In Time: DVD review

If you’re the sort who starts sentences with “If time were money...”, you’ll probably like this movie. Time is money here – it’s the year 2161 and life stops at 25, unless you’re rich enough to buy more. Yes, time has becomes a currency of sorts, transferrable from one person to another. And yes, successful sci-fi thrillers have been made on flimsier premises (for instance: “This is a movie about corporate spies who steal business secrets by entering people’s dreams”).

Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is a factory worker from Dayton, a working-class neighbourhood where people’s time keeps running out. Quite by chance, he’s gifted 116 years by a world-weary aristocrat who “times himself out”. Unfortunately, the cops, or “time-keepers”, assume that the suicide is murder and start hunting for Salas, who’s moved to the classier part of town. There he meets Philippe Weis (Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser), and relieves him of both his money and his daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried). Just when things couldn’t get stranger, the time-keepers turn up, Salas takes Sylvia hostage and soon they two are on the run, in a literal race against time.

The director is Andrew Niccol, whose debut film Gattaca was a more cogent sci-fi satire (he also wrote The Terminal and The Truman Show, both of which are variations on existing outside of time).

In Time is mildly gripping, and Timberlake can evidently carry a film by himself, but it also takes its ludicrous premise way too seriously. We’re repeatedly told that the rich keep time for themselves by raising the cost of living, and are expected to cheer when Salas and Sylvia become a Bonnie and Clyde-like couple, stealing time and giving it to those in need. We’d rather just watch them run from time-keeper Cillian Murphy, or play “Who’s the best-looking member of a cast that includes Amanda Seyfried, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde and Matt Bomer?”. The DVD includes a couple of deleted scenes, but we wouldn’t encourage you giving up hours of your life in exchange for this.

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

In which the blogger offends fans of Guide

I am not the biggest fan of Guide. I thought it might have been more interesting if they'd made Marco a more sympathetic character, instead of an ogre (an impotent one, to boot). I also feel the film loses the plot a little when Raju becomes jealous of Rosie's success; it doesn't seem very consistent with his essentially good-natured character of the first half. I'll admit there are some noteworthy moments in the movie, most of them connected to Waheeda Rehman dancing or Dev Anand's dialogue delivery. But for me (and it must be just me, because everyone else seems to think the world of this film), the only scenes in Guide I'd want to see again and again are the first nine minutes.

The film starts in flashback, with Raju being released from jail. After a brief flashback, and a interior monologue in which he concludes he can never go back to where he came from, we see him set out on the road. As the credits unfold and the sonorous voice of SD Burman sings "Wahaan Kaun hai Tera", we see rapidly cut scenes of him sleeping by the wayside, sweating, get soaked in the rain, freezing, working on a farm for money. There's a fantastic shot in which he's looking at coins strewn around his feet, which people have obviously thrown at him assuming he's a beggar. He won't pick them up though; he grabs his jhola and takes off running. It's no more than a few seconds, but it cues us in to the kind of character Raju is.

The Average Shot Length for this credits sequence can't be much more than 3 seconds. This is unusual if you consider that Vijay Anand, Guide's director, is known for his long, intricate takes. There's nothing that resembles the percussive style of these early scenes in the rest of the film's three hour running time. When I saw Guide recently, I did something many fans of Indian cinema will probably consider sacrilege. Instead of letting the movie sink in, I immediately went back and replayed the first nine minutes. Then I did it again. And again

Anatomy of a Scene: The 25th Hour

"It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening"

The best passage in the 2002 film The 25th Hour is nothing like you’d expect from its maker, combative Spike Lee. The series of short scenes that unfold after James Brogan puts his battered son Monty in the car are, in all likelihood, an alternative reality dreamed up by a father who cannot deal with the idea of his son going to prison. On the way to jail, James starts to talk about leaving town, driving out west. We’ll have one last whiskey, he says, and part ways forever. Monty will then change his name, get a job, settle down, have kids. He can never come back, or be who he was before, but he’ll have a life. As the old man speaks, images from Monty’s new life flash before us, teasing us with the possibility that all any jailbird needs is a dad willing to drive him out of town. Yet, I found myself moved to tears, and reduced to arguing, unconvincingly, with myself about how Monty does indeed escape and start a new life. What makes these scenes all the more touching is that you wouldn’t expect Brian Cox, a no-nonsense actor if ever there was one, to be selling you a can of hot baloney, and you don’t expect Spike Lee, whose career has always been about confrontation, to direct something that’s pure escapism.

Don't mind your language

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Rio Bravo

Fred Zinneman’s High Noon is considered one of the great Westerns, but fellow director Howard Hawks was no fan. As he later remarked, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help.” So Hawks teamed up with John Wayne (who disliked High Noon even more) and set about making the exact opposite of that film. The result was Rio Bravo, a movie about a sheriff who does ask for help – though unlike the Gary Cooper character in High Noon, only from those who are likely to be of use.

Despite its indignant origins, Rio Bravo is one of the most blissfully entertaining Westerns ever. Sheriff John T Chance (Wayne) is in a tight spot. He’s just arrested Joe Burdette for shooting a man at point-blank range, and knows that Nathan Burdette, Joe’s brother and a powerful rancher, will be looking to bust him out. He also knows the townspeople are either too afraid to help, or too inept to fight. So he assembles a strange posse – his former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), now a recovering alcoholic, an old cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and the youngest draw on the block, the Colorado Kid (Ricky Nelson). There’s also a seductive cardsharp called Feathers (Angie Dickenson), who Chance can’t intimidate or seem to shake.

Howard Hawks was lionised by the auteurists because his films – no matter what genre – always looked like they’d been made by the same man. Rio Bravo certainly does have that patent Hawks mixture of screwball comedy, sexual tension (male-female and male-male) and economically choreographed action. Yet this film, rated by many as the director’s best, also deviates from the Hawks canon in certain ways. The relaxed fatalism that hangs over the film is miles away from the frantic rhythms of His Girl Friday or Scarface. There’s also a melancholy – especially when Dean Martin is onscreen – that one doesn’t see too often in the director’s films.

The script was by Hawks regulars Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, and the broad-ranging score by Dimitri Tiomkin (to hear “El Degüello” once is to have it haunt your dreams). Dean Martin showed why he was the best actor in the Rat Pack. Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez is a caricature of an excitable Mexican, but funny nevertheless, and Angie Dickenson’s voice is so laden with mischief one gets the feeling she scares John Wayne more than the killers. Wayne was already an icon by then; he exudes the confidence of one who’s realised the audience doesn’t expect him to act, but just be himself. A couple of years later, Sergio Leone ushered in the age of the revisionist Western. Rio Bravo thus stands not only as Howard Hawks’ last great film, but also the first “last great Western”.

A shorter version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Super 8: DVD Review

In the months leading up the release of Super 8, there were rumours about how the movie was JJ Abrams’ tribute to the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg. This seemed unfair, especially since Spielberg’s produced several films that bear no resemblance to his oeuvre (Transformers: Dark of the Moon, for one), and JJ Abrams is a serious talent in his own right (he created Lost and directed the sleek 2009 reboot of Star Trek). Yet, once the film released, it turned out the rumours were accurate. Super 8 is strongly reminiscent of early Spielberg, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Kids on bicycles in tense situations. Check. Townsfolk looking up in wonder at bright lights in the sky. Check. Henry Thomas in the lead. Check. (Okay, it’s Joel Courtney, but they’re dead ringers for each other).

So Super 8 is definitely Spielbergian. Sadly, it isn’t quite Spielberg. Six kids working on a Super 8 zombie movie witness a strange train crash. After they pick themselves up, they hear a loud banging from inside one of the derailed bogies. As they watch from a distance, something indistinct and animal-like breaks out and disappears into the night. Almost immediately, sinister military men arrive and refuse to say anything useful. It transpires that the escaped creature is an alien, and this time it isn’t phoning home, but roaring, mauling and slaughtering its way back. What starts out as a fluent piece of ’70s nostalgia turns into a monster movie that’s high on spectacle and low on logic.

In its stronger first half, before we actually see the creature, Super 8 conveys a real sense of what it must have been like to be young and film-crazy in small-town USA in the ’70s. Abrams, his friend and cinematographer Larry Fong and the film’s producer Bryan Burk all started out this way, making genre film rip-offs in their backyards (in a neat bit of back story, Abrams was given the chance to restore Spielberg’s own 8mm films as a teenager). The affection the director has for these kids and their cheesy horror flick is palpable. The younger actors respond beautifully, especially the self-possessed Elle Fanning and Riley Griffiths as the young director.

There’s plenty of trivia on the audio commentary, as well as in the two mini-features “The Dream behind Super 8” and “The Visitor Lives”. None of these is successful in explaining why the town suddenly becomes a war zone, or why exactly all the dogs disappear. What they do make clear is the extent to which everyone on the project was in awe of the Spielberg. Abrams, Fong and Burk spend half the audio commentary’s running time trying to come up with a suitable question to message the man; the next half is spent anxiously waiting for his reply. As always, you can rely on Spielberg to transport grownups back to childhood.

Closing night

Ben Gazzara, best known for his films with John Cassevettes, died today at the age of 81.