t's easy to say that a movie is lousy without realizing what goes into making it. Sometimes it's absolutely delightful.
In the short term, the horrible lip-sync in Bhayya kills you (this is a dubbed film). In the long term, the done-to-death storyline does. In the really long term, Vishal will most likely continue to make the same movies - he seems to be funded really well by an indulgent family. Fortunately, in the really long term, as Keynes said, we are all dead.
Bhayya is a typical Vishal film - full of violence where 1 (one) man routinely beats up a dozen dhoti-clad machete-wielding goons. There's nothing much else to the tale - one young man versus the army of a big bad villian who he takes panga with because of a girl. It also successfully sets the bar lower for all further Vishal films, thanks to some really sad comedy in the first half.
Jagan (Vishal) takes on the powerful goon Guna (Ajay) when he's trying to save Malathi (Priyamani) from him. He beats up all of Guna's henchmen and Guna himself to pulp, with Guna even going into coma. Guna's brother and mentor Mallanna (Devraj), a don in Cuddapah, then swears revenge, setting the tone for the rest of the movie as a mixture of a battle of wits and a whole lot of violence.
The first half is too bad for anything to make up for it - it focuses on Jagan trying to win the affections of Malathi, but the comedy is very poorly written (e. g. Vishal seeing an old woman as Malathi while a kid with him sees her as who she is - what was that about?), and featuring as it does only Vishal himself and no professional comic cast, has no life support even. An episode showing a flashback of Ashish Vidyarthi and Urvasi can range from barely tolerable to repulsive depending on how pained you are in general in life. Plus, there are too many jokes featuring old women.
A good bit of all that stuff might have been more bearable if it were part of an original Telugu film featuring familiar Telugu faces - for a dubbed film to work, there has to be something extra in terms of either script or presentation. There's no special effort in the dubbing itself to bring in close lip-sync, and there's plenty of Tamilian dressing and script all over the place. It feel funny when they keep desperately trying to refer to the whole setting of the film as Cuddapah.
The second half of the film is at least routine violence fare, and would get an average rating for itself, but cannot pull it out of the hole the first half plunges it into. The songs feel like unnecessary interruptions, and with there being no hummable tune, the effect gets aggravated.
Vishal is a decent actor, but the expressive Priyamani surprisingly has nothing to do except wear micros in the songs. Another surprise is Nirosha, the heroine of Mani Ratnam's Gharshana, in an insignificant role - what was she doing here? Most performances are decent, and the film visually looks okay, especially compared to the previous Bharani.
You can wait for this one's DVD to come out to watch it, but that would be stupid. Instead, just forget it.	
An untested American submarine captain teams with U.S. Navy Seals to rescue the Russian president, who has been kidnapped by a rogue general.	
This movie kicks mountains of ass! From the opening scene, which depicts the ancient Japanese ritual suicide method known as harakiri or seppuku, Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike’s latest film is clearly not screwing around. The opening scene is a textbook case of the effectiveness of sound design in film: we are mercifully spared the visual details of the disgraced samurai slicing open his own belly with his sword, instead focusing on a long take of his agonized face with the hideous squelching sounds of the violent act filling the soundtrack, an effect that is arguably even worse than onscreen violence. I remember being surprised to hear that the latest film from Miike (Audition, Gozu) managed to get an R-rating, and the fifteen minutes cut from the original Japanese release for the international version probably accounts for this, but I have little doubt that this scene has been presented exactly as Miike intended. It is a brutal beginning to an extremely violent film, a scene that really lets the audience know what it is in for.
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a masterpiece of harmony and artistic accomplishment, brought to life with the vivid and forceful genius of a director at peace with himself and his performance. A true work of art, it is a carefully and methodically adjusted masterwork, based on a classic story of war and justice, of struggling humanity and survival, pregnant with a Shakespearian conception of nature, revealing the generosity of well-tilled earth or magic spell of silent forests, where visual symbolism paves the way for metaphysical redemption.
Though simplistic in appearance, this story of seven samurai hired by farmers to defend their village and crops from rampaging bandits has universal, even mythological, significance. This is the story of mankind, always at struggle with itself for survival, and yet also looking for metaphysical redemption, which is, according to Kurosawa, only to be found in powerful harmony with nature. Kambei (Takashi Shimura), the older samurai, a self-described veteran of many lost campaigns, has the wisdom to recognize that only the farmers will eventually win this fight, because their relationship to life (and nature) is a fundamental one still unsoiled by social considerations or obsession for personal accomplishment, which is sadly the case for the samurai. Although farmers and samurai share the daily burden of fighting for their lives, only the farmers can provide the necessary condition for a lasting and constructive prosperity in the troubled and violent time of feudal Japan, whereas samurai have to find redemption through stoic balance, or put their sword to the worthy cause of social justice. Read More
What does one do upon learning they have just a few months left to live? Akira Kurosawa gives an answer to this question in his film Ikiru. Telling the simple story of a Japanese city official, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), and his efforts to see that a park is built in a waste-ridden empty lot, we the viewer are given an insight into the final task of a man living with terminal gastric cancer. Setting the pace of the film to slowly recount the struggles of seeing this final task through, Kurosawa ultimately conveys through Kanji the beauty of life, as well as the urgency that inevitable death instills in us all. It is because of this limited amount of time that terminal cancer allows one to live that a psychoanalytic focus on Ikiru seems almost natural to me. With an analysis looking toward death and the psychological ramifications it imposes on not only Kanji, but the rest of the characters as well, the question of why he is so driven to build the park before his death becomes that much more profound. When analyzing Ikiru under a psychoanalytic lens, the most logical aspect to focus on is not only death, but the influence it has on a person throughout their entire life. In the case of Kanji Watanabe, a man who is so engrossed in his work that he has lost touch with reality as a result, death and its inevitable influence are nothing more than some mythical, far-off event that he doesn’t have to worry about. Read More
I’d like to start this review off with a question: Does anyone even know about this film? The reason I ask is, for those of you who don’t know, I am currently living in Gifu, Japan, where the selection of films from the west that make it to rental here are not always the most well-known or popular back home. Having only read Wikipedia’s plot description of Vantage Point to refresh my memory, I saw there that the film got a 95% at Rotten Tomatoes and was overall a box office success when it was released in February of 2008. Though after seeing the film, I am unable to fathom how that could be the case, why was I suckered into watching Vantage Point? Two words: Matthew Fox.
For those of you who are fans of Lost, let me just tell you, it’s even bigger here in Japan. So if any Lost fan sees Matthew Fox’s face on a DVD cover at the store here, they’re going to rent it. Being a die-hard fan of Lost myself, I got suckered in by the same Hollywood tactic. Although the premise of the film is a little too reminiscent of 24, I liked the idea of a film that employed Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon effect of showing the same event from multiple perspectives, giving the viewer the responsibility of sifting through the facts and coming to their own conclusion. Vantage Point tries to one up Rashomon, however, in that it gives us eight different perspectives of an assassination attempt on the president while he speaks at an anti-terrorism rally in Spain. Now that you know why I gave Vantage Point a chance, let me get to the real heart of the matter. Why didn’t I get this film?
‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’ is written for percussion trio and electroacoustics. Jack explained: “Setting this Norwegian folk tale I wanted to use the structure and imagery of the tale to give a sense of the main character’s journey. It was my intention to highlight the sexism common to many folktales of the past, and use it for dramatic effect within the work. I recorded the tale in English, Welsh and Norwegian and then worked out where these sounds would work best within the piece. I also used sounds gathered on my last trip to Iceland. At its simplest level it is a story about finding love. At its most complex it is about the importance of questioning your relationship to the world and asking difficult questions. To this effect I wanted to guide the audience through the work with textual cues, leaving space in the music and electronics for them to create the images in their own imagination.”
Supported by: Arts Council of Wales, Wales Arts International, Arts Council England, Nordic Culture Point.