pitch right  – This is, I believe, the most frequent stumbling block for a movie studio swayed by a director and overpaid, image conscious stars into bankrolling a movie that resembles the original comic in name only. Ang Lee’s Hulk is the most perfect example – a character primarily known for smashing things could not – and did not – work well as a psychological study of father-son relationships. The first two Superman movies were successful because they got the square-jawed do-gooder image of the character perfectly, the later ones made Superman the straight man, and boy, were they bad or what! One of the most jarring films I’ve seen of late was The Spirit. Yes, the one that featured Will Eisner’s character as interpreted by Frank Miller – and the movie just could not make up its mind about whether it was a noir take-off, a goofy take-nothing-seriously caper, a sex-violence-gore-filled piece of exploitation cinema. It was possibly Miller’s inexperience at work, but here’s a textbook example of how to NOT make a film. Sure, you can interpret characters your own way – but you cannot have a violent, bone-crunching fight sequence followed by a goofy Loony Toonesque show-off between the two characters.

2. Obscurity works. I will admit that I hadn’t heard of Daniel Clowes before I saw Ghost World. In fact, I will even admit that I had kind of assumed Ghost World would be about a world full of ghosts where a lone warrior, accompanied by the two hot girls on the cover of the VCD will wage a lonely war against supernatural beings by day, and totally do the girls at night. The movie of course had nothing to do with the scenarios my wretched mind had cooked up. It was a neat story about growing up in the suburbs and teenage alienation, and the fact that it was based on a little-known graphic novel worked in favour of both the film and its source – people like me went and discovered the sweaty, underground genius of Dan Clowes and the indie crowd loved the movie. What I am trying to say here is – a lesser-known graphic novel might just beat every other rule that I’ve laid out – it could include stars, it could manufacture its own interpretation of the source material, take tremendous liberties with the storyline, and could still win accolades. There’s no pressure to live up to the demands of the true believers – hell, did anybody know about A History of Violence before David Cronenberg made a movie out of it? Or Road To Perdition? When there’s no fan following in the first place, it gives the film-makers the liberty to make a film that stands on its own. If you read the original graphic novels, you’ll be shocked at the way the movies diverge from the books – not only adding characters and situations that weren’t there in the comic in the first place, but in both cases, changing the structure of the storyline to match the point Mendes and Cronenberg tried to get across. And they still worked, earned awards and created new readers for the books – in both cases, forcing DC Comics to reprint the books in newer editions ( they were originally published through Paradox Press, an original line under Warner that published mostly standalone crime comics).

3. Contemporary Relevance Comics have always reflected contemporary trends – Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is largely a reaction to the Reagan administration, a lot of anti-Thatcher sentiment appears in the 80s works of British writers like Pete Milligan and Alan Moore. But while backstories make sense to the followers and action sequences bring in the early weekend box office returns, the smart filmmaker knows how to add a layer of subtext that strikes a chord with the casual movie-goer and elevates his film beyond a generic popcorn fest. V For Vendetta was a comic set in a Thatcherian England gone fascist, while the Wachowski brothers, in their adaptation, made it more reflective of the prevailing political climate in 2006. Zack Snyder’s version of 300 also had a set of themes tacked on to its generally-straightforward storyline. The plus point of adding contemporary relevance to a comic book movie is that it gives the critics a hook to watch and review the film at a different level, and it leaves the current-affairs-savvy viewer happy that he “gets” what the movie is really about.

4. Stars don’t matter, actors do – There is this famous anecdote about Sir Alec Guinness, who could not stand the fan adulation about his character Obi-Wan Kenobi – and refused to attend Star Wars conventions. Probably Sir Guinness could not stand how Kenobi overshadowed every other role in his illustrious career, but this is a telling example of how a role brands an actor for life. All the more relevant with comic characters – fans have a tremendous   emotional investment in characters they’ve grown up with, and if actor Joe Shmoe plays  WhamPowBiff-man, he will always be identified as such. Christopher Reeve was a wonderful actor – look at his deadpan role of a theatre actor in Noises Off, but hey, he’s always remembered as Superman. Ditto Hugh Jackman. Non-stars have the ability to invest more fully into the character, rather than their own personal tics taking over the story. Jack Nicholson did a smashing job as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, but at the end of the day, the character you saw onscreen was Nicholson playing a deranged lunatic, not the Joker. Tobey Maguire as Spider-man works in the first movie, but by the time he takes off his mask for every other scene in Spider-Man 3, it’s almost farcical – seeing Maguire the star try to assert his presence in the frame. In sharp contrast, look at Hugo Weaving as V or Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, and you will be hard-pressed to believe these characters were overshadowed by the star-power of the actors involved.

5. Slavishness does not equal “Faithful to the source” Yeah sure, so the movie resembles the comicbook, the plot is directly from a memorable story arc and even the actors stand around just like the original panels. So why am I watching the movie in the first place? For that matter, why call it a movie at all – just call it a role-playing comic or something. It was Sin City that began this fad of panel to screen recreation, and while it was a bold visual experiment that worked really well – actors in stilted poses pretending they look anything other than dumb when emoting to the specifications of a printed page? Newsflash – they look very dumb. Voice-overs that echo narrative captions, excessive green-screen sets – I predict that in 10 years, all this will look as dated and groan-worthy as music videos from the 80s.  And then we’ll all snicker about how we called Zack Snyder a “visionary” director.

6. Ignore the fans Yeah, you heard that right. Sure, fans weep and wail  about every single detail, but here it is – they will always find flaws with the finished product, regardless of how good it is. So why bother at all? Keep the fan-service to a minimum, stick to a solid concept, make the changes that will translate the film properly onscreen – never mind the complaints about not being faithful to the source. The source comic exists as the template, but it’s moronic to think it’ll look or feel the same when real people are mouthing those lines or wearing those exact same costumes. Sam Raimi took liberties with quite a few aspects of the Spider-man mythos while making his movies – did anyone hear the howls of frenzy when the term “organic web-shooter” was bandied around? – but it paid off. The whole Harvey Dent/Two Face origin was reworked in The Dark Knight, but the brilliance of the overall package bulldozed over all fan-grumbles.

7. Stick to the same team for the sequels This one’s pretty much common sense coupled with a rudimentary knowledge of film production. A movie works not because of a concept, a script or a strong character, but because of a solid combination of the above with the vision of the principal crew, along with the equations that are shared between them and the cast. Your movie is a success, and then you decide to make the sequel, but with a different director – you’re effectively starting from scratch. Too many examples to mention here – consider the Batman sequels after Burton, X-Men 3, or even Punisher War Zone. The caveat: if your franchise tanked, feel free to reboot the franchise with a completely new team. Worked for Hulk and Batman, didn’t it?

8. Throw Joseph Campbell out of the window The classic “journey of the hero” bit that Campbell expounded has, quite frankly, been done to death by monkey-hordes of screenplay writers hacking out three-act scripts. It’s time to move on, already. Scripts that work beyond the usual good-against-evil spiel that’s been around, scripts that go beyond telling a basic vendetta tale that could be a generic action movie. One of the most telling examples of this is Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil, even though the movie was true to the spirit of the original comics, the pedestrian script let it down. Add to it the insipid writing in Constantine, the Punisher movies, the Fantastic Four movies, and others too numerous to mention – the ones in which you can predict in detail where the movie is going because you’ve seen hundreds like them before. All with the same cliched punchlines, the clipped dialogues, the juvenile foreshadowing and the soaring strings.

9. Avoid Alan Moore You would think film-makers would learn by now, but apparently not. So here’s the thing – Alan Moore writes comics. Comics, see? Not storyboards that can leapfrog onto the screen and make you pots of money. He writes his scripts with an eye on the artistic team he’s working on at the moment, and he writes stories that could probably be told on the screen, but not the way he wrote it. You can make a movie on Jack the Ripper, and it could be a thrilling look at a serial killer in Victorian England, but you cannot adapt From Hell. Call it something else, distance yourself from Moore the writer, and you’ll have a film that might work on its own, and you’ll have your dignity intact at the end of it all. Why expose yourself to an impossibly high standard that you know you are never going to attain anyway, when you can safely – y’know – write your own story and bring it to life? So the next time you want to adapt an Alan Moore comic, do yourself a favour. Watch From Hell, Constantine, LXG, V For Vendetta and Watchmen – and weep with disbelief at your own temerity. Quit it, there are better things to do that trying to adapt a Moore comic.

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AR Rahman, Comics, Mixtapes, Movies, Music

Of movies, blankets and mixtapes

What really annoyed me after watcing Darna Zaroori Hai is the knowledge that RGV’s scriptwriters are so starved of scary ideas. Between this movie and its precursor, there have been five storylines involving cars on lonely roads. Hey, I know lonely roads are scary, and I understand that you guys drive to Khandala every other weekend and it’s a long frigging lonely drive, but get off it already. My point is, if you want to make a horror movie, you need to understand horror. Are you being scared by what you just wrote and translated to screen? I think you need to go out a little more, read a lot, watch a bit of Argento and Fulci and Hitchcock and Park Chan-Wook. And then maybe you will get out of this loser-level walk-up-behind-me-and-say-boo level of scriptwriting. And someone needs to take a jackhammer to Amar Mohile’s keyboards, there, that’s a horror story for you guys – loony music critic ends up with a jackhammer because the music had subliminal messages in it.

Sasi was here for all of half a day, and just because I was dying to share Blankets with someone, asked him to borrow it off me and read it in the next couple of days. I loved that book. Once upon a time, I totally hated reading autobiographies, but it’s books like Blankets that renew my faith in the fact that people can talk about themselves without laying it on too thick. The book is beautiful, romantic without being cheesy, graceful without being highbrow, poetic without being inaccessible. One of the few books this year ( Yes, I know the year isn’t even half-over yet, but I know that this statement is true, period) that I read in one sitting. And the artwork, oh my goodness, what I wouldn’t do to get ONE PAGE of Craig Thompson’s pencilled art. I had read that he was inspired not by other comic-book artists ( though there were definite Will Eisner influences on the storytelling style), but by post-Impressionist painters like Pissarro, Modigliani and Matisse, and his influences show themselves in flowing panels, full-page thoughtscapes that give me goose-pimples as I read the book.

(So what is Blankets? It’s a graphic novel, by this gentleman named Craig Thompson, an autobiographical retelling of his childhood, his relationship with his brother Phil, and his first love, a girl named Raina who he meets at Christian winter camp. He spends two weeks at Raina’s place, and a greater part of the book deals with these two weeks and their repercussions on Craig’s life. GRAAAH, I am bad at describing things like this, just go and read the Wikipedia entry already, huh?)

This would perhaps be the most beautiful book you won’t read in your lifetime, if you are in India. The steep price-tag (29.95$) ensures that even if it’s imported, the price will be high enough to dissuade people from buying it. Plus, yeah, no scanned versions available yet. It would be tough to scan this without destroying the book, it’s 600 pages. So don’t ask.

I made a mix-mp3 collection, again, part of the weekend project. I call it my Ultimate Though Slightly Biased Feel-Good AR Rahman Mix. Slightly biased because these aren’t songs that have been dubbed (and hence not part of the “national consciousness”, so no Bombay, Roja, Rangeela, Dil Se – you hear?) or are easily associated with ARR Hits package – these are the gems that lie in dormant brain-cells, songs that give me a high everytime I hear them because I have not been saturated by them at any point of time in my life. Each of them has a story, of course, and maybe someday I might get around to wearing off your collective ears with them, but for now, the songs will do. 14 tracks in one zip-file, meant to be listened to in the order in which they are arranged.

You can download the zip right here.

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Movies, Weirdness

Hate

It is time…for me to tell you what I should have told you five days, ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.

The Prophecy is true, Harry. I hate to say it, but that doesn’t change things. Not one bit. I…..you, me, all of us, had hoped for better things, and we thought we had them, we believed, we trusted too much. Ah, but for the meaningless twists and turns of two convoluted minds, we might have felt it.

You felt it, Harry? That familiar tightening at the pit of your stomach, when you think you are about to experience something you’ve been waiting forever. That rush of adrenaline when the people you knew a long time ago were brought back to life after five long years? You did, of course. And after that, my boy? How long did it take for you to find out about…..about the Truth. The Truth had been in the air for months, shadowy whispers that we chose to ignore. The ravings of unbelievers, we called them. But the Unbelievers were right all the time. The Prophecy, all of it, is true.

Unbelievers, Harry.

I am an Unbeliever now, you know. One of them, now.

The Matrix Reloaded sucks, Harry. It sucks big-time.

Maybe it was The Agents that did it. Maybe the version we’re seeing onscreen is not the version Larry and Andy planned and directed. The System must have assimilated our collective consciousness and given us what we’re meant to see. Not what we wanted to.

*we hates them*

No.

*stupid flying people in black coatsssss. stupid kung-fu. stupid architect. stupid mero-mevo-meor-aaaarghhh. stupid oracle. stupid EVERYONE. we hatesssss them*

No. NO!

I am raving now, Harry. I am sorry.

Your turn, my boy. Five days to go, and it’s going to be you all over again. And you, Roland. Five months for you. I will be waiting, of course. Somewhere deep down I feel you are going to let me down too, and I am not holding my breath. No sir.

*Stupid wizard boy kirrrrrrmmmmphh*
Shut up.

I am waiting, Harry.

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