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    Reviews

    “A cerebral joyride”
    Karan Johar, filmmaker on REDIFF

    “Among the most charming and creative Indian independent films”
    J Hurtado, TWITCH

    ★★★★✩
    “You don’t really need a big star cast… you don’t even need a big budget to get the techniques of filmmaking bang on…”
    Allen O Brien, TIMES OF INDIA

    ★★★★✩
    “An outstanding experience that doesn’t come by too often out of Indian cinema!”
    Shakti Salgaokar, DNA

    ★★★
    “This film can reach out the young, urban, upwardly mobile, but lonely, disconnected souls living anywhere in the world, not just India.”
    Namrata Joshi, OUTLOOK

    “I was blown away!”
    Aseem Chhabra, MUMBAI MIRROR

    “Good Night Good Morning is brilliant!”
    Rohit Vats, IBN-LIVE

    ★★★✩✩
    “Watch it because it’s a smart film.”
    Shubha Shetty Saha, MIDDAY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A small gem of a movie.”
    Sonia Chopra, SIFY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A charming flirtation to watch.”
    Shalini Langer, INDIAN EXPRESS

    “Interesting, intelligent & innovative”
    Pragya Tiwari, TEHELKA

    “Beyond good. Original, engrossing and entertaining”
    Roshni Mulchandani, BOLLYSPICE

    * * * * *
    Synopsis

    ‘Good Night Good Morning’ is a black and white, split-screen, conversation film about two strangers sharing an all-night phone call on New Year's night.

    Writer-Director Sudhish Kamath attempts to discover good old-fashioned romance in a technology-driven mobile world as the boy Turiya, driving from New York to Philadelphia with buddies, calls the enigmatic girl staying alone in her hotel room, after a brief encounter at the bar earlier in the night.

    The boy has his baggage of an eight-year-old failed relationship and the girl has her own demons to fight. Scarred by unpleasant memories, she prefers to travel on New Year's Eve.

    Anonymity could be comforting and such a situation could lead to an almost romance as two strangers go through the eight stages of a relationship – The Icebreaker, The Honeymoon, The Reality Check, The Break-up, The Patch-up, The Confiding, The Great Friendship, The Killing Confusion - all over one phone conversation.

    As they get closer to each other over the phone, they find themselves miles apart geographically when the film ends and it is time for her to board her flight. Will they just let it be a night they would cherish for the rest of their lives or do they want more?

    Good Night | Good Morning, starring Manu Narayan (Bombay Dreams, The Love Guru, Quarter Life Crisis) and Seema Rahmani (Loins of Punjab, Sins and Missed Call) also features New York based theatre actor Vasanth Santosham (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain), screenwriter and film critic Raja Sen and adman Abhishek D Shah.

    Shot in black and white as a tribute to the era of talkies of the fifties, the film set to a jazzy score by musicians from UK (Jazz composer Ray Guntrip and singer Tina May collaborated for the song ‘Out of the Blue), the US (Manu Narayan and his creative partner Radovan scored two songs for the film – All That’s Beautiful Must Die and Fire while Gregory Generet provided his versions of two popular jazz standards – Once You’ve Been In Love and Moon Dance) and India (Sudeep and Jerry came up with a new live version of Strangers in the Night) was met with rave reviews from leading film critics.

    The film was released under the PVR Director’s Rare banner on January 20, 2012.

    Festivals & Screenings

    Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Mumbai 2010 World Premiere
    South Asian Intl Film Festival, New York, 2010 Intl Premiere
    Goa Film Alliance-IFFI, Goa, 2010 Spl Screening
    Chennai Intl Film Festival, Chennai, 2010 Official Selection
    Habitat Film Festival, New Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Transilvania Intl Film Festival, Cluj, 2011 Official Selection, 3.97/5 Audience Barometer
    International Film Festival, Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Noordelijk Film Festival, Netherlands, 2011 Official Selection, 7.11/10 Audience Barometer
    Mumbai Film Mart, Mumbai 2011, Market Screening
    Film Bazaar, IFFI-Goa, 2011, Market Screening
    Saarang Film Festival, IIT-Madras, 2012, Official Selection, 7.7/10 Audience Barometer

    Theatrical Release, January 20, 2012 through PVR

    Mumbai
    Delhi
    Gurgaon
    Ahmedabad
    Bangalore
    Chennai
    Hyderabad (January 27)

    * * * * *

    More information: IMDB | Facebook | Youtube | Wikipedia | Website

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Suspect Drishyam: Did they steal it?

June 18, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Drishyam Suspect X

Ever since Drishyam released in Malayalam, there has been a lot of talk and assumption that it’s an unofficial remake of the Japanese film Suspect X (based on the novel The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino). With multiple remakes of Drishyam awaiting release (with Kamal Haasan in the Tamil remake Papanasam and Ajay Devgn in the Hindi remake) and also a licensed adaptation of The Devotion of Suspect X produced by Ekta Kapoor under production, here’s a closer look at the two films.

The general belief is that Jeetu Joseph’s Drishyam is copied (or at least adapted) from Suspect X. To someone who has seen both films, this sounds like a charge as valid as the accusation that Reservoir Dogs is a copy or adaptation of The Killing.

Let’s look at the bones.

The Killing is about a bunch of strangers who come together to pull off a heist and things go terribly wrong and most of them end up dead. And Reservoir Dogs is exactly the same idea. But while Kubrick shows us the heist playing with linearity, Tarantino lets us figure out what went wrong after the heist. Despite the acknowledged source material, Dogs stands on its own as a film simply because, you know, as the saying goes “It’s not about where it’s from. It’s where you take it to.”

Suspect X is about a cover up. It’s not a murder mystery. We know up early on in the film/book whodunit. It’s a HowHideIt. And so is Drishyam.

While Suspect X uses the skills of a genius problem-solving math professor, Drishyam subverts the idea of what constitutes smart by giving us a hero who hasn’t dropped out of Class 4 and his only skill sets and passion involves watching movies on TV.

While mathematics is about creating difficult riddles, cinema is about simply believable myth-making. It’s about manufacturing a story by creation of a set of incidents in a credible world populated by convincing characters who want you to believe they lived that life. How’s that for a meta-narrative… which Suspect X is not.

Without giving away anything about the specifics of the case, yes… both films follow the template of a murder investigation. Questions are asked, alibis are checked, evidence is produced, versions are compared and while both narratives have a few similar elements given that the core plot is almost the same, Malayalam filmmaker Jeethu Joseph’s take on the story is truly unique.

Unlike Suspect X, Drishyam’s leading man fumbles, makes mistakes and is always on the verge of getting caught whereas in the original, the genius has created a watertight set of equations that will comprehensively prove the riddle he has given them.

Given a choice between a problem solving specialist dealing with a problem by changing the question and a ordinary man with no special abilities other than movie watching desperately trying to come up with a narrative against the odds to save his own family, who would you root for? Which film would you rather watch?

There is no right answer. Except that if you thought about this enough, it means you know they are both different films trying to tell slightly different stories of very different people driven by different motivations, resorting to different means to figure out very different solutions to the same problem.

You are bound to smile at Drishyam even if you have seen Suspect X because the characters win you over, thanks to the fantastic performances and the smart storytelling. If the character, central conflict, choice of approach, treatment and even the resolution is different, then what’s left is just the similar premise. Even if Drishyam is a copy or an adaptation as alleged, it is one hell of a cover up because there just isn’t enough proof or sign of guilt here.

QED.

Caught between two Indias: Tales of two dogs

June 6, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Kaaka-Muttai

Anyone who wants to understand India or Indian cinema can learn everything – Ok, almost everything – about the different Indias within by just sampling the two releases of the week.

One that defies the notion of India as a poor country by mounting a dysfunctional family drama bigger than the biggest of Hollywood indies in that space. One that shows that no matter how rich, these characters are poor little souls needing our empathy. Oh, yes, we are talking about Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do.

And the other that shows us the spirited world before the poorest of poor by crafting a bittersweet adventure with an all new cast of raw young actors.

One that shows us that no matter how poor these characters are, they have led a life richer and larger than any of us can even imagine.

Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai is the single most relevant film of our times since The World Before Her and Court last year. It ranks up there with the best movie experiences of my life. One I will cherish for a long time to come.

While it’s brutally unfair (to Zoya, of course) to compare the two, we must only to see what these two films made at the opposite end of the spectrum are trying to tell us.

In Zoya’s luxuriously shot indulgent showcase of self-pity, every character on a luxury cruise that costs 8000 euros a head is so full of angst of not getting what he/she wants from life. Ranging from a favourite plane (rich son’s motivation) to a 49 per cent share investor (rich father’s plan) to a figure that would ensure her husband doesn’t dump her (rich mother’s fear) to a desire to dump her chauvinist husband the minute the ex shows up (the rich daughter’s desire).

And it’s all narrated by a pompous dog voiced by one of the biggest actors in showbiz. How much snooty expensive wine can you pack into one bottle? Watch DDD to get a taste of what money can buy. A proxy vacation for the price of a movie ticket in the middle of your sad miserable dysfunctional lives. If Zoya took us to Spain and made us live vicariously through the boys who jumped off a plane, scuba-dived and ran with the bulls in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, here she takes us on a cruise with a dysfunctional family that has waited 30 years to start talking to each other about their true feelings.

This could be any Indian family irrespective of class if you replace cruise with a bus journey across a village because irrespective of class, Zoya’s characters are as regressive as any Indian family – north or south, rural or urban. And this regressive dysfunctional family needs to finally open up, talk across the table and embrace progressive choices without worrying about the rest of the world.

If not for the all-knowing fly on the wall dog that has no bearing on the plot or was around during most of the proceedings, this would have been a fairly likeable film but the storytelling gimmick is so terribly out of character for a dog that you are not sure what’s worse – the gimmick bit of it, the actor behind the voice or the lines themselves. This disinterested bullmastiff is a mascot of rich people’s love (often kept in a cage when it’s not time to show off) and also the voice of disconnect (at least with our middle class existence) in an otherwise universal, relatable film. A film your folks would lap up irrespective of what us snobbish critics say because… who doesn’t want a vacation with the stars?

Dil Dhadakne Do

It’s interesting that Kaaka Muttai (Crow’s Egg), the other release of the film, features a trophy dog too – a pug that costs Rs. 25,000. One that’s used to gently take a dig at this culture of materialism and high breed consumerism. The scene where the kids try to sell their stray mongrel for 25,000 without the slightest clue about why a pug is more saleable is a riot.

In M. Manikandan’s naturalistic document of spirit and innocence, the two little heroes (who have earned their titular nick-name by stealing crow’s eggs because they cannot afford chicken eggs for protein) are so full of spirit when they set out to buy their first pizza that costs Rs.299… that’s more than what their entire family can earn in a month. Can money alone get them access to the junk food of the rich? While this is a film that could have become one of those melodrama-ridden manipulative depictions of poor-as-innocent and rich-as-evil-poverty porn narratives Tamil cinema used to churn out as a formula after the success of the Madurai films, Kaaka Muttai is refreshingly restrained, as it chooses to focus on the spirit rather than the odds that the children are faced with.

The plot is just an excuse to show us the changing socio-economic dynamics between the haves and the have-nots in a consumerist world. What happens to class politics when the power is transferred from politicians to capitalists in a media-monitored voyeuristic networked world? The ripple effect of Kaaka Muttai’s narrative needs to be seen than described to do it full justice.

The brilliance of this narrative lies in its layers.

At a basic micro level, it’s a story of a family living at the very edge of civilization trying to get a taste of the modern world. The father is in the lock-up, the mother tries to make ends meet and get her husband out of jail while the granny wants to be of some use to the household (that she looks at the picture of a pizza and tries to recreate it using her cooking skills to satisfy the kids) and the kids themselves are happy picking up coal from the railway tracks as long as they get three rupees a kilo. And life will never be the same for this family when the kids begin to dream of pizza.

At a macro level, it’s the story of a slum and its inhabitants. Every character is a delightfully detailed nuance contributing to the larger story. They are flavours influencing the kids in the neighbourhood. There are times when you fear that the characters would cross over into the world of crime, given how close good and evil reside in a slum but fortunately, Kaaka Muttai is the handiwork of a filmmaker who has his heart in the right place. It’s responsible, mature and so well balanced. I smiled when an affluent kid who is friends with these children saves them a slice of half-eaten pizza in his tiffin box early on in the film.

In one of the finest scenes in the film, the brothers in their quest for pizza find two rich kids who are not allowed to eat the street side Paani Puri. The plate is always yummier on the other side of the class. This is the kind of balance that puts Kaaka Muttai right on top of the year list. With half a year to go, I can bet there’s nothing in sight that can take the place of this most relevant, entertainer that makes you alternate between feel-good and feel-bad all through. It’s an incredibly shot slow-burn that shines bright, thanks to the filmmaker’s gaze (Manikandan has also shot the film) that fondly finds beauty even in the dirtiest sewer running across Chennai (the Couum river). And it’s playing with English subtitles here in Bombay, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.

And at a completely meta-level, this is a film that inspires goodness. When I thought of the 450 bucks I had spent on the ticket to watch this movie from the comfort of a recliner, I thought of the noodle-sponsored campaign where Ranveer Singh tells us it costs only 750 rupees to feed a child for a whole year at a time when instant noodles in the country are nearing extinction.

And then, I thought of Zoya’s world where 750 rupees is less than what you would tip the waiter for the right bottle… no, glass of wine (how can you tip less than 10 Euros on a cruise, ya?!)

And here we are, caught right in the middle of two Indias… among many. On a Friday. Going to the movies for escape and enlightenment. Until another Friday gives us something to talk about.

eom

Cannes: Lessons from an expensive holiday

May 26, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Sudhish at Cannes The best part about the Cannes Film Festival is that the dates are announced well in advance that you can plan your travel really well. Make up your mind well in advance and ideally, start four months before the festival. For May, start planning by January.

TRAVEL – Break down your trip:

Cheapest ticket to Paris – Book three months ahead. You will get it for under 500 Euros. And book Paris – Nice separately one whole day later, so that you can see Paris and also account for missed connections. You don’t want to come to France and leave without time in Paris. So always account for the break journey. Also, compare with the fare you get direct from your city to Nice which might be expensive because your local airline would automatically put you in a partner airline which may not have the cheapest fare for that region. Do NOT book midnight flights, whatever you saved you will lose paying for a cab ride. Nice to Cannes at night would cost you 100 euros by taxi. Book flights that get in during the day, walk up to the bus stop, ticket costs 1.50 to Nice or Antibes and you can take a train to your hotel. You can even take a train from Paris. There are superfast trains that make it five hours and cost lesser than airfare and get your right into Cannes. Budget: 500-600 Euros. (Could shoot up to 1000-1200 Euros if you wait till April/May)

TRANSPORT – Trains, your best friend:

If you want to get to the hotel quicker from the airport, walk it to Nice St. Augustin train station – will take you ten minutes to get there but after that, it would be much faster. What you need is a weekly pass – that costs 9.90 euros and gives you unlimited rides for a week. (Each ticket otherwise is about 6 euros) I haven’t tried getting a pass at St. Augustin but the weekly pass should be available in the bigger stations like Nice, Antibes and Cannes. Always stay close to the train station. Buses ply once in half hour, so you can’t count on them. And the roads are so narrow, you don’t want to risk bike rental. I was thinking of renting out a motorcycle except that I saw an accident on Day 1 and never considered it. Also, the deposit on motorcycle rental is very high. Can go up to 1000-1500 Euros and if you fall off the motorcycle, your holiday is over. Get the weekly train pass and you are set. Budget: 10 Euros.

HOTEL – By the Palais or the train station:

When you are booking, go to Google Maps, click on hotels a few streets away from the Palais – at least four months before – because they fill up really fast. By February end, 90 per cent of them are booked and the rest are super expensive. Do not do Airbnb, since most of them require deposits and you are better off having that money on you in an expensive town like Cannes. If you are unable to find accommodation near the Palais, the venue of the festival – look up hotels right next to the train line – Cannes Bocca on one side, Golfe-Juan-Vallauris, Juan Les Pin, Antibes or Nice on the other side. ONLY look for hotels right outside the train stations even if the distances seem tempting (like 1 or 2 kms from station because in the hills, even a 500 metre walk on a steep could be taxing). I stayed at Du Levant at Antibes which undoubtedly offers a spectacular view of the sea but at the festival, you won’t have time to enjoy your sea-view. And it took us one km of walk and waiting for buses to get to the train station (or a 15-20 euro cab ride every time to the station. To Cannes, a single trip from Antibes would cost you 55 euros by cab) Budget: 100 euros a day for a decent roof over your head. (This would go up to 200 a day if you don’t book on time).

BADGE – Marche Du Film, your all access pass:

Unless you have a spectacular profile in the film business, don’t even bother applying for a free registration badge – you will end up waiting for weeks and not hear anything. Instead, Get yourself a Marche Du Film badge that costs 300-400 Euros (the earlier you buy, the cheaper it is) and you can buy this online on the official website. This is an industry badge, the only badge that gets you access to all films in Cannes, or at least gets you access to invites for the red carpet ones. The films at the Grand Lumiere Theatre – which are all official competition or Out of Competition official selections – are all red carpet events which are INVITES only. Once you get a Marche Du Film badge (make sure your profile online establishes your film credentials), you are set to get access to all screenings – official and the market screenings. There is a Day Pass of 20-30 Euros which you can buy for entry to the Palais but what they don’t tell you is that it does not get you access to screenings. It just lets you catch celebs on the red carpet. If you are really desperate and have no money, take a cue from the students and hold a board with the name of the movie you want an invite for and stand outside the venue. On a lucky day, you might get what you want. If you don’t want to base your entire trip on chance, get that badge. Best investment ever. Budget: 300-330 Euros. Cannes Michael Caine

RED CARPET – Screenings and Attire:

Red carpet screenings are black tie events and you need to be dressed in a tuxedo and black formal shoes (if you are male) and they are mostly nice to women as long as they are wearing a fancy evening dress. Do not think of renting tuxedos though the websites indicate you can rent one for 20-30 Euros. During the festival season, the tuxedo rental goes up to 100 Euros a day. You are better of getting one stitched for a 100 Euros before you leave for Cannes instead. Budget: 150 Euros. OTHER FILMS – To queue or not to queue: With the Marche Du Film badge, you should be able to queue up for the other screenings and if you spot unreasonably long queues, you are better off going for one of the market screenings. There are a lot of good films in there and you might be able to squeeze in two market films in the time it takes to get access to one official screening. And chances are the market screening film might be more fun. And if you are going towards the end of the festival, your Marche Du Film badge would get you access to all the films that played under official competition in a smaller theatre minus the rush. I ended up standing three hours in the queue for Youth and didn’t like it as much as I would have otherwise liked. But if I were staying back for the last few days, I could have caught it without the baggage of hype and long queues. Ditto with Love 3D.

FOOD & NIGHT LIFE – Party all night:

A beer costs about 3-5 Euros. So, a decent meal for two would cost 20-25 Euros. The place is full of bistros… And most of the pubs around the festival are open all night. So if you miss the last train before midnight, plan to stay out and party till five in the morning. But be warned, you will end up blowing about 30-40 Euros just drinking during the night. But you must stay out one of the nights. It’s quite special. A friend literally forced me to stay on but I’m glad she did. You never know who you would meet. We met a pilot who couldn’t name his boss (clearly a Hollywood celebrity – he said we would know the person if he took the name) and he bought us drinks. Most of the official parties are invites only. It always helps to network because someone will know someone who has a pass. Budget: 40-50 Euros a day for food and drinks.

Will edit this post as and when I remember more but if you are really smart about planning it, you can manage a trip and back under 1500 euros. If you don’t plan it well, you might end up spending three times that. Or more.

Interview: Aishwaryaa R Dhanush – From darkness to light

April 30, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Vai Raja Aishwarya

What do you do when your father is a superstar of the masses, your husband is one of the best actors ruling the trade and your mentor is a much acclaimed maverick filmmaker with blatant disregard for formula?

Aishwaryaa R Dhanush decided to step out of the shadows – of Rajinikanth, Dhanush and Selvaraghavan – when she started work on her second film Vai Raja Vai releasing on Friday.

Her first film 3, a serious dark drama about a violent bi-polar protagonist was hijacked by the unexpected virality of the promotional song “Why This Kolaveri” (that had very little to do with the tone of the film) and shocked audiences who weren’t quite prepared for a depressing film. Critics found the film closer to her mentor Selvaraghavan’s school of filmmaking than the commercial type her father and husband are associated with.

While she had Dhanush help her out right from scripting back then, this time around Aishwarya decided she had to do it all by herself – with very little support from the family. I spoke to a nervous Aishwarya on the phone earlier this week to find out all about the new film. Here are some snatches from that conversation.

I’ve been watching your Dad’s films in the order they were made for my book on him and find his transformation quite fascinating. Have you seen them in the order they were made?

“No. Not really. But I’ve read some of the books on him. None of them have been able to get the facts right.”

I guess it’s always difficult to piece together accounts of a man’s life from memories of people who knew him. Luckily, my book is not about the facts. It’s not about the person but the onscreen persona that emerges from his films.

“Then, it’s subjective. You can write what you want.”

From the trailers of Vai Raja Vai, I can tell there’s a significant change of mood from the darkness of 3. This seems like a fun film.

“That was a very conscious thing. 3 was very intense and very dark and I tend to gravitate towards the darker side of storytelling. So, I consciously didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go out of my comfort zone. I find myself comfortable portraying complex relationships and concentrated emotions. Commercial cinema was very challenging for me.”

The story goes that you came up with this over coffee?

“I wasn’t ready with a script. I hadn’t planned what I would do next when I met this friend of mine – Archana Kalpathi (the daughter of Kalpathi S Aghoram of AGS Cinemas). When I briefly told her how I wanted to explore intuition, she took the idea back to her father. Having explored bi-polar disorder in 3, I’ve been very interested in the psychological aspects of the human being.I find intuition very intriguing and wanted to see how I can bring that idea into the film. AGS has always been particular that the script has to be different. So that’s what interested the producer. I didn’t have a bound script. Everything just fell into place.”

You wrote this yourself?

“Yes, I wrote it alone.”

In Tamil?

“I type Tamil in English.”

Would we see the Selvaraghavan influence or have you made an effort to come out of his shadow?

“I would say this has a combination of influences from my Dad’s kind of cinema and Selva’s. There are certain shots that would remind you of a Selva film but a lot more comparisons can be made with my Dad’s films. It’s a good balance.”

Why don’t you use Dad’s name in your credits? 

“I just feel it would be too long. I don’t see the reason why I should announce it. Everybody knows who I am. I am proud of my initials. While a person shouldn’t change their surname, the husband shouldn’t be denied his place in my life… It’s all right. I’m happy to be Aishwaryaa R Dhanush.”

You wrote a film without Dhanush as the hero but you’ve given him a cameo.

“I wanted to do something independently. It’s not fair to keep going back to him. I was working out of my comfort zone. Last time, he was around to support and help. This time, it was a conscious decision to do something on my own. But he’s done a cameo playing Kokki Kumar, one of my most favourite characters he has ever played (Kokki Kumar from Selvaraghavan’s gangster epic Pudhupettai). When we had a chance to intersperse it in our narrative, I didn’t want to let it go.
But it’s just a one scene. We shot for five hours. He has been busy shooting films in Hindi and Tamil. It was nice of him to do this.

Vai raja still

You have worked with a young cast led by Gautham Karthik. How did that fall into place?

“Each of them fell correctly into character. Daniel Balaji, Tapsee and Vivek have always been selective about their roles. When they heard the script, they knew it was a multi-star cast. The characters demanded these people. And I was lucky to get the right artists playing the characters I wrote.”

A while ago, we thought the market was ready for offbeat films but a whole bunch of good films (Kaaviyathalaivan or Ennakul Oruvan, for example) didn’t work. Nor have the big films worked (Lingaa, for example). What do you think is going on? What does the market want?

“The beauty of film business is that we can’t ever gauge what the audience wants. But yes, people have become broad-minded and the audience wants to see good cinema – doesn’t matter big or small. Jigarthanda and Darling were critically acclaimed and did well commercially. I think the release date has become more important. Promoting films has become so important.”

Also, do you see the game changing as the movie watching experience today is interrupted with the presence of the mobile phone in the hall? Nobody watches movies alone anymore. You are plugged into a network and reacting live.

“It is very unhealthy to have a running commentary going and people commenting on scenes as they are watching the film. Making cinema has become much more challenging. Today, if a film runs for two weeks it’s as much a success as a film that ran 50 days in the past. And that’s such a big challenge.”

What if you had the chance to make a film with your father? What kind of film would you make?

“I’m happy just being his daughter. I don’t think I’m experienced enough to direct him. It’s very difficult for me to see him as anything but a father. The equation we share is very personal. I can’t go out and pretend to be something else – like a director on the set. When you are a director, you have to treat people a certain way.”

Whoa! You sound like you slave-drive your crew.

“I’m a taskmaster. I’m not at all pleasant.”

Vai Raja Vai

Did you learn that from Selvaraghavan?

“The first advice he gave me was: Don’t look weak. You have to be the bad person. Only then, work will get done.”

Do you still go to Selva for inputs?

“He lets you be. He has so much confidence in me. I don’t think even I have that confidence in myself. If and when I go back to ask him anything, he’s like: Why ask me when you know the answers.”

Has he seen Vai Raja Vai?

“He’s been travelling, writing his own script but is eager to watch it.”

What about your father and husband? Have they seen it? How did they react?

“They have seen it and were quite surprised. They were very happy about it. My father thought 3 was very serious but this, he said, is perfect for the summer vacation. Timepass.”

(The film is releasing in Mumbai and other metros with English subtitles.)

OK Kanmani: Unlimited thaali please, we are South Indians  

April 18, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Director: Mani Ratnam
Cast: Dulquer Salman, Nithya Menen, Prakash Raj, Leela Samson
Rating: Liked it*

✰✰✰✰

OK Kanmani for blog

About twenty years ago, Mani Ratnam made a movie about two young people from different communities who elope and make Bombay their home.

In Mumbai 2.0, or OK Kanmani as Madras Talkies insists, the young lovers are not fighting communal tensions but the prison of marriage or what it represents: commitment for life.

Now, I wish Mani Ratnam lived in Mumbai.

Because he would have enjoyed the freedom Jaideep Sahni had with Shuddh Desi Romance (a not-so-perfect film redeemed by a great ending) because OK Kanmani could have been THAT film that challenged the sacred thread. Or the knots often worshipped as thaali (Before you think of a bad pun, Yes… also one that gets you – both men and women – unlimited meals for life and we are not just talking about food here).

While Shuddh Desi Romance intentionally made young people seem flippant and confused about what they want, OK Kanmani is about two confident, independent young individuals – consenting adults – who choose to live and sleep together knowing very well what the future holds for them.

Mani Ratnam basically takes that Trisha-Siddharth (or Vivek Oberoi-Kareena Kapoor) love story from Aayitha Ezhuthu and fleshes it out with all the things people have come to expect out of him – the modern middle-class family dynamic, the irreverent tone (with which you call your parents by name), public transport (trains, of course), great looking houses with tasteful production design (even if it’s meant to be a seedy lodge, it better have a swing, Yo!), talkative kids who are quick to spot lovers up to mischief, people professing love sitting across the room, attractive people dancing to Rahman’s funky music, terse dialogues in staccato Mani-Ratnamspeak, magic hour and finally, rains to resolve everything. A squeaky clean petrichor feel good ending. You know you love it.

By now, a Mani Ratnam film is genre by itself. And you can’t question the genre because the man invented it. It’s like telling Jobs or Cook: Dude, in my opinion, the new iPhone 6 bends. You used to make cooler phones.

You know what you are getting when you buy an iPhone and the upgrades just make it more relevant for apps you tend to use more. Even if an Android has better specifications, nothing quite matches the feeling of wielding a highly acclaimed, incredibly beautiful, classy symbol of the elite (and the aspirational upper middle class.)

As much as I enjoyed the home comfort and the easy-on-the-eye sophistication of Mani Ratnam’s storytelling (and the writing truly marks a return to form – he should just stop collaborating and polluting his writing with substandard pulpy writers), I did find the old-fashioned endorsement of marriage a little too outdated. But then, Mani Ratnam’s films have not just respected the sanctity of marriage. They celebrate marriage.

In Mouna Raagam, he made a dysfunctional marriage (marred with baggage from the past) work. In Roja, he made a woman from a small town get in to war territory in search of her husband. In Bombay, the marriage of people from two communities was a symbolic representation of India as a secular State. In Alai Payuthey, lovers who secretly marry almost lose each other before they understand the true meaning of marriage.

Mani Ratnam continues this tradition of making even the most commitment-phobic young people FUCKING TOE THE LINE!

While you could expect someone on the other side of 50 to not understand how young people meet and greet these days (Yes, I found that long drawn meet cute at the wedding contrived), it is a little disappointing personally to see Mani Ratnam’s persona as a filmmaker change from the rebel (I always see Mani Ratnam as Karthik – Manohar from Mouna Raagam, or say Suriya – Michael from Aayitha Ezhuthu) to the father figure (now I see him as Arvindswamy – from Kadal or Prakash Raj – from OK Kanmani) – the preacher! That annoying uncle who has only one question to passive-aggressively ask every time he meets you: “Eppo Kalyanam?” (When good news?)

OK Kanmani is unfortunately that Uncle who makes you believe that marriage is the answer to your conflict of living in without any expectations from each other. He wants to say it’s good to have expectations. It’s good to miss each other madly and want to hold on to each other. Marriage is so good you know you want it. It promises you unlimited meals of chicken soup for the soul. Go marry already. I want to eat your Kalayana Saapad, unlimited thaali please.

But ideological differences aside, I LOVED the exquisitely framed (PC Sreeram) modern day fable on the soul-stirring beauty of good old-fashioned marriage (where you are there for the other, in good health and bad). Especially because the chemistry between the lead pair of Dulquer Salman and Nithya Menen is crackling (the young actors make you live their confusion) and equally adorable is the portrayal of the older couple (Prakash Raj and Leela Samson are terrific) in an Amour situation.

Yet, it’s a lost opportunity. Towards the end, there’s a lovely scene in there when the boy gifts her a necklace. He may not believe in a mangalsutra/thaali but gets her a parting gift that symbolically means the same damn thing – I love you and want you to wear this around your neck so that I know you love me. Isn’t that enough surrogate and subtle endorsement of marriage enough? Why take it all the way to a literal court acknowledged State-approved registered marriage with a vengeance, Mani Uncle.

As it is, it’s very difficult for young people to find houses in Mumbai (especially, bachelors – forget live-in) and you KNOW this (especially because you had to pass off spacious bungalows and five-star hotels from Chennai as Bombay though I must add it’s a big come down for The Park’s Pod to be de-promoted from New York in Good Night Good Morning to Bombay in OK Kanmani).

So pardon me if I don’t agree with the convenient solution of marriage to resolve complex relationship issues of space (physical and mental) and choices (professional and moral).

But I remember the ground reality of home.

It is not yet legal in Tamil Nadu to speak about pre-marital sex. Ask Khushboo. (As a friend’s father often says in denial when told that young people these days do things other than sleep on a bed together: NEVER BE!) And any discussion on the need for a thaali is interpreted as an insult to your own mother. Ask Puthiya Thalamurai.

Which brings me back to what I started this review with.

I wish Mani Ratnam lived in Mumbai.

(P.S: My rating scale goes from: Loved it. Liked it. Liked it but. Didn’t like it. Hated it.)

Thoughts before THE jump: The flutter of the big butterflies

April 3, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

About 16 years ago, I was sitting at the computer lab at Manipal Institute of Communication – super nervous. What next?

I have never been a believer. I’m a cynic. Maybe that’s why I was right for criticising everything.

I looked at my resume.

I had morphed the cover of Gentleman. It featured a guy in a trash bin on the cover and I put my face over his; I changed magazine name to Gentlemen, and modified the featured blurbs to Freshly Dumped (out of a communication school – in fine print), Looking for a job, For Hire… you get the idea.

The rest of my resume – formatted in two-column magazine layout – with generous use of pictures to support each section came to three pages (as opposed to the single page resume we are taught to submit).

I printed three copies before the computer wiped out the file that took me two weeks of work. The back-up floppy disk got corrupted.

I took a chance and sent one copy to the newspaper I grew up reading. I didn’t hear from The Hindu for a month and a half. So I sent the second copy of the three with a reminder. It worked. I never had to use the third printout of my resume for 16 years.

That brings us to today.

I’m sitting staring at the laptop screen in my apartment in Andheri at the heart of the film industry – super nervous. With the same old question. What next?

I quit my job at The Hindu last week.

It was a very difficult decision – one I never saw myself making all these years – because of pure economics. It just wasn’t feasible anymore and I had drained all my savings trying to keep the job going for the last nine months.

Bombay is an expensive city and nobody living outside can even imagine the complexities of living here – say, simple things like finding a house on rent when you are a bachelor – let alone traffic and topography. It was my choice to come here to report on films. It was my price to pay.

I quit on a high with the satisfaction of doing the job to the best of my ability.

I had the unique record of getting eight of my stories (with seven bylines) on the same day (February 22, 2015) in different supplements of The Hindu.

I had turned in 55 stories in my last 68 working days this year – in fact, I filed a big one a day after I resigned.

* * *

The truth is I never saw myself doing films full-time. It was a passion I entertained with savings from my journalism career. Over the last 15 years, I’ve made three films. X, the third one, a collaborative project with 10 other filmmakers, is all ready for release mid 2015.

You know the feeling when you have been married to one person for as long as you can remember… and then suddenly one day, you are single. This feels just like that.

I really don’t know what it is to be single. It’s like I’ve always been committed. I always had that job that supported me, despite my flirtations with cinema.

Now, that’s gone. And there’s nothing to fall back on.

The Hindu was home to me. It still is. But if you don’t leave home, how do you know where all you could go?

I know what I don’t want to stop doing.

I do not plan to stop reviewing films or chatting with people because I never saw that as a job. Thankfully, I still have a base of readers on social media and I hope to continue to give them what they follow me for. This just means my own WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels will be a little more active.

It may not bring me money but I can do with the love. And of course, the hate because that’s always pushed me to do better.

* * *

It was just last month that I took a motorcycle trip across the South.

I did Madras – Tiruvallur – Bangalore – Hampi – Goa – Chiplun all the way to Bombay. I felt I owed it to the cruiser I bought, ten years ago, with the resolution that I will go cross-country riding some day.

When I got home last month, I saw the motorcycle rotting at home and I remembered the resolution. I was eaten by guilt. I borrowed money from a friend, got it fixed and decided to do what I had always only dreamt of doing.

It didn’t matter that the furthest I had done was Madras to Pondicherry.

But if I had done it once, I could do it a few times. I told myself I just had to take it 50 kms at a time. And then, worry about the next 50.

That’s how I finally did it.

I stopped every 45 minutes to an hour, clicked photos, enjoyed the journey, live-tweeted, rode all day and chilled with friends – old and new – in the evenings. One day at a time. 50 kms a session.

One week later, I had finished something I never imagined I could do.
Today, I think that trip happened for a reason. It was by design. I had code-named that trip The Road of Trials (because that’s how much I love Joseph Campbell).

Today, I realise it was exactly that.

It was a trip that was preparing me for this moment.

Just like that one-way trip on a plane that took me sky-diving. It was a trip I did to tell myself: If you can do this, you can do anything.

I have jumped off a plane.
I rode 1748 kms on a motorcycle.
I’ve made three films as an extended hobby.

Today, I’m all set to take a full-time plunge into films.

Because that’s what I love most. The first two films I made wiped me off Rs.35 lakh rupees of my savings of 15 years. But the third one earned itself a producer. It even changed the way I look at cinema today. It probably happened to make a snooty critic like me look at the unlimited, varied possibilities of storytelling in a non-judgmental, inclusive manner without delusions of superior self-intellect.

I can feel the flutter of giant butterflies in my stomach and it’s not something I ate. It’s that jittery feeling that comes pre-exhilaration.

Conventional wisdom says I should shift from my house to a hole just to save money that will keep me afloat for a few more months. But when have I ever been conventional? I’m not quitting the life I am used to that easily.

In fact, I’m moving into a more comfy home even if it means a little more rent. It took me a week of bunker-mode depression and introspection to figure this out. But now, I can see it clearly.

I came to Bombay to be a fly on the wall reporter and do my reviews a little earlier.

Today, life has given me a chance to be more than that.

Maybe I’m not here to pay rent. I’m here to buy this fucking house.

Maybe I’m not here to deconstruct films. I am here to construct them.

My best friend lent me $9000 when we were making Good Night Night Morning. I asked him then: “What if the film doesn’t recover even this much?”

He said: “I’m not investing in the film. I’m investing in you. I have full faith in you. You will return it someday, say, with a 10 per cent interest?”

It’s also time to channel the faith that people have in me.

It’s time I embraced faith, not blind-folded, but with a clear vision of where I am going.

It’s time to take that leap.

Because: “There’s no such thing as half a leap of faith. You either jump. Or you don’t.” (X)

(Originally posted here.)

Detective Byomkesh Bakshi: Case of the missing opium

April 3, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

Director: Dibakar Banerjee

Cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Anand Tiwari, Swastika Mukherjee, Divya Menon, Meiyang Chang, Neeraj Kabi

Rating: Liked it but*

Swastika

If cinema is the opium of the masses, with his new film, director Dibakar Banerjee shows us that he’s not the best drug dealer. Because he tends to smoke it all.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshi is an opium dream.

One moment naturalistic, and then over the top. One moment smart, and then a tad too expositional. One moment quiet, one moment heavy-metal loud. One moment for style, another for substance. One moment a thriller, and suddenly a rare moment of slapstick. Taken individually, these moments work but Banerjee’s erratic storytelling that opts for substance-influenced style over substance makes Detective Byomkesh Bakshi the curious case of lost identity with Banerjee trying to find out what kind of a filmmaker is he, when given all the money mainstream filmmakers are given and a Yash Raj Films backing.

Unless the intention itself was: “Let’s take the Bengali babu and make Bakshi as a Japanese film – but in Hindi, with anachronistic heavy metal music and English lyrics.”

You get the vibe of watching scenes from a really cool ultra-violent Japanese film in the middle of a lot of talking and until the villain shows up with his evil Amrish Puri avatar and then on, it’s a eighties Bollywood film.

The actors are all fantastic. Sushanth Singh Rajput nails it and gives us a character we look forward to if this franchise takes off and the likeable Anand Tiwari plays a great foil. The rest of the cast is fantastic too (not naming specifics to not give away the plot, twists or ending) except that the makers leave so many characters and threads hanging for long stretches of time that the inconsistencies in tone and pace gives us enough time to appreciate the detailing of painstakingly done production design, time-travel cinematography and the cool music.

It says a lot about the film when things that should ought to be invisible are unanimously praised. But this is a film let down by the guy at the helm – in writing and directing departments.

What this film needed to work was the economy of writing from the forties (and the fifties). Fewer scenes; tighter storytelling.

Average filmmakers are written about when they make good films. Great filmmakers are written about when they make average films.

Yet, Bakshi is not an average film. It’s way above average by Bollywood standards and if we were to give points for the visual and aural appeal alone, this is the film of the year. At least till Bombay Velvet comes along.

It’s the first time Banerjee has fumbled but a misstep that needs equal amount of criticism and appreciation because we want to see more of this franchise. This could be the beginning of something truly epic. It has promise, potential and the right team backing it in every department. All it needs is the captain to pull up his socks.

*My rating scale goes from: Loved it. Liked it. Liked it but. Didn’t like it. Hated it.

Birdman: The Dark Knight Surprises

January 22, 2015 · by sudhishkamath

SPOILER ALERT: This review is best read after you’ve seen the film.

The key to understanding Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s modern masterpiece Birdman lies in figuring out who you really are.

Are you the kind who believes nothing really matters and nothing is important? Or do you take yourself and everything around you way too seriously.

Are you the kind who is expecting to watch a superhero film given the title of this film – Birdman? Or someone who is looking for a deeper meaning (like The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

It is kind of redundant and futile to review Birdman because it mocks at the very idea of criticism, especially the tendency of critics to deconstruct art with a series of adjectives… Lazy labels, as Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton better get the Oscar this year for Best Actor) the frustrated artist screams at the critic in one of the many outstanding scenes in the film.

A thing is a thing and not what is said of it, says a prominent sign in the green room that reminds you throughout the film that your opinion simply doesn’t matter.

Before we get deeper into what Inarritu has done with Birdman, it’s important to understand the context and the filmmaker’s body of work. Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel and Biutiful are all explorations of life and death… experiments with linearity and chronology of events as they try to examine cause and effect, the interconnectedness of the universe, deeply profound, depressing and DARK. This time, the knight of all things dark springs a surprise, like he’s finally figured it out – the Birdman is a epiphanic statement about the point of life, meaning and art, of course. A statement he makes with lots of laughs and shows us he’s so good at comedy (who would’ve thought given his dark filmography) and so effortlessly at that.

It feels like a finale because Birdman feels like the point of enlightenment and awakening of a filmmaker who after making four award-winning critically acclaimed arthouse films has finally realised that it’s not really about making something a few will appreciate before figuring out where to go for their cake and coffee when it’s over. Nobody cares these ponderings on art and meaning of life. They don’t sell popcorn. You know what sells? Pornography and comic books.

So, Innaritu’s lays it down for them simple this time, saying: All right, you lazy dumb popcorn-munching idiots, here’s a linear superhero film with a lot of laughs, told with pace, urgency and histrionics because subtlety doesn’t seem to get through your thick empty skulls. You won’t appreciate Biutiful, here’s a movie about a superhero featuring the guy who was Batman.

Not that he’s kind to the critics and the patrons of high art. To them, he says: All right, you pretentious movie snobs who are going to kill me for making a funny film because comedy is low art, here’s a pretentious little title and a few clues that will help you see the meaning you seem to be searching for, so that you can use a few more adjectives.

Which is why Birdman returns to the very basics of art – the sacred stage where it was born. Where there were no second takes. And to adapt to the form of theatre, he borrows a few techniques – like seamless start to finish cinematography (executed with a few cheat cuts, of course), a very basic drums score and the basic outline of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the Broadway production that forms the backbone of the film, one that turns meta as the film progresses.

The cast of characters he picks for Birdman are all battling their hubris. And alter egos.

Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), a jaded fading star best known to be the face of the Birdman movies (Incidentally Keaton was Burton’s Batman and turned down the third film because it wasn’t dark enough) wants validation, acceptance and relevance again after turning down a profitable franchise because he just wanted to be a real actor. But he has to pay the price for his decisions. A broken family, brink of bankruptcy (caused possibly because of his health issues as hinted), a daughter he couldn’t spend time with and the fast fading aura. In his head, he’s still haunted by his jilted alter ego – the man with the Hollywood mask and superpowers, one who looks down at the ordinary people below him and one egging him to return back to the confines of the comfort suit and Hollywood mediocrity. The man in the bird suit doesn’t want this ordinary life of struggle and pursuit of meaning or art as long as he can gross billions but the man with the wig feels the need to prove himself because he wants to be remembered (Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died the same day but nobody remembers Farrah, he says)

Mike Shiner (Edward Norton who plays this so flawlessly without a single false note or a wrong beat) is a popular Broadway actor – the audience loves him, so do the critics. And he doesn’t really care about what they think. He’s seems like the anti-thesis to Riggan because he doesn’t need validation. He already has, he wants to mine deeper for realism on stage because that’s the only place he finds himself at home – at pretense. When he is pretending to be someone else. In real life, he has no identity or drive. He likes to life in a world of pretense. When a journalist asks him why he chose to be an actor, he doesn’t even have a real reason and decides to steal Riggan’s backstory. The scenes where they spar make for some of the best moments in the films – this could be a conversation between two alter-egos (one man’s life is the other man’s alter-ego) and this is best illustrated a moment after Shiner is done telling Riggan that nobody gave a shit about Riggan anymore… When a lady interrupts their conversation and asks Shiner to take a picture of her with “the guy who used to be Birdman”. It’s a moment that proves to be a great reality check for them both and they have nothing more to fight about.

Sam (Emma Stone is going to lose her Oscar despite the nomination only because Patricia Arquette spent 12 years on Boyhood) is the voice of epiphany in the film. She’s the one who has figured it out, after time spent at rehab, that none of this matters, no one is significant because in the larger picture, how long all of humanity has been on this planet would fit on one slip of toilet paper in an entire roll (if you were to draw one dash on it for every 1000 years). In the film she’s trying to be realistic and the voice of reason, she does not believe in greatness or even the idea of her father trying to be a hero, let alone a superhero.

If you put their roles together, you get to understand how id (Riggan), ego (Sam) and superego (Mike) work or Freud’s theory that the human psyche has three parts that shapes who we are.

Birdman then is an exploration of who we really are behind the masks we were. To explore this, it embraces the meta-narrative by becoming the duality of two worlds – the real and the make-believe. At any point, Birdman leaves it open to interpretation whichever way you want to interpret it.

There will be multiple theories doing the round soon, so I am going to take a crack at it myself. But if you read one piece about – It was all a dream or He’s dead all the while – close the window and find a better site to read – they are the dead and tired clichés of the genre and please show Inarritu some respect here, this film is not about the obvious clichés – you have to see beyond the mask the film is wearing.

Extra Spoiler Alert: There will be a whole bunch of people who will believe the character killed himself at the end. That’s pointless, his “suicide” already happened on stage.

It’s that conviction he has that makes him above the ordinary, the one that makes him a superhero in his pragmatic daughter’s eyes. Having almost killed himself for art, he flushes his Hubris goodbye (the last we see the man with the suit is in the Bathroom) and realises he cannot even smell the flowers his daughter brought him. So he opens the window and looks at the beauty of the birds and watches life not through the lens of art but through the real window of life. He has found happiness finally. He takes yet another leap but this time, even his realistic daughter realises that it is possible for a man to soar you know, as long as he’s got rid of his hubris.

Another clue to unlocking Birdman is the constant reference to Icarus, who if you remember school, was the dude who “flew” too close to the sun despite warnings from his father and fell into see because the sun melted the wax. That was a fable about hubris leading to your fall and certain death. This is a film about learning to fly right towards the sun minus the hubris of the bird suit.

The beauty of Birdman is that all the above is just the kind of details critics would look for in a film. Which is why I think the makers have thrown in some abstract asteroid footage and shots of dead jellyfish and the birds eating them on the beach. After a third viewing, I would interpret those visuals bookending the beginning and the climax of the film as his vision of a near death experience. The film unfolds as he’s fighting for his life (Because it’s a continuous fluid narrative from the start till the obvious CUT to the air vent at the hospital after he shoots himself on stage) The last time he tried to kill himself, jellyfish stung him all over and he rolled over the sand at the beach to get them off him. Now, the birds (his kind) were eating those dead jellyfish (these oldest multi-organ animals have survived for over 500 million years – another reminder of the film’s point about how long human’s have been around given the life span of the universe). He’s a falling star literally burning himself up to shine. (A celebrity friend theorises that this perhaps marks the arrival of a Superhero from a different planet…the Superman myth) And he resurrects himself as an immortal infallible superhero – the man he always wanted to be in the eyes of his daughter.

One of the clues to solve the last scene lies in understanding the score of Birdman and what it represents. The drums score represents his reality. The movie score represents his larger than life alter ego (there are multiple occasions in the film when he asks characters to stop the movie score signifying the end of the scene that happened in his head). The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, is complete only when he emerges as the master of both worlds.

Perhaps that’s why the score of the last scene has some answers. When Riggan with his new face opens the window to watch birds, it’s a real slice of life moment and he’s found movie magic in it (as the movie score punctuates the moment) and as he jumps off the window and flies, when his daughter rushes towards the window and looks down, then looks up and smiles, the score is a mix of the drums and the movie score because he has become the man he always wanted to be – the man his daughter loved and looked up to. And these are the lines the film begins with: “Did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?” “I did.” “And what did you want?” “To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on earth.” (These are the words from Raymond Carver’s tombstone but here they stand for his resurrection and rebirth through Birdman) Rebirth is a theme constantly referred to in the film. All the characters in the film are born again/get a second shot at life, including Riggan’s best friend, lawyer and manager Jake who specifically mentions he’s born again.

But if you want to read Birdman as just a superhero movie, it would still work as a story of an actor with superpowers but all he wanted to be known for was as the actor, not for superpowers. Then all the bits of magic realism in the film work literally. He does fly indeed and the taxi driver asking for the fare could be chasing someone else. He neither confirms nor denies this because Inarritu wants this to be what you want it to be.

It’s not just a commentary on the artists, actors, critics and studios but about the audience too. Birdman throws the spotlight on the changing paradigm of what constitutes entertainment today – reality TV, clips that go viral, celebrity porn (oh yes, literal celeb pornography too) and the tendency of the audience to be filmmakers themselves as they feel the need to shoot anything larger than life they see. Which is why the scene where Riggan finds himself locked out of the Green Room in only his underwear is funny and disturbing at the same time.

Riggan maybe flawed, balding, might look like a bloated “turkey with leukemia” but he’s indestructible, nothing can stop his indomitable spirit and relentless pursuit of trying to be relevant again as a true artist despite all the angst and frustration (Is this because Biutiful that took Inarritu almost four years to make didn’t quite work at the box office?). He liquidates till the last of his assets, puts everything he has at stake and is dealing with a completely dysfunctional world… but the good news is: He’s literally death proof.

He’s tried to kill himself before when his wife left him. He tried to drown himself only to be attacked by jellyfish. He tried to shoot himself on stage only to lose a nose and get a fresh one. His face has changed, he doesn’t even look like himself anymore. The world knew him even when he was behind a Bird mask. But Riggan finally finds himself only after he takes off the bandage “mask” from his face at the end of the film.

The film is about masks at the end of the day. Who we pretend to be and who we really are.

X: Premiere & Reviews

November 28, 2014 · by sudhishkamath

Team X

Team X just got back from a super awesome world premiere at the South Asian International Film Festival, New York. Here are the pics from the premiere.

Also happy to report that the film opened to some rave reviews.

Twitch: “X focuses on the elusive qualities of love and its effects on people as they grow up and grow old, seeing this change through eleven different pairs of eyes is startling, charming, shocking, and panic inducing, but overall the experience is mesmerizing and the kind of experiment I would love to see more of.” – Josh Hurtado (Read full review here.)

Meniscus: “The most remarkable aspect of X is the fact that in spite of the quite disparate cinematic styles and narrative modes employed by these 11 directors, the film feels quite coherent and cohesive. If one didn’t know many directors were involved in this piece, he or she could easily conceive of a single filmmaker attempting different styles in order to tell the story.” – Christopher Bourne (Read full review here.)

Unseen Films: “How the hell did they pull this off? In theory this film shouldn’t work. 11 writers and directors all using their own vision to create one story? It really shouldn’t work. I mean I’ve seen versions of this in novel or graphic novel form and it usually falls apart somewhere in as the styles clash, but it doesn’t happen here…The portrait of K that we get is rich and complex, perhaps much more complex than if one director had done it all. Say what you will there is something about the various tones and styles that give color and shading to K and his struggles that wouldn’t be there had just one person directed this film. I think a single director would have been too worried about making a seamless whole so the unevenness of life would have been lost. Wow.” – Steve Kopian (Read full review here.)

We Drink Your Milkshake: “X is going to be one of the biggest surprises of the year for people that get a chance to see it. The numerous directors gimmick help give K a more rounded look as a character and a person, and it’s sometimes funny, sad, tragic and joyful just like life is. This might seem like a strange comparison, but this movie has more than a few a parallels to Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 1/2, or more aptly, the musical NINE with the constant flashbacks about a troubled filmmaker with fidelity issues and creative roadblocks. Track this movie down if you can since by the time this review comes out, it will be too late to see it at SAIFF.” – Javier Fuentes (Read full review here.)

X - The Poster

 

Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam: 50-50

August 24, 2014 · by sudhishkamath

Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam Movie Stills

As much as I want to appreciate the “different” approach, I was a little let down. Maybe because of all the generous praise from the younger bunch of filmmakers. Maybe they felt the need to return the compliments this film gives them.

I have multiple issues with R.Parthiepan’s film though I didn’t mind it at all and was quite entertained for half its running time. It also had quite a few endearing moments and I was tickled by the wordplay and wit too. Since many have already dwelt on these positive aspects, I think I should talk a little more about the critical aspects of this film that’s both good and bad (50:50 to use the director’s yardstick.)

One, while I have full respect for the senior writer-director’s ambitions of doing something truly different, he is probably attributing way too much importance for being different, as if a different story or making a film with no story is a great idea that deserves applause.

It’s a nice gimmick no doubt but the premise of a bunch of people trying to make a movie is not all that uncommon. Most student films, in pretty much every film school or class anywhere in the world, are about the angst of trying to make a film. It’s a thought that almost every filmmaker has either crossed out or pursued deeper right at the beginning of their career. It’s how deeper you go into this premise that gives the film depth, meaning and perspective. While this gave me an insight into the thinking process of the average Tamil filmmaker, I was quite surprised by the randomness in the script discussion sessions. No method, no structure, no progression from thought to idea to plot to story to script to film. Just random brainstorming that makes screenwriting seem like the bit of improvisation we used to do back at school culturals in the 20 minutes of prep time we got before Ad Zap. Yes, while I am aware that maybe 80-90 per cent of films are still written this way, I certainly do not expect a film about the script to be so grossly unaware of the basics.

The filmmaker assumes or wants us to believe it has no story or script. Because he wants us to think that people making a film is not a story. I may have even bought this if there was no conflict at all. But every character has a conflict. The team has a conflict. The protagonist has a conflict. And conflicts are stories. There can be a story without a beginning or an ending but the conflict is THE meat – the quintessential and most important qualifying part of any story. If they are claiming there is no story there, they are either ignorant or lying. Both are equally disturbing.

While there are a lot of witty insider observations about the film business itself that provide us with a few laughs, the meta-narrative here is gimmicky because it is not true to form. It randomly introduces us to heavy duty drama and twists for the sake of engagement and is a little too full of self-pity. Yes, we all know about the big bad world of showbiz where luck, opportunity and stardom overrides talent, ambition and integrity but making films (that too for a market) is not really the noblest thing in the world. Nor must we feel sorry for all those who don’t make it.

Which is one of the reasons I loved Jigarthanda that had zero self-pity for its protagonist even if it seemed autobiographical. Writer-director Karthik Subbaraj was able to be objective and unemotional about his protagonist and showed the filmmaker as the opportunistic asshole who uses his uncle, friend, girl, gangster and finally the power and clout of a successful filmmaker to get what he wants – at any cost. Because we artists are like that. We are selfish. We don’t need pity. Because we would do anything to do what we really want to do. We are not going to wait for miracles.

Parthipan, however, is a little old school. He wants us to appreciate his filmmaker hero’s desire to do something different as if it’s the noblest thing in the world. He wants to feel bad that he is denied a chance in bringing change to the world. He wants to wait for the producer’s call and thinks it is poignant.

It is not. Welcome to independent filmmaking and digital technology.

Besides, Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam can only go two ways and that’s not really an open ending. Having an open ending is a little over-rated too because you can pretty much cut any story before the climax scene and it would seem poignant (Honest to God, I did this for Good Night Good Morning because the climax didn’t turn out all that well. So we just axed the whole thing and ended it with the call – it was the easiest thing to do).

Take the Ramayana. You can end the story wherever you want.

They build the bridge. The armies stand by for the battle. Fade to black. It becomes the story of two kings who went to war for a woman. It’s a setting the stage for sequel ending.

Ram defeats Ravan. Credits roll. Commercial ending.

Hero questions Sita’s purity. She takes the agni pariksha. Cut right at the flames. Abstract arthouse ending.

Sita kills herself and goes back to earth. Tragic ending.

This is not to undermine open endings in general. There are many great examples of open endings – from Citizen Kane to Lost in Translation to Mulholland Drive to Inception that make you wonder and ponder about what actually happened for years together. An open ending is not a multiple-choice question you give the audience. It’s a thesis you want them to write over years. A hypothesis. A hypothesis that will remain just that because nobody knows for sure. It’s an answer the filmmaker takes with him to the grave.

Here not only does the filmmaker water down his “open-ending” with an item, he also ends it with the biggest compromise – he has an ending too (As the credits finish rolling, we see the hero in the director’s seat).

How is this then a film without a story if it has characters, conflicts and even a clear resolution?  (As a friend said, for a film without a story, go see Anjaan – where even holographic projections demonstrate reflex action when shot at, where characters cannot recognise a man without seeing a toothpick in his mouth!)

There was so much potential and promise here, given the years of experience Parthiepan has in showbiz.

Watch it anyway because it’s very generous of an old school filmmaker to try and be like the brave young filmmakers of today and also acknowledge it so openly.

Parthiepan Sir, young filmmakers today don’t need to wait for calls from UTV.

They go make their film, however short, irrespective of the outcome.

Because, there’s always Youtube for the hits. And Facebook to make sure people Like your film.

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