The Shop On The Beach

There was a shop on the beach just past the footpath that sold cigarettes and soft drinks. I stood there waiting for my cigarette, and watched the woman hand it to me. She was about as old as my grandmother, and spoke about her afflictions with a matter of factness that only old people can seem to bring themselves to. It was close to ten p.m., and the man busied himself closing the shop. He was athletically built, dark, with a thick, cat's whiskers moustache. He had the unmistakable features that belied every policeman in this city. I wondered what he was doing there. Wasn't this too sedentary, selling soft drinks for a living? What had he made his peace with? I tended, no, wanted to think that he had made his peace with whatever it was that had brought him here. In spite of seemingly natural inferences to the contrary, my curiosity pleaded for a happy answer. He spoke to another man, eye on the sky, about the possibility of rain that night. His voice held a tone that bordered on the arrogance of self-perceived know-it-all. What story had he brought with him?

There was something about his demeanour and his appearance and just his being there that quietly but surely conveyed the presence of a past life. It was one of those times when you know your mind is on the verge of a trip around its own imagination, and there is that split second before it actually happens when you sense the anticipation within yourself.

I wonder if we're only deceiving ourselves when we think we're imagining the lives of other people. All that we're really doing is putting ourselves, even if only as spectators, in a world we think is imagined but is actually only a product of all that we know and of all that we know of. Are we even truly capable of imagination?

And then it happened, a ridiculous catharsis, when I noticed he had a limp.

Suddenly, it almost burned in me, not the pity that I did feel for his handicap, but the thought of what it had brought him to. I felt what seemed like empathy. At the same moment, I found myself wondering if empathy was what I should be feeling.

Empathy probably had no business being there.

Review: Music And Lyrics

Remember that Backstreet Boys video called Just Want You To Know from their new album that was on the music channels recently? They’re disguised in gaudy hair, leather jackets, a beat-up convertible with its top off, and other such charming relics from the eighties’ American music scene. As an ode to 80s glam, the video was sufficiently tacky, and, now and then, cleverly so. Now imagine one of the band members in the video as a real person, and construct a movie around him. What was originally a kitschy, fun four-and-a-half minute music video, enough for some sharp parody and a few fanboy injokes, is now forced to become the story constructed around it, with paraphernalia like characters and love interests and a plot.

Music and Lyrics is a lot like that movie you just imagined. It stars Hugh Grant as Alex Fletcher, a musically empty-tank pop star who gets by performing mostly at college re-unions and amusement parks. At basically any place that has a chance of finding the now-forty-year-old women who were once Grant’s adoring female-majority teen fanbase. Drew Barrymore plays Sophie Fisher, a bumbling, earnest housekeeper assigned to Grant’s digs. By a twist of movie fate, she finds herself in songwriting collaboration with Grant. Both actors, in terms of their respective characters’ personalities, are in familiar territory, and are at obvious ease in their roles. Grant is constantly witty in that very Hugh Grant kind of way. Like those many self-effacing lines that begin to trail off past halfway. Has there been an actor more precisely typecast, time after time, than Hugh Grant? The scenes with the two of them, therefore, in leading up to writing a song together, are probably the most enjoyable in the movie, so much so that I found myself rooting for their efforts when they’d finally finished a first draft of the song and were to play it together for the first time.

Even with that not-uninteresting beginning, this film always seemed like a romantic comedy that could go either way. Grant’s and Barrymore’s quirky wisecracks notwithstanding, the humour and the tone are most often the too-quick, too-cute variety that sit-coms and other films of Music and Lyrics’s kind have long since pushed into tiresomeness.

There are Grant is to write a song for Cora, a teenaged pop nymphette who is a cross between Christina Aguilera and latter-day Madonna. Contrast her as today’s pop music sellout with Hugh Grant as an eighties musician who has sold out. Especially in a movie whose premise is musicians’ lives, this is an intriguing contrast between two of the lead characters. Sadly, nothing is done with it.

Just a couple of times, Music and Lyrics suggests it is in on the joke. And this was in keeping with the movie’s setting, as a lot of the glam appeal of eighties music is like that. That’s what 80s bands with big hair and exhibitionist music now want you to believe, at any rate. In this movie, take the end-credits, for instance. It is a montage of “deleted” shots full of silliness and general fun on the sets of an eighties music video shoot. That montage and the actual video at the beginning worked well. But the movie in between doesn’t quite, and neither does it imbibe its own attempts at parody convincingly enough. Music and Lyrics starts off with an airy likeability but ends up highly diluted.

Babel

The trouble with movies that have multiple plot-lines playing out remotely is that the viewer knows there’s a common theme or a binding thread, and unless he’s engaged enough by the individual stories, will sit back and wait for it. And when the thread between these stories sits only lightly in evidence, you question the build-up even more in retrospect.

Babel is a set of seemingly unconnected stories, each of which is set in a different part of the world (Yes, one of those). Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are American tourists on a bus riding through a desert in Africa. We are also introduced to Chieko and her set of teenage friends in a city in Japan, a Moroccan family of five living in a village, and a Mexican nanny assigned to watch over two American children. The film switches between these fables randomly, as a rather cumbersome thread begins to reveal itself.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director, tries to give each of his settings a mark of identity, a distinct character amidst its essential randomness. But the results are often unwieldy and a little forced. Attempts to capture the milieu of a Moroccan village, for instance, results in faux-authentic street shots of children running after a bus. Much of the movie had an air of self-importance about it, such as the many stretches filmed in photogenic slow-motion with heavy, intoning music.

The way the movie unfolds suggests it is always building up to a climactic moment, a moment that will shed light on and give a context to whatever we saw leading up to it. There are extended stretches in the film showing us teenagers in Japan meeting in malls, flirting and hanging out with friends. And stretches that show us two suburban American kids at home with their over-worked nanny (who, in case you’re wondering, is trying to get away so she can go to her son’s wedding across the California border in Mexico). In real life, these are everyday, banal happenings. On film, apart from conveying to us that these are random, ordinary people and something ominous is about to happen to their status quo, not enough is done with these scenes so that we begin to care about these characters and their situations.

Inarritu tries to use his everyday snapshots to illustrate a lofty human theme, but never quite pulls it off. In the process, Babel becomes rather like an anecdote that stakes too much on the weight of its punchline. The punchline, then, is put under pressure to enlighten the rest of what we have seen, to justify the movie, in a way. As the last shot fades, we see a dedication from the film-maker on the screen, a sort of moralistic reminder to the audience that Babel’s theme does indeed carry a serious message. Much like a vociferous lawyer in a courtroom, Babel overestimates the gravity of what it is saying, and how it is being said. This is a story, or a set of stories, that is threaded together awkwardly and heavily without having enough to back its weight.

Originally, here.