Why So Serious?

I'd written this post last August, just edited it...

I still remember the moment when I first read about Heath Ledger's death. 23rd January, 6.30 in the morning, I was at Mulund station, waiting for the train. Flipped the folded paper after reading the headline and there it was, the tiny headline which made me do a double take : 'Brokeback Mountain star dies at 28'
My jaw dropped and I had to read the article 3 times before the whole thing sunk in. Ledger had been found dead, lying next to his bed, by his maid. The cause was later determined to be an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

I have seen very few movies of his. So when The Dark Knight came out - the latest Batman film and the last movie Ledger completed, I looked around desperately for someone to go with to see the movie, which had garnered rave reviews. After delaying for weeks, I finally grabbed M, one of my best friends, on a very wet, cold afternoon and went to see the movie. And what I saw blew me away.

Christian Bale as Batman was good enough, but his face was concealed behind the Bat mask for about a third of the film, so I couldn't really appreciate his acting. But Ledger(playing Batman's arch nemesis-the Joker), who had burst upon the screen in the beginning of the movie itself, was a force to reckon with. His beautiful (OK, handsome) face hidden under ghostly white and red makeup, green tipped grimy blond hair, shabby purple suit, voice modulated to sound whiny & sinister, a lopsided walk and posture all culminate to bring on screen one of the most impressive performances seen in recent cinema (How many movies adapted from graphic novels can say that?)
He was quite creepy, with all the shuffling around, the nasal laugh and no apparent conscience. And of course, his "why so serious?" is definitely the line of the year.

On a high after the hugely successful Brokeback mountain which garnered him an Oscar nomination for best actor in a supporting role, Ledger had, with this role in Batman, completed dabbling in almost all genre of cinema - romance, drama, action, science fiction...One can one ponder where this actor would have been 5 years from now. He might go down in film history as one of those great, would have beens, a la James Dean and Leaf Phoenix

Heath Ledger has, quite literally, delivered the performance of a lifetime (reducing Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the same character in one of the earlier versions of the batman movies to a mere caricature). I smell an Oscar (Hey, he won it). What is the saddest part is that it will be his first and last.

A week of Movie madness

I'd attended the Asian Film Festival for the first time last year. Its the first and only real film fest I've attended so far, so I was super excited about attending this year as well. The movies shown last year were not exactly good (I'm sure there are better films being made in Asia), but the whole experience was fun - running between two theaters (2 venues), laughing at the really dumb films, being taken aback by some unexpectedly good ones(rare, this) and so on. This year was no different, if anything, the quality of the selected films deteriorated further, with some gems here and there. Here's an account of the Day 1 :

The fest opened at Plaza with Aha!(Dir:Enamul Karim Nirjhar), a Bangladeshi film that went on and on for what seemed to be over 3 hours.

Plot (What, Where?!): A man is preparing to sell his ancestral home. Enter his physically abused daughter and grandson (both having rhyming names- Ruba and Buba?!) from the States, Ruba's subsequent friendship with her neighbour - 'kissi kissi' Kislu (no comments) - a friendship which started out with her staring out of her window at the underpants he put out to dry, his 'all (and very bright) colours of the rainbow' underpants, and I mean rainbow quite literally - one colour for each day of the week. Throw in a very irritating, cricket obsessed servant with flies perpetually buzzing around him, and who, btw, is also an ex-convict; some highly uninteresting relatives and a party for the grandson's circumcision, and voila! - you have a not so very encouraging start to the festival. Aha! is also Bangladesh's official entry to the Oscars (There's hysterical laughter in my head) and that does not bode well for that nation's Oscar hopes this year or the next 10 - that is how long the jury will be mad at them for having the gall to send in this one

The next one was Ma (Dir:Manju Borah), from Assam, a musical, with the leads bursting into song every other minute - the Assamese apparently have songs for all occasions: love and other similar emotions; sowing, harvesting, rains, summer, fishing, motherhood, walking ... you get the hint. The film also vaguely flitted over the border dispute between Nagaland and Assam. Most others found this one bad as well, but my friends and I found this one quite bearable, after the traumatic experience of Aha!

After such a wonderful start to the festival, we decided that we didn't have the courage for anymore movies that day and ran away to college as fast as we could!