Category: 2. Govindini Murty

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.

LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo in The Atlantic: The Specter of Putin’s Re-Election Haunts Three Recent Russian Films

From the new film "Putin's Kiss."

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

Putin’s Kiss, Khodorkovsky, and Target question tyranny, capitalism, and their country’s future.

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. As Russians head toward their presidential elections on March 4th, a trio of new films sheds light on a contemporary Russia veering between hope and cynicism, democracy and authoritarianism. The documentary Putin’s Kiss depicts a young Russian woman who becomes disillusioned with her role as a leader in Vladimir Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi in the wake of a brutal beating of a journalist. The chilling documentary Khodorkovsky examines the fate of the jailed Russian billionaire turned democracy activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And the science-fiction epic Target depicts the moral collapse of a wealthy elite in an authoritarian, near-future Russia.

On the brink of what may be another six years under Putin’s rule, these three films reveal a deep anxiety about Russia’s future—and a faint glimmer of hope for more genuine democratic freedom.

Masha Drokova is the young heroine of Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss (2012), a selection of the 2012 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and currently playing in limited release. Born in 1989, Masha is part of the first generation to grow up in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the age of 16, Masha joins Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi; by age 19, she is already a spokesperson and leading commissar of the youth group, and Putin himself awards her a medal of honor. By age 21, the bright, ambitious Masha has everything thanks to Nashi: a prestigious spot in a top Moscow university, a new car, an apartment, her own TV talk show, and access to the highest echelons of Russia’s power elite.

As briefly mentioned in the film, Nashi itself was founded in 2005 by Putin supporters to counter the rise of pro-democracy youth groups in the wake of the Ukrainian Orange revolution. Although purportedly “democratic and anti-fascist,” Nashi bears a striking resemblance to the Soviet youth group Komsomol. Like Komsomol, the well-funded Nashi provides a route for many young people into official advancement.

In Putin’s Kiss, Nashi founder Vasily Yakemenko is shown exercising a Svengali-like control over his young charges, exhorting them to discipline and promising them a new life if they will dedicate themselves to Putin and the Russian motherland. As Yakemenko says to the Nashi faithful: “I want everybody to understand: There is no authority for the movement except for the policy of Putin and Medvedev … Being part of the movement means going out into the streets. It means to tell a villain he’s a villain.” As depicted in the film, a major part of Nashi’s efforts are directed toward vilifying Putin’s opponents as “enemies of Russia.” By way of example, the film shows some particularly crude attacks directed at opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Garry Kasparov.

Masha is initially drawn to Nashi out of patriotism and ambition. She sees Nashi as a way for young people to get involved in helping advance Russia, and she considers Putin a force for strength and stability. Masha is such a fan of Putin that she becomes known as “the girl who kissed Putin” for impetuously pecking him on the cheek when he presented her with a medal.

Yet Masha’s curiosity about the larger world leads her to make friends with a group of opposition journalists. Masha’s chief friend in the group is the gregarious Oleg Kashin, a liberal journalist who writes for the Kommersant newspaper.

Things take a dark turn one night in 2010 when assailants brutally beat Oleg Kashin …

[For the remainder of this article, please visit The Atlantic.]

Posted on February 29th, 2012 at 11:29am.

LFM’s Govindini Murty in The Atlantic: From Méliès to Montparnasse, a Cultural Cheat Sheet for Hugo

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

Decoding the many references to film history in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated movie

By Govindini Murty. Martin Scorsese’s delightful children’s film Hugo is currently nominated for eleven Oscars, the most of any film of 2011. And in a year of movies like The Artist and Midnight in Paris that pay homage to early 20th century film and cultural history, Hugo might be the most complex cinematic homage of them all.

Based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells the story of an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in 1931 Paris. Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) maintains the station’s clocks and tries to repair a mysterious automaton left to him by his late father, a clock maker. While doing so, Hugo encounters an old man who sells toys in the station, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), and his precocious step-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). Hugo and Isabelle team up to find the secret of the automaton, discovering along the way that Papa Georges is none other than Georges Méliès, the legendary turn of the century filmmaker known for such fantasy films as A Trip to the Moon (1902).

Scorsese uses the stunning 3D cinematography of Hugo much like a palimpsest, layering multiple levels of historical, cinematic, and intellectual history in each scene. Hugo references everyone from Jules Verne, Django Reinhardt, and the robot C-3PO to classic silent movies like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. Scorsese has even said that he considers the 3D in Hugo as a cinematic form of Cubism.

This cultural guide will help to decode the wealth of allusions in Hugo, making for a crash course in film, art, and literary history:

Maria from "Metropolis," C-3PO from "Star Wars."

Mysterious Automata

Hugo’s central mystery revolves around the automaton left to Hugo by his late father. The eerie metallic figure recalls such classic automata as the Machine-Man in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis and C-3PO in Star Wars. According to Hugo author Brian Selznick, the inspiration for Hugo’s automaton came from an 1805 writing automaton created by Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillerdet, currently in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, as well from the 18th century Jaquet-Droz writing automata in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Animated figures go back to the Renaissance, when mechanical humans and animals would appear out of clock faces to mark the time. Automata were also popular in Hellenistic Alexandria, where automated figures were used in mechanical puppet theaters and in temples to provide oracles.

In Hugo, the automaton possesses a dual quality—both ominous and marvelous. This reflects the ambiguous feelings that people have toward humanoid automata—seeing them either as frightening doppelgangers (as in Metropolis) or as magical helpers (as in Star Wars). The scene where Hugo dreams that he turns into the automaton reinforces this ambiguity and dramatizes a common fear of dehumanization in the machine age.

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

Posted on February 22nd, 2012 at 8:16am.

LFM’s Sundance Diary & Final Thoughts on the Festival

LFM's Joe Bendel, Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

By Govindini Murty. Sundance sets the tone for the entire film industry in North America. Its spirit of supporting creativity, talent, and scrappy innovation is one we heartily applaud here at Libertas. We also applaud the fact that in recent years Sundance has become a home to so many pro-freedom films. To name just a few, these have included Mads Brügger’s daring expose of North Korean Communism The Red Chapel (2010), Chris Morris’ brilliant satire of Islamic terrorism Four Lions (2010), and Lee Tamahori’s intense anti-Saddam Hussein thriller The Devil’s Double (2011).

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival continued this tradition. Pro-freedom films screened at the festival included: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s efforts to expose the brutality of the Communist Chinese government; The Other Dream Team, about the Lithuanian basketball team and their struggle to overcome Soviet influence; Putin’s Kiss, about the turn toward authoritarianism amongst the Nashi youth movement in Putin’s Russia; and Mads Brügger’s The Ambassador, a witty and politically-incorrect expose of corruption in central Africa. There were also a host of entertaining and well-made narrative dramas and comedies this year. A few we at Libertas enjoyed included The Raid, Grabbers, and Shadow Dancer.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Sundance 2012.

Jason and I arrived at Sundance on Monday, January 23rd. Libertas super-contributor Joe Bendel had already been at the festival since opening night on January 19th, and had managed to fit in an astounding number of films that first weekend. Because we admire the Zen warrior-monk focus Joe brings to writing movie reviews, the first thing we did when we arrived in Park City was meet up with Joe on Main Street – the central artery through which all things Sundance flow. Snow flakes were falling and the lights were twinkling on the picturesque street as we all met up in front of the famed Egyptian Theatre.

Slipping and sliding through the snow and invigorated by the air of good cheer around us, we headed with Joe down the street through the crush of festival goers and filmmakers to plan our film-going strategy. With approximately 180 films showing at Sundance, many playing simultaneously in multiple venues, careful coordination is integral to having a successful Sundance experience. As we hurried down Main Street, we ran into Paul Giamatti (looking avuncular with a fuzzy beard), and Jason spotted Kate Bosworth (there promoting her thriller Black Rock). Jason wanted to ask her whether she did her own surfing in Blue Crush, then thought better of it.

The first Sundance film we had scheduled for that night was an 11:45pm screening of Grabbers – a campy, sci-fi Irish alien-invasion movie. Sundance’s Park City at Midnight screenings are where the festival shows its genre films, and the raucous crowds that attend these screenings often provide a lively show of their own. The screening of Grabbers was great fun, with the mostly drunken crowd hooting and hollering throughout the screening, and we agreed the film had a good chance at getting distribution. In fact, Jason spotted some distribution execs he recognized walking into the theater. We would have stayed for the Q & A with the filmmakers, but it was 2:00am and we were scheduled to attend the coffee chat with Stan Lee at 9:00 the next morning. This was something we would have to get used to at Sundance: sleep deprivation.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Stan Lee at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.

Tuesday, January 24th’s highlights were most definitely Slamdance’s two-hour coffee chat with Stan Lee in the morning, followed by the screening of his film With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story that afternoon. Slamdance is the fun, ‘alternative’ festival to Sundance, and is really worth a visit.  Jason has already described this wonderful event with Stan Lee in detail, but let me just add how charming, witty, and delightful Stan is in person. He was truly gracious when we met him, with a big smile on his face and a roguish twinkle in his eye. We bonded with him over our mutual love of classic film and all things Errol Flynn, and had fun asking him questions about his work and inspiration during the course of the two-hour master class/coffee chat. We would have loved for Joe to have attended this event with us, but Joe was scheduled to leave Sundance Tuesday morning for New York, so we bid him adieu the night before. Continue reading LFM’s Sundance Diary & Final Thoughts on the Festival

LFM Reviews Shadow Dancer @ The Berlin/Sundance Film Festivals: A Timely Drama on the Dangers of Ideological Fanaticism

Andrea Riseborough in "Shadow Dancer."

By Govindini Murty. The internecine conflict in Northern Ireland has provided potent cinematic subject matter for decades. Shadow Dancer, starring Clive Owen, Andrea Riseborough, and Gillian Anderson, is the latest film to dramatize this fraught topic. Directed by James Marsh (Man on a Wire) and currently screening at the Berlin Film Festival, Shadow Dancer tells the story of a young woman torn between loyalty to her radical IRA family and her efforts to protect her young son by becoming a spy for the British.

What is so striking about Shadow Dancer is that it portrays the British government in a positive light as it attempts to negotiate peace with the IRA – while portraying the radical IRA cadres who oppose the British as unregenerate fanatics.

Andrea Riseborough & Clive Owen at The Berlin Film Festival.

When I recently saw the film at Sundance I asked director James Marsh and actress Andrea Riseborough if they intended the film to have a pro-British message. Marsh immediately assured me that the film was non-political and was intended purely as a drama examining the predicament of one particular IRA family. Riseborough differed from him, saying that she thought the film was sympathetic to the IRA.

This discrepancy suggests how hard it is to remain neutral in depicting political subject matter in the movies; one inevitably has to make choices about what to show or not show on-screen, and these choices in turn affect the perceived politics of a film.

As for the film’s meaning, it will be viewers ultimately who will be the ones to decide.

In Shadow Dancer, Andrea Riseborough (of Madonna’s W.E.) plays Colette McVeigh, a young single mother caught up in the terrorist activities of her staunchly IRA family in Belfast during the waning years of “the Troubles” in the early 1990s. Radicalized by the death of her little brother years before, Colette has been aiding her two IRA brothers, Gerry and Conor, in a series of bombings, shootings, and assassinations against the British and their loyalists. Unbeknownst to her family, Colette has been having second thoughts about the violence she is perpetuating – especially since she is now the mother of a small boy. When she half-heartedly drops off a bomb in a London subway without setting off the detonator, British intelligence picks her up.

British MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen) persuades Colette it’s time to renounce her IRA terrorist ways and become a secret agent for the British. It’s either that or go to jail for twenty-five years and give up hope of raising her young son herself. Colette chooses to become a British agent, but her brothers’ continued terrorist activities, combined with the paranoia of a sadistic local IRA boss, place Colette in one moral quandary after another. Does she help the British and prevent further killings – but endanger the life of her family at the hands of the suspicious IRA? Or does she keep working for the IRA and take part in more assassinations, only to be arrested and locked away in jail by the British? A budding romance with Mac – her decent, well-intentioned MI5 handler – makes things even more complicated for Colette. Continue reading LFM Reviews Shadow Dancer @ The Berlin/Sundance Film Festivals: A Timely Drama on the Dangers of Ideological Fanaticism