Death on the Nile - A Review

I just watched Gilderoy Lockhart's Kenneth Branagh's version of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, and wanted to share a few of my thoughts about it. This review will have mild spoilers, so stay away if you haven't read the book or seen another version of the movie.

I'll start with the positives.

Kenneth Branagh isn't terrible as Poirot. In fact, he seems to have improved his act since the first movie, Murder on the Orient Express, and his accent is slightly more like David Suchet in this movie (who is the best Poirot in my opinion). I would keep Branagh ahead of Alfred Molina, Peter Ustinov, and of course, John Malkovich. He may even be better than Albert Finney. I like the rest of the cast as well - Gal Gadot, Emma Mackey and Armie Hammer fit into their roles. The visuals are great, and modern techniques, such as drone shots and CGI suit the story well. The digitally de-aged Branagh looks a little weird in a flashback scene, but I can live with that. Overall, anyone who is not fanatic about murder mysteries or Poirot would probably find this a gripping movie.

But I'm not such a person. I scrutinize murder mysteries with psychopathic attention to detail, and I'd not hesitate to end friendships over a disagreement involving Poirot. So here's my verdict.

First, the story is incoherent and full of holes. It's too much to think Poirot would go back to the heat of Egypt after having just come from there, whatever be the justification. Secondly, when people are dropping dead like flies, and everyone is trapped on a boat, is it believable that Poirot will not have everyone's belongings searched? And how does the murderer get the gun in the revelation scene, while Poirot himself remained clueless? The first murder comes a bit too late in the movie, and as a result, the movie drags on quite a bit longer than necessary.

The second aspect in which this movie fails is perhaps evident even from the poster above. Quick, look at it, and tell me who the main character is in the movie? From the beginning to the end, Poirot remains just a character in the movie, not the character. I would have blamed the director for this, but Kenneth Branagh himself is the director. If a person who played Gilderoy Lockhart and Hercule Poirot, arguably two of the most pompous characters in British literature, fails to make a movie revolve around himself, I don't know who can. I re-watched David Suchet's Death on the Nile right after watching this one and the difference between the two is stark. The older version has long sequences focused on Poirot, his mannerisms, his dialog, his idiosyncrasies. In the newer one, the other characters often steal the show. We never even see Poirot sitting still and thinking, exercising his little grey cells, something that the older version focused on often. The newer version replaces that by cheap thrills of a nimble Poirot chasing the murderer across the ship's deck, up and down stairs.

But the third and most vital point where the movie maker failed, and which was totally avoidable in my opinion, is what they did with Poirot's moustache. They gave it a back story.

I try to keep an open mind when it comes to interpretation of literature into film, and while I'm infinitely more fond of David Suchet's waxed version of the moustache, I don't blame Kenneth Branagh for trying to do something different. But whatever be the style, I do consider Poirot's moustache to be his pride, not his weakness. Characters like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot are like superheroes in many ways, and their little oddities, however illogical, become part of their personalities. Imagine a Superman movie showing a backstory about why Superman started using the red cape, then trying to explain the cape using aerodynamics, and finally showing him giving it up so that he can fly/fight better. Would you like that movie? I wouldn't. Similarly, one can invent all sorts of backstories to make the character more real, but when they try to rationalize Poirot's moustache, or love for symmetry, with logic from that backstory, these things definitely lose their magic. These things are not loved because they are logical - in fact, I'd say it's quite the opposite.

Branagh has said he wants to do more Poirot movies, and this movie hints "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" is going to be the next installment. Will I watch that when it comes out?

Probably.

I'll watch it for the same reason I watch every new Jurassic World movie, every new Fantastic Beasts movie, every new Feluda / Byomkesh movie or Srijit Mukherjee's Kakababu movies - even when I know the stories and I hate the movies. I have grown up with these characters, and watching them say or do something familiar on screen still gives me a moment of  attachment to my childhood days, and harks me back to the carefree summer afternoons I spent binge-reading mystery stories lying on my bed. Watching any rendition of Poirot a rendition of Poirot that at least tries to stay faithful to the original will always recreate some of that magic for me, and Branagh's rendition is definitely in that category.

But if he wants me to love him as Poirot, he will have to do better. He'll have to stop trying to explain Poirot's eccentricities and embrace them for what they are, and make the movie all about himself, as Gilderoy Lockhart would have done.

Of Time and Its Chronicler

Busy as I've been, I still found the time to see two movies last week. The two are of absolutely different genres, one being a sci-fi thriller and the other a biopic. Yet, there was a common thread connecting the two movies.

The first one was Interstellar. Christopher Nolan's movies often tax the viewers' comprehension abilities, and Interstellar was no exception. While many movies have fantasized about interstellar travel and visiting alien planets, there are hardly any that have approached the subject in such a scientifically accurate manner. Black holes, wormholes, time dilation, gravity waves - these are concepts which boggle the mind even in their unadulterated form. Add a little creative license and the result becomes truly remarkable.

I do not want to talk too much about the plot of movie here since it is easy to give away spoilers, and it would be a shame to do that. The movie reminded me of several movies, but primarily of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rotating spaceships a lot of other things refer to that movie. Interstellar also reminded me of WALL-E and the book Rendezvous with Rama. As a matter of fact, Interstellar is almost an unintentional prequel to WALL-E. The robots of Interstellar were very lovable too, though they were not like WALL-E. They reminded me more of Marvin from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. With the lovely music by Hans Zimmer and some never-before seen scientifically accurate visuals of a black hole and a wormhole, the movie is a very out of this world experience, although one might need to do a little homework in order to understand it fully.

One of the concepts presented in Interstellar is that of time dilation. Time runs slowly for astronauts close to the event horizon of a black hole and they age more slowly than their friends and relatives on earth. This was somewhat difficult to digest for a lot of people, as was the idea of dimensions more than four. I, however, was aware of such things since my school days and I understood most of the movie. I may sound arrogant when I say this, but actually knowing these concepts was not my credit at all. I read a couple of excellent books on these subjects which made me knowledgeable. The first of these was the book "A Brief History of Time." This book has shaped many of my ideas about the universe, and strangely, much of my idea about God as well. The second movie that I saw this week was about the life of the author of this book.

Most people accept Stephen Hawking as the greatest physicist of our era. He was diagnosed with an extremely rare motor neuron disease when he was a student. The doctors said he had only two years to live. Yet, Hawking mysteriously went on living well beyond those two years, married and had children, besides telling us much of what we know about the universe and authoring one of the most-sold books in history. Today, the 72-year old wheelchair-ridden Hawking who speaks with a speech synthesizer is a familiar face across the world. The movie "The Theory of Everything" tells the story of how a normal college student became the Hawking of today. It tells the story of the day-to-day struggles of a young Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane. It tells the story of one of the most brilliant brains on the planet struggling to break free of the most unfortunate imprisonment of its body.

The Theory of Everything is an extremely well-made film. The casting choice is phenomenal: Eddie Redmayne does not look like Hawking, he is Hawking. His portrayal of the famous scientist's physical disabilities, his slurred speech, his strained movements is so realistic that it is painful to watch at times. Felicity Jones is adorable as Jane Hawking as well. This movie also has a beautiful theme music, though not as intricate and exotic as that of Interstellar.

And then there is time itself, as one of the characters of the movie, the same time that holds the story of Interstellar together. Both the movies are a race against time. In one the human race struggles to survive while time runs out for them, and in the other it's more of a struggle for one man while time claims yet one more of his normal bodily functions. It is not a race that can eventually be won, of course, but can time be temporarily held at bay? Watch the movies to find out.

I recommend both of them, but if you decide to watch just one, then go for The Theory of Everything. It may then interest you enough about time so that you change your mind about watching the other.

Review: Chander Pahar

[This review has no spoilers. My longer Bengali review with spoilers here.]

Which is the scariest real or fictional creature ever? Dracula? Frankenstein's monster? Spiders? King Kong? Ghosts from innumerable horror movies? Septopus? Dementor? Velociraptor? The answers will, of course, be as diverse as people are, since what scares one could seem comical to another. That is the point where most horror movies fail - as soon as they show the cause of fear, a lot of their viewers simply stop being scared anymore. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was no doubt aware of this problem when he was writing Chander Pahar, and so he decided to never expose Bunyip, the mythical beast that guards the diamond mines in his story. In my opinion this is where the story succeeds as a spine chilling adventure. Shankar, a youth from a remote Bengal village explores Africa with seasoned adventurer Diego Alvarez, and along with man-eating lions and black mambas and herds of elephants, he also runs into the mythical Bunyip lurking in the Mountains of the Moon. Who or what is the Bunyip? The tribal people say he is an evil spirit who guards the diamond mines. Diego Alvarez says it is an animal that killed his friend. Shankar never sees the Bunyip, but he sees what it can do, and he sees the fear in fearless Diego Alvarez's eyes when the Bunyip is mentioned. By the magic of his pen, Bibhutibhushan instills that same fear in the readers' hearts. While reading the novel we turn pages tense with anticipation. What will Shankar see next? What will the Bunyip do?

This is also where the  movie has its greatest failure. By showing the Bunyip as a mere mortal animal, it totally destroys that supernatural aura surrounding the beast. Whether the shown creature is scary or not is a different question altogether, but it wasn't necessary to show it at all. It really beats me why director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee could not understand this simple thing, whereas everyone I know seems to find this same flaw with the movie.

But the Bunyip aside, the movie is a very brave effort to bring Bengali cinema up to the international standard. Yes, most of the special effects were ridiculous, but the movie was made with a meager budget of Rs. 15 crore. Accepted, there were plot holes and inconsistencies, but it's a movie after all, and what movie doesn't have them? On the other hand, there were stunning visuals of Africa, an international cast and live African animals - something unthinkable for a Bengali movie. Most people including me were skeptical about the acting abilities of Dev Adhikari, the actor playing the main protagonist Shankar, but I am happy to say Dev was reasonably good in the role. Besides, the director knew of Dev's weakness in delivering Bengali dialogues and used voice overs in a lot of places. Gerard Rudolf is even better in the role of Diego Alvarez, and the way he handled Portuguese, English and Bengali dialogues is commendable.

When Bibhutibhushan wrote the book, research was difficult. He must have had to work really hard to get most of the facts right. However, the director's work was not easy either, since the viewer of today is raised on Discovery and National Geographic Channel documentaries on Africa. He had to shoot on location, show the real thing, or he would be caught cheating. He got that mostly right barring a few exceptions. The first lion sequence, the cave and the Kalahari have been shown particularly well. The scenes in Salisbury of 1911 are believable, though obviously the city was not shown on a grand scale. One particular omission that pained me was the absence of any mention of the strange baobab tree, something that immensely fascinated the Shankar of the novel. Also, due to a mix-up in the names of the mountain ranges in the original book, the film mostly shows the Richtersveld mountains which hardly have any forest cover. The real Mountains of the Moon would have been the Rwenzori range which has dense tropical rain forests just like in the book.

But in spite of its many flaws, the best part of watching Chander Pahar was the fact that I watched the movie in a theatre sitting in the US. Nobody can remember the last time a Bengali movie released here. Although the number of people watching the movie (9) was not encouraging, I hope Chander Pahar will make more producers and directors take up big budget productions like this and release them in the US. This was one of the very first novels that I ever read. I really wish to see more of my childhood favourites come to life on the big screen.

Sleuths on Screen

Uttamkumar as Byomkesh in Chiriyakhana

Cinema, and by this I mean both the big screen as well as the small, has virtually replaced the book as a medium of storytelling. Movies are being made from all genres of fiction and virtually nothing seems out of reach for them. Movies like Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings have demonstrated what technology can achieve, while numerous great directors have demonstrated time and again what can be achieved without technology. In view of all this, it seems a pity that few directors, if any, understand how detective stories work.

By detective stories I mean detective stories, not thrillers. I do not mean Robert Langdon, Jason Bourne or James Bond. I mean the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And our own Byomkesh and Feluda. Is it too hard to understand? A director may have made great films and yet, he often messes up a on a detective story. Why? I think the answer to that question is straightforward. One simply has to understand why those of us who love detective stories do so.

What is so special about Sherlock Holmes or Feluda? What makes Hercule Poirot unique? Is it the story? A novel plot is only novel the first time. Then why do we go back and read those books again and again, even when we know who the murderer is?

Elementary, my dear Watson. We love our detectives. We know them inside out and love their every fault, their drug addictions, their lethargy, their arrogance, their obsession with cleanliness and symmetry. We are not bothered about who the criminal is. We want to predict how our detective will react in a given situation and then see if our predictions come true.

We want to learn up their dialogs, mon ami, we want to laugh at their mannerisms. We are not simply interested in seeing a crime being solved. We want to see the man (or woman) we know solving the crime. This is what the directors fail to see. 

The name's Bakshi. Byomkesh Bakshi. 

Sandip Ray, for instance, does not understand that we don't want to see Feluda punch somebody to a pulp. We would rather have a Feluda who gets occasionally intimidated by knife throwers or beaten up by thugs. We know his time will come and we patiently wait for that moment. Feluda in a fistfight? Come on, that's like asking Rahul Dravid to prove his worth by wrestling. Not that wrestling is bad - its simply not his game. It took the junior Ray three amazingly bad films and one moderately bad one to finally realize that. His father, of course, didn't do much better when handling Byomkesh. Uttamkumar may have been the biggest superstar of his time, but he was no Byomkesh. Byomkesh never had a pet snake. Couldn't a man like Satyajit Ray see that it mattered? Of course, it is quite another matter that the poster of the upcoming Byomkesh movie by Anjan Dutta (right) hints that Ray's Chiriyakhana may not have been the worst Byomkesh movie ever.  And yet, it has nothing to do with budget. Most Indian fans will agree - and not just Bengalis - that Basu Chatterjee's small screen Byomkesh has never been bettered. How did that happen with a small budget?

Look at the hair, not the moustache

Supposedly the 1974 classic The Murder on the Orient Express was the best representation of Poirot on screen till then. Really? Ladies and gentlemen, what you see on the left is the best representation of a man who would die before he parted his hair asymmetrically. Do they really take us seriously? Sherlock Holmes is the fictional character who has been depicted on screen the most number of times. I have seen many of those, and never liked them. Firstly, the representation was either too literal and bookish which combined with the old London sets made the movie unrealistic-looking. Secondly, they failed to get the essence of the stories. In the version of The Sign of Four that I saw, Watson's fiancée finally finds her treasure. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the criminal was found and arrested. When Warner Brothers announced their multi-starrer big-budget Sherlock Holmes movie, I thought they would finally get it. I should have known better. This is what Sherlock Holmes in that ninety million dollar movie turned out to be:

Not shown: bullet-time punches and Jude Law as Watson

The reason why I am ranting about this here is that I recently came across a BBC TV series called Sherlock which is based on Holmes, but puts Doyle's detective in present-day London. He uses a laptop and a smartphone, maintains a website and searches the Internet when needed to solve crimes. Watson is an army doctor back from Afghanistan who blogs about Holmes' cases. Compare this with Sandip Ray's Feluda who, even after having time-traveled from the 1970s to the 2010s, does not own a cellphone or a computer. Ray does not even make an attempt to explain this anomaly, let alone try to modernize the story-lines and incorporate the changed technology realistically.

Strangely, this modern Sherlock is the best Holmes I have seen on screen so far. This is the man I have known and loved since the day my father gave me the Complete Sherlock Holmes in two volumes. He has the same arrogance, the same disregard for rules, same spite for the Scotland Yard and the same thorough knowledge of the world he lives in. The real Sherlock Holmes was a man of science. This one is no different. His instruments have changed, but he is still the master of the best methods. He uses texting instead of running errand-boys now. He uses Google search instead of going to the library. He still beats up dead men at the morgue because he wants to see how corpses bruise. He talks lightning fast, thinks faster, and when he speaks he is usually obnoxious and conceited. In short, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes exactly how he would have been if he lived today. Here's a trailer for the first season of this mini-series.

Of course, I have only seen the first season (three episodes) and I don't know yet how this has turned out in the future episodes. I have seen great movies ruined by bad sequels before, and it may well happen here too. However, from what I have seen, this first season is good enough to teach Sandip Ray a lesson about handling Feluda in the 21st century. He could, of course, choose to stick to 1970s like the original stories, but that would only increase his budget. If something must change, why change the character's personality and make him fight thugs? Why not make his deadliest weapon deadlier with the help of smartphones and cameras and laptops and the Internet? A tablet would serve the purpose of his blue notebooks perfectly. He need not even write in Greek - he can simply password protect it. He can still smoke his Charminars, and he can still switch off his phone when he needs to disappear for a few hours. As long as he does not look like a behind-the-times anachronism, anything works for me.

As far as Byomkesh is concerned, I do not need to give suggestions. With Anjan Dutta as the director, the movies are going to be like... piles of ash, as Byomkesh himself would put it. Only, there wouldn't be any treasure to uncover underneath.

The Adventures of Tintin

When a director makes a movie, one of the most important things to keep in mind is the target audience. Sometimes, a director has to make a children's film that faces severe scrutiny from adults. Very rarely does such a film match the expectations of this adult audience since typically their expectation is based on a childhood love of  comic books (or normal books). Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a notable exception in this respect. Not only does the movie do an excellent job of keeping the viewers on the edge of their seats throughout the 107 minutes of its running time, but it also pays due  attention to the smallest of details that were so important in  Hergé's original comics.

The movie starts with a Catch Me If You Can-style animated silhouette opening credit sequence that uses the same font as in the Tintin comic book titles. This sequence itself is full of references to other Tintin stories. Then when the opening shot was an animated Hergé painting a street portrait of Tintin, I had a feeling that the movie was going to be respectful to the original creation. I wasn't wrong.

The movie combines story elements from three comic books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Tintin meets Captain Haddock in this movie. The Thompsons and Nestor are in the movie as well. Important comic book characters Omar Ben Salaad and Bianca Castafiore make brief appearances too. We see references to The Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Broken Ear and King Ottokar's Sceptre, among others. As for Professor Calculus, he does not appear in this movie. He will probably be introduced in the sequel.

In a motion capture movie it hardly makes any sense to talk about the cast since anybody can be made to look like any character, but the cast here looks good. The Captain Haddock of the film is more the Haddock of The Crab with the Golden Claws and less the Haddock of the latter stories which I think is understandable. The camera work is amazing, although it is all done with a virtual camera. The detail in the graphics is breathtaking. The music is good, though I have heard much better from John Williams.

And then there is Snowy. No review of this movie can be complete without a special mention of the CGI Snowy. As in the comics, in every scene Snowy is doing something or the other on the side even when the main characters are engaged in something else, and the time the artists have spent in drawing the actions and reactions of this realistic little dog is really praiseworthy. In one particular scene Snowy comes face-to-face with a sitting camel, and the silent little interaction between the two animals keeps coming back to the mind.

Some of my friends expressed displeasure at the amount of Batman-like action packed into the movie but I disagree. The Tintin fans know all about the story, and yet, these very fans want to remain entertained throughout. These fans, like me, have grown up reading Tintin comic books and now, as adults, want to be entertained by a movie that retains the simplicity of the comic books and combines it with the superb film making techniques we normally associate with Spielberg. Almost two decades ago he gave us Jurassic Park, and to this day I cannot find a single flaw in the computer generated dinosaurs. The quality of the animation in Tintin is so good that a few times during the movie I felt some character's movement looked unnatural, only to remember that it was not a live action movie.

I had been waiting for a long time to see this film. Tintin released in India on 11.11.11 when I was in the US. It released in the US on December 21st - the day I left for India. Back in Kolkata, only one theatre is still showing the movie in one show. I had to travel for two and a half hours to get there and could buy the ticket for the 11:45am show only at 11:45am. I ended up seeing the movie from the front row. But for the two hours the movie was running, I forgot all about everything outside the Tintin universe. In the end, every second of it was worth the wait and the trouble.

Slice of Life?

That's how you enjoy life

Recently I happened to watch the movie "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara." The movie had been so spectacularly praised by almost everyone around me that I was expecting a pretty much life-changing experience when I sat down to watch it. And what did I feel afterwards? Not only was the movie not great, it was not even ordinary. Cliched and predictable to the last degree, the movie dragged on and at one point I was just wanting it to get over so that I could move on to better things in life. The ordeal lasted a full two-and-a-half hours.

Later, when I confronted a friend who had highly praised it, he said the dialogues were nice and the jokes were hilarious. The actors looked good. What more could anybody ask for?

"A plot? A story, you know, with a beginning and an end. That would have made it really watchable. I don't think you can watch jokes and dialogues for over two hours," I said. "Dude, this is a slice of life movie! That's the way they are supposed to be - no need to have a well-defined storyline. You need to acquire a taste for them." He sounded smug.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Three points actually. Firstly, I know there has been a sudden increase in the number of "different" movies recently with smaller multiplexes and all that, but is just being "different" enough for a movie to be called good? There is no dearth of good looking people willing to act, and if you have money you can go and shoot in scenic locations. But don't you need a story and some semblance of reality to make a good movie? Or are the Hrithik-Farhan-Abhay-Katrina fanboys numerous enough to make any movie containing these stars a success? One of my friends said she loved ZNMD because of the lovely underwater scenes (which account for less than 10 minutes of the movie). "But you can see that even on Discovery Channel," I told her. Her answer was that Discovery Channel could not be seen on a big screen. Then is it enough to show some Discovery Channel-like visuals to make a movie good? Which leads us onto my second point.

My second point is a little controversial. Who decides whether a movie is good? Of course, everyone should have the freedom to like or dislike a movie, and I have no right to say nobody should like ZNMD just because I didn't. But I do have a problem with people saying that the message of the movie was something that I didn't "get." I mean, come on! What is the point of making a movie where your message will be lost in bad film-making and will have to be explained? For me, the message of the movie is what I got from it, and not what somebody else explained to me. To paraphrase Bengali columnist Chandril, directors these days aim to make a movie that will make every viewer feel, "I understood that, but I doubt if the general public will." That's what these so-called offbeat movies are all about- making every viewer feel superior to the others- and this leads to the problem that I am trying to focus on here. The media, the celebrities, the fanboys on Facebook and Twitter, everyone gets together and indulges in something that can only be compared to the story of the emperor's new clothes. If you don't like the film, you are unworthy.

A railway platform in Mumbai

I noticed the same phenomenon recently with the Hindi movie "Delhi Belly" and the Bengali movie "Autograph." I haven't seen the first one and saw the second one but didn't like it. Autograph is a lame attempt at recreating scenes from a Ray classic using a big star. Throw in some good music and things cannot go wrong. However, my point here is not about the quality of the movie itself, but the assertion that some people make that you HAVE to like the movie or you didn't get it. Don't these people realize that they actually do more harm to the movie by raising the expectation? The English movie Slumdog Millionaire is a case that comes to the mind. Is it an enjoyable movie? Yes it is. Does it have a hidden message about triumph of love blah blah blah? Nothing that is not there in the most routine of Bollywood flicks. Is it a realistic depiction of life in India? Nonsense! It is a complete "don't apply your brains" movie as I said before.

Singham: How real people fight

And this is my final point about these "different" movies (and ZNMD in particular). Depiction of reality. Do you know anyone who buys a handbag worth €12,000 for a friend's wife? Have you ever met someone who went skydiving and deep sea diving on the same trip without any prior experience of either? Have you ever heard of a person who could maneuver in free fall and hold hands with other skydivers in mid-air on their maiden jump? Let alone the maneuvers, do you really think anybody would be allowed to jump alone on their first skydive? Do you find it believable that a girl talks with her fiance on phone from India in the morning, and then reaches Spain that very evening to check on him without any prior planning? I wonder if Sonia Gandhi could do it that fast! And the ending sequence that has no relation to the rest of the movie? It's so bad that it's good! Of course, suspension of disbelief is there in every movie, but then why call it a slice of life? Call it fantasy, like Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings. Why is a Dabangg or a Singham or a Robot worse than a ZNMD? Just because they have unrealistic action sequences? What about unrealistic storylines, unbelievable characters and plot holes the size of swimming pools?

So please guys, give me a break. All I want is to draw my own conclusions after watching a movie and not listen to your interpretation of it. If you think I am dumb, so be it, but I will call a spade a spade. And I will not call a movie like ZNMD good.

The Botched Ending

[Warning: Spoilers ahead. Do not read this review if you haven't read the last book in the Harry Potter Series and don't already know the ending.]

The Devil, they say, is in the details. And it is in the details that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 fails as a faithful adaptation of the book. But since it has its own share of enjoyable moments, let me first gloss over the bigger picture.

The Gringotts episode was amazing. Right from the acting of Helena Bonham Carter to the depiction of the light-starved and tortured blind dragon breaking free over London, it was flawlessly executed. So was, to some extent, the battle of Hogwarts, phase one. I mean, they did not show Fred Weasley die, but they showed his body later, so that was enough for me. Voldemort didn't meet Snape in the Shrieking Shack but in some Hogwarts boathouse (Hogwarts had a boathouse?) but that would be forgivable considering that they showed the teachers, the Order members and the students defending Hogwarts in a very nice manner. I only wish they had shown some of the ghosts.

The Chamber of Secrets, the Room of Requirement, the episode of Kings' Cross station - everything was perfect. Then there was the Prince's tale. Alan Rickman proves once again why he has been given the opportunity to portray the greatest character in the series. The short and beautiful memory sequence which jumped back and forth in time between Snape's childhood, youth and recent events brought tears to my eyes. Yes, Alan rickman is Severus Snape, and nobody could have done it better.

Now the botched up details. First, the minor ones.

This movie never bothers to explain how Harry knew Hufflepuff's cup was the horcrux in the vault, and just how Tom Riddle had found the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. It does concoct some lazy excuses for patching up these plot holes, but we miss the beautiful detailed analysis of Voldemort as a person that Rowling so beautifully wrote in the last two books. Also, at the very end (19 years later), why oh why couldn't they have aged the actors properly? Only Bonny Wright looks convincing as the older Ginny. The rest of the cast... c'mon guys! This is Hollywood, for heaven's sake! Just adding a paunch to a 20 year old does not make him a 40 year old!

Harry used the elder wand to repair his own broken wand before returning it to Dumbledore's grave in the story. Here he breaks the elder wand and tosses it away. No harm done, you say? Agreed. However, it will make any Potter fan unhappy.

But the worst mistake of the movie was the handling of the wandfight between Harry and Voldemort. In the book, they had fought in a room full of people, circling each other and Harry calling Voldemort by his muggle father's name. In my opinion, Harry's real moment of triumph was not when Voldemort died, but when Harry told him, in front of a room full of people, that Severus Snape was Dumbledore's man all along. And they cut out that part! Harry here killed Voldemort who died alone like a sad old man, never knowing what the flaw in his plan was. Why, I thought the last fight of the book was too dramatic, "almost like a movie." And now when they do make it into a movie, they remove it from the script. What irony!

In short, it could have been a great movie, but David Yates narrowly missed that. If you have not read the books and want to understand the plot from the movies alone, stay away. If you are a Pottermaniac like me then you will be disappointed with the ending to the series.

Very, very disappointed.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

I have been busy.

Too busy to blog. Too busy to shop on Black Friday. Too busy to upload photos on my photoblog. Too busy even to read my favourite blogs and comment on them.

But I wasn’t too busy to go watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on the day of its release, and to put it bluntly, the movie rocks. This is exactly what a Harry Potter movie should be like.

I would have been skeptical if this same opinion had come from another reviewer, because the last movie by the same director was everything a Harry Potter movie should not be. With unnecessary deviations from the storyline, large chunks of vital plot points left out, and important characters and details reduced to mere passing references, David Yates reduced the gripping sixth story into an intolerable headache. This time, however, by splitting up the story into two movies, he has been able to do justice to the little incidents that make the book such an interesting read. Another major plus point of the movie is the absence of Michael Gambon and his insufferable performance as a hot-headed Albus Dumbledore.

To be honest, the expectations were high. They are always unfairly high for a director directing a Harry Potter movie, because there are people like me who would go splitting hairs about specific dialogs and what a particular character’s hairstyle looks like. But at the end of the two and a half hours, even I had to say that I was as satisfied with the movie as I was with Chris Columbus’s first two movies.

Right from the initial seven Potters sequence, to the teen trio’s adventure in the ministry of magic, to Harry and Hermione’s visit to Godric’s Hollow, Harry finding the sword, and finally the happenings at Malfoy Manor and Luna’s house – every scene was nearly as I had imagined. There was the added bonus of a fantastic animated story-telling sequence within the movie. I won’t say much about the plot, although I doubt if there is anyone who hasn’t read the book and is still worried about spoilers while reading this blog. Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Tom Felton are magnificent as usual in their acting, and even Daniel Radcliffe seems to get the hang of it now.

Was it perfect? No. The failure to mention the taboo on Voldemort’s name left a vital plot point unexplained. I hoped to see the paintings on Luna’s ceiling. Wormtail was supposed to die because Harry had once saved his life – the film failed to mention that. Most importantly, the semi-nude kissing scene between Harry and Hermione was totally uncalled for. I know what the book says, and it could have been shown differently considering it is only a children’s movie. But then, no movie is ever perfect. Some only come very close to perfection.

Like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 did.

Inception - The Review

[Before you start reading, please be aware that this post discusses a few plot elements from the recent movie “Inception” and the book “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows” although I don’t think I have given away any major spoilers from either the movie or the book. Also, I think if you are interested in Harry Potter and haven’t read Deathly Hallows by now, probably you deserve spoilers being thrust into your face anyway!]

Mundungus Fletcher had an idea. It was a brilliant escape plan to take Harry away from the Dursleys. Only, it wasn’t he who generated the idea. It was Severus Snape who had gone into his subconscious mind and planted the seed of that idea. When Harry saw Snape doing it, he wasn’t seeing it in the real world of course; he had dived into Snape’s mind and he was looking at the projection of Snape and the projection of Mundungus talking among themselves. And as you know, Harry Potter exists just in the mind of author J. K. Rowling and her millions of fans, and we have no way of knowing whether Christopher Nolan is one of them. So when Nolan had this idea of inception, it was probably triggered by this projection of Mundungus in the mind of Snape’s projection in the mind of Harry who was in turn just a projection in Rowling’s mind – a Rowling who wasn’t real but just a projection of Nolan’s own subconscious.

Confused yet? Welcome to the world of Inception.

Christoper Nolan’s latest movie explores the world of dreams and the subconscious mind, and questions reality in a way that probably only “The Matrix” did in recent times. It is built on the premise that several people can share a dream and interact in the dreamer’s subconscious. There can also be a dream within a dream, a concept that we computer programmers call “recursion.” And just as in computer programming, if the exit condition is not specified properly, one runs into all kinds of problems.

The movie plays with its timeline in a very interesting way – without giving away any key plot points, let me say that when we dream for a few seconds, the incidents that occur in the dream span a much larger time. This “expansion of time” has been cleverly used throughout the movie which is as full of action and special effects as all action movies these days seem to be.

That’s about all I am going to say regarding this movie. Too much discussion is likely to harm your viewing experience. Leonardo DiCaprio is good as usual, as is the rest of the cast. Nothing new needs to be said about Nolan’s direction after “The Dark Knight” and Hans Zimmer’s music is lovely as usual. There is only one thing more that I want to say about this movie.

That is about the concept. The idea.

The protagonist in the movie says, “What's the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. Which is why I have to steal it.” While nobody is accusing Christopher Nolan of stealing someone’s idea, the concept is not entirely original either. In stories all over the world, people interacting through dreams with other people both living and dead is a well-known plot device. As far as questioning reality and bending the rules of physics is concerned, The Matrix got there first, and the science of The Matrix (only the first one) was much more believable. Not that The Matrix was original either – we Indians have always known that the world is just Maya, but that is not relevant to this discussion here. What is relevant is the fact that the comparisons with The Matrix are inevitable for Inception, and according to me, Inception loses on that front.

And that is why, my final verdict is that while Inception is a very well-made movie, it left me a little disappointed. I don’t know whether the trailers were too explicit, or I had set my expectations a bit too high reading the “OMG Inception is the best movie made in like, ever!” Facebook status updates from some of my friends. But when I saw The Matrix, I felt it was full of surprises. Inception, on the other hand, felt predictable to the very end – not in the details of course, but in the overall plot. To be fair, I saw The Matrix when I was a lot younger, I had not seen trailers, and Facebook did not exist back then (I know I sound like somebody’s grandfather saying that line).

Inception is definitely an excellent movie. A “must-watch,” to use the oft-used phrase. But a life-changing experience as some people around me seem to claim? No way! Four stars out of five if you ask me. The Matrix would probably get five. Not Inception.

But then, it was The Matrix that planted the seed of the idea in our minds. Inception pays the price of coming second, and it does a very good job of being the second.

The K-7

It's over a month since I wrote my last post here, and while I would not go so far as to say I have disappointed my readers since I do not have enough of them, I am sure the few that I have would not have felt exactly appointed either, being forced to look at that dog story again and again. But why didn't I write? Was I busy with my coursework or my research? Although I'm tempted to answer that question in the negative, it would be politically incorrect for a Ph.D. student to say so. Therefore let me put it this way: I wasn't any busier in the last month than I have been in the past year and a half. The reason for not posting here is something different. It is my newly purchased toy that is keeping me occupied for most of my spare time; a toy which goes by the name of Pentax K-7. It is my first digital SLR camera and I have been spending all my leisure hours learning to use it and reading up its 330-page user manual.

When friends see my camera, they react in one of three ways.

"Oh wow! That looks cool! How much zoom does it have?" is the typical reaction of people who are not familiar with SLR cameras. On being informed that it has only 3x zoom, they barely conceal their disappointment and walk away.

The second reaction is from a very small group of people who are aware of SLR camera fundamentals but do not keep track of the current market. They ask me about the camera and listen with interest when I describe its features, and seemingly accept my verdict that this is the best camera for this price. But it is possible that these people have been behaving this way out of politeness, and they actually belong to group three which is by far the largest group among all my friends.

The group three people ask, "Why Pentax? Why not Canon or Nikon?" Sometimes the question is implied even if not spoken aloud. I hope the rest of my post would serve as a satisfactory answer to this question. This is not exactly a review of the K-7 as I have not tested it thoroughly yet, and it is definitely not a comparison of the performance of the K-7 with competing models from Canon and Nikon since I have not used those cameras. However, I think this post could still be useful to a person who wants to know what to look for before purchasing a digital SLR camera.

But before we come to the K-7, we must go back in time. Almost twenty-nine years ago my father wanted to buy an SLR camera. Unlike me, he had the experience of using several borrowed SLR cameras. Yet, when he decided to buy one for himself, he settled on the Pentax MX. Although the camera looks like a giant compared to the tiny point-and-shoots of recent years, it was then the smallest SLR in its class, and one of the smallest manual SLRs ever made. Numerous moments of my childhood (and later my sister's) were captured on film using that camera. For the first eight years, my father had only one lens after which he bought one more. He always maintains that Pentax lenses are as good as Canon and Nikon lenses if not better. I can say they are at least better than Canon as that is the only other brand that I have used. When I came to the US in 2008, my father gave me the camera. I bought another lens after I came here and I have been shooting on film occasionally ever since.

When I decided to buy a DSLR, my first concern was, "Will I be able to use my old lenses with my new camera?" As I browsed the online reviews of various models from different manufacturers, only Pentax advertised of one fact.

"Our cameras are compatible with all Pentax lenses ever made."

This in itself was not sufficient reason to be overjoyed. Modern lenses are auto-focus lenses which allow quick clicking, and they also have image stabilization which means the lens elements can shift a little to offset the effect of small vibrations of the photographer's hand. I have used an older Canon lens with a new Canon DSLR body, but the result was less than satisfactory as the older lens did not have image stabilization. The newer lens gave far better images. So if Pentax says their cameras are compatible with older lenses that was all very good, but would the picture quality suffer if I use those lenses? On closer inspection, two more facts were revealed.

1. Pentax DSLRs have shake reduction in the body and not in the lens like Canon and Nikon. That meant any lens that I used, old or new, would give exactly the same quality of pictures. This fact has been confirmed now that I have bought the camera and used it with older lenses.
2. Pentax DSLRs have auto-focus assist for use with manual lenses which means the camera lets me know when the focus is perfect even when I am using a manual focus lens. Not only that, the K-7 can also automatically click the picture as soon as the focus is perfect when I am using a manual focus lens and focusing by rotating the focusing ring.

I emphasize on the above facts so much because the usability and performance of my older lenses was a crucial issue in my choice of camera. And if someone has an arsenal of older Nikon or Canon gear, I would suggest they go for their respective brands, although no other brand makes using older lenses as easy as Pentax does. This moon photo is a handheld shot taken using my Vivitar 100-300mm manual zoom lens fitted with a 2x teleconverter.

My father always tells me, "A camera is only as good as the bit of glass in front of it." While this was completely true for older film cameras, things are a bit more complicated in the digital world. Here cameras have "features", and a sensor which records the images. Although I was already almost certain on buying Pentax because of the lens compatibility, I still checked out the features of this camera and tried to determine whether I was making a compromise on any front. And only then I realized how bad Pentax's marketing strategy was. This camera was offering features that similarly priced Canons and Nikons didn't (weather-sealed body and lens that can operate at -10 degrees Celsius, 5.2 fps shooting, 30 fps HD video, 3" LCD, 100% viewfinder, live view to name a few), and yet not many people knew about them. Not only that, this camera was offering features that were invented by Pentax, features that no other manufacturer provided. That is why when I tell my Canon and Nikon using friends that I have an electronic level-indicator, automatic horizon correction, sensor-shift composition adjustment, in camera HDR capture, a sensitivity priority mode, rear panel remote-control sensor, external microphone jack, a lock on the mode dial and one touch RAW, they usually go "Huh... what was that again?" And despite all this, the K-7 has one of the smallest bodies in its class.

I am not writing this to advertise for Pentax. I am justifying my choice. Does the camera have any shortcomings? It sure has. I am not saying this myself because as I said, I did not compare it directly with Canon and Nikon DSLRs of its own class. I did use a much cheaper Canon Rebel XSi during summer, and although it overexposed my shots, I loved how it sensed my cheek and switched off the LCD when I put the camera to my eye. I would have loved that feature in my Pentax. As far as image quality is concerned, I am very happy with the images so far. However, this website compares images from different brands and they suggest that the Pentax K-7 sensor falls short of the competitors under certain conditions. I do not dispute their claim. I just say I can live with that shortcoming as it is a very specific condition where it fails.

Also, two allegations have been made about Pentax DSLRs all over the Internet. One, their autofocus is slower than Canon and Nikon, especially in low light. Two, the high-ISO images captured in low light are noisier in Pentax. I myself cannot say if they are true, but if the experts say so, they must be. Again, I knew of these problems before I bought the K-7 but they are things that I can live with. The picture on the left was taken at ISO 1600. Click on it to enlarge it. Does it look too bad?

The bottomline is, I am an amateur photographer and intend to remain so (well, except the occasional summer job maybe). I am not among those people who go on expeditions to photograph wildlife or shoot rock concerts and weddings professionally. Low light is usually an indication for me to pack up and go home. So a faster focusing lens or a less noisy sensor does not appeal to me as a weather sealed body or an in-camera shake reduction system does. That is why the Pentax K-7 remains my choice.

And that is why blogging will take a backseat until I get bored of my new toy, something which I don't foresee happening in the near future.

Harry Potter and the Half-book Movie

Or Harry Potter and the Half-baked Movie.

Whichever name you call it by, the sixth movie in the Harry Potter series keeps the average Pottermaniac glued to the seat for most of its 2 hour 33 minute duration and leaves them longing for more in the end. Quite literally. And I don't say this as a compliment. I say this because the movie leaves out very important plot points in favour of some fancy scenes invented by the director.

Maybe I am not a very good reviewer, because a person who wears a Hogwarts school T-shirt to the movie can hardly be expected to be objective. Also, the fact that my companion kept me waiting for a few hours in front of the theatre and failed to turn up or inform anything did not help. This is the second time I watched a movie alone (I mean without some company- the theatre was full enough) and I am not keen to repeat the experience. However, let me try to evaluate the movie in as fair a manner as possible.

First of all, this is the first movie in the series where I did not feel the flow of time. In earlier movies, there is a clear flow of time as events follow one another during the academic year at Hogwarts. Here, each event seemed to be an occurrence by itself, without referring to the notches on the time scale. It is true that we see some snow, and Christmas comes (only so that Harry could go to The Burrow), but then during the attack on The Burrow the land is still as swampy as in summer.

And while we are at it, when did the death eaters ever attack The Burrow? That was not earlier than Bill and Fleur’s wedding seven months later. Why was that scene needed? Just to show that Harry and Ginny loved each other? To provide a little more screen time to Bellatrix Lestrange (who is a bit too theatrical for my tastes) and Fenrir Greyback? All this could have happened at Hogwarts in the end. There wasn’t even a battle at Hogwarts.

Secondly, what happened to all those memories of Voldemort’s youth and his family? No mention of Marvolo GrantGaunt, the Riddle family or Hufflepuff’s cup. I wonder how they are going to continue the next movie without showing these things.

But most importantly, who is the Half-blood Prince? Why wasn’t it mentioned why he is the Half-blood Prince? We once hear him mentioned with respect to the book, and then, he himself announces of his being the Half-blood Prince in the end. The whole importance of the name of the movie is lost on the non-reading viewers.

But the movie had possibilities to excel. Although Professor Slughorn is a bit too thin, the cinematography and the music in this movie are really good. The special effects are brilliant and so is the acting mostly. However, I really do not understand why David Yates and Steve Kloves think they can tell a better story than J. K. Rowling. Evidently they do think that way, or they wouldn’t have messed up the ending so much. And the free goggles coming with The Quibbler can see wrackspurts? Really? Are these filmmakers dumber than the millions of Harry Potter fans who understand that there are no wrackspurts or crumple-horned snorkacks?

In the end, a Harry Potter movie is all about fans; fans who swear by each tiny incident in each book, and I don’t think those fans will approve of this movie. I understand that a book and a movie are very different forms of story-telling and everything from a book cannot be incorporated in a movie. I am not being unreasonable about this point. As a proof, I will say that I fairly liked the fourth and fifth movies although they omitted sections of the book. However, this movie leaves out sections that are critical to the storyline. I would like to see how they are going to fix this problem in the next movie.

Our Home

This is not a review of the best documentary I have ever seen. I will not write a conventional review because a review can never express the range of emotions that I felt while watching this movie. Further, a review should be impartial and objective. I can never be objective about a movie like Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "Home" and weigh its good and bad points, because the overall message of the movie is so strong that it becomes more important than everything else.

Not that there is a lot to weigh. With breathtaking aerial views of the earth from 54 countries, Armand Amar's truly global music and moving narration, Home has depicted our planet in a way that I have never seen being done before. From the Arctic pack-ice to the Australian grasslands, from the Masai village on the savanna to the skyscrapers of Dubai, from the rain forests of Costa Rica to the permafrost covered Siberia, from water-guzzling Las Vegas to the parched villages of Rajasthan, Home may have just created the most complete picture of our planet. It is something that we could proudly send across the universe to other civilizations to tell them about us.

Did I just say “proudly?” Scratch that out. Watching Home made me hang may head in shame. It brought tears to my eyes. Shame for being a specimen of Homo sapiens. Tears of sadness on seeing what our greed has done to our mother planet. And this is where Home is different from many other documentaries on similar topics that I have seen on National Geographic or Discovery Channel. Home is not a neutral narration of events happening on earth. Home has a message to give us, a plea that we have ignored for too long. We, some of the newest creatures to walk the face of this planet have defaced it in such a way that no other creature in history ever dreamt of. If another intelligent species unacquainted with humans were to watch Home, they would surely make sure that none of us ever reached their planet.

Home deals with most of the evils that mankind brought with them – climate change, global warming, deforestation, erosion, droughts, species becoming extinct, ever-widening economic gap between the rich and the poor. As the movie says, “Everything is linked.” It also provides us with beautiful visuals of pristine lands unaltered by our filthy hands. Home directly points a finger towards the developed nations with their wasteful and over-indulgent lifestyles and tells them to mend their ways, or suffer. Watching this movie truly makes us realize that we human beings are like cancer cells on the planet.

Watching Home also made me more proud of being a citizen of a third world country than I have ever been. India ranks among the topmost nations where spending on renewable energy sources are concerned, and Indians (along with the inhabitants of other poor Asian and African nations) have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the world. We still live close to nature, and with nature. That does not mean that we won’t suffer, of course. The ultra-consumerist lifestyle of the West (of which I have been guilty of lately) is killing the planet. When it goes, nobody will be spared. Unfortunately, that seems very likely given the number of abusive comments on the movie’s YouTube page screaming that global warming in a myth.

The movie was released on June 5th this year in theatres, TV and on the Internet simultaneously. I found it on YouTube. Here is the link. (A word of caution to viewers with slow Internet connections: it is over an hour and a half long and high definition video, so it may get stuck. Also, its actual size is around 1 GB. So if you have a limited-download-quota Internet line, be careful.) This kind of release was needed to reach the maximum number of people. Who spends money to go and watch a documentary in a theatre? They might watch it on TV, but then it leaves out people like me who live off the Internet. And the makers of Home wanted to pass on this warning to as many people as possible which they were able to do this way.

But most importantly, Home passes on a message of hope. Along with showing us the mistakes that we made, it also shows us the way forward. It tells us how we have the power, even now, to change things for better. It tells us how people around the world have ignored pessimistic views and made miracles happen. We just need to act and spread the word.

That’s what I am doing. Not writing a review. Just spreading the word.

(Update: The movie was available on YouTube only till 15th July, so the first link will not work anymore.)

Up

Last night I watched "Up", Disney-Pixar's latest presentation. I have been hearing about this movie from my friends for the last couple of weeks, and what they said seemed to be a bit odd for a children's animated movie. Two of the ladies said they cried through the movie, and the third didn't cry, but she heard sobs in the theatre. So even before the movie started, I was somewhat apprehensive about it. After watching the movie, my verdict is that this is one animated movie that is different from all others because it is not funny at all.

Now readers may say, "But you wrote the same thing about WALL-E a few weeks ago! You said it is different and scary." I agree. WALL-E is different. WALL-E is scary too, because of the message it carries. But each and every scene of WALL-E is funny in itself - a quality that can be found in any other Disney movie like Aladdin, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life or Jungle Book. All these movies are essentially based in a children's world, with incidents that a child can understand and find humour in. Even WALL-E, with its bleak futuristic setting, uses humour in every scene to be "funny" to children. And this is something which Up isn't. It's just not a funny movie.

True, it does try to be funny in some of the scenes, like when Alpha speaks with a high pitched voice or when Russel climbs over Carl's face (sorry Crys, I used the same examples as you did but then I read your review first, and it's difficult not to internalize!), but the overall situation in the story was so serious at these moments that the humour is completely overshadowed. The first ten minutes of the movie are probably its funniest - the next wordless sequence between Carl and Ellie is probably the saddest and most depressing sequence I have ever seen in a children's movie. Without revealing anything about the storyline, I can only say that whatever happens to Carl starting ten minutes into the movie and almost up to the end would have probably made this movie a tragedy if not for the forced happy ending (which is a must in children's movies). Again, one must understand that the death of Mufasa in The Lion King, or the poisoning of Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were frightening or depressing sequences in themselves, but with respect to the story they were small temporary misfortunes that were only a part of a bigger story of triumph. Here, however, the losses are so permanent and crushing that it keeps lingering at the back of the mind even during the happier moments. Although I did not cry, I do not blame someone who did. Interestingly, an injured man bled in a scene here - I cannot remember any Disney movie scene in the past where blood has been shown so explicitly, but I may be mistaken.

But is the movie good? The story is relatively simple, with fewer incidents happening. The music by Michael Giacchino is hauntingly beautiful. The animation is good, though I felt it is not as good as WALL-E. There are again a few plot holes, but if you can believe the basic premise of a house flying away with helium balloons, you really should not bother about plot holes. Overall, the movie is definitely good and children may even find it funny and cheerful to a certain extent. But if you are an adult and want to watch this movie to spend a couple of hours laughing, stay away. Adults should approach Up with an expectation to see a good serious movie. If that's what you are looking for, you won't be disappointed.