Films I Have Seen Recently

Half the fun of watching a good movie, or reading a great book, or coming across some amazing eating-joint, for that matter, is being able to tell people about it. I don't think I would have enjoyed reading Ulysses or watching 8 1/2 so much if getting through them didn't grant me bragging rights, especially to those people who had tried to do the same and failed. Even otherwise, the joy of watching something like Fargo or The Big Lebowski is to be able to go over its finer points with other connoisseurs of good cinema. Or laugh about them over cheap booze.

Even though my movie watching has continued more or less unabated, thankfully, I haven't been getting time to write about it here. Or even talk about it with anyone else, except occasionally with a few friends in my mails or over GTalk. There are a few other movie enthusiasts at my small office, but I don't want to give my colleagues an impression that about the only thing I do after work is see films and read fiction. Plus, not many people can get enthusiastic about stuff like Korean romantic films or Japanese sexploitation flicks.

This mail is solely about some of the more interesting movies I have seen in the last 1.5 months or so, and would like to suggest to you too.

Some of these movies have been nominated at the Oscars this year - Milk, The Wrestler, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - and you would have seen them anyway. There are others though, which are equally good, if not better than some of these, but would be lost to memory after doing short tours of the festival circuit, resurfacing as a 'cult classic' some years from now.

I have maintained a record of every movie I have seen since 2004, and it'll be easier for me to go to the list and pick out the memorable ones. But, I would like to do this without looking at the list and see which movies have actually remained etched in memory.

The first name that jumps to my mind is this Swedish film called Låt den rätte komma in, or Let The Right One In. I see that it's at 191 on the IMDb Top 250, so it might not exactly be forgotten soon, but I haven't met too many who have seen this. It's a very unusual take on the vampire story. The snowed-in sets that it has been filmed in make the story of a young (or not so young) female (or not so much of a girl) vampire (as much of a vampire as one needs to be) living a lonely life even more striking.

The next one is The Fall. It's not even a good movie, in the strictest sense. It's just a beautiful movie. The story, maybe to show how inconsequential it is in the general scheme of things for Tarsem Singh, the director, is made up in the movie as it progresses, at times changing characters or setting in the middle of the narrative, because the little girl with a broken arm, for whose benefit the story has been thought of in the first place, is not happy with some part of it, or does not understand some other element. Every shot in the film, that supposedly used no CGI, is painstakingly created, but some shots are particularly breathtaking.

Then there's Blindness. It's one of those rare instances where I have strongly disagreed with what Roger Ebert had to say about a film. This film could be read into a lot to decipher messages about how, today, we look at things, but rarely ever see them. But, for me it was simply a thought experiment to see how people would behave if everyone went blind. Would our notions of shame, propriety, communal behavior still remain intact, or, as happens in the film, we will drop everything, including clothes in some people's cases. A slightly painful film for some people to watch, but very interesting.

JCVD has to be one of the quaintest films I have seen in a long time. Jean Claude Van Damme plays a character strongly inspired by his real life persona, who is known by the same name, and has had a similar film career of having played out repetitive roles in regressive, violent, B-grade flicks. Going through a really lean phase on personal and professional fronts, he reaches absolute pit bottom when he gets involved in a bank heist. This is probably the first time when I realized that Van Damme, whose kick-boxing movies I did enjoy as a kid, can actually act.

A friend gifted me with mint-condition DVDs of six Korean films recently. I have had time to watch only two of them, and one of those was good enough to be a part of this list. It's a strange film again, with very unique characters, whose motivations and responses aren't always clear. Wang-ui Namja, or The King and The Clown, is one of those stories that seem to flow completely on their own, without any pre-meditation, reaching a climax that might seem out of place if seen or spoken of out of context, but could not have been avoided if the story had to run its full course. It is a little over-the-top, as most Korean films are, but here for once, it goes well with the kind of characters that populate the screen.

And the final name would be Ta'm e Guilass, or Taste of Cherry - another of Abbas Kiarostami's masterly creations. Like a number of his other films, the main set in this film too is the protagonist's car, and most of the characters are real people, with no acting background. A very simple plot - a man looking for someone to cover his grave after he lies down in it and commits suicide - is made interesting by how different people respond to this curious demand.

That's it. For now. Got to leave to watch Delhi-6.