—J J Siddharthan and V Vamsi Viraj
JJ: These are the list of the best movies I have seen, not in any particular order.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
A landmark achievement in film-making. It is truly a comic book movie. Edgar Wright did something like this in ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ by making it look like a video game. With Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, the directors (who also made the wonderful ‘The Lego Movie’ and ’21 Jump Street’) have given a transcendental movie watching experience.
Pariyerum Perumal
The movie that is super close to home. Helped me gain a new perspective on how to approach caste-related issues. Extremely painful to watch. And also IMO has the best Tamil album/soundtrack of the year.
Vada Chennai
Saw this in Paris with a Tamil crowd and a good spread of French people. Interesting watch. I heard the movie was censored here in Chennai; the uncensored version that I saw truly added to the gravitas of the storytelling Vetrimaran is an expert in. Also one of the few modern day Tamil movies that one can call is truly epic in its scope of storytelling.
Mission Impossible – Fallout
The best action movie of the year. I was fortunate enough to watch most of this year’s big/tentpole movies in IMAX. This movie comes really close to standing toe-to-toe with Mad Max: Fury Road. Really, really close.
Black Panther
I felt something really wonderful when I saw this one. I don’t know how to describe it, and when I left the theater I felt provoked, empowered, and good. Very few blockbuster movies were able to do that to me, that is to provide wholesale fun/entertainment while also waking up something deep inside you.
Annihilation
Annihilation is a fable about man’s abuse of nature that starts as a mind-bending sci-fi that switches genres and becomes a psychological thriller by the end. The ensemble cast led by the ever-charming Natalie Portman was perfect. Also, this is one of those rare films you cannot spoil for anyone even if you try.
A Quiet Place
Another truly one of a kind experience. Whoever said that movies are 60% sound and 40% visuals couldn’t be more right. And it is still a mystery to me as to why Emily Blunt still hasn’t won an Oscar.
Vamsi: I don’t actually remember watching that many movies in 2018. It seems like a blur although a lot happened. I have grown extremely selective. I don’t want to shut myself out of movies completely and so sometimes I feel like I am doing it as an obligation. To not lose touch with an art form that I have enjoyed all these years. I do enjoy them when I am actually watching but to make the decision to watch them has become fraught with dilemmas about time, mental effort, and dedication to the art form. Rather than the best movies, I would say these have been the most memorable movies I have seen last year. Alongside the disappointments. They stayed with me for quite some time, the characters, their motives, their actions.
Jump Street 21 and 22
Such hilarious stuff! The chemistry between the lead pair is damn good. I used to watch the funny bits on youtube and one day downloaded the movies. So much fun in how they take tropes of buddy movies and show how they can still be hilarious.
Brawl in Cell Block 99
Visceral as fuck. You really believe that the protagonist will go to those lengths. Vince Vaughn is so bloody good. The colors are mostly drab and grey. They give a real feel of the prisons, of the Hero facing huge odds but only by the end do you realise nothing could have stopped him. Every character is believable in the movie’s universe.
C/O Kancharapalem
Heart-breaking and still heart-warming. One of the leads Raju still flits in and out of my head sometimes. He’s so down-to-earth, so humble, and has the best kind of outlook on life. A humanist. Your heart really goes out to him. You can’t forget the kind of experiences that made him. There surely hasn’t been a more grounded protagonist in all the movies I have seen in years. The movie is a masterclass in how ambitious you can be with next to nothing. It really evokes the small town settings where life just rolls along, giving you memorable stories when you care to go beyond its placid veneer.
Aravinda Sametha
While watching the movie itself, I didn’t feel much. It has rousing scenes and rousing dialogues but overall it didn’t seem to cohere that well. I guess that’s a given for masala movies. Not every masala movie has the emotional and narrative integrity of Baahubali. But as it reaches conclusion, you marvel at what it has done. After the initial 5 minutes, not a single goon is killed by the Hero (except for the antagonist). There’s no big climactic fight. The Heroine or his Grandma teach the Hero at crucial junctions of the story. He actually evolves. The movie ends with the Hero verbally repudiating the kind of toxic masculinity that his uncle Balakrishna is known for. I was left clapping profusely by the end of his dialog.
Pariyerum Perumal
It triumphs when you are made to feel for the Hero’s tormentor also. The tormentor breaks down and expresses his fears that they might lose the Heroine. In his own moral universe, he’s right and he truly believes that. And that is unsettling and sad at the same time. While C/O Kancharapalem lays out the small town in all its lazy charm, PP does the same for an urban setting in showing its violent side. I think PP could very well be seen as an urbane sequel to Kancharapalem. What happens when communities and castes come to occupy the same social spaces in an urban setting? As opposed to a semi-rural setting where you could still maintain your distance from other castes..
Infinity War
When you contemplate after watching it the first time and think of its world-building, you are just in awe. There are all these powerful characters with their motivations and all the action scenes that never let up. It fully succeeds in all that it sets out to do. Like one reviewer said, there’s so much MOVIE in this movie. All the strands and action scenes and other worlds. You get the vast expanse of space as also the congested scenes of a metro. It’s exhilarating. And I still shout out the best dialog-cum-entry sometimes – “BRING ME THANOS!”
Goodhachari
A little gem. There are all the tropes and yet the movie continues to surprise you with its twists and turns. Great music, protagonists who are sure of themselves. And the movie doesn’t take the audience for granted. It gives you a high in the way it punches above its weight.
Vada Chennai
Like Baradwaj Rangan says and I fully agree, parts greater than the sum. The theme music still rings in my head sometimes and some of the dialogs too (“you think I am a prostitute???”). The movie probably makes for much better viewing once you contemplate and think of how it falls back on itself and begins again at places and themes where it ended. This has actually triggered a multiverse in my head where you shoot a movie focusing on a class, like our insti class and its 5 years. But after this, you also make movies focusing on the after and before lives of some of the characters. And show how they make the same/different decisions they are going to make (or have made) in insti. How some non-starter love stories in insti bloomed afterwards (like yours and Frauke’s). How some friendships became stronger (mine & Mukesh) or weaker (too many examples). How some things remained the same while some continue changing, like us coming back to old flames in every conversation that goes long enough. The possibilities are exciting and endless.
Vada Chennai was like this epic tale you’d love to hear and want to keep going and going. You want to know how its fascinating characters evolve and rise and fall. But Pariyerum Perumal is horror. Makes you real uncomfortable and you want it to end. There’s a sense of fear and despair in the air and I was left shuddering about when the next stab of violence would befall these characters. There’s no rise for these characters, just little flickers of hope that you’re afraid might be brutally extinguished anytime.
I was just thinking up this arc where Vada Chennai and Pariyerum Perumal are set in the same universe. Anbu would be recruiting Pari’s dad’s troupe for some big event in his area, gets to meet Pari thus, kills anyone coming after Pari who comes to Chennai after running away with Jo, then Pari helps him legally fight the system trying to gentrify that area. At some point Pari goes back since he studied law for his people. See these stories Telugus will make. Full on hope and wish fulfillment only.
KGF
Are Telugu and Tamil movies even trying? That’s what I thought watching this movie. So much bombast, so much machismo, so many mass moments, and a climax that is so much wow that it becomes mythical. The final few moments become so badass that they’re nothing short of the old tales of how demigods emerge. And it’s got baddies like in a game where you encounter bigger and bigger bosses till you reach the end boss. Rajamouli would have been proud. It all rides on Yash and he delivers, faltering only during the gratuitous romance bits. You just can’t have him doing romance, it’s almost blasphemous. I saw it in Kannada and didn’t get most of the dialogs but it still held my attention.
Aquaman
Fun. Lots of fun. There’s enough depth and enough mass moments that you forgive the lack of emotion. There’s great world-building and the movie really succeeds in pulling off multiple genres and linking all the strands. It’s like someone said, when you’re having this much fun, would you really care about emotions? All the set-pieces just keep getting bigger. And the origins of Black Manta are very well-done.
Maanagaram
I must have seen the final scene quite a few times. You just end up with a feeling of having seen something brilliant where the City becomes a character in itself. Best kind of thriller. Never lets up. Good Time is another one-night movie that you might want to check out.
Nocturnal Animals
I have come to dislike this movie but it stayed with me. Still flits in and out of my consciousness now and then. Why did the characters have to be like that? Why couldn’t the Hero fight back? Why did it have to be so violent and so sad? A second viewing might clear things up but I don’t have the courage to watch it a second time. It’s a Novel within a Story and I am not sure if the Novel was deliberately made like that to mimic the Story. It came from a deeply personal space and the Hero seems to have lost his old self in writing that Novel.
I am not your Negro
Saw it a third time this July with S and it doesn’t lose any of its poignancy or narrative power. I should watch it over and over till I remember all his insights. That you care so much about Blacks and their icons (Malcolm X and Martin Luther Jr.) and that you are left with a sense of awe at a man who’s hypnotic and still so human and humane, that’s where the movie triumphs. James Baldwin is the ghost that never lets America rest in peace. He ends with a dialog, ‘The story of the Negro in America is the story of America.’ Well, the story of Baldwin in America is the story of a writer against power. Power might win now but the writer speaks to eternity.
The Lunchbox
The initial few scenes play out like a seamless documentary on the dabbawallas. As the movie progresses, the invisible aunty keeps advising the heroine about this kind of spice or that amount of chilly to add, and you get this big urge to go whale on some Marathi food. This is a movie that makes you fall in love with the food and the characters. Nimrat Kaur, Irfan Khan, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui turn out superb performances. You are there with them, you are living their joys and pains and struggles. They pull you in to their little worlds within the wide expanse of Bombay and it all feels so authentic, so slice-of-life. There’s one scene where Khan just dominates Siddiqui (like the one where Matthew McConnaughey dominates Di Caprio in Wolf of Wall Street). Siddiqui is left jaw-dropped by the end of the scene, so was I. Maybe if there were an Indian remake of that classic romance In the Mood for Love, these three characters – the woman, the man, the man’s friend – would surely live up to the original. And this remake would be better because everything becomes more awesome when it has yummy Marathi food dammit.
Humble Politician Nograj
Again a case of parts greater than the sum. Every moment that Nograj is on screen, you just can’t stop smiling. The movie slacks at times and is not funny enough but his character stays with you and you wish he pushed the envelope further. But a worthy effort and I hope there’s a sequel!
Black Panther
I saw it twice and realized it’s only a one-time watch. I convinced L to watch which she did the night before she left India. This was a case of expectations becoming too high. I absolutely loved the background songs of the movie’s trailers. They are soo good. I still hum them sometimes out of the blue. And they skewed my expectations of the movie. I was subconsciously expecting some kind of a backlash, some subaltern rebellion. This was fulfilled by Killmonger but he didn’t have enough screen time nor did he have enough fun messing around. I kept waiting for more and more but the movie disappointed with a final act that was not big enough, not explosive enough.
You know how it could have become better? Winter Soldier. The final fight would have been a lot cooler if Killmonger had activated Winter Soldier. Imagine Panther landing punch after punch and almost defeating Killmonger except Killmonger keeps saying one Russian word after another every time he takes a punch. When he’s down and almost out, he takes one big gasp of air and shouts the final word and Boom! Enter Winter Soldier. This scene becomes a lot more heavy and tragic and awesome if the roles are reversed, if Black Panther is the one who shouts out for the Soldier. It can easily find parallels with Krishna urging Arjuna to kill Karna.
2.0: Why? Like why? This is a great case to show VFX simply doesn’t matter. You were dissing Baahubali VFX but you seem to have missed the point. For Rajamouli, the story and the narrative were important and if the VFX was good enough (as opposed to being world-class that you want it to be), that’s perfect for him and the audience. He will not let form overwhelm the substance. Shankar lets the form overwhelm and become the only thing that matters. He spent two years for VFX. If he had spent a fraction of that on story and characters, the movie wouldn’t have been such a disaster in South India.
Leviathan: It’s this Russian movie that was critically acclaimed. It’s actually good. You will like it. It talks of the fight of little people against big people who have the power of state behind them. It shows the toll it takes on little people and how Power can crush them completely, all in the name of God. It leaves out no hope, no redemption. But I got bored midway, played the movie a little faster. I don’t mind the ending or the lack of hope but I just didn’t get into it.
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