two movies – two books / alexander, a civil action, absolute friends, never let me go

i agree completely with mukul, i think. if a movie sucks then everything about it sucks. and if you like a movie you tend to forgive lots of it. there was nothing forgivable about ‘alexander’. not the long winded pompous narrative, the fake accented english that everyone spoke, the snake woman angelina jolie who pouted and gazed slyly and/or seductively at the camera, or colin farrells pathetic insipid alexander, or the boring love stories, the hetero and the homo and the overdone set pieces or the battle sequences where everything turns mtv editing and green turns red and red turns yellow. the star cast all walks around like they are trying to be part of something very profound. if it wasn’t so tedious it might have been fun as camp. why did baz luhrmann not finish his version before oliver stones- it would have been so much more fun.

‘a civil action’ was a civilized (read - ordinary) courtroom drama where john travolta tries to do a erin brokovich. pollutants are in the water near a small town from a local leather factory and a lot of kids are dead. john fights the case for the grieving mothers. naturally its not only about the case but also about how the case transforms the man. in this case money grabbing ambulance chaser becomes environmentalist do-gooder a la jerry maguire. so then. yawn.

i am a fan of the john le carre hero- the englishman who gives everything up for love and the idea of the nation. in ‘absolute friends’ a vagabond double agent of the cold war era who is beginning to reconstruct his life gets pulled into a complex trap of international terrorism and counter terrorism rhetoric when his old friend- the only man he trusts, reappears at this doorstep. soon he is trapped, as in so many of his books, in between the personal and the idea of a cause as the book viciously dismantles the charades of the ‘war against terror’ where faith and love are sacrificed for money and power. and as usual fantastically written. total thriller.

the new kazoo ishiguro ‘never let me go’ is a strange chilling book. the trick is that he first makes us empathize with a girl who seems to be innocuously reminiscing about her time in an english public school and about her two close friends. its all very harmless and beautiful until soon we realize that there is something odd going on under the surface. the students of the school are being bred and trained for a very specific purpose. they are to be donors when they grow up. they are being farmed as clones to donate body parts for humans. its science fiction at its most human as we see the entire story through the inside of this strange upside down world- where the normal is the outside- and is completely scary.