Movies in January

Time is short, and the list is long. The Pianist and Network: two films you don't need me to tell you are quite good. Withnail and I was strange but wonderful. I should have seen this years ago (but then the same is true of Network). The Sunshine Boys was written Neil Simon by and stars (at least the version I watched) Woody Allen and Peter Falk as a vaudeville team that can no longer stand each other but are trying to work together on one last gig. A good story and Woody and Peter are perfect.

Death at a Funeral is a perfect streaming Netflix movie. Funny enough once but I'm unlikely to watch it again.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet starring David Tennant was quite good. I liked having Patrick Stewart play both the father and the uncle, and Hamlet cutting his palm when he swears his oath to the ghost and having the knotted bandage there to see for the next few acts, a constant reminder, very cool.

Season 1 of Rome I liked quite a lot. My only gripe is that it's just a shade too intense for my boys to watch it, which is a shame as it really brings the history to life.

I've been trying to watch more French films lately (another Netflix bonus). I quite liked OSS 117 Cairo, Nest of Spies. It's a parody of a series of films you just know Mike Myers was looking at when he was crafting Austin Powers. The lead actor is wonderful; he does smarmy so well. My favorite scene is one where he knocks back a couple of scotches in his boss's office, and then gets more than a little buzzed. It was well played, the slowly building sense that our hero isn't all there that culminates in his attempt to get down the hall. How does Bond do it? I had watched this after seeing a trailer for the sequel OSS 117 Lost in Rio because a French spy film featuring Nazi luchadores simply must be seen. Alas, it was not as sharply written as the first.

3 idiots has Aamir Khan and Vidhu Vinod Chopra joining forces to tell a story about the cruel pressures of college in India. Think Tiger Mom, times ten. An excellent film. I particularly liked all of the inventions the engineering students came up with; very clever and clearly they really work.

My Name is Khan also has a few scenes of engineering inventiveness, but mostly it's a story about how not all Muslims are bad. It also features Shah Rukh Khan as an autistic man. The filmmakers did their research, and his performance is quite good. The fact that I kept hearing Robert Downey Jr. talking about not going "full retard" is clearly just my own baggage.

Mela was apparently a box office bomb, and I'm not sure why as I found it rather fun. Aamir Khan is a traveling actor and while there's some sort of A story that involves a woman (Twinkle Khanna in I think her last role?) who needs to avenge her brother or something, there is a lovely B story between Khan and his buddy that drives the truck. They had a wonderful chemistry together. Wikipediaing later, I see that's probably because the buddy was played by Khan's real-life brother. He looks more like Salman than Aamir. But I liked him; he played a good buddy. (And I think I answered my own question there; when the most interesting thing you've got going on is your B plot, your going to bomb in the box office. But you know I'll always love you, because I'm very forgiving of crummy A plots. I'm looking at you The Last Legion. I never seem to remember you're a movie about King Arthur. Aish is so distractingly cool).

Besides being one of or the last film from Twinkle Khanna, Mela also seems to be the point in Aamir Khan's career where he decided to do movies that had some deeper value. He followed it up with Lagaan, after all. 3 idiots is a more current example. But he also produces more interesting films, such as Peepli Live, a very dark comedy indeed about farmers in rural India who discover there's money to be had in suicide. This movie is as much a critique of politicians and the media as it is about the plight of farmers. Very sharply written.

I'll finish up with two starring Ranbir Kapoor. Wake Up Sid is about a young man in danger of remaining a perpetual adolescent, and the friend that gives him just enough of a poke to get going. All of the characters in this one are well-written with good arcs (Sid has some pretty cool friends). A little more old school song and dance is Bachna Ae Haseeno, a movie that takes it's title from a song from one of Ranbir's dad's movies. A movie I've never seen, so I don't know why the song was instantly familiar to me. I must have heard it somewhere. It is quite awesome, original or remix. Love the horns. It's worth taking a look at the original on youtube just for Rishi's outfit, and the girls in go-go boots. But I digress. This is another very modern story about a young man who gets on the receiving end of rejection and looks up all the girls he's wronged to apologise. It has its moments (his best friend certainly has some interesting T-shirts). Still, for me, it's all about that song: