A patriotic poem.

Full River Red (China; 2023)

Director: Zhang Yimou

'Full River Red' is a patriotic poem written by Yue Fei, a Chinese general during the reign of the Southern Song Dynasty. There was a time when the Jin Dynasty overpowered the Northern Song Dynasty from the area now known as Manchuria. Yue Fei was assigned to recapture the northern capital from the intruders. Just as he was about to overpower the invader, he was told to retreat.

The Southern King thought the released Northern King may have a claim to the throne. Yue Fei was called back to the southern capital, charged with trumped-up charges, and executed or died in prison. He was a victim of an internal political imbroglio. An established poet, Yue Fei wrote the poem to stir patriotic fervour among the people. It portrays his hatred towards the invading northern army and his frustration toward the peace accord with the Jin dynasty from the north. 'Full River Red' has become a masterpiece in the history of Chinese literature.

To put cold water into the sense of Chinese patriotism, a renowned Song scholar from Princeton, James T. C. Liu, says that the poem may have been written in the 16th century, looking at the words used. Yue Fei lived between 1103 and 1142! So, the poem may not be his at all.

As complicated as Chinese history was when we studied it in school, with similar-sounding names and convoluted turns of events, this movie follows the same trajectory. It should have occurred five years after Yue Fei's demise.

The Chancellor, who worked under the umbrella of the Southern Song emperor, had made a secret agreement with the Jin Dynasty representative. Yue Fei's supporters (the people) intercepted the papers by killing the Jin's messenger. The Chancellor had to prevent his maleficence from being out in the open. He assigns two men to find the culprit.

That snowballs into a sword unsheathing, head decapitating, violence-filled dark comedy. The film's climax is the poem's recital by all the prisoners. The entire army rises to the occasion with the inspiring patriotic hair-raising words of the poem.

This film turned out to be one of the highest-grossing Chinese movies. It is nothing more than using a common heritage to spur nationalism. But then, do they really share a common heritage when the People's Republic of China may be viewed as the rule of the Han people over other ethnicities like the Manchus, Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols, and more. I am not sure whether the Chinese living in the areas bordering Central Asia and Tibetans share the same romantic views on a shared history.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

You left a trail…

Meiyazhagan (மெய்யழகன், Tamil; 2024)
Written & Directed by: C Prem Kumar

How often have you been caught in a situation where someone catches you at a party and goes on a rant? They seem to know everything about you. They would tell you about your parents and obscure personal details of your childhood. The trouble is that you don't know him from Adam. You would not have the slightest clue who he is but too embarrassed to ask him. You would not want to offend the other person and appear haughty. More so when you return to your hometown, doing better than where you came from whilst the other person is still stuck in your hometown. 

You slowly try to pick a cue from his sentences. You try to look deep into his eyes, perhaps to pick up any identifying features. Negative. You try politely asking people behind his back, but it proves difficult as everyone assumes both seem engaged in a conversation so deep that we are blood brothers. 

You become desperate as the other person sticks on to you like a leech that does not drop off. You reach the point of no return when he says he worshipped you and owes it to you for being such a motivating icon in his life. You give up when he says he owes everything to you and insists on having a meal with you.

The protagonist, Arul, feels this as he returns to an estranged family wedding near his ancestral home. Twenty-two years previously, Arul's family had to leave the ancestral home after a family feud. Arul, a teenager when all this was going on, remembers it as a painful event in his life. So, returning to meet the same people engaged in the showdown was cumbersome for Arul.

He planned to make a lightning trip there, bless the newlyweds, and return on the last bus back to Chennai. All that came to nought when Arul bumped into this chatty, nameless chap who would not go away.

Arul simply could not place him anywhere in his life, but according to the chap, they spent a momentous summer in 1994. He clings on and on, refusing to leave his sight. Things become more problematic when Arul misses the last bus out and has to stay the night there. With no acceptable lodgings available, left to Hobson's choice, he takes the chap's generous offer to stay at his abode. Even his wife knows Arul well. He is mesmerised by the hospitality. After a few drinks, things become emotional, and the chap confesses that he would name his soon-to-be-born child with Arul's gender-neutral name, Arulmozhi.

Arul feels ashamed and leaves the chap's home without telling him. As in all 'feel good' Indian movies, resolution comes via a phone call and long-deserved confession. 

It's an engaging movie minus all the masalas associated with Kollywood. As expected from a film produced by Sivakumar's family, devoted to developing Tamil and Tamilness, the film is smattered with iconography closely related to Tamil culture and Dravidian politics. 

From the word go, the opening credits are written in Tamil only. Then, the viewers see Jallikattu and an Indian Kongu bull dragged into a story that is more about human relationships than the importance of the continuation of Jallikattu. Then, the framed photo of EV Ramasamy appears now and then. The spoken dialogue is recommendable for it avoids corruption with Madras basha. Tamil is relatively pristine. Tamil pride can be felt when the characters talk about their ancestors fighting for the Cholas, the plight of Sri Lankan Tamils in their civil war and the Thootukodi massacre, where Tamil citizens got killed for standing up against an allegedly polluting copper smelting plant.

Arvind Swamy and Karthi's acting is recommendable. Their chemistry, bromance, and characterisation of their roles are excellent. It's a good movie. 4.5/5.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Part of the company you keep!

Onibaba (Japanese, 1964)
Director: Kaneto Shindō

Many stories tell us to be wary of the company we keep with. Like how Amma frequently reminds us, a calf, if it moves around with piglets, will eventually join the piglets and source its daily meals from the rubbish dump. An animal, placed high in Hindu society, will ultimately do unholy things depending on the company it keeps. 

There is something special about black-and-white movies and the horror genre. It reminds me of my childhood, when my sisters and I would flock around our home 16" TV, squinting to watch RTM's Friday offering of Cerita Pontianak. Even the poor makeup of Pontianak would scare the living daylights out of my sister. She would even be scared to enter the kitchen. To make it worse, I would hide around the corner and jump suddenly in front of her, making her scream!

Onibaba is a classic Japanese movie set in the Samurai era. Times are bad. All the territories are at loggerheads; all men are out to fight, and the women have to rough it out, scavenging on whatever comes their way, stealing from travellers, catching dogs for meals and selling loots. A lady and her daughter-in-law desperately try to survive in that climate. A neighbour, who returns from war, informs them that the lady's son died, not in the war, but while stealing food. The lady blames the neighbour for the son's death. The neighbour seduces the young widow, but the lady is not very happy about it. The lady's daughter-in-law, the young widow, is secretly in love with him and has secret trysts in the dark of the night. The lady comes to know of this and tries to prevent her.

One day, as the lady follows the daughter-in-law to one of these late-night meetings, she is stopped by a mask-donning samurai at knife-point. The lady tricks the samurai by pushing him into a pit. She removes his mask and wears it to scare her daughter-in-law. It works, but the mask gets stuck to her face after getting wet in the rain. After forcefully removing the mask, the lady and her daughter-in-law discover that her face has peeled off and is disfigured. The daughter-in-law runs away scared. The lady falls into the same pit and dies.

A chilling movie. Introduces the Hannya masks, usually used in Japanese Noh theatres, typically representing a jealous female demon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A musical horror?

Joker: Folie à Deux (Madness shared by two; 2024)
Director: Todd Philips

No matter how much they suck at anything, adults are not supposed to tell children they are wrong. They are supposed to be encouraged, only showered with positive vibes. It is believed to give them self-confidence and stretch them to greater heights beyond their capacity. 

Nobody is graded. Everyone gets a medal for participating. Everyone is a winner, and he is exceptional and made to believe. 

I have news for you. Go into the world and realise that nobody gives two hoots to you. Everybody is in a hurry. Nobody has time to listen and talk to you. Every man is an island.

To make matters worse, the others have no qualms about stepping on or over you to achieve their goals. Losing you is just one step closer to their goals. There is no time to coach or wait for you. It is a man-eat-man world out there.

Living under the hawking eyes of helicopter parenting or even chip-implanted surveillance, these snowflakes find themselves naked, exposed to the cruel elements of humankind. They once thought everyone was laughing with them all. Much to their disappointment, they realise that they were laughed at. They were not the Joker that everyone loved, but the butt of everyone's joke.

The question is when they will realise that reality and how they will handle it.

After the successful run of Joker in 2019, the filmmakers decided to push their luck. Joker (2109) did well as an evil, dysfunctional character from society's low rung, venting his anger in broad daylight in front of TV cameras. The audience felt for the Joker, and the movie garnered much attention and accolades. Riding on Joker's popularity, the scriptwriters must have taken his fans for clowns (or idiots). They roped in Lady Gaga to pair as Harley Queen, Joker's love interest. We get it that both characters were discontented with their parents and turned out dysfunctional. Both of them blame their respective parents for their predicaments. We get it. 

The shared madness between them and the periodic bursting into songs did not go well with fans. There should be something more concrete than occasional glancing between characters, falling in love, songs and soliloquies. 2/5.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Gory historic details or gore fest?

Razakar: The Silent Genocide Of Hyderabad (Telegu, 2024)

Director: Yata Satyanarayana

In her last major speech before her disposition, Sheikh Hasina accused those who opposed her rule in Bangladesh of being Razakars. The opposition took offence to this term and soon widespread mob throughout the land. Of course, it is not that that single incident brought down an elected government but a culmination of joblessness and unjust reservations for a select population group. In the Bengali psyche, Razakar is a pejorative term meaning traitor or Judas. It was first used during the 1971 Pakistan Civil War. The paramilitary group who were against the then-East Pakistani leader, Majibur Rehman, were pro-West Pakistan. After establishing independence in Bangladesh, Razakars were disbanded, and many ran off to Pakistan.

Around the time of Indian independence, turmoil brewed in the princely state of Hyderabad, which had been a province deputed by the Mughals from 1794. The rule of Nizam commenced since. That vast state of Hyderabad covered Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and parts of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. In total, seven Nizams ruled Hyderabad. Barring the rule of the sixth Nizam, Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan, their rule saw much discontent, oppression and restricted liberty. Even before the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, in 1857, 1000 members of rebelling tribal members were hung unceremoniously on a banyan tree. In the present state of Telangana, there was a kingdom named Gond. Some British soldiers trespassed on their land and destroyed public property. The Gond members killed them. The British retaliated by hanging the leader Ramji Gond and others on a tree immortalised as the 'thousand skull tree'. 

Other hardships the people endured were high taxes, forced conversion and the inability to use their preferred languages. Before this, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada were freely spoken. Then came the use of Persian and Urdu. 

When the British decided to pack up and leave, the 562 Indian states could join Pakistan or India or stay alone. Hyderabad initially wanted to be part of Pakistan. Imagine the logistics of having a landlocked independent state with the ideology of the enemy, i.e. Pakistan. The last Nizam gave Jinnah an audience, but his demeanour cheesed off the Nizam. Upon taking his seat, Jinnah sat with one leg crossed against the other and smoked a cigar. That, remarked the offended Nizam, was the end of their discussion. The Nizam vowed to stand alone, promising to develop Hyderabad to Turkistan, the apt replacement for the once splendid Ottoman Empire.

This much is known. India wanted Hyderabad to be part of India after two large chunks of land were given to Pakistan, but states made a deal with India-Pakistan. The Standstill Agreement in November 1947 gave the princely states a year to decide which side to opt for.

What happened within Hyderabad State is debatable. Though many of the gory stories that come out are denied by many journalists and historians, many swear of the atrocities that bordered on genocide that they had to endure. At the end of the day, it is a Muslim-Hindu issue. The deniers insist it was humanly impossible for a ragtag squad of Razakars to create so much damage. They blame the communists who were also trying to put footage into the state. It was a chaotic time. Peasants were rebelling, and landowners wanted to hold onto their lands. 

Hyderabad had a population of 15% Muslims, who ruled the majority Hindus. The ruling class also included Pathans, Arabs, and other foreign administrators. The frugal Nizam was, at that time, the wealthiest man on Earth, with diamonds and other priceless minerals under his thumb. When the Nizam wanted to remain independent, his yeoman, Qasim Razvi, the leader of a quasi-political party, clandestinely recruited radical volunteers to uphold Islam and prevent the fall to the control of the Hindu Rashtra. Razakar is an Arabic word meaning volunteer. 

Meanwhile, with his vast coffers, the Nizam procured surrender German weapons from the victors of WW2. Rifles and automatic guns were flown in via Pakistan with the help of arms dealers. One such person was Frederick Sidney Cotton, who was supposed to transport Qasim Rizvi out of Hyderabad when the Nizam fell, but Cotton left him behind.

 Sadar Patel was the leading man behind the liberation of the people of Hyderabad. 75 years later, the correct nomenclature for this exercise is still debated: whether it was a liberation of the state or the integration of the State into the rest of India. Nehru and Patel tried to dissolve the tension amicably through negotiations. K M Munshi was sent as a negotiator. When all talks failed, and the cry of the people of Hyderabad reached screeching levels, Patel and the Indian Army with the airforce moved into Hyderabad under what was called 'Police Action' in Operation Polo, disobeying the Standstill Agreement. Hyderabad was annexed into the Indian Dominion on 17th September 1948.

Qasim Risvi was charged with sedition and was imprisoned till 1957. He left for Karachi after his release and died a pauper in 1970. The Nizam was not charged but was given a ceremonial post till his date.

This movie created a lot of controversies before its release. The filmmakers were accused of distorting history. The atrocities were magnified, and some of the violence committed by the upper-class Hindus, moneylenders, landowners and communists was assumed to have been done by Razakars. There were half-truths and blatant lies. The Nizam is said to have aided Hindu concerns and temples. It seemed that the Communists did fight against the Razakars, but they were not credited in the movie. Some intellectuals label it as Hindutva propaganda. The Hanging Tree incident is a fight against the British but somehow lumped here as the Nizam's doing. It turned out to be a gore fest with little cinematic value or compelling storytelling.

(P.S. Qasim Razvi's party remains a legitimate political party. From Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MIM, it is now known as All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, AIMIM. It is a formidable opposition party that regularly churns out Islam and Muslim-related issues. After Rizvi, the party's helm was passed to Abdul Wahid Owaisi, the current leader's grandfather.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Always the second fiddle!

Daddio (2024)
Director & Screenplay: Christy Hall

This movie would not have hit my radar if Qantas had not apologised to its passengers on a flight to Tokyo for a mistaken screening. A glitch in the system made only this movie being screened in all in-flight entertainment for a whole hour. Qantas specifically apologised to the children for the mistake. The apology must have been because it must have been boring as hell for them. And also perhaps because of two ‘unholy’ sexting images of an erect phallus and a full display of a pair of mammary glands in their full glory. 

Not that I am complaining. It is a well-made drama that discusses a very mature subject- what either gender expects in a relationship. This conversation occurs during a cab journey from JFK airport to Manhattan between a twice-married cab driver and his passenger, a 30-something confident lady who is a mistress to a married man with kids. That is it. It starts with the lady (Dakota Johnson) entering Sean Penn's yellow taxi and ends when they reach their destination. It is all conversation and text messages. Now we know why Qantas had to apologise to the kids! - for kids telling their parents, “I am bored!" and parents unable to give them an alternative. Returning from her hometown after a visit to her sister's, Dakota is travelling to her apartment. A kind of nosey cab driver, Penn, starts to strike up a conversation with Dakota.  

After a few cursory topics, they open up about each other's private lives. The highlight of their chat is what each other expected or had expected in their lives. Pretty soon both become all so philosophical, especially Penn. At one moment, Dakota was reevaluating her whole imbroglio with a married man and its repercussions. A married man with an affair is in it just for sex. He will never give up his family so that his mistress can have a fairytale-like, happy ending forever and ever. Period. A confident, self-sustaining female may have her dreams and targets in life, but having her lover all to herself will not be successful. She will always have to play second fiddle and the scorned home wrecker. An interesting watch. 4/5.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

When stock pundit be held responsible!

Money Monster (2016)

Director: Jody Foster

That it is. There is no shortcut to making that first million. First, one must realise that one's journey to the land of gold and honey may meet impassable obstacles and not reach the intended destination. Or, he may be skewed away from the path and end up in a ditch. Or, he may be swallowed by a beast (or troll under the bridge, if you still believe in fairy tales!)

Wealth is finite. It is a zero-sum game. For one to make a million, somebody else must lose a million. The way advertisers do their thing, prospectors buy the idea that no one is a loser. They entice you into the gravy train, which never runs short of curry!

With the advent of complex algorithms, the unholy union of data scientists and conniving dupe masters never had it better. Speaking in incomprehensible jargon that they do not understand, they create a smokescreen that can cleverly hide their true malfeasances. Their spick appearances and polished social etiquettes belie their demonic intentions beneath their mask.

Even nations are getting involved in this debacle. When fiat money is churned out indiscriminately, even small Governments with altruistic intentions gamble on their children's future when their investments appear robust and are backed by the greenback. 

Have you noticed how financial experts have such short life spans on the airwaves? Like swallows before the summer, they appear in droves when the stock market is doing well. They yak and yak like they have perfected the art of making money out of the market. It is as if they are there for everyone's picking. Overnight, they will be uncontactable when things go south; swallow fly south. This must be why their actions are termed 'flight by night' activity. And the market will swallow everything in one big lump. 

What happens to all those sycophants who promote and sing praises of the moneymaking product as if it is the best thing to happen to mankind since sliced bread? Are these mere messengers? We do not kill the messengers. Or can they be held accountable for what comes out of their mouths? 

These are the questions that go through the mind of the compère and controller of a popular money programme named 'Money Monster' when a disgruntled investor holds the host at gunpoint and straps a bomb vest over him. The investor had lost his inheritance in stocks after taking the programme's advice, hence the frustration. 

As expected, life on the silver screen is more black or white. By the film's end, the cause of the stock prices' fall is pinpointed to fraud by its owner, and instant justice befalls the wrongdoer.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.