Not A Game Review

And with that, my Christmas of Film experiment comes to an end.  There were a couple of pleasant surprises, with both Eyes Wide Shut and AK vs AK being set around Christmas which I was not aware of prior to watching them.  No Country for Old Men takes first spot out of the movies I have watched over the last ten days. The tension and the philosophical undertones are hard to beat - truly a modern classic.  Heat was the most disappointing in that I had much higher expectations of it than what it ended up being.  There were a couple of films I watched which I haven't logged here - Zanjeer and Deewar - because I don't have anything meaningful to say about them just yet, and also because I did not watch them with my full attention. Perhaps another day. The greatest gift this period has given me is the space to consume lengthier films to their fullest without worrying about being in the office the next morning.  Movies shall hopefully continue to remain an integral...

There is a lot going on in American Fiction . It is a story about siblings facing tragedy and escalating financial needs when one of them passes away and their mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It is also about frustration with the literary establishment which rewards titles that portray minorities in the light that confirms the white consumer's view of them over those penned by authentic voices. It also meanders to touch upon the behaviours we inherit from our parents, and the cost of being reserved and not letting others in.  There are so many threads here, and though the film tries to balance them as best it can, it struggles to narrow down on its central plotline. Some of the film's more intriguing interactions arrive when Monk is discussing the authenticity of Black fiction with another writer who has no qualms serving the market in contrast to him, sadly we only get a few of these conversations that help the film go beyond its absurd satire. Nonetheless, in portr...

Terrific dialogue and a brisk pace chew through the film in no time at all, and before you know it almost three hours are up. Part murder mystery & part drama, The Hateful Eight is a captivating watch, and personally was far more enjoyable and focused on its subjects than my last brush with Tarantino's work ( Inglourious Basterds ) .

I watched this when I was not in the mood for a serious film, and AK vs AK did not disappoint.  There are a few layers to peel if you're interested in a deeper analysis, particularly the takedown of celebrity worship and exposing the reality of being in thrall to the paying public, but the less you'll try to dissect this the more fun you'll have. It should be mentioned that some familiarity with Indian cinema and who the AKs in question are is a given prerequisite to said enjoyment.

SPOILERS FOR AGRA (2023) Guru's piercing eyes are perhaps his most defining feature in the film. Through his eyes, we are given a window into lust, fear, anger, and anxiety. Mostly lust. Kanu Behl's follow up to the brilliant Titli (2014) takes another deep dive into the Indian male psyche, directing our attention to widespread sexual repression. Guru ogles at women in public, fantasizes about having sex with a coworker during his breaks, and finds some release in an anonymous chatroom that he frequents when looking for someone to sext with. The chat always seems busy, but if you look past the activity the messages are alike in their desperation; a steady beat of bots masquerading as girls seeking hung men, men masquerading as hung men seeking any woman, and then Guru - furiously searching for a woman in the digital ether on his way to work or in the bathroom at night - with a persistent mating call: "Milke karogi koi chat? Bolo? Hello?". Agra is set in the eponymou...

Perhaps it was the fact that Heat was preceded by far more meticulously crafted thrillers in my watchlist ( No Country for Old Men , There Will Be Blood ), or that I went in with high expectations. Whatever the reason, the end result was disappointment.  Heat does not tell a new story - this is the same old tale of a cop dedicated to putting his criminal adversary behind bars. The cop is a complicated man himself (surprise!). He believes in burning himself out and ignoring everything to the detriment of his marriage (a pattern being repeated for the third time, as we're frequently reminded). The script feels the need to mention all of this over and over, which I believe is a disservice to the audience who are smarter than given credit for.  There are also numerous references to the lack of personal attachments one has in the criminal life, and how you need to be ready to drop everything and run if you spot the eponymous "heat" around the corner. The film goes to great pa...

Out of sheer nostalgia and curiosity, I watched Naseeb last afternoon. My only memory of this film is watching it on TV when I was recovering from some forgotten affliction (likely a minor cold) one afternoon and was bored alone at home. The heroes were leaping off a burning rooftop, gliding across a rope with makeshift pulleys impossibly fashioned from rings. That is the only thing I remembered about this movie, and seeing as I had the time on hand, why not take a walk down memory lane? Unfortunately, nostalgia is the only thing this film has going for it.  To say Naseeb (and most films from this era, to be frank) have aged poorly is an understatement. The misogyny seeping through this 'family drama' is quite tiresome. There is a bizarre segment where Hema Malini's singer refuses to model a bikini in London, because 'women in our culture are revered for being beautiful while fully clothed, not naked.' In response to the director who refuses to accept her hesitati...

They will revoke my cinephile card for this: Eyes Wide Shut was one of the most boring films I've seen in a long time. Sure, it's great to look at. But its scattered assortment of ideas don't quite come together to tell a coherent story that gets its message across. Dreamlike vibes can't sustain a film that's over two and a half hours long by themselves. Many reviews frame Eyes Wide Shut as a 'sexually provocative' film, which is to say there is a lot of sexualisation of the female form on display here. Fans will insist this is Kubrick's statement on women being objectified, though I remain unconvinced. That said, I have read some great analysis , such as drawing parallels between the film's subject matter and the MeToo movement, reading it as a condemnation of the elite's use of women for sex and personal pleasure.  However, to me it is more of what the viewers got from the film than what it was trying to say in the first place (which is the ...

  There Will Be Blood paints a detailed panorama of an oil prospector with bold strokes of black on its rich desert canvas. There is also a cruel promise in the title, likely unintentional, of what is to come for our planet after all this time burning oil.   The pursuit of God and the pursuit of profit intertwine in this turn of the century character study, and the Faustian bargain that material success often comes with. While it could benefit from broadening its focus ever so slightly beyond the purview of its protagonist, There Will Be Blood nonetheless creates a compelling picture of the ups and downs that come with chasing black gold.

What struck me about Apocalypse Now midway through the film was how timeless it remains. What I mean by that is, most other films made over 40 years ago have an unmistakeable feel to them which betrays their age. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Apocalypse Now could just as easily be a more recent endeavour by an independent filmmaker, and I'd totally believe it. The story follows a fairly common structure of journeying through various sets, each more perilous than the last, in pursuit of a final destination. I've seen this repeated through other films I've seen this year ( We Bury the Dead and Civil War come to mind), but I would be very interested to find out which films pioneered this, and how mainstream this approach to storytelling was in film when Apocalypse Now came out. Buried under the critique of the mindless violence and brutality performed with impunity by the US Military in Vietnam is a tale of journeying between worlds. The world  where we begin this jo...

For far too long, this sat on my backlog as one of those critically lauded films that I never got around to for reasons unknown even to me. I have a faint recollection of my father telling me how much he enjoyed this film, which is a testament to its popularity because my father does not watch movies all that much, much less ones made in a foreign language.  I am glad I finally got to experience No Country for Old Men - this is a moody, desolate philosophical undertaking disguised as a crime thriller, and a very good one at that. It looks, sounds, and feels gorgeous, and it really is difficult to find any complaints one could have with it (none have come to my mind so far in the past couple of days since I watched it).  No Country for Old Men tackles the exasperation of finding yourself in a world that is constantly changing shape and morphing into something you do not recognize, and the sheer unpredictability of fate which can smite you like a clueless bug under a human foot...

2024, without a doubt, has been the year of film for me. Usually I oscillate between video games, film, and TV as the mind desires multiple times during the course of a year, but films have been the consistent choice (for the most part) in 2024. To round off the year, I have decided to go through my backlog and watch those I never did get around to until now. Snippets of thoughts shall follow to hopefully memorialize the experience for a future date.

Thanks to the remake, I finally got a chance to play this much-hyped PlayStation title on my PC nearly a decade after it first came out. This piece, however, has nothing to say about the technical quality of the remake - don't expect commentary on the frame rate drops and occasional lag, crashes, the ethics of attaching an exorbitant price tag for what is clearly a dysfunctional product, or whether it was necessary in the first place. Rather, this is an expression of surprise at the fact that such a garbage piece of media has somehow managed to attain cult status with a movie in the works and (now) a remake.  Let's get this out of the way first: Until Dawn does nothing more than port a campy teenage slasher to the world of video games, replete with all the sexism. It recycles tired slasher cliches and clothes them in a new digital skin (a very swanky UE 5 powered ultra-high quality textured skin). The sexist tropes are perhaps my single largest issue with this game that bears...