Full screen

Here’s where you pause for the best of movies, masala, magic...
Personal Recommendation
Night Watch (2004)
Director: Timur Bekmambetov Language: Russian Cast: Konstantin Khabenskiy, Vladimir Menshov, Mariya Poroshina, Galina Tyunina
Timur Bekmambetov’s film isn’t spectacular, but it is several cuts above most of the fantasy films out there. The movie is based on Sergei Lukyanenko’s eponymous book whose moral underpinning and oblique comment on the state of affairs in post cold war Russia place it in the league of good pulp.Night Watch is a stylish thriller set in a gloomy world where humans unknowingly live alongside Others, people with special powers. The Others are divided into the Light, the good guys, and the Dark, the not-so-good guys.
Anton Gorodetsky learns the hard way that there’s a blurry line between the two. A member of the Light brigade, Anton works in the Night Watch. Both sides maintain an uneasy truce by policing each others’ activities. Anton is sent to catch a couple of vampires who plan to drain a young boy. The encounter gets out of hand when one of the vampires is killed. But little does Anton know that he, the boy and the surviving vampire are part of a larger conspiracy whose outcome has already been decided.
Set in the dark, menacing atmosphere of Moscow, the film seems like an extended hallucination in an appealing way. Anton is frequently in an altered state of reality as he must drink blood in order to catch vampires better. Others can enter a bleak, cannibalistic parallel world called the Gloom. Anton’s partner is a woman who has been punished into inhabiting an owl’s body. She can occasionally break out and when she does, there’s a storm of feathers and protoplasm.
WORLDLY WISE
Still Life (1996)
Director: Jia Zhang-ke Language: Mandarin Cast: Tao Zhao, Sanming Han
In Jia Zhang-ke’s meditative film, Shen Hong and Sanming make their way to Fenjie, an ancient town that’s being systematically hammered into rubble since it lies in the path of the Three Gorges Dam. Sanming is searching for his wife who left him 16 years ago. When he finds the house she had left has been flooded, he decides to wait for her, getting a job with a demolition crew that’s knocking the town down. We learn that Sanming had bought his wife from marriage brokers who had abducted her. Then, Shen Hong, a nurse, arrives in Fengjie searching for her husband who has hasn’t been home in two years. When she finds him, she confesses she has a lover and asks for a divorce.
The unrelated characters experience a sense of displacement that mirrors the upheaval around them — the dam, which carves the Yangtze, has left a wasteland in its wake and displaced more than a million people. There’s little conversation as the film moves at a slow, ponderous pace with the camera panning across China’s sites of erasure — crumbling buildings, people who have been uprooted. It’s like being shown a slideshow of modern China. A number of Indian parallels come to mind — the Narmada dam, SEZs, Mumbai’s new highways. The Three Gorges Dam is one of the country’s most contentious political issues. And Jia delivers a powerful critique of the Chinese idea of progress that involves forcefully reshaping the environment on a mind-boggling scale. This is achieved less by words than by Jia’s images of a wasted landscape that are often disturbingly beautiful.
OUT ON DVD
The Lives Of Others (2006)
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Language: German Cast: Ulrich Müher, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck
An officer with the Stasi, Gerd Wiesler coldly executes his inquisitions till he’s given the task of snooping on East Berlin’s intellectual power couple, theatre director Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. When Wiesler discovers that his assignment has been prompted not out of suspicion of the couple’s political persuasions but by a minister’s desire for Sieland, he becomes sympathetic. The more he spies, the more Wiesler is drawn to the couple. So when Dreyman decides to something uncharacteristically radical, Wiesler watches his back.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut film is a touching and suspenseful look at a bleak period in history. Set in the last years of communism, The Lives of Others captures the claustrophobia of a country subjected to hysterical levels of surveillance. When tensions are ratcheted up after Wiesler decides to intervene in Dreyman’s case at the cost of his own job, Donnersmarck sustains a pace that’s as taut as Wiesler’s perennially erect backbone. The centrepiece of the movie is Ulrich Müher, who stands out as Wiesler. Almost robotically efficient, he rarely betrays emotion, remaining admirably poker-faced throughout. He’s scarily blank while turning the mental screws on a man suspected of sedition and convincingly innocent when he’s being scolded by a suspicious superior. The only indication of an empty emotional life is a depressingly empty apartment and a visit to a prostitute.