Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Hannah and her Sisters is one of Woody Allen’s finest. The movie is Allen’s take on three sisters living in New York, their relationships with respective romantic interest (nee. complicated) and relationships inter se. It is very Allen-esque with regard to the humour albeit with a greater finesse.


It starts off with a characteristic set of neurotic people except this time they are all in the same family. The story starts and ends between two big family dinners of two years, the Thanksgivings. Led by Mia Farrow as Hannah it is supported by Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, Dianne West and Carrie Fisher.
Hannah is a picture perfect woman with everything going for her, or so she thinks; Lee’s sole identity is that she is Hannah’s sister and someone’s wife while Holly the last of the three sisters has a life of her own mostly in her own imagination. Hannah’s husband Elliot falls for the sister Lee and that starts the story on one Thanksgiving, all starting the domino effect; over the course of the next year till the next dinner these relationships evolve.
This movie went on to fetch the Academy Award for Caine and West for their roles as Holly and Elliot respectively. With a rating on 93 percent fresh on Rottentomatoes and an average of 8.3 on IMDB and Metacritic we thought it would be the best to start the week with this one. Personally it only comes to be a close second to Manhattan or Annie Hall.

WHEN: 9:30 pm, 12th May. Turn up in the quad 15 minutes prior to screening and we can talk about this work and maybe even see what can the other movies be for the next few weeks to come!
WHERE: One of the classrooms. Just follow Rishabh when there.

Interesting movie stuff:

Doordarshan - Sundays, 11pm - some of the best regional films - Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi. With subtitles. I am yet to be disappointed by any of the films shown. Do check out.

Jaya TV - Saturdays, 6pm, "Haasini Pesum Padam" - Suhaasini (famous actress and Mani Ratnam's wife) talks about movies - everything from techniques to reviews - she picks the most interesting movies to review, and is excellent on the technical side. For instance, she got this special effects expert to talk of how they create some effects on the computer, the software used and so on. The show is in Tamil, so have your Madrasi buddy around to translate!

Aananda Vikatan magazine - the standard Tamil magazine reviews one foreign film every week. Even I can't read Tamil, and so I usually just look at what movie, and then try to find it and watch it. The last edition of Vikatan that I could get my hands on recommended this movie - Ballad of a Soldier.

Shut Up and Deal

The Apartment and a steaming mug of mum’s cinnamon cappuccino; and rainy days, when the world seems a dismal, lonely place cease to bother me, forget bother, they zip right by. It is just one of those movies, the perfect blend of hope and despair, not romantic slush where the down but not out protagonist is a near perfect figure who the world seems to constantly misunderstand/ underestimate, (Jerry McGuire, Wimbledon both of which I like) instead the characters all have shades of grey. Lemmon plays CC Baxter, an ambitious clerk in an insurance firm who’ll do anything for a raise, including letting his bosses use his apartment for their … um…“trysts”. And the ever lovely Shirley MacLaine is a loveable elevator operator who is however having an affair with one of the bosses, on the dubious promises of marriage.

What prevents the Apartment from being a typical, the underdog prevails and there is hope for us all type of flick is the fact that the movie has a darker, dissatisfied feel to it, a sort of permanent sense of loneliness which begins to lift near the closing. The sharp wit and one-liners all draw laughs yet we see through Baxter’s façade and glimpse the desperation underneath. The movie is hugely entertaining and is even slapstick in places, yet it retains its dignity and warms one with delicate and moving scenes, constructed with extreme care. The time when Lemmon hides away the razors or the scene with the bowler hat and his gloating or even the closing scene are lovely to behold. All in all the movie never fails to deliver, or, the coffee is way too good.

Cross-posting

I have a suggestion - why don't we cross-post any film related post on our blogs on this blog? I know all of us have some blog or the other, and our 'passion', the films, give us much of the material for the blogs. So, perhaps, some cross-postage might help our public image.

Of slapstick, fillums and critiques

When you turn around and look back at all the screenings on campus, save and except a few here and there, the essence of the light movies seems to have been sidelined since the inception of the club. Apparently the intention with which film club was started was to expose people more to movies that are otherwise not readily accessible but are critically acclaimed, keeping the same in mind over the past two years film club has screened movies accordingly. But amidst all this the fun of movie watching seems to have become redundant and is evident at the poor turn-outs. The solution to this when discussed, its results culminated into the Amitabh Bacchan Screenings, the turn-outs bears the testimony and I shall not delve any deeper into it.
Since Film Club is an informal club we do not work on a mandate per se, we suggest that please attend the open meetings and suggest movies that you would want to watch, if you want to watch French new wave we will all sit together and decide on how to go about with it, if you want to watch Govinda-david dhawan combination we will still sit together and decide how to go about it. Its just a matter of taking initiatives and its the fillum club after all

P.S. The aforementioned is mere suggestion, kindly take it as same.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

Screening more films

This trimester has nearly come to an end, and everyone shall now soon be busy with studying for exams. Meanwhile the NLS Film Club has not been screening films regularly. Even EMC's Univ Week film-fest didn't happen this year. (Kudos to the Literary and Debating Society for having screened some films instead -- though they had nothing whatsoever to do with literature.)

Come next trimester, we should firstly try to have a meeting with all those interested in the Film Club project
attending. After that, depending on whether we decide on further themes (or discarding the very idea of "themes"), we should get down to screening more films.




So much for next trimester's plans. Tonight (or as soon as possible), M.V. Swaroop shall grace us with his presence and screen a Tamil film directed (and scripted) by Mani Ratnam, called Kannathil Muthamittal (translating to, "A kiss on the cheeks"). (Here's the IMDB entry.) It's a lovely movie about the life of a girl (Amudha, played expertly by P. S. Keerthana), following the revelation on her ninth birthday that she is in fact adopted. The film follows her quest to find her real mother through war-torn Sri Lanka. With brilliant acting by all, this is a film definitely worth watching. What's more, it unites Mani Ratnam's two favourite things: child-actors (Anjali) and strife-torn settings (Roja, Bombay, Dil Se). Do turn up!

P.S. Swaroop might even follow it up with a couple of Woody Allen films. So watch this space!

War Films

This month we have chosen 'war films' as our theme. Our movie selections so far have been: Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, and Platoon in an attempt to combine serious films depicting war with a (not-so-light-hearted) military comedy like Good Morning Vietnam. The ongoing selections for the various University teams, including the moot selections, make the screenings somewhat difficult to schedule, calling for a departure of the regular weekly screening. However, most of the screenings so far have been reasonably well attended, apart from Platoon, which can be written off as due to bad timing.  

We'll be holding a meeting sometime soon to decide on next month's theme.  Do attend and give us suggestions for a theme, or just to contribute to Film Club by your general criticisms and suggestions.  

Film Club, anyone?

The idea of having a film club in law school is not a new one. But we certainly feel that we need a forum where students can screen films, read about and discuss them, argue over directors, camera techniques, convince others why some film is the greatest film ever and say things like, “F**k, you haven’t seen it. What’s wrong with you?” Obviously all of this happens even now, but at a very small scale. Most screenings happen only when someone from LnD or Law and Society takes the initiative. Majority of students aren’t ‘into films/cinema’. And so the need for a dedicated film club.

So, what’ll the proposed film club do?

Well, screen films for one. One film a week, at least, as per a pre-decided schedule, with a theme. It could be four Kubricks in one month, or a French New Wave month or a month of American gangster films or a Satyajit Ray bonanza or four independent/documentary films. Anything[1]. However, we wish to have a mix of “serious” and popular/mainstream films so as to involve a larger part of the law school community.

In order to further engage the students with the medium of cinema, members of the film club would also circulate articles/essays on the film/genre/director, film theory etc. A blog will be maintained where interested students can follow-up internet resources on cinema. We may even have after-screening discussions, if students so wish.

The film club will also be responsible for inviting experts to conduct film appreciation workshops. In addition, we also plan to organize an annual week-long Film Festival in law school. The festival will have film critics, theorists, directors (if possible) who’ll conduct lectures and screen films of various genres.

We are sure there are many cinema-enthusiasts out there, waiting with suggestions, ideas, comments. Do turn up for the first film screening, and we’ll decide how to take this forward.

The theme for July is Film Noir and we are screening Maltese Falcon (1941). Please read the attached notice for a short note on ‘Film Noir’ and the film.

(Ankur Singla)	(Shubho Banerjee)	(Sidharth Chauhan)
(Pranesh Prakash)	(Arjun Ghose)	(Cyril Diengdoh)
(Aju John)	(Spandan Biswal)	(Poongkhulali B)
(Ganeev Kaur)	(M V Swaroop)	(Raman Chima)

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[1] “Why not four Govinda flicks?”, you may ask. And we don’t have good answers. Maybe one is that you’d get to see them anyway. The club will try and screen films which are not freely accessible or which are acclaimed classics. For a better reasoned answer, read Roger Ebert’s (a well-respected US film critic) essay “Great Movies” on 19(1)(a).