Spider-Man 3

A Disappointment!!!

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The Spiderman franchisee kicked off with brilliant first movie in 2002. It was followed by an even better and superb sequel in 2004. So it was with a lot of expectation that one went to see the third edition of this super hero franchisee. To be honest I consider the Spiderman series to be the best of all super hero adaptations released so far (although Batman Begins has raised hopes of rivaling it if it can follow through with an equally good sequel). I was looking forward to seeing how Raimi would keep the plot moving forward as he did in the previous sequel.

When the movie starts we find Peter Parker in total contentment with life. He is doing straight A-s at college. He is on the verge of proposing to his girlfriend, Mary Jane, who is also the star of a Broadway musical. He is adulated by the whole of New York City who even gives him the key to the city. But we know his bliss won’t last long as Spiderman will have deal with three formidable villains soon.

The first of these is an old friend itself – Harry Osborn, who still believes that Spiderman killed his father and therefore holds a grudge against him. Harry, who has inherited his father’s weapons and chemicals, becomes the new green goblin and indulges in a battle with Peter Parker. In the course of the battle Harry hurts his heads and begins to suffer from amnesia. This makes him become his normal likeable self. But before long he regains his memory and continues his quest to avenge his father.

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In the meantime a petty criminal named Flint Marko escapes from the prison. His daughter is gravely ill and he needs to arrange money for her treatment. While on the run from the police he stumbles into an experimental facility on particle physics and is transformed into sand thus becoming the Sandman. Peter Parker also learns that it was Marko who actually murdered his Uncle Ben. Thus Spiderman now begins to look out for the Sandman with vengeance in his heart.

The third villain enters the movie in the form of an alien symbiotic organism. While Peter Parker and Mary Jane are out on a date a small meteorite crashes nearby and the symbiotic organism oozes out of it and follows Peter home. There it bonds with Spiderman’s costume, thereby changing both the suit’s appearance as well Parker’s personality. It enhances his powers as well as his aggression. Spiderman later realizes the change and tries to get rid of the symbiote while at a church. Edie Brock, a rival photographer of Peter Parker at the Daily Bugle, is also at the church and discovers that Peter Parker is in fact Spiderman. The symbiote falls off from Spiderman’s body and takes over Edie Brock making him the villainous Venom.

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Will Spiderman overcome such formidable foes and how? What will happen to MJ’s and his relationship? The answer to all these questions forms the rest of the movie.

As someone who has been a fan of the franchise from its very beginning it was disappointing to see that it has come stuck in this edition and has not build or moved forward in any sense. It seems to be time for both Maguire and Raimi to let go of the series. There is nothing new in this edition that we haven’t seen before. Even the action sequences which are usually spectacular weren’t up to the mark in the second half of the movie. The climax was so uninspiring that the director even had to resort to a running commentary from a TV reported to make even mildly interesting. The best action sequence of the entire movie was the very first one between Spiderman and the new green goblin. When the first action sequence overshadows the climax, then you know something is wrong with the movie.

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The biggest flaw of the movie is the abundance of villains it has. Because of the three villains in the movie Raimi does not have either the space or the time to develop their characters and all of them seem to be a bit too hashed up. Their characters develop either too sudden or are totally incomplete. For any super hero movie to succeed there has to be a great playing out an equally great villain. Case in point is Jack Nicholson in Batman or Alfred Molina in Spiderman 2. But in this movie we do not have any such great scope for any decent actor. The only person who even had the slightest chance was Thomas Haden Church as Sandman. But even his character is rushed through the movie and is not properly developed. One minute he is fighting Spiderman and the next he is suddenly very remorseful of his actions, apparently with no rhyme or reason for it. He is almost reduced to a wimpy character rather than a villainous one.

But the biggest disappointment is venom. This is one character which should have deserved a separate movie all on its own. It was so disappointing to see the venom on screen for such a short period of time. Even the sequences which show Peter Parker’s personality as changed could have been done better. Instead we see Parker shaking his booty through the streets of New York, a poor cousin to Travolta in ‘Saturday Night Fever’.

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Some of the characters like Gwen Stacy are completely wasted and you are left wondering why she was there in the movie in the first place. Maguire clearly hams his way through the movie, especially the emotional scenes, and it was certainly the worst performance of the series. The other actors are too insignificant to make a difference.

The movie has its moments. Like the first action sequence or Marko’s transformation into Sandman. And overall you might be entertained from time to time. But the good parts are too short and far in between for it make a difference. Spiderman 3 is a colossal disappointment.

Malèna

The dark side of beauty

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Giuseppe Tornatore is one of those directors who takes charming nostalgic movies and strikes a chord in the heart of his audiences. He mostly makes period movies set in a small town of Sicily. Malena released in 2000 is said through the eyes of 12-year old Renato and is set in a 1940s small town of Sicily. Renato’s focus of attention is the most beautiful woman in the town, Malèna.

The story starts with an adult Renato remembering the day he got his first bicycle. The adult Renato narrates the events to us through a voiceover. The day Renato gets the bicycle is the day he is shown ogling at Malèna for the first time. In the beginning his feelings for her are purely lustful. For a boy who is just entering puberty this means that his hormones go haywire and his only concern becomes the goings on in his trousers. This makes the first half of the movie mostly funny to watch.

We also learn that it is not just Renato who has his eye on the voluptuous bombshell. The whole town has their eyes on Malèna for various reasons. You see, she is the wife of a soldier who has gone off to fight the Second World War. Hence the men of the town ogle and fantasize about taking advantage of this single woman. The women of the town are afraid that she will take their husbands away from them. And all of them resort to vile gossiping about her. The whole town indulgences in this when she takes cross town strolls dressed all elegant and glamorous.

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Renato is taken over by lust and follows Malèna around wherever she goes without her noticing him. He in the process learns more about Malèna and sees the real person that she is underneath all the glamour. For instance he learns that her regular strolls across the town are to visit her almost deaf father, a professor of Latin, to help him with his household chores. By peeping into her house from a nearby tree he is able to see her pain and loneliness. Above all he sees her unfaltering love for her husband. He sees that she is not the slut that the townsfolk make her out to be.

But thing take a turn for Malèna as the war intensifies. People become more angry and vile towards her. Rumours of her husband’s death only intensify their attitude towards her. She is shunned and isolated by the women of the town. Even her relationship with her father suffers a catastrophic blow when a slanderous letter about her sexual immorality reaches his hands. He is later killed in a German bombing of the town.

Thereafter Malèna falls into hard times and in a bit to survive she becomes what the town always called her to be; a slut. She turns to prostitution and begins to even entertain the members of the invading German army. However when the war ends and the Germans retreat she is mentally and physically humiliated by the town’s women forcing her to leave the town. It is then that her husband returns from the war. What he does after that forms the rest of the movie.

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On the face of it Malèna is a simple sentimental movie. By underlying it is the theme of jealousy and hypocrisy. The women of the town are not able to hide their jealousy toward Malèna. The men are a case of sour grapes. Since they are not able to have her they invent wild rumours and thrash her reputation without remorse. It is also a coming of age movie. The young Renato, who first sees Malèna as only a sexual object see her as a human being towards the end of the movie. In the process he also learns more about the cruelty of life.

The movies visuals are breathtaking every time Monica Bellucci walks on the screen. Beautiful would be a word too inadequate to describe how she looks in this movie. You can’t but help identify with the boy who fantasies about her all the time. She doesn’t even have anything to do for a majority of the movie other than to look great. She doesn’t even have a dialogue through major portions of the movie. But she shows that she is not just a beautiful face when she handles the complex final scenes with ease.

The young boy Giuseppe Sulfaro plays the other central character of the film Renato. He plays the role with a talent that belies his age. He displays the right emotions and leaves no one in doubt as to what is going through his head.

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Tornatore’s direction is creditable. He easily gives us a view of what Renalto is seeing. He makes us go through the same feelings that Renalto goes through. We feel the same lust for Malèna, we feel the sense to try and help her in some way and like Renalto we to feel helpless and sad about the misery that she goes through. The music is as haunting and poignant as the movie itself. Malèna is overall a beautiful, charming and haunting movie that you will remember long after you have seen it.

Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku)

Remembrance of a horror

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Akira Kurosawa’s movies in the later stages of his careers were starkly darker than his earlier ones. In Rhapsody in August he tires to tackle the Nagasaki atom bomb dropping and its impact on three different generations. It shows us how three different Japanese generations and an American views the bombing and its effect on human life.

The movie is mainly said from the viewpoint of four children who come to visit their grandmother. Their parents had gone to visit a long lost brother of the grandmother. The grandmother’s lost sibling is in his death bed now and wants to meet his last surviving blood relative before he dies. However the grandmother’s memory has become increasingly selective with age and she does not even remember the name of such a brother. So she sends her son and daughter (the children’s parents) to visit them instead. She does this so that the grandchildren are left in her care and she could spend time with them during their summer vacations.

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The children, to begin with, are thoroughly modern and westernized. They walk around in their jeans and t-shirts with American logos. They are in awe of their rich American cousins and wishes to spend their vacation at Hawaii. But a trip to the nearby Nagasaki changes their attitude to America. They realize that their grandfather had died in the bombing while working at a local school. They also realize how tough it must have been for their grandmother to lead life from then on as a single mother of two. The children grow increasingly resentful of America. They begin to feel and understand an event which they had known only through text books and as numbers.

The grandmother relives her past by way telling stories of it to her grandchildren. Through her stories, which are sometimes factual and sometimes mythical, she introduces the children to the beauty of the land and the sufferings of people in the aftermath of the bombing. She says that she was resentful towards America for a long time but has now taken the attitude that the real blame should go to War and not to the country. She is of the opinion that countries will do anything to win wars.

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The grandmother’s children harbor no ill wills whatsoever to the Americans. They are in fact happy to have found a rich relative back in Hawaii. They scheme and plan to get the grandmother to go to the US so that they can take up jobs at their cousin’s pineapple factory. They seem to neither care nor have any great feeling for the tragedy and have almost forgotten it.

The grandmother ultimately relents to visiting Hawaii when her brother and his son Clark (half Japanese and half Caucasian) request her repeatedly to visit them. She however says that she will visit only after the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, her husband’s death anniversary as well. This takes the American family by surprise as they had not known that the grandmother’s husband had died in the bombing. The grandmother’s own children feel that their mother had squandered a golden opportunity for them. They felt that the American do not like to reminded of the event.

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Clark however turns out to be polite and apologetic about the bombing. He manages to strike a bond with the grandmother and even participates in the memorial service on the day of the anniversary. His stay is cut short when the news of his father’s death reaches. The grandmother too remembers her brother at that time and is devastated that she did not visit him earlier. This has an effect on her mental stability and a thunderstorm soon afterwards have her reliving the horrors of that fateful day when the atom bomb was dropped in Nagasaki.

Kurosawa tries to show the impact of the bomb on the lives of the people who survived it. Some of the scenes are poignant and moving. The sequences were the children learn more about the bombing, where the survivors pay tribute to their classmates, the utter destruction symbolized by the twisted metal of a jungle gym in the school yard all stay with you even after you have watched the movie.

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But that is not to say that the movie is a masterpiece. I found the movie really tough to watch as the drama was a bit too low key and the pace a bit too slow for my liking. There is a definite bias in Kurosawa’s interpretation of the event. There is a definite finger pointing towards the Americans as being responsible for dropping the bomb while conveniently forgetting the events leading up to it. One can argue that the old lady does not harbor any resentment towards the Americans. But even those moments are made to be less profound than the accusatory moments.

I am one of those who strongly believe that the master’s later works pales in comparison with his earlier ones. Rhapsody in August however still shows glimpses of Kurosawa’s mastery over the medium. Nobody can capture beauty or take a shot that is imprinted in your mind for the rest of your life as Kurosawa can. It just proves that a genius and his work will always be remembered just like major events. No matter how good or bad they are.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)

Ran – Movie Review

The fruitlessness of chaos

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Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is an adaptation of Shakespear’s King Lear as well as the legends of the feudal lord Mori Motonari. The meaning of ran is chaos and that’s what we get to see in this film. The feeling of harmony and peace that the movie starts off with is quickly replaced by one of violence and treachery. And the fruitlessness of it all is what makes it the saddest part of the whole affair.

The story starts off with the old patriarch of the Ichimonji clan, Hidetora, deciding to abdicate the rule of his kingdom to his three sons; Taro, Jiro, and Saburo. Taro, the eldest, will receive the prestigious First Castle and become leader of the Ichimonji clan, while Jiro and Saburo will be given the Second and Third Castles. This means that the younger brothers are to support the eldest in running the kingdom and thereby be together as a united force. Hidetora will remain the titular leader and retain the title of Great Lord. Suburo criticizes this plan by saying that Hidetora himself achieved power through treachery and that he is foolish to expect his sons to be loyal to him. The king mistakes this suggestion for disloyalty and banishes Sabuora from the kingdom.

However Saburo’s foresight is proven true when under the behest of his wife Lady Kaede Taro begins to take more and more control of the kingdom. Things reach a head when Hidetora is forced to comply with Taro’s demands of confirming his new standing and powers by signing a document in blood. Hidetora thereafter storms out of Taro’s castle and moves on to the second castle of Jiro. But he finds that Jiro wants to use his father as a pawn to pursue his own ambitions and even asks his father to enter the castle but without his guards.

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The old man then leaves for the third castle where he is welcomed and given refuge. However the combined forces of Taro and Jiro attack the castle and begin to destroy everything and murder everyone in sight. Hidetora is distaught and he wishes to commit seppuku (ritual suicide). However he the finds that he wont be able to do so because his sword is broken and he subsequently plunges into madness. Meanwhile Jiro murders Taro and becomes the leader of the clan. He now has an affair with Lady Kaede who wants Jiro’s Buddhist wife Lady Sué to be murdered. Lady Sué learns of this plan and flees from her castle.

Sabuora learns of his brother’s treachery and gathers around an army of warlords to search and rescue his father. Jiro learns of Sabuora’s intentions and sends his own army to confront him. Jiro attackes Saburo’s forces and is ultimately decimated by the warlords and their armies. Saburo finds his father but one their way back he is murdered by Jiro's gunnery brigade whom Jiro had sent to murder Saburo incase he found their father. The old man too dies of heart break at the sight of the dead body of the one son who loved him.

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The greatness of the film is the characters. Kurosawa gives enough space for all of the character to develop and showcase their depth. Lady Kaede’s tranquility on the outside masks her turmoil inside. Her clan was destroyed by Hidetora and was forced to marry Taro. She therefore has a hidden agenda of destroying the Ichimonji clan. She too is beheaded in the end by one of the loyal generals of Jiro who finds out that she had planned the path destruction all the way.

We also find it difficult to sympathize with either Hidetora or his sons. They all are seeking power and wants to attain it even if it means ripping apart families even their own. Even Saburo sides with the enemies of the family in the end though it can be argued that he at least was loyal to his father till the very end.

Kurosawa also tires to convey the message that the cycle of violence is never ending and that our bad deeds will always come back to haunt us. He also gives us the depressing view that even good can sometimes be crushed by evil in the course of chaos. He illustrates this with the fate of Lady Sué. Like Lady Kaede her family too was destroyed by Hidetora. Her brother Tsurumaru’s was blinded by Hidetora and her castle destroyed. But unlike Kaede, Sué embraces Buddhism and forgives her father-in-law. But even she is killed by Jiro’s forces.

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The other striking feature of the movie is the visuals. Kurosawa shows that he is as adept in handling color as he was with black and white. He uses the medium of film like a canvas and paints some of the most mesmerizing visuals you will ever see on a movie screen. The sheer beauty of the visuals is breathtaking.

He also uses the visuals to be symbolic. For example one of the climatic shots of the movie shows the blind Tsurumaru tap his way to the edge of a precipice clutching a Buddhist scroll given to him by his sister. Kurosawa captures a long shot where Tsurumaru seems to be engulfed by a reddening sky and he seems to lose his balance and fall off the edge. However we see that he just barely manages to hold on to the cliff even though he is forced to let go of the scroll. Kurosawa shows that sometimes even God cannot save us from ourselves.

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Unlike his earlier films Kurasowa does not provide any glimmer of hope or redemption in the despair that is all encompassing the film. He does not provide any salvation for any of the characters. He vision is apocalyptic and hence the visuals of the war are appropriately chaotic and brutal. But still he never glorifies the violence and manages to convey the fruitlessness of it all which is the overall theme of the movie.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)

Red Beard (Akahige)

A statement on humanity

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Red Beard marked the end of the golden age of Akira Kurosawa. After red beard he found it extremely difficult to get financial backing for his projects and went on to make only 7 more films in the next 30 years. But Red Beard enabled Kurosawa to make a statement he had only hinted at in High and Low. The sufferings of man can be alleviated only if we are able to help one another.

Kurosawa chooses the setting of a clinic for the poor to make this statement, which is perfect since no other place would have enabled him to tell the stories he wanted to tell. The story begins with a young doctor named Yasumoto, educated in modern medical practices at Nagasaki, coming to visit the clinic at the behest of his father. He is there to meet the chief doctor at the clinic Dr. Niige, who is more popularly referred to as ‘Red Beard’ due to his beard being a shade of red. Yasumoto finds the clinic to be not to his liking and he is even more distraught when he learns from Dr.Niige that he has been tricked into coming there as a replacement for another inept doctor.

Yasumoto is not at all thrilled at working in the clinic. He believes that his knowledge would have helped him become the doctor of the shogun which would have enabled him to be very wealthy and famous. He is proud and arrogant about his education and even boasts that he knows more about medicine than the Red Beard. He believes that the Red Beard only wants to steal his notes and studies. He also learns that he cannot quit the job as he has been appointed by the magistrate himself. Therefore he decides to be such a nuisance that the Dr.Niige himself will be forced to throw him out of the clinic.

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With this intention in mind he goes about breaking every rule at the clinic. He even refuses to wear the uniform of the doctors at the clinic. But the Red Beard slowly manages to draw him into the daily affairs of the clinic and manages breaks down his resistance one by one. It is through Yasumoto’s interaction with the various patients and his subsequent transformation that Kurosawa propels the story forward.

The narrative of this movie is mostly episodic. Each one of the cases that Yasumoto encounters at the clinic gives a new perspective of life to the young doctor. Kurosawa paints the larger picture with the help small, seemingly innocuous characters. The genius of the man is very evident when he is able to give the proper depth and development to each of these characters.

Yasumoto realizes his own naivety when he is forced to deal with a psychopathic child abuse victim, referred to as ‘The Mantis’. The mantis is a beautiful young lady who seduces her victims before murdering them with her hairpin. The young doctor barely manages to come out alive off this encounter with her.

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He realizes that he is yet to acquire the mental fortitude to be a doctor when he collapses after witnessing a surgery for the first time. When the Red Beard asks him to tend to a dying man named Rokuskue, Yasumoto is unable to bear the poignancy of death. He is not even able to be alone in the room with the old man and is visibly relieved when the nurse takes over from him.

Yasumoto is also profoundly influenced by the life stories of these patients. Be it the hopelessness of ‘The Mantis’, or the grim and harsh reality of Rokuskue’s life and death or even the undying love of the saintly Sahachi; who works relentlessly to help others even while he is poor and dying. In fact it is from Sahachi that Yasumoto learns the importance of the uniform he had refused to wear till then. Sahachi tells Yasumoto that the uniform represents a beacon of hope to the poor as it identifies a clinic doctor who would take care of them even when other wealthy physicians wouldn’t. Yasumoto is so influenced by this that after Sahachi’s death he starts wearing the uniform.

Yasumoto’s growing up is completed when he is placed in charge of curing a 12 year old girl rescued from a brothel by the Red Beard. The girl’s illness is as much psychological as it is physical, mainly due to the cruel treatment that she had been subjected to by others at the brothel. Yasumoto is so immersed in curing her that he himself falls ill in the process. The Red Beard however uses this opportunity to cure the girl further by putting her in charge of nursing Yasumoto. Her treatment is completed when she tries to prevent another young boy from the path of crime.

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The movie is not without its flaws. At times the movie moves forward at a snail’s place. Sometimes you just feel the dreariness to be unbearable and strangely it makes you detached from the emotional bind that is so necessary in such movies. Sometimes you just wish that Kurosawa would get a move along in telling the story.

Having said that, the movie, which clearly pales in comparison to the master’s other movies, still manages to be head and shoulders above most other movies even now. Kurosawa’s attention to detail is very evident in the movie. And his use of light and shade is as amazing as in any of his other movies. Red Beard is a movie which would lose half its effect if it were to be shot in color.

It is said that Kurosawa took 2 years to make this movie. The production was so tense that it brought to an end one of the greatest collaborations of movie history; that of Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa. Although Mifune gave another towering performance in the movie, he was so frustrated by the never ending schedule of the movie that a conflict between the two was inevitable and they never worked together again. This was also the last of Kurosawa’s black and white movies.

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In spite of all this Kurosawa was undeterred in making a most poignant statement on humanity. He tried to show that love for a fellow human being is more important than acquiring all the wealth and fame in the world. Above all Red Beard makes the statement that there is nothing more important in the world than being able to help lessen the pain and sufferings of others. And the is the overall message of the film.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)