When I read this week that Sidney Lumet died, I was saddened because it never occurred to me that he would have to stop making movies on one dull day.

The first Lumet’s movie that I watched was 12 Angry Men (1957). Instant fanhood. I watched it several times. The least I enjoyed it was when it was screened in the IC&SR auditorium after which people discussed it, then the moderator asked the audience to write down on a piece of paper the one thing they took away from the movie, then the audience wrote, then the pieces of paper were all collected, and then the audience left. Nothing ruins a movie like a crowd discussing it and a ring master asking the crowd to write the one thing they took away from it. It might be amusing to read how various people might have prioritized their thoughts and managed to throw away everything else while clinging on to the one thought that would make them look most unique and wise.

Then I watched the prophetic Network (1976). If you know of a better movie made about the television media, I want to know about it. Today Glenn Beck does a poor imitation of Howard Beale. I am yet to see a more cosmic and ferocious monologue than Ned Beatty’s, the chubby face of God. I am glad to see the movie enter the IMDB Top 250, and now rise up to the Top 200, glad that it has reached far more people than it did around the time I had first watched it. (1976-77 was a great and infamous year when All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Rocky.)

Then I watched Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Agatha Christie’s favorite film adaptation among her novels. It was possibly the most visually striking movie Lumet made (but how would I know! I watched 9 of over 70.), and it didn’t make a big impression on me visually, either because the print I had watched wasn’t good enough or because he just couldn’t make a movie where anything other than the story can be overt. But the movie was nostalgic and exotic about a time and a place that I know nothing about. It gave me a good idea of Poirot. Most of all it had a remarkable performance by Ingrid Bergman almost entirely during a single five-minutes-long no-cuts scene, the more interesting part of which is that Lumet kept the camera on her face throughout, as if directing our and the Academy’s attention.

Around this time I chanced upon the filmography of Sidney Lumet and found one of the most prolific and diverse repertoires. I took Roger Ebert’s advice when he wrote, “If you care to read only one book about the steps in the making of a film, make it Making Movies.” I hardly learnt anything from the book, but it gave me an appreciation of the infinite things that go into making movies, and taught me that I knew nada. The book introduced me to a warm non-auteur hard-working director who worked on making movies as if it was his daily job. He was serious about making movies, about making the best possible ones given various limitations, while being considerate with the producers and the cast and the crew. (Unlike the legends of cruelty about Kubrick and Hitchcock’s styles of filmmaking, Lumet sides with the softness in Eastwood’s approach.)

Sidney Lumet was often considered as lacking a visual style, and he likely took it as a compliment. He didn’t consider technical details unimportant, but seemed meticulous, even obsessed, about they being not just supportive but also invisible in letting the story to be conveyed in such a way that the audience isn’t drawn to any particular aspect of the filmmaking itself. It was clear when I watched the story of redemption, The Verdict (1982). The movie has the least dramatic courtroom closing I know of, even when compared to the famous scene in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962), which according to me is passionate though not dramatic. In the director’s commentary of The Verdict‘s DVD, Lumet spoke about David Mamet’s writing, Paul Newman’s acting, the numerous casting and lighting and coloring choices made, and many other things. I found his commentary, like his movies and book, thoughtful and informative about the themes of the works as well as the nitty-gritties of filmmaking.

Then I watched the rowdy Dog Day Afternoon (1975). I had watched it in several parts over several sittings before a recent full-length viewing. People quote, “Attica! Attica! Attica!”, which is unknown to me. Wyoming, anyone? Given the increasing debate about alternate sexuality in Indian society, I welcome its re-release or screening in a film festival. Apart from its rich themes and characters, its plot and narration are gripping enough for most people who watch movies. For some reason I didn’t love the much-acclaimed Serpico (1973). May be it was the hairdo, or the dog, or the heroine, or simply that Serpico wasn’t an easy character to connect with. Nevertheless, watching this and the previous movie were, to me, a new revelation of Al Pacino’s acting prowess.

Then I watched The Deadly Affair (1966), the movie I least liked among all Lumet’s movies, despite the famous novel and the stellar cast. May be the secret agent stuff has lost its charm on me. Had there been a DVD commentary, things might have been different.

Then I watched the nail-biting Fail-Safe (1964). It was remade recently and to me it seems very suitable for theatre production. It is a well-balanced debate on war and the tragic conscious choices of destruction that accompany it. It was understandably overshadowed by its counterpart. The satire of the movie was provided by the forced disclaimer about how the military makes truly fail-safe mechanisms that absolutely preclude the events of the story from ever happening. Hypocrisy, stupidity, or does it matter?

Then I watched The Anderson Tapes (1971). It gives an idea of what Lumet may have made of a script like Ocean’s Eleven‘s. While it is about a grand burglary by a hand-picked gang, it’s neither cool, nor smooth. Apart from what is considered as one of the earliest takes on the absurd intrusion of electronic surveillance, it also came across as the full-length first draft of Dog Day Afternoon.

All his movies that I watched are social commentaries on the ambiguity of guilt, the absurdity of consumerism and TV ratings, the validity of victims sentencing the perpetrator, the settlement of court cases on external reasons, the celebrity of crime, the sanctimony of watchdogs, the blurring of friends of enemies and enemies of friends, the logic of war, the notorious choice between security and privacy. His leitmotif was conscience, as the NY Times obituary suggests. His movies are filled with characters with personal moralities. Speaking of which, characters in Lumet’s movies often are themselves the vehicles carrying elements of surprise, either by peeling their layers one at a time throughout the narration (never a back story) or by having them act in a way that surprises themselves. When I think back at many of these movies, I notice that he was prone to downplaying even the most outrageous and dramatic elements in them, while accompanying them with a wryness.

7th July, 2011: I’m not sure why I felt compelled to not post this back then.

Motherhood became the common theme of the movies I watched in the 9th Pune International Film Festival. Among the 15 movies were my first Australian, first Ecuadorian, first Danish and first Russian (talkie) movies. The absence of subtitles for the English movies was refreshing. Overall the movies were better than the previous year’s, both in terms of scripts and production values.

The festival organizers have once again failed to acknowledge IMDB and Wikipedia for sourcing numerous plot synopses and bios (Retrospective) in the official catalogue, though I’m glad they acknowledged IMDB for the newsletter trivia sections. Ironically, a workshop on Copyrights was held as part of the festival this time. I was also disappointed by the selection of several popular Indian movies that TV channels screen from time to time: Anbe Sivam, Bandit Queen, Caravan, Chashme Buddoor, Dasavatharam, Jodhaa Akbar, Mughal-e-Azam, Prahaar, Raavanan, Saagara Sangamam, Taal. Jodhaa Akbar and Taal especially hurt because of the delays they caused to a couple of movies I and a hundred others were waiting to watch. The magic of international film festivals is to discover movies that people most likely have not already watched.

The Tree: Happy family of father, mother, three sons and one daughter. Father dies. The usual conflict of the grieving members struggling with their lives and the family falling apart was let go. Instead here is a loosely functional family, the members more distant from one another due to their different ways of adapting to the tragedy, where the mother (who had never worked before) and the elder son (still in high school) gradually become more responsible and are keener about moving on. The movie allows them to be more than mourners. They are all sad, they all miss the father very much, but they try to live with it, together. The young daughter poses most problems with her vehement belief that the huge tree beside their home, which is on the verge of uprooting their house, is holding the father’s soul. The tree is symbolic. They won’t forget the tree, but they cannot continue living with the tree for their own sake.

My Time Will Come: The movie centers around a government hospital, largely its morgue. Many people are impacted by the several murders and other crimes that take place, most of them in a single day. None of the crimes are investigated beyond the filing of an autopsy report, nor is there an iota of outrage. The farthest that one crime, a rape-murder, gets investigated is when the coroner visits the crime scene out of curiosity. The people simply hope, pray, accept, attempt to forget, and get on with their lives. At the wisest of moments they comment on the government, the police, the society, and their own apathy. All this while seeming entertaining. The movie is a bleak portrait of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, a portrait that reflects a scary image of urban India.

Puzzle: Happy family of hard-working husband and equally hard-working housewife, and their two grown-up sons. The housewife is finally bored with the daily chores, anxious about the generation gap, and discovers puzzle mania. She steals time whenever possible, while hiding it from the husband because he can’t understand the new fascination and is even insecure about it (he suddenly gifts her a cell phone, a thread that’s never carried forward). Why does she like these puzzles? Perhaps for the first time in many years she is doing something entirely for herself, without the judgment of people who count. The abuse of close-ups, odd camera angles, unnecessary background score (while playing puzzles), and one cliché were the disappointments. The smiles and laughs were created through many many subtle observations of familial relations. Last year’s Argentinian movie Empty Nest dealt with similar themes in a more cheerful and less memorable manner. Both the Argentinian families are strikingly similar to the Indian families that I’ve known. Indian and Argentinian mentalities resonate well, and that may be the reason why Puzzle’s director Natalie Smirnoff bagged the “Special Jury Award”.

R: Two new prisoners arrive in a correctional facility filled with hardened criminals, and both their names begin with R. That’s the only relation to the title. The movie was made because someone thought they could, and not because they thought they had to. The catalogue called it an “anthropological study” and it may well have been a program in the Discovery channel, the creatures of which I could hardly empathize with though they occasionally are interesting. It was the most tiring of PIFF 2011. Like many others I watched this because another movie I had been planning to was suddenly cancelled to make way for Taal, presumably because it was the only convenient time for Subhash Ghai to attend.

A Fugitive from the Past: The movie could have been inspired by Rashômon and High and Low, and possibly a few other Kurosawa movies. Three lowlifes set a factory afire and run away with a lot of money, while the surrounding world tries to weather a storm. Only one survives, escapes into the society along with the money, and manages to rise in it over fifteen years. A geisha falls in unrequited love with him after a one-night stand, and changes her life and lifestyle in search and protection of him. A good old-fashioned homicide detective remains hot at heels, all the years. The movie has a neat structure, specific points of view, and a labyrinthine screenplay (not exactly) that touches upon numerous aspects of society in an epic manner. It must have been very good. Unfortunately, inexplicably, a good 30 minutes from the movie were cut, and we ascribe it to the preceding Taal and Subhash Ghai for taking up far more time than was allotted them.

Mamas and Papas: Some don’t want children. Some lose children and can never get over them. Some can’t bring up children and want to give them up. Some try hard but can’t have children. They all have their reasons, and their decisions will change their lives and their spouses’. The movie succeeds in narrating four such loosely-connected stories with warmth and light-heartedness. Strangely, not unrealistically, the stories are about the mothers. They are the ones who have their reasons. They are the ones who make the decisions. Not fathers. The fathers are only peripheral. Perhaps that is how it should be.

The Rowan Waltz: During the second world war there were international borders where fertile crops were seeded with landmines by enemies. Sixteen-year-old girls were given a crash course and burdened with unearthing the mines. It could have been that the men were mostly serving in the war, the boys were expected to be ready for their turn, the women were expected to do other important chores within households and elsewhere, and so it fell on the girls. The movie is set in one such village. When it could have been so much more, it chose to be another mushy romance with beautiful people in beautiful locales. As well-received as it was, especially by my unduly irritating neighbor and her boyfriend, the movie disappointed me with such limited utilization of its potential.

Another Year: It is another year in the lives of a happily old couple that has been married for decades, and a vain ageing woman desperately looking for anyone that is not readily interested in her. The happy ones maintain their happiness and the desperate woman remains unhappy. Whereas the old couple supports each other and anyone who needs help, adjust to their son’s moving on and a sibling’s mourning, the woman regularly tries to change her life by changing something big in her external life to no positive effect. It’s always satisfying to watch Mike Leigh’s actors leading ordinary lives and communicating subtly around the dining table. The desperate woman is not new to us, but the persona created by Lesley Manville is very refreshing. The director succeeds in portraying the apparent myth of a happy marriage, and Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen deserve much of that credit. [Roger Ebert’s Review]

The Trojan Women: Hector’s mother, Hector’s widow, Hector’s sister, all the other devastated women of Troy in the aftermath of war, and the Helen of Troy. I hadn’t watched a single Katherine Hepburn movie, nor a Greek tragedy. (Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy doesn’t count.) Having now watched this Greek tragedy made in English, I merely nod in agreement while reading Roger Ebert’s Review, and hope to watch Elektra some day, and some Hepburn movies this year.

Majority: Most of us watched the Turkish movie because of the number of awards it bagged in recent festivals (including the Mumbai Filmfest). It’s a depressing movie that made many in the audience laugh at themselves. A young man in a well-to-do family managed long ago to suppress his identity, knowing well his successful father has a plan for him already. He is not as passive aggressive as he is passive. He compromises at every point of his life. He is able, good-natured, and not without his own thoughts, but it is easier to be part of the group. He perpetually wears a slight grimace, possibly pissed off with himself most of all, and always holds back his thoughts. He gets a big chance when a “gypsy” girl befriends him, and he tries to fight for keeping her. It is probably too late for him to learn how to fight, but there is a hope that he might do it again in the future. I know people just like him. In the movie again is a mother frustrated with the insensitivity of her husband and now her son, partly blaming herself.

The Poll Diaries: Chris Kraus’ thirteen-year-old Oda Schaefer is precocious, curious, and adventure-seeking. She reminds one of Anne Frank, and she was fortunate to have lived and written till the age of 88. The movie refers to an important chapter in Oda’s life when she visited Poll from Berlin, learnt dark secrets about her father and step-mother, and protected an Estonian poet who became her first love. The story might be fictional. More than the deviant laboratory studies of Oda’s father in his quest to “cure evil”, it shows the artistic and affluent lifestyles of aristocratic families and their close ties across borders even at the verge of war. It’s the foot soldiers, strangers to one another, who kill each other in war.

The Sicilian Girl: Rita Atria is a national heroine in Italy who twenty years ago set into motion major Mafia investigations in Sicily. The movie is a biopic of this gritty girl. Since her childhood she had the unusual hobby of documenting Mafia-related incidents in her diary, going as far as surreptitiously taking their photos in the later years. After the early death of her father (a don) and later her brother (a Mafioso), she took her diaries to Paolo Borsellino who became the chief investigator of the case. The movie director admittedly took many liberties with the story, something that I first noticed with the ending. Whereas her suicide (at the age of seventeen) seemed to have resulted from the trauma and fear after the murder of Borsellino, the movie portrayed it as a heroic decision so as to give a greater credence to her testimony. The movie also ignored the thread of Rita’s sister-in-law Piera Aiello whose actions may have inspired Rita to approach the authorities. (Piera Aiello is now serving as the president of the Rita Atria Antimafia association.) After having to wait more than forty minutes (because of the delay caused by Ashutosh Gowariker’s unforgettable masterpiece Jodhaa Akbar) I and my friend had to sit on the steps of the theatre as the movie turned out to be the most crowded of the entire festival. The icing was the appearance of director Marco Amenta after the movie ended. While he spoke about the movie and awaited questions from the audience, many chaotic members of the audience shouted “Lights!” to the theatre boys. The director quipped that lights weren’t necessary, that he was just a director and not an actor, but whoever listens when there is a chance to see. No questions asked. (Last year Finnish director Dome Karukoski appeared in PIFF after the screening of his Forbidden Fruit, the only non-Kaurismaki Finnish that I watched.)

Zeppelin!: The Hindenburg disaster which contributed to the shelving of airships continues to generate speculation. Here a young man seeks to solve the disaster for personal reasons, the disaster that killed his grandfather, and the consequences that culminated in the suicide of his father, and haunts him now. It is a beautifully-made movie, with black-and-white for the grandfather’s timeline, grainy camera footage (Technicolor?) for the father’s timeline, and Kodak Vision (?) for the current timeline. I didn’t find the movie as gripping, partly because Hindenburg disaster is too distant and the familial tragedy too impersonal. The occasional motionless or out-of-sync lip movements seemed intentional and jerky.

Somewhere: Good movies are often plot-driven or character-driven. Somewhere neither has a plot nor is its central character ever driven to do anything, and it’s a wonderful experiment. Hollywood star Johnny Marco is so buried into boredom that he falls asleep while making love to a stranger woman whom he impulsively desired (or deluded himself that he desired). Marco is a most passive of characters. He does nothing, but remains successful because he turns up wherever and whenever his publicist requests him to. Things happen around him if they do at all, much like when the make-up man plasters Johnny’s face and leaves him for a few hours with only the nostrils uncovered. And then we know: Johnny Marco couldn’t be said to be living, but only existing. Existing like his Ferrari. Towards half of the movie a reporter asks him, “Who is Johnny Marco?” Nothing. The movie is deliberately slow with good reason. It meticulously tracks the subtle changes in a character, not the spectrum from a downwardly-spiraling Hollywood star (which Johnny Marco is not) to a redeemed actor restored to his former glory, but a narrow band from a man lost to boredom (early stages of a depression, methinks) to a man who decides to come out of that stage. The changes are subtle and minute, but marked well enough to plot them on a curve. [Roger Ebert’s Review]

Certified Copy: I was looking forward to seeing Juliette Binoche more than anyone or anything else in PIFF 2011. This was to be the last movie. Fitting. In what turned out to be a major disappointment and the biggest irony, the box certified to contain Certified Copy had a different film inside it. I waited for about an hour before walking out, while the volunteers raked through everything they could in an attempt to find the film. The reason I waited till then was to eavesdrop on the adjacent conversation between a Marathi man and a Finnish woman. They were strangers. He spoke like an academic certain of the superiority of Indian diversity and heritage, including their film industries, all the while rubbing his sooty bare foot with his hand. She was eager to absorb whatever she could about this exotic land. I was glad for a chance to witness earnest cultural exchange.

I don’t track the movies I watch as diligently as I track the books I read. It possibly means that I don’t care as much about what I watch, about how I spend that aspect of my time, watching being more passive than reading. That is alarming. IMDB, Bigflix and a scrap book suggest the number in 2010 to be in the whereabouts of 100. Despite the large number, very few of them were thoughtless tripe picked only because they were there. Below are a few memorable ones, and not all are strictly movies.

PIFF 2010: 16 movies. I wrote about three of them. I realized while reviewing old notes that nearly half of them had a rape victim and more than half of them dealt with the abuse of important female character(s). Among those that I haven’t written about I call out the Romanian satire The Happiest Girl in the World. Only few movies were very ordinary and disappointing, but the overall experience was below that of PIFF 2009 for reasons beyond PIFF. What I like the most about PIFF (or any film festival), unlike the regular theatre-going, is the privilege to escape a national anthem, to watch a movie without the intervention of a censor board, and at times be a part of an audience and not just a fun-loving crowd. PIFF 2011 starts today.

Internet Movies: Early in 2010 I took the fancy of watching movies available legally on the Internet. Internet Archive, Openflix and Youtube Movies are good websites for such an endeavor. I watched a few decent movies this way before switching to Bigflix, which turned out be one of the best decisions I made last year.

Ingmar Bergman: I picked Bergman as the auteur to follow in 2010. Including the silence trilogy and Wild Strawberries I watched 7 of his movies, limited there by Bigflix’s collection. It is easy to become fond of his work. I hope to go to a Bergmanfest one day.

Sidney Lumet: Now is a good time to cheer for my favorite director. I became a fan of Lumet after watching 12 Angry Men and Network and then reading Making Movies. In 2010 I watched his Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Verdict. He also gave enlightening commentaries in all these DVDs, something that’s rare with directors. Given his prolific output I have a lot more to look forward to in the coming years.

Historical Significance: I touched upon ancient film history by watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Fritz Lang’s M and Metropolis. I can imagine how excellent those movies must have been in their times. Even today they aren’t boring though we’ve seen many things like those, inspired by those, better than those. I was especially impressed by M, both the movie and the titular character.

Boston Legal: I watched only the first season of this TV series (Bigflix limitations). It is hard to believe that it had to be cancelled. While the common reasons for its popularity are the cranky characters and the outrageous court scenes, I hold it special for showcasing the best portrayal of platonic love.

South Park: Season 14 wasn’t the best. I remain a fan for its ability to remind me of my hypocrisy and push my boundaries of humor.

TED Talks: After Google and Wikipedia, in 2010 TED outranked IMDB among my list of favorite websites. I must have watched more TED Talks than movies in 2010. Many of them twice. Several inspired me, some into action. Few changed the way I think.

Random Recommendations: These are many other movies that I remember vividly from 2010, and am thankful for watching them: Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Martin Scorsese’ Shutter Island, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan. I ended 2010 by rewatching Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a movie that played a very important role in my life. A partial full list is here.

Interval. The director being a big Sergio Leone fan chose to include a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the shocking scene where Frank draws his pistol and slowly takes aim at a child. (The scene that may have inspired a similar scene in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay.) As fun as the homage may be, the particular scene was a bad choice here. It would have made a lot more sense to choose the opening scene at the railway station where three trigger-happy men wait patiently for Harmonica. That particular scene truly captures the pace of The American.

The main reason why Anton Corbijn’s The American is not doing well is that it has unfortunately been mis-marketed as an action thriller. Another reason is that it is not a movie for everybody. I often hear that one has to be in a certain mood to watch some movies, which I often disagree, but had I not been ruminating about solitude recently I wouldn’t have liked The American. After playing Michael Clayton it is easy to imagine why George Clooney may have been drawn to playing Jack the American. The movie is not so much a story as is a character study. It should have retained the novel’s title of A Very Private Gentleman.

Jack is a veteran in the profession of making custom weapons for professional assassins. Naturally his head is filled with doubts about what his dangerous customers, or any strangers for that matter, might be up to. In the opening scene, he is ambushed by Swedish gunmen for a reason that he doesn’t know. Perhaps he had built a weapon that was used to kill the enemies’ leader. As much as it is improbable it is also not impossible for his beautiful companion to be one of the Swedish enemies, so he shoots her in the back of the head.

We see three women in the short period of his life. He suspects all three. Two of them gravely.

As a skillful craftsman he is well-adjusted to a very long life of solitude, as may be best in his profession, but it is occasionally clear that he enjoys certain company. His solitude is at least partly a compromise. He must have trained himself to make his face unreadable. He rarely talks to anybody, never about his feelings, and he doesn’t show them on his face even when alone. Jack is alone on the screen for almost half the duration of the movie, may be more, and George Clooney made it an enjoyable experience for me. It is non-trivial because most of the scenes are not exactly what we consider “action”. But at no point does his mind seem blank. Unreadable sometimes, but never blank. There are moments when it is clear what he may be thinking, and moments when one can only guess. We see a man who is gradually getting tired of his life, who is getting desperate by the doubts eating his insides, who has allowed himself to feel guilt. There may be awards.

I have several complaints about the movie, much unlike what I heard from most of the audience in the theatre last night. Primarily the movie is not long enough. After the interval the second half of the movie seems rushed, abandoning the deliberate pace of the first half. (The righteous CBFC India made it worse by chopping several minutes of a crucial character’s role, presumably because she works as a prostitute in a bordello.) It is also possible that a cruel studio executive, no not the producer George Clooney, might have demanded some quick action before the movie ends. I hope to one day see the director’s cut, though it is unlikely to be much better.

It is only right that the movie is set in Abruzzo. The slow movement originated in Italy. Another irrelevant note that I can’t resist: Violenta Placido is one of the most beautiful names ever, as beautiful as the actress.

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The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

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