Reviews: United 93 and The Guardian

United 93 opens with two deliberately contrasting images: The first is of an airline pilot getting into uniform for another day’s work. The other is of two young men with looks of intense foreboding in their eyes, getting dressed and offering prayer. The film reconstructs the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and shows how hijackers’ attempts to maintain control of the plane were subsequently thwarted by a group of passengers. The plane eventually crashed into farmland, shortly after the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, killing everybody on board.

We also see a lot of what happened on the ground that morning, at air traffic control centers struggling to cope with planes jumping radar and at military units in a state of alert in case of further attacks. The crises at hand give rise to many moments of conflict between these agencies, and United 93 is as much a chronicle of these situations as it is of the events on the plane.

It is on this on-the-ground canvas that the film’s tone and intent is established. During these scenes, you almost sense the film-makers taking a conscious step back and allowing the visual narrative to flow with minimal interference. They seem to realize that the natural drama and tension is adequately conveyed simply by giving us a no-frills version of how events panned out, without too much need to intervene and dramatize. There’s always a danger that a movie centered around a plane hijacking will end up milking its inherent drama for all it is worth. United 93 refreshingly, and significantly, steers clear.

Much of what transpired on board the airplane is pieced together from phone calls that passengers made to their families during the hijack. In the homes of these families, and in the air traffic control and military units that the action keeps switching between, we see footage and hear voices from TVs tuned into live news channels. This is very early coverage of the attacks: that window of time between televisions tuning in to the two planes hitting the world trade center and televisions not entirely grasping what had happened. These snapshots have been played endlessly since then, but almost always as a pre-cursor to the ’larger’ questions and reactions and analyses that followed. By giving them a human, chronological context, United 93 puts these images back in the most immediate context in which they took place.

For a subject that lends itself to statement-making as easily as September 11 does, United 93’s demeanour is admirably restrained. This is a real-life drama whose tone encourages you to buy into the film’s authenticity willingly.

When Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) is asked to take a break from his job as a marine rescuer and play teacher at a Coast Guard training facility, I decided that the stage was well-set. Probably because of the natural intensity that is an inevitable part of such settings, boot camp movies have always provided fodder for engaging movie drama.

Among his students, Randall sees the most potential in Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher), a champion swimmer whose troubled past has somehow resulted in a single-mindedness to make it to the coast guard’s elite. Fischer is possessed with the kind of against-all-odds-and-then-some determination that, depending on how the character comes off in the movie, can either translate into the audience rooting for life’s underdog or descend rapidly into cliché.

In The Guardian’s case, one will most likely be pulled towards the latter. Just as you’re thinking that the film seems to be veering towards credibility, it manages to steer itself yet again in the direction of cliché. Most of the movie is set in a training unit. You would think that the uniformed life provides an ideal platform to “keep it real”, so to speak. This film, rather than doing that, ends up over-produced, its dialogues going for the jugular too frequently, and its sequences a little too deliberately slick. There’s a scene at the pool, for instance, where the team is going through its swimming drills. This is reduced to an Ashton Kutcher photo-op, his freestyle motion carefully in sync with a rap song that plays in the background. Each stroke, but of course, is in time with the thumping beat.

The centerpiece of the movie, at least in intent, is how the relationship between Costner’s and Kutcher’s characters develops. Costner is the seen-it-all veteran who now sees shades of himself in a young Kutcher. While Kutcher is all youthful bravado, Costner is the old-timer who still hasn’t lost any of it, taking care of business with the nonchalance and smug assurance of having been there before. They’re each trying to gain the other’s respect and admiration. But what could have been a potentially insightful exploration into the relationship they forge (and into their individual characters) turns into a series of rather flat episodes of each man simply trying to impress the other.

Kutcher, in this movie, is constantly asking the audience to take him more seriously than the pretty-boy image that precedes him. In spite of the tough exterior that his role requires, the tone of the film does not let him stake his case – and I can’t be sure he would have even if the movie had allowed him to. Zoom out a little and you find that Kutcher’s battle of trying to reach above his pop image epitomizes the movie itself. As a portrayal of the life of coast guards, The Guardian wants us to take it seriously. It occasionally tries, but is not able to get too far away from its big budget roots. Halfway through the film, you may find yourself wondering – and quite rightly too – why everybody seems to talk in punch lines. A film dedicated to a creed of people whose motto is, according to the end credits, ‘So Others May Live’ certainly deserves a less glamourized, less Hollywoodized portrayal.

Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, and a bit of an Oscars rant

The insatiable appetite of the world’s film and television audience for Hollywood has allowed me to watch a few editions of the Screen Actors’ Guild awards over the last few years (the latest edition was last night). Each time, what always struck me about the S.A.G. awards was the unmistakable sense of For Us, By Us about it. The thank you speeches will tell you this outright, but otherwise too, there is always an atmosphere that this was a room of colleagues and this was the night they raised their hat to the good work amongst them. As opposed to a sense of the world pronouncing its judgement (or making its opinion known conclusively, at any rate) that the Oscars take on and even begin to mean.

The S.A.G. Awards displays, refreshingly, a relative absence of the media-posturing that is such an inseparable part of the Oscars. The S.A.G. Awards does fall well within the media radar – the fact that I can watch the event in its entirety on television year after year in India reflects that – but it has none of the extreme focus and hype that the Oscars generate. To the average fan of movies made in Hollywood, while the Oscars is a much chewed-over and anticipated event, most awards leading up to the Oscars, such as S.A.G., are of interest purely for indications of who might be favourite to win the Oscar. Hence, while the result sheet at the end of the night will generate much media interest and poring over, the awards show itself is much less of the world’s conversation starter that the Oscars become in the weeks leading up to it.

I love the thank you speeches at the S.A.G. Awards, and I’m referring to the tone of the speech rather than specific instances of what was actually said. Foremost is that the S.A.G. allows winners much more stage-time than the Oscars. Have you noticed at the Oscars that even as winners are handed their trophy and arrive at the microphone, they already seem to be distinctly aware of the fact that their time on stage is rapidly disappearing? It has always bothered me that the Oscars forces its winners off the stage in what is often the moment that defines their life’s achievement. That it won’t give people – the very people it is supposed to be celebrating – the dignity of being allowed to complete their sentences as the world watches. The S.A.G. Awards, on the other hand, being not as high-handed or self-important as the Oscars are, is not above allowing its winners to pause for thought (and breath) without the threat of your microphone being cut off and the hostess escorting you off stage. And you can see that the winners are much happier for it. In fact, it improves the thank you speech, and makes it a much more engaging monologue. The winners aren’t under the pressure of having to reel out the names of the twenty people they want to thank at the grave risk of missing one, all within the thirty-odd seconds they have before the producer starts making like he’s slicing his throat off with his hand.

The thank-you speech at the Oscars is so often hurried. Although watching an absolutely ecstatic actress with an Oscar in one hand switching between names tumbling out of her mouth, thinking of still more people to thank, and starting to cry those first tears of joy makes for extremely endearing television, it becomes more about the drama of it. It’s voyeurism, mouth agape, at the tumult of emotion in another human being, that’s the draw of the Oscars presentation. Take, as a contrast, Forest Whitaker’s speech at the S.A.G. Awards last night when he won the actor award for The Last King Of Scotland. He started off with a short silence trying to figure out what to say, and followed with a speech that came in fits and starts. I like how this was ok, if this is how Forest Whitaker’s speech is, then this is how it is, and there’s no under-the-spotlight pressure of having what you say in your moment of glory conform to television-ratings needs.

The Tenant

The possibilities were fascinating considering that Roman Polanski both directs and plays lead in The Tenant. Especially in a role that is as fraught as his: Polanski’s character, Monsieur Trelkovsky, through the course of the movie, becomes less and less in touch with reality, seemingly incapable of distinguishing between episodes that actually take place and episodes that he imagines. I wonder if Polanski the director first conceived Trelkovsky in a certain way, and then as he started ‘acting’ the character and getting into his skin, started seeing angles that he hadn’t seen before. Did he see ways that his character (and the movie) could be portrayed differently? Or did he recognize his dual role beforehand and approach the conceptualizing accordingly, allowing the combined output of actor and director to shape and guide the character?

Polanski plays a quiet young single man who moves into an apartment in Paris. Even as he is settling in, he starts to feel that the building and everything about it, his fellow occupants, the landlord, his own apartment and its past, is spooked. Each scene seems real, as if it actually happens, and there are no indications that suggest otherwise. But as we go along, we realize that some of these episodes are mutually exclusive, that if one episode had actually taken place, the other could not have, it had to have been imagined. This is the stage on which a dark, often fantastic story unfolds, with reality and a game that we’re never quite certain who’s playing play out in an uneven, unsure juxtaposition.

The ambiguity of Trelkovsky’s actions is conveyed perfectly. Is Trelkovsky schizophrenic? Are his neighbours actually doing all of this to him or is he imagining the neighbours doing all of this to him? Are there actually people standing inside the bathroom down the corridor from his apartment, expressionless and motionless, for hours, or is he a victim of his increasingly volatile imagination? Polanski’s performance as an actor is mysterious; his character is in a state of going through the motions as if he doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Trelkovsky never quite seems to be able to explain his own actions; he always looks like he’s questioning himself and how in touch with reality he is. He does not do this in soliloquy that often, in films, provides insightful little dekkos into the minds of characters going around the bend. Neither are these questions in the form of coherent thoughts being voiced aloud. The self-doubt, then, is conveyed through his eyes, in the way he looks at himself in the mirror, and in the reflection against the glass of the bathroom door.

There is no accompanying music in the background almost throughout. The absence starkly brought home how much the ear is used to having these background sounds assist you in settling into the mood of the film. You consequently participated that much more in settling into that mood in your head, in getting into the skin of the movie. There’s a scene in which he’s crossing the road in late evening traffic and is hit by a car. You heard only street noise, and those are the only sounds you’re tuned into. It heightened the reality of the situation, making what you were watching seem more like an actual street and less like a street in a movie, less cinematic and a little more visceral.

There are many instances that suggest that they don’t quite fit, or seem just a tiny bit out of place in the scheme of things. I loved the scenes where he is with his friends, such as when he first when he invites them over to his apartment when he’d just moved in, as a nocturnal celebration involving a lot of ribbing and laughter. At such times, he seems to live in a dichotomous personal world. His aloofness and deceptive quietude are a contrast to how his friends are, all more extroverted and involved and risk-taking. There are no outward indications of this being a contradiction in terms for him – he remains in his removed state all through. In a more microcosmic, staggered way of showing us how this happens, he smokes one brand of cigarettes, Gauloises, in one scene, refusing a pack of Marlboro at the pub, and in the next couple of scenes smokes Marlboro, first not minding it and then specifically asking for it. This is before another scene where he asks for Gauloises. All of this is subtle, in that they never call attention to themselves, they just seem to happen, but then that is exactly how you picture a confused mind’s contradictions taking shape and gaining momentum, an indication of something amiss here, a small change in behaviour there.

What boggles the mind, and is brilliant cinematic touch, is that the ambiguity, the layers that each interpretation of a scene provided, continues right through. Polanski’s character traverses each of these layers discretely, and yet at the same time. How these layers appear and discern themselves, and how one layer develops into another and take on such strong undertone became, to me, emblematic of the film itself.

The degeneration in how his mind is functioning, taking random turns and throwing up tangents, is reflected in how scenes in the movie are conceived, in increasingly twisted ways. The not-quite right aspects of his personality unravel slowly, in a morbidly teasing fashion, in a way that his doubts on his own reality are transferred to you too. But there were many times, not least at the end, when I felt that one thread of the movie tied in perfectly to another one. Every so often, a common motif between two or more threads started to reveal itself. It is mind-boggling that Polanski – and especially given that he also has to constantly imagine himself in the role – intevwove those threads into an atmosphere as bizarre as what we see here. Polanski plays around with your head as much as he plays around with Trelkovsky’s. As both director and actor, Polanski is exquisite as mad scientist in his own and in The Tenant’s mindspace.

New Adventures In Hi-Fi

You have to be in an active-minded, adventurous mood when you want to listen to new music, music you haven’t heard before. In fact it’s the only time you should listen to new music if you want to give it any respect at all. When you’re playing something you’re familiar with, you’re playing a piece of music that you know you like, and know how it makes you feel. You want to revel in the familiarity of the sound, rather than have the sound intrigue you and force your ear and brain to perk up.

We receive new music in a very different way than we receive music we’ve already heard before. You’re always a step ahead of music you know. We often find ourselves mouthing the opening line of that verse a couple of bars before it actually starts. Or taking that guitar solo four steps ahead of the note it is currently on and then allowing the notes to sound out and fill in the pattern. In a way, we’re looking back at the music. By mouthing the part beforehand, you’re telling your brain that you know the song, and parallelly, you’re filling in the parts of it that you don’t.

The time it takes to ‘know’ a song can vary wildly: you might be rocking to the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction right after your first or second listen, but you can still manage to play that King Crimson album for about the fiftieth time and find entire musical dimensions that you hadn’t noticed before. Does this simply translate to more ‘complex’ music taking longer to become familiar with? ( making comparisons of any sort between songs and bands and genres is a messy business, but I think we can agree that King Crimson’s music is rather more complex than the Rolling Stones’). Familiarity with a song does not need to equal you knowing all of it. Rather, ‘knowing’ a song, to our brains, equates to finding pegs that will provide that anchor of familiarity: the song’s back-beat maybe, or a particular riff. Which is why the first description of a song often tends to be its time signature (when you’re at a concert, how often has the musician said ‘this song is called so-and-so and it’s to the count of five’?). This isn’t because the time signature is the most revealing aspect of the song. Hardly. Saying that a song is played in ¾ time tells you almost nothing about the song itself. A song’s time signature more serves to deconstruct a song than to describe it. But what it does is set your brain up to fitting in the pieces of the song into a structure that it can readily comprehend. Our mind is already looking for that anchor.

What about the songs that we aren’t listening to for the first time, but yet aren’t completely familiar with yet? These are the songs that still intrigue us, and constitute a large majority of our playlists at any given time. Here, we instinctively catches on to the parts of the song that we do know. And when we do find something new in that song, our mind rushes out to grab it. Just for that instant, it is in unchartered territory, and then the mind goes back into its comfort zone of familiarity. There have been times when I’ve had to nudge myself out of this when I’m listening to a song that still holds discovery-potential. We become more easily familiar – and hence slip into that comfort zone faster -- with a 4/4 tune with a strict verse-chorus-solo structure even if the song is new to us. The opposite happens with more ‘complex’ songs. The Crunge off Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy album, for instance, is a song I really like and have heard many times, more times even than many songs that I consider myself more familiar with. Yet its 10-beat time to start with and changing signatures as the song progresses have prevented my brain from allowing the song to settle into me. This is a song that I’ve listened to many times before, yet it isn’t a song that my mind has pegged down yet. In this case, it is more the unfamiliarity of the song – and hence the excitement of discovering things about it that I haven’t pegged down -- that appeals and fuels further listens.

Blood Diamond

My review here. I haven't talked about the casting too much, and this is a movie that has Leonardo Dicaprio in it, somebody who has gained enough respect that every performance of his is scrutinised in the context of being an addition to his body of work as an actor. It's not that Dicaprio didn't bring enough to his character, he did. But I'm not sure that all of it worked in that jigsaw-pieces way that great performances often are; you start to see the pieces and how intriguingly the puzzle is constructed. Then you see how some of the pieces fit and you have these little thrills when a piece of the puzzle does find its place.

Five Point Someone, Or How To Kill A Decent Enough Premise By Being Maddeningly Simplistic

I had one encompassing feeling watching the Madras Players’ staging of Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone. The goal of the play, ostensibly to explore collegian angst by telling a story surrounding three boys through their years in college, ended up becoming simply a telling of a (quite predictable) story surrounding three boys through their years in college.

The idea, of course, was that the collegian angst bit would be explored through the story. The focus, though, was more on plot development than on anything else. In the process, the play became a series of snapshots. One moment, the boys are deciding that they will draw the line at a 6.0 GPA and ‘do things’ with their four years. Scenes that follow include a clumsy meeting between Hari and the professor’s daughter. (Yes, a socially challenged geek meeting a pretty girl is expected to be awkward, but must the scene itself, and subsequent meetings between the two, be executed awkwardly?) Another is of the boys lying on the roof of their college drinking vodka and smoking pot. In another, they are trying to pass an exam by plotting to steal the question paper from their professor’s office the previous night.

While all of these scenes follow each other well enough in terms of how the story develops, they forget that the story itself is supposed to only be part of a larger picture that the play should paint. Just like the plot, the thoughts that the boys have are reduced to a one-follows-the-other series of black-and-whites: We shall not “mug” because we must have fun. I will break away from the group because I need to “focus”. And so on. If you’ve ever been in college and pondered over what you want out of it or out of your life in general, the first thing you will realize is that you do not have a series of yes-or-no answers or decisions to your questions. Forget the answers; the questions don’t get framed that conveniently.

All through, there are indications that aspects of each of the boys’ pasts have affected them. For instance, Ryan does not love his parents (they sent him to boarding school), and changes the subject when Hari asks him about whether he has had a girlfriend. But how does this affect him now as a person? What about his character is a product of this? There are no attempts to consider these questions, or even give these questions any shape. Troubles from the past are hinted at and left at that. A case of being purposely enigmatic to suggest a false depth, perhaps?

And while there are attempts to anecdote us into believing that these guys have been through four years at IIT together, as best friends no less (a ‘ragging’ incident when they enter college is what brings them together. The aforementioned decisions to not study, drink and smoke pot follow), there is little that indicates that they have changed over their four years there. Ryan is still the happy-go-lucky rich kid; Alok is still the conscientious responsible “adult”; Hari is still undecided but knows he wants to be like Ryan. How have their four years together changed them as friends, in how they are around each other? How has it changed them as people? It’s not just the three main characters, pretty much everybody is painted with the broadest, most simplistic brush strokes possible, reaching out to the nearest available stereotype, with no attention to detail or nuance.

The play, just like the book, works at one (and only one) level, and does all it can to milk it: the anecdotes enacted on stage (or described in the book) will let us re-live some of the things we did (or wanted to do) in college: Not study! Fall in Love! Listen to Pink Floyd and Drink Vodka! As anything more (such as “At one level, this is the tale of every college student in India”), this work falls well short. Of course, at some stage, you will wonder, like I did, how much of the problem must be ascribed to the stage adaptation and how much to the original work that it was adapted from.