The following is a long personal reflection on Dune and Society.
When people were starving during the Bosnian genocide in 1993, the paper of record - NY Times - editorial said "[UN] needs to authorize force, including armed escorts for relief flights, if the Serbs or others ignore the warning." Today, Gazans are suffering from a man-made famine and I dare if any newspaper, let alone NYT, will use the same language as here. In hindsight, everyone is a moral…
Jonathan Glazer's Banality of Evil in Domestic Life
More of an experimental mood piece than a narrative cinema. There are many bold formal choices that Jonathan Glazer makes. The film starts with an overture that sets the mood. It sounds like a groan, a desperate call for help, and an indictment of humanity that let it happen. Mica Levi leaves us with an unforgettable aural sensory experience. At one point, one of the Höss children plays the last words of…
This film is the opposite of what it means to be effortless. From the needle drops to the mystery, it is a pretentious mess. Something in the way Girish Kohli directed this film didn't sit right with me. There was a desperation on Kohli's part to prove his mantle as a director. But his aesthetic choices were in stark contrast to mine, and I found myself being irritated at regular intervals with his musical taste. Being unsubtle is one thing.…
What I really liked about the film was its refusal to cast men as simply pigs who always chose their own tribe. It would have been a reductionist and lazy reading of patriarchy. By bringing in a material benefit to their hypocrisy, Anand Ekarshi's screenplay makes this as much a 'human' story of opportunism, power, and weakness as a lone woman's battle against a permissive system. Masks are a repeated motif in this film, and they act as both metaphorical…
Satoshi Kon lets his imagination run wild and it was an absolute treat to watch it unfold. The Japanese have always been pioneers in this medium, but this film might have changed my entire approach to what I call animation and its potential.
Hitchcock famously said, 'What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out'. In the same way, we can say Animation is drama plus imagination. A lot of material that wouldn't have made sense in an…
To be honest, I went in with the mindset that this was going to be another rich person trying to frame their own story through their cultural capital. While a part of my suspicion was true, this was more like a takedown of another cultural icon than a personal story of triumph.
The title of the book on which this movie is based is called Elvis and Me . And the title of the film is Priscilla. That small change…
