Good night and good luck

Lets start with some trivias.  How many of us have heard about David Strathairn  ? How many of us would believe that George clooney would actually charge 3$ for writng, directing and acting? You all might have , but when i was watching Good night and good luck i was totally unaware of the facts.

But keeping facts aside this 2005 movie directed and co scripted  by George Clooney , based on the real conflict between veteran radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy especially relating to the anti-Communist Senator’s actions , and his paranoia with his hysterical witch-hunt of communists, people who associated with communists, and people who remembered going to a public meeting years back where a communist happened to be. McCarthy reckoned the “security” of the country was at risk, and ordinary people were losing their livelihoods if the slightest taint of red was suspected.

David Strathairn is exceptionally well in the portrayal of Ed Murrow , the legendary American broadcast journalist who came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II ,  the role brought Strathairn  a best actor nominee in the oscars , but won the best actor at the Venice film festival, making this role as his performance of a life time , but the best part of Strathairn’s  haunting performance is his voice, the way he is able to uncannily reproduce Murrow’s unmistakable cadences. A big chunk of Murrow’s words in the film are taken directly from his speeches and on-air commentary, and hearing Strathairn read them is close enough to the real thing , one can find that out by watching Murrow’s videos on you tube.

David Straighthairn

American journalist Edward R. Murrow  who is played in the film by David Strathairn

Senator Mc Carthy though on the other hand is portrayed by original archival footage of the senator himself , and probably in no better way Clooney would have portrayed the meanness of the character, and  himself plays Fred Friendly , Murrow’s show producer . The whole movie revolves around the news show SEE IT NOW which Murrow hosts. The movie also has one of the best ensemble casts i have seen in along time with strong and short roles by Robert Downey Jr. , Patricia Clarkson and Frank Langella.

Shot in black and white, with excellent cinematography by Robert Ellswit ,  it creates a 1950s America of sombre suits,  jazz music ,  typewriters, Scotch and cigarette smoke curling romantically through the air , and considering the amount of tobacco consumption in the movie , one can very logically infer that cigarettes were not a cause for any health ailments then.

There’s also something heroic about Clooney’s undertaking: he believes in the importance of reconnecting audiences to a convulsive period of recent American history, when questions of integrity and honesty in public life were being debated as if they really mattered.

What had more impact for me though was the underlying tone of the film which rings just as true today as it did 50 years ago , a riveting piece of cinema which is as entertaining as it is socially and politically important. When the term accountability has found its way out from the dictionary of our news channels and media organisations , when the fourth pillar of democracy is in some ways not bothered about the other three pillars , and the fifth pillar stands astonished to what is happening,

When everybody including the news channels are looking  for entertainment in the news, and all that they are concerned about is , how much money everybody made in IPL , but not where the taxpayer’s money is going, and will the world end in 2012 or not,  or which indian cricketer is presently dating which actress , but not about the farmers committing suicides all over the country, or the lack of devlopment in north east India,  can a Vishvanathan anand get the same television coverage as that enjoyed by a Yuvraj singh?

And thats what Good night and Good luck tells you , keep the history aside or for that matter plot of the movie,it tells a story whose implications for today are inescapable, that what and how  journalism should be , the morals and ethics involved in a medium so important to the development of the country .

It cannot be summed up in a much better way than in the words of Ed Murrow  himself or the opening scene of the movie.

“This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television. If what I have to say is responsible, then I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”

It’s a wonderful life after all!!

What pleasure do simple things give us in life , like finding a ten rupee note in a jeans not worn for a long time ,or accidentally cooking something that is edible , listening to your favorite rare song played randomly by a radio station , meeting a long lost friend on the railway station,  I just got the same feeling after watching Frank Capra’s masterpiece  It’s a wonderful life , I had seen the movie in my yesteryears but watching it again after understanding the cinematic idiom a bit was a totally different experience.

I don’t intend it to be a review as much as it is an emotional outburst, and the minority that might haven’t seen the movie may find it too much of a fairy table or an Aesop’s fable, but what I understood of the movie was it is the best human story that I have seen, Christmas is just the background, but what lies beneath the surface is the feeling of sacrifice, courage and humanity

SPOILER ALERT

The story is simple , an angel set out by god to help a discouraged man  and reaffirm his faith in humanity , and if the angel does so he will get his wings , poor soul is still an ASA ( angel second class) and desperate to become an angel first class , but god wouldnt be that easy on him , on earth George Bailey is a young man who wanted to travel, have adventures, go to college, and be an architect in a big city. But  responsibilities to his family and to his community kept him from leaving the small town where he grew up. He held down a responsible job, worked hard, treated people decently, and helped out whenever he could.  

But what sets the movie apart is Capra’s brilliant direction, and his ability to bind human stories in a way that not just makes it point but makes the viewer a part of the narrative , a quality that is so lacking in most film makers today .Capra is also at his best in his ability as a screenwriter , he binds the scenes so  poignant with emotion  in a way that never do they seem overblown or sentimental.

It’s a wonderful life spans two of the most traumatic events of the last century , the great depression and the second world war , and the ordinary man’s journey through them , which in this case would be the protagonist of the film George Bailey played brilliantly by James Stewart . Stewart gives the finest performance of his career as the man finding hard to find himself , it’s such a powerful performance that it’s difficult to believe that it is an actor playing a part, his boyish charm and wide eyed enthusiasm along with the moral strength of his character is what makes him the perfect hero ,  Donna Reed is beautiful and sublime , her unparalleled portrayal of a supportive and intelligent wife , brings out an extremely charming , believable and romantic on screen chemistry that one rarely sees.

Capra’s unflinching faith in the human life and inherent belief that man is a good creature, the feeling of optimism that we also saw in Satyajit ray’s cinema, is the inherent belief of the film, that it is not a bad world .

The film not just makes you feel good, but it also makes you feel better , which in these dark times of nine eleven to twenty six eleven, is becoming a scarce commodity, it reposes your faith that you have stopped believing into, it moves you in a way that you are forced to introspect.

So for those who haven’t seen, you are missing something, and for those who have, see it again, you’ll enjoy it even more; I did.

Fateless..........beyond agony and pain

If there’s one event in history which redefined the way mankind perceived itself and other fellow humans , altered the course of the world forever it was the second world war ,from the year 1940 to 1945 the world experienced hell on earth , words like holocaust , adversity, suffering became part of everybody ‘s everyday life,  those who lived that era have always lived with adversity as their constant companion,  viewed free will and fate and the meaning of life on different terms than others.  It’s got nothing to do with being suicidal, and nothing to do with not loving life.  It just is what it is.  What else could it be?

I thought about all this a lot while watching the movie Fateless (2005) ; Fateless is based on a novel by Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author who spent a year in Nazi concentration camps as a young boy. The movie is the account of one year in the life of fourteen year old Gyuri Koves,  as some have speculated, Kertesz himself, after being shipped to Auschwitz, later shifted to Buchenwald and finally to Zeitz, a lesser known concentration camp in 1944.The film opens with Gyuri’s father being sent to a concentration camp , it very effectively captures the fear on their faces ,  their mute acceptance of the fate destined to them or the lack of it , the helplessness that one cannot escape , the horror on the faces of parents knowing that their son is going on the journey to death , the innocence of a fourteen year old unaware that he shares the common fate that of his father and millions of other Jews, that he cries unexpectedly and unknowingly when his father hugs him before leaving.

Fateless doesn’t glorify the holocaust, or it romanticizes the pain and suffering originated from of the second world war like most Hollywood movies do , but it narrates them as they were , in small sepia montages it forces us to feel them , it doesn’t commit the folly of telling us about  the feeling . Its unique perspective (from the recollections of a 14 year old boy) is its place in time, and that time is the moment at hand. Through a series of bleak images about the grim realities that gyuri faces, which transform him from a boy to a man. Gyuri’s stoic acceptance of disease, malnourishment and Nazi atrocities makes you visit those situations in your own imagination, it transcends the barrier of cinema and you become an active participant in the boy’s struggle.

But  fateless is not a sad and depressing film , it’s a film that makes you introspect , there are moments that makes you smile, adversity is the biggest teacher in the world and the movie asserts the point well , a piece of meat that accidentally features in a soup shocks and amazes many, one lies next to a dead body in a hospital and keeps mum about the fact as speaking would prohibit the ration that he was taking in the name of the dead person , in such ghastly moments people do find moments to laugh and sing. The individual instances of loss, pain and indignities suffered, add up to an atrocity of monumental proportions. But these people living in hell survive on only one thing; hope. That one day they will go back, I read somewhere that hope is something that you cling to when you have nothing else left. That’s how the fourteen year old survives , the holocaust is over for him and the world but the nightmare remains and he has to live in it , his normal emotions come back when he returns to Budapest , only to find himself deprived of everything he dreamt about , people who shared the common fate with him , now want to live in constant denial , even his family and friends do not want to hear what went in the camps , for them it’s a thing of the past , but for Gyuri its not when he is back  on the road he thinks back on his life in the camp which now seems less confusing to him than the freedom outside., the camps are not the past. They are his present reality and they will remain so for the rest of his life. The movie concludes as he recalls wistfully that the year spent in the camps was not one of just horror and suffering; there were "magic hours" there too. He thinks back on his favorite hour, just after dinner, a respite from the day's backbreaking labor, ["which I waited for and loved most in the camp"] when he would joke and sing with his fellow prisoners. As Imre Kertész said in his Nobel speech “in my writings the holocaust can never be in past tense”

To most of us, watching movies about the Second World War mostly makes us ponder on the question: what would I have done? How would I have behaved?  In this way somehow we make peace with the fact, or somehow make ourselves believe that we have experienced something, or would have survived a suffering that surpasses comprehension. Fateless works the other way it shows us what it might have been like to endure atrocity as a form of ordinary reality, which is probably the hardest thing to do.