Salim’s Viewing! (updated)

Kankar (Pak Drama)
Sanam Baloch is amazing. Def my favourite Pakistani actress. This explores domestic abuse and it’s hereditary nature. The ridiculously regressive nature of this society (one is punished just for being born female) is portrayed accurately but Sanam’s character is an inspiration, both admirable and memorable. And what a finale!

Ek Thi Marium
I can’t get enough of Sanam Baloch so watched this biographical telefilm in which she plays Pakistan’s first female fighter-pilot who died on active duty. Marium of course deserves the tribute but the film itself never really takes off. Additionally, I can’t help but roll my eyes at any demonstration of Pakistani patriotism so this clearly wasn’t a film for me.

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An Jo on Zero

Spoiler Alert

In the pre-climactic scene of Zero, Anushka’s Aafiya talks about the compounding nature of love; at once the fragility and strength; at once the frailty and honesty of human beings. the emotion of love. She talks of facts in her life being stranger than fiction; of the actions one resorts to for love. Love, or the search for it, yields two types of reactions: one that the self feels; and one the other, i.e. the world feels. It makes sense then, that only three individuals [Katrina’s Babita Kumari, the hurt-in-love actress, smiles and says proudly that she kissed him when Shah’s Bauua Singh comes onto the digital bill-board in a foreign country] that consider themselves – and are made to feel – incomplete by the world at large go through what might be called a different trajectory of emotions when in love or when lost. And if one, as an audience, buys this logic, much, and much more of the scenes, and story-line makes sense – at least to the heart – and one’s willing to forgive the excesses that the writer and director resort to under the unbearable burden of making Shah Rukh Khan, the ‘superstar’ act as well as retain his star wattage. This is a double-edged sword that sometimes works and shines – but also bleeds both ways, and it shows.

What the Movies Taught Me About Being a Woman (Manohla Dargis in the NYT)

“I was a movie-struck kid, and I learned much from watching the screen, including things about men and women that I later had to unlearn or learn to ignore. I learned that women needed to be protected, controlled and left at home. I learned that men led, women followed. And so, although I loved Fred Astaire, I merely liked his greatest dance partner, Ginger Rogers. I was charmed by her sly smile and dazzled by the curve of her waist as she bent in his embrace. But I saw her as a woman in the great man’s arms, a message I didn’t learn just from films. … In the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, I have been thinking a lot about what movies have asked me to dream, including the image of the forced kiss and all that it signifies about women and film. I’ve been thinking about what else I learned from them.”

 

Read the complete piece (embedded clips et al) HERE

Nicole Kidman Married Tom Cruise for Love — and Got Protection

Excerpt: “…That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection. I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed. I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.

Of course I’ve had #MeToo moments — since I was little! But do I want to expose them in an article? No. Do they come out in my work? Absolutely. I’m open and raw. I want to have my well of experience and emotion tapped into, used — and I’m not just talking about sexual harassment. I’m talking about loss, death, the full array of life. But it has to be by the right people so it’s not abused again. I’m making a movie with Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie about Roger Ailes. [Kidman is playing Gretchen Carlson.]”

Showman: New Yorker Profile of Sam Mendes

Excerpts: ““The director as a concept, as a cultural phenomenon, is dying,” he said. “Coppola of ‘The Godfather,’ Scorsese of ‘Taxi Driver,’ Tarantino of ‘Pulp Fiction’—these figures are not going to emerge in the way they did in the twentieth century. The figures who are going to emerge will come out of long-form television.” He continued,

NewYorker.Com Review: Richard Brody on The First Man

“The one scene that embodies the sixties onscreen is, to my mind, among the most contemptible scenes in recent movies. It takes place midway through the action, when Congress begins to question the value of the space program. Neil is dispatched to represent nasa in a meeting at the White House, where senators fret about “taxpayer dollars,” and while there he is summoned to the phone and informed of the deaths of three astronauts in an Apollo test. The point is clear: that the astronauts are risking their lives while Congress is counting beans and playing politics. 

An Jo on 96

SPOILER ALERT

96 is a bittersweet amalgamation of the ‘BEFORE’ series – chiefly ‘BEFORE SUNSET’— by Linklater, beautifully mapped onto the Indian landscape by contouring out the emotional crests and troughs of childhood love, its extensions, and its sustenance. It is a triumph for one of the most interesting actors to emerge out on the Tamil screens, Vijay Sethupathi, who brings his own brand of ‘casualness’ to his act, yet segues it – mainly in the second-half – into a fine act embodying a character who pretends to be living in the ‘moment’ but is really living in the past savoring moments of first love which are, obviously, momentous to him. [In fact, the film opens with a song ‘The Life of Ram’, with the lyrics and visuals expounding on the loneliness that’s part of Ram’s existential crises, as well as the thread he hangs onto to continue his existence. It shows him living life as a travel photographer, but traveling alone, and seemingly enjoying the independence—(he pulls a cart for an old man in Calcutta; drives in circles in his car onto a vast, open field; sits staring at the horizon on a beach, and runs on sand-dunes in Rajasthan, while the lyrics convey his feelings that he hasn’t understood the world yet though his hair has greyed..)— that a relationship-less existence provides, but that’s actually a facade.] There’s a nod here to Ranbir’s characters from Ali’s films portraying his alone-self in a populated world that’s hard to miss.