Tags
a most wanted man, anil mehta, ankhon dekhi, boyhood, chris evans, highway, imtiaz ali, kangana ranaut, matthew mcconaughey, Philip Seymour Hoffman, queen, randeep hooda, richard linklater, snowpiercer, true detective
A list of movies and a tv show that reached out to me in 2014 (not in any order of liking):
Boyhood: I had liked the first two “Before” movies of Linklater, but by the third installment I got weary of the pseudo-existential-crisis of two self-absorbed individuals. So when Boyhood arrived in the cinemas with its back-story of having been shot over 12 years with the same actors aging in real time as the fictional characters they play, I approached it with excitement tempered with a bit of skepticism about the “12 years in the making” being merely a gimmick. All skepticism disappeared in the darkness of the cinema once the movie started, it touched me and talked to me. It was life unfolding on the screen – no big melodrama, no cinematic-ally styled conflicts and resolutions, just daily life in all its beauty and pain. Sounds dull? But so is everyday life if you had to watch it on the screen.
Ankhon Dekhi: The only movie where I got misty eyed this year. Babuji is tired of the lying world after being party to an incident which he regrets when he finds out how wrong his actions were, actions which stemmed from hearsay and not his first hand experience. There on he decides to believe only in those things that he has seen and experienced with his own eyes. What follows is a delightful take on life, love, family, relationships, everyday life, and subsequently death. The house that Babuji and his family inhabits is captured so beautifully on camera that I have not felt so “lived in” in a house since Satyajit Ray’s depiction of the house inhabited by Arati and Subrata in Mahanagar.
Snowpiercer: An experiment to thwart global warming fails and the world freezes. All of humanity has perished except for a few hundred who are on a train called the Snowpiercer that’s circumnavigating the planet. The train houses a microcosm of the global society – class, income inequality, power struggles, all of it! A visually arresting piece of film-making that shows a mirror to the existing state of the world and delves into evolution and creationism at the same time.
Queen: A film about self-discovery of a diffident girl-next-door. The film is a triumph in the genre of character driven cinema. Have written at length about this one here. Kangana is my pick of actor of the year (male or female).
A Most Wanted Man: Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s last lead role and as expected he owns the part of a disillusioned CIA operator who is struggling to find the validity of his work and his life in the murky world of espionage and the war against “terror” waged by the super-powers against an enemy which they try to manifest to maintain themselves as a relevant force for global peace.
Highway: Another movie about self-discovery with a mix of the Stockholm syndrome plus parts of Dil-se plus an oedipal complex plus a road movie! Imtiaz Ali’s most honest movie in my opinion (save for the last 15 minutes – which I am willing to let go of) with a heartbreaking performance by Randeep Hooda (who is right there with Kangana as far as performances of the year go). The Indian highways and the scenery that forms around it is a thing of un-capturable beauty but Anil Mehta’s cinematography presents it with its natural raw quality without overtly romanticizing it.
True Detective: The police procedural aspect is a mere excuse for this gripping human drama. Matthew McConaughey’s Rustin “Rust” Cohle must go down as one of the greatest on-screen fictional characters of all times. Rarely does one see a character with such integrity and genuine-ness in fictional contemporary art. The ugliness and the beauty of humanity was never laid out so starkly. Rust mouths some of the most memorable dialogs about human nature and human evolution like the one below which is my favorite quote from this year :
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
Satya-vachan!
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P.S: I read the list above and I realized that all of my picks of the year are on the themes of self-purpose, self-worth, and the quest of why-we-exist. It cannot be merely a coincidence, it cannot be!