Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps"

I was half way through my teenage years when I first saw a drama. It was Crazy Mohan's famous laughter riot "Marriage made in Saloon". I did not quite understand much of the comedy in it but it was a strange first-time experience. It was muck like a movie, except that the actors were performing live, the camera angle was set pretty much the same, which is behind your cornea, no instant panning to Alps mountain for songs and most important of all it was 100% three dimensional. When the actors move on the stage, I heard the 'thud' from their walking across the stage, sensed the changes in their voice as they moved and spoke at the same time and saw the slight adjustments made by other performers to make sure everyone and everything is in its right place for what is going to follow and all of it happening in the same exact second. One thing that made me particularly hooked was the way the various sets and props were instantly moved around to create the surroundings required for a scene. I like plain flow of events and this particular asset of the theater-drama world really gave me the sense of transparency that I could appreciate. Since then I have only been to couple of such theater shows, all in my hometown- Chennai. Although I never gave much thought to it, I always wanted to see such play here in America. Lots of movies have been adapted from such plays, most of them from the famed Broadway district of New York city. For this thanksgiving holiday weekend I took a trip to the 'Big Apple' with some of my friends and after giving it a serious thought this time I decided I should enjoy the theater-drama-luxury. And by cause-effect principle, on a cold, windy November afternoon, we were seated at the legendary, warm, kind of old-style Colt Theater in Broadway, NYC for the 2’o clock drama- "The 39 Steps".

Yes, it IS a long prelude, but it helps to understand the cause-effect principle. The 39 steps is a comical recreation of the similarly named Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film, which is an adaptation from John Buchanan's novel published in 1915. It's a classic spy-action-romantic-thriller story, which somehow has comedy in its core. It opens with a monologue by the hero Richard Hannay (Charles Edwards) who is a suave, low profile gentleman in a World War II imminent Britain. The repeated news of war and rumors of war on the tabloids further bore Richard who is fed up with the tedium of his life. To break free, wanting to 'do something utterly pointless', he decides to go to the theater where he meets Annabella Schmidt (Jennifer Ferrin). As the story moves she mysteriously gets killed at his home as result of which he flees from the cops (a number of them)/bad guys (again, a number of them) while he unfolds the 'mysteriously' part mentioned earlier. Note the Key word in the above sentence is 'A number of them'.

The show only has four members as cast. That's right, other than the lights engineer, only 4 members perform for the whole 2-hour production. Charles Edwards plays Richard, Ms Ferrin plays Schmidt, a farm girl called Margaret and Richard's eventual love interest Pamela and all the other roles are performed by Cliff Saunders and Arnie Burton who are aptly referred in the stage notes as Man#1 and Man#2 since it would be pointless to list all the characters they play. To get a perspective of the effort, imagine Dhasavadharam Kamal. Now imagine that he must change from one character to another in front of the camera. Now imagine that there is no re-take and everything, down to last sigh from the script, must be performed in one continuous flow and still be mentioned as "Man #1 and Man #2". Together, they become all of the ‘A number of them’, I mentioned earlier. They must really love their job.

The show is simply astonishing at various levels and it kept me and my friends talking about it for hours after it ended. Throughout the play Mr.Saunders and Mr.Burton produce some exceptional performances moving props and exchanging costumes between them as they morph from casual onlookers to policemen, to dangerous spies, to Irish hotel manager-couple, the dangerous villain couple and at one point life-less stage props. Apart from acting they also carry/move/adjust/remove most of the stage artifacts with such precision that its hard believe that they don't even break a sweat. The best part of the play was the scene in which Richard travels in a train with a couple of talkative passengers. Just using some battered wooden trunks and frugal yet brilliant lighting, combined with perfect synchronization between the actors the scene was an absolute winner leading to great applause and appreciation from the audience. Another such scene would be using 4 chairs and steering wheel to simulate a bumpy car ride. It’s hard to explain the amount of work and the way it was executed. It’s something that must be seen to appreciate and enjoy.

Mr.Charles, playing Richard takes center stage from start to finish guiding the story and sometimes controlling Mr.Saunders and Mr.Burton from over doing things (as per script, of course). I always liked the British accent and when it’s mixed with charm and excellence its quite entertaining. Ms.Ferrin performs her part to the fullest matching everything with her male colleagues on stage. But the clear winners of the show where Man#1 and Man#2 who seem to be present through out the play, the fact which I realized only when, in a comic twist, Mr. Burton himself mentions it.

Not very often that I feel that I got the best value for my money, but this one is definitely the best 69$ I spent for a product of entertainment value.

Burn After Reading

When it comes to comedy, Hollywood has done it all. From the wildest Eddie Murphy to the wackiest Jim Carrey and all the Adam Sandlers, Ben Stillers and Mike Meyers in between, the masters of movie making have not left a stone unturned. But when you think of American comedies, for some reason, only tities and fart jokes come to mind, with seriously rare exceptions like 'Juno'. Although there hasn’t been much favor among the movie buffs for a British style dry wit in American movies, every now and then some creators try to throw such films to the audience hoping to see if it catches on. Usually these movies are low budget, feature not so prominent figures and tend to play on the safer side by employing stupid characters with even stupid-er actions. 'Burn After Reading' is one of them, but only too different.

Story: Very Simple. A small misunderstanding gets blown out of proportions when people of different priorities get involved leading to the obvious chaos, which gets solved, in the end, by the chaos itself.
Osborne Cox (John Malkovic) is a CIA analyst, who gets fired because of office politics and becomes paranoid, more than usual that is. He decides to write a book about his life in the Agency (which he so poshly refers as ‘a memoir’) which, stored in a CD, in a bizarre flow of events falls into the hands two completely mundane gymnasium staff, Chad Feldhiemer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand). They think the CD contains sensitive information (which Chad calls ‘the shit’) associated with ‘some guy’ with some ‘high profile agency’. Linda, who is short on cash for her reconstructive cosmetic surgery (the complete works of her body) that she thinks is her only chance of finding her soul mate, sees this as the God given opportunity. Meanwhile Osborne gets more insane by the day as he learns of his wife Katie Cox’s (Tilda Swinton) sexual relationship with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who is an womanizer for his part, and secretly divorce Osborne. To make things a bit more convoluted, Harry, who dates women for sex, hooks up with Linda. While Linda and Chad try to get some money out of Osborne’s ‘shit’, Osborne tries to bring his personal life to order as the CIA watches over the proceedings and for fun sake the Russians are dragged in as well. What ensues is an hour and half comedy-drama that is smart and funny for the same reasons. And the movie ends, strangely, as if nothing happened.

Now, given this kind of first class cast, you expect the performance to be outstanding. But what you don’t expect is the kind of characters they have taken up and brought to life with such panache. While Brad Pitt is the over excited childish guy who says ‘Appearances can be Deceiving’ in the funniest possible way, George Clooney effectively becomes the guy who just after having sex goes for a long jog and builds a cradling women's pleasure machine in his basement. As always Jon Malkovich performs as only he can, ever narcissistic ever swearing. All the other actors fit snugly into their characters and you hardly get distracted.

To me the highlight of the film is Chad, I mean Brad Pitt. With his careless and adventures character he makes the funny part of the film standout. As Linda drags him into tricky situations he complains and then curiously follows only to be get hit in the face. The whole scenario is as confusing to him as it is exciting. Brad simply owns the movie until he gets shot; oh yeah, he dies just before the movie ends.

The movie is the handy work of Joel and Ethan Coen (guys who made the 2008 Academy Award winner ‘ No Country For Old Men’) and it clearly shows. The film has the same arid tone and the characters are already into their stride when the movie starts that there is no beginning in the story as such, only the event that triggers the chain reaction. As soon they talk, you know their nature and then you kind of expect them to react in the way they do. And with every miss-step its dark comedy jumps out of the screen. The movie is set in what looks like cold weather streets of Washington DC and the music perfectly brings out the complexity of the situation.
The punch dialogue of the movie is the final sentence uttered when the CIA director played by J.K Simmons says that they should ‘learn to not repeat what they did in this case, although they are not sure what they did in this case’.

Mostly, you laugh in this movie because its funny, but more importantly it is intelligent.

And by the way, if you don’t find this movie funny, don’t beat up yourself. Like I said in the first few lines, this is not for everyone.

Tamil: Subramaniapuram

Subramaniapuram:

It is not very often that I watch a Tamil movie.The reason behind the attitude is that I rarely watch a movie that does not give any signals of being the least bit interesting. This applies impartially to a movie of any language for that matter. Usually the film features a favorite actor or actress of mine or the story seems intriguing or there is at least a fair bit of incredible CGI effects in order to peek an interest in me to watch it. Without at least one of these items, it is hard for me to even think about it. Now, honestly, I have tried a few times to watch such movies, but just after a few minutes, I always end up cursing myself for wasting my brain’s time. It would have rather spent those irrecoverable hours day-dreaming. In all fairness, most of Tamil movie industry lives on the ‘masala movie’ formula and if you are even a least bit health conscious, like me, then you know it is a not a good recipe. That said, these days Kodamabakam, the place which is supposedly the capitol for Tamil movie industry, seems to have attracted some sensible residents. There has been, in recent times, a few good movies released here and there that seem to have broken the shackles of the stereotypical Indian melodrama and ventured into the better quality zone. A friend of mine referred the fairly recent release ‘Subramaniapuram’ as being good, and since movies are sort-of his area of specialization I decided to give it a shot and I was not disappointed.

Story: The story is not new or complex. Four jobless, penniless, careless, friends trust the wrong guy and find themselves in the deep end. They seek revenge, as friendship, love and betrayal play a triangular series only to bring their story to an abrupt halt. What makes the movie worth watching is the fact that you get to experience the emotions as it unravels without much effort.

The movie starts in the present day as Kasi (Kanja Karuppu) is released from prison and he recognizes someone waiting outside for him as his pal. What looks like a reunion of two friends takes a sharp turn as the other guy viciously stabs him with a knife and takes off. And with him the story makes a leap back 20 years where Kasi, Paraman (M Sasikumar), Azhagar (Jai) spend every day of their lives together as friends with irresponsible binging and fighting caring for none.

The story is in late 80’s backdrop and with the narrow streets of rural Madurai in Tamil Nadu and thick retro hair-do of the cast the director takes you to that time and space instantly. Classical Tamil hit songs of the bygone era are played over big loud speakers often enough to keep you there. Initially it is hard to differentiate between the major players; with both the main characters’ faces almost covered with thick beard.But after a while you get used to it and start recognizing them by their voices. Majority of the first half of the film brings all the important characters into the view. There is the ex-counselor who is losing power and not happy about it, his manipulative brother, Samudirakani, who frequently bails out our rowdy bunch out of jail, and trouble, for which our gang feel indebted, and of course, the seemingly inevitable love story. Azhagar and the ex-counselor daughter secretly trade smiles and emotions much to the annoyance of Paraman who feels that it amounts to disloyalty to their frequent saviors.

The story takes a major twist when the counselor looses his party’s chief regional post to his rival leading to shame and disgrace. In order to get ahead, Samuthrakani convinces our Azhagar and Paraman to kill the opposition leader using their loyalty and affection towards him. They draft a plan and execute it and surrender to police, hoping that Samudirakani would bail them out, only to find out that they were betrayed. Full of rage, they swear revenge and as soon as they get bailed out of prison by their new found acquaitance there, look to get it.. From here on it is just cat and mice story with both parties switching roles as the cat and mice while Azhagar struggles to find a place between his long love and new found vengeance. While affection and anger introduce conflict of interest, money and betrayal complete our heroes’ circle of life. In a crude twist of fate things come to an abrupt end.

Throughout the movie, the characters perform as if there is no camera in front them. Every dialogue, every emotion and every gesture is delivered with such ease and realism that it’s too easy to forget that almost all of them are newbies to main stream cinema. To be noticed especially is Swathi, who plays the female lead role as the daughter and Azhagar’s love affair, performs admirably. With her typical south Indian face and charm, she looks the character and more importantly delivers it with aplomb. The father character and the handicapped friend also produce stunning performances.

Director SasiKumar, who also produced the film, must get huge applause for his efforts in making sure that the film does not drag on. The movie flows in a stream line fashion without losing its grip on the viewer. The sets and props were positioned to perfection and only when you look back at the movie, the meticulousness is apparent. There were no unnecessary songs, out of place dialogues and best of all, for which I thank the director, no punch dialogues.

Like I said earlier, it’s not very often that I watch Tamil movies, but when I do and I realize that it’s a good one, its very refreshing.

One only hopes that this is not rare blip in the Tamil cinema, but a forerunner for things to come.

Kung-Fu Panda

I have always loved animation movies. I’ve always loved cartoons and animation movies are simply the richer cousins who visit not as often, but never fail to entertain. From Tom and Jerry to Swat Kats, my life has always been made better by toons and I have to say, 3D animation and its various forms do, and probably will, hold a special place in my heart forever. If someone is talking about animation, they are most likely taking about a piece of video by Pixar. They have proven time and again that when it comes to 3D animation, they are the leaders in innovation and entertainment. From Toy Story series to the latest Ratatouille, Pixar has clearly set the standard and often exceeded it. But the movie I am going to discuss in this blog is not from Pixar, but a studio that does not have such a great history when it comes to CGI Animation, but has a spectacular history in movie making. With one of the best film directors of the era, Steven Spielberg, at the helm, DreamWorks Studio has definitely produced more than few crowd pleasing movies and it hasn’t failed to deliver in its latest CGI treat “The Kung-Fu Panda”.

Story: Most animation movies have a simple story line (who cares, if your characters can pull of matrix like moves at standard cost) and Kung-Fu Panda, is not so different. Po (Voiced by Jack Black) is a clumsy, fat Panda with a big fetish for and absolutely no skills in martial arts who is nominated as the Chosen Warrior to defeat Tai Long (Ian McShane), a evil snow leopard who wants to destroy the valley of peace. For that he must become the pupil of Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), a red panda,along with the furious five (a monkey, tigress, viper,mantis and crane- voiced by Jackie chan, Angelina Jolie, and so on), one of whom was supposed to be the chosen warrior, and learn to become a martial arts master and destroy Tai Long.

I started to watch this movie like the way I watch all the movies, ‘expecting it to be decent’. But ‘decent’ became ‘wow’ the moment the movie began and before I knew it, it crossed ‘awesome’ and there was no turning back. The animation was crystal clear, at times making me wonder if it was real. One good example of the amount of perfection that has been achieved with the movie was the scene in which Po is given some wisdom by his master up in the cliff edge at sunset. The fur in the panda’s body gracefully move with the light wind that blows across the screen, while the red sun’s dying rays, smoothly change the silhouette of the animal with shades of gold. The darker sections of the movie, like the Chorh-Gom Prison, where the snow leopard is held, were also brilliantly sculpted to bring out the mood of the location at the same time not distracting the viewer. And the action sequences are an instant knockout especially the final fight between Po and Long.

One best criteria of a good animation movie, or any movie for that matter, is that the audience must not get detached from the screenplay for the full length of the movie due unwanted ambiance and the fat panda and his friends certainly make sure that we didn’t. Everything has been put in the right mix and served with warmth and chopsticks.

The comedy in the movie is also a big plus. The panda’s clumsiness border hilarity especially at the beginning of shifu’s training. Jack Black gives the panda model pure life, making it funny and adorable at the same time. I remember the never ending laughs in the theater every time the panda starts climbing the winding stairs to the high temple. All the characters share the comic relief in the movie, even the grand master tortoise.

The only thing I felt disappointing about the movie was that Jackie chan had only a few lines throughout but given the amount of stardom in the movie, it’s understandable.

Overall, Hollywood has once again shown its sophistication in CGI animation with yet another blockbuster in the much less crowded genre and this movie, if anything, has only piped my love for pandas, animated or real.

Dhasavadharam

This was the third Tamil movie that Ive gone to a theater to watch in USA and as they say, three was definitely lucky. The first was Sivaji: the Boss and the second was Bheema (What a waste of money that was!!). This was my first movie since I came to Arizona and let me tell you that, that alone was not the only ‘firsts’ about the movie.

The story: As you might have already come to know from various other, more prominent, film reviews, the story is not much. The crux of the story can be precisely put in a single phrase as ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and can be extended a little bit for better understanding by following it with the phrase ‘and the reason is, most of the time, too complex for any mortal mind’.

Govind (Kamal Hassan with less makeup) is a biological scientist in US who tries to stop his associate from conspiring to sell a viral strain to antisocial elements where it can be used as a biological weapon against humanity. A few milli-litres of the infected solution, which is stored in a tiny vial, has the potential to wipe out cities and as Govind is chased by a hired ex-CIA/assassin Christian Fletcher (Kamal hassan again with quite a lot of makeup) to get hold of it, into several near death situations, the vial gets accidentally sent to India and the action spills over to the sub-continent. What happens to the vial and how religion, science, nature and 10 roles of Kamal Hassan seamlessly work together to result in a ‘happily ever after’ moment is the more than two and a half hours of feverishly scripted and intricately executed celluloid feast of a film, DHASAVADHARAM.

Kamal Hassan has mostly produced movies of very good quality over his long and impressive career as an actor and director, but this movie, in which he has done story, screenplay and dialogs along with 10 different roles- a record for any actor in main stream movies, must be one of his crown achievements. This is special, not merely because of the challenges that he has imposed on himself for the various roles he took in movie that has broken a lot of barriers that seem to have encased and crippled Tamil films, but the fact that it was not a one man show (relatively) as it is a typical case in any big star movies.The film is packed with thrilling action scenes, especially the mostly natural looking chase sequences-a rare sight in Tamil movies, ever winding plot that keeps you engaged throughout and some extremely impressive sets and locations that take you to the center of the story.

The movie travels to a number of geographical locations as the story moves through various subplots, revealing one character-played-by-kamal after another. Kamal takes it upon himself to perfectly match every one of the 10 characters he has played, including a 90+ year old woman, with the language, accent, posture and timing that make them as realistic as any other cast member. From Fletcher to Kalif Ullah, from Balram Naidu to George Bush the actor has stamped his authority and while doing it, appears to be, at ease. Especially his performance as Christian Fletcher is one for the ages. Putting up makeup is one thing. But becoming that person takes substance. It’s as if the man has knobs which he can turn at whim to modify his characteristics and become anything he wants.

Asin Thottumkal requires a special mention here. Too often it can be noted in Kamal movies that every other cast member is shadowed by his prominent presence (performance, rather) and it can be very hard for any actor/actress to be noticeably visible in his shadow. Asin, playing dual roles as Kothai Radhain ancient times and Aandal (a fierce agraharam devotee of Perumal) in current world, does it with aplomb excelling in portrayal of her character and, backing it with a very impressive agraharam-tamil accent, revealing not the fact that Tamil is not her first tongue. There were so many characters in the film, given that Kamal himself was involved in 10, and the mere fact that I remembered Asin after the movie was over was not just because she looked great but it was also her great performance. Like her or not, one must say, well done, Aandal.

The director, K.S Ravikumar, has done a very good job with the movie. Instead of giving each character a small 5 minute presence, which is the usual formula in such types of films, kudos to the director for making all the 10 characters stick till the end. The movie never slacks in projecting a multitude of things to the audience. From the hi-tech work place of Govind to the beautifully crafted performance arena of Avtar Singh it’s hard not to get impressed.As for characters, I personally enjoyed Balram Naidu with his typical regional accent and attitude and George Bush, who was brilliantly portrayed exactly the way I percieve him. I also enjoyed the fact that the songs were cut short as the story moved there by merely accentuanting the situation rather than playing full length and making us forget the story itself.

The negatives about the movie, as usually the case in Kamal Hassan films, were not the absence but excess of things. One thing in definite excess was the panning camera which was used more often that not and induced sharp headaches to more than few in our outfit. Excess use of sloppy computer graphics gave us an excuse to close our eyes to soothe the headache. One definite excess glamor girl- Mallika Sherawat; she might well have found her best part ever in Jasmine (a performer in a Las Vegas gentleman’s club), but seems completely out of place when it comes to acting. How did the director come up with a ‘Stripper working in Las Vegas who was initially trained by Pakistan’ is any body’s guess.

Looking back at the movie, headache aside, I would have to say it was money well spent and I would give it 8 out of 10.

Highlights: Kamal Hassan (all 10 of them), stunt work, editing and direction and Asin Thottumkal.

Distractions: Mostly mediocre and, at more than a few instances, annoying camera work and CGI, Mallika Sherawat.

Until Next Time…..