Movie

Avatar cultural equations & Biblical lift offs

Nay I may not have like Avatar as a movie but I liked the concept of resistance of the natives against the invading marauders, and in my previous post I viewed it as the huge corporate machines decimating the simple traders and businessmen.  LINK

The people of  China are flocking towards AVATAR since they see a reflection of what happens in their own society in the movie.  Its an irony that a communist country is dominated by powerful capitalists in disguise who mow down housing localities ruthlessly in the name of development.  The poor and affected are rendered homeless with no recourse to justice and not even allowed to protest or picket.

Then came this fantastic explanation from the Biblical point of view by Kwok Pui-lan for Religion Dispatches … read on

“The blockbuster movie Avatar has garnered critical and commercial success, netting $760,000,000 in two weeks. The 3-D effects have mesmerized many critics, as viewers were transported to the hanging mountains and dreamscape of flora and fauna of planet Pandora. Others, such as Annalee Newitz, have criticized this sci-fi movie as rehashing white fantasy about race, since the white man eventually became the leader of the natives.

I saw the movie on New Year’s Day and found it offers much food for thought on an anti-imperial reading of the Bible. The movie retells Rahab’s story in the book of Joshua with an interesting twist. In that familiar story, Joshua sends two spies to search out the city of Jericho. The spies enter a Canaanite prostitute Rahab’s house. When the king of Jericho orders Rahab to surrender them, Rahab hides them and saves their lives. Rahab makes a pact with the spies and asks them to spare her and her family when Jericho falls.

In Avatar, planet Pandora is not only a land of milk and honey, but also has a large reserve of a precious metal unobtanium. The avatar of Jake is sent as a messenger to ask the natives to relocate so that the humans can mine the unobtanium. Jake learns the native ways, falls in love with one of them, and becomes so identified with the natives such that he helps them to fight against the colonizers. The movie invites us to look at the world from the point of the indigenous people—to see the beauty of their interconnected way of life and learn about their culture. By doing so, it invites us to look at the Bible from the side of Canaanites.”

Matchpoint

I watched this movie over the weekend.  Somehow, need to admit again, I am unable to make any sense or find any meaning out of all these flicks.  I bores me no end.  Here is the synopsis.

“Match Point” is a drama about ambition and obsession, the seduction of wealth, and the often discordant relationship between love and sexual passion. Perhaps most importantly, however, the story reveals the huge part luck plays in the events of our lives, refuting the comforting misconception that more of life is under our control than really is. A one-time tennis pro, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) was used to falling just short in his life. But when he befriends Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) and marries his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), the doors are opened to the kind of money and success that Chris had once only dreamed of. Chris should have settled for happiness, but he is torn by his attraction to Tom’s impossibly beautiful and sensual fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). The attraction turns to an obsession that forces Chris to make a critical choice. Now everything in his life hinges on if Chris falls short again…and whether or not his luck runs out.

It had its Tamil moviesh intrigue towards the end, the two detectives conversing and takeing two different view points. Christ Wilton begging to keep the entire investigation a secret.  The ring of Nola’s neigbhour who gets killed for reason at all is found in the pocket of a drug dealer who in turn gets implicated for the the murders…. allowing Chris to go scot free.

Yuk.. left a bad taste in the mouth… a rotten weekend.

The age of Stupid

We were originally scheduled to watch it in Bertram Hall @Loyola college, Chennai, India  but we decided to have it outdoors, midway through a slight drizzle we shifted indoors to Lawrence Sundaram Auditorium, and the wisecrack quipped… the climate change in action.

age of stupid

The film was crowd-funded by a profit-sharing partnership comprising a mere 228 people and groups, including a hockey team and a women’s health center, who each invested portions of its £450,000 budget, The Age of Stupid is a destabilizing experience.

Set in 2055, “The Age of Stupid”  depicts Postlethwaite as a global archivist perusing historical footage of environmental news clips and catastrophes – including “interviews” of six eco-survivors from around the world: a Hurricane Katrina survivor and former oil-company worker; an Alpine tour guide who has witnessed the demise of his homeland and livelihood over previous decades; and a young Nigerian med student who simply can’t access clean, running water in his country.

The film was well done, very different from the Al Gore ‘The inconvenient Truth’.  Al Gore can shake you up and can be very intimidating but The Age of Stupid can will shake you up for a while and cease, it will resonate in your mind and impact your daily life…not to miss.

Oh I loved the illustrations that made life look or rather the solution look very simple.  If we all can do something about it we all can be one.  It portrayed USA as the biggest culprit, but did it very subtly.  The one on the communities opposition to Wind Mills and the campaigners tears at the ignorance of the people can actually inspire y0u.

The key take away for me is the story of Nigeria, the agony of the people.  Its actually unfortunate for a nation to be oil rich, it said.  For the benefits will be capitalized by a few and the common folks will be harassed, you actually see this happen in Nigeria.  You need to watch the Nigerian medical student Layefa Malemi. The brings us the the point that simple life is much better, Hail India.

We have our own Jay Wadia, Indian airline entrepreneur, his dreams would have sounded very sensible to you if you were to read them in the press, afterall he wanted every Indian to be able to fly, after seeing the pathetic sight in the railway stations.  The you watch Jay Wadia in the film and you will find him coming out stupid and short sighted.

These real-life players were very impressive and touching . Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud witnessed their father’s murder during the U.S. invasion of Iraq and their resentment is lethal, as they sell used shoes on the streets of Jordan.

Animator Cath Elliott explains how to represent the upcoming fifty years of social and economic collapse in a not-crap way, with only one laptop, one pot of coffee and a password for the BBC and ITN archive libraries.

I agree with Ken Livingstone who said “EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE COUNTRY SHOULD BE FORCIBLY BE MADE TO WATCH THIS FILM”

The different kind of Church

Its been a while since I had gone to a church, reasons abound, would not like to go into it right now, unless you want to get into a discussion and in which case you need to comment on this blog entry or mail me at benedictg@gmail.com

This church is lead by  Auston Lippart and its very different apart from the long hair that he sports tied up as a pony tail, the tatoos and the jazzed up vehicle the format of the service is  also innovative.

Lippart vanLippart board

There was real hard music, loud and strong… the toughness of a shippie was obvious. I have this favourite observation that most churches are still in butterflies, windmills and waterfalls, sheer chilled out life of piece imagery but Lippart is will teach you to plough the rough seas, take on pirates and swig a bottle of rum and yet have the heart of a dove inside.

He actually said it, the externals do not matter. Looking at how he looks reminded me of most of the ‘white washed’ fruitcakes who are nasty and wild on the inside.  Its got to be the other way round actually.

I wish that Lippart has spoken the sermon, it would have been fun but one had settle for a regular who thought he was intelligently leveraging the stark enviromental realities shown in the film “An Inconvenient Truth” and preached a doomsday sermon, pulling out the words from the Bible like how a mugger may pull out his knife to threaten his victim.

Oh! ye simple  when will you ever lever your simplicity and your foolishness?  I felt like screaming.  But fortunately the last part of the service was wonderful …..some heavy rock and then the benediction.

Wonder if Joseph will ever talk to me again ??

M*A*S*H : We remember You Larry

How can one not allow those 30 minute  episodes from resonating in my mind… we all loved it…the M*A*S*H of the pains of a hospital in a tent in a war zone a double whammy …yet the anti establishment humor seemd to outdo the suffering and present a situation of fun…

Larry Gelbart, one of the stellar writers in television history and a driving force behind “M*A*S*H,” has died. Gelbart, who was 81, died at his home in Beverly Hills and had been diagnosed with cancer in June, according to the Los Angeles Times.


With a passionate, ironic, angry and fiercely comic voice, Gelbart turned a CBS comedy – a notably dark one, to be sure – about a group of surgeons in a field hospital in Korea into arguably the most successful series in TV history. The February 28, 1983 finale was seen by 106 million people – a record that still stands and likely always will.

But Gelbart’s role in “M*A*S*H,” which he developed with Gene Reynolds, overshadowed a career on Broadway that spanned a couple of decades and a briefly spectacular big screen run that yielded two Oscar nominations for 1977’s “Oh, God” and 1982’s “Tootsie,” which he finished writing after the original script had gone through a handful of re-writes by other Hollywood scribes.

LAST DAY OF FILMING

(This is a lovely touching scene…goose bump types)

[

Larry Simon Gelbart was born in Chicago on February 28, 1928. In the early ’40s, his father, Harry, a barber transplanted the family to California where he cut the hair of major stars like Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, Eddie Arnold and George Raft. The son went into show business as a writer on radio shows, joined the Army, and afterward wrote material for Bob Hope, Jack Paar, Art Carney, and Red Buttons. The association with Caesar – TV’s greatest star in the early years – came later.

William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White wrote in their book ‘The Elements of Style’ the following paragraph.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outlinE, but that every word tell.”

The lines were written by Strunk in the original book, and while writing the introduction for a later edition, White had the sense to mention them in the introduction. The ‘Elements of Style’ of course is about writing in English. But the idea expressed here is very important for filmmaking. I’d like to say it like this.

“Vigorous filmmaking is concise. A scene should contain no unnecessary shots, a sequence no unnecessary scenes, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the filmmaker make all his scenes short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every shot tell.”

Of the hundreds of theories on filmmaking I find this the most fundamental and its application the hardest. It is hard mainly because it is quite difficult to determine which shot is unnecessary and which is not. In Strunk’s mind things were black or white. Either a word was important, or it wasn’t. I don’t know whether he ever considered that one word could be less important than another, and therefore its contribution though small, still be helpful. For those who live by grays and fractions, the decision-making could indeed be tough. But it is an approach I’d consider worthwhile.

Later on in the introduction, White quotes Strunk again. This time as Strunk makes his axiom a little softer, and for me, clearer.

“It is an old observation, that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.”

Strunk wasn’t that inflexible after all. But what he does with this last paragraph is take the argument into the realm of individual preferences. And from that realm, unfortunately, the argument can never come out.

I have a feeling the book is full of such lessons, or as I like to consider them, approaches.

By Satyaki Roy in Facebook

.

.