raavanan . 5 cm per second . rebuild of evangelion 1.0 . raiders of the lost ark . i am legend

it goes to show how much difference an actor makes to a film. a shot by shot clone of 'raavan' but such a massive difference. while abhishek desperately scowls away and his snarls appear more comic than menacing, vikram is the real deal. even the chemistry with aishwarya works so much better and the film is not so much of a downer. still no masterpiece but with flourishes of incredible beauty. the rain drenched mountains and a delicate heroine up to her knees in mud; a villain who might have had more nuances had he not been saddled with those silly manic sounds and a hero who is anything but pure; in a dance ballet of sorts. she falls in slow motion from a branch that protected her fall over and over again.

if 'voices from a distant star' was about unbridgeable distances in the cosmos the triad of related films '5 cm per second' makes those distances those within the everyday. as he waits alone in a train compartment stranded in a blizzard the wheezing, creaking sounds of the tracks and the buzz of the electric bulb keep him company in his impatience. in the second story a schoolgirl crush on a distant classmate in the company of the ocean surrounding the island and in the third the city that does not allow an enounter between neighbours.

unlike '5cm' which attempts much more than a conventional anime film, 'rebuild of evangelion' plays like a long episode of an animax serial. the first of 4 films i read. in this one tokyo 3 is a massive machine that rises and collapses from the ground at the flick of a button. from a city with supermarkets and schools it turns within minutes into a fighting machine against the 'angels' who have taken over the earth and are intent on wiping out humanity.

in 'i am legend' the 'angels' are human beings turned into some kind of nightmarish nocturnal creatures when a cure for cancer goes wrong. will smith is the lone survivor in new york city searching for a cure in 'ground zero'. spectacularly conceived emptiness of streets inhabited only by animals escaping from the zoo. in the end, all of humanities hopes rest on a vial in a commune of humans in vermont. suburbia is salvation.

nowadays with the special effects machinery completely swallowing up a hollywood blockbuster film to see 'raiders of a lost ark' again was to remember that there were once characters and plots that were funny and entertaining and did not always come out of a box. although these characters did end up being boxed later.