Watch the flicks

[muckefuck]

Bend It Like Beckham Pretty much exactly what I expected: Feel-good sports movie meets culture-clash comedy; wackiness ensues. I was particularly amused to see baldy-man Anupam Kher concealing his big shiny pate under a Sikh turban. (Note to the hair-challenged: It's never too late to convert!) The only thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth was the lesbophobia. Did we really need the scene of Juliet Stevenson (looking eerily like Michael Palin in drag, but with even more crackerjack comic timing) disrupting the wedding with charges of dykery? Or the underwhelming education scene following it (best summed up as "Y'know, lesbianism isn't that bad!")?

Also, for a few moments, I thought the filmmakers would actually have the gonads to give us a happy ending which doesn't require the female lead to be paired off with a male, but I guess that was simply too radical a departure from formula and I should be content that it wasn't felt necessary to assign a man to Keira Knightley as well. But my biggest disappointment was not being able to find out what all the Punjabi was. The closed captions simply say "[Punjabi]". I thought for sure some geeky Punj would've produced a web page similar to, say, the guide to Chinese dialogue in Firefly in the four years since the movie was released, but no joy.

活著 (To Live) For a while there, I made a point of watching pretty much every product of the collaboration between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li so I'm not sure how I missed this one. She was beautiful, of course, even when artfully aged and succumbing to some decorous wasting disease. Likewise, the whole film was beautiful, even when depicting awfulness that should've been unbearable. I'm not sure what I really got from it besides "Sucks to live in China", something that I kinda knew already.

All films are manipulative, of course; what we ask is simply that they not make it too obvious. But I felt that the melodrama was overdetermined in spots. (C'mon losing both children, respectively to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?) Moreover, the long takes of parental histrionics verged on emo-porn. If The Sweet Hereafter taught me anything, it's that depictions of grief can be so much more wrenching when they're quiet.

Next in the queue: Bollywood Dreams. Which reminds me that I really need a short list of recommendations from local Hindi movie musical maven mollpeartree. If anyone else has suggestions for films we simply must see, feel free to pile them on.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It wasn't that I wanted to see a lesbian romance, I just would've been happy not to see her paired off at all. They were doing so well--"Yeah, I'm crazy about you, but I've got lots else going on and this isn't a wise choice for me right now"--I wish they had just stayed there. I read it not as "See, she really isn't a lesbian!" Hadn't they established that (for both girls) sufficiently already? Rather it was the old-fashioned trope about a woman not being complete unless she's married. It doesn't matter how successful she is in any other area, if she can't get and hold a man as well, then she's a complete failure.

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

Ah ok, I misread you. In that case, I agree with you :)