Movies: Igor, Chameli
Oct. 4th, 2009 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaWe watched Igor a week or so ago, actually; I'm just behind on posting. Loved it. Both TODS and I have a thing for Frankenstein and have seen a lot of variations - this one was playful and entertaining, with a delightfully gruesome sense of humor. Got it from Netflix.
Chameli was a Bollywood flick we got free from Jaman. Shorter than most (less than two hours) and very serious, although I think there were some scenes that would be very funny to a more knowledgeable audience. The plot is very simple; a businessman stranded in the rain is drawn into the dark world of a fascinating prostitute. Very interesting, lots of layers. The weather echoed the events in the movie: a dark night and steady downpour for most of it, then thunder and lightning when things got exciting with a particularly deafening thunderbolt when the police commissioner was pulling strings (almost godlike), finally daybreak and no more rain at the end, where the characters find some hope. There is an emphasis on how the businessman's world is so entirely different from Chameli's; yet, the way he gets help from the police station is through a network of threats and bribes tied in with the police commissioner, who helps Chameli's pimp exactly the same way. There are two stories we don't know at the beginning of the movie: how Aman's wife died, and how Chameli became a prostitute; we gradually get the answers to both questions as the movie unfolds. (No, they're not related; the screenplay is not by Dickens!) They managed to work in three song-and-dance numbers. The ending is pleasantly ambiguous.
Chameli was a Bollywood flick we got free from Jaman. Shorter than most (less than two hours) and very serious, although I think there were some scenes that would be very funny to a more knowledgeable audience. The plot is very simple; a businessman stranded in the rain is drawn into the dark world of a fascinating prostitute. Very interesting, lots of layers. The weather echoed the events in the movie: a dark night and steady downpour for most of it, then thunder and lightning when things got exciting with a particularly deafening thunderbolt when the police commissioner was pulling strings (almost godlike), finally daybreak and no more rain at the end, where the characters find some hope. There is an emphasis on how the businessman's world is so entirely different from Chameli's; yet, the way he gets help from the police station is through a network of threats and bribes tied in with the police commissioner, who helps Chameli's pimp exactly the same way. There are two stories we don't know at the beginning of the movie: how Aman's wife died, and how Chameli became a prostitute; we gradually get the answers to both questions as the movie unfolds. (No, they're not related; the screenplay is not by Dickens!) They managed to work in three song-and-dance numbers. The ending is pleasantly ambiguous.
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Date: 2009-10-04 05:08 pm (UTC)I think my two favorite films based on the mythos are The Bride (almost fairy-tale-like) and Gothic (which has a flavor of surreal horror that reminds me of Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard).
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Date: 2009-10-15 05:13 pm (UTC)I have a tape on which I collected a bunch of references to the mythos - don't have that Dollhouse one, though! I think my favorite is either the movie the family watches in an episode of Dinosaurs (which is interrupted because Fran says it's too scary for Baby), or the Wild Wild West episode in which Ida Lupino is the Dr. Frankenstein character and the monster is an exact duplicate of Jim West. Of course, you can tell the difference because the monster is very wooden and expressionless, while Jim West ... um, actually, the difference is very hard to tell!
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Date: 2009-10-05 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 05:14 pm (UTC)