Change Your Image
lixy
Reviews
Mlyn i krzyz (2011)
Gorgeous but flat and clunky
This gorgeous reconstruction of Bruegel's painting is ultimately more impressive than inspiring. There is no character, no narrative, no emotion in this piece and there's not that much analysis, either, despite the director's claims. I just saw it at the SF Film Fest, and the likable and knowledgeable director gave a lengthy lecture a) on how long it took to find the fabric for the costumes and b) on the loss of our ability to read pictorial symbols. Sadly, the latter was not related to (or within) the film directly--that would have been interesting indeed!--and neither is the impressive (expensive) production design enough to make this work compelling.
If you are interested in symbology and art history, see Peter Greenaway's, far superior Nightwatching, a film with a plot and lively characters as well as a fascinating view into the meanings (and the USE of meanings and symbols) of another famous Dutch painting, which, despite also suffering from some bombastic elements, still manages to engage the viewer in its own right as a movie.
Also Derek Jarman's Caravaggio comes to mind as a film that uses tableaux to evoke the painter of the title. Despite--or perhaps due to--being somewhat opaque and strange, the Greenaway and Jarman films (and almost any of their work) are far more interesting than The Mill and the Cross, because they use the medium of film to SHOW and not TELL. This literal and slavish reproduction of the painting was impressive in its verisimilitude but ultimately pointless and superficial.
Rang De Basanti (2006)
Dire message, dreadful waste of wonderful Bollywood actors and production
A disturbingly bad film, and a rare example of one that utterly misses its own point: initially it's a call for unity among different religions, and a story of patriotic resistance to the evil repression of authority. At the end the message is: forget legitimate protest, just kill those in power whom you don't like.
Starting off as a pleasant enough Bollywood entertainment about disaffected youth and the western blond girl who engages them in life and reminds them of the heroism of their ancestors against the evil British Colonial rulers (let's not even go there) the second half completely changes track and ends up as a political manifesto advocating violent terrorism as a way for social change.
It's dispiriting that the film's (initial) message of unity, democratic change and resistance to the evils of power could have been done much MORE powerfully without violating the internal logic of the story. The last quarter of the film comes out of the blueit's like you're watching a different movie. There are about 10 different ways the script could have gone differently and held together conceptually, while keeping the message which is (or initially seemed to be) about coming together and resisting oppression: SPOILER ALERT!
- the youths could have been awakened to their problems, made a stand, and taken over the radio station, (even been killed and martyred for their beliefs) without killing someone in vigilante fashion
- the youths could have discussed their understandable vengeful feelings before acting on them.
- the women, originally portrayed as agents of change, could have been included in the decisions, or continued as characters to encourage critical discussion and thinking (instead of being pushed aside and become the clichéd tragic, mourning, passive, victims).
- the potentially interesting parallels between the present-day corrupt Indian government with the colonial British one could have been explored, and taken to the logical conclusion, which is that terrorism and violence only continue the cycle, cause more divisiveness and don't work. (Gandhi, Partition, hello!)