Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Realism of The Revenant (2015)


"If we ended up in greenscreen with coffee and everybody having a good time, everybody will be happy, but most likely the film would be a piece of shit."

I wondered throughout if it was all done for real, but yes it was. The Revenant, a 2015 movie, nominated for 12 oscars, is a beefy deal to get over with. Glad to have screened it tonite when Yogi was over. "Starkly beautiful and uncompromising", as one review calls it; ditto.

I did know it would be about the outback, and especially focused on survival, unaware of the background that it is based on the trapper expeditions in the harsh American north. Also didn't know the man behind it - Inarritu - all of whose movies I have enjoyed and found a lot of awareness encapsulated. Babel also had a similar theme of unfolding drama among people of diverse ethnicities and languages. But whereas in Babel the camera swept back and forth between interconnected dramas unfolding in the Moroccan deserts to the Japanese clubs to the Mexican and American border, here the camera is set solely on the American outback, and all "different" peoples - Arikara, Pawnee, Siouxee, French, English - converge here to create an epic drama.

After watching this movie, I admire the skills of the trapper and the survivor even more. Just a week back was I introduced to Nessmuk, a legendary American wilderness survivalist, pulling me back into the feverish thought; and today came The Revenant. Long wilderness reveries to follow in the near future.
Stories started to swirl off the set of the film in the summer. Crew spoke of enduring a “living hell”, of being forced to work in -25C temperatures, of travelling for hours to remote locations in Canada and Argentina to film for a mere 90 minutes, the result of Iñárritu’s decision to shoot only in natural light. 
Leonardo DiCaprio went through hell to play indestructible fur trapper Hugh Glass in The Revenant
PS: 2016 Oscars had some predictable outcomes
- Best Director for Alejandro Inarritu - two consecutive Oscar wins is a feat not seen in the last 65 years, and one which establishes the dominance of the Three Amigos (the Mexican trio of Inarritu, Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron)
- Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio - and his first Oscar!
- Best Cinematography for Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki. He is now the first cinematographer in history to win three consecutive Oscars, following gongs for Birdman (2015) and Gravity (2014)

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Where is the friend I seek / Var är den vän (Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället) / Johan Olof Wallin

Where is the friend I seek at break of day?
When night falls I still have not found Him.
My burning heat shows me His traces
I see His traces whenever flowers bloom
His love is mingled with every air.
His voice calls in the summer wind.


This short translation from the english subtitles to Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) fluttered many hearts (and some like me, who paused the movie midway to blog about it). The poem is a beautiful thought. But replaying the lunch scene over and over, I couldn't help but wonder why the dialog (which is in Swedish) takes so long for each individual line - they just seem to be saying too much for so few words. So I decided to find out more about the poem and its origins.


The poem, Var är den vän som överallt jag söker (by Johan Olof Wallin, a Swedish archbishop and poet) is an old swedish poem, originally written as a hymn in a Swedish book of Psalms published in 1819.

The poem is 8 stanzas in total. In the movie, Bergman uses only the first two, and breaks on the third one. Here are the stanzas spoken between the three characters:

Var är den vän som överallt jag söker?
När dagen gryr, min längtan blott sig öker;
När dagen flyr, jag än ej honom finner,
Fast hjärtat brinner.
Jag ser hans spår, varhelst en kraft sig röjer,
En blomma doftar och ett ax sig böjer.
Uti den suck jag drar, den luft jag andas,
Hans kärlek blandas.
Jag hör hans röst, där sommarvinden susar,...


Here's something for improvisation on the subtitles (hat tip to this guy):
"Where is the friend I seek everywhere?
Dawn is the time of loneliness and care,
In every sign and breath of air,
I find His love is there."

Happy cinema!

Monday, June 18, 2012

Cinema, lately




+
Buffalo '66, Aranyam Kaandam, The Names of Love, Massey Sahib, Shame, Gandu, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Harakiri, Kikujiro, This Must Be the Place, Falling Down, Festen, Dawn of the Dead, Boy, The Graduate, On Any Sunday, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, 50/50, American History X, Ip Man, The Conversation

-
Walkabout, The Year My Voice Broke, Machete, Cet obscur objet du désir, Good Will Hunting, My Left Foot, Wag the Dog, The Departed, Hanna, Warhorse, Reality Bites, Choke, The Man From Nowhere, Dogtooth

Friday, September 16, 2011

hold you close someday, i will,
to break your heart.
impossible is what we were meant to be;
impossibly close so we
could share a common breath,
and for you to kill me with your eyes
the slow onset of a mischievous smile;
then thin air you'd become
that i breathe in like a perfume,
again to let go.

you run away from me now
as my haemoglobin enriches everything but me,
a fountain of all that I ever was trying to be,
to get across to you.
but I lay dead as you run away
and, dead, I shall wait here for you forever.

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Weekend in movies

Where but on the couch would you have found me over much of the weekend. All purpose dissolved, all deadlines lassoed and forwarded to the coming weekend.
What it left me with is a prospect list for the best of 2010 indian cinema, and surety of a malevolent force that feeds us the likes of Dabangg, Guzaarish, Robot, despite the presence of super-better alternatives.