**/**** starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel directed by Deepa Mehta
by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours--indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.
by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and
occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical
origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from
Plutarch--the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts
from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all--and workshops it
through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All
three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied
with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that
needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them
together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance
between humanism and intellectual rigor.
***/**** starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker directed by Ashutosh Gowariker
by Walter Chaw With the subtitle "Once Upon a Time in India," Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers--as is Bollywood's wont--for Hong Kong's martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-Eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India's own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture's surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.
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