tokyo godfathers. sankat city. wall-e . g i joe – imitation of life . the general . kaminey . vantage point .

the bums from tokyo godfathers with a heart of gold with all the homoerotic undercurrents was a new thing to see in an anime film. no high tech / fantasy concept here. just a lost/ stolen baby and the three homeless people trying to find its parents. though i did love both the mumbai/bambai crime caper films the devil-may-care madness of sankat city was terrific fun, while kaminey could not completely shake away the satya hangover. but the locations in both were fabulous- whether that is the steep road in dindoshi where the bags get exchanged or that gorai garbage dump which mirrors the real city in sankat city; or the abandoned railway compartment in ‘kaminey’ and the cul-de-sac within which the final shoot out occurs. in wall the garbage dump takes over the whole planet and human civilization is a capitalist consumer fantasy on a distant spaceship. the entire first half where wall-e dutifully organizes the garbage on the planet into towers made of little cubes is gorgeously imagined. when the love story begins the hollywood formula begins to show. but until then it is lovely. ‘imitation of life’ is shamelessly over the top camp. without any trace of embarrassment and (thankfully) without a sly wink to the camera it takes its world of high melodrama very seriously. the torrid lush tearjerker concerns the relationships between two women and their daughters, while race comes in between one black mother and her daughter who is ashamed of her heritage, the white woman’s daughter falls in love with her mothers suitor. naturally it all ends with a death and mahalia jackson’s soaring voice in a church. g i joe is worth watching only for one fantastic chase sequence on the streets of paris when the joes try to stop the bad people from releasing nanomites that are going to eat the eiffel tower. it is the only place where the hollywood action really kicks in. the rest is standard stuff about a white leading man, his black best friend, some international hotties and lots of blow ups because of evil corporate types. another hollywood action film was ‘vantage point on tv which tries a rashomon like kaleidoscopic shifting points of view of a presidential assassination attempt. the tape rewinds and plays and rewinds and plays again until you cant care really what happens as long as it gets over really fast. neither of these manage the action-comedy of ‘the general’ whose basic story involves nothing more than one long chase sequence; first towards the north and then towards the south. in the end as has now become default some explosions bring the proceedings to an end.