Inner Revolution

Walk that trail which lines the dark to step on shadow of grown trees nailed to the ground. The edge of cliff calls your name and primal life colors your veins black. Feel the blade, unearth the pocket and grip your will to shred your lips. Blood seeps broken lines of skin stained with a past.

Look down at the cascade of wooden trunks webbed with the maya of green. Leaves have been constricted to spears and pine cones sharpened with age. Your fall is inevitable. Hair flows against the dirty wind in every direction your happiness has run away from you. Take one step and the war begins. Heart and mind corrode your cells with the radiations of life. Take two steps and the cells get sliced in tearing death by the surgical weaponry of the pines.

Shallow whims of heart and submissive temperament of mind had crippled your being into a void. You win the battle at the first step. Fear of losing existence brought you back to exist. Chromosomes of this new being tags its label to 48. You are an orphan. Parented by no heart and mind but by a complete sense of the body and being. 

You committed mistakes. You traded your senses for a sugarcoated life of the easy and pathetic. Self-complacent grease diminished your hunger for the unattainable. You traded the pulse of your veins for the closest rush of an apparent ecstasy. You traded time for healing sorrow. No more. You demolish what can be attained today. You attack what you had dreamed since your childhood. Heart and mind is stoppable. Body and being is unstoppable. You break the glass wall of your whims and rust ridden sorrows. There is no life. There is a being. You are that being. 

Look closely at the eyes. Humans’, beasts’, or the ones you see at the mirror. Just stare at the building hollow in them. Solve that labyrinth. Within it there is freedom. Until you accept that freedom, you are a slave. Just like the billions who lived and died before you.

Do not go to McLeod Ganj and Triund!

You are at the mountain top. Darkness beyond sunset has crept over the land. Streaks of dim light escape from the camping tents near you. Icy cold wind is nailing your body. Behemoth clouds are gunning down the horizon with their thunderbolts. There is ultraviolence in the air. Your pale shadow from half-burnt bulbs is shivering. Snow clad neighboring mountains stand taller and colder than you. Now live this experience with your mates and you will experience a dark night at Triund. Do not go to Triund.

You are at your workplace. The clicks of computer keyboards play a faster symphony than your imagination. Projects and assignments have formed skyscrapers on your mental farmland. Stuck in its gate is a board which reads “Creativity will be prosecuted”. Monotonous routine is drilled deep into your blood that you feel even the mosquitoes call you by your name. Your thoughts cannot get past the lowest common denominator. You trap others in your own confinement. You are experiencing a (capitalist) world of slavery. Please, stay there.

You get a call from your friend at 7 am to pack your bags and go for a trip together to a lush land of cold mountains. You will get over with college in a month. Your comrades and you will wander off to career oriented paths. Your time is running out. You reach the railway station and head off to a journey marked by humorous vices and overcrowded stories at the train box. You book a cab and stare at birds chirping a welcome song as the altitude gets higher. Air gets purer and your mind oozes heavy doses of tranquility. You are at the threshold of the Tibetan exile capital of India. Do not pick up that call.

You wander off to the market of McLeod Ganj. Your eyes see a neat fashion statement. Streets are lined with ornaments, food and an adventure of travel. What you actually see is freshly brewed freedom served with a calling of the wild being sold for free. Your taste buds are not working alone when you are eating breakfast at a café. Your ears also have to listen to the elemental music of divine Buddhist mantras. You relax at the balcony of your hotel room. The aroma of coffee does not pass through smog inflicted air. You binge watch tails of spectre clouds continually floating across a reddish moon. You are awestruck with that haunting beauty. Do not experience nights where your pupils dilate and hesitate to flatten.

You want to trek the 9 km long path of Triund. The sole of your feet longs to kiss the land of a distant dream. Your budget appears to stalemate that longing. You buy the calling of the wild from the streets and checkmate the king of monetary shortage. You begin to trek a path whose boundary is marked by the trees of rhododendron (Buraansh). You are walking in the middle of woods showering red flowers. Your eyes watch the scenery in pixels which your DSLR fails to shoot and hear the notes floating in alfresco air which your phone’s playlist fails to match. Clouds darken the sky in a flash of time and rain begins to wash your skin from the stench of the sweat of plains in a way that face wash products still cannot. Hailstorm replaces the rain and you feel your heart pumping blood like never before. You sit at a café and watch balls of ice hitting the façade of classist travelers and filtering them down to mere humans. Do not plan to trek the path of Triund.

You have reached the summit and you are motionless. Your jaw has dropped down to the abyss of wonder. Your feet have not failed you. You do not see anymore but feel. You are feeling the existence of the gigantic range of snow clad Dhauladhar range behind your camping site. Your eyes are moist. You are feeling your existence under grey clouds. You eat plain food and have some tasty laughs with your mates, while mother Earth provides an ambience of thunder and purple lightning. Your clothing is not warm enough and you are sleeping the night, best defined by the bard’s words- “sweet are the uses of adversity”. In the midst of the freezing night, you are losing your external self. You realize that even the sky is external; for the Sun is forever in your mind. Do not camp where your body feels comfortably numb.

You wake up to a sunny morning. You have the urge to look at a mirror and gaze at the body vibrating at the frequency of unparalleled love. In a list of your most beloved things, you have finally climbed up to the number one position. The dog sitting next to you agrees on that. You bask in the sun. You photograph different lives posing a new sense of meaning, they secretly feel from within. You trek down with your four college buddies who have lived the same experience. You pack McLeod Ganj and Triund in the bag of your heart and leave for the place where henceforward you will wear the shield of freedom against the attack of monotonous monetary routine. Do not wake up to a sunny morning at Triund.

I repeat, do not go to McLeod Ganj and Triund!

The Shape of Water overview

The Shape of Water (2017)

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Screenplay by: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Cinematography by: Dan Laustsen

Starring: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon

She gazes and learns an interesting art form from the telly, shuts the door and enters the hallway. Realizing the emptiness of arena which has always guided her home; she livens it up by tap dancing her feet to “Bojangles, the stair dance”. Or perhaps, her mind realizes the emptiness of her disabled world and her young heart reloads her body with daft hope. Dance is a beautiful cinematic totem attributed to our protagonist Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins) by the master puppeteer of the story, Guillermo del Toro.

 She exits her apartment and an old owner of her neighboring theatre offers her two free tickets of the screening of a ‘Bible show’. In the beginning of the film, when the overall box office performance of the theatre was not clear, I wondered whether that owner gifted her free tickets as a symbol of kindred spirit or for the sake of pity. Upon deeper introspection of the film, I realized that the scene was a ‘Fade in’ for del Toro’s fantasm for Church, its obscurities and people’s evolving spirit for something greater the usual Holy.

Eliza sees the amphibian man, or as the folks of its native land refers to him – God, for the first time when he is under water. Water is a special sign. Its love stories are not decorated with mundane bourgeoisie houses and status but with intense complexity that only a few rare lovers get to live. You surpass the human wavelength and become a God or Goddess yourself, when water drives your soul.

Our protagonist is mute and shares friendship with a struggling artist, her neighbor. The artist wishes to go back to his younger self and the mute’s face shines curiosity for a regular life. He teaches her the essence of dancing, in the world of a black and white past. Colors after all, build a façade over the world dancing in the binary frequency of black and white. They watch telly and tap their feet to the rhythm of the music. I guess, sometimes all it takes is two special people to tap their feet together and their soul gets to liven up a little bit more.

 Del Torro renders her libido, routinely. Her janitor work, routinely. But he reminds us that amidst what has become routinely chores, there’s always a catalyst to convert this routine into life. A shining star who renders the mundane and taboo into humor and feeds oxygen to the suffocating human in us. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) is that shining star in The Shape of  Water. Natural, spontaneous and converses with her eyes. Brilliant!

To gather the company of the Amphibian man with whom she begins to share an amorous spirit, Eliza cracks an egg with a spoon and it’s the first time we see the creature in alfresco air for just a second and the frame shifts back to her. In that second there was an adorable confusion in his eyes as he watches her. He watches her like how my dog gazed at me, resting his head on the railing, when I was about to enter my home, wearing a face mask for the first time. That adorable confusion in his eyes feeling ‘it’s you… I know it’s going to be you.’

While discussing the decadent morality of a few flawed characters in Bible, in a subtle stroke the antagonist, Strickland (Michael Shannon) taunts the black woman, Zelda over the image of God being more of white man than a black woman. In another scene the café owner debars a black couple from sitting at the empty counter table seats. With these strokes, del Torro slams all the worldly religious hypocrisy, racial and female discrimination matters right onto our faces. This is how you portray the prejudice of humans, by neither exaggerating nor deviating from the flow of the story. As my school teacher used to say – “short and effective like a bullet.” This is brilliant screenwriting.

During her daily commute, Eliza uses an apparel as a cushion against the bus window during her daily commute. Lights and cinematography reaches a grand, praise worthy summit at such scenes. It’s at these times during the tiring commute that your eyes want to rest, but someone special occupies your mind and enchants your world with a starry sky. At times, with eyes shining blue gems.

 At times, with their rubies embroidered face.

Their lands of birth were separated by miles. Their countries, different. But somehow his pulse throbbed with the same music she loved. A quiet land with each other, in the ambience of that music and food is what became xanadu for them.

Our antagonist, Strickland is perhaps the personification of time, torturing a naïve and sensitive face. In the reel life, that face is the amphibian man. In the real life, humans don that face for a tortured masquerade. Here’s something though, which makes us the possessor of becoming an enlightened being but the Amphibain man fails to possess. It’s the human will, which can bend the time to one’s favor and alternate the conditions of his present and future universe to his/her heart’s beating. I do feel the emotions being portrayed in such scenes but realizing the essence of such emotions in real life, makes me enjoy and live the message of the movie on a twin fold level of emotional and logical gratification.

      

“He sees me for what I am, as I am. He’s happy to see me, every time every day.” signals Eliza, a person victimized for the better parts of her life, for the one who gets her heart beating. A blissful pehomenon. A continuum of subjective and objective love. Love of a high standard.

Moment arrives when she thinks she will have to bid adieu to her one and only. That moment of separation is not gut wrenching but rather slithers your gut into pieces and roasts it on burning coal. Oh, but how can she say goodbye when her heart has finally begun to live? In a moment of cinematic brilliance, del Torro brings Eliza into an epiphany of expressing her love which will make your eyes bathe red in the shape of water. What appeals to me even more is the eye for optimism, shown in the end when the moment of separation reaches its most sensational point. Their love hits rock bottom and in the bleakest of darkness emerges this light which burns the black and illumines their new found love to the frequency, which would’ve perhaps taken the Greeks years to fathom. Water signs, you see.

Strickland attains revelation and speaks, “Fuck, you are a god.” It’s the time you realize that you are greater than your past. It’s the time when oppression itself realizes that you cannot be tamed with dejection, self loathe and depression. It’s the time you create a new destiny for yourself. It’s about the time you lose the Ugly, acting fraudulently as hope, gather the soul's Bright from the past and find eternal freedom to create the most powerful and happy future. Only happens when you believe in your heart’s unfiltered wish and work towards it.

Each movie that I watch is a journey to the inner self. The more I watch them, the more I see and feel my inner state vividly. It is through cinema that I find myself easy to describe. It is tough to phrase but I am just energy’s human form who looks at life through an empathetic, dreamy set of rose-tinted shades and now, unabashedly drive my will to the heart’s desire.     

Click to watch the trailer of The Shape of Water

Killers and Psychological Thrillers

Vengeance of the Cursed.

Starring:
Cursed Few, Sane

Ugly impulse against the world; their [Cursed Few] hearts have no pity for the Sane. Gold and diamond ridden necks of the Sane turn into charcoal ridden skeleton; their eyes have no sense of Vanity Fair. Beyond the decadent morality of humanity; their mind boasts a novice religion of bloody sensuality. It begins with the world in general and then their steady stream of rage engulfs only the Sane who laughably comprise this world.

Not unlike a conundrum, which the gifted resident of Baker Street can solve, the horror of psychic fluxes have gunned their childlike emotions down to the misery valley. The environment has become a whirlpool of dark void and only a stab across soft chests can cease their null desires. They may rise to the moon or lick the crevice of hell like a tide, but deep within, they wish to be gentle, even and stable. Three words, which if brought to life can only be visualised erupting as a persona on a mirror, where just one naïve attempt to touch that mirrored soul and it smokes away to oblivion.

Channel your vision to a beautifully embroidered carpet. The tapestry of colors, their edges and infinite arcs. Gaze at them and imagine a life following these patterns. You may classify it as an exotic, abundant, archetype of fondness, but you also know that a minute from now and you will return to YOUR life. You won’t realize that once you look away, this world molds the life of a cursed few into that tapestry. You won’t realize that once you look away, these patterns and arcs turn grey. That these patterns do not have soft edges but posses such lethal sharpness that its sufferers have become inherently numb to blood and heartfelt contentment.

The sane began with pity, then annoyance, followed by hatred for the cursed ones. Their demeanor, presence in the vicinity and then their existence; the sane hated and continues that hatred with much more vigor than their religious fervor for fictitious figures. Sanity is a façade for meager senses of emotions. It is not a term for exuberant form of living, but since most humans flourish in its domains, the cursed ones get attacked by them.

These cursed ones have realized that only through the occurrence of astute psychological trauma, they have been able to strive towards a self-generated purpose of breaking the façade of lifeless dreamscape; dreamscape built by nature and rendered lifeless by the Sane. Some wish and other have been able to achieve it through murder - the only action which is beyond the shallow justice of the superficial entities or the Sane. They will murder humans or their own complacency, but either way, they will rise beyond the venomous tapestry of grey life, erasing any emotional bankruptcy. If others wish to dear them, they shall sign onto a life, declared corroded by the Sane.

Lover of an aware and awoke killer is fulfilled wholeheartedly, as the great deception of pretentious being is destroyed by the void of his/her past.

(Images used are screenshots from the movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos.)

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.

      

The Magnificent Seven Overview

                                    The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Directed by: Antoine Fuqua

Screenplay by: Nic Pizzolatto, Richard Wenk

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chris Patt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Hayley Bennett, Peter Sarsgaard.

Expectations do not bear a conundrum. Take movies, for instance. You experience a great film and then, when it’s time to make your conscience aware of another feature film, the former expects to relive the same greatness. Even more, if it’s the same genre. This is not a deliberate effort, but the algorithm of brain’s evolution is honed in such a manner. The same expectation which the DC fanatics writhe with; post Christopher Nolan’s thrilling and philosophical Batman saga.

The gripping genre: ‘Wild West’ or simply, ‘Western’, invoke a carnivorous, blood-thirsty and passionate vibe within me and many of you, perhaps. ‘Django Unchained’, ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and many other Western movies have set a tone, in which the cowboys, their savage antagonists (irony), the timid victim, altogether create crackerjack plots and hence, give rise to a magnificent story. In The Magnificent Seven, I couldn’t find such magnificence. In the following statements, I will explain how this movie failed to parallel my expectations. 

The story is the backbone of a movie. Details are what should be pondered upon, before finalizing the script. Should a writer wonder whether each dialogue delves into the moral fibre of the character and whether he/she is writing an original piece or just following a mediocre dogma? Yes, he should! This movie lacked a sturdy backbone. A woman’s quest to avenge the death of her husband by hiring seven talented hunters to raise hell against a powerful trader and his army, could have led to a visual poetry, perfectly grand to be inducted into the ‘Cult-classic’ category, in the years to come. But again, the writers got allured by the charms of dogma.

It is certain that I cannot judge the deeds of a director in a particular movie, in a manner that professional directors would do. It is also certain that I am not blind. Being naïve is a tangible choice. In this case, I ignore the choice. Where some scenes - like the wide shot of Denzel Washington and Hayley Bennett riding their horses against the tangerine dusk or Byung-hun Lee and Ethan Hawke training the spooked farmers or the initial skirmish between The Seven and Bartholomew Bogue’s (the trader) men or some perfectly timed close-up shots exposing the emotions of the struggling victors in the final war – made me think that the director, Antoine Fuqua is capable of visualising an ascending linear narration; the rest of the movie made it clear that he just wants to show us a replica of a Marvel Studio’s war story with cowboys and ”Texicans” . War stories, that can leave only a sixth-grader, bedazzled.

The tea was brewed with a behemoth potential and the cup was strong enough to carry it, but the saucer was faint-hearted. It was either scared or inapt for the duo. The tea was poured and the cup moulded it into a magnificent shape, but, on touches the cup to the saucer and the saucer quivers. The cup dangles around the saucer’s curb and the tea spills. Though the cup does not fall, it spills the good half of the tea. The person watches the entire action and now with a stained desire sips only the remainder. He knows that the tea is divine, that the cup has its base well-guarded, and that it’s the saucer which robbed the divinity of the act of drinking a cuppa full of tea.

Saucer – The Script, the mediocre direction by the director.

Cup – The sets, setting and the occasionally displayed aesthetic side of the director.

TEA – THE ACTORS AND THE ACTRESS IN THE LEADING ROLES.

P.S.      I kept imagining Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of Bartholomew Bogue (the antagonist), just because There Will Be Blood. Haha?  

Pink Overview

                               Pink (2016)

Directed By: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury

Story & Screenplay: Ritesh Shah

Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Piyush Mishra

“Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kya Hai?” Minal (Taapsee), while suffering with the state of paranoia and bewilderment in her voyage through the prison cell and courtroom, must have heard this song, ricocheting in her mind palace. Or I can just assume that.

It’s a force in sync, a hyperbole decry against a victim of prejudiced cascade, that satisfies the unscratched itch of a tub-thumper or the plaintiff’s advocate (Piyush), in this case. His antagonist, Deepak (Amitabh) relies heavily on the shredded boundary that has kept his diving heart, still afloat: his dying wife. That wrath which appears as an aftermath to a helpless condition was waiting to burst out. That agony which absorbs the spongy mind, following a traumatic experience had already seeped through his aura. The former could be seen as a hustler, in the courtroom, and the latter - as the ethics calculators define it - a licentious being. They bark against each other. Condescending attitude flows parallel with them. They raise different glasses in the honour of their cause. But the occasion and the champagne remains the same. We get to know that they are advocates. The question that the director wants us to answer is - Who is the devil? (With a metaphorical sidekick) Who gets to be awarded as ‘The Devil’s Advocate’?

'Evil' is a questionable word. A continuum of Red and Black. The motive of the girls’ (Taapsee, Kirti, Andrea) search for leisure or the guys’ underhand impressions for pleasure. The free will to live or man’s age old tradition of deriving a woman’s clandestine desire. Perhaps, Zarathustra would have been a better advocate-cum-judge in this quest; but our courts are devoid of Nietzsche and replete with judges, scanning facts and figures.

The trio of the beautiful (perception, mind you) victims, or the “normal working” women [whatever that means] had enacted their characters in a good fashion. Not great, as you can sense it with nearly every Bollywood movie. Nearly. The director, a B-town debutant has worked on visualising an escalating scenario on our screens with an impact akin to that of the Sonam Kapoor starrer Neerja. Call it my prejudiced aspiration, but considering that he belongs to the land of the legendary Satyajit Ray and performs the same profession which Ray did, I was waiting for moments where I could pleasantly whisper, ‘WOW!’…I mean, the mainstream audience should be introduced with the epiphany, which veterans like Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese, and layman like the writer of this article, experienced when they watched the classic: Pather Panchali.

Piyush Mishra is a poet by heart. The crux of a poet is the rhythm of the underlying waves inside the senses, obtained as a result of manifestations that the body experience. The ebb or the upswing of this rhythm, determine the poet’s mood. In Pink, I caught Mishra swimming in the same rhythm as he did in Anurag Kashyap’s classic, Gulaal. As if Prithvi Bana left the turbulent abode of Rajputana to portray the criminal lawyer in Pink. Amitabh Bachchan, is the figure who seems to understand the analogy in character enactment and the architecture of the same, at the seven-score of his life. Still lacks the savageness of on-screen Manoj Bajpayee, but if someone hails the former as his/her favourite actor, I would comprehend with his decision.

  

Like a blithe in the alfresco air, maybe the producers demanded it or the director felt the same tinge of emotions that Manuel Neuer felt before challenging Leo Messi in the Champions League match (2014-15), that after the movie finishes, the actual scenes of the infamous incident upon which the plot of the movie revolves, is displayed to the audience in coherence with the ending credits. Note that, the cinematic element of this movie lies in the hidden truth, in the absconding tradecraft of the protagonists and the antagonists and in the final judgment of the viewers. The ending display stitched a glitch in the impact of the movie, unlike Talvar and much like Morgan Freeman’s narration at the end of David Fincher’s thriller: Se7en.  

    

Overall, Pink is a movie which exhibits the storyline, much loved by (stereotypical) feminists and is controversial for pragmatists. For a cinema lover, Pink is a movie you must watch at least once, either for the sake of changes in movie-making scenario in Bollywood or you could taste the sugar of unified dismay towards the guilty actions against women and praise the film-makers.