shoreup Reviews

Sacred Games (2018–2019)

A pretentious and disappointing exhibition

[5/10 · 23 July 2018]

Sacred Games promised a lot with the trailers and delivered little with its gratuitous violence and poor characterization coupled with out-of-context feminism and shades of "dark comedy" which does not suit the Indian climate at all. To be sure, the cinematography and sound effects are very good but thats the effect of the money Netflix brings to the table and not something essentially artistic about the series.

The series is ostensibly about a gangster about to blow up Mumbai and a cop who wants to stop it but in essence, its a commentary on the state of politics and corruption reigning in Mumbai with its characters drawn from the who's who of 90s Bombay. This should have ideally lent itself to a gripping story since Mumbai is a complex city with its unique sense of chaos but the directors have yet again displayed their juvenile sense of characterization and wannabe aspirations without talent. Anurag Kashyap apparently had read the book but surely when it came to portray it, he chose to remove all subtleties and use the easy way of cuss-words and titillation which is quite in keeping with his pedestrian level of cinematic understanding. While Nawazuddin is good at his role, his character is handled like a child by Kashyap by making him romance a hermaphrodite. A man who has ambitions like Gaitonde will never be spending his time on a local mistress. Its bad psychological understanding. The entire Cuckoo episode is a sham and the novel has just a few lines on this character. But why let the author's vision come in the way of a perverse masturbatory exercise of a "avant-garde" director. A RAW "analyst" starts directing high-grade secret operations behaving like a amateur and somehow is offended when rebuked for being a novice. More so, its a perfect moment for the directors to appease to the liberal crowd by letting her slam the gender bias in this case. The so -called Hero, Sartaj Singh played by Saif Ali Khan is portrayed as a wimp who has to lick his colleagues ass Majid for every little thing. This is quite in keeping with the general unmanly depiction of men in Indian media lately. Its a sorry sight seeing a well built Khan act like a loser but a daring and honest portrayal would not be in keeping with the mainstream idea of Men in India being nice and accommodating. It seems the directors want to have a subtle laugh at the Sartaj Singh character. His victories are more about chance than initiative and whether Vikram Chandra had such a portrayal in mind is a question to ponder on. In the end, this series could have a lot of things good about it but the Indian directors are simply not competent enough to handle a story like this with the maturity needed. As a last thing, the episodes are named after prominent Gods like Rudra and Yayati but the content has nothing to do with them. Its another crappy act which only serves to make the audience feel as if something "sacred" is going on. One hopes the next season will rectify these errors if the directors decide to take the medium seriously.

Arrival (II) (2016)

Villeneuve's complex masterpiece on the essence of Humanity and Aliens

[10/10 · 2 December 2016]

Arrival marks a significant evolution in the treatment of Aliens in cinema, eschewing the cheap theatrics of fantasy films or easy projections of murderous intent on all extra-terrestrial life forms started by Ridley Scott's Alien trilogy. The film is based on Ted Chiang's Story of your life but Denis Villeneuve's remarkable vision has significantly enhanced the visual and narrative impact of this story. It starts with the mysterious appearance of enormous bean shaped objects in several locations on earth. Unable to get any meaningful information about the whys and hows of this event, the FBI enlists a linguist, Amy Adams to help in the translation of the cryptic sounds which these seven-footed aliens give out. The story revolves around this communication and what it reveals about humanity as a whole.

Apart from the stunningly melancholic look of the film, highlighting the psychologically bleak state of humanity in general, the film has a singularly haunting theme. Villeneuve is a master of the slow forward moving shot and all his films feature characters whose narrative significance is underscored by their portrayal in these perfect scenes. There are many complex themes treated here, language and conception of space-time being the most important ones. Human language is linear in time and this singular concept makes the non-linear, circular script of the aliens difficult to understand. Our use of the linear script is a reflection of our existence in a frame of time which for us only goes forward. But if this movement can happen both ways, then the language must necessarily be able to reflect that. The prime-riddle of the script Amy Adams has to unlock concerns this reversibility. The psychological impact of our limited language is also shown succinctly. Humans tend to project their desires on inanimate objects all the time. A knife can be a weapon to kill and also a weapon to cut fruits but depending on our desire for either of this, it can be good and evil at the same time. Thus when the Aliens mention weapon, humans interpret that unambiguously as an evil intent, projecting our interpretation of weapon on theirs. Such fundamentals elements of language are explored with great narrative immersion. The last and most important theme is about determinism. Modern day philosophy has over-analyzed this thing to exhaustion and one of the results of this has been the increasingly helpless situation of man to change anything for the better. Because the Aliens can get in and out of time at will, they can view the whole of future from outside of time. Amy Adams is given visions of her future which she does not comprehend at the time. Her understanding of the present comes through her intuitional immersion in her future. The film masterfully balances this manipulation of time without losing the narrative focus on the present. At the end, we are the beginning and the film has completed a circle much like the script of the aliens. The great moment of philosophical insight into determinism and free-will occurs at the end when Amy Adams is asked by her future husband if they want to have a baby. She says yes knowing fully the future of this child. Her answer gives rise to the question, What would have happened if she had said no ? Does fate only work if we give assent to it ? But whether for Amy Adams or for us, the strength to welcome fate knowing it will wrench us is truly worthy of the highest endeavors of Mankind.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Being and Time

[10/10 · 28 June 2016]

Some day in the future, the history of Cinema will be written when it will cease to be an art form, having served its purpose and seen its highs and lows. On that day, Once Upon a time in America will once again be remembered as a glorious milestone in the annals of art. An epic whose dimensions still remain to be fathomed, it will remain one of the greatest films to have ever been made and the crowning glory in the career of Sergei Leone, whose legacy can be summed up as the maker of this one film, which he considered his masterpiece and which ultimately took his life when the greed of the producers and lack of institutional support led to it's unfortunate mutilation, being cut down from its original four hours run time to a detestable 140 minutes, the substance long gone and a pale shadow left behind. But history has been kind to it and the original vision of Leone has been restored and appreciated universally.

Based on Harry Grey's novel The Hoods, the story revolves around four Jewish kids in Brooklyn during the early days of Prohibition who get involved in the underground liquor trade early in their lives. Among these are two dear friends Max and Noodles, played by James Woods and Robert De Niro. The film charts their successes and failures against the larger canvas of American society, trying to come to grasp with a new century and its contradictions. Four hours is a long time but you need that kind of time if you want to narrate an epic like this, because an epic is about time and its strange justice. Without time, you won't be doing an epic, you'll be narrating events without those subtle intervals of apparent silence which links facts and transforms tales to epics. Covering a period of around seventy years, the film takes us through the tumultuous period of struggle in the lives of Max and Noodles, their rise to the top of the underground trade and their fall. Their are many characters whose lives revolves around these two, including Deborah, the love of Noodles played by a young Jennifer Connelly. Deborah's Theme. a signature piece of music composed by Ennio Morricone should count as one of the most enchanting pieces of melancholy ever carved out. After the death of three of the four friends due to a misunderstanding in the prime of their youth, Robert De Niro is left alone to face the life long guilt of having caused their deaths and he leaves the city. Three decades go by with him living with his loneliness when he is invited to a mysterious party. The masterful editing makes use of brilliant back and forth between the past and the future, juxtaposing the now old Noodles with his pain and his deep past which alone provided the few moments of happiness. He has changed with time, accepted its decisions and learned to live with himself when it surfaces that his whole life has been the story of a betrayal, a betrayal by his closest friend Max who never died in that accident three decades ago, who took away his love and banished him forever to a life of agony and loneliness. One of the great scenes of this film has Noodles returning to Deborah after 35 years, asking her if she made the right decision to leave him. Her life has been no less lonely amid-st the glamour and success of being an actress and the mistress of Max. The camera cuts to a closeup of the now aged Deborah removing her makeup, revealing the ruins of time etched in her eyes, her melancholy probably redeemed only by her love for Noodles who she never thought would appear again. Two lives destroyed by a betrayal. Max is now Secretary Bailey with whom Time has now caught up and he is about to lose all his fortune and success. He wants a settling of accounts between him and Noodles and asks De Niro to kill him for having done such injustice. But time has erased Noodles's memories. He has made peace with his version of history, and the truth does not matter anymore. Perhaps his refusal to face truth is his revenge as Max is left alone to face himself without the redeeming revenge of Noodles.

Its a film that has a lot to say about love, revenge, betrayal and the strange role that time plays in our lives by restructuring memories in such ways that justice is no more a question of right and wrong but rather only a matter of man being punished and redeemed from within. It's inside us that justice has to be found, whether anyone else knows it or not. Man himself is his judge and Once Upon a time in America will forever remain a testament to this lofty vision of this strange species called Man.

Psycho Raman (2016)

Misguided script and an immature directorial fiasco

[3/10 · 26 June 2016]

Raman Raghav could have been a solid exploration of psychological intricacies but ends up being a shallow montage of clichés pepped up by pretentious classical beats and stylistic gimmicks of distortion sounds, fast cuts and post production gymnastics. Anurag Kashyap has of course managed to better his performance from the dreadful Bombay Velvet but he has nothing to show here except his pale copying of Tarantino type, chapter-ed narrative and school level Freudian psychology.

The story is "based" on the notorious 60s killer Raman Raghav as a modern day Ramannah gets inspired by his hero and starts killing people. The plot apparently revolves around him and his "nemesis" so to say, the cop Raghav, detailing their apparent contradictions but deeper identifications but here ends the movie for all narrative purposes. Cinema is still driven by plot development no matter how much avant garde novices claim the newness of absurd plots. And there is none of that elusive plot here. Vicky Kaushal, an actor with great potential is portrayed as the clichéd conflicted cop whose interaction with evil brings out the devil inside him. He is so full of pain and agony rescued by narcissistic self hate. Nawazuddin Siddiqui of course is the killer who kills for no understandable reason and by the end of the movie, you're still wondering why this serial killer really kills ? The plot was surely designed to show how the people on both sides of the law are not really so different but an immature script has let the film down. Serial killers are not mad, their motives are not absurd and their philosophies not as lame as the film shows. In the end, the killer is almost given his own podium to justify his killing through the purity of its absurd motives. Since he does not kill for money, or by hiding behind the garb of religion or any such material motive, he is the pure, he is the unblemished and he indeed is the lord of death. After seeing the film, it seems that had the makers lifted the story of the real Raman Raghav verbatim, that would have made for a better film. At least it would have had a coherent psychological framework. Here we see the now fashionable, "real world" obsession of independent film makers with slum neighborhoods, cheap laborers slaving away for foreign brands in Mumbai ghettos, African drug peddlers ignorant of English and how our cop is conversant with all the dirt of an urban cosmopolis. But as far as the psychology of the characters is concerned, something which a thriller should explore, there is such a lack of depth here that you feel cheated in the end as an audience.

I am sure intellectuals will come running with justifications about the plot, showcasing it as some complex mix of absurdity and dead-pan humour, an element which is destroying cinema. Borrowed from American art-house cinema, dead-pan is not a lived reality, it's an artificial form of extra smart directorial flourish which should be used sparingly. But Mr Kashyap seems to have overestimated it's narrative value. Its possible he uses it to cajole our brain-dead audiences who, deprived of such comic relief might just slip into a coma but it's a worthwhile question to ask if that coma is the inevitable outcome of anything he does these days. A film marketed like a thriller such as this one creates expectations of pure plot-driven narratives of tightly packed scenes with little space for nonsense but the outcome is a tightly packed collection of nonsense with little space for plot. There is no need to make your characters erupt into agonizing bursts of self-hate if you intend for the characters to do nothing about that realization of their weakness. Of course this is a question of how the director imagines his characters to be. But do we really want to make and see films where characters appear weak and impotent in changing themselves for the better and instead, in absurd ecstasy of Freudian "death-wishes", rush headlong into destruction ?

Natsamrat (2016)

A Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions

[10/10 · 23 January 2016]

Natsamrat is a tribute to a bygone era of Marathi theater which was probably the last great art movement that shaped the texture of the society it inhabited and which it took inspiration from. Life has since moved on and theater has become relegated to the margins of society but a glimpse of what it was capable of has been presented in this great work of art which should become a classic in time.

It tells the story of a once - celebrated giant of the stage whose retirement from theater also starts the beginning of his fall from glory into a miserable state of existence, bought about by ungrateful children and a society that has retreated further into its hypocrisy and shallowness. It has no need of a larger than life actor who lives his life with much of the flair and celebration and truthfulness with which he decorated the roles of the great tragedians of the past. Impotent political correctness and circumspect sheepishness is now the order of the day where truth of any kind is banished and manipulative strategies are encouraged, indeed celebrated. Whereas this larger critique of society and a lone man's fight is nothing new to cinema or art, Natsamrat's unique claim to greatness comes from its brilliant synthesis of searching dialogues and superb acting. There are outstanding exchanges between Vikram Gokhale and Nana Patekar musing on the nature of life and its trials. For our generation raised on easy clichés of feel good relationships, these two actors show what the essence of a truly honorable friendship over years really is. The culmination of this brilliant friendship invokes the famous dialogue from the Mahabharata in which Karna questions Krishna on the unjust nature of Fate and Krishna begs forgiveness. A more memorable display of acting will be difficult to find.

Its a testament to the acting prowess of Nana Patekar that he is able to take on a role which has been considered a milestone in Marathi theater for decades now. The tragic story of an actor is shown through his identification and questioning of the great roles he has performed. He reminiscences of Lear whose folly and tragic pain mirrors his own. Theatre we are shown is not just a means of entertainment but a profound mirror in which we can seek answers to life's most difficult questions, including the greatest of them all: What's the purpose of life itself ? Its another question whether we have the desire to seek these answers. A society is defined by the questions it asks and not necessarily by the solutions it invents. Out great misfortune today is that we don't question the mysteries of existence anymore. The film deals with many more issues of life, death, suffering and the paradoxical depth and shallowness of the actor. Mention must be made of Medha Manjrekar who plays the dignified stoical wife whose self effacing dedication to her husband is only matched by her lifelong resolve to protect him. She keeps having high temperatures, perhaps because she always takes the storms on herself. A film that should be seen many many times.

The Affair (2014–2019)

The psychological underpinnings of drive and desire

[10/10 · 15 December 2015]

The Affair is one of the few recent productions on TV which deals with the hard psychology of man woman relations and its myriad entanglements. An affair between two married people is largely a narrative device through which the series explore what drives men and women to seek out risk, love, chaos and meaning throwing all the comforts of a "settled" life to the bin. Though there is a moralistic angle to it, but its kept at the sidelines with the primary focus being the psychological subtleties of love and betrayal. One can say that the series is heavily driven by pitch- perfect reactions of characters to each other and the ambiguity of desire. Jealousy and possessiveness haunts the characters in the initial part of the story where an affair, quite necessarily is creating new avenues for the intensity of desire to gush forth. There are lives being left behind in the promise of a better one and the collateral damage to the once dear. Season 1 is concerned with the question of carnality as a means to feel alive again. The greatness of the story lies in its astute understanding that men and women are similar in some ways and different in many others. Desire is the self trying to complete itself through another but men and women understand completeness differently many times and this creates timeless problems between them.

Season 2 deals with the aftermath of the affair and I think there is a lot said here about what are the fundamentals of any relationship which determines which relationship lasts and which fails. One of the most brilliant aspects of the second season is the way it brings out the life is approached differently by men and women. What gives life meaning is not a solved question and in pursuit of what one considers meaningful, we are ready to make many subtle self- deceptions. Many times, complexity is just weakness given a flair of rhetoric. At the end of our lives when we are less driven blindly to achieve and more likely to take a dispassionate view of life, much of what we called "complexities of life" will turn out to be a desire to avoid responsibility. Neither man nor woman has the absolute answer to what a good life is. Perhaps we can someday realize that its always in the middle that the answer lies. Mean while, The Affair can teach us how to reflect on these questions and find our own answers

Our Friends in the North (1996)

As time rolls by

[16 November 2015]

Our friends in the North is one of those things you grow to admire in time, long after the details have left your mind and its melancholy essence has been absorbed by your consciousness. You will go back to this essence many many times as you grow old and find yourself identifying with someone or the other in this majestic work.

It covers 30 years for the most turbulent period in modern British history starting from the early sixties with its anxious flirtations with radical Marxism and ending in the bland nineties enmeshed in the muck of decadent consumerism. The plot revolves around four friends who are archetypes of the times and the greatness of Peter Flannery's script is to lay out in exquisite detail the fantastic interplay of archetypes and time. Some of the greatest of British actors played their life defining roles like Gina Mckee, Christopher Ecclestone, Mark Strong and a young Daniel Craig whose performance alone should make it worth seeing. Its a kind of work which is now largely impossible today primarily because of the class it focuses on; lower middle class Britain and their problems. In our post political age, where the public has been largely relegated to be spectators to their lives, its refreshing to witness a time where politics was the heart and soul of many lives who wanted to change the world albeit a bit foolishly. Nick ( Ecclestone ) is one such character. The cinematography is not the best but the plot makes up for it. Multi episode TV series like this was a creation of British TV and there is no better example to show how time is such a valuable thing to have in narrative expositions. Every episode focuses on a year and three decades gives the audience the chance to see characters play out their fated, entangled lives amidst all their joys and failures, swimming in the turbulence of sweeping historical changes.Every work of literature invariably comes up against the shores of narrative completeness where it faces its most troubled critics. Our Friends in the North has that self contained completeness where you are hard pressed to find leakages and thus you can say with a proud boast that its complete. There is an inevitability to the flow of lives that gives it a self sustaining rhythm till the end where you realize that nothing could have been any different. You feel for every character because by the time you have reached the end, you have come to believe in the old Buddhist maxim which exhorts man to believe in no judge-mental God who sits and punishes from above but to believe in man himself who weaves his own destiny, thread by thread which at the end of time, can chain him to the rock or carry him over to the heavens. A masterpiece which will last many a storm of time.

Forbrydelsen (2007–2012)

On the complexity of human nature

[10/10 · 13 October 2015]

Forbrydelsen ranks among the most outstanding creations in the modern age of path-breaking Television. Complex plots, superlative acting, brilliant cinematography, and the haunting music of Franz Bak. At a time when crime-drama has become a staple of modern "entertainment", this is one series which treats the viewer as an adult and refuses to give simple answers which can coddle him up at the end with a comfortable vision of God's grace.

The writers of the series clearly have an astute understanding of the muddled ways of world of Politics, Military and any institution for which self-preservation comes above all else. Human Beings are not simple, that's a cliché but its in the ways they are complex which makes them unique. Motives are always murky but what exactly drives that ambivalence is at the heart of this brilliant work of art. Every character is brilliantly portrayed by actors who should really be given much more credit than they are usually accorded. Sofie Grabbel as Sarah Lund ranks as one of the most fascinating characters created. A detached, shy woman with an instinct for truth, her portrayal never comes off as forced. Right from the pilot till the last seconds of the ending episode, the superb script and the subtle twists keeps the viewer hooked on with a skill that's not matched by much other series. There is a natural flow to the plot which usually revolves around parallel happenings in two or three places which come together at the end to reveal a superstructure of knowledge which is extremely satisfying to an intelligent viewer. Season 2 for me is the best of the three but the others are no worse. Its a testament to the brilliance of Danish writers and actors that a country located in the far north without much worldwide access to markets creates such work which Hollywood then comes begging only so they can mutilate and dumb them down for their own audience. I hope this Golden period of Danish Television comes up with more Forbrydelsens and Borgens so that our age of stupidity can get some much needed manna to recover from the imperialistic domination of trash that Hollywood shoves down out throat with clinical precision every day. If for nothing else, watch Forbrydelsen for its profound insight into the nature of man and evil. Watch it to know that duality is at the heart of life and no one is without his or her faults but its ultimately choice that defines us.

TVF Pitchers (2015–2022)

The invention of the engineer as archetype

[1/10 · 1 September 2015]

This show is made of engineers by engineers for engineers. Its a mammoth fest of technocratic dudes who try to imagine away their stale dull lives spent typing coma inducing code into a paradise where they are still coding coma inducing programs but now, they are their own prison-masters. The creators of the show, like all engineers have a thumb-rule algorithmic approach to "storytelling"" as they call it, since on closer inspection, it resembles more like hallucinated tumbling forth of incidents which somehow all come together in the end, albeit through some "cute" sentimentality like the speech of a management executive at the end of Episode 5. Sentimental coddling of the generation is the new fashion and TVF is milking this.

Of course all this is not deliberate as the people in real lives probably live such trivialized lives themselves. Its a testament to how much Pitchers appeals to our melodramatic and over sentimentalized, puppy love generation that there is not one bad rating in IMDb for this. The only other time such unanimous applause was seen in the annals of an Indian work of "ärt", it was Gunda, a timeless favorite of all engineers. TVF has got together a singular bunch of urban bards spinning yarns of meticulous nonsense quite in tune with the culture around. So no blame to them. But to applaud a miserable bunch of peter pans with their "unique" problems of work life and bubbling with easy platitudes at every step is an insult to the whole paradigm of praise itself. Dudes, you can get all your funding and set up your companies but life is infinitely tougher and the real problems of your code-driven existence are still a deteriorating marital and sex life, a loss of morals and the emptiness of modern distractions, one of which is shows like yours. If you really want to be the voice of the generation as you never shy of boasting, read some literature (assuming you have patience), try getting inside the hearts of men and women and figure out whats ails your generation so much.The engineer is a symbol of the vacuity of modern life and exalting him to the status of a modern mythical figure as you're trying is not just stupid, its saddening.