Jehane Noujaim‘s The Square is an enthralling and frustrating documentary record of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It tells its story by holding a steady narrative focus on a small cast of central characters and tracking the revolution’s rise and fall–so to speak–from the glory of Hosni Mubarak‘s resignation to its co-optation by a variety of counterrevolutionaryContinue reading “Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square’: Enthralling and Frustrating”
Category Archives: Movies
Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos
The YouTube video titled “A Glorious Dawn” starring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (their voices run through Auto-Tune), and snippets from Sagan’s epic Cosmos, has now racked up almost nine million views and twenty-seven thousand comments since it was first put up sometime back in 2009. (Mysteriously, in addition to its seventy-seven thousand ‘Likes’ it hasContinue reading “Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos”
The Killing and Vigilante Justice
There are two instances of vigilante justice in The Killing‘s first season: Bennett Ahmed is brutally beaten by Stan Larsen and Belko Royce, and Councilman Darren Richmond is shot and critically wounded by Royce. Both victims were suspects in the murder of Rosie Larsen; both have been mistakenly accused, a fact that makes their fates particularly poignant.Continue reading “The Killing and Vigilante Justice”
The Killing and the Death That Dare Not Speak Its Name
One important feature of AMC’s The Killing, (the subject of yesterday’s post), which it inherits from the Danish original Forbrydelsen, is its focus on the effect of the central murder on the victim’s family. In so doing, the show manages to be, besides the imperfect police procedural, a painful examination of the most commonly ignoredContinue reading “The Killing and the Death That Dare Not Speak Its Name”
The Killing as Cautionary Police Procedural
If Wikipedia’s entry for “police procedural” is any indicator, AMC’s The Killing is not commonly thought of as one. But despite being a traditional whodunit, it has many of the features of that genre; it depicts “a number of police-related topics such as forensics, autopsies, the gathering of evidence, the use of search warrants andContinue reading “The Killing as Cautionary Police Procedural”
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion: Portrait of the Apocalypse
If you find speculation about post-apocalyptic situations interesting, then you should find speculation about the progression of an apocalypse interesting too. Steve Soderbergh‘s Contagion is a fine cinematic take on this eventuality. The movie’s plot is simple: a deadly new virus jumps the animal-human barrier, and is transmitted quickly by contact. The virus’ first appearance occursContinue reading “Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion: Portrait of the Apocalypse”
The Post-Apocalyptic Famine
A couple of days ago, I viewed Tim Fehlbaum’s directorial debut Hell, which “tells the story of a group of survivors in post-apocalyptic Germany in the year 2016, when solar flares have destroyed the earth’s atmosphere and temperatures have risen by 10°C.” As my posts here on The Walking Dead and The Road would indicate,Continue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Famine”
A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani
Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears‘ My Beautiful Laundrette makes most of its viewers laugh a lot. My personal favorite of its many rib-ticklingly subversive moments came–as it seemingly did for many others–when the gay street punk Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) helps the Pakistani Nasser Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) evict black West Indian tenants from his slummish property,Continue reading “A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani”
Ogling the Antics of the Rich and the Stockholm Syndrome
The New York Times’ Room For Debate features the following question today: Several Academy Award contenders like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle” glorify white-collar criminals and scammers, and many reality TV shows embrace the wealthy, too. A new series, “#RichKids of Beverly Hills,” is the latest example of our enthusiasm for “oglingContinue reading “Ogling the Antics of the Rich and the Stockholm Syndrome”
From ‘Filling the Sky’ to ‘Sharing the Earth’
In On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (Random House, New York, 2006), Marshall Berman, in the chapter ‘The Street Splits and Twists’, which, among other things, describes the complicated relationship between women and Times Square, notes in his commentary on Ethel Merman: Gypsy is one of the most grueling of AmericanContinue reading “From ‘Filling the Sky’ to ‘Sharing the Earth’”
Samir Chopra 