Lights, Camera, My Opinion

 Best Movie – V for Vendetta

 

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate.' This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valourous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose.

That is the best example of alliteration that I have ever seen. There are 51 Vs in that sentence and that is just the introduction of the character. A character played by Hugo Weaving (the same who played Agent Smith in Matrix). The movie’s writers are Andy & Larry Wachowski. But its story is based on the comic by the same name by Alan Moore which in my opinion is the best comic writer. The movie does change the characters and some events from the comic book but at times it is completely faithful as well. Before this movie I thought movies were the ready-to-eat versions of books, but this is not the case here. A movie here combines the plot and narrative of a book, the visual beauty of a painting and the tension & passions of a song.

The visual allegories provided in movie are simply awe striking at times. The way V draws his knives in a V shape, the fireworks making a V in sky, the red V mark on the cell they had kept V in. Then Ewey finding herself in the rain like V had in the fire (the names V and Ewey, not a co-incidence). But the biggest and most complex is the dominos scene which symbolizes the chain reaction that he has set and the way things are stacked up, everything will fall. The domino fall ends with one piece left standing with one red and one black side, which means only thing remaining in the end will be him and Chancellor Sutler. And they both are two faces of the same coin. And it’s not just the visual treat and the dialogues and Shakespeare lines (they are quite a few from Macbeth and Richard III) but also the eerie similarity to real life when V says “The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by the people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.”

To me it is the best movie I have watched, it has a good story, excellent dialogues, deeper meanings, fantastic acting by the entire cast, breath taking cinematography. But the biggest is the message that one man can make a difference. V is no superhero, he had the time and patience and most importantly the drive to what he wanted. A definite must watch even if you don’t see all the layers at one time.

FREEDOM FOREVER !

Best Villain – Malcom McDowell as Alex Delarge from A Clockwork Orange

Malcom McDowell is scary, no let me rephrase MM is making-you-hold-your-breath-fearing- what-he-might-do-next scary. He doesn’t all these nasty things because he is forced to do it by the circumstances or because of his greed for money or he is because somebody killed his mommy in cold blood. He does them because he likes to do them. He is inclined to what the movie says – Ultra Violence. So he drives people off the road, seduces two underage girls, beats up his rival gangs and his own gang members, rapes a young woman and half kicks her husband to death and finally kills a woman with a giant porcelain dildo. But he does with so much panache and Beethoven music to the background that it feels like he’s a musician at a concert, he was born to do these things. And in a way he was.

And that is what the movie’s message is; that if you forcibly make a man to do good he’s not actually good, but also the flip side that he is not bad just because he does bad things as well. And there is the question about morality. Is there good or bad in the world without choice.Stanley Kubrick's one of the finest works.

We find him in the most adverse conditions after his treatment, he is left homeless, beaten up by the his own friends, tortured to the sound of his favorite music but still it is difficult to sympathize with him because in the words of someone from the movie “he is rotten to the core”. But he is just a teenager with no megalomania or plans to destroy the universe, no multi-million dollar evil empires, he looks just like an average guy. He is the villain next door, and maybe that makes him so scary.

That’s why, the sight of him sitting in the Korova milk bar trying to make up his ‘razoodock’ still gives me the chill. And that is why the simple song  ‘Singin in the rain’ makes hair stand on my back.

Best Love Story – American Pie Series.

Ya you read that right, and this is not sarcasm. While to most people it was about Jim humping an apple pie, the pact to get laid, lots of toilet humor and Finch fucking Stifler’s mom at the end of every movie but to me it was not. It was about Jim and Michelle’s love story.  To quote from the movie :

Michelle: How did a little perv like you, turn into such a great guy?

Jim: How did a little nympho like you, turn into such a great girl?

Michelle: I'm still a nympho.

Jim: Well, I'm still a perv.

Jim: You know Michelle. To quote someone that I’ve learnt quite a bit from. I think you and I are a perfectly natural normal thing. Perfectly natural.

And that’s what they are, a perfectly normal couple (well not really). Love to me is that only, it’s about accidentally saying “This one time at band camp” and realizing you are in love, to take a walk on the beach with her alone when things go wrong, to look all over for her and smile when you see her on the top of the stair case, raising your glass to your friends when you finally get the girl. It’s about getting the sex bible to keep your girl and it’s about leaving the Lacrosse game to finish the duet.

That is how love in the real world is, it’s not about writing letters from beyond the grave, it’s not drinking poison after your loved one is dead, it’s not about arriving and saying “No one puts baby in the corner”.  When you are in love you don’t see angels playing harps, people dancing with you on the street; it’s the small things that tell you, and it’s the small things that matter in life, always.

And the best part is the soundtrack, it consists of my favorite love songs. 1. Sway - Bic Runga. 2. Into the Mystic – The Wallflowers. 3.  Honey & the moon – Joseph Arthur. And also worth mentioning here is Laid – James.

And the last line - Love isn't just a feeling. Love is something you do. It's a dress, a visit to band camp. A special haircut. ;-)

Best Neo Noir – Manorama Six feet Under

Inspired from the now classic Chinatown this replaces the darkness and shadow games of the original black & white movie with the barren landscapes of Rajasthan and lots & lots of nothingness. The result is even more unsettling. Instead of the darkness of the original where you think what lies in the shadows here you know that nothing lies in the light, there are not witnesses to whatever is happening and you are cut off from the world. And to confuse you further Navdeep Singh directly puts Mirage in context with an image of Yana Gupta saying that what you see in the desert might actually not exist.

It’s not a rip off or a cheap copy, but a re-interpretation of the original. Director even pays homage to the original by showing the nose cutting scene  on the TV at Satyaveer’s house (Abhay Deol). Nothing is reliable in the movie; the wife of the Maharaja who soon turns out to be not the wife of the Maharaja the, his irritable and nagging wife Nimmi who advises him good but he never listens, his brother-in-law and best friend, Brij Mohan (Vinay Pathak) with uncertain loyalties who starts his sentences with “Jeeje”. Manorama’s roommate played by Sen who plays his almost love affair. Even his prying neighbor creeps you out.

 The narrator is Satyaveer Singh Randhawa (Abhay Deol), a down-on-his-luck public works engineer. He compares Lakhot – dry, desolate and despondent – to the general downturn in his own life. An aspiring writer whose only novel Manorama sank without a trace, grieves about how he had once wished to be famous but is now resigned to a banal and unremarkable existence. “Is mardood raet ke jungle ,ae chote mote commission lekar apni choti moti pareshaniyon ke saath ek choti moti gumnaam see zindagi jee raha huun”. The movie serves up twist after twist and keeps the suspense going till the end.

Unlike Chinatown this however ends on a happy note and breaks away from the noir genre and says the big fish doesn’t always win, sometimes the small fish gets away. Watch it if not for Abhay Deol’s restrained performace or Vinay Pathak’s over the top one, then for the eerie backdrop of the desert. Rajasthan as I have seen.

Most Misunderstood Movie – Hancock

The whole list till now has been unconventional but this one is right out there. Hancock currently hold a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and isn’t a darling of the masses either. It could have been great but director made a mish-mash of the unique and the clichéd.

“A hard-living superhero who has fallen out of favor with the public enters into a questionable relationship with the wife of the public relations professional who's trying to repair his image.” This is its synopsis on imdb.com and it is far from the real issue.

Director Peter Berg tries to address the loneliness, lamentation and reluctance of a superhero who doesn’t want to be a Hero leave alone Super.  He rejects the public because they reject him, lives alone in a trailer on a barren hill; goes over the ticket of Frankenstein that he found in his pocket 80 years ago every morning, has amnesia and a drinking problem. The director could have explored this angle further and could have had gone to places where only Watchmen has gone before, that Superheroes are also normal people and have normal people’s needs, like the need to be loved, of company, of being appreciated, they are also embarrassed and afraid to open up in front of others.

But then the movie tries to get some comic relief in and quickly descends into banality. A goody two shoes PR guy comes in who is trying to make the world, has a quirky wife and a sweet kid. So then Will Smith puts on a spandex costume and tries to save a sexually attractive lady cop, things and cars blow up all around and you realize that this cannot recover from this abyss.

But still the movie has its moments, like the scene where Hancock wakes up alone passed out of his trailer and runs his hand the movie ticket, his sole connection to the past. Or when he makes drawings in his prison cell introspecting and the last and the most powerful when he walks away from a mortally wounded Charlize Theron knowing this is the only way she will survive.  All in all a great could have been movie.