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The Dark Knight
For the first hour or so into the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, I wasn't buying it. I hadn't seen Batman Begins, so I didn't know how Christopher Nolan's re-invention of this franchise was going to be and I was getting disappointed. First of all, using Chicago as a realistic setting for Gotham was too bad. Chicago looks great and the skyscrapers look towering and solid as only American skyscrapers can but there was no fantasy, Gothic gloss to the city. Absolutely none. Many critics have loved this "realism" but I missed the shiver of entering a fantasy world.
I wasn't buying Christian Bale's Batman either. Bale is too little in stature to be an authentic superhero. When he dresses up as Bruce Wayne, he lacks a certain magnetism and looks lost in the proceedings. I did love his mechanical lisping as Batman though. But, is Batman still a rookie and learning his craft here? Is it why he stumbles so much? I don't know. Because of the realist setting around him, Batman feels like a guy wearing a strange suit to a party not the crusader in a fantasy land. The super hyped aerial shots didn't really make an impact when not seen on IMAX.
My mind was quibbling over these trifles when a character makes a surprising decision and I was pulled into the vortex of the plot. What the Dark Knight lacks in fantastic parpahernalia, it makes up in heavy plotting. By that I don't mean arbitrary twists and turns but intense conflicts generated by strong characters played across a giant canvass with nothing to hold them back.
The story goes like this. Many Batman impostors are prowling the Gotham. Petty crime is down and the mob doesn't know what to do. A new district attorney Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, is intent on curshing the Mob but through legal means. Batman is trying to improve his body suit and armour and his sercet identity, Bruce Wayne dreams of yielding the crime-fighting mantle to Harvey Dent.
But, a new menace called Joker, played by Heath Ledger, arrives and quickly takes over the Mob, intent on taking over the Gotham ultimately. Of course, he runs into Batman and their duel is not unlike of the one between Peter verkovensky and Stavrogrin in The Possessed or Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.
Should Batman let Harvey Dent pursue the Joker or should he do it himself? While he is in the crutches of that dilemma, Joker becomes bigger and bigger, like an elemental hurricane. When that force is unleashed against the Gotham, it takes the whole Gotham itself( and not just the heroes) to defeat the anarchy.
Acting wise, everyone shines except for a poorly cast Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has a strong character to play but wrecks it as usual. Heath Ledger's Joker is coming in for a lot of praise but Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent is no less inspiring. Bale's eponymous hero grows on you after a while. But, the best performances that elevate the movie to a very high level and lend it a cracking chemistry are from the supporting chracters. Gary Oldman playing Lt. Gordon, Morgan Freeman playing Lucius Fox and Michael Caine playing Alfred the Butler.
The Dark Knight is being celebrated in some conservative cirlces as a triumph of conservative messaging telegraphed in a major hit. All through the first hour I wasn't sure of that. Bruce Wayne's courting of Harvey Dent remined me too much of the adulation of say, someone like Eliot Spitzer but the political references in the later half of the movie particularly, to torture and domestic surveillance, do seem to favor conservative talking points.
Nevertheless, whether it's conservative or liberal at its core, is beside the point. Unlike hundreds of liberal, anti-American movies we have been forced to watch since 9/11 which advance their themes by gratuitous insults, jarring one-liners which don't belong, blatant editorialism, soprofic narratives, spectacles supposed to induce guilt but which produce boredom, all marketed under the sanctimonious labels of dissent and subversion, the Dark Knight does it the right way. It personifies abstract principles within richly realised characters and then lets these characters thrash it out without imposing any constraints, achieving thereby, not only a critical smash but also a bonanza at the box-office.
That's how it should be done. 
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Get Smart
Get Smart is a movie adapted from 60's television series of the same name. Not having seen the television series, I cannot vouch if the movie is faithful to its original but it definitely feels like a television show itself.
Get Smart features Maxwell Smart, an analyst at CONTROL (a spy agency of the US), who wants to be a field agent. Max or Agent 86, is groomed by a very impressive Agent 23 but is held back by his boss who thinks his analyst skills are more important to CONTROL. Once, the CONTROL headquarters are broken into and news comes of nuclear material getting out of hand in Europe, Max is despatched to Russia but under the wings of Agent 99.
The movie is supposed to be a cross between humour and action but it never gets the balance right. The action set pieces are all derivative and the humour is ineffective. Steve Carrell, the comedian gets the longest opportunity for rehearsing his role in the movie itself. All through the first act, it feels like he is rehearsing; only when the movie moves to Russia, it feels like he is acting. Anne Hathaway is too fat to be glamourous. Only Dwight Johnson as Agent 23 and Alan Arkin as the boss manage to get their roles right.
That aside, the overall quality, the tone and the ambience of the movie is so poor, it felt like i was watching some third rate Bollywood concoction. Not a Hollywood movie by any light. Shared on
This is an impressive book of scholarship. A book of vast erudition written in accesible, lucid prose that even a lay person with no prior knowledge of lingusitics or arachaeology can follow with little effort.
Sir William Jones, a British functionary,first noticed the amazing simliarity between Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit and postulated that they originated form the same parent language called Indo-European. Today, scholars recognise around 12 main Indo-European lanague families, represented by everything from English and French in the west, to Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali in the East. Over 3 billion people are thought to be speakers of these languages. Not only all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, all the people who spoke them had some disitinctive simliarities in their cultures and religions as well. At one point of time in history, they all descended from a single cultural-linguistic ancestor.
Does a linguistic ancestor also imply a common racial inheritance? Once the existence of Indo-European was postulated, many people jumped to just that conclusion and the study of Indo-European became a minefield of controversies and cultish fads.
Anthony rescues the Proto-Indo-European language scholarship from the morass surrounding it. Anthony despatches with the idea of common racial inheritance at once. A common linguistic and cultural ancestor does not imply a common racial inheritance. Speakers of Sanskrit, Tocharian, Latin and Celtic may share the same language pool but not the same gene pool.
Once the politicising aspects are despatched away, the author calmly but eloquently begins to explain how Indo-European was reconstructed from the daughter languages. Several candidates have been proposed for the homeland of the original language but Anthony chooses the most obvious one, the Caspian-Pontic steppes of modern Ukraine, and makes an unimpeachable case for it. The Indo-European people originated somehwere in this vast steppe. They may not have invented the wheels but they quickly learned to how to design them. With the domestication of horse, the invention of wagons and later chariots, Indo-Europeans quickly mastered the hitherto impenetrable steppe and quickly spread around the world and became the people we know from history: Vedic Indians, Greeks, Celtics, Germans etc. They primarily spread through migrations rather than invasions.
Anthony also describes how the lifestyle of these ancestors can be deduced from a lexicon of a few hundred reconstructed words. They were a caste based people with a warrior caste and a priestly class for whom poetry was quite important. They worshipped a sky god and followed a patriarchal life style.
This is one amazing piece of scholarship. I was hooked onto it from the start. For an interested, head-scratching amateur like me, this book was a godsend. For a casual reader, it should be a revelation.
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The Magician's Nephew by C.S.Lewis
OK, I succumbed to it. After resisting it for a while, I began reading the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis. I saw the first movie and didn't like it much and now there's a second movie and with all the hype surrounding it, I finally decided to give the books a try. I bought the omnibus edition which has all the Narnia novels in it.
The Magician's Nephew is technically the first novel of the series but it was the sixth novel that was published. It is more of a prequel than a first novel. It would have been probably better to start with the other novels. I have just finished it but I can't tell if I enjoy Narnia yet. It just feels like I'm dipping my toes in Narnia universe
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Picture Courtesy: Famous Poets and Poems
Edith Wharton is usually compared with Henry James and usually judged to be his inferior. I find her to be a much greater artist. In her best works, she can play on your emotions like a surgeon carelessly cutting open a heart. The House of Mirth is easily the most agonising novel I have ever read. Nothing happens in it but somehow the plight of Lily Bart put me under some heavy torture of shame and anger
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The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford
If you are a science fiction fan, you must know about Gollancz masterworks series whose titles include some of the best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. I don't like science fiction as a genre and I am just getting into fantasy, so catching up with this series has been a good way of familiarising myself with the genre's traditions.
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National Treasure: Book of Secrets
When National Treasure was released, it was dismissed by the brotherhood for many reasons but chiefly, as the New York Times put it , for the "frisson of patriotism" that it was able to infect an audience with. That's at least honest. They did not invent a faux excuse of lack of historicity as they did when they loaded on Pearl Harbor. No matter how much they pounced on it, National Treasure broke the quarantine. It became a huge hit and unlike Pear Harbor, did not have to be restricted to a single outing and so, could keep sending those frissons of patriotism again and again
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It is interesting that those who comprise a civilization can't even bother to show up, those who fight for it also strive to know what they fight for. The Weekly Standard published recently a wonderful article about an upcoming book called Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth Samet. She was an English teacher at West Point for 10 years and it's based on her experiences on teaching young military officers some classics of the Western literature.
"In class they read The Iliad, Beowulf, War and Peace, World War I poetry, and also Pope's Essay on Man, Dickens's Bleak House, Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," the curious lyrics of Wallace Stevens, Diderot's plan for the Encyclopédie
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Adam Brody and Meg Ryan walking In The Land Of Women
I caught this movie on a fluke and I expected I wouldn't think much of it. It is more or less similar to Elizabethtown, a movie I hated. In the end, it came as a pleasant surprise and I liked it much better than I'd initally hoped
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Al Bore has won the ultimate seal of global messianism, so what's in it for us?
There is something marvellously ridiculous about Nobel Peace Prize what with Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and some North Korean tyrant I can't name getting it but this is the worst of the lot. There was at least a semblance of argument that those awards were for, you know, peace. But, what exactly this pendulous piece of human flesh done for the humanity
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Comments (2)
Comment by nagster
on Revenge of the Old Europe
Cenacle
I don't know why the choice of Teddy Roosevelt is questionable though, when you don't consider Km Dae Jung not.