2024

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)
dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

dir: James Mangold

2024

Ah, musician biopics. For some viewers, these inhabit the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for traitors and people who pick their teeth in public.

This director previously scored big with Walk the Line, which was not only very successful, but set forth the template for all these loathsome biopics, whereby they have become parodies of themselves, and we keep lapping them up like the slavering Pavlovian dogs that we are.

Just before doing some important thing, let me think back on all the moments that brought me here. Let every song I ever wrote be inspired by something someone said, or something I saw on the way to the laundromat. Let everyone, especially my first wife, tell me I’ll never amount to nothin’ until I become the biggest star in the world. Let my inevitable descent into addiction be magically healed by the love of a good woman. And let there be a concert at the end where everyone, my true believers and my doubters, be united in celebrating the awesomeness that is me.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horribly about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.

dir: Ignacio Maiso

2024

This is not a sequel to The Girl With the Needle or The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo, or any of that lazy nonsense that I’m trying to imply, but it does have “Girl” in the title, and I’m on a run, lately, so.

Forgive me another digression, so soon, so frequent: I was quite saddened by the death of David Lynch recently. I had been, just before his death, and just after, watching Twin Peaks: The Return on one of the too many streaming services I am subscribed to, and enjoying it immensely, finding it now even more poignant upon his death.

And it gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate his body of work, and his approach to filmmaking, seeing as a lot of the time in the past I would often find scenes in his flicks strange, odd for oddness’s sake, or obscure / impenetrable to the point where I sometimes felt like some critics were too embarrassed to admit they had no idea what was happening in his flicks either, and were just screaming “bravo!” as loudly as they could to cover their embarrassment.

It’s only now, having read more from the man himself, and feeling like I have more of an idea as to what he was grasping for in much of his work, it feels like the strangeness that he was trying to achieve even in relatively simple scenes that would seem to go on too long, or to have stretched-out cadences, timings, beats, that he was always or at least often trying to tap into the unconscious, the dream-like, the sometimes unknowable, the horrible and the harrowing, and the beautiful and transporting, and he tried everything to achieve that, whether he got there or not.

And sometimes it maybe didn’t work, and maybe in a lot of instances it did work. Trying to do all of that in combination with trying to make something “commercially viable” always brought him into conflict with producers, tv executives, and film companies, because they don’t give a fuck about any of the above, but they do want the cachet that comes with working with someone so cool and avant garde blah blah.

So when I started watching this flick, this odd flick, and the timing felt “off”, and the editing and shot compositions seemed strange and strained, I think I was mentally in a better place to handle something weirder than usual.