Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)

Some mood music, while you read.

We at the PPCC are huge sci-fi nerds, and yet it has taken us a long (loooong) time to get into that one mighty pillar of sci-fi-ness, Britain's Doctor Who of Britain, starring Britain, co-starring Britishness. Okay, we tease, but, damn, that shit is nationalistic! Which is fine. Most spec fic is notoriously US-centric, after all. Anyway, we're glad we finally initiated ourself. In addition to being nationalistic like crazy sauce, it is also addictive and silly and fun and full of everything.

It's difficult to review a PILLAR, so instead we'll focus on a few things:

• The episode, Midnight, and how it's awesome and a good intro. (Review)
  
• Some Doctor Who themes, and how they run the gamut from awesome to stupid to huh-ness. (Thoughts)

Allons-y, then!  

Episode review: Midnight

Doctor Who episodes seem to come in three varieties:

• Really trashy, ridiculous, and occasionally awful one-off episodes, featuring a Monster of the Week. As some of our friends assured us, "You do know it's a kid's show, right?" (No, we didn't! But now we do. Oh, how we do.)
  
• Really spectacular, mind-bending one-offs.
  
• Mediocre-to-good episodes that are usually redeemed by giving us one more crumb along the Great Path of Understanding the Doctor, usually accompanied by a Great Emotional Moment for the Doctor as well. These are exciting.

Midnight falls into the secondary category. It's the perfect gateway episode; you can watch it while knowing nothing of the Doctor and his Interminable Journey. But, of course, the experience is much richer if you do know a bit, since Midnight takes several Doctory themes, and then subverts them in refreshing ways.

Midnight begins on a fancy, diamondy planet called, uh, Midnight. Which is ironic, since it is brilliant and sparkling and very, very sunny. It is also totally hostile to any form of life; the sun being "x-tonic", which is technobabble for "zapping killer laser beam-like". The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion, the wonderful Donna Noble (the wonderful Catherine Tate), are taking a (much-deserved) break on Midnight, which markets itself as a party planet. The Doctor decides to go on a nature tour, while Donna lounges by the pool.

On the nature tour, we're introduced to a variety of Typical Human People: there's the suburban couple (Daniel Ryan, Lyndsay Coulsen) and their sullen teen son (Colin Morgan), the bumbling professor (David Troughton) and his geeky assistant (Ayesha Antoine), the flight attendant (Rakie Ayola; called a "hostess" in the episode, since apparently it's also 1950), and a middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Sharp). After lampooning modern commercial flight (endless, chattering entertainment options, tiny peanut packets, and so on), the journey is underway. The Doctor makes a few friends, people joke, and obviously something horrible is looming on the horizon.

We won't give away the horribleness, because much of the episode's genius is the smart and inventive (and cheaply-produced!) monster that we meet. If it's a monster at all. But it's something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock: the fear and tension is slow, subtle, and gripping. One subversion of the Doctor Who routine is that the Doctor is as ignorant as everyone else on the ship (and in the audience) as to what the It thing is. Nothing is supposed to live on Midnight, and yet it seems something has? (Note that we can't even conclusively say that something has. One lovely interpretation of the episode is that there was nothing there at all, and everyone just freaked themselves out.)

A second subversion of Doctor Who's usual stuff is that, for once, humanity isn't celebrated, but instead retreats immediately into the banality of evil. When confronted with something difficult to understand and potentially violent, the passengers become scary and bestial themselves. It's reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's comments on seeing the "ragged scaffolding" of suburban civilization strip away, and how rattling that can be. For Doctor Who fans and the Doctor himself, it's especially rattling: usually, humanity has a big ol' crush on the Doctor, and is always happy to be helped. Here, they're skeptical, paranoid, hostile.

Anyway, the craft in this episode is just brilliant. The dialogue: building up tension, revealing aspects of the It thing's otherness slowly, taking sudden turns. Argh, as a writer, the PPCC burned with jealousy at someone having had such a good idea! The music. The acting: Tennant is always pretty damn good, but his role-reversal during the climax was so well-done. As with Lesley Sharp, especially in the earlier moments of being possessed, when she's/it's "learning". Ah! So good. Bravi, bravi.  

Big thoughts  

First big thought: Doctor Who is Buddhism

In fact, it might be as Buddhist as Groundhog Day, and that's pretty damn Buddhist. Except, whereas Groundhog Day is uplifting because it shows us nirvana (the ultimate happy ending), Doctor Who just grounds the PPCC down with its nihilistic woe. Seriously, how can this be a kid's show? HOW?! It is misery by design.

The most obvious Buddhist links are, first, the regeneration, and, second, the eternal woe. Oh, the woe.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it tends to repeat again and again, until we can break out of it by building mindfulness and compassion and non-attachment. Once you break out of that cycle of life and rebirth, you turn into Bill Murray - i.e. a Buddha, an enlightened being. In Mahayana Buddhism, there's an intermediate stage, called a bodhisattva - that's someone who delays nirvana, staying amongst the merely-stuck to teach about loving-kindness and being all nice and stuff.

You could argue that the Doctor's a bodhisattva. But we wouldn't. Because while he is pretty helpful and sorta nice and all that, he's also fighting the same battles over and over again: those Daleks never seem to die, do they? Nor does the (wonderful) Master (nor should he!).

Similarly, you'd think the Doctor would have learned, by now, that attachment leads to suffering (second Noble Truth in the ol' Buddhism). But he doesn't - constantly seeking out Companions, and constantly, ahem, effing them over. They never seem to emerge unscathed from their adventures. Seriously, after you've lost various Companions to death, dismemberment and being locked in a parallel universe, JUST STOP, DUDE.

So, it's Buddhism, but it's Buddhism at its saddest: the moment after the First and Second Noble Truths (life sucks, and the sucking will go on forever), and before the Third and Fourth (wait, maybe I should stop all this). To use a Christian analogy, it's like modeling a story on the moment after Jesus dies, but before he's resurrected. It's just miserable, dude.

 IS THIS WHAT YOU TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, BRITAIN?!

Which brings us to the second big thought.  

Second big thought: Doctor Who is Nationalism

 "Oh no," someone gasps. "They're headed towards Earth!"

Cut to outline of the UK.

The ostensible backstory is that the Doctor loves Earth like peanut butter loves jam. And that's fine. But Earth is basically Britain. And not only that - it's England. Scottish David Tennant wasn't allowed to keep his Scottish accent because, of all the regenerations a rogue Time Lord could make, of all the species, the genders, the heights and the everythings, the dude's gotta be a white English male every. single. time. Rumor has it the newest Doc, Peter Capaldi, will be retaining his Scottish accent, but this was - apparently - a major BBC decision.

Sometimes, the nationalism stuff is grating. But we know that we have no leg to stand on; most sci-fi is heavily skewed towards the US, and few people even seem to notice. At other times, the nationalism stuff is hilarious and wonderful, such as when an ailing Doctor - remember, this guy's a magical, super-smart, self-healing, time-traveling alien - is on the brink of death and then healed by the power of a CUP OF TEA. (Seriously, that was brilliant.)

Another wonderful byproduct of the Who's nationalism, is its portrayal of workaday Normal British Folk in all the supporting characters: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the London shopkeeper. Donna Noble, who's "just a temp from Chiswick!" And their funny families! Everyone is pretty modest, even mediocre. What's nice about the show is that it celebrates this normality for the inherent brilliance it can conceal.

Third big thought: Doctor Who is fandom

Fandom is nice. Fandom is fun. And Doctor Who has a huge, gigantic, long-lived fandom that seems to go on and on in every direction, and rival the Trekkies in terms of historicity and population density. Many of our good friends are Whovians. Some of the latest Doctors themselves - Tennant and Capaldi - are Whovians. And then you've got things like Adventure Time fans and fun, smart YouTube channel fans, and references all over the place. And the fanfiction! Oh, the fanfiction. We don't even want to go there.

For whatever reason (we still haven't pinpointed it), this miserable, lonely Time Lord has captured everyone and their mom's attention - including ours. The PPCC has basically put everything on hold while we finished off the Tennant years. And now we've still got all of Matt Smith to go - oh God.

There's still so much to say - how Doctor Who compares to Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, since we do think they are two sides of the same (weird) coin. Or the weird moments of transcendental, pulpy space opera in Who - especially when they talk about the Time War (and it sounds like the line-up for a heavy metal festival, "the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres!"). But we'll leave that to another day, as it's 1AM here and a Time Lord has just regenerated in our laptop!

The Endless Summer (1966)

The charming, hypnotic documentary, The Endless Summer, features a lot of surfing. Surfing. Surfing Surfing.

It also features a pair of globe-trotting 1960s Californian surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, as they paddle their way out from Senegalese, Ghanaian, South African, Australian, Kiwi, Tahitian and Hawaiian beaches: always and forever in search of the "perfect wave". In the meantime, director/writer/narrator Bruce Brown provides a Beach Boys-esque commentary: sly asides, self-deprecating humor, complete political incorrectness ("Sharks and porpoises in South Africa," Brown notes while filming a pod of porpoises behind the surfers, "have yet to integrate."). The boppy 1960s music, mixed in with some questionable stuff meant to sound "tribal", along with Brown's cavalier painting of surfers as hubris-filled daredevils to be revered - all of this sounds like it would make the 1.5 hour film excruciatingly narrow and kind of annoying.

Instead, thanks largely to those soothing shots of surfer after surfer after surfer, as well as those meditative, lingering shots of a slow sunset, or those beautiful moments using a camera on the board, or the smashing waves in Tahiti: it's all very beautiful. And fascinating. Fascinating because of the sheer adventure of Mike and Robert, as they paddle around, always in a boppy good mood, assessing the water temperature and perfection of the curl. In Lagos, Nigeria, Brown notes that the air and water are so hot, it almost "melts the wax off the boards". Near Durban, South Africa, the boys find the "perfect wave" - little "pipelines" of water, curling smoothly and perfectly from a promised seven miles away. Brown notes that these waves provide surfing so lengthy that you have a "nervous breakdown". "It's the kind of wave," Brown says, "that makes you talk to yourself."

The physicality, naturalism and pop mysticism of the sport bubbles under the surface throughout this film, perhaps explaining its status as an enduring classic. What is it about surfers? Why do we all like them? Why are they so Zen? They always seem to have predilections towards spirituality, especially the really laid back kind. Or did we absorb that awful-yet-nostalgically-wonderful surf spirituality feel-good teen flick, Airborne, way back in the day? And is that why we can forgive them anything?

Suffice to say, despite the grating treatment of poverty by Brown (Africans are "natives", ready to "massacre" each other; Australians are "local residents"), as well as the increasingly dodgy boasting (Brown jokingly emphasizes all the various ways surfers can die), this film is... well, definitely appealing. It's also a perfect little gem of American history: what it was like to surf in the 1960s; what that south Californian landscape that The Beach Boys later immortalized (and Weezer later post-modernified, or proto-hipsterized, or whatever) looked like, as described and shot by people from that place. Gnarly, man.

Recommended.

Una vita difficile (1961)

Una vita difficile (A difficult life) is the frustrating, Odyssean tale of Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi) as he navigates the post-war Italian landscape, trying to balance his partisan ideals against the harsh pragmatism that the poverty-stricken surroundings engender.

Essentially covering the same ground as C'eravamo tanto amati (which we much preferred), Una vita difficile starts with the same nostalgic romance of partisan fighting in WW2. Silvio, suffering from bronchitis as he treks through the Lake Como countryside, narrowly escapes being shot by a Nazi when Elena (Lea Massari), a local girl, kills the Nazi with her iron (whoa). Thus follows their brief three-month affair, after which Silvio flees to join his partisan band and, once the war ends, moves back down to Rome to pick up his pre-war journalism job for a left-wing daily.

A work trip up north reunites Silvio and Elena, who decide to get married. They return to Rome, where they live in borderline starvation. A son is born. Silvio is offered a position which contrasts with his left-wing morals; he refuses. Eventually, his unrestrained idealism lands him in jail, and Elena takes their son back up north.

This basic tension - Silvio's ideals versus cynical reality (often embodied by Elena); the poor, proletarian South of Silvio versus the bourgeois, industrialized North of Elena - is played out throughout the film in a variety of ways.

And all of this stuff was covered in the later, better C'eravamo tanto amati. Certain scenes - the happy crowds following Rome's liberation, the working-class trattorie with the wandering trumpet player - are even identical. Yet while Una vita difficile seems as well-remembered as C'eravamo tanto amati, we prefer the latter. It approaches the same subject with greater grace and more equanimity. Silvio's inability to let go of his idealism (and his indignant righteousness), to the point of driving away his family, is akin to Professor Palumbo's extremes - except Palumbo is articulate, off-kilter, hilarious and a sympathetic caricature. Silvio, instead, alienated us: he seemed an unlikable combination of entitlement and self-pity.

Of course, despite the identical setting, it's a harsher version of the same world that these characters live in, compared to C'eravamo tanto amati. Compare the trattoria scenes: in C'eravamo, the characters struggle by with half-portions, in Vita, they can't even pay for anything and are kicked to the curb. The requisite sell-out scenes, when Silvio succumbs to becoming a vile commendatore's underling, are full of humiliation and corruption. This extreme view just cements Silvio's righteousness, but it doesn't tackle the real issue: what if selling out does lead to a better life? The character of Gianni from C'eravamo also sells out, but his trials and tribulations are largely existential: materially, he is comfortable and happy.

Another reason we didn't particularly enjoy this film is that here, the treatment of women is just terrible. Elena, for however objectively rational and selfless she is (when Silvio implodes, she finds a way to provide a comfortable life for their son), is presented as unimaginative and frosty because she doesn't "get" the cause. Silvio abuses her regularly and, when she leaves him, she is presented as having "abandoned" him.

One of the reasons we love Lina Wertmuller's films so much is that she takes these stereotypes of Italian sexual mores - the frosty northern girl, the lusty southern man - and completely subverts them, most often via Giancarlo Giannini playing an extreme version of southern machismo. Consider, for example, Swept Away, where another left-wing, poverty-stricken southerner humiliates and dominates a bourgeois Milanese ice queen. In Swept Away, that relationship is presented as fundamentally ridiculous: compelling in its absurdity, ultimately false. Una vita difficile, maybe because it was made almost fifteen years earlier, is still earnestly enamored with Silvio's status as a man, from Rome, who is poor.

This is not to say this film isn't good. It's considered a classic, and it is indeed very well-made. The scene when the starving Silvio and Elena are invited into a royal lady's house for dinner while the republic/monarchy referendum results are announced was surreal and powerful, akin to the "lifestyles of the strange and wealthy" scenes from La dolce vita or Signore & signori. It's not a bad film, from a technical point of view. We just don't agree with its underlying philosophy. As the other northern beauty says to the other left-wing Roman in C'eravamo, "You're the first likable Roman that I meet."

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That being Nino Manfredi, who is indeed very likable and who we'll take over Alberto Sordi any day.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

What a classic! And what an underrated work of genius.

Like all good sci-fi, Planet of the Apes is an imaginative and entertaining commentary on major parts of our current society. Or, in this case, 1960s American society. Segregation, anti-intellectualism and creationism are all dissected via the lens of one unlucky space explorer, Taylor (Charlton Heston), and his misadventures in a civilization where apes enslave humans.

Taylor, along with his two cosmonaut friends, Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton), are heading to Earth after a brief mission to space which has dilated time over seven centuries for the Earthlings. But after they bump something in the ship, they end up way off course: thousands of years wrong, and crash landing into a planet where the few humans are primitive mutes who are rounded up by troops of gorilla soldiers wielding muskets and flash photography.

Things quickly spiral into the surreal as Taylor and the others end up imprisoned by the apes. Already we see clear segregation: the orangutans are the scientists, the gorillas are the soldiers, and the chimpanzees are just trying to get by (especially after the "quota system" has ended - Affirmative Action?). After a wounded Taylor regains his voice, all hell breaks loose. He befriends two chimpanzee progressives - Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) - who liberate him and send him off to discover the truth about this crazy planet's great mysteries.

The setting is rich and vivid. There's a great moment, for example, when Taylor is fleeing the guards and he ends up in a natural history museum - taxidermied humans are exhibited in various scenes "from the wild". The characterizations are also fascinating; Taylor and his astronauts chat at length about their old habits as misanthropes and lotharios. And we just loved the cheeky nudges to 1960s (counter)culture - at one point, Taylor shaves and tells a young sympathetic chimp that where he comes from, "only kids your age wear beards". The kid cocks his head, "Beards? I don't go in for fads." Cornelius chimes in: "Somehow, [clean-shavenness] makes you look less intelligent." Later on, Taylor jokes with the young chimp, "Remember: never trust anyone over thirty!"

A lot of a fun (and a lot better than the 2001 remake); it was clearly made with passion and intelligence. And some of the dialogue - especially Taylor's liberal use of "Damn you, damn you to hell!"s - is delightful. Now get your stinking paws off me, your damned dirty ape, and watch this damned film!

Star Trek, episode 67: The Empath (1968)

When they weren't pioneering the final frontier and general TV science fiction, Star Trek was pioneering what it means to be a modern fan.

It was with them, in the 1960s and 1970s, that all the modern idioms of fandom culture began: in particular, the almighty subculture of fanfiction. And Season 3's episode, The Empath, is an important historical moment for fanfiction: a fan-written episode which was bought by the producers of Star Trek, it features the three greats schools of fanfiction writing: Slash (homoeroticism), the Mary Sue (wish fulfillment), and some good ol' Hurt/Comfort (self-explanatory!).


An inspirational poster.

One day, the fiercely bromantic trio of Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the good Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) beamed down to a mysterious planet. The planet's sun was about to go nova, and the Enterprise crew were just checking out how the planet-side research station was holding up in all those solar flares and solar storms and such. After discovering a dusty, abandoned station, and a crusty old video showing the scientists disappearing, KirkSpockMcCoy disappear as well -

- and reappear in fanfic playland! Here, every fannish impulse is indulged and, in the style of fanfic, protracted... for a really long... time. Now in a mysterious "room", they meet a beautiful, silent, self-sacrificing alien ballet dancer (Kathryn Hayes, in a body sock) with perfect make-up. McCoy admires her beauty and calls her "Gem" (HA! like JIM, get it? he's so in love), but we at the PPCC will call her by her true name, Mary Sue. Mary Sue is the titular fangirl author stand-in empath, as she has no vocal cords but, like, really, really feels for the intense, palpable love between KirkSpockMcCoy (slash, check).


Meet Mary Sue. She will be your guide in these strange lands.


McCoy tends to Kirk's injuries while Spock looks jealously on.

Enter the Vians (William Sage and Alan Bergmann), big brainiacs (literally) who like to toy with these characters' emotions. They are the stand-ins for the fanfiction writer's ego (the Mary Sue is the id). For purposes that remain nebulous until the very end, the Vians engage in a little hurt/comfort - first, torturing Kirk and pervily monitoring whether Mary Sue (as well as Spock and McCoy) comforts him. They then show up and demand someone new to torture - after some noble scuffling, McCoy wins and is tortured until he suffers from "blood circulation failure". Now at death's door, it's up to Mary Sue - powered by the love of Kirck and Spock, and under the ever-watching Vians/pervy fangirl - to heal McCoy in a very extensive sequence with many shots of McCoy's sweatily/sexily suffering brow. Back in the safety of the Enterprise, KirkSpockMcCoy marvel at how amazing Mary Sue was - "a pearl of great price," supplies Scotty! The end.


A hurt McCoy, in the Nth hour of his comforting. No change.


The PPCC, after a long night reading horrible fanfic.

So we can't really tease too much, as we started writing fanfiction at the tender age of 13 and have never looked back since. It's quite a fascinating (to steal Spock's favorite word) subculture, and it can (and has!) cultivated real literary talents who went on to publish in real, non-fanfic science fiction magazines (that would be us, shazam!). But we've never had any misconceptions about what we were doing (making Obi-Wan Kenobi our boyfriend), whereas some fanfiction authors still try to pretend they're doing something literary and, er, disinterested. But we'll let that argument rest for now.


Okay, sorry, we couldn't resist. (But clearly they are the OTP.)

Instead, let's talk about the episode. Well, apart from a LOL moment when Spock and Kirk curse this blasted emo-sucking force field prison, it was a relatively tame contribution to a series we have, by now, come to expect only the most crazy fun from. It was like reading the most run-of-the-mill fanfic that misses the whole point of Star Trek (the crazy!) to get another helping of its comfort food (the bromance!), as played out by our favorite actors. Blah. Much more exciting would be reading some very good (and not scary!) fanfic, such as this one (for McCoy lovers, such as the PPCC) or this one (for Spock fans) or this one (for Pavel/comic relief fans).

Star Trek Episode #28: The City on the Edge of Forever (1967)

Our noble quest to get over the anti-Trekkie prejudice which runs deep in our veins continues. Today, we went for the much-acclaimed classic episode, The City on the Edge of Forever.

Written by the well-known (apparently!) sci-fi writer, Harlan Ellison, and later winning a Hugo Award (the mother of all sci-fi awards), The City on the Edge of Forever is a tightly-wound story about drugs, time travel and moral dilemmas.

One day, the spaceship Enterprise was rocking and rolling along time bumps in the space-time continuum. By coincidence, during one of these bumps, the good Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) accidentally injects himself with "cortrazine" - some sort of stimulant that, when taken in high doses, leads to, well... this:


Oh, Leonard. You're so silly.

Now properly batshit insane, McCoy screams garbled phrases, runs around, and then beams himself down onto the nearest planet. When the rescue team - Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spockfield Spockly Spock the Third (Leonard Nimoy) among them - go chasing after him, they find a mysterious portal. This portal may seem like glitter-encrusted plastic to our space adventurers, but soon the Man in the Portal Voice assures them that it is, in fact, a time-travel device. Just when Spock and Kirk are busy marveling at its time-travel-ness, crazy McCoy jumps in - and manages to alter the course of history in such a way that suddenly the Enterprise disappears from space above them. Now Kirk and Spock have to follow him.


BEHOLD! LUMPY DOOR OF TIME-TRAVEL-NESS!

They do; and land in Depression-era USA. After some comical mishaps with their sci-fi uniforms and Spock's pointy Vulcan ears, they end up in the warm and friendly care of do-gooder, Edith Keeler (Joan Collins(!)), at her 15th Street Mission. While Spock busies himself with "endeavoring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bear skins," Kirk falls in love with Edith - hard. The mystery of McCoy remains: where is McCoy? What does he do which alters the space-time continuum so dramatically? How can they stop him? They do, eventually, figure it all out - and it unearths a hairy moral tangle of surprising (for 1960s television) complexity.


Chillin' at the Mission.


Oh, Mr. Kirk. Always so ready to give your heart out.

The time-travel paradox thriller is, by now, a well-worn sci-fi theme (e.g. Back to the Future, The Terminator, Bring the Jubilee). What makes this Star Trek episode understandably a classic is its variation on the theme: what if straightening things out in the past is morally difficult? Even morally repugnant? This episode's philosophical maturity is admirable, in that it investigates the ambiguity of real life, rather than falling back onto the standard "he good, he bad" schoolchild moral dichotomy.

The writing is also pretty darn good. As we said, the narrative is airtight: you're propelled forward from crisis to crisis in a dynamic, engaging way. There are some sweet moments of humanism, such as when Kirk uses reverse psychology to get Spock working on the computer:

KIRK: Couldn't you build some form of computer aid here?
SPOCK: In this zinc-plated, vacuum-tubed culture?
KIRK: Yes, well, it would pose an extremely complex problem in logic, Mister Spock. Excuse me. I sometimes expect too much of you.

Leonard Nimoy's expression is priceless!

Another touching moment is when a delirious, exhausted McCoy marvels at the historical American setting and then suddenly starts to despair:

McCOY: Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably... needles and... sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures... all the terrible pain!

Oh, poor, pessimistic humanist Dr. McCoy. He's like Hawkeye Pierce. Only angrier.

So, after all this talk, you might think we looooved this episode? Alas, no. While we admired these things in a detached way, our emotional core still couldn't see anything but plastic, glitter, tight pants, bad acting (Mr. Kelley being particularly bad) and strong vibes of Nerd. Is the prejudice bigger than us? Bigger than logic? Possible. The prejudice made us notice, for example, glaring points which were never resolved: what happened to the guy who beamed himself? (Or did he phase himself?) Who are McCoy's "murderers" after all? Why is everyone's uniform so tight? Did Uhura forget to wear her pants today? Why 1929 America, of all the places in the entire history of the world? Etcetera.

All in all, then, our summary thoughts are:

• If you like Star Trek, you've probably already seen this. If you haven't, you'll definitely love it.
  
• If you hate Star Trek, you'll probably admire this but it won't be converting you anytime soon.

And if you're curious, or think the PPCC is far too skewed a reviewer, you can now watch the episode online!

Signore & signori (1966)

(300th post! Arbitrary yay!)



If the north of Italy has a La dolce vita, it is Signore & signori (Ladies & gentlemen). Just as La dolce vita exposed the debauched, immoral (night)life of the Roman bourgeois, Signore & signori does the same for northern Italy - and it uses the same style of vicious satire. A key difference is that, unlike La dolce vita's underlying melancholy, Signore & signori believes the proper response to the outrageous hypocrisy on display is laughter. And indeed, it is very, very funny. Another key difference is that northern Italy has historically been more "bourgeois" than southern Italy - that is, it has been historically richer and more empowered (e.g. Renaissance Venice or the Duchy of Savoy, to the Kingdom of Naples) - so this film could just as easily be set in the 1960s as the 1560s.

Signore & signori is funny in a scathing, dark way. No character is better than any other character, and all of them are pretty awful: selfish, mean-spirited, hedonistic. The film is divided into three distinct sections, each focusing on a particular problem among the bourgeois of a northern Italian city (most likely Treviso). The first story focuses on the loud, over-the-top Dr. Castellan (Gigi Ballista) and his blonde, airhead wife, Noemi (Beba Loncar). On an evening before a major party, one of Castellan's friends, the nervous-looking Gasparini (Alberto Lionello), comes to Castellan in confidentiality with a medical problem: he is impotent. Yet at the party, Castellan repeatedly sets Gasparini up for group mocking, as well as spreading the rumor to everyone (eventually reaching Gasparini's wife, the fearsome moral police lady Ippolita (Olga Villi)). But Castellan is the one being duped when, upon returning home, he finds Gasparini and Noemi together!


(You'll notice that exclamation points, adultery and mean-spirited mockery are themes of this film.) One of the various adulteries.


Like La dolce vita, the Church is shown to be just as morally bankrupt as everyone else!

The second story follows the tall, oafish Osvaldo Bisigato (Gastone Moschin). Bisigato's shrewish, nagging wife complains to him all day, so he typically wears earplugs. His children ignore him, his job in the bank is boring. His only respite from this wearying existence is the cute girl, Milena (Virni Lisi), who works at the coffee shop downstairs. Under the eyes of the gossiping Treviso elite, Bisigato visits Milena every day, eventually beginning a relationship with her. Eventually it all comes crashing down: he leaves his wife and children, provoking the wrath of the Catholic morality police, led by Ippolita; his "friends" begin to send anonymous letters to him insinuating at Milena's moral weaknesses; and everyone in town basically conspires to juice the situation for all it's worth, teasing both Bisigato and his family in their weakest points.


Aldo Puglisi, who plays the only non-Venetian character and only honorable character, the Neopolitan police officer, Mancuso. Question to the PPCC: is Aldo Puglisi the Doppelgänger/lookalike of Ranvir Shorey, or is it just us?!

The third story, by far the most disturbing, follows a gorgeous, young country girl, Alda (Patrizia Valturri), as she comes to town to buy some goods. One by one, the town's bored, womanizing men - from the shoe shop salesman to the pharmacist to Gasparini and Dr. Castellan as well - seduce (rape?) her in exchange for pretty shoes, some headache medicine, and so forth. Prostitution? Rape? The insinuations are not very pretty - and things get even worse, when Alda's enraged, drunken father comes to town, accusing the men of statutory rape: Alda is only 15 years old! The guilty group, meanwhile, panics and - with the help of Ippolita, and therefore the approval of the Catholic morality police - they bribe Alda and her father in order to "save the face of the good town citizens".


The guilty group.

Each outrageous twist in this already over-the-top film is punctuated by loud, silly, 1960s dance music: emphasizing the harshly satirical take on the moral bankruptcy of the Northern provincial elite. It is sometimes very funny (Bisigato's tale in particular), sometimes cringe-worthy (Gasparini's), and sometimes disgusting (the statutory rape case). It is also very broad and very obvious: with slapstick, sight gags and caricatures instead of characters.

That's actually okay. Despite the seediness of the content, and the broad brushstrokes in which it's presented, we really enjoyed this film. It tickled us pink to see the Veneto region - so often ignored by Italian cinema, which is dominated by artists from Rome, Naples and Palermo, stories about the Mafia or Cinecittà, and a particular emphasis on the Southern experience. Signore & signori's characters speak in the thick Venetian dialect, hover around the familiar architecture of the region. The regional setting is important since, as we never tire of saying, Italian culture is dominated by regionalism: there are distinct stereotypes concerning what a Neopolitan looks, sounds and thinks like, as compared to a Roman, Milanese or whatever. It was therefore interesting to read that director Pietro Germi had actually considered casting this film with well-known southerners Marcello Mastroianni and Nino Manfredi (especially baffling since we think Nino Manfredi epitomizes "Roman irony"). The film's regionalism is also fascinating since it shows the relative wealth and moral bankruptcy of the Veneto, as compared to the intense poverty still experienced in Campania, Calabria or Sicily at that time (the 1960s).


The wonderfully handsome Giulio Questi, as the lecherous pharmacist. Giulio Questi went on to win acclaim as a director of ultra-violent spaghetti westerns such as Django, Kill! He also played one of the aristocratic princes in La dolce vita.

The performances and presentation are all fun and frothy and self-consciously horrible. No one plays for any sympathy - these characters are not supposed to be liked. The cinematography, with its lazy, drooping shots of Treviso's Piazze dei Signori (Gentlemen's Square, where much of the action takes place of course!), its spinning cuts and sight gags, also seems "in" on the joke.

Brutal and shamelessly one-dimensional, we definitely recommend this film as yet another examination of Italian regional sociopolitics in the postwar era - after Ladri di biciclette, La dolce vita, Io la conoscevo bene and C'eravamo tanto amati. Will we ever get tired of this genre? Not when the movies about it are so good!

Dulha Dulhan (1964)

Dulha Dulhan (Groom Bride) is a sweet little film that doesn't aspire to much and generally succeeds. It is pure vanilla: a straightforward take on the old school Memory Loss Romance, with several pretty songs, pretty actors (although Raj Kapoor was, by then, going a bit blobby) and pretty moments. It is the oft-elusive "nice" movie: something almost everyone will probably like, at least a little. Vanilla is, after all, the most purchased ice cream flavor!

This may make it sound bland, and in a way, it is. But it's a... nice sort of bland, a mashed potato sort of bland, even - at times - a poignant Morandi painting sort of bland. It's a humanistic, non-demanding comfort movie for the jaded PPCC reviewer's soul. And anyway - we love Raj Kapoor.


The bromance is strong in these two.


And the trio has great chemistry as well.

The story is simple. In a working class chawl somewhere in Bombay, two buddies - Raj (Raj Kapoor) and Bansi (Agha) - struggle to make ends meet. Raj is the sensitive, poetic one who, of course, is a struggling playback singer, while Bansi is loud, boisterous and working nights on the movie sets. (There's a funny implicit commentary on the inefficient, haphazard way movies are made in Bombay, as Bansi is more often coming home from cancelled shoots than anything else! And there's even a surreal Shammi Kapoor reference!) One day, the boys get a letter from Raj's friend, alerting them that the friend's daughter will be visiting Bombay and could they show her around, yadda yadda.

When Raj goes to the train station to pick her up, he sees that she is the beautiful, bewildered Rekha (Sadhana). Although Raj is anxious to get rid of her and put her up in a decent hotel, lest people talk, he eventually gives in and lets her stay with them. Eventually, her wide-eyed, Bambi-esque naive good humor wins over even his (relatively) more cynical urban bad attitude, and they fall in love. Marriage, sweetness, memory loss and emo ensue.


A cute moment.


Another cute, intimate moment. Awww!

There were a number of sweet little grace notes in this film, and the vibe throughout is one of gentle good humor. Even the latter half, which falls into the usual old school emo and made us wonder if tragedy king Dilip Kumar would have been better suited, was never really that dramatic. When a despairing Raj proclaims he's going to go wander around India and wallow and don't try to find him, we weren't that surprised to see that he was actually just down the street, moping but remembering to shave. Or maybe we've just gotten used to spectacular, over-the-top dramatics - where losing love pretty much guarantees death and destruction - so it was pleasantly surprising to see Raj despair in such a contained, rational way.


Raj's emo despair is only expressed in some handy superimposed flashbacks on low volume.

The performances matched the film's understated sentimentality. Critics of Raj Kapoor can relax in knowing that he's very toned down in this film, with none of the trappings of the squirrelly, "Ji!"-ing tramp persona he was most famous for. We should note that he shares the screen very well in this film - acquiescing his huge screen presence (and iconic fame, at the time!) to Agha again and again. For a performer that sometimes suffered from overly self-indulgent theatrics and occasional outright screen-hogging, it was refreshing to see how well he worked with the other two leads, Agha and Sadhana. Beth rightly notes how sweet the bromance between Raj and Agha is and, while Sadhana's performance sometimes felt flat for us, the romance was lovely (sometimes heart-meltingly so!). For that reason, we liken this film as more Chori Chori or Jagte Raho than one of those "It's The Raj Kapoor (Me! Me! Me!) Show!" movies, and Raj Kapoor haters, you should give this a try.

Dubei dao (1967)

Dubei dao (The One-Armed Swordsman) is much touted as a staple classic in the martial arts wuxia genre of Hong Kong cinema. According to this article, the film's significance is that it established a number of trends which would later define the genre: heavy bloodshed, alienated anti-heroes and - disappointed "aww!" from the feminists among us - the shift from a female to male perspective. The PPCC doesn't know enough about old school wuxia to comment on this; can anyone recommend some of the female-perspective classics pre-One-Armed Swordsman?

The One-Armed Swordsman's titular protagonist begins with two arms. Back in the day, Qi Rufeng's (Feng Tien) Golden School of martial arts was attacked by some bandits. Rufeng's servant, Fang Cheng (Feng Ku), died trying to defend him and - in exchange - Rufeng agreed to teach Cheng's son, Fang Gang (Yu Wang), in the ways of awesomeness. Yet as Fang Gang grew up, the other students - who we like to call Lavender (???), Lumpy (???) and Crazy (Yin Tze Pan) - were always bullying him. One evening, they confront Fang Gang in the forest and, after repeated challenges for a martial arts showdown which he refuses and/or easily brushes aside, they satisfy themselves with... cutting his right arm off!

It is, in particular, Crazy Lady who cuts off Fang Gang's arm, later claiming she did because of her tumultuous love/hate feelings towards him. Whatever, crazy lady! Keep her away from sharp objects!


Fang Gang's got one arm and half a broken sword. And he can still kick your butt.

Anyway, Fang Gang hobbles off and collapses into the boat of the pretty (and sane) Hsiao Man (Chiao Chiao). As Hsiao Man nurses him back to health, he despairs that his life will now be meaningless without martial arts. Yet, after the pair are harassed by some wandering goons, Hsiao Man finds her father's old kung fu manual which - irony of ironies! - was accidentally set afire and only the chapters on left-handed techniques remain! Despite promising the pacifist Hsiao Man that he will soon abandon martial arts to lead a pastoral existence in the country with her, Fang Gang trains himself in left-handed swordsmanship - just in time for the massive showdown which is brewing between his old Golden School and the villainous brothers, Long-Armed Devil (Yang Chih-Ching) and Smiling Tiger Cheng Tianshou (Tang Di). As Long-Armed Devil and Smiling Tiger pick off the more inept Golden School students one by one, it's up to the mysterious one-armed swordsman to defend the very people that maimed him.


The Golden School of martial arts, good at losing and quasi-accidentally cutting each other's arms off.

This is a fairly entertaining film told, to our eyes, in a straightforward, lightweight way. Indeed, if we hadn't been told it was a classic, we would have assumed it was just a throwaway 60s martial arts flick. This article provides interesting commentary:

"Virtually every aspect of this film has been exceeded and improved upon by later offerings, but this is where it all began in its primitive violent form...With One Armed Swordsman the ultimate anti-hero was born; a macho, resolute, honour-bound character who had little to live for, but a lot to die for."

Since we live in a post-One-Armed Swordsman world, it's difficult to gauge the importance of this film - much like it's difficult to explain the importance of, say, Dilwale Dulhanie Le Jayenge to Hindi cinema to someone who's only ever watched Shah Rukh Khan films. As we said earlier, we'd be very interested in seeing a typical wuxia film from the pre-One-Armed Swordsman days.

Something that did make us understand the cult legendary status of the One-Armed Swordsman was his later appearance in the Japanese Zatoichi film series. Just as Toshiro Mifune's legendary Yojimbo appeared in the film Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo for some clashing of the titans, so too do Zatoichi and Gang Fang duke it out in Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman. Now that sounds cool!

Pics from Wikipedia and DVD Beaver: One-Armed Swordsman.

La dolce vita (1960)

A typical scene from Fellini's classic. The drunk guy in the back is named... Paparazzo.

Hedonism - especially drinking and partying - has been explored in a number of ways. From the tragic wallowing of Devdas, to the bittersweet romanticism of Naina, to the awful hyperrealism of Aberdeen - whatever you think of the demon drink, you can probably find a film that suits your fancy. But if you want a film that sucks all the fun and glamour out of partying and makes you seriously consider taking monastic vows, watch La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life).

Like Rashomon, La Dolce Vita is one of those Perfect Films. Directed by the most famous (especially among trendy Anglo-American intellectuals) Italian director, Federico Fellini, it follows the surreal life of a tabloid journalist, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), as he navigates the glitterati of 1950s Rome. On the surface of things, Marcello really is living the "sweet life" - he schmoozes with rich and beautiful stars, he is beautiful himself, he is out every night in the top-end, trendy nightclubs and restaurants of Via Veneto. Even better, Marcello enjoys a position of relative privilege, since he is there to expose this world and generally he can pretend to remain untouched, unsoiled and "above" its debauchery. Marcello is cool as a cucumber, in all senses of the word: he is neither fawning fan nor judgmental outsider. Instead, he easily slips in and out of a variety of situations - the film follows him through nightclubs, prostitute's homes, decaying palaces, and, of course, into the Trevi fountain - as an agreeable, unassuming participant. Marcello's private, gnawing frustration at the superficiality of the "sweet life" is only revealed in his attachment to his bourgeois intellectual friend, Steiner (Alain Cuny), and his stubbornly co-dependent relationship with his Good Italian Girl, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux). Marcello's despair can only be seen in the beading sweat on his forehead. But the tension between what Marcello wants - something more, something deeper and more satisfying - and what he has - access to glamour, material wealth - is never resolved. In fact, the climax of the film leads to Marcello's spiraling decline and things end on a particularly bleak note.


A frazzled, despairing Marcello, at the end of his tether.

Like many classics, the film is powerful on a number of levels: a commentary on celebrity culture, on the Italian - and especially Roman - obsession with la bella figura (i.e. the philosophy where aesthetics are all-important), the boredom of parties, and on materialism versus true happiness. Poor Marcello never quite finds the joy he's looking for - mostly because he keeps searching for it down the wrong paths. When the most promising path - a dedication to bourgeois intellectualism; the Steiner route - turns out to have the most horrific end, he despairs. Things fall apart, and no amount of artificial sweeteners - drinking, partying, glamour - can ease his truly sour life.

Oh God, that was a horrible pun. Sorry about that!

Anyway, moving on: We'll talk about the bella figura philosophy, since we reckon most of our readers are non-Italians and hence might be unfamiliar with this important cultural concept. La bella figura is an Italian phrase which literally means, "the beautiful figure" or "beautiful image". It has all sorts of connotations in everyday Italian mentality. Whereas "Did you look good?" would sound pretty weird in English if you asked your friend this after a job interview, it's a pretty standard thing in Italian: "Hai fatto bella figura?" It doesn't just mean were your clothes in order and your shoes shined, it means did you project the right image, the correct overall aesthetic: enthusiastic, interested, well-put-together, whatever. In the previously PPCCed Come Te Nessuno Mai, one of the sweetest scenes occurs when protagonist Silvio gets punched in the face by a long-time friend whose girlfriend he's kissed. We then see Silvio in his apartment building's elevator, staring in the mirror and sobbing, "Che figura di merda! Che figura di merda! Che figura di merda!" (Literally, "What a shit figure!")

For better or worse, then, Italian culture valorizes aesthetics. While that may make it sound superficial, we at the PPCC are keen promoters of aesthetics. We like beautiful things. We get enthusiastic about beautiful things. We don't think there's anything wrong with that. Quite the opposite - we think beauty (and the sublime) are highly valuable facets of the human experience! And Italian culture is just very aware of that - this is the culture that produced and embraced the Rennaissance, humanist art, the Sistine Chapel, Donatello's David, Gucci, Prada, our beloved Giancarlo Giannini (see blog banner)!


Anita Eckberg has a brief but enduringly famous role as an air-headed visiting Swedish celeb.

However, as with all things, a life based purely on la bella figura is not going to give you everything you need - and, in particular, it won't give you much spiritual satisfaction. La Dolce Vita's Marcello is acutely aware of this. Even as he adjusts his hair and smooths down his (no doubt brand-name) suit, he suffers from the vacuousness around him. He wants more - but he's just not sure what. Domestic comfort and intellectual pursuits aren't the answer - the desperately needy Emma and the surprise of Steiner make sure of that. Religion isn't the answer either - Fellini constantly paints Roman Catholicism in a cynical, post-Christian way. For example, the opening scene is of a helicopter flying over Rome carrying an enormous statue of Jesus Christ with arms outspread. In the helicopter are Marcello and his photographer, Paparazzo (his name is the origin of the term paparazzi; Walter Santesso), and, after flying over a rooftop pool where scantily-clad women are lounging, they pull the helicopter around to exchange phone numbers. Later in the film, Marcello covers a story about two children in the countryside who claim to have seen the Madonna. It's clearly a scam, and the camera lingers on the infirm elderly people who have come to wait in the pouring rain for the children to speak again. Even just little details - such as the crooked, disorienting staircase inside Saint Peter's that Marcello has to climb as he chases after his latest scoop - emphasize this alienation. The Church won't help you, bro!


The iconic first scene, as helicopters fly over ancient Roman ruins with a huge Jesus in tow.

And so he's left with his "sweet life" of parties, drinking and superficial "fun". Fellini does an excellent job of undermining any tawdry glamour that lifestyle might have by always including at least one bored, exasperated sober person in the party scenes. This person is both a conscience and a realist; by seeing this person (and it's usually an unimportant character, like a waiter or the guy who owns the house in the end) and their reactions, we see just how pitifully grasping the sweet lifers are. And even worse, they'll be waking up with wicked hangovers tomorrow morning! Marcello begins the film as this sober, disparaging outsider, but slowly slides into becoming a sweet lifer himself - in the end becoming a drunken source of ridicule and pity.

The performances are all top-notch. Marcello Mastroianni was one of the few Roman actors who spoke with barely a regional accent. Instead, his "RP Italian", coupled with his conservative-yet-stylish suits and his blandly handsome face perfectly establish his neutrality as the hero. We read somewhere that Fellini picked Mastroianni for that very reason - he wanted someone who was bland but agreeable, a face that was pretty but not particularly memorable. And Mastroianni is great - he projects the bubbling undercurrent of anxiety and despair in a meltdown-free way. (And we haven't even touched on his excellent portrayal of the ironically impotent Latin lover stereotype!) Everyone else in the film has brief roles - Anita Eckberg is wonderful and iconic as the scarily empty-headed celebrity, Alain Cuny as Steiner is fantastically creepy, Walter Santesso's Paparazzo has a smarmy, cocky, Roman-issimo air, and Yvonne Furneaux as the doomed Emma projects vulnerability and imbalance wonderfully. Anouk Aimée has a small but critical role as Marcello's incredibly posh on-off lover, Maddalena, and she was glamorous and tragic.

The film is long - around three hours - and its episodic nature might alienate some viewers who prefer linear narratives. It's also a total downer, like watching nihilism purified on film, and - as happens, most of the rare comedy is culturally-specific (they satirize Roman-ism a lot). But it is both an important work and a very, very well-made piece of art, so we definitely recommend it.

Haseena Maan Jayegi (1968)

Ahahaha! Fabulous!


Why are ya strangling yourself, Shashi?


Eh? Why are ya strangling yourself?

Well, gosh. We liked Sharmeelee, and now they've gone and made a male version of it. We take back everything we said, Beth, about Shashi being only an OK actor. But what does it say about the PPCC that after Junoon, In Custody, and Vijeta - all more typically cited sources of good acting on the part of our big hero, Shashi Kapoor - it should instead be the fluffy Haseena Maan Jayegi where we go, "Wow! He's amazing!" And - irony of ironies - Beth doesn't even like this movie!


What an unattractive woman.

Haseena Maan Jayegi is basically the All Shashi All The Time Show. It's a 1960s romp through mindless mod fun - both in Carefree and Emo varieties - and it stars Shashi Kapoor in an excellent double role. First, he is rakish Rakesh (sorry), the college cad with a cat-calling obsession. Though Rakesh is a lot of fun (check out his first number where he teases Jab Jab Phool Khile's Pardesiyon Se Na Aankiyan!), he is a total misogynist. Boo, Rakesh. Second, Shashi plays Kamal, the supreme scion of goodness. On paper, Kamal sounds like a bore - goody two-shoed, earnest, enjoys bringing dates to graveyards and delivering sermons - but he's actually quite endearing. Oh, you!

Both Rakesh and Kamal fall for the same girl, one Archana (Babita). Archana is annoyed by Rakesh's skirt-chasing antics while charmed by Kamal's softspoken gentleness. Yet while Rakesh and Kamal have starkly drawn personalities - and here we must say, Shashi did a great job making them two different people - they are, after all, physically identical. More than once, Rakesh tries to use this resemblance to his advantage and, after Archana is duped, Kamal jokingly warns, "Watch out that you don't marry me and honeymoon with him." Did we just hear the bell of foreshadowing go clang?


We're always so impressed by doubling in Hindi cinema.

Well, this is 1960s pop Hindi cinema, so of course that's what's going to happen. Especially since the Sino-Indian conflict erupts and both boys, former military school students, volunteer to fight. When the two run into each other at the military camp, evil Rakesh decides now is his chance to bump off Kamal. There is a deliriously weird fight scene, as both Shashis are in identical uniforms, and director Prakash Mehra makes sure we have no idea which one just got punched. When it looks like one of the two has been bumped off, we follow the surviving Shashi back home. Now the fun is amplified - the audience doesn't know which Shashi has returned, and his behavior - highly traumatized after the fight; hell, who wouldn't be emotionally scarred after being strangled by their self?! - is a bit off. Who is this guy? It takes a kinda boring courtroom scene followed by an excellent expedition to Tibet (!) to solve everything. And any movie that features Tibet as a place of spiritual awakening gets major brownie points.


There's also a pointless proletarian comedy subplot featuring Johnny Walker. We were annoyed by this, not because of the stupid jokes, but because it was all about Johnny trying to bed this mindless, personalityless woman, whose father kept declaring that he wouldn't let his honor be besmirched. The woman (played by Laali) was just a setpiece to be moved around by the two men, sometimes literally. It was misogynistic and dumb.


OMG HIS ANGST.


OMG HER ANGST. MATCHING SPOUSAL ANGST.

Beth thinks that this film starts strong and then goes off the rails at intermission. We at the PPCC instead loved every minute of it. We admit that this love depended critically on acceptance of the whole "Wait - did I marry Rakesh or Kamal?" dilemma. There are histrionic meltdowns galore in the second half, so if that's not your cake either, avoid.

However if, like the PPCC, you occasionally yearn to see your big hero go limp-wristed from emotional pain...


Like so.

...then there are ample rewards. "Nahiiiin!"

There are also two very nice songs: first, the God of Transcendental Pine-Wooded Lovers' Duets - that is, Bekhudi mein sanam - and, second, the unexpectedly nice duet between Johnny Walker and Ameeta. Bekhudi mein sanam is one of those rare songs that the PPCC knew and loved before having seen a single Hindi movie. It was thus with great joy that we discovered, months ago, that it was picturized on our beloved Shashi. And today it is an even further joy to see that the filmi context surrounding it is as fun as ever. Our only disappointment is that the rest of the songs were sort of subpar for Kalyanji-Anandji.

As we said, this film is really Shashi's show, and he demonstrates amazing energy and variety in his two performances. In fact, so good is he at demarcating Rakesh and Kamal with separate body language that we started to forget it was the same guy playing both characters. Talk about suspension of disbelief! Shashi also threw himself head and foot into the dance numbers. We at the PPCC have seen so many Shashi movies that we've become very familiar with the stock expressions he used when phoning in a performance - in Haseena, it was all new!


Tibetan redemption? *happy sigh*

As is typical in Hindi movies of the era, the women's roles were either completely vacuous or just unlikable. Babita does as much as she can with Archana, which is to say she doesn't have much to work with. Her basic motivation is to get married and preserve her honor, and she doesn't have much of a personality beyond that. Meanwhile, Ameeta could have been replaced with a blow-up doll (in fact, that would have probably made the comedy subplot funnier).

We were really impressed by the direction in this film, but that's no surprise - it was Prakash Mehra. Mehra directed the zany and ridiculous Namak Halaal, starring a by-then-much-older 80s Shashi paired with Amitabh, as well as the only tolerable Devdas adaptation, Muqaddar ka Sikandar. Haseena had some great shots, and overall it was a very skilfully told story.

In terms of film analytics, some cool stuff worth mentioning:

1. Death of the self. OMG the movie starts off all Freudian, where Rakesh and Kamal could easily be symbolic of one man's dual natures (ego versus id?), and then it turns Buddhist, where only by destroying his self + becoming one with himself can the man find peace!
2. Why are they identical? The film never resolves this seemingly incredibly important issue. They only tease us by alluding to it again and again. "Oh yeah, that's Kamal. No, I don't know why we're physically identical." Weird! Maybe the film's trying to say that, deep down, we're all the same - or, as the transcendentalist The Thin Red Line would have it, "Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man."
3. The Tibetan bit. Gosh, we can't give too much away, but when ahem ahem cough cough happens and then ahem cough, we were so happy. Even a Tibetan hat! Be still, mera dil. We think this fully supports the Buddhist hypothesis. In fact, you know what, we've convinced ourselves.

Kanyadaan (1969)

When the best part of the movie features a pregnant Om Prakash, you know you're in a mess.

Kanyadaan started out strong - with magically sublime (magicablime?) shots of a young Shashi Kapoor against a background of crisp mountain air, with soul-plumbingly beautiful music by Shankar-Jaikishen, with interesting 'war of the sexes' themes. It all went wrong though, when the narrative started veering off in irritatingly predictable-yet-insufficiently-alluded-to ways. Add to that, the main source of melodrama - country bumpkin Rekha's (Asha Parekh) inability to adapt to changing 1960s bourgeoise norms of marriage and divorce - was on pretty shaky ground, as no one seemed to be troubled by everything as much as she was, so her troubledness just looked more and more bizarre. Nay, attention-seeking!


The usual Shashi way of dealing with things: get shashed.

Consider, for example, one of the final scenes: after much drama, Rekha visits the Shash, who is currently Devdasing himself to death. Presumably her visit is out of compassion; it's an effort to prevent his suicide by bottle. The Shash proclaims, "Very well. I'll stop drinking because it hurts you. But what will I do? How will I live my life without this crutch? I just don't know. Sob." Goodness, such despair! And he thinks getting wasted is a crutch now? Never mind that it's been all of a week, get that man to an AA meeting. Or at least, I don't know, address what he just said. Instead self-centred Rekha goes, "I regret ever coming into your life." Huh? OK, we weren't talking about you anymore, you silly cow. Why must it always be you, you, you?

But this is the film's fault. It can't seem to decide who the protagonist is. Is it Super Bourgeoise Man (Shashi Kapoor), the sensitive soul and poet, young, orphaned, rich, looking and acting as if he wandered out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel? Or is it his love, Bumpkin Woman (Bumpkini?), poor despite her gallons of hairspray, who was a child bride, unbeknownst to everyone including herself and her supposed husband? Or is it even the Fred and Ethel neighbors? Who knows, who cares?

Neither can the film decide where it stands on gender relations. In the opening scene, a boys' team is playing field hockey against the girls' team. The boys lose, but then it's revealed that their star player - Amar (Dilip Raj), AKA Fred - threw the game. When one of the girls confronts him about it, he says, "I threw it to teach you girls some self-confidence!" (Well, we're paraphrasing.) What? Isn't that terribly patronizing? It's certainly counterproductive! (That said, a wonderful sequence on gender relations follows Om Prakah, who plays the silly servant and resident populist comic subplot protagonist, who is desperate to impregnate his firebrand wife. At one point, he exclaims, "Tut! If I was her, man, I'd be popping those babies out like muffins out of the oven." He then proceeds to dream about himself being pregnant, and this part was hilarious!)


It's always gotta be you, you, you, Bumpkini! Even when the Shash is burning up his Jawarhalal Nehru outfit and just kickin' it classic style.


Look at him. Just look at him! He's hot. And he's so melodic when he's melancholy.

And then there's the whole re-marriage issue, source of much needless angst. Bumpkin Woman wails and despairs and generally acts melodramatic that, alas, she is already married (even though she didn't know about it, and no one cares) and is therefore incapable of marrying the Shash. Meanwhile, her supposed husband - who, we'll give it away, is Amar the Fred character - was likewise unaware that he was already married, likewise got married, but the movie doesn't seem to fussed about this. He certainly didn't jump in front of the first speeding car when he found out (Bumpkini's typical response).

In fact, the melodrama is then completely undermined in the end, when, after the Bumpkin Mom (Mrs. Bumpkini) has arrived from Eastcabumpkin, India, to see how her daughter is shashing it, even the freaking Mom - purveyor of all things traditional! maintainer of all things conservative! - tells her daughter, "Look, maybe you're taking this child marriage thing a wee bit too seriously." There proceeds a brief lecture on how child marriage isn't really valid if the children, as adults, don't recognize the union anymore, and, as interesting as it is to hear this coming out of a 1960s Hindi movie, it's still just horrible narrative form. We just spent 2.5 hours waiting for the last bastion of blindly conservative idiocy - sorry, Bumpkini - to wake up to the reality every other character seemed already fully aware of. Even more irritatingly, there are a couple subplots that are just overinflated balloons: when Ethel the Neighbor suspects Bumpkini of seducing Fred, or when Shashi appears to be going to the whorehouse and is actually just writing the play. What?! Ugh. Don't waste our time with this trash!


Some genderbending: a woman smokes a cigarette outside the baby department!

Anyway. Despite the horrible narrative form and just the horrible plot, this film is - like Jab Jab Phool Khile - another example of a very didactic but very aesthetically pretty 1960s film. The music is uniformly amazing, with two of the songs - Likhe Jo Khat Tujhe, and Mil Gae Mil Gae - reaching states of such transcendent bliss that our love of Bollywood was reaffirmed big time. Also, the camerawork is likewise very, very good - and it's interesting to note how Apollonian it is (compared to the Dionysian masala 70s?): all rigorously measured golden ratios, geometric patterns, and so forth. Our absolute favorite moment in terms of filmmaking was during Likhe Jo Khat: Shashi and Bumpkini are frollicking around a tree in the usual forest. Just as the music pauses, Shashi grabs Bumpkini's hand and pulls her around to him, singing, "Kaha tum ho, vaha mein hoo." (Wherever you are, there I am.) During these lyrics, the camera pulls in tighter and tighter until we can see only her face pressed against his chest. That shot, we think, perfectly captures the delirious joy one would feel if singing at high altitudes with the Shash. And because of its transcendence, we'd say it captures any delirious joy, anywhere, anytime.

And now presenting:

Things We Have Noticed Are Becoming a Trend in 60s Shashi Movies
1. Mohammad Rafi sings for Shashi (sometimes - ed.). Yay. Editor who has been schooled in the comments: But not always! See comments.
2. Shashi has a shelf of hair and wears tapered trousers, like a true dork.
3. There will be 1 song featuring crisp mountain air and wooded areas.
4. The heroine's hair will resemble a beehive.
5. The moral of the story will be the oppression of women, or some variation thereof.
6. There will be a play-within-a-play.
7. At least someone will be super bourgeoise.

Examples: this movie, Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965), Pyar Ka Mausam (1969), Abhinetri (1970), Sharmeelee (1971).

OMG. Give us 70s masala anyday.

Fuurin kazan (1969)

All hail! The best actor in the universe!

Man, Toshiro Mifune was da BOMB. He was absolutely, unconditionally, unparalleledly DA BOMB. If he was a number, he'd be infinity to the infinity.


Toshiro, you were da bomb.

The magnificence of Toshiro Mifune was sometimes complimented by the surroundings; such as in the case of the epic jidaigeki samurai swashbuckler, Fuurin kazan (Samurai Banners). This is a film full of pageantry and glamour. The battles are large, the costumes precise, we have sweeping shots of gloriously large mountains. Set during 16th century feudal Japan, it tells the story of Kansuke Yamamoto (Toshiro Mifune), a ruthless and ambitious samurai who became a legendary general in the Kai domain. Under the lordship of ruler Takeda (Kinnosuke Nakamura), Kansuke dreams of conquering all of Japan - uniting the country from sea to sea. For a man who professes to dream of peace, however, he's an awfully violent guy. The prologue establishes him as a man whose ambitions often outweigh his scruples: betraying a fellow samurai and killing him in order to get a job.

After advising Takeda to overthrow the nearby kingdom of Suwa, Kansuke finds the now fatherless Princess Yu (Yoshiko Sakuma) about to kill herself. Yu's maid is insisting that she must, out of honor, but Yu - who reveals herself to be as powerful and single-minded a figure as Kansuke - outright refuses. She does not want to die, so why should she? Instead, Kansuke takes her prisoner and delivers her to Takeda, who takes her as a concubine. It takes more than a little convincing on Kansuke's part to get Yu to agree to be Takeda's concubine and bear him a son. All the while, political and military machinations aside, Kansuke is falling a bit for the fiery young princess. The feelings seem reciprocated, until, after giving birth to an heir, Yu declares that she both loves and hates Takeda, and will forever be consumed by these conflicting feelings. Kansuke is understandably disappointed.


Kansuke advising Takeda.


One of the large-scale battles.

All of this culminates in the famous battle at Kawanakajima, which, if you know your Japanese history, should come as no surprise. The PPCC knows nothing about Japanese history apart from what Toshiro has taught us, but we do know our narrative structure, so we weren't that surprised. But it was still magnificent and sad.


This was one of those movies where they have little diagrams explaining battle strategies.

Apparently the Kansuke of legend had a bad eye and a bad leg, and Toshiro thus manages to infuse Kansuke with an air of hardened gruffness but also fairly obvious vulnerability. At least, there are several moments when Kansuke's physical difficulties are obvious, and yet he still maintains an almost exaggerated aggressive quality. It reminds us of Kurosawa's only critique of Toshiro: that his voice was too "rough". The scenes with Princess Yu are a good juxtaposition, in that suddenly he is diminished and becomes almost servile: "Anything you wish is my command," and several variations thereof. We at the PPCC liked Princess Yu's character very much - she was a lady in charge! - though we didn't find Yoshiko Sakuma particularly charismatic. The same goes for Kinnosuke Nakamura, who played Takeda, and generally came across as slimy and unlikable. Takashi Shimura, another Kurosawa alumna, appears in the background - but apart from being a comfortingly familiar face, he doesn't have much to do at all.

We should note, however, that while the filmed is filled with sweeping shots of beautiful landscapes, and often the geometry in the scenes is admirable, there was a certain emotionally cold quality. At least, we had difficulty at times following all the historical twists and turns - no doubt this would have been an easier film to follow for someone who had some background knowledge. Similarly, the non-relationship between Kansuke and Princess Yu leaves a lot to be desired. "For the love of God, just say it!" we often cried, but to no avail. Also, while we've often enjoyed the music in such similar samurai swashbucklers as Rashomon or Ran, the music here seemed to drift between emotional cues.

Anyway, it's all lovely if you love Toshiro, which we do. Also, the sheer awesomeness of the setting and costumes is great fun - one of the few films which succeeds to bring out an independent universe, so that we could believe that there is much more that we are not seeing.

Clip - Samurai Banners
Uploaded by AmberCeca

An excellent scene: the assassination of the ruler of Suwa. The best moment is in the end, when the assassin kneels before the ruler of Suwa and declares, "Sir, I have been ordered to kill you."