All the small things!

#Home (Malayalam, 2021)
Director: Rojin Thomas

We look at other people's lives and go agape. We think our lives are nothing to shout about compared to others, but we soldier on with our otherwise unglamorous life. We tell ourselves that it is our God-given duty or dharma to do the things we do as our responsibility, our raison d'etre. What is more, when we are old and unproductive. This world is no place for ageing dogs. As they say, when you age, even your shadow does not respect you. Your life experiences and life lesson are considered passé. They are deemed too worthless to put to use to fight the challenging current times. In essence, we are looked upon as a mere goods train being pulled by the engine, dragged to its destinations.

The seniors go on accepting their situation as fait accompli. Yeah, our lives sucked, but it is what it is. Of course, we were once young. We also had dreams and ideas of what was right and what was not. Unbeknownst to us, our actions must have impacted somebody's life somehow. There must be someone somewhere who benefitted from our efforts.

This is one such movie. Oliver Twist (yes, his father was a bibliophile) is a retired man who is quite happy doing all the handiwork around his home, caring for his aged father, and occasionally chatting with his childhood buddy Surya. Oliver's elder son, Anthony, a first one-hit scriptwriter, has hit writers' block. As his producers breathed down his neck for the script as multiple deadlines came and went, he came back for inspiration. Every time Anthony sees his father, he feels frustrated. He asks himself why his father is such a bumbling old man and a constant embarrassment. He fancies his girlfriend's father, an erudite person with a PhD who had just written his autobiography. 

Anthony gets desperate as another deadline approaches, and he has no script to submit. Oliver has a great story of his past to tell Anthony but fears that it is not glamorous enough.

Life in Oliver goes through ups and downs. Finally, the seeming good-for-nothing father-figure in the family actually has performed such a tremendous life-altering deed that saved somebody's life. That somebody is none other than his girlfriend's father. If not for Oliver, the PhD holder would not have such great heights.

We should continue doing our small deeds. Somehow, these insignificant gestures would snowball into something big and potentially earth-shattering.

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No end to espionage!

No Time to Die (2021)
Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

In my youth, I used to think, "with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, soon these espionage movies will all be passé." How wrong I was. And here I am in the 21st century, and the Russians are still posing a threat to the Western capitalist world, so we are told.

The Slavs, dressed in Red Soviet uniform then, have changed into their sharp suits, digital devices, and oligarchic money to play the same espionage and political manipulation game to portray a rosy picture of communism to the world. World domination, it seems, is high on their agenda. 

But frankly, let it be vulture capitalism and Red ideology; they are merely just two sides of the same coin. Think US election, think Bashar al-Assad to usurp power, think despotic leaders trying to suppress dissidents, you will find American and Russian handiwork in action. It is all about world domination, absolute power and total control by the powers that be. So, come the 21st century, or 25th century, the story of one group trying to dominate the others stay relevant. It is the story of mankind. 

So, it is no surprise that the Man with a Licence to Kill is still relevant today. In keeping with the changing times, however, the writers had altered some characters to appease members of the woke generation. As Daniel Craig was said to be doing his last appearance as James Bond in this film, the filmmakers are dangling the prospect of the next 007 to be a black female. Earlier, they had also introduced Miss Moneypenny as black. Q is possibly gay too. 

As I see it, the movie will be remembered as one generic offering that flew us by. Frankly, I was looking for a grand opening as I did in Casino Royale, but sadly many, if not all, of the action scenes had a sense of deja vu in each of them. Let it be a car chase, bike ride or massive island hideout destruction, the familiar feeling of 'haven't I seen that' kept coming back. 

After seeing Rami Malik perform brilliantly as Freddie Mercury is 'Bohemian Rhadsody', his talent is really wasted here. He just appears as an expressionless baddie with a puckered face. He does not make us hate him (or pity him).

The screenwriters must have tried to infuse emotion into Bond as it is Daniel Craig's swansong. But the idea of carrying a child in a car chase with the crooks shooting at the car is disturbing, to say the least. And the idea of a Bond illegitimate child?! We have all seen Bond escaping from more death-defying feats; why not this? Verdict: 2.5/5.

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Through the lens of a child's eyes!

El Sur (Spanish, The South; 1983)
Director: Victor Erice

This film has been hailed as one of the best films ever to come out of Spain. Ironically, the director refers to this film as an unfinished product. The remaining 90 minutes of the movie where the protagonist is supposed to visit the South of Spain never came out in the final product. Some say it was due to a lack of funds that the producer did not proceed with filming.

As children, as we were growing up, we wanted to know everything that was happening around us. We knew something not right was going on but just could not put the finger on it. The adults kept things secretive, but we sensed something was cooking. We put two and two together to paint a composite picture of what we perceive as complicated adult life. Sometimes, we understand more than we were expected to know. Other times, we got it all totally wrong.

This movie portrays the emotions beautifully that a child goes through the heady times of childhood in the uncertain times after the Spanish Civil War. Estella lives in the Northern part of Spain with her parents. Her parents are not precisely the lovey-dovey type of couple. The father is a medical doctor engrossed in his psychological experiments while the mother is contended to play housewife and knitting. There is not much intimacy going on; Father stays alone in the upstairs room.

Snooping around, Estella suspects that Father may have a movie star lover whom he jilted when he left the South. Father was active in the Spanish War on the Republican side against General Franco. His father, however, was on Franco's side. Both father and son had a falling, and Estella's father left with bad blood.

Realistically, Estella's father is suffering from PTSD. It could be a culmination of many reasons - his disappointment with the Civil War, his departure from the South, leaving his old girlfriend, trapped in a loveless marriage and the dull weather of the North.

As the years go by, Estella slowly understands what her father is going through, but nothing can predict what goes through his mind. All the while, the South remains a mysterious area to Estella. A single visit by her paternal in her childhood makes it even more intriguing. One day, Estella gets her chance to go down and endure the South. She goes there to study. The second part of her experience is not there in the film as it ends there.

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Everything is fake!

Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Screenplay and Direction: Victor Erice

This offering is said the best film ever to come out of Spain. To a movie connoisseur, this film is all about what filmmaking is all about. It is about the depiction of subliminal messages in symbolism and in such a subtle manner that beats the censors but not the intended target, the audience.

To a regular filmgoer, the movie would be as exciting as watching paint dry. It is relatively slow, with frequent long pauses between takes. It is said that it was intentional to drive home the point about Spain's tumultuous times under the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975. It tried to show how people led hollow lives; there was silence due to the dearth of human economic activities and governmental censorship that altered people's reality.

It narrates a family of four, a father, a mother and two young sisters with a live-in maid. Both the parents are obviously not on cordial terms. Both of them seemed to be engaged in their own activities. Father (Fernando) is into writing poems and tending to his beehives day in day out. Mother (Theresa) is in her own world, writing letters to an unknown lover.

The setting is 1940s Francoist Spain, in a small village where nothing is happening. The excitement of the day is the arrival of the movie screening van. That day, they were screening a butchered version of Frankenstein. The two sisters (Isabel and Ana) are watching the film. Ana, the younger one, is confused about the story and why Frankenstein is beaten up by the villagers in the movie. Isabel tells her that everything on film is unreal. Frankenstein is very much alive and is hiding in a nearby barn.

The director, Victor Erise, has a particular interest in telling stories from children's point of view. (See El Sur). Ana slow learns about death. She thinks that an army deserter who hides in the barn is the Frankenstein from the film. She feeds him and gives her father's coat to him. So, when the deserter gets killed, Fernando is summoned by the Francoist police, and Ana goes into hiding.

What about the beehive? What is the symbolism here? In my mind, the activities surrounding the beehive are pretty unproductive. The worker bees work laboriously in what seems like forever unfinished tasks. They appear perpetually busy, working non-stop. All their efforts, the intricate organisation, and the complicated distribution of labour mainly fatten the Queen Bee and ensure her fertility. The worker bee would probably get a pittance for his life-altering endeavours. His life purpose, much like the peasants in the lower rung of the pecking order in a fascist regime, is just to fatten the elites under the pretence of doing a noble job in the name of the country.

Capitalism, vulture capitalism and the post-truth era are not different from a fascist organisation. The commoners are sold a particular idea. That idea is emphasised and reminded repeatedly to generate a false sense of urgency in their minds. The powers-that-be utilises the power of media towards this end. We all end up doing a lot of unnecessary chores to satisfy the agenda of the top 1%.

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Not the love of one's life but love of life itself!

Before Trilogy
Before Sunrise (1995)
Before Sunset (2004)
Before Midnight (2013)

Director: Richard Linklater


This must surely be a very ambitious project. In a way, it is real-life experimentation. It tells about how life treats two individuals over a span of 18 years. It shows how two 23-year-olds look all doe-eyed at life and again at 32 and 41. At each time, we get an idea of how they see life is ahead. They embrace it with so much zest, thinking that they know why their elders get it all wrong. They thought they had discovered the secret why so many from the generation before were so miserable and vowed never to repeat their mistakes. They could see as plain as day what and where they went wrong. They knew they would never prey to these situational demands.

Jesse, an American student, met Celine, a French lass, aboard a Eurail train heading to Paris. Striking a conversation, they clicked as they shared similar values. They made an unscheduled stop at Vienna and spent the whole evening talking and talking about everything under the star. Literally under the stars as they spent the night in the park. The morning after, they parted ways, promising to meet at the exact station in 6 months. That was in 1994.

Their second meet happened nine years later, in 2003. The earlier scheduled date did not materialise as Celine had to partake in her grandmother's funeral. It was a time before people had instant messaging. Both had made it a point not to exchange contact numbers anyway. Jesse is now an accomplished author on a book tour in Paris. He is now married with a child back home in New York, whilst Celine is still wandering around wondering what to make of life. She finds relationships too complicated but finds solace in caring for the environment and social courses. She works with an environmental NGO. Their few hours of tête-à-tête before the flight ended up with Jesse wilfully missing the flight. 

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in all three films.

Another nine years later, Jesse sends off his firstborn home at the airport in the third film. Jesse's son is leaving after spending summer with his father. Yes, Jesse has divorced his first wife and decided to marry Celine and settle in Paris. They have a pair of twin girls. As they reach the tail end of their summer vacation, their otherwise blissful union hits a bump. Celine is contemplating a career change. She has to choose between a French Government post and a higher paying one in Chicago. Jesse wishes that she chooses Chicago as the job is in tune with her life ambition. Celine thinks Jesse chooses Chicago as he wants to be staying close to his son and possibly work towards custody of his son. That is when the battle started. It spiralled into a feminism war and equality, etcetera.

The irony of it all is that they end as the very similar couple that they vowed they would not be in their later years.

At the end of the day, it's not the love of the
other person matters. It's the love of life.

A few lessons of life are learnt here. Invariably love turns sour. Couples have to invest time and effort to be in love as the default button says go out and spread the love. Life is no fairy tale for that someone special to morph from nowhere to assume the role of Prince Charming. Fairy tales are grim satires of life, not an imagined utopia.

The thought of someone complementing and completing the (better) other is ludicrous. The speech 'You complete me' is a subtle invitation to indulge in the act of experimenting with the lock-and-key mechanism. It is a biological process, not a transcendental one.

Life in modern times is stressful. With so many societal expectations to meet, one lifetime is not enough. If surviving through the hard knocks of life is not challenging enough, there are gender roles to be fulfilled. Conversely, there is a push for gender empowerment as well. With all these boxes to be checked, to say that the modern man is stressed is an understatement. With all these swords of Damocles hanging over our heads, how will one attain peace at heart and mind? Only when there is peace in oneself can one find a genuine connection with others.

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Before they 'jump the shark'!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (season 8, final season)

After a long hiatus, Brooklyn Nine-Nine returned with its last season. A lot of things happened after the previous season. George Floyd's mishandling, Black Live Matters movement and calls to defund the police did not put the police in the best of light. Despite the public sensitivities and the problems of filming under pandemic situations, the team managed to churn out an entire ten-episode season. The producers decided to keep it neutral by avoiding too much police work and limiting the storyline more to the precinct's pranks.

Fonzie on water skis, in a scene from the
1977 Happy Days episode "Hollywood,
Part 3", after jumping over a shark

Maybe it is just me; I feel that actors have all grown lethargic playing their roles. The initial glow and enthusiasm seem to have been lost. Perhaps the producers saw that too. Rather than creating a 'jumping the shark' moment or even 'nuke the fridge' scene, they wisely decided to call it quits. After eight years of 'working', the team ended the season emotionally with their classical whacky treasure hunt during the Halloween season.

What do these jargons 'jumping the shark' and 'nuke the fridge' even mean, you may wonder?

Between 1974 and 1984, 'Happy Days' was flying the waves with its sitcom set in the mid-50s to mid-60s midwest USA. After an initial stutter, they started flying high but hit a bump in Season 5. The producers tried to push the limit by using the show's main star, Fonz's, waterskiing abilities. They made him leap over a shark in one episode in his trademark leather jacket and shorts. The show went on for seven other seasons but never really regained its past glory.

Pundits always mention the 'jumping the shark' moment as the beginning of the decline of the show's popularity. It may not have not totally true as other outlandish characters appeared in that season too. Mork, an alien, stranded on Earth, made his debut. He was so popular that he went on to have a life of his own in a spin-off 'Mork and Mindy'. All in all, 'Happy Days' had 255 half-hour episodes.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) is rumoured
to be the next Indiana Jones. 

The general understanding is that any film sequels more than three are bound to be a dud. So when the 'Indiana Jones' franchise became so popular, the monetary attraction to make a fourth film was just too great. The scene where Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator lined with lead was simply too outrageous for even a die-hard Indy fan to stomach. Just when you think that the 'nuke the fridge' scene would put an end to future Indiana Jones endeavours, think again. Indiana Jones 5 is in the pipeline for 2022, and in keeping with Hollywood's gender fluidity agenda, a female actor may be whipping the asses of the baddies.

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No free fling!

Kaanekkaane (As you watch, Malayalam; 2021)
Director: Manu Ashokan

Just like how my friends put it bluntly, "there is no such thing as a free f*ck! Everything has a price tag." No one is willing to give up something so intimate to them without any attachment. Something so personal surely carries with it excessive baggage and expectations in ROIs (Return of Investments). Affairs of the heart are never rational. The thrill of tasting the forbidden fruit digs one deeper and deeper into a heap of hopelessness. 

When you are not on the wrong side of the fence, it is easy to be judgemental. Sitting in the comfort of the armchair, it may sound prophetic to pass laws on what a person should and could do in a particular situation. We must remember that rules are made for others to follow. When it affects ourselves and our dear ones, we look for loopholes or, worse, shift the goal-post.

This intense family drama is told and acted in a very sober way without much dramatisation, perhaps at the end, but precisely for the right reason.

Paul, a civil servant at the land office, visits his grandson after about a year. Paul has not gotten over the death of his daughter, Sherrin, who succumbed to injuries in a hit-and-run accident. Paul's son in law, Allen, is now re-married, and his new wife, Sneha, is pregnant due any time. Paul was about to see another lawyer to appeal his daughter's case in the higher courts.

As he tries to build a relationship with his grandson, Paul realises that Allen may have got intimate with Sneha before Sherrin's demise. Slowly, everything falls in place. Sneha may have been a demanding lover, pushing to go to another level, and Sherrin's accident could have been a convenient death. Or was it murder?

Paul does his own investigation and determines that Allen had decided not to help Sherrin when he saw her sprawled by the roadside after the accident as momentarily he thought her death would ease matters with his demanding lover. It was just a temporary lapse of judgement but was long enough to take Sherrin to the point of no return.

Paul started blackmailing Allen with this theory and a recorded confession; Paul finds himself in a quandary. When he is about to tell Sneha about Allen's confession, he finds her unconscious in her home with an obstetric emergency. The idea of abandoning Sneha crossed his mind as that would mean he may gain possession of his grandson, and Allen was already going insane with guilt. Sanity prevailed in the end.

Sneha is sent to hospital; she survives and delivers a healthy baby. Paul realises that the same evil thoughts that almost made him leave Sneha to die must have been the sinister idea that took the better of Allen, causing Sherrin to die.

Paul returns to his hometown, deciding to put a rest to pursuing Shireen's accident any further. Man is not infallible. Sometimes we make the wrong decisions when clouded by emotion. We fail to make rational decisions we would otherwise make and live to regret them every living day. To forgive is divine, they say, but the long arm of the law will still get you.

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