virtuallyBRAINdead

This was my first Leos Carax experience and turned out to be one of the best surreal films I have seen. If you are watching this movie just for the sake of entertainment then please don't. It is a movie which is larger than itself, a part of our daily lives mingled with the weird situations we face as they bend and go out of our control. Some people have argued that this film depicts how cinema making has changed over the years, but that is partly true as this movie shows us what we actually are: a complex sum of different masks that we wear to face different people and different situations. Examiner.com has argued that what Carax has created is much different from David Lynch and Luis Buñuel who are highly regarded as the emperors of surrealism but I would disagree as the elements of surrealism in the Lynchian cinema are more dreamlike and complex and the same in this movie are life-like and uncertain so they are just different faces of the same coin. The film has a single man playing different characters each one very different from the other and Denis Lavant has outdone himself in playing them very well scene by scene. It has every element of human emotions and shows how they overshadow each other, at times. This is a kind of movie which deserves to be seen in a single sitting; no popcorn breaks and no intervals because if you miss a scene you miss the whole point of the movie. The cinematography is well done and make-up is mind-blowing but the fake penis may freak out some people. The movie changes its pace very frequently and changes our mood with it. This movie could not be reviewed in a single viewing and probably not in repeated viewings but that won't stop you from watching it again and again if you are a surreal-cinema aficionado.

GOW is one of the most standout Hindi movies of 2012 directed by Anurag Kashyup. The five hour long movie was released in two parts and every moment of the movie is worth watching. Pepped up with experimental music and quirky dialogues the movie is jam-packed with brilliant but not so mainstream actors. The movie is set in the Dhanbad's Wasseypur, a place rich of black diamond and plagued with rivalry between two Muslim operated gangs stretched across generations. The move beautifully captures the mafia-politician-police nexus in then Bihar, the Bollywood loving junta of Wasseypur and is loaded with songs that you will keep on humming for days. While Manoj Vajpayee's awe will keep you glued to the screen it is Nawazuddin Siddiqui who leapt across the heaven for me. The characters in the film are complex and well-developed and have nothing in common except narcissism and disregard for law. Cinematography is absolutely brilliant and the shot where the coal dust is all that is in the air you will feel as if you are sniffing it under your nostrils. When Jean-Luc Godard said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, he was probably not wrong; the movie is full of desi guns and village belles where shootouts take place at every nook and corner of the town. The screenplay is steady and doesn't break the environment it creates from the starting. This is a tale of revenge, blood-money and insanity which will leave a spot on your brain for the years to come.