Author: Govindini Murty

Here is the bio.

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: “We’ve All Been Brainwashed”: China’s Dissident Bloggers Speak Out in High Tech, Low Life

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone.]

By Govindini Murty. Even as Chinese dissidents like Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and artist Ai Weiwei suffer physical imprisonment, hundreds of millions of their fellow Chinese citizens are suffering a form of mental imprisonment thanks to their nation’s system of internet censorship. For example, the Chinese government recently blocked on-line searches for words relating to the 23rd anniversary of the June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, censoring the terms “Tiananmen square,” “June 4th,” the number twenty-three, the words “never forget,” and even images of candles. The award-winning documentary High Tech, Low Life, currently screening at film festivals in the U.S., UK, and Australia, profiles two dissident Chinese bloggers who are working to challenge this Orwellian system.

Directed by Stephen Maing, High Tech, Low Life was in part funded by a Kickstarter campaign publicized on The Huffington Post and was an official selection of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. High Tech, Low Life documents the work of 57-year old blogger Zhang Shihe (known as “Tiger Temple”) and 27-year old Zhou Shuguang (known as “Zola”), two of China’s best-known “citizen reporters.” Even as the Chinese government uses internet technology to stifle dissent, these brave bloggers find creative ways to circumvent “The Great Firewall of China” and publish the truth about human rights abuses to the world. Along the way, Tiger and Zola suffer official harassment, familial disapproval, eviction, and arrest.

Blogger Zola describes in the film the vast apparatus of internet censorship that exists in China:

“There are 440 million netizens in China, 40,000 internal police monitor them, and 500,000 websites are blocked in China.” [Despite this,] “if an incident happens anywhere, netizens and citizen journalists will flock to the scene from all over the country. The censors might stop some of us, but they can’t stop all of us.”

Tiger Temple expands on the morally corrosive effect of the government’s censorship: “We’ve all been brainwashed. We’ve been listening to lies for too many years.” Although material prosperity may have improved in China, Tiger argues that life today is as bad as it was under Mao’s dictatorship. As Tiger puts it, the Chinese people are “complacent because they feel powerless.”

Tiger Temple and Zola could not be more different in style. The older, more experienced Tiger is a writer and former publisher living in Beijing who becomes closely involved in his subjects’ lives, bringing them food, money, and legal help. Tiger’s father was a high official in the Communist Party, but the family was persecuted by Mao during the Cultural Revolution in the ’60s. Tiger recalls how he and his family were beaten, evicted from their home, and exiled to the countryside. It was then, as a 13-year old, that Tiger says he started “roaming the country.”

Tiger’s entry into blogging was almost accidental. Returning home one day from viewing an exhibition of Monet paintings in Beijing, he saw a woman being stabbed to death on the street by a man as bystanders watched. Horrified but unable to prevent the murder, Tiger grabbed his camera and documented its aftermath instead. He notes that when the police showed up, they were angrier at him for taking the photos than at the murderer himself, because such scenes would normally be censored from the press. Tiger went on to publish the photos online and caused a sensation, becoming known as China’s first “citizen journalist.” Tiger adds that he calls himself a “citizen” and not a “citizen journalist” because that way the government can’t ban him.

Years later, Tiger makes lengthy journeys on bike through the countryside to report on the lives of the rural poor who have suffered in the rush to urbanization. He is even on occasion tailed by agents of the government. In one trip documented in the film, Tiger bicycles 4000 miles to Er Loa, a village devastated by the illegal flooding of toxic waste by the local government. The floods of waste have caused the farmers’ homes to collapse and have made farming impossible. Villagers tell Tiger that local officials have warned them that if they complain too much they will be arrested. Not only does Tiger take photos and video of the environmental devastation, he also brings the villagers flour and noodles to feed them and tells them he has forwarded their information to a university in Beijing where law students are working to file a legal complaint with the authorities. Tiger interests an NGO in their case, and the farmers are ultimately brought to Beijing to speak at the Civil Society Watch’s Environmental Protection Conference.

The blogger Zola at the Great Wall of China.

Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: “We’ve All Been Brainwashed”: China’s Dissident Bloggers Speak Out in High Tech, Low Life

LFM Reviews While We Were Here

By Govindini Murty. Kat Coiro’s While We Were Here (see a clip above) is the latest in a tradition of stories about travelers whose lives are transformed by Italy. From Goethe’s famous trip to Italy and its echoes in his Wilhelm Meister novels to William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, and Mike Newell’s Enchanted April, Italy has long worked its magic on voyagers to its mythic shores.

While We Were Here presents an understated variation on this familiar theme. Jane (Kate Bosworth), a quiet and somewhat melancholy writer, journeys to southern Italy with her husband, the dour Leonard (Iddo Goldberg). Leonard, a viola player, has been invited to perform in a concert in Naples. While Leonard spends his days in rehearsal, Jane wanders the streets of Naples, experiencing life at second-hand. The mediated nature of Jane’s existence is reinforced by the fact that rather than interact with any of the locals, she spends her time listening to tape-recorded conversations of her Grandmother Eves (Claire Bloom) discussing her experiences during WWII. All this is purportedly for a book that Jane is writing, but Grandma Eves’ lively reminiscences about life during the war form a pointed contrast to Jane’s anomie in the peace and plenty of the present. One day Jane makes an impulsive decision to take a ferry to the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples – and there falls into a romance with an American lad named Caleb (Jamie Blackley) living a carefree existence on the island.

Kate Bosworth and Jamie Blackley in "While We Were Here."

While We Were Here is essentially a three-character chamber drama that plays outdoors in the glorious settings of Naples and Ischia. All the character’s problems are of an internal nature. Jane and Leonard have marriage problems, but even as Jane tries to address them, the gloomy Leonard prefers to disappear into the work of his viola rehearsals. Jane wants to write a book about her grandmother’s experiences in WWII, but she’s worried she can’t make the book interesting because of a lack of engagement on her part.

Kate Bosworth as Jane.

As for Caleb, his disruptive influence on Jane and Leonard’s lives is overtly likened to that of Dionysus, with one scene taking place in a grape arbor on Ischia and Caleb himself somewhat resembling Caravaggio’s portrait of the vine-bedecked god. However, even as Caleb pursues Jane, he has no job and no plans for his life. He quotes Vittoria Colonna’s sonnets to Michelangelo as he and Jane tour an Aragonese castle, he takes Jane riding on a scooter and swimming in the ocean, but their relationship doesn’t seem destined for much more than that. Indeed, it seems to be her grandmother’s voice-over about the fun she had with her American and Belgian boyfriends during WWII that spurs Jane on to her affair with Caleb in the first place. Ultimately, Jane makes her own choices, but the person having the most fun with life in the film may just be Claire Bloom’s earthy, albeit unseen, Grandma Eves.

While We Were Here is not only an homage to the great “voyage to Italy” films, but, with its black and white cinematography, also evokes the look of classic Italian Neorealist drama. As Jane wanders through the narrow streets of Spaccanapoli, one would almost expect a young Sophia Loren, in her role as a voluptuous pizza maker in De Sica’s The Gold of Naples, to appear around the corner. And though Kate Bosworth might be the physical opposite of Sophia Loren, her slim blonde beauty and reserved quality do resemble that of such ‘60s actresses as the pixyish Jean Seberg from Godard’s Breathless (even down to the striped sailor top) and the cool, lovely Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s masterpiece of alienation, L’Avventura. Beyond looks though, Bosworth’s strong, sensitive acting forms the emotional core of the film (in particular in one standout scene with Goldberg’s Leonard), and she and Blackley have a number of amusing scenes in which their easy banter make the movie eminently watchable.

Romance in Italy.

Regardless, it’s enough for me that the film is set in Naples and Ischia. Naples is one of my favorite cities, and although I haven’t yet made it to Ischia (I opted for Capri instead on a trip some years ago), it was delightful to see again the streets and sights of old Neapolis. I have many fond memories of wandering the narrow thoroughfares of Spaccanapoli (under which lie ancient Roman streets), down the long Via Toledo, through the 19th century glass and wrought iron Galleria Umberto I, and into the Cafe Gambrinus (den of literati and revolutionaries) for an espresso. Other favorite sights that appear in the film include the Teatro San Carlo, the vast hemispherical Piazza del Plebiscito with its Neoclassical church, and the impressive facade of the Bourbon-era Palazzo Real. The latter in particular has a charming old library surrounded by dusty palm trees that overlook the massive walls of the medieval Castel Nuovo (only in a land as ancient as Italy is a medieval castle described as ‘new’!). Even if the film’s characters don’t seem to revel in their surroundings, we certainly can.

While We Were Here is a pleasant diversion for a sunny summer day – which is hopefully when this film will be released. Screening at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, the film was produced by the same team behind the delightful With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, and was recently picked up for distribution by Arclight Entertainment.

LFM GRADE: B+

June 6th, 2012 at 7:15pm.

LFM Reviews The Giant Mechanical Man @ Tribeca 2012; Available on VOD through June 19th

By Govindini Murty. In the midst of a movie season dominated by special-effects blockbusters, it’s nice to see smaller-scale indie films that celebrate the human within technology. Lee Kirk’s The Giant Mechanical Man, a selection of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival currently available on VOD (video on demand), depicts two sensitive souls looking for meaning within the machinery of the modern city. Set in Detroit, the title also evokes the industrial heritage of the city, with elegant montages that resemble sequences from such classic ‘20s documentaries as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta or Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a City.

The Giant Mechanical Man stars Jenna Fischer as Janice, a shy and insecure thirty-something struggling to find purpose in her life. She works as a temp but her lack of focus gets her fired – forcing her to move in with her picture-perfect, blonde, ambitious sister Jill (Malin Akerman) and her dentist husband. Tim (Chris Messina) is also a thirty-something loner adrift in the big city. He spends his days as a performance artist on the streets of Detroit playing a robot-like figure on stilts known as the Giant Mechanical Man.

The opening of the film features a striking, almost avant-garde sequence. Tim dons silver face paint, a silver suit, and stilts, puts on a silver bowler hat and – grabbing a silver umbrella – heads down the streets with a purposeful stride that is an ironic commentary on the businessmen around him going to work. Tim’s Giant Mechanical Man is an exaggerated, postmodern version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the subject of the best-selling 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson about a businessman who struggles to find meaning in his career.

When a local news show asks Tim why he does his act, he explains:

“I thought that it might brighten people’s lives up. … I guess I feel like modern life can be alienating … you’re mindlessly walking through it like a robot and you can feel lost. … Maybe if you see a giant mechanical man wandering down the street towards you, it would help to put it into perspective, you know?”

Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina in "The Giant Mechanical Man."

Janice sees Tim performing on the street and feels a connection with him, recognizing in his mechanical motions her own sense of being just a cog in the machine of the city. Through serendipity, Janice and Tim then both get jobs at the Fillmore Zoo. The zoo serves as yet another metaphor for the entrapment of humans in modern city life, with Tim at one point even comically pretending to be one of the exhibits. Janice and Tim strike up a friendship that turns into romance, but Tim is unable to tell Janice that he is the mechanical man. All this is further complicated by her sister Jill’s efforts to set Janice up with a self-absorbed author of motivational books, played with gusto by Topher Grace.

Woven into the story is Janice and Tim’s love of silent movies. As in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a love of silent movies in Mechanical Man is used to indicate an affinity for the poetic and the romantic. Janice watches Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Buster Keaton’s The General – perhaps drawn to both films because they feature wistful, sensitive characters who resemble herself.

The Giant Mechanical Man is a sweet, feel-good alternative to this summer’s action-heavy movie fare. Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina are both charming in their roles, and the quirky cast of supporting characters deftly play their parts. I especially appreciate the fact that Chris Messina’s Tim is a gentleman, standing up at one point to some misogynistic yuppie characters at a business party. I would have liked to have seen more stylistic experimentation in the film to highlight the theme of mechanization, but director Lee Kirk nonetheless shows in his debut feature a nice touch for genuine emotion and humanistic values.

The movie’s air of romance carried over into real life, as well, with star Jenna Fischer and director Lee Kirk falling in love during the shoot and getting married – a sweet, real world ending to a charming movie tale. The Giant Mechanical Man is currently available from Tribeca Films on video on demand through June 19th.

LFM Grade B+

Posted on May 25th, 2012 at 9:57am.

The Perils of Life in Communist Yugoslavia: LFM Reviews Easter Eggs @ Tribeca 2012

By Govindini Murty. The best films about Communism nowadays are emerging from countries whose citizens have directly experienced Communist rule. One sees this in the wave of films coming out of Eastern Europe as well as in recent Chinese documentaries like High Tech, Low Life that just screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Eastern European filmmakers, perhaps having more distance from life under the Communist boot, tend to take a farcical, absurdist approach when it comes to depicting totalitarian oppression. Croation director Slobodan Karajlovic’s narrative short Easter Eggs, which screened at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, follows in this tradition by showing what happens when Communist intolerance targets a family’s innocent Easter celebration.

Set in 1970s Yugoslavia, Easter Eggs depicts a mother who is determined that her young son and daughter enjoy Easter the way she did as a child – with an egg hunt, special tea, and commemoration of Christian ritual. The only problem is that her husband is a vehement Communist opposed to all signs of Christianity – even when practiced in the privacy of the home. A career-minded army officer, he is convinced that any sign of ideological deviation in his family will be disastrous for his career. As he rants at his wife when she persists in practicing Christianity: “You work against me, you work against the country.” Their child, the unseen narrator of the film, describes him as “an ingrained and incorrigible Communist.”

Looking forward to Easter.

Nonetheless, the mother secretly arranges an Easter celebration for her children when her husband leaves for work, hiding eggs in the living room, setting up a nice tea table, and placing a cross on the sideboard. In one of the funniest moments of the film, the children look at the figure on the cross and ask if it is Tito, the communist dictator of Yugoslavia. The mother answers “It’s not Tito, it’s Jesus.”

Things then take a somewhat melodramatic turn, but Karajlovic keeps a nice balance between comedy and drama in depicting the horrifying reality of life in communist Yugoslavia. Evoking the drab colors and settings of life in the Eastern bloc, while humorously depicting the army officer father’s obsession with his mustache and his demands for heated underpants, Easter Eggs follows in the absurdist style of such favorite films of ours as the Estonian-Finnish documentary Disco and Atomic War. Like Disco, Easter Eggs shows how average citizens through small or symbolic acts of resistance can subvert apparently monolithic communist and totalitarian ideologies. Recommended for anyone interested in celebrating freedom through film.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on May 14th, 2012 at 1:31pm.

A View of Life at the Grassroots: LFM Reviews CatCam @ Tribeca 2012

By Govindini Murty. Cat owners through the ages have pondered the pressing question: where do their furry feline friends go all day? Seth Keal’s charming Tribeca short film CatCam documents the efforts of a German engineer named Juergen Perthold to solve this very question. Juergen lives in South Carolina and adopts – or is rather, adopted by – an insouciant stray tabby cat whom he names Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee disappears for hours and sometimes days on end, and yet mysteriously returns not hungry for food.

Determined to find out where Mr. Lee is going on his adventures, Juergen devises a small camera that dangles from the cat’s collar, and activated by motion, takes periodic photos of what the cat sees. The results are remarkable. The photos reveal that Mr. Lee leads an active life roaming through the neighborhood and into the nearby countryside – encountering a busy network of cat friends (and the odd cat foe) along the way. Juergen posts his cat’s story and photos online – and soon Mr. Lee is an internet sensation.

Neighborhood cat/award-winning photographer Mr. Lee in "CatCam."

Fans write from around the country asking how they can buy a version of Juergen’s camera so they can see what their own cats are up to. International media pick up the story of the auteur cat who takes pictures. A prestigious European photography contest even awards Mr. Lee a prize for his daringly composed, impressionistic photos. This leads to a heated controversy in Europe over whether there is an “intentionality” behind Mr. Lee’s photos – an “artistic eye” that entitles him to be deemed “a photographer.” Ultimately, Mr. Lee is more interested in the shrimp served in his silver prize cup than in the prize itself – showing that despite his celebrity, he still has all four paws firmly planted on the ground.

Definitely recommended and recently the winner of the documentary short jury prize at SXSW, CatCam can be seen at future screenings to be detailed on the film’s website.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on May 14th, 2012 at 1:30pm.

LFM’s Govindini Murty in The Atlantic: Decoding the Influences in Hunger Games, From ‘Spartacus’ to ‘Survivor’

[Editor’s Note: The article below and its accompanying slideshow appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]

A guide to the cultural touchstones alluded to in the new sci-fi smash

By Govindini Murty. The Hunger Games enjoyed the biggest-ever box office opening for a non-sequel film this past weekend, and it’s likely to keep captivating audiences in coming weeks with its edgy action and potent critique of today’s celebrity-worshiping culture.

Decoding the influences on a blockbuster.

The film depicts a totalitarian future in which the all-powerful government of Panem (in what was once the United States) demands an annual “tribute” of two youths from each of its 12 districts to fight to the death in a televised event known as the Hunger Games. Sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) of the dirt-poor District 12 volunteers to take her younger sister Primrose’s place in the Games. But when she reaches the Capitol of Panem, she realizes that in order to succeed, her physical abilities are not enough. She must also create a convincing (if false) public narrative that she and fellow tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are “star-crossed lovers” in order to win the allegiance of the audience and outwit the “gamemakers.” This crafting of her own media narrative eventually turns Katniss into a popular heroine with the power to change the future of Panem itself.

Author Suzanne Collins has said that her inspirations for The Hunger Games came from a variety of sources, including the ancient Greek myth of Theseus, Roman gladiatorial games, contemporary TV, her father’s experiences in the Vietnam War, and news footage of the Iraq War. However, the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games contains a number of other cultural and historical references as well. Here’s a mini-guide to the cinematic, literary, and historical allusions in The Hunger Games.

The Goddess Diana

The Goddess Diana.

An early scene in The Hunger Games depicts Katniss sneaking into the forest to hunt for food. She retrieves her bow and arrows from a tree, and spotting a deer, attempts to shoot it—before her friend Gale interrupts her. The imagery of Katniss with her bow and arrow—central to The Hunger Games—evokes the imagery of Diana, the Roman Goddess of the Hunt, who was frequently associated with deer hunting. In one famous story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when the hunter Actaeon accidentally sees Diana bathing nude in a forest pool, she turns him into a stag and sets his own hounds to chase him down and tear him apart. One can see allusions to these hounds in The Hunger Games when the gamemakers send monstrous dogs into the forest to hunt down Katniss and Peeta. In addition, Diana was a chaste goddess, and Katniss’s reluctance to engage in a romance with Peeta reflects this warrior-woman ethos of independence from men. Early in the film, Katniss even tells Gale that she will never have children. Peeta himself, in his somewhat subservient position to Katniss, resembles male acolytes of the Goddess Diana, from Hyppolytus to the Priest-Kings of Nemi—who themselves participated in a famous ritual of fighting to the death, as described in Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]

Posted on March 26th, 2012 at 1:58pm.