Films of India

This is an effort to keep a list of Indian films or Indian co-productions I've seen. I'll put a link in my sidebar with my other film lists once this posts.

1920s:

A Throw of Dice (1929)

1950s:

Nagin (1954)
The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)
Two Eyes, Twelve Hands (1957)
The Music Room (1958)

1960s:

Devi (The Goddess) (1960)
Kanchenjungha (1962)
Mahanagar (The Big City) (1963)
Charulata, or The Lonely Wife (1964)

2000s:

Printed Rainbow (2006)
Naina (2005)

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a Mark Twain short story, was published on this date in 1865. You can read it online here, and if you haven't read it you won't regret spending a bit of time with this amusing tale. It begins,

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that, if Mr. Wheeler could tell me any thing about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was any thing ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once:

You can listen to it:

Rio Grande (1950)

Rio Grande is a 1950 western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. This is a standard western, with no strange and modern innovations to distract you from the basic cavalry and Indians plot. Not that I mind strange and modern innovations, but sometimes I just want a traditional western. This is one. Oh, and there are singing cowboys. You've been warned.

I watched this online, but I don't see it now. Here's the trailer:

The New York Times concludes a positive review with this: "Despite General Sheridan's pensive aside, "I wonder what history will say about this," Mr. Ford needn't worry. Chances are his public will eat it up." Slant Magazine calls it "a film of great warmth and humor". Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 75%.

Mid-November Snow!

Snow in November is almost unheard of here, but we got some Wednesday afternoon. Not much, mind you:

It was pretty while it lasted:

Yesterday morning, the day after the snow, it looked like this:

and by noon it had melted away. Tomorrow we have a predicted high of 64.

The Man Who Changed His Mind

The Man Who Changed His Mind is a 1936 British horror film starring Boris Karloff as the mad scientist:

"I was the leading surgeon in Genoa - the greatest authority upon the human brain,
until I told them something about their own brains.
Then they said I was mad. Look at me. Am I mad?"

Well, yes, since you asked, yes. You are mad.

I love the hats in these old movies:

via Youtube:

This doesn't seem to be much reviewed, and I imagine it was dismissed as a stiff, inconsequential effort not worth reviewing. It's fun if you're a Karloff fan.

Paper Folding 42 Times

Fold a piece of paper 42 times, and it will reach the moon:

Go for it!

The Legend of Shangri-la

image found online

The Legend of Shangri-la is a 2006 award-winning Chinese animated short film based on The Peach Blossom Spring, which is a 420 CE poem. Two men have tea together at 1:50 in part one below as the fisherman begins to tell the rich man the story of his experience in the fabled Shangri-la:

part 1:

At the beginning of part two below you can see the hospitality shown him by the Shangri-la residents: "They entertained me with their best wine and food in abundance."

part 2:

I'm sharing this at the weekly T Stands for Tuesday blogger gathering, where we share a post with a drink in it. Please join the fun.

Blindsight

photo from Wikipedia

Blindsight is a 2006 science fiction novel by Peter Watts. You can read it online here. From Wikipedia:

The novel follows a crew of astronauts sent out as the third wave, following two series of probes, to investigate a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt comet dubbed 'Burns-Caulfield' that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal to an as-yet unknown destination elsewhere in the solar system, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores questions of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, game theory as well as evolution and biology.

favorite quote:

There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

*******

Elizabeth Bear has an appreciation at Tor that begins, "It’s my opinion that Peter Watts’s Blindsight is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of this millennium". Kirkus Reviews calls it "a searching, disconcerting, challenging, sometimes piercing inquisition". SF Site says it's "a brilliant book".

Eyrie says, "This is solid speculative fiction with high stakes, an unflinching look at possibly very different forms of life, and a thought-provoking contribution to an ongoing discussion in SF about the nature of intelligent life."

Black Death

Black Death is a 2010 film about a novice monk pressed into service over the objections of his prior (David Warner) to be guide to a small group of men sent by Church officials and led by Knight Ulric (Sean Bean) to a remote town still untouched by the plague. Their goal is to find whatever demon-possessed witch or necromancer is responsible for the town's protection and force a confession and kill them to end the plague. It's a bizarre story with a heart-breaking ending.

trailer:

The Hollywood Reporter says it "achieves its goal of reproducing a medieval Europe awash with rats, filth and rotting corpses and men of violence ready to rip apart the bodies of any who have the temerity not to be sick. It’s a gloomy, despicable world". Slant Magazine gives it 3 out of 4 stars. Rotten Tomatoes has a mostly positive critics score at 70%, meaning 70% of the critics who submitted reviews liked it.

Mutiny on the Bounty

Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1935 film starring Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. This is one of those must-see classics. You can rent it online for cheap, but I never see this one available free. The last time I saw it I came across it on television with commercials.

trailer:

Slant Magazine concludes,

An unequivocal success upon its 1935 release, Frank Lloyd's big, astute spectacle can now be seen as a Swiss clock-type example of screenplay structure and a showcase for adventure unencumbered by beasts, blood, or much romance.

FilmSite calls it "one of the best nautical adventure films of all time and one of MGM's greatest classics." DVD Talk has a positive review. Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 94%.

The Magic Shop

The Magic Shop is a 1903 H.G. Wells short story. You can read it here or here. It begins:

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that LOOKED all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in. I had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth — a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just out of patent incubators, but there it was sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position; but here it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of Gip’s pointing finger made a noise upon the glass.

“If I was rich,” said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing Egg, “I’d buy myself that. And that” —which was The Crying Baby, Very Human— and that,” which was a mystery, and called, so a neat card asserted, “Buy One and Astonish Your Friends.”

“Anything,” said Gip, “will disappear under one of those cones. I have read about it in a book.

“And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny —only they’ve put it this way up so’s we can’t see how it’s done.”

Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother’s breeding, and he did not propose to enter the shop or worry in any way; only, you know, quite unconsciously he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear.

“That,” he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle.

“If you had that?” I said; at which promising inquiry he looked up with a sudden radiance.

“I could show it to Jessie,” he said, thoughtful as ever of others.

“It’s less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles,” I said, and laid my hand on the door-handle.

Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we came into the shop.

Listen to it here:

The Abominable Snowman

The Abominable Snowman is a 1957 adventure film about an expedition into the snow-covered Himalayan peaks to find the yeti of legend. It's directed by Val Guest and stars Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker; Nigel Kneale wrote it, basing it on a play he had written for television. Forrest Tucker is one of my favorites, and I never turn down a chance to see him.

A Hammer film, it is different in every possible way (except that Cushing is here) from the movies Hammer usually released. It's hard to convince people who don't like horror or science fiction films that they'll like this movie, so I won't try. But give it a chance. It's not what you think.

Mysterious Universe says, "It’s unfortunate that, despite its intelligent and thought-provoking storyline, The Abominable Snowman was not a big hit. It was filled with subtlety, restraint, and monsters that weren’t actually monstrous, after all. That’s not what the viewers wanted, however."

1000 Misspent Hours calls it "easily the best of the rash of Yeti movies that came out in the mid-1950’s". DVD Talk says, "it plays as a mature ecological fable, more powerful than a fistful of cautionary ecological documentaries."

Moria says, "the film builds to an ending that is interesting and certainly different to the xenophobic confrontations with the alien in American films of the period. Peter Cushing (who played the same role in the original tv version) gives another of his perfectly-elocuted aristocratic performances and Forrest Tucker has fun as the barnstorming American."

One Autumn Night

Lev Kamenev, Fog. Red Pond in Moscow in Autumn, 1871

One Autumn Night is an 1895 short story by Maxim Gorky. You can read it online here. It begins,

Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and inconvenient position. In the town where I had just arrived and where I knew not a soul, I found myself without a farthing in my pocket and without a night's lodging.

Having sold during the first few days every part of my costume without which it was still possible to go about, I passed from the town into the quarter called "Yste," where were the steamship wharves—a quarter which during the navigation season fermented with boisterous, laborious life, but now was silent and deserted, for we were in the last days of October.

Dragging my feet along the moist sand, and obstinately scrutinising it with the desire to discover in it any sort of fragment of food, I wandered alone among the deserted buildings and warehouses, and thought how good it would be to get a full meal.

In our present state of culture hunger of the mind is more quickly satisfied than hunger of the body. You wander about the streets, you are surrounded by buildings not bad-looking from the outside and —you may safely say it— not so badly furnished inside, and the sight of them may excite within you stimulating ideas about architecture, hygiene, and many other wise and high-flying subjects. You may meet warmly and neatly dressed folks—all very polite, and turning away from you tactfully, not wishing offensively to notice the lamentable fact of your existence. Well, well, the mind of a hungry man is always better nourished and healthier than the mind of the well-fed man; and there you have a situation from which you may draw a very ingenious conclusion in favour of the ill fed.

The evening was approaching, the rain was falling, and the wind blew violently from the north. It whistled in the empty booths and shops, blew into the plastered window-panes of the taverns, and whipped into foam the wavelets of the river which splashed noisily on the sandy shore, casting high their white crests, racing one after another into the dim distance, and leaping impetuously over one another's shoulders. It seemed as if the river felt the proximity of winter, and was running at random away from the fetters of ice which the north wind might well have flung upon her that very night. The sky was heavy and dark; down from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of rain, and the melancholy elegy in nature all around me was emphasised by a couple of battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom upwards, that was fastened to their roots.

The overturned canoe with its battered keel and the miserable old trees rifled by the cold wind —everything around me was bankrupt, barren, and dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears... Everything around was waste and gloomy... it seemed as if everything were dead, leaving me alone among the living, and for me also a cold death waited.

I was then eighteen years old —a good time!

You can have it read to you here:

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)

Coffee, by Henri Matisse

Coffee (1916):

by Henri Matisse, who died on November 3 in 1954 at the age of 84.

I had a birthday last month, and The Daughter gave me a lovely mug for Autumn:

along with some coffee and chocolates. Mine's more cozy and less exotic than Matisse's vision, but I always feel the desire for "cozy" when the weather is cold.

Please join the weekly blogger gathering at Bleubeard and Elizabeth's, and share a post with a drink in it.

Arrival

Arrival is a 2016 first contact science fiction film on the nature of time. I find the concept of non-linear time fascinating, and this movie is brilliant. And gorgeous. The score is perfect. It's directed by Denis Villeneuve and stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker.

trailer:

Rolling Stone concludes by saying, "the film gets inside your head and emerges as something intimate and epic, a linguistics odyssey through space and time. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of." The New Yorker says, "what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film." The Atlantic concludes by calling it "the best film of the year, ambitious in conception and extraordinary in execution".

Roger Ebert's site calls it "ambitious and moving" and "ambitious, accomplished filmmaking that deserves an audience". Rotten Tomatoes has a critics rating of 94%.

The Dead

The Dead is a 1914 short story (more novella length) by James Joyce. The dead are always with us, and that's a fact. The New York Times calls it "just about the finest short story in the English language." You can read the story online here. It begins,

LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies' dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style, as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark, gaunt house on Usher's Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils' concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve's, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker's daughter, did housemaid's work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders, so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

Of course, they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o'clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane's pupils should see him under the influence; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late, but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel or Freddy come.

"O, Mr. Conroy," said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, "Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs. Conroy."

It was adapted for film in 1987 as the award-winning The Dead, a faithful treatment directed by John Huston and starring Anjelica Huston. I haven't seen the movie.

trailer:

The New York Times says, "'The Dead' is so fine, in unexpected ways, that it almost demands a re-evaluation of Huston's entire body of work." Slant Magazine gives it 3 out of 4 stars. It's on Roger Ebert's list of Great Films, and he has a glowing review. Rotten Tomatoes has a critics rating of 93%.

Neely's Interstate BBQ

We had meant to go to Neely's Interstate BBQ for ages but never had. When The Husband was on vacation we were unable to take a trip, so we did a staycation. This was something we treated ourselves to that week. You can read their history here. This is the view from where we sat:

I had the small (yes, that's what they call "small") BBQ sandwich with beans and a Coke:

Delicious! You can see the menu here.

Afterwards we went to the Lichterman Nature Center

where they have a display of scarecrows:

There's not much Autumn color,

but it was a pleasant outing anyway.

Noroi (The Curse)

My October horror fest is over, but I'll still be posting a horror film a coupla times a month. I think there are more horror films than any other genre, and there are a lot of good ones.

Noroi (The Curse) is a 2005 Japanese found footage horror film made as if a documentary. This isn't a gory film and doesn't have "jump" scenes but focuses on the experiences of people who've come into contact with the curse. The plot summary at Wikipedia begins with this:

The film focuses on Masafumi Kobayashi, a paranormal expert who produced a series of books and documentaries on supernatural activity around Japan. He disappeared in the process of making his most disturbing documentary, The Curse. His house burnt down and his wife Keiko was found dead in the ruins. The aforementioned movie begins to play, shown mostly through the recordings of Kobayashi's cameraman Miyajima.

via Youtube:

It seems to have gotten generally positive reviews.

The Coroner's Lunch

The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill is the first book in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. I had never read a book set in Laos and enjoyed the atmosphere and learning something of the culture of the time. The characters are well-drawn, and the plot and sub-plots are fascinating. The book features one character with Down Syndrome who holds a position of responsibility in the coroner's office. This book begins in the Autumn of 1978.

from the back of the book:

Laos, 1978; Dr. Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old medical doctor, has unwillingly been appointed the national coroner of the new socialist Laos. His lab is underfunded, his boss is incompetent, and his support staff is quirky, to say the least. But Siri's sense of humor gets him through his often frustrating days. When the body of the wife of a prominent politician comes through his morgue, Siri has reason to suspect the woman has been murdered. To get to the truth, Siri and his team face government secrets, spying neighbors, victim hauntings, Hmong shamans, botched romances, and other deadly dangers. Somehow, Siri must figure out a way to balance the will of the party and the will of the dead.

Eurocrime says,

I was lost in admiration at this wonderful book: for the convincing and sympathetic portrait of a man and his little circle of friends and their lives; and for the exciting and clever dramas that, in the end, come to a completely satisfying conclusion, even solving a mystery very personal to Siri himself.

NPR has an interview with the author. Kirkus Reviews closes by saying, "This series kickoff is an embarrassment of riches: Holmesian sleuthing, political satire, and droll comic study of a prickly late bloomer." Publishers Weekly concludes, "this debut mystery, with its convincing and highly interesting portrayal of an exotic locale, marks the author as someone to watch."

Teke Teke

Teke Teke is a 2009 Japanese horror film based on an urban legend about a girl who falls on train tracks and is severed at the waist. Her vengeful spirit pursues victims and cuts them in half. I tend to like Asian horror films, and at only a little over an hour long, this is well worth watching. There's a scene after the closing credits you don't want to miss, so don't stop watching too soon.

There is a sequel, which is about the same length.