kinocow

A woman alone in the world

The breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting civil wars and resulting ethnic cleansing left thousands of families in the Balkans without closure. Blerta Basholli's film documents the tragedy of the Kosovan village Krushë e Madhe, where a hundred civilians were separated from the village and are presumed to be shot. The film follows the story of Fahrije, whose husband disappeared during the war and whose remains do not turn up in any of the mass graves excavated around the village. It leaves a lot of questions for her and her two children while facing a simultaneous battle of being a “dishonorable” woman for driving a car and having ideas for sustaining herself. Fahrije understands that she has to move on and that accepting meager handouts from the local women's community will not help her much in the future. She has to fight against the strict conservative norms applied to the women in Kosovan society to work and build a business of her own, a transformation that not only will uplift her but her friends and neighbors who are in the same tragedy together.

An intense character study, Zgjoi paints a picture of a woman finding her place in the backyard of continental Europe. It's a film with deep lows and gentle highs, though the village accuses Fahrije to be a whore for driving to the city and owning a car, the pain for her missing husband is hidden from everyone. This differential wrings hearts whenever she has to visit the mortuary to find out about the remains of her husband, oftentimes all that is left is a pile of bones or some clothes. This in turn becomes the companion piece for last year's haunting Quo Vadis, Aida? which depicts the genocides of Srebrenica, showing the faces of the men whose bodies will be discovered same way as they do around in Krushë e Madhe. _Zgjoi _ is a far more delicate film documenting the tragedy as it focuses on the aftermath for the grieving families and their struggle to find reconciliation in a patriarchal society that stacks all odds against them.

Fahrije is no ordinary hustler, labelled for being deviant she has to find ways to move on and focus on what is still left, her family. A scene that establishes her plight is a women's meeting where Fahrije protests, “we are not looking for donations, we are looking for work”. Though the women around her are slow to change fearing society, Fahrije takes an enterprising step forward making plans to set up an ajvar-making cooperative. The cooperative then becomes a safe space for the women to find collective healing and a path to redeem their past. There are moments in the film where one cannot but cry, but we cry with Fahrije, we cry for her tragedy and wish for her success. That is a win for Blerta Basholli's wonderful film.

#review #Kosovo #film

Or how to use a camera as a medium of consciousness

A camera is a tool that functions as a buffer between the one who's seeing and the person who sees, making film one of the exacting mediums to record reality with. The camera assumes the personality of the person behind it which is often diluted because of the dramatized domains the art form occupies. Rare exceptions are found when the camera becomes a tool of localizing and meditation, giving the viewer depth and context to the nature of things around them.

The HBO show “How to with John Wilson” tackles this meditative approach to film, setting it the bizarre confined of New York City where the director John Wilson introduces specific thematic elements juxtaposed to the everyday goings in New York. It's a show that eludes a genre-specific identity, it is part comedy, part cringe, part poetry, and documentary. Set to the childlike voice-over of the director, each short episode focuses on the issues that irk us as adults but for which no one has a specific answer. John Wilson brings curiosity to find answers to problems like how to split one's check or how to be spontaneous, juxtaposing B-roll footage to great comic effect. It explores parts of the human psyche that are assumed to be functioning properly but in reality, it puts most of us in a state of anxiety. Splitting a check or choosing a bottle of wine seems like the biggest mystery of modern life, what is appropriate behavior in these circumstances? Does one go for the second cheapest bottle of wine or risk a more expensive to a Portuguese wine shop at the end of the street? Though homo economicus might be a good thought temperament to imbibe, mental accounting hasn't yet reached the inner sanctum of our behavior. John Wilson helps us understand this division through his anxiety-prone view of life, making things awkward by overthinking and exhibiting this overthinking through the multitudes of human life in and around New York, with a couple of episodes exploring the same questions in Las Vegas and New Orleans.

How to with John Wilson is at its heart a passion project funded by HBO, giving wings to ideas that otherwise would remain as thoughts. The show exposes the conundrums between the reality of our experience vs. the reality of our thoughts, not a small feat for a 30 minute TV show.

#TV #HBO #review

Not all cops are bastards.

As I was watching episode four of the Italian series Inspector Montalbano, “The Mystery of the Terracotta Dog”, I had to remind myself that it was a whodunit revolving around an Inspector and his motley crew set in Sicily. The episode was 1 hour 45 minutes long, enough to drain the patience of an average TV watcher but still, it managed to demand my rasp attention as the narratives veered from the mafia, interpersonal relationships, and in the end a terrific love story based around a Quranic legend. Other tracks in the series have involved Montalbano falling in love with a dog, almost adopting a son and his love for croquettes.

It is in this respect that Inspector Montalbano stands apart from Columbo, Poirot, or Beck for the angelic pursuit of his trade. During his many investigations, he lets the small-time thieves, prostitutes, and illegal immigrants free, even protecting them from the nefariousness of Sicilian politics. Given the fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Italian right-wing, Montalbano comes as an agent of the State both just and clinical. Montalbano is the kind of hero we come to believe because his powers are real, we know what he eats and his morning swimming routines to keep him fit. We see his commitment (often on the fringe) to his girlfriend and when a range of women fall in love with him throughout the series, it doesn't come as a surprise. Luca Zingaretti who plays Montalbano makes one fall in love with him within the scope of an episode, from then on we're enchanted with his quirks and choices.

Inspector Montalbano is a rare police drama that does not insult one's intelligence and neither does it thrust the brutality of the world into one's face. Given the subject matter. there are hardly any grisly or risque sequences. This thematic softness is a take on the genre where the why of committing a crime is more important than the how. Given that the range of complex human interactions, the show becomes an enriching drama that probes the Sicilian life in a way that is more satisfying than the backstory of The Godfather. Montalbano has been one of the most satisfying hero stories I have seen on TV, enough to keep one engaged for more than a few months. This one is a 11/10, will recommend.

Happy New Year and see you again the next year. Thank for reading the kinocow this year and will be back with more reports in the next months.

#TV #Italian #Montalbano

Or a masterpiece of on how to see the world.

A good movie can change the way one looks at the world around. Walking out from Wes Anderson's French Dispatch on a rainy Berlin night, the city transformed itself into grim kaleidoscope of tail lights, smoky street lights and warm sign boards. A quick stop at Maroush for a shawarma makali was infused through Mr. Anderson's lens, with the soft bread pregnant with the meat and vegetable sitting warm inside press down toaster while calm Arabic music played over the speakers. It wasn't my first time at the restaurant but this time it felt different, my life played out as if a journalist from Anderson's film was following me, painting my life through words with a color palette I infused through the screen.

A common complaint about the film is that it is about too many things at once. Like a mega mashup of Wes Anderson's repertoire, like he's not going to make another film again. There is no problem with that as there's nothing like too much Wes Anderson. At some point when my bladder was giving away I was hoping that the film wouldn't end soon and that The French Dispatch be a real magazine. This film while being a cinematographic triumph is also deeply literary. I had the same weary buzz of the lack of my own intellectualism when going through the New Yorker, a rare movie that makes you want to keep reading and dreaming for days after one finishes watching it.

#film #WesAnderson #TheFrenchDispatch

“It is worth serious consideration how great an amount of time—their own and other people’s—and of paper is wasted by this swarm of mediocre poets, and how injurious their influence is. For the public always seizes on what is new, and shows even more inclination to what is perverse and dull, as being akin to its own nature. These works of the mediocre, therefore, draw the public away and hold it back from genuine masterpieces, and from the education they afford. Thus they work directly against the benign influence of genius, ruin taste more and more, and so arrest the progress of the age.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

Is it the end of cinema as we know it? Doomsday predictions say it is, cinemas have been shut for over a year and lockdowns around the world have made us accustomed to an endless stream of content from news cycles to Netflix. We are being exposed to large amounts of content making us tolerant to the pangs of drama and thrill, each new iteration demands that we get something more potent than the one that followed.

We are saturated with information now, twenty years ago watching the movies meant going to the theatres or watching something on the cable in the evenings. Now, every waking minute can be occupied from gifs to never-ending soaps and all the ancillary gossip/marketing material that follows with it. In this sense movies are almost obsolete, they cost a lot to produce, and they have to resort to the same gimmicks to keep audience hooked.

In this milieu come the Oscars, the long-standing global tradition of ranking which movies are the “best” in the past year. For all non-Americans they remain as the widely recognized benchmark of great cinema, the currency of pride and knowledge. But the Oscars in themselves are purely an American tradition, except for minuscule nod for foreign films that have found American audience or is adherent to American sensibilities. As international audience we are what our role relegates to, hawing over the gala as spectators. Take a look at this year's Oscars list, it shows a growing acceptance to diverse cinema, in tune with the diversity that America wants to show it is a flag bearer of. It is not a ceremony that bothers as a reflection to large parts of society, but the pontificating effort of an American few to keep the tradition rolling.

Cinema was once a sanctimonious affair, going to a dark chamber and gnawing on salted cardboard and getting our minds ready for the rush. It was a public act; we went to movies with others. Now fragmented in our homes, we nibble through cell phones, smart TVs, and laptops. the act of viewing is reduced to the act of consumption, we are users not audience. But what has remained the same throughout is the commercial interests of cinema, which unlike writing or painting had to happen in the finely oiled mechanisms of local and global commerce. The Oscars represent the pinnacle of this delivery machinery, anointing new winners and legitimizing our compulsion to watch these movies. The new Buddhas of the medium generated each year, a pickling process for maximum preservation.

But do these movies really stand the test of time? Almost all the movies nominated this year were forgettable without any visible merit. They will only be remembered for being a part of this pomp but nothing else. In the test of time these Oscars will mean if anything, very little.

#Oscars #cinema #America #covid19

Starting to write is the hardest, the actual part of sitting and writing the story. The idea has been brewing in me for years now and I have mapped all the finer details, the whole film plays in my head like I was presenting it to a festival audience. But the actual words on paper are closer to 0. I look for inspiration, I read Aristotle and a whole lot of other books ranging from atomic explosions to living with narcissists.

What nobody tells you is that giving shape to abstract thought is hard, it takes commitment, humility and whole lot of willingness to pain. Sometimes I want to give up before I even start writing, I think the festival audience are booing me and that I will be a one-hit wonder. Or maybe I will not have any hits, I will be relegated to the role of a flop writer, someone who has to fill his last days judging reality TV shows with obnoxious laughter tracks. Writing to fill pages to fill pockets.

I believe that no vantage to reality is wrong, each one presents in itself an aspect of truth that's incorrigible to violate. So the movie in my head has a right to exist, the characters fighting to populate this world. My responsibility is to be their conduit and help lubricate their delivery into being. I am a silent matron to my ideas, in their birth is my continuity.

#film #writing #screenplay

An Emotional History of the Modern World

To try describe the work of Adam Curtis is to look at cryptographic code. Behind the garble of alphabets and numbers lie secrets and plain truth waiting to be cracked, waiting to be devoured. As with any code it takes patience and skill to understand what lies behind. His narratives jump timelines and geographic locations, his thesis is a constant stab in rules of Aristotelian dramatics. At times a little more context is needed to decode the events Curtis jumps through, some of them are too outlandish for the generations that come after them.

Without the BBC's emblem radiating on the top of left, it is hard to believe that it is not the work of a master conspiracy theorist, his ideas when at their mildest taunt our own ignorance. But Adam Curtis is a gentle historian, he knows that we don't know and he makes a compelling case for us to revisit our ignorance and find a voice for all the horrors we experience but cannot explain. He guides us with our hands softly enmeshed in his, while his calm voice guides us through our own journey of life. He gives meaning in a system where we have long forgotten that one exists (that is except money) and Can't get you out of my head is a spiritual canon that reminds us where we are and how we got there.

Adam Curtis occupies the diametrically opposite side of the film universe Frederick Wiseman operates in. But like Wiseman, his films are a meticulous collection of arcane film clips stitched together in tedium that both tell a story and don't at the same time. Curtis' use of music is another major tour de force, joining forces with David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky in creating the perfect marriage between image and music. One can be sure that a mixtape with the music from any recent Adam Curtis film will be stuck on loop. This electric pairing also serves in increasing the shelf life of his documentary material. One can watch an episode of Can't get you out of my head twice with getting bored and further repurpose it as a podcast substitute.

Can't get you out of my head is one of the best films I have come across in the recent past, one that induced a long hangover meaning that it would be impossible to enjoy other films without Curtis' vision projecting on the back of my head. I cannot recommend enough for everyone to get drunk on his wisdom.

#documentary #AdamCurtis #BBC

“The same procedure as every year, James”

The German New Year's Eve ritual involves good food, lot of alcohol and a mandatory viewing of the TV obscuritas Dinner for One. A two person drama about over the celebratory dinner on the 90th birthday of Miss Sophie and her butler James who also stands-in for her non-existent guests. Over the course of the night James gets smashed while Miss Sophie maintains the pretense of her guests and tradition.

What made it a ritualistic viewing is anyone's guess but in the distanced, sanitized New Year's Eve 2021, here's a toast for all the imaginary friends and anticipated realities we have missed this year.

Happy New Year 2021!

#Germany #DinnerforOne #NewYear2021

All ice and no Suntory whisky.

The image of Bill Murray eternalized by Lost in Translation is on weak ground in director Sofia Coppola's uninspired New York version of her first movie. The dramatic structure remains the same – a lonely woman in a marriage, a charming older father figure and a husband that seems to have an affair. While Lost in Translation offered an image of loneliness immersed in the distance of Tokyo, On the Rocks happens in the characters privileged fugue of New York.

The plot of On the Rocks is illusionary. There is no tension of wanting to know what happens next. From the first moment you know that Laura, played by a trudging Rashida Jones, does not really care if her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair. She cannot focus on her book which we know nothing about and she feels unsexy thanks to the strain of motherhood. Dean comes and goes, and the tiny amount of lingering suspicion is poofed out with Laura's father, Felix's (Bill Murray) entry.

On the Rocks treats Bill Murray with reverence, at certain moments with too much reverence. His cauliflowered face gets a lot of dull dialogue that almost seems like it's pieced through the trivia section of a newspaper. At one point Bill Murray is singing a song on a Mexican beach which is when I started to wonder, what's the point of the whole thing? On the Rocks is the film equivalent of lounge music, it looks good, doesn't require too much attention and nothing happens in the end while still retaining essential qualities of a film. It's the kind of movie that you can half-watch while you're scrolling through an endless feed or even take a nap and see that you missed nothing.

The only merit of this movie that it has a singing and talking Bill Murray, everything else is glass and ice to his Suntory time.

#BillMurray #Hollywood #review

Budget Devarakonda and his chutney

The past decade of Hindi film has seen the resurgence of stories set in small towns of India capturing demographics that seemed distant from the Bollywood grandeur expected in the 90s. Stories started having ordinary characters with a strong dose of realism that otherwise dreamy film industry has long forgotten. Masaan, Mukti Bhavan, Titli and even to an extent Gangs of Wasseypur stand as shining examples for this new epoch that bring Hindi cinema inline with global consumptory preferences while still being deeply rooted in local cultural milieu.

This could be that the economic demographics of a filmgoer have changed drastically in past 30 years, as the average Indian in a city gets more prosperous, stories of smaller towns have more appeal. With the proliferation of internet and Over The Top (OTT) platforms the film going demographic that earlier was categorized in to A, B and C centers [1] has been now atomized. Film has become democratic in its reach and a consumer in South Delhi has the same content choices as someone in Tirunelveli. This makes the larger than life Bollywood masala films archaic especially when they are competing for eyeballs alongside Narcos and Stranger Things.

The Telugu film industry has been largely absent from this movement. Considering that only a few film families control the production, distribution and exhibition of films, stories became stagnant as the producers turned risk averse. The actors who come from the same families have macho/saint images carefully curated from years of making the mass masala movies. The script of a Telugu film hasn't changed since the mid-90s and it reflects in the reviews of popular film websites, the rating for most movies hovers around 2.5 to 3.5 on a 5 point scale. This stagnation has been changing in the past five years where college educated engineers started making stories that shared their ethos combined with the deep pockets of tech capital. [2]

With the OTT platforms making firm inroads into the production and distribution market there is an appetite for bringing newer cultural elements before the cinematic lens. Middle Class Melodies adds to the growing roster of indie Telugu films that hint at a changing industry practises and a shift from focus from the metropol to the smaller cities and towns of the Andhra/Telangana region.

Middle Class Melodies does not have much of a plot so to speak, the story meanders around a lot of characters before it reaches its conclusion but it's not an anthology either. At different points it is different things, once it is about Bombay chutney and at another a romance between side characters that goes nowhere. Not that this meandering is unwatchable, the freshness of the movie comes from this zigzagging through different characters. It feels like the director Vinod Ananthoju approached Amazon Prime for a webseries and got the budget for a full length film instead. His characters populate the tribulations faced by the Indian middle class (poor/lower middle class from the Western standpoint) which he uses to evoke a nostalgic emotion. The lost Teluguland of Guntur is both real and dreamy at the same time.

The only grouse I have with the film comes in the form of the lead actor, Anand Devarakonda whose only merit of being an actor is being the brother of Vijay Devarakonda whose back-to-back hits of Pellichupulu and Arjun Reddy propelled him to stardom. Anand Devarakonda has neither the nuance nor the charisma of Vijay and is in the film solely for being a cheaper semblance of his brother. Perhaps this level of nepotism is required to attract people to the screens in a culture that's still into hero worship and it is saddening to see that even OTT platforms have to resort to this desperation. In a way, Anand's non-charisma aids his character's loserdom. Most people without the means remain as pale imitations of their aspirations and Middle Class Melodies gets that right.

[1] – A,B and C centers represent the class of people watching the movie. “A” center refers to the educated or class audience in big cities, “B” center is the audience from smaller towns or from stand alone theaters and “C” center audience are the mass audience or in popular parlance the kind “that leave their brains behind at home”. This segregation is arbitrary and overlaps the caste divide often.

[2] – Aided with the rise of Youtube and Facebook. Social media opened the world wide open and for the first time showed that people can aspire for the world while still staying in India. Early Silicon Valley kitsch of “believing in oneself”/“passion” became buzzwords that still dominate the current young Telugu filmmaking generation.

(Streams on Amazon Prime)

#MiddleClassMelodies #Tollywood #Review #Telugu