Christopher Nolan : His Past & Future

The first Christopher Nolan movie I had watched was the famous stunner ‘The Dark Knight’ which starred the unforgettable & remarkable Heath Ledger featuring as an antagonist. As I gradually withdrew my attention from Ledger’s villainous role as the evil Joker, I slowly started looking more into the director. He appeared to be a man having a vision & the best knowledge on how to thrill the viewers with his extra-ordinary & a stand-out director.

“ So Christopher Nolan that is “, I said to myself as the movie ended &  the director’s name came proudly flashing on my computer screen  as if those letters were proud to form into a name that will be recognized as one of the respected persons in the cinematic world.

The very next day, I ended up browsing for Nolan on the internet, craving to watch more of his impressive ventures. “The Following, Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, The batman Begins, The Dark Knight “, I began moving my eyes through these names. Almost all seemed to be accepted by both critics as well as the audience with rising hopes that he will come up with more of such physiologically-demanded thrillers in the near future.

I downloaded all of them & watched them one after another after proper intervals. The intervals which sent my mind running into thoughts about the film I watched previously, making me completely awestruck over this director.

The Following, which showcased a writer who out of boredom & loneliness took to following random people on the streets desperately plunging himself into the world of theft, deceit & misfortune .

The Memento is a film about a man’s battle with his short term memory loss & his desperate attempts to avenge his wife’s murder.

   

The Prestige: Two warring magicians try to master a very spectacular magic trick even surrendering their own morale. The question is who ends up being the winner.

  

Batman Begins: A playboy billionaire at war with his own conscience rises as a masked vigilante, Batman to save Gotham from crime & terror.

      

Insomnia: Veteran actor Al Pacino plays Detective Will Dormer, who arrives in Alaska under the pretext of investigating a homicide case & ends up getting involved in murder, despair & insomnia

                            

The Dark Knight: The Gotham city gets a new crime lord, The Joker who terrorizes the people of Gotham with his fiendish actions. It is up to Batman & few other heroes of Gotham to save the day.

Inception: A new technology is developed where it becomes possible to access one’s dreams & steal an idea or plant an idea in it. Don Cobb & his associates are hired by a businessman to enter into his rival’s mind & plant a destructive idea in his mind.

  

The Dark Knight Rises: Joker is arrested & Bruce Wayne aka Batman becomes recluse, but not for long. The masked vigilante has to come back to save the city from getting destroyed by the mercenary Bane. Can he succeed?

                                     

                                       

                                          http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/?ref_=sr_2

After all his publicly as well as critically accepted ventures, Christopher Nolan has decided to grab the reins to direct ‘Interstellar’.  Interstellar will take you on a maiden voyage to space revealing all the undisclosed theories &   surpassing all the limitations of space. The film assembles the stellar cast of Mathew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises), Jessica Chastain & Michael Caine (Prestige, Inception, The Batman franchise).

I am not too much involved in sci-fi movies. I find them highly over-rated & unrealistic but as a Nolan-fan I am pretty much convinced that he will pull off outstandingly raising the bar of sci-fi films. Even after directing a hyped movie, Nolan is smart enough to beautify it more by introducing powerful emotions in it, as if he is holding the firm grip on keeping the film emotionally brilliant.

So all I can do is wait for interstellar to hit the theatre for another Nolan-esque thrilling experience in IMAX theatres.  The fact that Christopher Nolan is directing Interstellar promises swooping helicopter shots, Hans Zimmer’s outstanding music, some exquisite plotline & some emotional & thought-provoking conclusion.  

Interstellar is slated to release in the latter half of 2014. 

Chennai Express : Fun-rolled Masala Entertainer !!!

Since the days of Chak De India, judging his grace & his stupendous acting skills, I am a huge fan of Shah Rukh Khan since. A man of substance, he shows his skills in every film through his strong dialogue delivery & a firm grip over the emotional phenomena of the film. Every film he does, he makes it new for his audience & that is what makes him a stand-out actor.

Just few hours back, I caught up with his new film released today ‘Chennai Express’ directed by the Singham & Golmaal director Rohit Shetty, co-starring Deepika Padukone. It showed the King of Romance in a dynamic never-seen-before avatar & some fun-rolled laughter & Rohit Shetty style action.

Not much of surprise, the film touches all the genres of Bollywood completing a circle of entertainment. The film is the mixture of both: humour as well as some serious action. Frankly, I only liked Shetty for Golmaal & Singham. I found that mostly his films lacked sensibility & displayed some mindless insensitive action. But the fact that Shah Rukh Khan is starring in it made me really look into Chennai Express. Because as far as I know SRK, he is one of intelligent brains in Bollywood & knows completely well what he is up to.

Not deviating from Chennai Express, I would like to tell about the plot. The story is about Rahul, a 40 year unmarried man, who lives with his grandparents in Mumbai.  After his grandfather’s death, Rahul embarks on a journey to Goa but a series of confusions & misunderstanding, he finds himself in Chennai Express, a train that brings a big turn in the life of Rahul leading him to the place where he is destined to be.

Frustrated of his misfortune about not being able to go to Goa, Rahul meets Meenama, a South Indian girl from Kumban village in Chennai.  She happens to be the pivotal part of the film that changes the monotony of Rahul’s life. Rahul witnesses the ticket checker of the train being thrown in the waters from running train by the Tamil goons who happen to have kidnapped Meenama, thus being the only witness to the incident. Rahul is plunged into the world where he is being pestered, troubled & led into some humorous mishap. Shetty has depicted all of this in funny way that audience find themselves having the best time of their lives.

Chennai Express is sheer entertainment with fun-filled comedy all over. There is action, romance & humour throughout the film. It will leave smiles on everyone's faces when they leave the theatre. It is very impressive and unlike all Rohit Shetty films, it has the powerful element of emotion, the element which Indian directors use to uplift their standard of cinema. The songs are combination of foot-tapping numbers as well as some melodiously extravagant songs.

If you have caught up with all Rohit Shetty films, this one you will be the most satisfied with. The first time collaboration of Rohit Shetty-SRK duo will undoubtedly set the box office registers ringing.

The Conjuring : Creepy & Terrifying...

Not being a lover of horror films, I never caught up with one in the theatres.  The 1973 Academy-Award winner The Exorcist & the Bollywood horror flick Bhoot, directed by RGV was all I had watched from this genre. According to me, both these films had enough visual & sound effects to terrify the audience. As I was going through Bhoot for the second time, I noticed that the main source of terror was the sudden sound effect (irrespective of the screen showing a demonic creature or not) & RGV had used this trick to scare the audiences more than ghostly horrifying visuals.

A very similar but an enhanced effect accompanied by some great visual effects is what The Conjuring (2013) stands on. The Saw director James Wan extracted a piece of story from the case files of Warrens and directed a supernatural thriller proving to rather more than just a mere horror film. It had the soul accompanied by a well-defined structure.

The film opens up in a remarkable scene where a demonologist Ed Warren & his beautiful clairvoyant wife Lorraine who are paranormal investigators providing rational explanations to strange happenings, investigate a case of the Annabelle doll where a small doll suddenly becomes possessed by the ghost of the 7 year old girl haunting the house of two nurses. The scene remarks the introduction of the two researchers who research & provide solution to malignant ghost invasions in a person or in a accommodation.

The film flies back in 1971 where Carolyn & Roger Perron, with their five daughters move into a bungalow in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Right from the day, they settle in the family experiences weird happenings in the house. Their pet dog Sadie is found dead outside the villa, the mother Carolyn gets strange bruises after she wakes up in the morning every day,  an unknown entity takes to pulling the daughter’s leg every night, the door creaks open mysteriously every now & then. These incidents go on culminating and aggravating as these small strange happenings magnify themselves to reveal large demonic presence in the house.  The menacing situation ends up getting so severe and dreadful that out of fear & despair, the couple resort to the Warrens for help.

The story is not just about the family of Perrons. The life of Warrens is also showcased parallel with the life of Perrons. The film is totally one-sided that you can predict that the lives of these two families are going to end up meeting at an unfortunate turn. The film is not recommended for people with a weak heart as the scenes are impressive but frightening. The demonic visuals are sudden, unexpected & fear-inducing personifying the directorial talent of James Wan since he succeeds effectively in generating chills down the spine.

More enhancing are opening & closing credits in the movie, the weapon most under-utilized in modern cinema as the snapshots from real-life Warren Cases are shown. The film’s cinematography also receives thumbs up as the cinematographer John Leonetti uses some swooping shots to capture characters as they run inside the house.   The film appears to be a winning horror formula after some previously released horror flicks going deep under the ground.

Above all, the director’s clear fascination to horror films like Amityville horror, the Poltergeist & the Exorcist is clearly visible in the film. As the film progresses to the latter half, comparisons of The Conjuring to The Exorcist becomes totally unavoidable  but the director has lived up to the expectations in The Conjuring & succeeded in giving an extra-ordinary film.  For weak hearted people, my message to them is ‘ Try not to scream folks ‘.

Django Unchained : The Most accessible Tarantino movie ever !!!

Being a movie buff, I was well acquainted with Quentin Tarantino for his master-work in two exquisite projects Pulp Fiction (1994) , Inglorious Basterds (2009). That is why I was more eager than usual for watching his 2012 movie, Django Unchained starring Christoph Waltz, Jamie Fox & Leonardo DiCaprio in lead roles. The title comes from Django, 1966 western drama starring Franco Nero who happens to make a remarkable cameo in Django Unchained. The horror that Django Unchained expresses isn’t of slavery, but of a filmmaker attempting historical but a entertaining endeavour while shackled by his own superior persona.

Tarantino found an appropriate channel to exhibit aggression & violence in a dramatic manner. The plot is set up in the year 1958 post Civil War where black negroes were traded, enslaved and tortured in return of money.
The opening sequence depicts two brothers Ace Speck & Dicky Speck with several chained Negro slaves being taken to a place somewhere in Texas. Among those slaves is Django, the slave who is determined to save his wife Broomhilda who is being separated from him during an auction. The Speck brothers during their travel are interrupted by a dentist turned bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Waltz) who offers to buy Django from the Speck brothers but ends up shooting one & injuring other severely since they refuse to initiate the sale & Django gets unchained.Schultz offers Django complete freedom if he identifies the Brittle brothers whom Schultz, being a bounty hunter is required to kill. It somehow happens that Django has the ability to recognize the Brittle brothers as he had worked in their plantations before being auctioned to wilderness. The two go on bounty hunting rampage when finally Schultz gets so enamoured to Django that he offers to aid him in his search to rescue Broomhilda. There is more to Django than just a bounty hunter’s right hand. Django has forbidden love for his wife which he restricts from reflecting on his face as he has Broomhilda on his mind even after being separated from her. Cinematically Tarantino has represented it rather beautifully.
The underlying soul of the film is that the freedman Django & the hitman Schultz are pitted against Calvin Candie, the owner of Candyland plantation & his butcher Stephen to save Broomhilda who is working as a slave in Candyland. The violence is outsize and enormous but not disturbing and Tarantino has successfully created a niche to showcase onscreen violence with several blood splashing & spilling scenes.  The action sequences are blood, gore & comedy-rolled together thus keeping us entertained all the way.

Christoph Waltz ought to get thumbs up for playing a scrupulous, lethal & politely taunting bounty hunter.  Even the role of antagonist Calvin Candie is played beautifully by DiCaprio as he succeeds to look both well-mannered as well as purely evil displaying sheer splendour & ability.
‘Django Unchained’ is 165 minutes long and is filled with moments of agonizing & teased out action and surprises in casting as well as the story.  Some people may have criticized the director on how racist the film happens to be but if you sit throughout the film; you can discover plenty of scenes for the audience to engage in. The world created by Tarantino in film is not just of misery and pain but one having sarcasm, racism, extreme violence and reprehensible people.