addytorials

When I was very small and TV was making its first entrance into my life, the national network aired Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. I was left gaping through the movie. It was a movie that made kids all over the world enroll themselves in martial arts schools. It made teenagers go Hoo-Ah on their friends on every street. And it made grown-ups stand straight, talk curtly, smile coyly and gym regularly. Enter the Dragon was a revolution.

I saw Ong Bak with the title "Ong Bak: Enter the NEW Dragon".

Needless to say, my instant reaction was, "what a load of cheesy cr@p". And then the credits ran. The camera swooped down over the tree. The tree sequence began. And I was hooked line, sinker and everything attached. If any movie comes close to deserving the title "Enter the NEW Dragon", it is this.

The story didn't matter. It was good enough to string all the action together. The acting didn't matter either. What Tony Jaa lacked in silent charisma, he made up for in jaw-dropping graceful action sequences. What the script lacked was made up for by an able director employing a commendable and refreshing use of the camera in an action movie without special effects (though the repeated shots tend to get a bit tedious at times).

The film is a celebration of Muay Thai. The fight sequences are pure magic. And there are enough fight sequences. This movie is sex for the old school martial-arts-street-fighting-movie fan.

And though this will never be the revolution that Enter the Dragon was, it may make you gape just like you did that first time you saw Lee throw a punch.

Reunion is one of those movies where the words "I'm back" are supposed to hold many deep and profound meanings in addition to the literal one. However, all it does is make you laugh at it's absurdity and choke up the popcorn you were dozing off on.

What could have been a touching story about motherhood and family, or a moving film exploring the pain of loss and how it was dealt with, or a smart psychological thriller or even a little horror flick a la Pet Sematary - has been rendered utterly pointless and horribly boring due to an inane amateurish school-playish script.

Though the lead actress must be given due credit for her face distorting performance as the distraught mother, it is hardly her fault that her melodrama could not live up to a script that has her babbling motherly nothings to her kids (both dead and alive) throughout the movie.

Other actors need no special mention for guest appearances and cardboard props could probably have done better justice to their presence on screen.

The kids, however, being an integral part of the movie, ruin it even further beyond belief with their atrocious acting skills coupled with the equally wooden lines they had to mouth.

But though the scriptwriter has stolen from the story any glimmer of verisimilitude and turned it into an over the top tale with below average dialogues, could not the director have salvaged the movie with some amount of respectability to the intelligence of the unfortunate viewers? Well, he does try. At times the scenes between Mother and child, shot in bluish dark soft light, attempt to evoke tenderness in the hearts of the sleeping viewers. But then the very next instant he scares you out of your reverie with gimmicks straight out of horror movie textbooks. And the next moment the viewer is treated to spooky music pasted on scenes depicting the mother being affectionate to her children.

And though the scenes by themselves might be half effective as to what the director hopes to achieve in the viewer's mind, they fail to come together as one complete movie. The viewer is left feeling sympathetic for the child, then spooked out by him, then feeling sorry for the mother, then suspicious about her, and so on and so forth. By the end of the movie the viewer has no idea what he just watched.

Of course, the director must also be lauded for his heavy use of symbolism throughout the movie, which the idle viewer is compelled to notice (and often invent) for lack of anything truly interesting in the film. For example, breathing life into the child (literally!), macadamia nuts (to explain that she is going a little nutty now), gingerbread-man (the little one who has run away)... and many more (don't even get me started on the horses!). If you happen to be subject to this movie some day, I suggest you entertain yourself by spotting some more. Assuredly, they are mostly unintended anyway.

And to cap it all on a good note, the lights are well used, the snow looks nice, so do the animals. This won't hurt your eyes. Only your intelligence.

This supposedly autobiographical epic tale from Raj Kapoor broke all film-making conventions of '70s India. It was too long, there was no constant heroine and the hero never won.

Yet, the story unfolds beautifully, taking the viewer through the life of a simple man and his women. The protagonist is unreal in his simplicity and is more of a metaphor for the ideal lover. And like an ideal lover, he fails again and again. No film has better romanticised the self-defeatist trend of being a "good human being".

It is an understanding of romance in many stages seen through an unbiased almost transparent male perspective. It is more a study of "love" than a love story in itself.

The protagonist, pitched as a clown, brings to light the forever defeated lover, who the world laughs at. Good guys really do finish last. This is no Devdas. This is a man who goes through extreme emotional anguish only to stand back up again and expose himself and his pain to the world so that others may have a good laugh.

The downward spiral of the protagonist's resilient self-defeatist selfless romance bring no conclusive climax. And perhaps, that's how it really is. For people like these, there really is no conclusion. Life just goes on and on and chapters of their defeat just pile on one after the other.

A sublime movie.