Change Your Image
Crystalfall
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Death Note (2017)
An adaptation sorely lacking the spirit of the original comic
Death Note, the manga comic, is rated very highly due to its characters, premise, design and the highly logical way in which the key protagonists go to outwit each other. That is what the source comic is, a game of wits where Light (the Death Note owner) is a brilliant strategic mind and meets his match in the form of the misfit and mysterious L, who is just one step away from catching him purely based on logical reasoning and deduction.
While I don't have any issues in adapting the story to an American setting since that is the leeway given to adaptations, this film lacks any of the seriousness and challenge that the comic posed to the readers. While shrinking a 2,300 page comic to 2 hours was going to be impossible, the film lacks any ambition of living up to the original.
The main character is mentioned as being bright but beyond doing other students' homework, has no quality of the manipulator and calm thinker that Light Yagami was. While in the comics, he would think several moves ahead, here he is just an American teenager who is more than eager to share his secret so that he can get close to a cheerleader.
The only reason this film gets even two stars is due to the effort put in by. Keith Standfield as L, who tries to imbibe L's quirks from the comics, and Willem Dafoe's voice as Ryuk. Rest of the movie is poor to the point of being sacrilegious.
Advice: Read the original comic and then perhaps watch this movie to see how a major studio throws away money behind a half baked idea.
The Disciple (2020)
The cost of pursuing purity
The Disciple is a courageous and often quite brilliant portrayal of a man seeking to achieve purity in his discipline of choice, Indian classical music, with an idealism that is rarely seen in today's world. His reasons to choose this path are his father, who gave him endless lectures on the purity & joy of classical music and his gurus (both immediate and those he follows) that have set the path for enlightenment through complete devotion to their art.
While such devotion reaps rewards in fields like medicine, academics and other art forms, the issue is our protagonist, Sharad, is working in a field whose relevance is being lost. This can be observed both by the average age of the patrons of his music and the sparse audiences that are seen when such a performance is happening.
To Sharad's credit, his devotion is near absolute. He diligently looks after his guru, he does not go home or call home and even his job involves converting old tapes and LPs of rare classical music into digital format. His constant companions in this journey are tapes from an elusive and almost mythical guru called Maai. Maai famously never recorded her singing and sang only to achieve purity. She also says that the path of purity is lonely and very hard. All of this happens through her voiceover while Sharad's loneliness is made deeper by him driving his motorcycle in eerily empty Mumbai roads.
The performances, especially from Aditya Modak as Sharad, are very good and never over the top. Caricatures of classical singers about and to the credit of the cast, they remain true to their characters and are understated.
The movie is slow, ponderous and makes you think. Some reviewers are calling it dragging, mundane and boring. I did not see it that way. Yes, it may be long but it is never mundane or without meaning. In a way, this movie is also an attempt at cinematic purity of storytelling that is lost on many now.
I have been waiting for some time to get a follow up to "Court" from Chaitanya Tamhane. I had no idea this film was from him and only got to know it as the credits came. He is the Sharad to today's mainstream cinema. Hopefully he finds more patrons than Sharad does.
Court (2014)
Intelligent and layered storytelling on an important and contemporary subject
Court is a film that may seem simple on the surface but contains a layered narrative that compels the viewer to peel these layers back themselves.
The key themes explored here are the right to speech, societal biases that are deeply ingrained, the delicate dance of liberal values against conservatism especially given India's multicultural milieu, and the rusty and clunk machinery that is India's judicial system - a hopelessly rotting institution that still gives hope to many.
The film revolves around a dalit (lower caste) "revolutionary" whose main mode of revolution is to write and more importantly recite poetry in a wholehearted manner. Given that dalit representation in Indian art is nearly non-existent, this is an important choice made by the filmmakers. His crime is that he may have driven a lower caste man to suicide due to his poetry recital. The case itself is a bit absurd and darkly funny in the seriousness with which it is argued.
The filmmakers explore the main characters by following their daily lives to show us how their environment shapes their values. The protagonist is shown to be so unaware about the impact of his poetry in a politically charged country that he is almost childlike in his innocence. Innocence here is not to be confused with a "Not guilty" plea.
The liberal defense lawyer is an educated upper middle class man who makes it a mission to defend a man unselfishly who would otherwise be forgotten by the society to rot in a jail. People who have grown up with strong feelings towards freedom of expression and self respect would find the defence lawyer's idealism impressive. He even lands into trouble with a niche cultural sect just because he calls their customs outdated, though tangentially.
The prosecutor is a lady who argues that the old man's poetry is seditious and can hurt the unity of the country. We follow her life and see that even though she is a lawyer who can hold her own in an argument, at home she is still the one cooking the meals without question while her husband sits and plays with the kids. She defends traditional value vehemently and argues that anything that hurts sentiments hurts the unity of India.
Finally, there is the court justice i.e. the judge. He is a typical Indian patriarch who does what he wants and believes he is right. In an insightful exchange with the poet in the court, the poet says that he will continue to write about suicide even after this incident (again reflecting his childlike innocence). The judge actually asks him if he is being "naughty" (in Marathi) like a child.
The final scene of the film is again metaphorical and layered with meaning. On vacation, the judge is having a snooze on a bench when some of his household kids make some noise and disturb his slumber. He gets up, slaps the kid, scolds him and then falls back to sleep. As the kid goes away crying, the judge is back snoozing. A beautiful metaphor for an old and slumbering justice system that treats innocent voices as nothing more than irritants and will promptly reprimand them before going back to their slow decay.
The case in Court is argued in all seriousness and is quite intelligent. Definitely recommended.