A Fish Called Wanda

Actors: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin
Director: Charles Crichton
Writers: John Cleese and Charles Crichton
Music: John Du Prez
Cinematography: Alan Hume
Released: July 1988

The brainchild of former Monty Python member John Cleese, A Fish Called Wanda was daring for a comedy at the time due to its twisted sense of humor involving things like stuttering and cruelty to animals. Today, after two decades of gross-out comedy, it seems much tamer – though no less funny.

This caper comedy is filled with colourful characters, wonderful dialogues and slapstick situations which work. The plot is an inspired bit of lunacy about the fallout among jewel thieves (two Americans and two Englishmen) after a multi-million-pound heist in London. Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the scheming vixen who uses her sexual charms to manipulate her three male partners and their lawyer Archie (Cleese).

One of the special delights of the movie is its satire on the cultural clash between the stuffy Englishmen and their uncouth American counterparts. Cleese is completely at home playing the straight man, and Jamie Lee Curtis is perfect in her seductress role. The unsung hero of the film is Palin, who has a minor role but manages to steal every scene he’s in.

Kevin Klein is superb as the bumbling, jealous Otto who pretends to understand Nietzsche but is actually so smart that he thinks the London Underground is a subversive movement. His Oscar for this performance is so very well deserved. A special note of appreciation is also reserved for Charles Crichton, the director and co-writer who knows how to keep his direction light and unobtrusive.

Overall, this movie is one of the most hilarious comedies ever, and is a must-see for all lovers of zaniness.

Lawrence of Arabia

Actors: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn
Director: David Lean
Writer: Robert Bolt / Michael Wilson
Music: Maurice Jarre
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Editing: Anne V. Coates
Released: December 1962

Nearly four hours long and grand in every sense, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia aims for greatness and achieves it. The plot is simple: during the First World War, a British officer succeeds in uniting rival Arab tribes (led by Quinn and Guinness) and goes to war against the occupying Turkish army. The celebrated soldier comes across as a tormented sadomasochist with grandiloquent desires to be a warrior-king.

Peter O’Toole, gives his best ever performance as the enigmatic Lawrence. That other star of the film – the desert – is magnificently captured in all its endless immensity. If nothing else, this film is absolutely gorgeously shot.

All the other actors, especially Omar Sharif, shine in their roles.Lean’s opulent vision combines perfectly with Bolt and Wilson’s beautiful script to create a true cinematic masterpiece. The unforgettable music of Maurice Jarre and the magnificent cinematography by Freddie Young are perfect ingredients to this gorgeous mixture.

What works in this film is its perfect marriage of cinematic spectacle, narrative brilliance and superb characterization. David Lean’s biography of T. E. Lawrence is visually mesmerizing: a truly epic movie that is a must-watch.

Seven Samurai

Actors: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Seiji Myaguchi, Isao Kimura
Writer and Director: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Cinematography: Asakaru Nakai
Released: Apr 1954

Akira Kurosawa’s 3 ½ hour long masterpiece is so rich with underlying meaning and cinematic technique that no review can do justice to even a tenth of the film’s power. With its massive emotional range, dazzling technical virtuosity, and sensitivity, it remains after more than fifty years a supreme example of cinema’s power to astound. Seven Samurai is perfect. Period.

A village of farmers, sick of being attacked by bandits who rob them of their crop, decide to fight back by recruiting some samurai to teach them to fight, protect the village, and slay the bandits for good. The first one and a half hours of the movie is about the villagers and the recruitment, the next hour about the training and preparation for battle, and the last hour the 3-day climactic battle. The samurai are introduced in great detail, and we understand why it is seven men that are needed (not six and not eight), and why these seven are the ones selected.

Unlike modern action movies with superhuman heroes that decimate hundreds of well-armed opponents, in Seven Samurai, it is tactics, training and firepower that decide the winners of a battle. The samurai are vastly superior in one-on-one and hand-to-hand combat, but that fact is immaterial in the face of the bandits’ firearms. Each of the four samurai that die in battle is killed by distant gunfire instead of in hand-to-hand combat. And ultimate victory comes out of team effort, with a few making sacrifices for the benefits of the many.

This movie works so well because of its flawless direction and the sublime balance of powerful human drama and exciting action. The script and the cinematography are perfect. The camerawork is remarkably fluid for the time period: close-ups and sweeping pans are often incorporated into the same shot, in a single take. The movie contains some of the most dazzling battle scenes ever put on film. Slow-motion, rapid cutting, and telephoto lenses help develop a type of battle scene that literally draw the viewers into midst of the action.

Shimura gives a quiet yet powerful performance as the leader of the small army. Myaguchi is remarkable in the role of ascetic yet deadly samurai Kyuzo. Kimura is perfect as young Katsushiro, forced to learn some ugly lessons in life. But the real scene stealer is Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s favourite actor, who begins the film as the comic relief and gradually evolves into the real hero. The characterization is perfect: each of the characters – samurai or villager – stands out memorably. Unlike most other “gang of heroes”, here you can not mistake one of the samurai for another.

The Multi-millionaire’s Only Daughter

I never liked Jim Carrey much: but that was before I saw his Me, Myself and Irene, and could immediately relate to his split-personality life. You ask me “why”? I’ll tell you. Try my lifestyle for a week, and you’ll know. If six days and seven nights of being Arnie doesn’t kill you, I’ll take my hats off to you. I’ll take off my sweaty socks too, if that would please you.

It all started on that fateful day, six months back, when my mom, giving me her weekly “You’re a grown boy sonny, and you need to start thinking about your future” lecture. The f-word here was ‘finance’, what were your dirty minds thinking of?? “Your dad is going to retire very soon, you know, and we can’t afford to support you forever”. Blah blah, and so on.

That decided it. That night, as I wiped off the three thousand, seven hundred and ninety-second teardrop from my eye, I made a vow to myself that enough was enough: I would become a man at last. After all, I was fast approaching 23, and it’s surely high time I stopped being a boy, and joined the ranks of the men.

I had to stand on my own two feet financially. How long could I go on expecting my poor parents to sponsor my vices? And so, at the tender young age of 22, I had to cut my financial teeth. Get a job, and learn to manage academics and career at the same time. This required learning time management. And resource duplication. Apart from the fact that all these management terms sound double-Dutch to me, the plain and simple fact is that it required a whole sea-change in attitude.

After all, wasn’t I the person who had made a virtue of idleness? The guy who planned to make a career out of marrying the only daughter of a multimillionaire? The guy whose simple creed in life was “having a poor father is bad luck, having a poor father-in-law is stupidity”? And here I digress again. But hasn’t that been the story of my life? After all, isn’t any work a digression from the high pursuits of hedonistic vegetation?

Conclusion: Maybe I am destined never to mature…maybe men, unlike wine, just do not get better with age. And I still have not found the multi-millionaire’s only daughter, so I still have to slog at it. Sigh…

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef
Director: Sergio Leone
Writer: Sergio Leone / Luciano Vincenzoni
Music: Ennio Morricone
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Released: December 1966The plot of the last of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western trilogy centres around three gunslingers competing to find a fortune in buried Confederate gold amid the violent chaos of the Civil War. This extravagantly plotted epic follows its three main characters — laconic bounty-hunter Blondie (Eastwood), murderous Angel Eyes (Cleef), and tragicomic bandit Tuco (Wallach) — as they cross the American Southwest trying to stop one another with a barrage of lies, beatings, double-crosses, and ambushes.Of the three, Tuco alone is rooted in reality. Blondie and Angel Eyes are more iconic, lethal forces of nature with almost supernatural potencies. Constantly towering above the action is Ennio Morricone’s apocalyptic score.

Eastwood plays the good guy with his trademark laconic and cool charm, but unfortunately, his character is the least interesting of the three. Van Cleef is superbly serpentine and cruel as one of the vilest and most monstrous of Western villains. But the show-stealer is Wallach as the shamelessly greedy and self-centred Tuco: scruffy, insanely energetic, amoral yet lovable.

The film’s most memorable moment captures Tuco’s frantic scramble through an immense cemetery: a run transformed by a telephoto lens into an exhilarating ballet of desire. Another masterpiece of sheer kinetic filmmaking is the climactic three-cornered graveyard shootout in which Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes face off for the last time. Leone milks the tension in the scene to the last possible drop.

The movie is a study in extremes: the camera switches in an instant from huge widescreen landscapes to extreme close-ups that reduce the human body to a pair of narrowed eyes. Sure, the movie is too long, but it’s worth every moment of your attention.