The Imitation Game Analysis

The Imitation Game

Directed by: Morten Tyldum
Written by: Graham Moore

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch

This film is set during the 2nd world war, where the British govt. hire cryptographer Alan Turing to decrypt enemy's codes to win the war. This film seems like it's being dealt in a light tone, by the outlook - but the moral dilemmas that we see, the scenes where they have to choose who lives and who dies, it's so deep and dark. It gives us the essence of war. On the outlook, it feels like a popular popcorn entertainer, especially with the twists and turns, Benedict Cumberbatch being the star - but it definitely is more layered than that - it comes through in the writing. The scene where he tells his partner that he is homosexual, the way she reacts - it happens in a moment but what she says hits hard and makes us rethink about our idea of marriage and relationships.

The editing and the tone of the film doesn't represent the time period that the film is set in, it is responsive like a film set in the modern world where people interrupt and the dialogue overlaps a lot too. The color, sound, costumes and production are the ones which take us into that era. The fact that Alan Turing committed suicide, it's heart breaking - but the film doesn't use the opportunity to dramatise this - because you really don't know what he was going through and there is also some sort of mystery to it which they weren't interested in exploring - because this film is about celebrating the acheievements of Alan Turing. I think the text that he committed suicide is more impactful and dramatic than how a scene would have been, because now - it's upto our imagination.

The storytelling device of cutting back and forth in multiple timelines is very interesting - this device, if used well can almost control the emotional response of the audience. I read about a lot of historical inaccuracies, but to celebrate a person's work - a lot of their greatness gets lost in documentation, transfer of knowledge and hence we can be sure that their greatness is definitely beyond whatever that we know of them - so I think in an effort to celebrate a person, we can take some liberties to present their story, unless of course they make it unconvincing for us to believe. At the end, it's a film and not a documentary - it's a dramatized version - to make us feel and not just know about Alan Turing.

A Rainy Day in New York

A Rainy Day in New York 

Written & Directed by: Woody Allen

I'm out of words after watching this film, not only because I loved the film - but because I don't know how many more films Woody Allen will be able to make. This film, which he wrote and directed when he is 84 - it has the same amount of pondering on the idea of romance, going on a date with someone, appreciating the beauty of women as a 20 year old would. I just can't believe how he is keeping that alive in him throughout his life. The way he writes, makes films, plays at concerts and lives life - it just shakes me up and inspires me all the time. 

I still remember the first time I watched his film, Midnight in Paris about a year ago and the next entire day I was feeling sad about what a shitty life I was living. He opened me up to a world, a way of life, the artist's way and it keeps me looking forward to something constantly. His films are definitely a strong part of how my idea of the world has shaped up - it might be a stupid romantic way to look at life, but what's wrong in that? Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen and I'm sure a lot more people - are a testament to the fact that when you are passionate about something - you can live everyday with the same excitement as a child - you should listen to the way they talk about films and music. 

In his autobiography Apropos Nothing, Allen writes that he knows very little about filmmaking and he loves writing more - he says that if no one would let him make films, he would just write and if no one would publish his work (thanks to the pseudo moral righteousness of the millenial generation), he would write them for himself. He still believes in the simple fact that to be a writer, you don't need anyone to let you write - you can just write and do it whenever you want.

I don't know why I'm not writing about the film, I think because for me Woody Allen's films are not about that particular plot, those particular characters - for me it's always about his passion, towards art, women and life. I don't watch his films to laugh or have fun for the time that I'm watching the film - I watch them to get inspired. Woody Allen or rather his films, is definitely one of the most life changing things that has happened to me. It's a shame that his films won't play in the United States in spite of he being proven not guilty and it's an utter loss for actors who wouldn't work with him, who actually don't know what happened. 

Moothon Analysis

Moothon

Written & Directed by: Geethu Mohandas

Cinematography: Rajeev Ravi

Starring: Nivin Pauly, Shashank Arora, Roshan Matthew, Sobhita Dhulipala

Premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2019

This film is unbelievably real, each and every department helps in making the world more authentic. Nivin Pauly feels like a person who has been born and brought up there - he doesn't at all look like an actor who is playing that part. I'm baffled - I have no clue how they manage to shoot stuff like this, Liar's Dice was still understandable because it had less cast. It totally feels like you are thrown into this world, with the handheld shots, the lighting, the production design and how they manage to shoot in real locations with these many actors. The dialogue and the writing too, just compliment the world and the setting - they by themselves don't try to stand out. The characters are also portrayed with honesty, you can label them with whatever names you want to - but they have a sense of reality in them.

The costumes, hair and make up added so much for the authenticity of the world. Even simple things like Sobhita Dhulipala's bangles, Nivin Pauly's eyeliner, the clothes that people wear - at no where does it feel like these are actors and a film is being shot. I feel like if they can shoot this, then they can absolutely shoot anything that could be written. For me this film is about the setting and the world, more than the plot and the characters because I felt that the plot was too much to focus on and digest, the flashback slightly felt like a backstory. Having recently watched There Will Be Blood, I wonder if having a mute character is a cop-off to explore visual filmmaking - I'm not complaining for this particular film, but I'm just slightly confused about why film studies, critics and judges want films to be unlike real life - because real life is often filled with dialogues. Yes, I agree that if you narrate the story entirely on voice over, it's a lazy thing you're doing - but why force visual filmmaking too? Although in this film, he being mute somehow conveys his helplessness, innocence and makes us empathize with him.

Claire's Camera Analysis

Claire's Camera

Written, Directed & Produced by: Hong Sang-soo

Screened at Cannes Film Festival 2017.

The setting and the world in Hong Sang-soo's films are so personal, indiosyncratic and similar - any film buff would love these settings. His characters are often filmmakers, film students, film critics and they're often set in film festivals. This film is set in Cannes, France where a filmmaker, his collaborator and a sales agent from Korea go there - the collaborator fires the sales agent, who is a young girl, citing no reason - later we know that the filmmaker and the girl had an affair. All of these characters meet a French woman Claire in the city and roam around the city - they go to cafes, restaurants, libraries, they take photos and talk. Everything that is out there in the film comes from a personal space, the things that they do, whatever that they talk, the places they roam around - resonate with a lot of artists. They often use a line, 'You look like an artist' - what could more flattering than that if you say that to an artist. They also show how artists are proud of their art, often in Hong's films - he has characters who are impressed by the fact that they meet a filmmaker. 

Cannes is beautifully shown, we don't see travel video like montages or footages - but every setup that is there in the film, a beach, an outdoor cafe, a beer cafe, a bridge, a library, the road - all these setups portray the milieu of the place very well. It's not a constant dopamine rush, while you are watching the film - but it shows what kind of an experience you'd actually have if you go there and meet people. Hong's trademark, zoom in and zoom outs while in the shot are interesting and they are so long takes - they feel so real because the character in one scene asks a question which she already asked and she says, 'Oh I yeah forgot, you already told me that'. 

There Will Be Blood Analysis

There Will Be Blood

Written for the screen & Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis

Won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe for Best Actor.
Won Oscar for Best Cinematography.

This film primarily discusses themes like megalomania and obsession - similar to films like Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, Wolf of Wall Street, Breaking Bad, Whiplash etc where characters get carried away in the pursuit of something. It feels like this is an American theme. This film is about Daniel Plainview who makes some space for himself in the oil drilling business and slowly becomes a powerful man. Characters in such films are inspiring, in spite of their obsession - these characters have certain qualities to an extreme which is why they become flaws - if we don't have those traits and if we are timid are fearful, then these characters can definitely teach us a lot.

Daniel Day-Lewis's performance should definitely be studied - I observed the way he brings in a certain physicality to his acting. In one scene, where he makes his son drink milk and makes him lie down on the bed - the way he handles the kid, it speaks so much about the character. In a scene, where he beats up Eli, throws him in the mud and puts some mud into his mouth - every tiny action by him, speaks volumes about his character. We can't see an ounce of niceness in his body language, it should be so difficult to forget who you are a person and behave so badly. Joe Pesci does that verbally, the way he speaks conveys a lot about the characters he plays, especially in his performances in Scorsese's films but rarely does he bring his physicality into the role.

The cinematography is important in a film like this, because it is set in a different time period of course, but also because it has very less dialogue - the film doesn't depend on dialogue for its storytelling - I remember a large chunk of portions without any dialogue, it could also be because the kid goes mute and deaf after the blast. I could observe a lot of things through the framing, in the baptism scene, Eli is shown through low angle shots. After that scene, when Daniel reunions with his son, they show a wide long shot - it is objective framing - we don't see anyone's point of view, because the director doesn't want to empathise with anyone. He just wants us to know what happened in that scene. I think, the blocking definitely added a lot for emphasising Daniel's character, we feel the intimidation because it cuts to his close at the right time. 

Cafe Society Analysis

Cafe Society

Written & Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart

Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro

Opened the Cannes Film Festival 2016

Bobby Dorfman enters the Hollywood industry in 1930s to find a job where his uncle Phil Stern is a big shot - Phil asks his secretary Vonnie to show him the city and ooops! It's a Woody Allen film and it actually feels like a text, where we hear his voice over - every line that is there in the film, feels so literary, poetic and yet so banal and absurd. The way he introduces every character, it has nothing to do with the character's flaw, need and want - every character is so layered that the way he introduces every character, is about them as being a part of his world. Vonnie, when she falls in love with Bobby and when Phil Stern asks to marry him - she goes and marries him and it's the absurdity of life. The way Vonnie says what she hates about the glamour of the city and changes into them by the end, shows us how people change and it hits hard. The ending is beautiful, where it's not tragic but it keeps them and us wondering how things would've been if their choices were different.

The plot is so simplistic, about two men who fall in love with one girl - that if you tell this to anyone, they'd be so off already but the amount of layering that happens with the plot. One is a powerful movie shot, another is trying to find jobs in the same industry. One is married, one is young - one promises a stable future, one doesn't and it's not only her choice. It's also about how this complication is revealed to us, and all the parties involved, as Hitchcock says that drama comes out of people talking on a table with a bomb underneath which we, the audience knows can blow anytime.

There are a lot of other characters in this film, I wonder how Woody Allen writes these many layered characters, an intellect, a gangster - he introduces them with their archetypes itself, because of the way people look at them. All of them combined, it creates a Woody Allen world - it's so interested how a Martin Scorsese would show a gangster shooting someone with sheer brutality and Allen captures the same event with his world view.Woody Allen goes digital for the first time in his career, at his 47th film - it's ironic because to shoot most of his films set in the modern world, he used film and to shoot a film that is set in the 1930s - he chose to shoot it in digital. The cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is so strikingly visible, with the yellow all over - it brings in the aesthetics of 1930s without having all the period set pieces too.

Aamis Analysis

Aamis

Written & Directed by: Bhaskar Hazarika

Official Selection at Tribeca Film Festival.

Spoilers Ahead. I read the pitch synopsis of this film in the document of Goa Film Bazaar and I was blown away by the kind of stories that people were coming up with. When you read a story like, you are in such disbelief that it feels impossible to organically arrive at this stage but the way the film does it with so ease is impressive. I honesty was expecting more madness, I was expecting that she’d like the meat less cooked and more raw – I was expecting that he would also love her meat and that’s their way of getting physical as he says. I was expecting that they’d bite each other and eat each other’s flesh raw, the pace with which the film took us to a place where we believed that she is enjoying human meat, it could’ve easily gone there. But this film’s ending too was interesting, especially the look that cop would’ve had when he was looking at a guy trying to cut a human being, I would’ve been silent and numb but since he is a cop – his reaction was slightly different to it.

At the end, when we hear the breaking news headline – it made me feel that every bizarre crime incident we hear in one line in Inshorts or in TV headlines, would have had an organic story like this behind and we often feel like they are insane people – but there is rationale behind a lot of things and the way they pan out. This film is a subversion of the idea of an extra marital affair, it says that it can be way more things than sex. For us, their relationship might seem even worse than infidelity but for them, their relationship is sacred. The abstract imagery helps a lot in conveying how they feel, especially the scene where for the first time she eats human flesh, the montage is used so effectively – she is eating it and suddenly we see an image of she feeling liberated for half a second, or even less. That image of she feeling liberated, is also very well shot – it conveys her liberation in all respects. The scene where he dreams about her, we see a lot of images – we see her navel, we see blood and a lot of weird images juxtaposed to create an effect. Simple things like her glossy dark red lipstick also conveys a lot, it is a symbol for their hunger for more.

The sound design is used to make us squirm, whether in the scene where she tries bat meat, the scenes where he cuts his meat and in the last scene where he murders someone. The cinematography is visibly interesting, there is one scene where after they try to steal a body from the morgue – at that point both of them are at a point from where there is no looking back, they’ve stooped down to depths from where nobody can pick them up. The next shot is, where both of them are sitting in a restaurant and we see them from the terrace of the next building, conveying it visually – the shot is just for a few seconds, but it totally got into me because of the seamless cohesion of craft and story. After she asks him to get her a human’s meat, some from the arm and some from the leg – we see subjective framing at its best. We see shots of crowd and it makes us feel uncomfortable, it just reminds us that it could even be us. The camera then shows only the legs of people, the discomfort keeps growing – this is exactly similar to how some films show us only the private parts of women – like the opening scene of Kiara Advani in Vinaya Vidheya Rama. The only difference being, here the filmmaker’s intention is to make us squirm and there the filmmaker’s honest gaze does that for us.

Tiger King Analysis

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness

Directed by: Eric Goode, Rebecca Chaiklin

Streaming on Netflix.

The reason this documentary series feels so weird and wacky is because, the character Joe Exotic – is so contradictory, multi-layered and unapologetic. Apart from the character, the world of the show – it is about people who own zoos of big cats, conservationists of big cats and people who work there and for some reason this world has so many characters who are visibly messed up in some way or the other. This world and setting is something that I have never even known before – so it was interesting for me to watch this show.

Joe Exotic is unapologetically narcissist, he is passionate for his work and he does it in his own way, he wants to change things in the world – irrespective of the understanding of his abilities to do so. One admirable quality about Joe Exotic is, if he wants to do something, he’ll go for it without caring about the odds, without caring if he’d make a joke of himself and he just does his own thing. Joe Exotic’s character is portrayed in a way that whether or not he hired someone to kill Carole Baskin, doesn’t really make a difference in our understanding of his character – it might make a huge difference in legal terms but by the way we see him, nothing much changes for us. This, I think, is a character study in the most human and accurate way possible – because we see different accounts on him, we see him talking and behaving, we see what choices he makes, we see what he could be capable of and luckily, he had a reality show where he unabashedly talks without any censor.

Carole Baskin is another character, but we see her primarily from the perspective of Joe and hence I didn’t feel like I could make some sense of her from my own perspective. She has a mystery in her own life as well, but we can’t easily come to conclusions about what kind of a person she might be out of that. The docu-series feels like a fictional TV show, it has several dramatic events happening and it’s a good choice they made to make it into a series rather than a documentary feature. Apparently, during the research process for an intended feature, is when they discovered that there’s lot more content to explore and hence a series.