About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert

Sad to hear of the passing of Roger Ebert. I hadn't read much by him in the past few years (no particular reason - my online reading in general has thinned out), but his reviews were staples in my early years of net-surfing, circa 1998-2000 (when the Chicago Sun-Times site was one of the first pages I opened each time I got online) and I particularly enjoyed his Great Films essays. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, after he mailed to say he liked something I had written in Business Standard. This begat a comical email exchange because, although his ID and the tone of his mail seemed authentic, my blog had been plagued by some inventive troll activity around the time, and this seemed a little too good to be true. So I sent "Ebert" a very cautious, split-personality response expressing my happiness if the mail really was from him, but also being careful not to get too fulsome, and repeatedly using the phrase "assuming this really IS you". Then he would reply trying to convince me. He used faux-philosophical lines like "How can I prove I'm me?" He even sent across two photos from the 1999 Calcutta Film Festival, which I knew he had attended; the subject line of his mail was "Would an imposter have this?"

Even then I continued to be a little wary (the photos did seem to be insider views of the fest, but he wasn't in either of them). The pleasing clincher came a few weeks later when I was browsing through an entry on his blog and saw his response to this comment. (Yes, I'm showing off. Deal with it.)

At which point I mailed him back, apologising for my earlier reserve and saying the fanboyish things I had held back from saying earlier. He replied, sounding amused and relieved (and possibly also wondering if I was missing a few bulbs in the old chandelier). After that, however, we were only sporadically in touch - this was also around the time that his health problems were escalating.

As a very small tribute, here is a link to an Ebert piece that I often returned to in the old days, his review of Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. No idea why this review in particular struck such a chord (partly perhaps because I had just seen the film and was trying to collect my own thoughts about it), but the quality and the passion of the writing left a big impression on me during a difficult, depressing period when I was wondering if it was possible to pursue a career writing about the things I was interested in. (Or if I even knew what I was interested in.) On some level, this and dozens of other Ebert pieces helped me decide, though back then it was beyond imagining that I would one day get an email from the man himself, saying "We are similar in having strong interests in both film and literature."

P.S. I first came across Ebert's writings on my Cinemania 95 CD-ROM in the pre-Internet days (that was also where I discovered this fascinating new concept of the hyperlink). Hard to believe it's been nearly 20 years.

Murder by criticism

Okay, this is completely random and inconsequential, but it’s been interfering with my sleep for over a week now – so I thought I’d put it up here and get it over with.

Exhibit 1: Bob Biswas, the cuddly hitman from Kahaani

Exhibit 2: the young Roger Ebert

Of Creationism, quotation marks and moose stew

A link to something I enjoyed reading: Roger Ebert’s blog post “This is the dawning of The Age of Credulity”, along with the hundreds of comments that have accumulated on it. Taken together, the piece and the comments cover such topics as Creationism-vs-Evolution, Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical essay “A Modest Proposal”, Poe’s Law, and how the Internet (and the mad pace of modern life in general) has reduced our capacity to process understated humour. Lots of food for thought there.

Anyway, here’s the background: a few weeks ago Ebert wrote a deadpan piece titled “Creationism: Your Questions Answered”, in which he purported to explain the beliefs of Young-Earth Creationists. (It’s valid to ask what this piece was doing on his film-review site rather than on his more general-interest blog, but I’ll tread past that question.) Now, anyone who has followed Ebert’s writings over the years will know that he is emphatically not a Creationist himself (though I don’t think he describes himself as an atheist either). The piece was intended as a gentle parody: though its tone was poker-faced, there was enough in it (in my view, at least) to make his intentions obvious. ("Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose? Ans. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself.")

So Ebert probably didn’t expect that people would interpret this to mean that he subscribes to such ideas as the Earth being created in finished form on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C., or the remains of the Ark being visible on Mount Ararat. But this is exactly what happened, with the piece sparking thousands of comments from indignant rationalists on blogs across the WWW. The “Age of Credulity” piece is his response to the uproar, and it makes a very valid point about the decay of our instinct for satire and irony and the growing tendency to take everything we read or hear at face value.

To sense irony, you have to sense the invisible quotation marks. I suspect quotation marks may be growing imperceptible to us. We may be leaving an age of irony and entering an age of credulity. In a time of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, trained by web surfing and movies with an average shot length of seconds, we absorb rather than contemplate. We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite. We accept rather than select.

I’ve written earlier about my dislike of smileys, which too often serve as convenient “laugh here!” signposts, and about the common inability to appreciate delicate, understated humour (which we may as well acronym DUH), but even given my frustrations about these things I have to admit that Creationism is a special case – one where parody can be self-defeating. As Poe’s Law states:

Without a winking smiley or some other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing. In other words, no matter how bizarre, outrageous, or just plain idiotic a parody of a Fundamentalist may seem, there will always be someone who cannot tell that it is a parody, having seen similar REAL ideas from real religious/political Fundamentalists.

Anyway, if you have the time and inclination, go through the comments on the Ebert piece as well – many of them are very entertaining and/or illuminating.

P.S. Coincidentally, the moose is the favourite animal of a famous Creationist whose every campaign speech and interview is being closely followed around the world these days. On the comments section of one of the blogs I read, there was a persuasive reply to Ebert’s moose question:

Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?
Ans. So I can kill it and make stew. The Lord be praised – Sarah Palin

A truth beyond the merely factual

Roger Ebert writes a letter to Werner Herzog:

You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top. When you open “Encounters at the End of the World” by following a marine biologist under the ice floes of the South Pole, and listening to the alien sounds of the creatures who thrive there, you show me a place on my planet I did not know about, and I am richer. You are the most curious of men. You are like the storytellers of old, returning from far lands with spellbinding tales.

[...] you speak of “ecstatic truth,” of a truth beyond the merely factual, a truth that records not the real world but the world as we dream it.

[...] You have the audacity to believe that if you make a film about anything that interests you, it will interest us as well. And you have proven it.

Read the full piece.

(Earlier post on Herzog here)

Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking and Tarsem Singh's The Cell: some notes

I watched Anurag Kashyap ’s No Smoking late on Friday, just before going out of town for the weekend, and was very impressed by it. Though I had to review it for Tehelka, it wasn’t on a very pressing deadline and this meant I had time to think about the film for a while. For good or for bad, it also meant that I ended up scanning a couple of other reviews (something I normally avoid doing until I’ve written my own), and I wasn’t surprised at the way it was savaged by most newspapers. This is a very strange film, difficult to process even if you’ve seen and enjoyed movies like Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, which have similar addled-mind visuals. And if you go in expecting a linear or realistic (in the deadest sense of that word) narrative or because of the Bipasha Basu item number, your brain cells could easily short-circuit by the halfway point.

But for viewers who are willing to open themselves to it, No Smoking is a daring, imaginative, often brilliant film, one that marries a very personal vision with a keen visual sense and some of the best cinematography recently seen in Bollywood. It takes some time for this to become obvious, however. Notwithstanding a surreal opening sequence set in a snowy landscape, most of the early scenes are routine, even amateurish. John Abraham (as a chain smoker named K) shows off his chiseled upper body in a bathroom mirror and exchanges sophomore lines with his wife Anjali, played by Ayesha Takia (Shrill question: “Tum bathroom mein cigarette kyun peete ho?” Petulant answer: “Tum bedroom mein kyun soti ho?”). Cutesy thought and speech bubbles pop up now and again.

None of this prepares you for what is to come. Prompted by a friend, K descends into the creepy subterranean world of a prayogshala to meet a Baba (Paresh Rawal, excellent, even when mouthing gobbledygook) who will help him quit smoking, and it’s here that the film signals its movement from the real world into a dream zone where anything can happen – a world of bleached colours, grotesque character types and a shift from real-world logic (the Baba watches scenes from K’s life on mouldy videocassettes and has the power to control the destinies of his loved ones; effectively – Faust alert here – he buys K’s soul).

Some of what follows can be described in simplistic plot-synopsis terms (e.g. “K tries to cheat the deal but the Baba seems to know his every move and makes his family suffer”), but beyond a point the idea of a conventional storyline is irrelevant here. Far more compelling is the way Kashyap and cinematographer Rajeev Ravi draw us into the interior world of an addict who is much farther gone than he realises. Soon it becomes impossible to tell exactly how much of this is going on inside K’s head. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream.

Bleak though No Smoking is, both visually and thematically, it’s also a darkly funny film. I particularly enjoyed the speeded-up childhood flashback (played to the tune of the Gene Raskin classic “Those were the Days”) of K and his buddy Abbas (Ranvir Sheorey) smoking in a bathroom; the hilarious Newton moment in Cuba (don’t ask!); the nod to Cabaret in a musical scene set in a nightclub called The Bob Fosse; and the caricature of a loudmouthed, drunken boor who begins a conversation with K by slurring, “Arre, aap zyaada baat nahin karte. Lagta hai sochne waale types ho?” (So familiar! This could be a swipe at mainstream critics or at viewers who turn inverse snobbery into an art form by puffing their chests out and saying "Hum toh films sirf entertainment ke liye dekhte hain".) All this is the work of a director who knows how to have fun even while he exorcises a few personal demons, which is clearly what Kashyap is doing here.

I’ll probably never be a John Abraham fan, but apart from an unintentional chuckle-out-loud moment early on (desperately feigning intensity, he hollers “What’s loving your wife got to do with smoking?!”), he doesn’t do anything particularly wrong here, which is as much as I expect from him. What’s more interesting is the way Kashyap uses Abraham’s alpha-male screen image to discomfit the viewer, to sweep the carpet out from under our feet. An early scene juxtaposes him admiring his physique in a mirror with a shot of emaciated concentration-camp victims from Schindler’s List; later, there will be another chilling gas-chamber connection, and by the film’s end the hunky Abraham persona has been considerably deglamorised. Which is why it’s a bit incongruous that the Bipasha-John song (superb though it is) comes on after the credits roll.

The Cell

After watching No Smoking, I’ve been thinking a lot about Tarsem Singh’s underappreciated 2000 film The Cell, with its sci-fi premise of a “coma-therapy psychologist” (Jennifer Lopez) entering the mind of a serial killer in an attempt to discover the location of his last victim. Unlike in the usual serial-killer film, there is no physical threat to the protagonist here; the killer has already been apprehended and is in a comatose state. The threat comes from what your mind can make your body believe, and this danger is what the Lopez character must face.

No Smoking has a few obvious things in common with The Cell. Both movies use hypnotic, unsettling visuals to explore the mental landscapes of disturbed people. (The look of the prayogshala scenes in No Smoking reminded me of the scenes set inside the killer’s mind in The Cell.) Both movies are heavily (and often magnificently) stylised, which inevitably leads to the all-argument-ends-here criticism that goes “all style, no substance” or “it looks very impressive and beautiful, but where’s the story/what’s it trying to say?” Both are largely unconcerned with the “real world”, so much so that one flaw in both films is that the waking-life scenes are half-heartedly done; the director doesn’t seem too interested in them.

Both movies also suffer from star presence. As Baradwaj Rangan points out in his excellent review of No Smoking, many viewers will walk into the hall thinking this film is standard popcorn fare, because that’s what you associate John Abraham with. But it’s equally true that Abraham’s very presence will reflexively turn off a certain type of “serious viewer”, much the same way as Jennifer Lopez’s presence in The Cell turned off a lot of people who are pre-programmed to dislike her or any project she is associated with.

Also – and it may be too early to say this – the critical reception given to both films is similar, suggesting a timid, safety-first attitude to movie-watching. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who championed The Cell when it released, and I liked this bit from his review:

We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the dullest audience member. The new studio guidelines prefer PG-13 cuts from directors, so now we get movies like "Coyote Ugly" that start out with no brains and now don't have any sex, either. Into this wilderness comes a movie like "The Cell," which is challenging, wildly ambitious and technically superb, and I dunno: I guess it just overloads the circuits for some people.

Mentioning that Tarsem Singh is of Indian origin, Ebert writes:

Tarsem comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote that the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese and Coppola because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower's bland platitudes. Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?

“Rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls” is highly debatable, as anyone who has experienced life in an Indian city will know. Some of the reactions I’ve seen to No Smoking are equally indicative of a lack of imagination, and a simplistic idea of what a good film “must be”. I’m not saying No Smoking is unblemished – as I mentioned before, the real-world scenes are half-heartedly done, and the second half goes on for too long, much like the second half of Kashyap’s still-unreleased Paanch did – but it’s a film I’m glad a director had the talent, courage and resources to make.

P.S. Time hasn’t permitted it, but I’ve been wanting to do a series called “Favourite Films I feel Protective/Defensive About”. Included here would be movies that rank very highly on my personal list, but which I feel awkward bringing up in the film-buff’s equivalent of Polite Society – because these films have been vehemently dismissed by a majority of respected critics. Occupying a high position on this list would be films that are vulnerable to the “all style, no substance” accusation that I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of – films by the great visual artists such as Brian DePalma, for instance. And of course The Cell, a film I have a real soft spot for.

No Direction Home: Ebert on Dylan

Nice piece here by Roger Ebert about the ambivalence of his feelings about Bob Dylan. This is a part-review of Martin Scorsese’s new four-hour documentary, No Direction Home, but it’s more a personal account of the disenchantment felt by Ebert (and many others of his generation) towards someone they had held up as a spokesperson for their times. Now, he says, he can see Dylan in a different light:

"His songs led the change, but they transcended it. His audience was uneasy with transcendence. They kept trying to draw him back down into categories. He sang and sang, and finally, still a very young man, found himself a hero who was booed..... His music stands and it will survive. Because it embodied our feelings, we wanted him to embody them, too. He had his own feelings. He did not want to embody ours. We found it hard to forgive him for that."

Read.

A thumbs-up for Ebert

The brouhaha over Roger Ebert’s review of the Adam Sandler-Chris Rock starrer The Longest Yard has raised some interesting points about subjectivity in reviewing. The gist is that Ebert gave the film a "muted thumbs up" in an episode of Ebert & Roeper just before leaving for the Cannes Film Festival. On returning three weeks later he now had to get down to the business of writing the full-length review and justifying his earlier endorsement of the film - but in the interim he had seen so many vastly superior, vastly more ambitious films that the Longest Yard review turned into an exercise in ambivalence and self-examination.

Even as he stands by his original opinion, Ebert writes:

"I do not say that I was wrong about the film. I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to The Longest Yard at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for."

Later, replying to a reader’s letter on the topic, he admits:

"I was trying to balance on the cutting edge between conceding that a movie ‘works’ and knowing that life is short and one should ideally be making a better choice."

Many of my movie-critic friends scoff at Ebert’s largely populist reviews, at his star-ratings which always seem to over-praise mediocre movies and especially at the simplistic "thumbs-up-thumbs-down" approach that has been a trademark of his TV career (first with Gene Siskel, now with Richard Roeper). But that’s doing the man an injustice. Ebert freely admits that he himself never sets much store by star ratings and the "thumbs" approach - that those are necessitated by commercial dictates. His actual reviews - if you bother to read them all the way through - are usually more complex and thoughtful, even when the star rating shouts out ****! In fact, he repeatedly cautions his readers not to go by the ratings (which are imposed by the newspaper he writes for) but by the text.

In fact, contrary to this misperception that Ebert deals in absolutes, one of the things I admire most about him is his insistence that reviews are subjective, shifting creatures: that there are no constants, that one’s opinion of a film will change depending on one’s age or even mood, and even that it’s pointless expecting one review to be consistent with another, especially when the reviewer has been in the business for 40 years.

The other thing of course is his slightly convoluted (but indispensable) guiding principle for reviewers: "Don’t judge a film by what it’s about but how it’s about whatever it’s about." Such openmindedness about genres is, in my opinion, one of the first requisites for any good reviewer, but it’s sadly lacking in many of the best writers among movie reviewers around the world. Anthony Lane for instance: now there’s a man whose every review I’d read devotedly, just because his writing is so entertaining (especially when he’s taking the hatchet to a film). But somehow I just can’t bring myself to think of him as a good film reviewer: one rarely gets the sense that he loves movies, it’s more like he’s in love with his own writing and obsessed with being clever. Ebert on the other hand has no such hang-ups. (Which is not to say that his writing is half-bad either!)

P.S. Here's a heartily recommended link: Ebert's essays on Great Movies.

Whorism in film writing

Probably shouldn’t be writing this blog at all (indiscreet + not very ethical, given that I’m a sometimes-professional film reviewer myself), but couldn’t let the topic pass without saying at least something. Entire chunks – whole sentences – of Nikhat Kazmi’s review of Shark Tale in yesterday’s Sunday Times of India are lifted from Roger Ebert’s review for the Chicago Suntimes. (Just one sample: "Strange, too, that the movie’s value system seems to come from The Godfather, a study in situational ethics that preferred good gangsters with old-fashioned family values to bad gangsters who sold drugs.")

And where an attempt is made to alter the original text in a small way, here’s what results -
Original: The mob is ruled by Don Lino (voice by Robert De Niro, channelling Marlon Brando)...
Copy: The mob is ruled by Don Lino (voice by Robert De Niro, AKA Marlon Brando)...

A distraught Shougat called early on Sunday morning to read bits of both reviews out to me; he’s reviewing the film himself, and says he’ll purge himself of the irritation by referencing the Ebert review (in quote marks) himself and then arguing against it. Don’t quite agree with that approach, but I understand how he feels about the subject.

I’ll clarify that I have no delusions about the quality of film criticism in most of our newspapers/magazines, or the competence of those behind it – but one can always be surprised in new and terrible ways. For years I’ve gritted my teeth at the stultifying levels of ignorance on view on the front pages of the supplements of the most widely read newspapers in the country. The triflingness, the superficiality. I’m not talking so much about reviews here – there’s nothing wrong with opinion pieces, if they are reasonably well-argued (and assuming they aren’t lifted from somewhere else in the first place). But the lack of respect for basic facts - even in the past few years, with the Internet mollycoddling all of us – is abysmal. (And don’t get me started on the laziness in the use of terminology. My oldest peeve – dating back to when I was maybe 12 – is the use of ‘Hollywood’ as a generic term for every non-Indian movie; example Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood being included in a list headed "Hollywood movies based on Macbeth" a few months ago – this was when Maqbool was released.)

The inside buzz is that many of the foreign-movie reviews in most of our n’papers are dedicatedly compiled by interns from various websites, and it shows. (Actually, with the half-baked, ignorant nonsense that emerges when some of these ‘writers’ do attempt to produce something out of their own heads, unaided, I thank heaven for whoever invented plagiarism.) But this is the first time I can recall something being so blatantly, so cynically lifted word for word from another piece. Does this mean our reviewers have become completely apathetic about their job, about whether their readers are interested at all? I’m not sure. Maybe we do get the film writing we deserve.