Dogma

Being an Alan Rickman fanboi* has its advantages. The man has a talent for picking good things to act in, so I've been going through some rather lovely movies.

Dogma is not lovely (Snow Cake is lovely), it is hysterical. IMDB summarises it adequately- "An abortion clinic worker with a special heritage is called upon to save the existence of humanity from being negated by two renegade angels trying to exploit a loophole and re-enter Heaven".

This could have gone wrong in so many ways- employment of slapstick, cheap jokes, tired and/or vicious humour directed at religion, the godly system et al. It manages to be, however, an extremely endearing comedy (NOT like American mainstream comedy-which I find extremely trying on the senses, my intellect AND my patience) which manages  to poke fun at a lot of Serious Things with true good humour.

Additional bonus: God is a woman and She plays hookey from Heaven to play skee ball. 

Oh, and Metatron (the character played by Rickman) is priceless. Sample a few verbalisations:

• Metatron: You people. If there isn't a movie about it, it's not worth knowing, is it?  
• Metatron: Tell a person that you're the Metatron and they stare at you blankly. Mention something out of a Charlton Heston movie and suddenly everybody is a theology scholar. 
• 
  Bethany: Were they sent to Hell?
  Metatron: Worse. Wisconsin. For the entire span of human history.  

It sounds funnier in Alan Rickman's voice...

 

*As I've mentioned before, 'fangirl' simply does not have the same ring to it.

Joseph Stiglitz in Kolkata

The man's in town. And he's speaking on the Occupy Wall Street Movement on Saturday, the 14th of January at Salt Lake.

Closet Land: a first impression

Life’s little coincidences are delish, aren’t they? Here I was, on seemingly two extremely different trips, fanboi-ing on Alan Rickman on one end and starting Discipline and Punish (today) with Partha Chatterjee on the other. Who knew the next Rickman movie on my downloaded list would be Closet Land? Actually I knew that, but what would I have put the odds at of finding Closet Land screaming of young film student, thinking young film student, going angsty with Foucault? None. I mean, you have to admit: the timing is cute. 

I have NO idea if Radha Bharadwaj, the director of Closet Land (Indian origin reflecting in occasional table use in the background score. Predictable, Ms. Bharadwaj, but what can you do if the table just happens to sound nice, eh?) was fresh out of film school when she made this film because that’s an impression that stayed with me throughout- the conscious stage-play effect, the melodrama, the exaggerated attempts at subtlety. Felt kind of forced, BUT the acting is outstanding. Alan Rickman, duh. Madeleine Stowe could have made a complete hash of the character she was playing by overdoing the already overdone drama (I’m not saying that’s a problem universally: that’s just my problem. I dig understated, not overstated) but she was pretty brilliant.

Discipline and punish. Government. “You can break my body but you cannot break my mind”. Escape into fiction provides both resistance and agency to the subject, and escape into fiction threatens the state. Art, power, resistance. Was that your triad, Ms. Bharadwaj? Is the artist your way out of Foucault’s powerpowerpower? Torture doesn’t discipline, it produces the prisoner who says no and thereby breaks the exerciser of power? Is art the only threatening thing with the power to challenge, to resist and to be an alternative? Or did you mean imagination? 

This is a film that takes itself too seriously, in my oh-so-humble opinion. Kind of like of like a few productions typical to the English Dramatics Society at my alma mater (does that term only apply for school?), LSR. Win a fair few prizes, the aantel crowd raves about its intellectualism and then we all go parteyh.

Watch Closet Land if you’re a fan of Alan Rickman. You won’t be disappointed, he is EXCELLENT as the sadistic interrogator. (At one point he plays three people simultaneously. The man is a genius. Madeliene Stowe is pretty awesome too. Whoever did the casting did a perfect job, aye.) As for the message, ah, the handling could have been less heavy handed. And I don’t mean the torture sequences.

Post-script: This is what Radha Bharadwaj has to say about her film. (I was right about the fresh out of film school bit, it turns out...)