Hum Tum

Saif Ali Khan is no Shahrukh, that we know. We just saw Salaam Namaste last week too, but I've been very lazy about the blogging. In any case, it's very difficult to focus on a Bollywood movie when one keeps on wishing it were a different male lead.

Just like Saif Ali Khan is a poor substitute for SRK, Amsterdam is a poor substitute for New York. And Paris. This is the story of a couple that meet on the plane flying from Delhi to New York with a stop over in Amsterdam, which they spend together. Their paths keep on crossing, until (guess what) they realize they're in love with each other, blah blah blah. They spend time in Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Delhi and Mumbai, but all non-Indian locations are shot in Amsterdam. That could be less conspicuous if they avoided landmarks like the Rijksmuseum or the Concertgebouw, but hey, anything goes when they're singing and dancing with cheerleaders in the park.

Also interesting take on a kiss, a widow finding love again and marriage out of wedlock - or not so interesting if you've seen enough Bollywood films: this only seems to happen if the couple is living outside of India.

As a final note, I'd like to remark once again (or maybe for the first time on this blog) that as beautiful as Aishwarya Rai is, Rani Mukherjee has by far the coolest (or hottest) voice in Bollywood.

The Expendables

The Expendables has a lot of fighting, killing, running around and explosions. Unfortunately, it has much less plot, character development, and dialogue that makes sense. At 103 minutes, it feels very extended.

Director (of gang and movie) Stallone leads a group of mercenaries to some Caribbean island that's ruled by a mean general (David Zayas from Dexter) and an even meaner American (Eric Roberts). General also has a hot daughter. Stallone is offered $5 mil by Bruce Willis, but eventually goes and blows up the whole place (meaning the presidential palace, and likely, the nation's entire cultural heritage hosted inside it) for "personal" reasons. Schwarzenegger shows up for no reason, other than he's friendly with Stallone. There is even a scene involving the '80s action trifecta (Stallone-Willis-Schwarzenegger), which alone would be worth the price of the ticket; unfortunately, it is pretty clear that Arnie and Willis couldn't make it to the set on the same day, so the whole scene is completely fragmented and feels like some fanboy's montage sticking the three stars together. And the dialogue is simply inane, moving haltingly rather than smart-assedly. I'm not even going to go into the whole set of ideological problems related to a bunch of muscled guys going into random countries to blow things up.

The Expendables feels like a movie you'd run into on late-night network TV, only enjoyed (but then really enjoyed) if you're drunk. Or maybe stoned. Which is what Mickey Rourke looks like in the movie.

Splice

Vincenzo Natali's film about "two young rebellious scientists" who "defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism" received very good reviews (75% on rottentomatoes). Why, I don't know.

First off, as the summary suggests, the film features every imaginable (and unimaginatively used) cliché about "science gone wrong." Starting of course, with the improbably attractive and young scintist couple. It is then smothered by all the possible clichés involving psychoanalysis (I won't go into detail to avoid spoilers). I do not look forward to read scores of student essays in the forthcoming years on "A Psychoanalytical Analysis of Splice."

But what really enraged me about the movie is its claims to universality. This human/animal splice named "Dren" grows up superfast so we get to see all of its developmental phases. And without a TV to look at, or humans to talk to, it adopts all the typical "Western" attitudes towards gender, clothing, behavior, etc. Because that's how "natural" people act surely.

Chloe

There was a time when Atom Egoyan made beautiful, subtle films. Exotica tops my list, followed closely by The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey. Then I somehow skipped a few and saw Adoration last year. I thought it was a fluke, he'd get back to his senses. But now with Chloe, I'm getting worried.

A middle aged couple (Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson) in Toronto is growing apart from one another (or she thinks so). The wife hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to see if the husband will go astray. There is also a teenage son (Max Thieriot). Things get complicated. That he is a music professor and the plot seems to have jumped out of Così fan tutte is probably not a coincidence, but doesn't save the film.

Everything in Chloe looks beautiful. People (Moore! Neeson! Seyfried! Thieriot not so much.), clothes, houses, hotel rooms, even the doctor's office are all gorgeous. But everyone is so devoid of any humanity (maybe precisely because they are always so well-kept) that I found it impossible to care about any of them. And maybe I watch too many movies, but the narrative twist that is (presumably) supposed to give us the 'wow' effect is clearly visible from miles away.

One thing that's been on my mind: at the very beginning of the film, Moore's character (an ob-gyn specialist) explains to a patient how an orgasm works ("it's a series of muscle contractions, nothing mysterious about it"). If Egoyan is then trying to show that desire is not that simple and is in fact mysterious, he's comparing apples and oranges. Or so I thought.

Despicable Me

Cute, and not overly sweet. The plot summary on IMDB actually makes it sound a lot more sappy than it is: "When a criminal mastermind uses a trio of orphan girls as pawns for a grand scheme, he finds himself profoundly changed by the growing love between them." Luckily, Gru (the "criminal mastermind") is a villain of the same calibre as Dr. Horrible, thanks mostly to Steve Carell. I have to admit that while I found the adoption of certain 'suspicious' accents by Gru and his mom suspect, they were funny nonetheless.

What really makes the movie, more than anything else, are Gru's yellow minions. I want them. All of them.

Public media

This is a breakfast place on my street. For the world cup, they mounted a tv on the wooden 'wall' surrounding the demolition next door. They move the tv inside every night. Ingenious!

Twilight: Eclipse

Eclipse followed by True Blood. It was a day of werewolves, vampires, and the (slightly irritating) women who love them.

I never got into Twilight, as I previously explained. Eclipse is slightly better in the sense that at a few (very few) points in the film, it becomes self-reflexive and makes a few jokes. The whole thing seems so silly to me that without any jokes, it becomes unbearable. And the chasteness of all involved has become truly annoying.

True Blood, on the other hand, is anything but chaste. The homoerotic scene between Billy and Sam in S03E01 reminded me of the wonderful phrase "the subtext is quickly becoming the text" from my all-time favorite vampire story. Wouldn't mind seeing something like that in the next installment of Twilight!