Mind at 3 am

..pression

Mercy has lost translations. In cursed languages, the stinky tongue falsifies its spine. A happy boy was perhaps the shiniest hair whose fate was envied by tarred and demented grey neighbours. His ever growing yet vulnerable tongue was attacked by their losing and insatiable roots. The head became the serpent-in-arms.

His wardens grew him but couldn't outgrow their temptation of decadent morality. Why was he attacked when he was a sapling? While his roots were still... growing? Against this travesty, armed rebellion against a tyrant eater is still a comprehensive cause, though a universally failing one. 

That boy wanted to be happy and best. He was the herald of a layman then, and such young swords should have the encouragement and travelling morale as their side stands. Instead, you treated him as a scapegoat of ill-fated cosmic lights. When your disparaging mind couldn't flow with the waves of ice cold turmoil, you threw your spear of hypocrite wrath straight into his watery eyes. The dew of his tongue became the favorite song of smog. You belittled him when purposeless and wasteful "success" couldn't touch his feet. Even after forced and repeated attacks, he didn't hold the hands of a logical director. He was young... He was young. 

To render tense moods to happy ones or atleast normal ones, became his auspicious desire. Yet, you belittled him, denied his trials and scolded his will. Through cursed water he quenched his thirst of imaginary happiess. Yes, it became imaginary. You made it imaginary! Basking under the roof of dismay and the sum of suffering, he cut through his days as a product of a likeable (superficially) orpahange. 

Now that sapling has grown but much worse than ever, that agony doesn't bid adieu to him. As if it has seduced his sleep and crawled it's way into the inception of the same. As if sleep itself has become a dream, a dream which he naturally desires for, but is scared of the agony it brings for him. It shall never end. Death?

(Images used are screenshots from the British TV Series - 'Taboo')

Dunkirk Overview

DUNKIRK (2017)

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Sir Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles.

‘Dunkirk’ opens with silence, the most powerful cinematic tool. Director, Christopher Nolan, forces us to listen to that silence. This silence is a machine gun, loaded with the ammunition of entrapment, uncertainty and terror and pointed at the Allied forces by their nemesis, the Axis powers. The movie is like a musical symphony but it doesn’t hit any low key. Eccentric in its approach, ‘Dunkirk’ flows with crescendo and maintains harmony at the same time. It’s perplexing for average movie goers but for the cinematically literate ones, you may sit back and enjoy while sipping Chardonnay in the form of Hans Zimmer’s maestro backdrop score.

Birth of friendship amidst war torn arenas is eccentric in nature. Audiences around the globe are accustomed with watching a Spielberg-ish tale of unfortunate events and progressive dialogues, brimming up to a larger than life brotherhood among soldiers. By taking a twist from this narrative, ‘Dunkirk’ shows us moments where unusual friendship is born. It shows the alarmed faces of soldiers; the faces reflecting their subliminal thoughts of home and war’s futility. Their disposition taking an uncanny route; where their mind begins to trust each passing by comrade without a sound judgment. Not realizing that sidestepping any detail might result in a bullet in their head; or worse the entire camaraderie might get shot.

Fatherly love and brotherly compassion is prevalent in ‘Dunkirk’, much like Nolan’s other movies. Viewers are brought in terms with a father who will go against all strange odds, fighting through fear, to help his countrymen, his soldiers, escape the war ridden travesty. Where people find patriotism as his driving force, his deeds are in fact a redemptive measure for a very personal, and now lost, cause.

Christopher Nolan is adherent with ‘No Bullshit’ business. He does not find filming major chunks of movies through VFx and other CGIs, cinematically alluring. ‘Dunkirk’ was shot entirely on real location with real ships and airplanes, and sets devised to be as real as possible. As if embodied with devil-may-care DNA, Nolan took the risk of attaching the IMAX cameras on to the airplanes, while filming the scenes. Mind you, there are only a few IMAX cameras in the world and he has broken one down while filming ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. But with such an ambitious filmmaker as Nolan, producers and studio houses can take a high level of risk. ‘Dunkirk’ and others in his filmography are made akin to a scientific approach. One can imagine Chris making a graph of emotional factoring and cinematic sciences, while writing his scripts.

The team of ‘Dunkirk’ has been asking its potential viewers to watch the movie on IMAX screens. Since, the entire movie was shot on IMAX camera; it’s a great effin' deal! The cinematography makes the audience awestruck with its ethereal nature. The magnificence of the sea and the vastness of the sky accompanied with human lust for violence and blood-shed, makes the visual filming truly blue in its approach.

‘Dunkirk’ comprises of a few dialogues and major action sequences, bludgeoning the wishes of the mainstream audience. The essence of the movie needs to be clear. ‘Dunkirk’ is a survival movie and not a battle movie. It gives dominance to the brutality of dooming fear and crippling death against the slow rising brotherhood and faux dominance of compassion over ambition, as shown in other war related movies. Perhaps, this is also a hidden move against the political war pigs, who actually breed such situations from their warm office chairs, drunk on branded whiskeys.   

Not a connoisseur in the French New Wave film scenario, but I felt the editing was heavily influenced by that realm. Especially in the aircraft scenes. When seated in the theatre, you almost feel like you are flying for real. Wind, the pressure, the ambition to hurl down the enemy. The emotion is on your face. The cuts are sudden, making your conscious sticking on with reality and not just losing your senses, floating like a freebird. The air scenes paint the canvas of sky, thereby giving the entire sense of ‘Dunkirk’, i.e., MAGIC.

With an ensemble of a great cast, who enjoy a pretty humungous fandom, it was expected that there’d be a virtual battle of these actors’ caliber of drama enactment. But direction, story and war choreography overshadowed these actors’ acute enactment of war torn soldiers.

Trapped Overview

                                       TRAPPED (2017)

Directed By: Vikramaditya Motwane

Written By: Amit Joshi, Hardik Mehta

Starring: Rajkummar Rao, Geetanjali Thapa

There. The opening shot. An arched back, head lowered, mind confused, tongue silent and heart aching. I see him trapped. There. The emblem of a teenager. Dazzling beauty, throbbing blood pumps, nervous sensations, stupid ice-breakers and overwhelming expectations. I see him trapped. The film shows us a guy being trapped in an apartment at a new, isolated building. On a deeper level, it’s just a clear shadow of our hungry life and a body whose evolved, barbaric mind is trapped by filthy thrills.

It’s not about the final fruits of the labor we put through in life, but about breaking through the doors of obstacles, that hinders our forward motion. That it’s about breaking through the inhibition of talking to that girl, whose image occupied Shaurya’s (Rajkumar Rao) mind, day and night. It’s about reaching the final moment of the realization, that though she was about to marry someone else, he stripped his mind naked and became her one true love. In Vikramaditya Motwane’s (Director) other film (Udaan) as well, the protagonist – Rohan, breaks through the paralyzing and lonely outbursts of his father and runs away to a new, independent life (I envy the ending of that movie).

The story becomes clear just from the trailer. What you want to see in the theatre is the artwork of the film crew, rapid montages of struggle and the acting prowess of our emotionally charged – Hero. For a low-budget motion picture, the lighting zone comes as a challenge. But our financially strapped cinematographer (Siddharth Diwan), has shot the movie with such a zeal that you get the feel of a cinematic world, observed by an outsider’s eyes. Nothing superfluous, yet everything subtle and proper. The direction and screenplay was a delight to bear. It had the juices of an aching tale and vision of a dynamic storyteller. Here’s a problem though. We see this man, gradually being directed by his subconscious and revolving around thirst and hunger to overcome the loneliness of an evident death in an estranged flat. Scenes where he loses the odds of complacency and performs unnatural acts, or in truth-natural to the core, could have been focused with brighter instincts. When a human is deranged to the extent that he draws his blood out for an SOS message, or abandons his religious principles to survive on roasted pigeons, or hell, even drink his own urine, the scenes should have been able to bring an “Oh Man!” exclamation to my neighbor, whose giggles erupted continually while watching our subject struggle through the real-life Man Vs. Wild, scenario. Perhaps, my neighbor was actually scared the entire time. Or perhaps, my quest for perfection has turned me into an unrequited movie lover.

Psychedelia has answers unknown to us. Our brief intro in this absurd world is a conundrum in itself. So much so, that when death was a fist apart, Shaurya is tempted to FEEL the mundane. He wanted to FEEL the sweaty, damp air betwixt people in the local metro. He wanted to FEEL the taste of the butter-fixated palatable snack. He wanted to FEEL the life with his lover. These hallucinations became so strong that the tragic end of his love life, gave him a purpose much stronger than that of broken promises. I can fairly assume that he began watching a new film through his eyes, post his odyssey’s greatest epiphany. The title of the movie – Life: À la carte.   

Jolly LL.B 2 Overview

                                          Jolly LL.B 2 (2017)

Directed, Written and Screenplay by: Subhash Kapoor

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Annu Kapoor 

Waiting. Her life had divided preclusion of another one; a dying tree with a living sapling. Purchasing an invincible, hackeneyed ease of pleasure from an ambitious yet naïve, i.e. a progressing human; she bought the complacency of approaching death. Her troublesome world, as visualised narrowly on the screen by director, Subhash Kapoor, didn’t just move the audience, it made them pity her. Well, at least the majority of the audience. Sayings belonging to centuries, have made it clear that the catharsis of a progressive human roots for a bolt in the mental affairs. Jolly well be an advocate’s psyche. What steered the wind of smug satisfaction on the protagonist’s face, to the arcade of life, was just one question – Why Her?

On the screen I saw an advocate. The poster child of bourgeois. The hateful enemy of Marx. Post a childish rancour, a witty wedgie backs this lawyer, thus, earning him the devoured fruit of INR 5000. His bragging rights entailed the cunning of advocacy, my neighbours’ bragging rights entailed their beloved ‘hero’s’ acting, but the writer played with the rise of character’s drive to liberation in such a manner that subliminally, we became tuned to the building crescendo of the story.

Jolly, the advocate (Akshay Kumar), was a gimmick to his master. His master, was portrayed as a law-slinger with a royal demeanour. To glimpse you with a synopsis, a light-hearted son of a munshi, aims to become a successful lawyer. Starting his career as an ass kisser to a city-wide famous lawyer, he faces a catastrophe of guilt, which results in a metamorphosis of an easy going individual to an emotionally driven, power devouring lawyer (compare Mike Ross in Aaron Korsh’s Suits). (This metamorphosis, being the answer to the question asked above, “Why her?”) The creator of this hopeful, dramatic world, has sprinkled starry-eyed feminism, box office friendly songs and also, a few amateur screenplay narratives. Thus, what you get in return is a watchable but not impactful montage of cinematic courthouse advocacy.

Juxtaposing with youth’s innocence, was a relationship of wisdom. Wisdom, shared by the two aged fathers of the opposing advocates. When Jolly commits a murderous fraud, his father taunts him with a slander, rendering the former nearly losing his life’s backbone. When the defendant’s lawyer rattles on, without inhibition, for defending a criminal even after the malicious accusations justifying his client; it’s the father, who stops his morally woeful son, eager to glorify his reputation as the best lawyer in the city. Perhaps, it’s the childhood memories, our own spa of comforting safety that a father provides with; a notion with such an impact that the movie viewers ultimately submit themselves to the behavioural tradition of an aged father compelling his child to avoid significant jeopardy. Jolly LLB2 may be an average B-town flick, but it is an excellent minion of the psychology governing our meaningless existence.

Annu Kapoor, played the role of the defendant’s lawyer - Sachin Kantilal Mathur, on screen. One of the childhood memories that I possess, is that of a restaurant along a national highway. I was leaning against the bus and watching the antakshari show, playing on the TV of the restaurant. The show had a cult following and nearly everyone who watched it, loved the host, Annu Kapoor. Nevertheless, I resented his smug face and the attitude. Contrary to that, Annu Kapoor was on his level best in Jolly LLB 2, as the antakshari host now had a character suiting his mien. The dialogue framing, timing and the embodiment of the contemporary 90’s villain was preferably top-notch.

Akshay Kumar, yet again shows the audience that he belongs to the brass of comedy stars. The sombre acting though, was a montage of his acting in his previous movies like Baby and Special 26. Jolly’s wife, Pushpa Pandey (enacted by Huma Qureshi), can be easily dismissed, as the character fails to display with cinematic proficiency, the wife whose husband cooks delicious food for her, brings her fine liquor and deep within her heart feels that he is the greatest love her heart could ever experience.

Someday, there will be a moment, when it’s not going to be me, but some other film aficionado who’ll give a recommendation to watch Sydney Lumet’s courtroom drama and also one of the greatest movies of all time: 12 Angry Men. Then and there, I’ll recommend him/her, one the classiest Bollywood movies of all time, that will stand up against 12 Angry Men with no diffidence. I wish that movie releases soon. I wish.