Sunday, June 24, 2012

Batman Begins – The Ascension




I still remember that Sunday morning when I was a ten year old, Sunday mornings were something we eagerly awaited, but that was a day I was looking forward to with much anticipation for that was the day when Batman – The Animated Series was to be premiered on National TV at 10.30 am if my memory serves me right. When compared to other comic book heroes that we have grown up watching and reading, Batman comes with a darker tone much like his Bat Suit– a brooding crime fighter, with a scarred history of watching his parents die in front of him, he is no superhero like Spiderman or The Hulk, who possess superpowers that are acquired owing to a scientific experiment gone wrong, nor is he from another planet like his DC Comics counterpart Superman. What he does possess are the resources, he is a billionaire with an inherited wealth, much like Tony Stark/Ironman but only less cocky and arrogant. Yet he is reduced to a comical and asinine vigilante in the Adam West starring TV series of 1960s which was punctuated with Pows! Booms and Kapows! 

Earlier Batman adaptations to the big screen by Joel Schumacher and Tim Burton stuck within the pages of the comic book, Batman was morose and Bruce Wayne was more businesslike, Gotham looked gothic like any of those settings from a Tim Burton movie which only made me wonder why Batman would risk his life to save such a ugly looking city. The villains were more of a caricature–the bigger and established stars such as Nicholson, Schwarzenegger, Devito and Jim Carrey were nowhere near threatening as the bad guys. We as viewers had no emotional investment to the characters, we knew Batman would save the day, the villains were less maniacal and more dependent on their histrionics, much like Loki from The Avengers. It would be a walk in the park for Batman and we would walk out of the theatres with the perception of our hero tainted and nothing to take away from it. It would be unfair to blame Burton and Schumacher for having underplayed Batman’s aura on screen, nobody expected much from comic book adaptations those days after all. And in the year 2005 it all changed.

Christopher Nolan changed the whole template of how comic books had to be made into a movie. Sam Raimi had started with Spider-Man three years earlier by giving us a closer look at all that Peter Parker had to lose to become Spider Man, the curse of being a Hero which the whole city looked up to, the baggage that came along with it. Although Spider Man was well made by Raimi, it was still bound by the confines of Marvel comics. Maybe that was what Sony Pictures wanted–to veer off as little as you could from the comic books and to stay true to its source. When the Batman reboot was handed over to Christopher Nolan, he along with his writers Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer did not just show us Batman, but also showed us the philosophy that had went into making him “The Batman”. In Batman Begins they went deep into his past, they showed us what it took Bruce Wayne from being a Princeton dropout to being The Batman, the Prince of Gotham who watches over the city while it sleeps. 

They also gave more defining roles to the multitude of characters from DC’s Batman universe, we were introduced to Lucius Fox who heads the rundown Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises, and now is to Bruce Wayne what Q was to James Bond, the wise Alfred is not just limited as Bruce’s butler but is also his voice of reason and sanity during times of distress, like a father he guides Bruce Wayne with his sage like discourses. There is Rachel Dawes Bruce’s childhood friend and love interest, who was never a part of the DC universe but was specifically created by Nolan to give a straight-forward, honest and by-the-book attorney whose mantra “It’s not what you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you” motivates Bruce Wayne to become The Batman.

The story begins with Bruce still reeling from the death of his parents at a young age, trying to come to terms with their demise while misusing the rage building within him to take vengeance against Joe Chill, the man who killed them.  When admonished by Rachel for being self-centered and mistaking revenge with justice, he leaves Gotham to learn the ways of the criminal underworld, and the skills necessary to fight against it. His journey leads him to Henri Ducard who takes him under his wings and trains him as a ninja amongst the crime fighting outfit League of Shadows headed by the mysterious Ra’s Al Ghul. Things only sour between the two when Bruce’s principles clash with that of Ducard, when he is asked to kill a man as a way of exacting justice for the crime he has committed, a method he does not believe in since his eyes were opened by Rachel. After much carnage at the home of the League of Shadows, having left it in shambles, Bruce returns to Gotham to only find it in a sorry state of affairs where the cops are in bed with the criminals. Poverty and injustice run amok as there is no one to stand up against the dreaded mafia kingpin Carmine Falcone, who secretly deals with Dr. Jonathan Crane of Arkham Asylum to help him procure a drug that causes severe mental psychosis and hallucinations.  

Bruce Wayne who once suffered from his fear of bats overcomes those fears and uses the winged creature as a symbol to fight crime. Expert in the art of deception, master in theatrics, and laced with a hoarse voice that strikes fear within the hearts of criminals The Batman takes it upon himself to clean the streets of Gotham, albeit never acting as the Judge, Jury and Executioner but only delivering criminals at the doorstep of the Law with his methods. Batman Begins also focuses on how the Caped Crusader goes on to be allies with Jim Gordon, then lieutenant of Gotham City–a cop who helplessly watches his colleagues cut deals with criminals. Batman Begins has a modest beginning in terms of the set pieces when compared with The Dark Knight and the soon to be released The Dark Knight Rises, also it is the only film in the trilogy to not have a single scene shot in IMAX, it although is rich in content with enough time given for Batman to make his first appearance, solely focusing on the life of Bruce Wayne till then.

With a dark and realistic setting Nolan had given us a Gotham city to care for, it no more looked like an archaic and crammed city like how it was portrayed in previous Batman flicks–having shot in Chicago and parts of United Kingdom it more or less resembled a real city, with the poverty stricken and crime affected part of Gotham, the Narrows, modeled on the slums of Kowloon in Hong Kong. The score by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer gives an epic feel for a movie that dealt with the birth of a much revered and enigmatic Hero, and even today listening to the intro theme “Vespertillo” gives you a feel of witnessing something larger than life. 

When Henri Ducard explains to Bruce Wayne about what differentiates a vigilante from a legend, he says that a legend is he who devotes himself to an ideal that makes him more than just a man, there are many such axioms that go into being a hero. In Batman Begins Christopher Nolan had shown us the principles which went into the making of a Hero, and it is in the gripping and adrenaline filled sequel does the Hero grow on to become a Legend. But then, I have saved that story for another Sunday morning.


Sunday, June 17, 2012

The Price of Being Wise

Wisdom comes with age, and it is built with failure. Every time we fail, we feel disheartened but the takeaway is that you get a tad wiser, you learn from your mistakes. Every time you stumble, your judgment becomes better. We pay a heavy price for experience and wisdom, one that cannot be measure monetarily, Life after all is a fair trader, what can’t be paid with money is paid with time.  As you near your thirties there comes this added pressure of sounding wiser, in most cases it is to know when to keep your mouth shut. It is something I am still learning. I am still five years away from it……well actually make it four, but technically its three. The fact is that I hate getting to my thirties, you wake up one morning and realize that you are getting old–not the grey hair and less libido kind where you need to pop a pill to get a hard-on–but that of a more mature kind, you are expected to know about shares, stocks, and mutual fund investments and tax calculations, people ask you about what kind of curtains would suit their bedroom, which school is good for the kids, who should be elected the president, that kind. Questions pertaining to movies and music are directed towards the younger kind, those freshly passed out of college, in their early twenties. Bastards. No one asks for your advice on love. There was a time when a friend would ask you how to woo a woman and you would quote lines which you find after Google searching “Love quotes”, now your friend only wants to know on how to save a relationship, the answer to which even Google is trying to figure out.

You try to fit in with the younger generation but you feel terribly out of place, you are looked upon as a relic, you feel like Gandalf the Grey amidst a bunch of Hobbits who look up to you when wisdom needs to be imparted. They are busy Whatsapping while you are busy wondering “What is that app?”, they listen to heavy metal, while you secretly listen to Kumar Sanu and Anuradha Paudwal, only to realize that it has left you misty-eyed (or is it just me?). They share memes and rage comics, while you are still deciphering what “LOLWUT” means. You realize that there is no such thing as “Love at first sight”, what they showed in the movies of the boy getting the girl was just the prologue. They never showed us the compromises and shit they had to go through to make it work. We slowly realize that Love is not about swinging to a tune in the Swiss Alps after all.

You learn to gauge between right and wrong, between friends and acquaintances. You realize friendships aren’t forever only memories are, the more new people you meet, the more the images of your good old friend keeps fading away from your mind, and despite what they say you would never be in touch for long. The world is filled with interesting people each more different than the last, the more we move forward the more we keep meeting. You no more want to screw things up with your recklessness, but instead you want to prevent things from screwing up. You learn to keep a leash on your tongue, and also on your heart. You don’t judge things/people by their exterior, but instead learn to appreciate for what they are on the inside. Family gatherings scare the shit out of you because someone or the other would bring in that million dollar question “So when are you planning to settle down?” like as if right now you are volatile bouncing about the four walls of the room high on drugs, ready to explode any moment. It is strange why a question of getting married is phrased as “Settling down” when actually marriage leaves you anything but “settled down”.

I prefer being young, reckless and stupid–to have my immaturity as an excuse to blame all my mistakes on. I could maintain this façade of being in my early twenties, with a devil-may-care attitude, but grow up we have to do someday, as one cannot fight Time for it leaves the sharpest of swords rusty (no, I am not referring to the penis here) but also, have I told you that Time is a great teacher?

Now if you’ll ‘scuse me I have to go and snip out these gray hairs off of my head.

  

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Shanghai - Movie Review





Bollywood has always found it tricky when it comes to crafting a film based on political themes, political dramas in the past have been either too preachy or have all the over-the-top ingredients of a commercial potboiler, Prakash Jha’s “Rajneeti” was an example of a director who wanted to make a political thriller but ended up making a movie which was heavily influenced by The Godfather and Mahabharat and ended up being loud and ridiculous. Just when it seemed that one cannot expect a hit-in-the-guts kind of a political thriller in an industry where directors still dish out one mindless crass commercial movie after another, Dibakar Banerjee asks us to hold on to that thought and goes about making a film that is not just sensible and smart, but is also funny in a subtle way. The end result is “Shanghai”.


Adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’ “Z”, the story is based in a fictitious town named “Bharat Nagar” where the powers that be promise their citizens of making it into a city as developed as Shanghai. But there is a heavy price to pay for progress, as skylines are to be erected only after rendering slum dwellers homeless.  Herein comes Dr. Ahemadi, the messiah who ruffles some feathers amongst the powerful ruling party by asking questions and fighting for the rights of the soon to be displaced junta.  Deemed as a threat to the monetary progress that the party, IBP, is to make with deals for investment in crores of rupees ,  Dr. Ahemadi is mowed down in what the police cover up as a case of drunken driving. Pressured by the wife of the activist, a cover-up investigation is launched by the state government headed by the no-nonsense IAS officer T.A Krishnan (Abhay Deol) hoping to silence the ruckus caused by the media. Aided by Shalini (Kalki Koechlin) a student of the activist, and Parmar (Emraan Hashmi) a part time pornographer, Krishnan slowly peels layers of truth to get to the bottom of the mystery,  which if revealed would put his life and career in jeopardy. 

Yet what makes “Shanghai” click are those casual moments even in tense scenes, like a football making its way into a press conference held in an almost dilapidated school, or accidentally playing a porn clip whilst wanting to show a recorded footage as an evidence to the IAS officer, or the opening scene where a goon innocently yearns to know what they call “mutton” in English from where the scene then steamrolls to a mob wreaking havoc lead by the said goon, as in slow motion the horror unfolds in front of our eyes.


Abhay Deol gives a composed performance of a man who is asked to toe the line drawn by his superiors with rewards of a Stockholm assignment dangled in front of him. Although the forced Tamil or its accent on his Hindi may at times make you cringe, he asserts himself as an actor in a brilliantly filmed scene towards the end where he holds the gonads of his superior and forces to make a deal with him, without sounding intimidating yet with a chilling method to his demands. Kalki Koechlin as the angst-ridden protégé of the activist is pissed-off in almost every scene that she is in, making her seem at times one-dimensional. Yet it is Emraan Hashmi, a man who started his career with a notoriety in serial kissing now puts his mouth to better use in delivering dialogues, in the process stealing the show. As the street smart videographer his is a strongly written character, be it being helpless in seeing his boss killed and dealing with its after effects in fear, or the gullible awkwardness with which he starts a conversation with Shalini and Krishnan, he essays his the role of a small-town bumpkin with much conviction.


The supporting cast is top notch, be it the seasoned Farooque Shaikh as the CM’s top dog, or an unknown actor like Pitobash Tripathy–the firebrand of a goon who sells the idea to run down over someone with the guile of a salesman, or Prosenjit, the articulate activist who raises a storm among the junta, and harbors feelings for his student. Credit goes to Dibakar Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar who prevent “Shanghai” from sounding morose and heavy-handed in spite of its serious theme. There are the occasional songs which are cleverly inserted, “Imported Kamariyaa” a formulaic item song, for a brief moment made me ask “Thou too Dibakar?” but as the song played on, and as the scene shifted back and forth it made me realize of Dibakar’s genius.


We complain about our movies being stereotyped and no-brainers that often play to the galleries, we blame our film makers for dumbing down our audience, once in a while it takes someone like a Dibakar Banerjee to challenge the audience to raise its bar. The question is: Will we?

Monday, June 4, 2012

Max Payne – Kill Kill ! Faster Faster !



Don't Angry Him

As the end credits of Max Payne 2 fade away to Poets of the Fall’s “Late Goodbye”, Rockstar Games had promised us that Max Payne’s journey into the night will continue. Max Payne­ – that angst ridden cop who in the previous two editions was in search of the ones who had murdered his wife and child, gunning down villains and their goons, mouthing off dialogues that word by word took us deeper into his troubled soul, and took us closer to his world whilst in Max’s body we searched for his vengeance – is back this time as an alcoholic, fat, dumb cop (in his own words) on pills with a knack of being in the wrong party at the wrong time,  and also much capable of spoiling it. The game moves eight years into the future from where Part 2 had ended, Max works as a bodyguard for the rich Branco family in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with his friend Passos through whom he had gotten the job. How they meet is explained in subsequent chapters as the story shuttles between his troubled past in the snowy moonlit night of New Jersey and through the harrowing present day in sunny Sao Paulo.


The story begins with a bald Max Payne holding a gun over the head of one of the villains, as the flashback takes us to where it all started.  Max comes out all guns blazing but in vain as another damsel in distress, Fabiana, of the wealthy Bronco family is abducted on his watch by the street gang Comando Sobra. His search to get back Fabiana and the other hostages leads him through the seedy underbelly of Sao Paulo. Combating through the mean streets filled with meaner thugs, while berating himself with snark-filled dialogues that have become a trademark of this franchise as much as its edge-of-the seat gameplay, Max goes about solving the mystery only to stumble upon a bigger conspiracy. And this is where the story gets complicated, as you end up losing interest in the narrative hoping for the end to come soon. At the point where the writing lets you down, Rockstar’s solid gameplay comes to the fore and keeps you glued to the action.


He's back, he's bald and this time he's more pissed off.
With every passing chapter comes a new environment with tougher enemies, from the high-rising towers of the city to the poverty stricken Favelas to the thrilling finale at an airport of which even Michael Mann would be proud of, the environments are well-detailed and the action sequences are slick and stylish. Max dives, swings and slides in slow motion during programmed pivotal moments of action in the game, only to leave you agape and wanting to play the sequence once again but with more panache. With smarter and unrelenting enemies who keep coming at you, flanking you when you are taking cover at the same place for a long time, Max Payne 3 not just tests your dexterity with the controller but also tests your strategy on how to take down the bad guys. Back with their patented Shoot-dodge and Bullet-time, the folks at Rockstar make sure that Max kills people with style. With no auto-replenishment of health as seen with other games, it makes the gameplay at times frustrating yet more challenging, and seeking cover while counter firing even more essential. The addition of a box of pills to restore your health with every time you replay the failed scenario helps sustain your interest in the game, giving you a hope of finishing the level even after you are killed many times.


Bending time, one bullet at a time.
With cut scenes galore and split screens with phrases of importance in bold and large when narrated by our hero, Rockstar has tried out a new form of narration moving on from that graphic novel feel we had when playing the previous two installments, to throwing us right in the middle of a high-on-adrenaline Hollywood film. The background score by HEALTH that ranges from fast-paced during mind numbing shootouts at the discos and airports, to haunting and intense during stealth action sequences in the docks and at a cemetery at night captures the mood of the sequence brilliantly and keeps you hooked. James McCaffrey’s trademark voice for the titular hero reflects Max’s self-deprecating humor as easily as that steely never-say-die doggedness which comes out of him when push comes to shove. It lends a personality of its own to the brooding Max Payne, a man on the edge who has got nothing to lose.  


As the game towards the end spirals into a mindless killing spree with the storyline fading away into being almost non-existent, all that keeps you going is the legend of the tortured Max Payne,who wherever he goes keeps on fighting the demons of his past that come in various forms to haunt him. Rockstar after a long wait of nine years have come back with a revamped Max Payne 3, with larger-than-life action setpieces, a snazzy narrative, and a more pissed of hero with a wide range of arsenal to combat an army of more than dozen. It all seems to be worth the wait. Even so, when the story goes on to be too heavier on the eye and longer to bear, all that keeps us pushing Max forward is the core of the franchise that hinges on - Max Payne’s journey to redeem himself whilst enduring Maximum Pain.