Buried (2010)

You wake up in the dark, disoriented. You’re bleeding. You’re gagged and your hands are tied. But you get your hands free and get your lighter and flick it on and realize that’s not even the worst thing. The worst thing is that you’ve been buried alive. That’s it. For 94 minutes, we, the audience, are inside that coffin with Paul. As impossible as it might sound, it works. It’s tense and horrifying. Claustrophobic, shocking, and awe-inspiring, if not always because of the script, then because of the filmmaking. Buried’s directing, cinematography, editing, and score all act in concert to form a remarkably singular vision. Rodrigo Cortes’ poise and sheer talent are the principal reasons why this film is so successful.
Reynolds has always been a quiet, believable actor, so understated that he rarely gets the credit he deserves. (He worked just as hard at selling the loopy “The Proposal” as Sandra Bullock did, and his “Definitely, Maybe” was a rare romantic comedy for grown-ups.)
“Buried” not only gives him a real part to play, far from the superheroes he’s played, and is about to play, Reynolds’ Paul is a more than ordinary guy, subject to panic attacks, but it also gives him an almost existential subtext.
To transform an enclosed, buried coffin into the entire world of a film is astonishing. To film that world, create obstacles within it, not just without, and produce a taught, strong film of so high a caliber is nothing short of awesome. For Ryan Reynolds to so fully commit to a character so hopelessly ensnared, to carry an entire film on his back, let me remind you, is actually a big deal. That this film is able to not only scare its audience, raising the collective heart rate to well over 180, and fit in a very distressing commentary on the U.S. government’s love affair with corporate bureaucracy is wonderful. Because even though Buried is not without its problems, its accomplishments are so far and above the expected, the imaginable, that it’s nothing short of a success. Despite all that, astonishingly, this movie is not going to be your run of the mill thrillers, there is suspense, yes you read right, suspense. Am not going to spoil it for you, go watch this piece of awesome film making by Cortes. Its definitely worth it.

Rating- A (Never mind the minor logical loopholes)

Abhilash D

Amistad (1997)

AMISTAD is no SCHINDLER’S LIST. Think it unfair if you must, but Steven Spielberg is going to face comparisons like that for the rest of his film-making career.
Now that we know what he’s capable of, we’re not going to let him get away with choosing less than stellar material.
AMISTAD is hardly a half-hearted effort, in fact there are a couple of scenes which rank with Spielberg’s best work as a director. It is, however, a piece of material which ends up providing far less impact than it should. The film is based on the true story of a 1840s court case involving 44 black men and women, led by Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), accused of piracy for an uprising against their capters on the Spanish slaving ship “La Amistad.” Found off the coast of Long Island by a U.S. Navy ship, the blacks become the subject of an intense and controversial series of legal challenges. Are they the property of the two surviving members of the “Amistad” crew? Are they the property of Queen Isabella (Anna Paquin)? Are they the property of the naval officers who claim salvage rights? Or are they the property of no one, free men illegally captured from their homes in Africa?
It is the latter point which is argued by attorney Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), assisted by abolitionists Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) and Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgaard), with further assistance from former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins). Faced with direct opposition from struggling incumbent President Martin Van Buren, the case becomes a flashpoint for Southern grumbling over the slavery issue. Baldwin tries to overcome a profound language gap and get Cinque to tell his own story. AMISTAD is at its best when Cinque is telling his story, allowing the electrifying performance of Djimon Hounsou to take center stage. Though he utters only half a dozen English words through the entire film, Hounsou’s fervent work brings to life an intelligent man trying to understand a thoroughly baffling new world. He is the heart and soul of AMISTAD.
If it had ever been made clear that AMISTAD is Cinque’s story, the film could have been a masterpiece. Instead, David Franzoni’s script allows too many characters to flirt with the impression that the story is all about them. Freeman, as a former slave turned anti-slavery advocate, somehow gets first billing despite disappearing for most of the film, McConaughey plays his noble lawyer from A TIME TO KILL, but without a sense of what the case means to him.
The second best performance in the picture, and the only one with any depth, is given by Anthony Hopkins as the semi-senile, ex-president John Quincy Adams. Adams comes into the story mainly in the second half as he argues the slaves’ case in front of the Supreme Court. “We’ve come to understand that who we are is who we were,” he orates in his moving and complicated address to the court.
Even given the film’s tedious pacing, the slaves’ story doesn’t quite come out. We see extremely gory pictures of naked people being beaten to death as their blood splatters everyone nearby, and we see naked human beings chained together, attached to a weight and thrown to their deaths in the ocean.
“Whoever tells the best story wins,” is Adams’s advice on how best to conduct the trial. Spielberg should have listened. All in all, AMISTAD is an excellent story, poorly told.

Rating- B

Abhilash D

No Strings Attached-2011

The premise of this flick promised fun – two people who like to have sex and not be related in any other way. However what you get is a movie going through the motions  to its predictable end. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie meet in their youth- once at summer camp and another time at a funeral. Those are the first couple of scenes. We are then forwarded to the present where Ashton finds out that his ex is sleeping with his promiscuous dad. Therefore we are supposed to believe that the most rational thing to do in such a situation would be to have sex. In any case, Ashton drinks a lot and calls up every girl on his cell phone. Next morning he finds himself naked on a couch in the house of Natalie Portman. It is a beautiful world. But wait-get this…5 minutes later he is having sex with her. Yeah. I really hate this movie. Subsequently they come to a  sort of arrangement, the one I mentioned at the beginning of the para. After that, you know where this is going don’t you? They have sex, boy starts to have feelings…girl wants to just have sex so he leaves her…etc etc…girl then starts developing feelings, sees sister getting married, goes back to boy, sheds some tears, we have a big hugging scene in the end.

Oh, btw, Ashton Kutcher sucks. I don’t know how much the girls like him as eye candy, but as an actor who has been on the scene for quite some time now, he unquestionably, clearly, 100 percent, absolutely sucks. Natalie might be the only thing you like about this movie but due to straightforward Hollywood Morality, she abruptly changes character in the middle of the whole thing and becomes yet another teary eyed, emotionally insecure woman instead of the woman who knows what she wants. Whatever. I don’t suppose I should expect any sort of continuity from the writers of this predictable piece of dreck. The jokes are forced, Ashton’s sidekicks suck even more than him, and there seems to be a shortage of hot girls throughout the film. Fuck you, monkey writers, you couldn’t insert a couple of strippers in this piece of crap?

Rating- C