Tamaal

This is an exceptional and highly refreshing movie.

Refreshing because a)it's not set in anywhere vaguely resembling America, b)there's little American involvement in the plot - even then, they're pretty much the villains of the piece and c)there's almost a complete lack of the sometimes-unintelligible American accents.

Despite these massive drawbacks, the film steamrollered the customarily-parochial Academy, which astoundingly nominated it for and awarded an avalanche of Oscars - including Best Director and Best Picture (it won the latter).

This was, incidentally, an amazing feat which the institution repeated the following year for "Gandhi".

The reaction isn't all that surprising, really. This is pretty much a flawless work, from Collin Welland's script, the memorable music by Vangelis, Hugh Hudson's tight direction through to the sparkling performances by Nigel Havers and co.

It is, perhaps, more a story of struggling against odds than a straight-out sporting historical drama.Both main protagonists, the Jewish Harold Abrahams and the Scottish Eric Liddell, fought against circumstances (either from without or self-imposed) to achieve their goals.

That the film manages to make this point without crashing down into maudlin sentimentality is yet another definite point in its favour.

This film is an audio-visual tour-de-force, even for Alan Parker.

Together with designer Gerald Scarfe and, of course, Roger Waters, Parker has produced an absolute gem of a movie.

Eschewing the stale concert footage of so many rock films, the trio, instead, put together a coherent montage consisting of skilfully-directed live action sequences interspersed with weird, sometimes grotesque, animations, all overlaid with the unmistakable Floydian sound.Most of the songs are from the best-selling double album but there are one or two that are to be found only on this soundtrack.

Parts of the film must have been harrowing to direct; in the Fascist sequences, forexample, Parker decided to employ bona fide skinheads!

And it was a treat to watch Saint Bob; he'll never win an Oscar but it makes a change seeing a musician play a musician.

It's been said before but a word of caution: you really have to be in the right frame of mind for this film. "Not necessarily stoned", as Hendrix said, "just beautiful".

In other words, this is not for the terminally-depressed or the suicidally-inclined; even Pink himself(someone once called him Roger 'Troubled' Waters) found it heavy going.

I saw this film when it first came out but couldn't remember a thing about it. Having seen it again yesterday, I understood the amnesia.

It is dull, dull, dull. Even the infrequent war scenes were nothing to write to the Academy about. And, yes, I am aware that this film was made nearly 25 years ago and, no, I'm not judging it by today's standards of technology. I'm judging it by the (relatively-)timeless standard of film storytelling.

It seems incoherent, meandering, with no real point to it, apart from the pointlessness of war. Was that the point? If so, why did it take Coppola so long to make it?