Zindagi na...quick review

Films dealing with life-altering epiphanies are always shot in stunning locations. And Hindi films dealing with the same, need a stunning cast as well. A possible rationale: beautiful places relieve stress and bring things into perspective. And beautiful people experiencing divine realizations can hold your perspective on the screen, often resulting in a ‘ka-ching’ sound at the box office. ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ (ZNMD) is one such film.
The film isn’t as simplistic as it seems and each character has a back story and internal conflicts that surface intermittently between thrill-seeking stunts, sugary love, drunk talking and some seriously childish pranks. What is aesthetic in this film apart from the charming Spanish countryside is that scenes which would usually be served with heightened melodrama are quite well contained and subtle, yet convey the emotion.
For a roadie movie about three guys the film’s overall humour quotient is not very high and is mostly situational and there are usually more people laughing on the screen than in the audience.
The best about the movie: Corrida de toros,La Tomtatina ,Sky-Diving,Abhay Deol & Nasseruddin Shah

Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone made a fistful of great films, but none better than 1968's ode to the fading American frontier, Once Upon a Time in the West. The film, about four lives headed on a collision course in a grimy, ramshackle town of the Western plains, is set against the backdrop of the encroaching railroad, which promises to bring civilization to this unruly, harsh country. And with progress, the coal-devouring locomotives also bring death—death for the American West's unspoiled beauty, death for an uncomplicated rugged individualism, and death to the cowboy, who has no place in the newfangled modern world of corporate villainy and commerce.

Leone, an Italian stylist who made a career out of transforming melodramatic genre pictures into wild, fiery, violent statements about the country that had inspired his cinematic dreams, uses West as a means of dramatizing that fateful instant when the Old West of gunslingers and shootouts mutated into the New West of manifest destiny-inspired greed and corruption. But as its fairy-tale title implies, the film is also interested in casting this historical turning point as a parable about the death of the western itself. Much like The Wild Bunch (except with more beauty and pathos than Sam Peckinpah would ever deign to muster), Leone wants his multi-pronged fable to be not only history, but myth as well.

This mythologizing was a somewhat predictable turn for Leone—his cinematic landscapes had grown more expansive and daring throughout the course of his Clint Eastwood-headlined Man With No Name trilogy. On the other hand, West's devotion to classic western iconography and archetypes can be seen as a mildly startling departure from the revisionist westerns he had become famous for. The Man With No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) was infamous for its upending of traditional western tropes, the most obvious being the notion of the cowboy as a noble, stabilizing force of purity and honesty.

With West, Leone made certain that surface similarities existed between the film's characters and those found in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—Charles Bronson's stoic harmonica-playing loner can be equated with Eastwood's "Good" Man With No Name; Henry Fonda's vicious Frank is Lee Van Cleef's "Bad" Sentenza; and Jason Robards's wily bandit Cheyenne is Eli Wallach's "Ugly" Tuco. But unlike his previous work, Leone eschews the pervasive amorality that gave his earlier films their groundbreaking vitality, choosing not to overhaul western clichés, but to incorporate them into essential components of his majestic mise-en-scène.

This modus operandi can be gleaned from the film's riveting opening scene, in which a trio of rough-and-tumble killers quietly awaits the arrival of a train at a dilapidated local station. The men, calmly standing in the noonday sun with the sweaty swagger and bloodthirsty eyes of desperados, are stock characters from a hundred previous westerns. The way Leone orchestrates their waiting game, however, is something akin to the way Beethoven arranged his symphonies. Using a mixture of intense close-ups (Leone's signature stylistic flourish) and painterly long shots, and casting the scene in almost complete silence (thus enhancing the immediacy of the environment's sounds), Leone instills this rather routine setup with near Biblical grandiosity.

One of the men's vain attempts to dissuade a fly from resting on his face becomes transfixing in Leone's tight Panavision close-up, and the director's patient camera wisely lingers on these nasty, no-nonsense thugs just long enough to instill in them a sense of legendary vileness. When the train finally arrives with Bronson in tow, Leone marries Ennio Morricone's hauntingly skuzzy guitar riffs to a gorgeous deep-focus shot angled upward from the ground near the trio's boots, with Bronson a tiny but nonetheless imposing speck in the distance. The effect is a transcendent moment that encapsulates the quintessential, doom-laden instance in all westerns that occurs right before hands flash down to holsters and gunfire erupts.

Bronson's Harmonica (he gets no formal name, as befitting a ghostly renegade) has arrived in town to meet with Henry Fonda's wicked, power-hungry Frank. After disposing of Frank's goons at the station, Harmonica slowly finds himself drawn into a drama involving Claudia Cardinale's Jill McBain—the feisty and jaw-droppingly gorgeous widow of a slain local businessman—and Robards's scruffy outlaw Cheyenne, who's being framed for the murder of Mr. McBain and his three children. Since Leone shows us their execution, we know that Frank has killed the McBains, but the motivation for their murder is revealed with great prudence.

Repeatedly, West's most flawlessly executed moments involve acts of exposure or revelation. Each character's face is initially revealed to the audience either through measured zooms or graceful, swirling pans around the character's body, and Leone uses his elegantly dreamy pace to consistently tantalize us with hints of things to come. Mrs. McBain, a former prostitute, arrives from New Orleans at her new home to find a funeral procession, and Leone conceals the scene's payoff—the sight of McBain and his children's corpses sprawled out on picnic tables—only after his delicate tracking shot, positioned from Mrs. McBain's perspective, has leisurely moved down the line of mourners. Similarly, the identity of the man present in Harmonica's periodic visions remains cloaked in an unfocused haze, so that Leone may intrigue his audience without divulging key information too soon.

Much has been made about the influence of Italian filmmakers Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci—who are credited with helping Leone conceive the story (written by Leone and Sergio Donati)—on the film. Still, even though West's pensive, tragic romanticism recalls vintage Bertolucci, and its abundant use of visual and aural signifiers brings to mind Argento, the film's seductive interplay between image and sound—a relationship that would reach its apex with the director's final film Once Upon a Time in America—is trademark Leone. The director harmoniously links disparate sounds and images: the buzz of a fly or a gunshot segues into the howling whistle of a train and the squeaking of a weathervane becomes the plaintive whine of a harmonica. Leone similarly uses the sounds of the natural world as a means of slowly revealing information—when the crickets stop chirping while McBain and his kids prepare for Mrs. McBain's welcoming feast, it's clear that trouble is brewing—and punctuates the action with Morricone's passionate, haunting score.

Leone employs his florid, expressionistic directorial style to convey an overriding tone of wistful resignation over the land barons' arrival. Although Mr. Morton, the sickly railroad tycoon who wants McBain's strategically-situated plot of land, pays the dastardly Frank to do his dirty work, Leone reserves compassion for this frail man intent on fulfilling his dream of seeing the Pacific Ocean before he dies of tuberculosis. Morton—who doesn't entirely agree with Frank's methods, and dies as a result of his naïveté and bad luck—isn't evil but merely pathetic, and his quest to trample through the West is portrayed not as reprehensible but merely inevitable. West recognizes that Morton is only the first in what will be a long line of industrialists plundering the land, and that the future he brings is no more distasteful, and might be slightly more tolerable, than the ugliness, corruption, and immorality of the old world embodied by Frank.

Inside his opulent cable car, Morton asks Frank (who is seated in Morton's throne-like chair), "How does it feel sitting behind that desk, Frank?" Frank, sensing the changing tides, replies, "It's almost like holding a gun. Except much more powerful." Frank desperately desires the power that Morton's money and influence commands, and the film becomes, in part, a portrait of his failure to straddle the line between old world (shoot first, ask questions never) and new world (wielding money as a weapon) criminality. "You've learned some new ways," Harmonica tells Frank before their climactic showdown, "even if you haven't given up the old ones." This, ultimately, is his undoing. Frank dies not because of a lack of proficiency with a six-shooter, but from an inability to wholeheartedly reject the gun in favor of the checkbook.

If Frank's death provides a fitting conclusion to the film's conventional good-versus-evil conflict, it provides little closure for Harmonica or Cheyenne. Like Frank, the two men are relics of an earlier, extinct species that cannot exist in the burgeoning modern world. Harmonica tells Frank they're "an ancient race. Other Mortons will be along, and they'll kill it off." Frank knows it's true, admitting that his desire to kill Harmonica makes him not a shrewd businessman but "just a man" who knows "the future doesn't matter to us." In their long dust jackets, tall leather boots, and Stetson hats, these nomadic, mythic gladiators accept their fateful destinies and, with a mixture of sadness and inexorableness, ride off into legend. It may not have been the final eulogy for the western the director had envisioned—even Leone himself would return to the high plains for the Mexican Revolution pseudo-western Duck, You Sucker just three years later—but in its beguiling, magnificent depiction of the end of an era, Once Upon a Time in the West has become what Leone had perhaps always hoped: the antiquated genre's triumphant final masterpiece.

The Western at Rest

Last week I saw an John Wayne flick,El Dorado,after ages.I have never been a big fan of The Duke.I mean if you have seen one movie of his,you have seen all.But this one was refreshing to say the least and rekindled by desire to meet The Duke all over again.This movie works,at least for me,perhaps because the lead people associated with it were more relaxed about what they were doing.As Wayne would say..."they didn't have to prove a darn thing to nobody anymore".I will elaborate..

1967 was a strange crossover time in American film. Directors like Howard Hawks had been canonized by the French "auteur" theory, and critics-turned filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Peter Bogdanovich were freely citing Hawks as an influence. At the same time, younger moviegoers were becoming attracted to new, hip cinema like Blow Up, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, and Hawks and John Wayne were considered fogeys, way past their prime. When El Dorado was released, half the public was celebrating and hero worshipping, and the other half was sneering.

A lot of the films that were considered hip in the 60's have become transparent, and the values that were once topical that attracted the young have become ancient. Looking at most of the movies from that era on video, from a new melliniuem's standpoint, its more refreshing to see a master craftsman like Hawks keeping the status quo than to see some first-timer showing off and trying to be self-consiously brilliant.

El Dorado is a pretty standard Western. It's not flashy and electrified like Once Upon a Time in the West or The Wild Bunch, but it moves gracefully, charmingly along. It's essentially a remake of Hawks' earlier Rio Bravo (with writer Leigh Brackett updating her own script). John Wayne, instead of sheriff, plays an aging gunman, who is getting too wise for the game. Robert Mitchum, as the drunken sheriff, takes over the role of the drunken Dean Martin, and James Caan is the fresh faced greenhorn last played by Ricky Nelson (thankfully, Caan doesn't sing). Hawks and Brackett take their time in setting up this story, giving Wayne and Mitchum plenty of backstory, before the stand-off in the town of El Dorado.

Wayne is so much better in Hawks films than in John Ford films. He seems more relaxed, and he actually acts. At the time of El Dorado, he had been in over 150 films and was finally growing relaxed in front of the camera. He moves naturally, as opposed to his stiff, jerky performances in movies like The Quiet Man (1952). Hawks, too, seems relaxed, like he knows nothing more is at stake, he had nothing more to prove, with this film. He had been in movies for five decades, and his craft was perfected. He seems to make movies with his guts, without even thinking about them. His skill is in his hands and in his eyes. El Dorado is an effortless movie, and it draws you in easily.

Limbo

If there’s one thing that stands out about Thomas Ikimi’s first feature film “Limbo”, it’s that despite of (or perhaps because of?) being shot on digital black and white video, this is one impressive looking film. Ikimi clearly has a good eye for frame composition, and there’s an innate intelligence on the screen and laudable ambition behind the script that you just don’t see a lot in low-budget independent films. Purportedly made for under $10,000, “Limbo” makes a fine first feature, even if it does get a bit ponderous at times, and the middle is not quite as sharp as the rest of the film.

Christopher Russo stars as the improbably named Adam Moses, a lawyer with a shady past who comes into possession of incriminating evidence against a crime boss. When the Mafioso’s attempts to pay for said evidence is spurned, the service of a notorious assassin who never misses is called for. Lured to a city rooftop, Adam is subsequently shot, but death doesn’t come. Instead, our man wakes up from the assassination attempt, unharmed, and for reasons unknown, finds himself stuck in a seemingly endless loop that repeats itself every hour, leaving only Adam to remember the hour previous.

Although the world continues on, resetting every hour, Adam remembers everything that has transpired. His only clue is the attempt on his life, which sends him in search of answers. Adam believes that the answers lie in his capturing of the elusive assassin. Or does it? Is Adam dead, and somehow existing only in limbo, trapped between Heaven and Hell? If that’s the case, why does a woman named Rebecca (Etya Dudko), who Adam first meets in a bar, also seems to be stuck in limbo as he?

For much of its first hour, and despite occurrences of a fantastical element like a time loop, “Limbo” is fashioned very much like an old fashion detective story, the noir qualities of those old stories made even more obvious by the black and white. It’s only later on when, in a spurt of manic anger, Adam kills a homeless man, that the film takes on more overt philosophical intentions. And because “Limbo” (purposely) has none of the whimsical of the similarly themed “Groundhog Day”, Adam’s actions do not involve hitting on the pretty girl in hopes of getting laid, but rather trying to keep himself from continually killing that mugger who keeps trying to mug him, or harming that prostitute who refuses to “just talk”.

God, religion, the nature of man’s free will, and what one should or should not do if there were no consequence to his actions, all come to the fore before all is said and done. These are, without a doubt, pretty heady topics, and Ikimi certainly knows more than his share of Philosophy 101. “Limbo” is indeed a very intellectual film, and if one were uninterested in the subject, one might be inclined to calling Ikimi and his movie overly pretentious. Then again, the fact that the film knows its subject very well would seem to indicate that “Limbo” is very much a heartfelt approach to, as well as a genuine attempt to explore, the subject matter at hand.

A major plus for “Limbo” is leading man Christopher Russo, who carries the entire film from beginning to end like a champ. Russo is a fine actor, and to watch the character slowly unravel from a man who thought he had left his checkered past behind to a man who slowly comes to embrace what he once was, you can’t help but wonder why this guy hasn’t done anything major yet. Less successful are the rest of the cast, but because Ikimi’s script is so Adam-centric, this isn’t an insult. Etya Dudko has little to do as Rebecca. Likewise with John Holt, as a stranger who seems to know what’s going on, or perhaps he’s just crazy.

Another sign of “Limbo’s” success is that you wouldn’t know the film was low-budget if nobody told you. It is that visually impressive, not an easy feat considering the digital video format, which has never been all that kind to visually-inclined filmmaking. Ikimi and company have a fantastic understanding of cinematic aesthetics, and take every natural advantage supplied by the choice to use black and white. Despite some slow spots in the middle, it’s startling how good “Limbo” is, especially for a first feature shot on a meager budget. Mark Thomas Ikimi as a filmmaker to watch.

You can watch/download it here..http://www.jaman.com/movie/Limbo/0QtZDraGdlOk/