--- layout: post comments: true title: "Young Critics Lab 2019 - Submissions" date: 2019-07-20 ---
Young Critics Lab - 2019 - Submissions
Why do you want to be a critic?
My movie-sojourn started in my childhood, when movie-Sundays meant mangsho-bhaat (chicken curry, rice) followed by a siesta and 4pm Bengali movie in Doordarshan. The person whom I accompanied was my mother, who also introduced me, with her Philips tape recorder and few cassettes bought occasionally, to Manna Dey, Md. Rafi and Kishore Kumar.
After a couple of years of sporadic movie watching, I started school in Jadavpur University and got hold of a laptop. The times were such, for 10 rupees, we could rent a movie. So one of us will rent a movie, copy the files to his laptop and then share it with others pendrives.
Thus started another round of acquaintances, this time to Hollywood. Without a knowledgeable guide, I looked up IMDb top250 and got to know Godfather, Fight Club, Inception and of course, the spine chilling Silence of the Lambs.
The eventual upgradation to active organizer from a passive watcher happened when I started post-grad at ISI, Kolkata. We started ‘Moviegoers' Club’, borrowed a projector from the dean, and started organizing movie sundays. The first movie we showed was Caché by Micheal Haneke. Faculties were sympathetic towards this initiative, every Sunday one of them would inevitably come to the show and contribute a few hundred rupees for buying tea and singara for everyone.
With all these happening, I started to realize the power cinema has about forming, shaping and altering an opinion. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a moving picture is probably worth millions.
Recent changes in Indian movie-landscape are interesting are special. There’s an ongoing reconstruction of movie making and watching habit in our country thanks to the advent of smartphones and DSLRs. That’s one of the major reasons for Bollywood stepping out to make movies like Andhadhun and Mukti Bhawan and still getting a business of crores.
Apart from having yearly visits to our ancestral home in rural Bengal, which helped me understand nitty-gritty details of socio-economic nature of Indian villages, I've been to many major Indian cities, lived in Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai. Travelling gave me ideas about how 'cinema education' changed nowadays due to the penetration of internet and faster connections. I’ve also travelled a couple of times to the USA, something surely helped me to understand Americans and their cinema.
Now, a movie critic needs to understand the audience inside out, she needs to have a fair idea about the demography, socioeconomic structure, cultural heritage, and above all, the taste of them. And once they’re understood, a great way of judging a movie is to evaluate if it's bringing something new to them.
From a childhood entertainment to a powerful media, cinema has attracted, enriched and baffled me in different ways. I’m convinced about its power, albeit committed towards the responsibility coming therewith. I’d like to part of the movement by suggesting the audience which they might invest their efforts on, and thus movie criticism.
A review of a Bollywood masala movie - Simmba
TL; DR: A typical Bollywood film with entertainment as the USP, while having a social angle related to rapes. (2 Stars/5 Stars)
Simmba is a Bollywood flick inspired from Telugu 'Temper' (but not exactly a scene-by-scene copy). Simmba is nickname of Sangram Bhalerao (Ranvir Singh) who got posted in Miramar police station, Goa having close connection with the home minister. The name Miramar is generic because it means sea-view in Spanish/Portugese.
The biggest flaw in this movie is the development of the character Simmba (or the lack of it) taking the maximum screen time. Simmba is corrupt to the core, who not only becomes allies with anti-social Durva Ranade (Sonu Sood) for the sake of money, but also bullies the good people (constable Nityanand Mohile, played by Asutosh Rana) and gets obsessed with receiving a salute from him. He also falls in love with Shagun (Sara Ali Khan) at first sight who provides daily meals with care to the policemen in the police station.
Being an orphan he looks for family always, but couldn't get one until he gets to Miramar. When he reaches there, he makes family with people around him JLT. Nityanand's daughter and wife become his sister and mother. He even pays for Nityanand's daughter's college fees from the black money he made working with Durva. Meanwhile, Akruti Dave, a young lady who teaches orphan kids because she reminded Simmba of his own teacher, also becomes his 'sister'.
As the movie proceeds, Akruti finds Durva's brothers peddling drugs using her students. She gets caught by the brothers while filming the drug distribution and was brutally raped by the brothers, later to die in the hospital. Simmba gets angry against Durva and his brothers which causes a tectonic change in him, and he arrests the brothers and submits the phone recording of the drug distribution.
This is where the character traits again go for a toss. Although helping out for Nityanand's daughter's education seems like a nice gesture, corrupt people do not change overnight just like that.
Anyway, the court asks for proofs on the rape & murder case but the evidence is mutilated by other corrupt policemen. So, angry Simmba fakes an encounter to kill the brothers after seeking approvals from the ladies that rapists should be killed in order to change the culture of rapes. The character of Shagun is virtually non-existent throughout the movie, except for supplying moral support to Simmba to encounter criminals. The story also shows crucial gaps here, because even after receiving evidence in digital format, Simmba keeps no copies of it.
Durva Ranade wants to kill Simmba for this without any intervention of judiciary systems and kidnaps him. Meanwhile DCP Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgan) comes in the last minute to rescue Simmba from Durva's captive. Although that seems a smart move to create a Shingham universe, like Gotham, seems kinda forced. He approves of Simmba's style and then Simmba owes his style from Singham himself.
Overall, the tone of the movie is hero-worshipping i.e. whatever the hero does is correct. That goes along with constables other than Nityanand being ardent followers of Simmba from day zero. The whole narrative goes with Indian definition of seriousness of crime. Selling movie-tickets in black or taking over land from elderly people is okay, but gets serious when people start peddling drugs. This confusion also applies with Durva's mother and wife, who don't bat an eye about their twisted occupation, but complains when you do the same in front of a child.
Apart from the hero and his girlfriends, other side characters are also very poorly painted. Couple of songs are good, though not all of them. The editing is extremely poor, as many scenes feel unnecessary and elongated. The hilarious scene of selling a corpse for 40 lakh rupees from Temper is missing, along with some major twists at the end. Acting is okay because not much of it was needed anyway. A good chunk of the dialog is Marathi, so subtitles can be useful for non-Marathi speaking audience.
This movie is a no-brainer and not that entertaining too. Not recommended for watching.
A review of a Hollywood serious movie - The Tale
TL,DR: A commendable effort on portrayal of sexual abuse of children, who often don't realize they're being abused. (4 Stars/5 Stars)
The Tale is a hollywood movie, written and directed by Jennifer Fox, focussing on the issue of sexual abuse of children and how the issue often gets suppressed by the society, relatives and often the victim themselves.
Jennifer (Laura Dern) is a 48 years old professor, who lives together with her boyfriend, started revisiting her childhood memories while filming a woman from India who talks about her love life. Around the same time, her mother discovers a bunch of letters which she wrote as a child, describing her relationship with her riding and running coaches. When Jennifer was 13, she visited Mrs. G. (Elizabeth Debicki), a dashing and beautiful young woman, for horse riding classes in summer. That is when she also met a brilliant sportsman, holding several medals and honors, Bill. Bill with the help of Mrs. G., allures Jennifer into a relationship. Her mother tries to convince her that the "relationship" with Bill, was a case of child abuse and not consensual 'love'. But old Jennifer is always in denial of the fact that Bill was a sexual predator, that there was no "love", that there were "others". She meets a private detective who helps her finding current whereabouts of Bill.
The prime focus, for the majority of screen time, is Jennifer convincing herself that an abuse happened at all. Children who do not receive proper attention or respect for their opinions from their parents, always have an attraction towards being considered mature. That is exactly what happened in this case, Jennifer being the eldest of the brothers and sisters.
Character development in the movie is fairly okay, but could've been better. The character Jennifer is well written, Mrs. G was supposed to be a mysterious charismatic character and so she is. Bill, as the antagonist, is as shrewd as he could be. The character of the private detective is unnecessary because the information he provided, could be found by Jennifer herself. Also there is no justification for the detective to be the good Samaritan and provide that information to Jennifer as that is what he does for a living. Jennifer's boyfriend Martin (Common) is shown to be sympathetic and caring. While dealing with abuses, past or present, support from people who are close is extremely important and that is exactly what Martin was providing. We could be seeing a little more conversation between those two. The other apprentices like Iris Rose (Gretchen Koerner) is shocked at Jennifer being involved with Bill at an age of 13 because it was illegal, not unethical.
Some of the scenes are very well articulated. The slow moving scene of Bill convincing little Jennifer is spine chilling, so are repeated rape of herself by Bill. The classroom moment when Jennifer realised that her first sexual experience was not at all romantic compared to her students, was also touching.
The pace of the movie is painfully slow. While the events in timeline were also very slow - it took 35 years for Jennifer to understand the real issues with her rapes, the manifestation of them in the movie doesn't have to be slow.
Overall, the movie discusses about child sexual abuse which is often hush-hush'ed so much by the society and the relatives, in spite of being it such a prevalent issue. It also brings out the primary problem with children not being aware about what is being done to them and also the general lack of attention they receive, as a result of bad parenting. Although this movie does not try to discuss at all about the psychology of the predator and what can be a possible workaround for them to stop themselves from committing such crimes. We need to talk more about them and the movie does exactly that. Recommended for a watch.
A review of a movie I love - The Big Lebowski
Why will I watch a movie? Why do people watch movies?
I am a 90’s kid. Which means in my childhood I've seen Anjan Choudhury dominating Indian Bengali movie market with 'Bou' series; in adolescent years, Prosenjit Chatterjee acting in Sobuj Sathi, Annaye Atyachar and the likes of them. Precisely why, probably like the majority of middle-class Bengali family people, I watched and watched all the 60’s, 70’s films where Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh etc. used to act.
Coming with this background, the movie I want to talk about is ‘The Big Lebowski’. The first time I tried to watch it was in 2009, in freshman year. Didn't understand it much, and got bored after roughly half an hour and switched it off. I understood that it’s a funny movie, but wasn't getting exactly why it's funny. Somehow I again tried it few years down the line; in the final year of college. This time a lot of things made sense. I was still not aware of Coen Brothers - neither Raising Arizona nor Miller’s Crossing. I was still one of those who follow Nolan and know nothing beyond him.
I loved it!
This movie has a multitude of interpretations, just like life. It’s a movie about taking it easy. It’s also a movie about friendships. And characters! Donny (Steve Buscemi), Jesus(John Turturro), Da Fino (John Polito) - all are so neatly woven colorful characters! And above all, why is it not a movie about bowling as well?
The influence of the movie on the audience was so monumental, they started following the Dude, and his way of doing things, his ‘style’ and called themselves Dudists. That gave birth to a whole new religion called Dudeism. Apart from that, the characters Dude and Walter are often compared to Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy. It’s also an Yin-Yang movie indeed.
The philosophy of takin' it easy effected me the most. The school of thought that an individual can control only his/her emotions and nothing else, gave me a totally new perspective towards life. Identifying what one wants - wanting nothing can be a want as well ("How many things can I do without?" - Socrates) - is crucial and shaping our actions towards it, that's the best one can do. Dude's likes, just like his needs, are very limited. He loves bowling, and drinking white Russian. He demands nothing from the society apart from being left alone with his rug, which apparently 'tied the room together'.
Anyway, coming back, maybe we watch a movie because we like to receive a message that a group of people wants to communicate to us. The Big Lebowki taught how to articulate those messages about a paradigm shift in lifestyle and simultaneously, how to be subtle about storytelling.
It gave a college kid a reason to watch more movies and also taught what to watch, and also maybe, what not to.