Tagged: action film

This was the major Hindi cinema release for Christmas 2017, one of the most expensive Indian productions and already a global hit.  It’s a follow-up to the similarly successful Ek Tha Tiger from 2012.  At the end of that film, ‘Tiger’, an Indian ‘super spy’ was assumed ‘missing’ after an incident in Cuba.  This sequel sees the agent of RAW (India’s secret service) discovered living a settled family life in the Austrian Tyrol when his services are required to rescue 25 Indian nurses held captive by ISIL-style terrorists in Northern Iraq.  What he doesn’t realise at first is that there are also 15 Pakistani nurses in the same predicament and Tiger’s Pakistani wife Zoya, also a ‘super spy’ agent, but for Pakistan’s ISI, is charged with getting them out. 

Tiger Zinda Hai displays all the elements we might expect in a contemporary Indian blockbuster.  Its narrative is built around its two major stars, Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, re-united from the 2012 film.  These two find themselves in a typical masala film in the sense that it combines elements of the family film, the romance, action picture and war combat film.  In doing so it borrows from a range of well-known films and star vehicles.  Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif) are married spies just as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Mr & Mrs (US 2005) are married assassins hired to kill each other.  Tiger and Zoya might indeed find themselves on opposite sides of a case (as they did in the earlier film).  But they also have a young son, Junior, like the secret service parents in Spy Kids (US 2001).  Once the action starts, Tiger becomes an amalgam of James Bond, Jason Bourne and Superman – while Zoya is more akin to a Michelle Yeoh or Bridget Lin in a Hong Kong action flic.  Hindi cinema has always been keen on importing ideas from Hollywood and Hong Kong but I’m sure there are also homegrown Indian models I haven’t seen.  I am well aware, however, that Indian cinema has had ‘action women’ since at least the 1940s. 

There are several interesting aspects of the narrative.  The idea of Indian and Pakistani agents fighting together against terrorists in the current climate is perhaps a fantasy, but still an intriguing prospect.  It’s also novel (in the UK) to see a narrative about the continued fighting in Iraq which doesn’t take the American or European perspective. ( The Americans are portrayed as not altogether trustworthy in this film.)  Ironically, the film was shot mainly in the UAE which has a significant population of Indian migrant workers (a third of the local population?)  mainly from Kerala and Tamil Nadu.  The UAE is also a market for Indian films.  How many Indian migrant workers are in Iraq is less straightforward to quantify.  News reports about stranded migrant workers have been numerous, but mostly in construction rather than the oil industry.  The city where the nurses are held is given as ‘Ikrit’ – presumably a fictitious version of Tikrit (the birthplace of Sadam Hussein).  The villain in the film is the terrorist leader played by Sajjad Delafrooz, an actor born in Iran but now living in the UAE.  He’s very effective I think.  I’d like to comment on the actors playing Americans but IMDb’s cast list seems to omit most of them.  They seemed OK and certainly better than many of the Anglos in Indian films. 

The traditional masala film in the 1970s-90s had six or seven lavish song and dance sequences.  Tiger Zinda Hai still has songs but one is used for the closing credits (and is performed in a Greek island setting).  Only one other song actually stops the narrative as such – a love song in the Tyrolean setting.  I can’t remember much about the other four. 

Since this franchise is built around its two stars, it’s necessary to think about how Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif perform.  Since I haven’t see them in anything else except the first Tiger film (and in Kaif’s case as a fantasy figure in one episode in Bombay Talkies), I’m dependent on news reports and trailers for other films.  Salman Khan is a big star, perhaps only just behind Aamir Khan and Sharukh Khan in the rankings.  His persona is very much as the muscle man and in this film he does rip off his shirt at one point to display his physique.  My impression is that he has put on more bulk since the first Tiger film.  He is also said to be quite a short man (various claims are made but he’s probably about 5′ 6” – the other two major stars are not much taller).  This makes Salman Khan almost square but his movements are impressive.  I thought he was fine in his role and gave his fans what they want.  Katrina Kaif was much more impressive than I expected her to be.  Her career was dogged in the beginning by claims that she was ‘inauthentic’.  She was born in Hong Kong to an English mother and British Kashmiri father and lived in various countries before settling in London where she was ‘discovered’ by a British-based Indian filmmaker when working as a model.  Brought to India she continued modelling and featured in several films but was hindered by her lack of Hindi language skills.  Her Tiger performances have helped to establish her properly (especially since both films have made substantial profits).  I was most impressed by her athleticism – I believed that her character could perform the action moves.  She is tall (certainly taller than Salman Khan) and lithe and she dances well.  I will certainly consider watching her future films.  As it turned out, I watched the first Tiger film, the day after watching the second. ( There is a post on Ek Tha Tiger (2012) here.)  I think I actually prefer the first film because it has more romance and fewer explosions.  The second film is also 20+ minutes longer under a different director, Ali Abbas Zafar.  He also wrote and directed Salman Khan’s 2016 blockbuster, Sultan, a genuine muscle-man flic on the basis of the trailer. 

Baumin (Song Yang) takes his battered photo of his son on his quest to find the boy

Wrath of Silence is a remarkable film from the relatively young (he was born in 1984) writer-director Xin Yukun.  This is his third film and I’m now eager to see his earlier work.  Accompanied by two equally youthful producers from Bingchi Pictures, Xin spoke about his ambitions to make new kinds of Chinese films in the Q&A following the screening.  Wrath of Silence offers a recognisable action thriller genre narrative which develops a fantasy strand in the final section and also delivers a powerful statement about some of contemporary China’s most important social issues.  The casting of Jiang Wu as the villain of the narrative recalls his role in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013) and his presence suggests perhaps that the film might be edging towards arthouse territory.  But this idea is undermined somewhat by the enthusiastic presentation of the first of several violent action sequences featuring the film’s hero Baomin (Song Yang). 

Jiang Wu as ‘The Villain’ (alternative title)

The story suggests a universal action scenario which for most western audiences will be familiar from spaghetti Westerns.  The landscape is an important element and perhaps the touchstone here is the kind of action thriller from Korean cinema such as the Good, The Bad and the Weird (South Korea 2008).  The mix of personal drama/action and crime/corruption also makes it similar to a film like Memories of Murder (South Korea 2003).  Baomin is a stubborn farmer in the mountains of Northern China, close to the Mongolian border in 2004.  Needing money he’s had to seek work in a mine some distance away and he returns to his sick wife to discover that his son, who was tending the family’s few sheep, has disappeared.  Baomin is mute, having bitten off his own tongue in a fight and his temper hasn’t improved since, though his martial arts moves have!  In his search for his son he will eventually come face to face with Jiang Wu’s villain Chang who operates a corrupt mining business whose illegal activities are carried out with the backing of a gang of thugs.  Chang is portrayed as a man with a passion for meat and a hobby involving simulated hunting with his own indoor shooting range.  The narrative is provided with a third strand which involves Chang’s lawyer – a young father whose daughter will also go missing.  Xin is able to mix genre tropes and issues which bring together familiar Chinese stories – missing children, the rape of the environment, the rise of entrepreneurs and the new urban educated class – with genre elements such as action and fantasy. 

The crime gang’s lawyer is forced to search for his abducted daughter

The London Film Festival screening I attended was in fact the film’s international première following its appearance in the new Chinese festival earlier in the year.  The film is handled by Fortissimo Films, the former Dutch-Hong Kong sales house that is now Chinese-owned.  In the interesting and useful interview with Xin and his producer on the Eastern Kicks website, Xin asserts that they are able to deal with the Chinese censors even with a potentially difficult film like Wrath of Silence.  Yet it now appears that the film’s Chinese release scheduled for 13th October has been postponed indefinitely.  It isn’t difficult to see why the Chinese authorities might be wary of the critique of corrupt business power and its impact on local communities.  The film deals in metaphors for China’s recent rapid economic development and the problems it poses. 

Reading the reviews of its LFF screenings it seems that, while praising the films vitality and the director’s creativity, most reviews suggest the film is too long.  Personally, I did find the level of violence and the length of the action scenes to be excessive.  I’m sure they would work in a more tightly focused action film but here they need to gell with the more measured dramatic sequences.  The narration is presented in a complex way with flashbacks to explain plot and motivation and the final chase is followed by an extraordinary scene which like other elements of the story, is based on experiences of the director as a boy growing up in the same region (as is the use of meat, especially lamb/mutton as a major part of the local diet).  The film’s title might be interpreted as both the anger of the mute miner, but also the anger of the ‘silent majority’ of oppressed peasants, or even perhaps the anger of the hills themselves suffering from ‘rape’ by the mining companies.  This is an ambitious film and I’m prepared to forgive the uneasiness of the mix – perhaps it is even a strength?  The trailer below doesn’t have English subs but the images present the story effectively. 

It’s a moment to celebrate when a major South Korean film gets a UK release and from this weekend in the UK you have the opportunity to see it – as long as you live in one of a handful of major cities.  When films from the revived South Korean film industry arrived in the UK from the late 1990s onwards it quickly became apparent that most of them were beautifully produced with a high level of technical skill and aesthetic understanding and that there are plenty of accomplished actors as well as skilled directors.  It then quickly emerged that there were certain directors who were interested in marrying genre ideas from other cinemas with forms of Korean story-telling and aspects of Korean history and culture.  Kim Jee-woon is one such director, first introduced to UK audiences with the immaculate horror film A Tale of Two Sisters (2002) and the slick gangster/crime film A Bittersweet Life (2005).  Since then we’ve had releases for his ‘kimchi Western’, The Good the Bad and the Weird (2008), the hunt for a serial killer, I Saw the Devil (2011) and Kim’s American outing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Last Stand (2013).  There are other titles that I don’t think have made it to UK cinemas. 

Song Kang-ho as Captain Lee of the Japanese Police.  Whose side is he on? 

The Age of Shadows is at heart a ‘resistance movie’, although technically it isn’t set in wartime.  Ignore all the taglines that say it is a ‘spy movie’.  I watched the film on a plane, poorly screened and cut by several minutes I think (it is listed as a 140 minutes in cinemas) and I missed the credit that all the press reviewers picked up.  Consequently, I struggled to place the time period.  The story is based on real events – a plot by an underground resistance group to explode bombs inside a government building in Seoul during the 1920s.  The Japanese had been in direct control of Korea since 1910 (and indirectly since 1876).  Kim’s film goes beyond a tense thriller to embrace two major action sequences and the soul-searching drama of a central character torn between personal survival and complicated feelings of patriotism.  This is Lee Jung-Chool, the Korean who has become a Captain in the Japanese Police – and who is played by the great Song Kang-ho.  He must report to his Japanese commander and attempt to infiltrate the resistance group represented by two star actors, Kim Woo-jin (recently in Train to Busan (South Korea 2016) and Lee Byung-hun (seen briefly in The Magnificent Seven (US 2016)) with Han Ji-min as the female lead.  Han is not really given enough to do and this, for me, seemed to be the weakest aspect of the film. 

The action scenes are terrific with wonderful set design and well integrated CGI.  The action ranges from Shanghai (where the resistance collect explosives) to Seoul with the excitement of the train confrontation in between.  Song is very good and the narrative and his playing mean that we are never quite sure how he is going to act, torn between pragmatism and idealism.  In his Sight and Sound (April 2017) review, Roger Clarke suggests that the film’s title is a reference to Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic World War Two resistance film Army of Shadows (1969).  That certainly fits in the sense that Kim would surely know the film (and I’m sure he knows the Hitchcock films that might inform his train confrontation).  It’s also an interesting reference to cultural exchanges after Melville’s adoption of East Asian film culture in Le samouraï (1967).  It’s almost as if Kim is retrieving Melville’s borrowing.  Melville is also borrowed by various Hong Kong filmmakers for gangster films (see Vengeance (HK-France 2009).  But Kim may also be borrowing from Ang Lee’s Lust Caution (China/Taiwan/US 2007).  I think the real force of the Melville allusion is in the torture scenes when the resistance members are captured by the Japanese.  The film suddenly got serious for me at that point. 

I’d love to watch the film again on a big screen where I’m sure it will look wonderful.  Unfortunately the distributor Soda’s engagements seem to miss out Leeds/Bradford completely.  Outside London the film is screening at the major independent arthouses such as Watershed, HOME and Showroom and various Cineworlds and Odeons.  Bizarrely, however, if you live in Manchester or Sheffield, you can choose an arthouse or a multiplex but if you live in Liverpool, Leeds/Bradford, Hull, Nottingham, Leicester or several other big cities, you are denied an opportunity.  See the full list of screenings on the Soda website. 

Kurosawa’s original Seven Samurai with Mifune Toshiro in the foreground

The new ‘Seven’ led by the man in black (Denzel Washington)

The new version of The Magnificent Seven is an entry in a major global franchise.  The universal elements in the film’s story have been around for a very long time.  Robin Hood, for instance, is a story in which a group of outlaws protect villagers from the Sheriff’s men.  But the specific story structure of seven ‘professionals’ recruited to protect a village comes from the imagination of Kurosawa Akira and his collaborators and the folk tales and history of 16th century Japan that created the 1954 film Seven Samurai, widely regarded as a classic action film.  Seven Samurai prompted the original Hollywood remake in 1960 and several sequels.  In his chapter on ‘Remaking Seven Samurai in World Cinema’ in East Asian Cinemas (eds Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai, I. B. Tauris 2008) David Desser explores the influence of the film on a range of productions in Hong Kong and India as well as in the US.  My interest is in the extent to which the new film draws on Kurosawa and how much is lost through the process of adaptation.  The scriptwriters of the new film, Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk, are credited alongside the original writers Kurosawa, Hashimoto Shinobu and Oguni Hideo.  I note that Pizzolatto is a novelist who has written for the TV serials True Detective and the US remake of The Killing, and that he has also taught writing – all of which might give some hope that he could make good use of the original script. 

There are certainly aspects of the original script still present, but the new film is 133 mins long, roughly 65% of the running time of the Kurosawa film, so quite a lot is missing (there is no ‘padding’ in Seven Samurai).  The location of the story has moved north from the 1960 version and re-located in the Sierra Nevada (“three days from Sacramento”) in 1879.  This makes sense since Seven Samurai was similarly based in the mountains in an isolated village.  The date and setting make the new film a ‘mountain Western’ with gold mining.  Here is the first problem in that the townspeople of Rose Creek don’t have a visible farming community and their attachment to the land is symbolic rather than being portrayed realistically. ( In the original, the bandits have already been to steal the rice harvest and are expected again for the barley harvest.)  The new script isn’t quite sure what to do with the gold miners and it doesn’t have time (or enough imagination?)  to represent farming.  Instead it introduces the villain as a capitalist exploiter and the main motivation of the townsfolk to be expressed through Emma (Haley Bennett), a woman who wants “righteousness” after her husband was killed by the exploiter “but will take revenge”.  A similar figure was a minor but important character in the original.  Apart from the preacher, none of the other townspeople is given a narrative function as such.  Because of this, Kurosawa’s main theme is lost. 

Seven Samurai is about a distinctive clash of caste and class presented as a humanist epic.  The farmers in the isolated village normally despise the samurai, whose societal role as warriors employed by feudal lords is under threat during the 16th century when many of them are unemployed, becoming ronin or ‘masterless samurai’.  The samurai who are recruited to help the farmers are poor and hungry – they will fight for three bowls of rice a day.  But they are also men of honour, so they will fight to maintain that honour.  Kurosawa makes this explicit and deeply moving by a decision to employ what was already becoming his trademark, the ‘master and apprentice’ roles within the group of samurai.  Shimura Takashi as Kannei is the ‘master’, the older man who is a wise warrior, a skilled fighter and a leader of men.  Katsushiro (Kimura Isao) is the young man, the devoted follower and the one with most to learn because he is distracted by a young woman from the village.  Shimura was the actor used most by Kurosawa.  But he isn’t the star of the film.  That’s Mifune Toshiro.  Mifune plays Kikuchiyo, the man who would be a samurai.  His secret will only emerge later when we learn that he was a farmer’s son and that he had been abandoned as a baby during a raid by pirates.  Kikuchiyo forms the bridge between the samurai and the farmers.  He understands both and despises both, yet supports both.  It is his human story that reveals the film’s theme.  The genius of the Seven Samurai script is that we learn about a wide range of characters – so there are individual stories – but those stories also inform the overall narrative about a society in which both farmers and samurai/bandits are suffering (but in which the farmers will be the long-term winners). 

Emma (Hayley Bennett) becomes a sharpshooter – and the effective leader of the town. 

The script for the new film struggles to find the same sense of coherence.  We do learn something of the ‘back stories’ of ‘Chisolm’ (Denzel Washington) Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and a few others, but these stories don’t relate to the overall narrative in the same way as they do in Kurosawa’s film.  Chisolm does have a personal reason to fight, but like Emma’s motivation it is about revenge against the villain, not about honour.  Revenge is not a motive to trigger carnage on the scale depicted here.  At the end of the Seven Samurai, the three survivors are the ‘master’, the ‘apprentice’ and the second in command.  The other four samurai have been killed and the master observes, as planting begins for a new crop, that the farmers have won.  I suppose I shouldn’t spoil the ending of the new version, save to note that what it seems to do is to highlight the new ‘diversity’ amongst the defenders of the village.  Yet the weirdest thing about the whole film is that presence of a black law enforcement officer (Chisolm), an East Asian gunslinger, a Comanche warrior and a woman leading the townspeople is never really commented upon.  Director Antoine Fuqua has said that he wanted to make the kind of Western that he watched as a child with his grandmother.  In this sense his film is ‘colour-blind’.  But this is a film set in that period of Western history when the four ‘minorities’ he presents in the narrative were actively engaged in conflicts in the ‘real West’ as well as the Hollywood ‘revisioned’ West of movies from the 1970s onwards.  It’s as if movies like Harry Belafonte’s Buck and the Preacher (1972) never happened.  In The Magnificent Seven we see the gamblers and saloon girls leaving town when the attacks begin, but in McCabe and Mrs Miller (1973), the brothel-keeper played by Julie Christie is a new kind of female entrepreneur to stand alongside the school teacher and the homesteader as a new female type – and a representative of capitalist enterprise.  Instead of running away she would consider selling out to the kind of capitalist exploiter who threatens the town in the new Seven.  The East Asian character is again not investigated in any way, even though 1879 was some 10 years after Chinese workers had helped build the first transcontinental railway in the US.  Chinese migrants (and therefore East Asians generally) would have been part of the life of many Western towns.  I’m not sure how a Korean would have got there, but the point is that Fuqua seems fairly cavalier about both ‘real’ history and the myths developed during the declining years of the Western as a mainstream genre.  By contrast, Kurosawa’s historical representations were essentially ‘realist’ with careful research to get things ‘right’. 

Kurosawa famously built his village in the mountains, for the most expensive film in Japanese history at that point.  He built it to specifications with the various action sequences in mind.  Fuqua presumably built his own town on location for the same reasons.  Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have thought so much about how to shoot the action scenes.  The only thing I remember from the great battle is the bizarre sight of Denzel Washington performing a riding stunt worthy of a Roy Rogers movie in order to shoot a bad guy.  Fuqua did choose to have a church at the centre of the action and this was a good decision, conjuring up a whole host of Westerns, but again I don’t think it was thought through fully.  Kurosawa set his battle in the midst of howling winds and torrential rain with swordsmen struggling in a sea of mud to great effect.  Nothing as exciting happens in the new film.  However, I should record that I actually enjoyed watching Denzel and co. even as I was ticking off the missed opportunities.  The film was entertaining, it just wasn’t ‘special’.  Seven Samurai still stands at No 19 on IMDb’s all-time list of the Top 250 movies and for good reason.  It has a great story, human values, engaging characters, terrific performances, photography and editing rarely bettered, a wonderful score and Mifune on fire.  See the trailers below for a quick summation of the differences. 

Last week, more or less by accident, I attended back-to-back screenings of India’s top box office film, Kabali (India 2016) and Hollywood’s latest revamp of the Bourne franchise, simply titled Jason Bourne (US 2016).  I’d wanted to see Kabali but Jason Bourne was an ‘impulse watch’, mainly on the grounds that Alicia Vikander and Vincent Cassel are two of my favourite stars.  I’d seen two of the previous Bourne films and three recent Rajnikanth spectaculars.  The result of this current contest between the action champions of the US and India was, for this viewer, an away win for Superstar Rajni. 

Let me deal with Jason Bourne first.  The return of Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass, this time with his regular cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who first came to international attention as Ken Loach’s cinematographer), gave hope to fans of an action film par excellence.  Vikander’s casting and that of Cassel matched earlier European casting choices.  They were joined by Riz Ahmed in a Steve Jobs type role and the whole package had a very European flavour for a Hollywood blockbuster.  Unfortunately, the script was left to Greengrass and his editor Christopher Rouse and they proved to not be up to the job.  In truth, Jason Bourne is four separate action sequences somewhat loosely tied together by the familiar plotline of Damon’s character Bourne trying to find out what his own father did that started this whole chase scenario in which he is pursued by corrupt CIA officials.  The novelty is that this time he might expedite a further release of Edward Snowden type secret materials – and in doing so create further problems for the CIA in its link to the surveillance potential of the Riz Ahmed’s character’s new software developments. 

In the first major action sequence, Bourne is on the streets of Athens during anti-austerity riots.  He’s meeting his ex-CIA ‘insider’ partner played by Julia Stiles.  Bourne is in ‘drab’ but she has long flowing blonde hair – easily visible to the satellite cameras of the CIA back in Washington where Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander can track the couple’s every move and release ‘The Asset’ – the assassin played by Vincent Cassel.  We never learn what the Greek riot was about (are audiences expected to know the details of Greece’s economic and political problems?),  but various Greek bystanders are killed in the mayhem and the action moves to Berlin where Bourne and his local contact make similarly stupid mistakes.  After that it is London and then finally Las Vegas.  In each case, the main confrontation is between Cassel and Damon with the CIA mission being compromised by Vikander’s realisation that something may be amiss in what they are doing – or perhaps she has her own ulterior motives? 

The action is indeed spectacular but by the fourth sequence it starts to get boring, though I perked up and genuinely laughed when a Police SWAT vehicle crashes into a Las Vegas temple to the fruit machine.  In technical terms, the film is very efficiently made, but the script is full of holes.  Bourne has no personality and I wanted the Cassel character, who unfortunately has no redeeming features, to end up with Vikander.  Perhaps the oddest aspect of Jason Bourne is the BBFC entry on the film which shows a 12A Certificate and suggests that there is ‘moderate violence’.  So, children can’t be harmed by multiple deaths by sniper bullets or beatings in which people are repeatedly hit to a sickening soundtrack.  But there are no sexual encounters or drugs so children won’t be affected.  The hypocrisy is staggering. 

Kabali is, by comparison a lot less slick and at times quite slowly-paced, but it wins because of warmth and wit, because it is actually ‘about’ something and because it has Rajnikanth, genuinely a superstar, mainly in South India, but also in parts of the world with a Tamil diaspora and other surprising places such as Japan.  Rajnikanth is now billed as ‘Superstar’ in his film’s credits.  Now 66 he has appeared in some 200 films since 1975.  His superstar status depends on his affinity with the ‘common man’ in the crowd (I’m not sure about his appeal to the ‘common woman’).  Whatever trouble he is in, Rajni’s character will emerge and live to fight another day, mainly because of his lightning reflexes.  Kabali reminded me of one of Rajni’s earlier successes as a gang leader in Mani Ratnam’s Thalapathi(India 1991).  In the new film we meet Rajni as a man who has served 25 years in a Malaysian prison for a crime he feels he was not responsible for – and which was associated with the death of his pregnant wife.  He is met at the prison gates by followers who have been waiting patiently for him – and building a school in his honour to train young Tamils in Malaysia who have ‘failed’ or lacked opportunities.  But Rajni (Kabali) is a gang leader, albeit one with principles and political ambitions.  Flashbacks reveal how he began as the leader of Tamil workers on rubber plantations in Malaysia, striking for better conditions.  His enemies are other Tamil gangsters who resent his leadership and reject his political aims and Chinese gangsters led by Peter Lee (Taiwanese actor Winston Chao). 

In some ways Kabali is a melodrama.  Kabali is ruthless when he first emerges from prison, immediately taking down some of his Tamil enemies.  But he is soon distracted by memories of his wife and begins to follow up clues to what really happened 25 years ago.  Flashbacks take us into a family melodrama in which we learn of miraculous recoveries.  Kabali still has a wife, but he will need to travel to the ex-French colony of Pondicherry to find her.  He also has a daughter who emerges in true melodrama fashion – and he has surrogate sons from the school founded in his honour.  But all this family business means that Kabali’s enemies have time to organise and the film’s finale will prove whether Kabali can still be a boss in Kuala Lumpur – which offers a cityscape of tall buildings to match any American setting.  As one Hindi/Bollywood critic writes, this is indeed a ‘Southern pot-boiler’ but the emotion got to me.  Rajni himself remains eminently watchable.  He is now playing close to his age and the wig works very well – he looks cool and stylish as a don in his sixties.  He dominates the frame and speaks commandingly and he can still use a gun and make his moves. 

The release of Kabali in India has been a media event in itself – even outside the South.  Kabali‘s producers claimed the biggest ever opening box office for an Indian film.  Box office figures in India are always dubious and especially so in Tamil Nadu.  Nevertheless the film has attracted huge crowds in the South and has been dubbed into Hindi, Telugu and Malay (where several scenes have been censored) and probably other languages too.  In North America, the UK and Australia we are able to see the Tamil original with English subs.  One of the most interesting Hindi/Bollywood reviews of the film suggests that Hindi dubbing is very poor for Kabali and that it loses not only Rajni’s great delivery, but also the political subtext of Tamil identity in colonial and post-colonial Malayan history. ( Malaysia and Singapore with their significant Tamil diaspora communities are key audiences for Rajni films.)  Another article commenting on Rajni’s status as superstar claims that no film script can contain him any more and that the his films will always fail for fans who have enormous expectations. ( Rajni fans treat the star like a deity, making offerings to giant cardboard cut-outs of their hero and watching the films multiple times.  His fans outside Tamil Nadu will fly in and purchase tickets at inflated prices to see their hero.) 

Kabali is directed by Pa. Rajnith, one of the younger feted directors of Tamil cinema.  Having not seen his first two films, I’m not sure how Kabali stands up to them.  He seems to do an OK job and it’s good that Superstar Rajni can work with the new generation.  But surely he can’t go on playing the same kinds of roles much longer?  He can certainly act and it would be good to see him take on something new – perhaps something with less action and more politics.  But I doubt his enormous fanbase would agree.  One thing you can say about Rajni and Kabali is that apart from the Godfather references that helped to build Superstar Rajni’s persona, Hollywood has so far not produced anything to compete with him directly. 

This year’s Chinese New Year screening at HOME Manchester presented by the Chinese Film Forum UK and the Confucius Institute at The University of Manchester, was a Taiwanese film.  We’ve had a variety of features over the last few years in Manchester and they have usually been films that haven’t been acquired for UK release. …  Continue reading →

Ek Tha Tiger introduced the pairing of Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as ‘super spies’ in a Hindi cinema blockbuster for Eid 2012 that became a big commercial hit.  It’s interesting to re-visit now that the sequel has been similarly successful after release during the Christmas period of 2017.  Though both films are instantly recognisable … Continue reading → […]

‘Creative Visions’ is the title of the latest celebration of Hong Kong Cinema at HOME in Manchester (continuing a series of celebrations that started during the cinema’s previous incarnation as Cornerhouse).  This latest short season of films presents work from 1997-2017, twenty years since the handover of Hong Kong back to China.  HOME’s seasons come … Contin […]

Hotel Salvation is the latest Indian Independent film to successfully tour film festivals worldwide and now receive a limited general release in the UK.  It was first launched at the Venice Film Festival last year.  Its young (25 year-old) writer-director Shubhashish Bhutiani had already won prizes with Kesh (2013), his thesis film short from New … Continue re […]

Cloud-Capped Star is the first film in Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy about the partition of Bengal in 1947 and its aftermath.  It could be argued that all of Ghatak’s features between 1952 and 1977, when his last work was released posthumously, were concerned with the partition, but it is the trilogy that has been … Continue reading →

This is the third feature by the French auteur Katell Quillévéré.  It’s adapted from a novel by Maylis De Kerangal and the screenplay is by the director and the highly-experienced Gilles Taurand.  I’d seen and enjoyed Ms Quillévéré’s first two features, Love Like Poison (2010) and Suzanne (2013), and I was keen to see the third, although I knew it … Continue r […]

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The Labour leadership election appears to have got the UK press and broadcasting media in a real tizz.  One of the most aggravating aspects of the reporting is the constant appendage of ‘left-wing’ to any reference to Jeremy Corbyn.  He is … Continue reading →

The 10th anniversary of the ‘7/7 bombings’ in 2005 in London saw a range of remembrance events across the UK.  These resulted in a great deal of media coverage.  One BBC radio reporter referred to the four young bombers and … Continue reading →

The local elections in England last week produced two examples of quandaries for broadcasters.  The big story for the BBC and other commentators was the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by a curiously charismatic Nigel Farage.  UKIP are … Continue reading →

Hinterland is a good example of the global/local.  Like some other modern states the UK has statutory requirements and cultural policies that protect the other languages in the Home Nations and this means support for both Welsh and Gaelic broadcasters … Continue reading →