Freezing-Cold Dishes of Revenge
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
The White Tiger (Ramin Bahrani) rated R 125 min.
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): I keep trying to honor my New Year’s resolution for keeping the verbiage in these postings to less than I’m prone to do given my natural rambling inclinations. So far this month I’m reasonably OK in my intended direction but keep facing challenges to my “Keep It Short!”-dictum because I’m finally able to see some of 2020’s best releases which easily get my thoughts flowing; still, I’ll attempt to hold back my full spew of praise where these 4-stars (or better) winners are concerned. However, one thing adding a bit more to the total length this time (and for the next few months) is the return of my referral to Metacritic links summarizing 2020 (some still debuting in 2021) Awards/Nominations and Top 10 listings from noted critics (not me, of course), so you’ll find that way down in the Short Takes subsection of Related Links. For my reviews this week, though, the featured one is The White Tiger, set in India but mostly delivered in English (some Hindi with subtitles, though), about a young man born into poverty determined to better himself by becoming a driver for a powerful family who controls his local village; his plan begins to succeed, then a tragic event leads to trouble in this well-done exploration of the caste/class system having so much impact on this vast society, in the process presenting some ethical challenges for the audience in terms of indefensible actions by various characters. Also, in the Short Takes section is a review of another winner, Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan as an ex-med student still grieving over the rape and death of her close friend some years ago so she goes to bars, acts fall-down-drunk, then when a “helpful” guy takes her home for sex she sobers up, confronts him, until one day a former classmate, now a doctor, re-enters her life causing her to question her future direction (the former’s on Netflix streaming, latter’s on several platforms for $19.99 rental). That section also contains suggestions for some choices on the Turner Classic Movies channel (but too much extra text for line-justified-layout like you see here [Related Links stuff at each posting’s end is similarly-ragged], at least to be done by this burned-out-BlogSpot-drone—oh, tedious software!) along with my usual useful (?) dose of industry-related-trivia.
Here’s the trailer for The White Tiger:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $. To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid those important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters like this:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: We begin with a cluster of scenes that may take us a bit of patience to fully make sense of but they’re spiced with humor: in 2007 Delhi (the National Capital Territory containing the city of New Delhi) we see a car speeding through the streets at night; this is interrupted by our narrator/protagonist in 2010, a young entrepreneur recently on the financial upswing (sporting a dapper waxed mustache), Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), who tells us that a story set in India (much of the dialogue’s in English, although what’s in Hindi is translated in subtitles) should begin with a prayer, an easy task for Hindus as they have thousands of gods to choose from. Next, he’s writing an e-mail to Chinese Premiere Wen Jiabao in anticipation of this powerful man’s upcoming visit to India, offering to merge their talents and resources because, as Balram sees it, the Whites of the West are on their way out while the Browns and Yellows of Asia are the future of the planet (also he wants to liberate lower-caste/class Indians from their indoctrinated servant mentality, living like caged roosters aware they’re next on the chopping block yet offering no resistance, assuming that's their fate); Balram does mention, though, the slight wrinkle he’s wanted for murder, so to give Wen a better context of this man he could be working with, Balram will tell him (and us) the story of his life.
Therefore, we shift to a major flashback in the rural town of Laxmangarh where Balram as a poor child shows intellectual potential (a teacher tells him he’s like a white tiger, a rare animal who comes along only once in a generation), but when he’s offered a scholarship to a school in Delhi he’s forced by his demanding grandmother (Kamlesh Gill)—because of his sick father’s debts (Dad dies later of TB)—to stay home and work for the local landlord known as The Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar), aided by his cruel enforcer son, The Mongoose (Vijay Maurya). As he gets a bit older, Balram convinces Granny to finance his training as a chauffeur (to get money for the family) so he can become a driver for The Stork’s younger son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), back in India with his upscale-desiring/NYC-raised/daughter-of-immigrants wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). Balram gets the job (with an underhanded-trick on Ashok’s current #1 driver), becomes surprisingly-friendly with Ashok and Pinky (although they clearly still consider him a servant, much to Balram’s chagrin after he’s cut contact with his family due to a visit back home where Granny tried to force him into an arranged marriage).
Now we’re back to 2007 where we realize it’s these 3 younger characters careening through the streets of Delhi on the night of Pinky’s birthday where she insists on driving, despite being drunk, tragically hits/kills a child in the street. Balram does what he can to keep any suspicion from falling on his employer-“family,” only to find Stork and Mongoose demanding he sign a statement taking responsibility for the homicide which they hold as blackmail against him if ever needed (this becomes unnecessary as no investigation follows about the kid’s death, yet Balram remains faithful to his employers, still hoping to rise in society with these thugs). Pinky’s appalled (wants a better life for Balram), leaves Ashok to return to the U.S.; he’s heartbroken even as Balram tries to comfort him, yet Balram’s begun taking advantage of his “master” with fake repair bills, etc. while Ashok’s now treating him more like a traditional servant. ⇒Meanwhile, Stork and Mongoose are providing bribes to hide their illegal coal business, then there’s a shift to Ashok delivering huge amounts of cash to a woman we’ve seen throughout the story, The Great Socialist (Swaroop Sampat), newly elected to a high government post. Balram’s now also got custody of a nephew sent by Granny to learn the driving trade, takes the kid to a zoo where he finds inspiration from an actual white tiger. While driving Ashok and his red money bag around one night, Balram fakes a problem with a tire to catch his boss off-guard, kills him with a broken whiskey bottle, then flees to Bangalore with the nephew (there are visual implications his entire family back home is slaughtered by The Stork’s goons) where he uses some of the stolen money to pay off the local police, the rest to establish a private taxi service (with well-compensated-employees) for call-center-workers, signing off his letter to Wen Jiabao with assurances he’ll never be caught because the drawing on his wanted poster looks like millions of other young Indian men, he’s altered his facial appearance anyway, plus he’s changed his name to Ashok Sharma so he’s flown the rooster coop, now fully becoming the tiger.⇐*
*If you’d prefer a plot summary (but also with spoilers, like mine just above) accompanied by visuals from the film here’s a useful video (12:07), though it’s interrupted by ads at roughly 1:15 and 10:20.
So What? I suppose if you’re well aware of the society, culture, and traditions of India this film would have even deeper meanings for you—especially if you have any position/heritage akin to Balram’s situation (or know anyone who does)—but you certainly don’t need such background knowledge to appreciate these dismal life-expectations that this determined-to-not-live-as-a-servant-young-man must find a way to overcome in order to not be a compliant “rooster,” as well as understand the hostile attitude he has toward not only the power-holders who’ve held his family and neighbors in thrall for the benefit of personal greed but also some of his kin, such as Granny, who share this greed (but at a considerably lower level of accomplishment, accepting the assumed reality of how much she could expect to gain given the situational limitations she’s not willing to challenge in a manner done by her grandson). Do Balram’s resentments, frustrations, specific sense of justice justify his crime? No, I can’t say they do—despite my overall support for him—which just adds to the complexity of what we’re presented with so successfully in … Tiger. This guy’s not a hero in any traditional sense,* but we can see how his situation stands for an entire planet’s socioeconomic-imbalance as the well-to-do continue to do ever-more-well while the have-nots sink farther below the poverty line, the sort of ongoing-reality leading crowds of the dispossessed to embrace populist/ nationalist/dictatorial leaders (I think you know who I mean, in the U.S., around the world) in hopes of better economic pursuits for the downtrodden, even when it’s all really b.s. just to aid the strongmen.
*Although John Ford gave us a somewhat-similar-conceptual-situation in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) when, for the betterment of his frontier community, lawyer Rance Stoddard (James Stewart) allows everyone to think he killed local outlaw Valence (Lee Marvin) in a duel, setting himself up for a successful career in politics, statehood for his territory, even though the actual killer, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), shot Liberty from the shadows in cold blood, for the larger good of his society although he then shrank into obscurity. Hey, I never said I wouldn’t divulge spoilers about older classics, did I? Anyway, even with knowing the outcome of The Man … you can still appreciate how successfully this early-deconstruction of western genre myths have been elaborated on-screen.
Certainly the younger characters in ... White Tiger have intentions toward a more-equitable-society but fall short of aspects of that ideal as they become “Caught between the longing for love And the struggle for the legal tender […] Who started out so young and strong Only to surrender” (Jackson Browne, from "The Pretender" [1976 album of the same name; video with Crosby, Stills & Nash]) so that even though Balram finds material success, while being willing to share his social advancement, he’s clearly set for more deadly-bargains-of-choice as his future unfolds in India, maybe in China too.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Regarding those Metacritic lists of Awards/Nominations and Critics’ Top 10 lists noted in Opening Chatter above, you won’t find The White Tiger in either group (yet?) like you will Promising Young Woman (reviewed below)—although the CCAL writers are supportive, with those at Rotten Tomatoes offering 91% positive reviews while the ones at Metacritic are predictably lower (almost always, except in much lower percentiles) but still encouraging with a 76% average score—so it may end up being a film where good things are said about it although it doesn’t connect strongly enough either with critics, industry insiders, or audiences watching aspects of an unfamiliar-culture for any of them to remember it too long after its debut; nevertheless, I like it, feel it needs to be explored in enough detail to be the feature review this week, and encourage your curiosity toward it if you’re a Netflix streaming subscriber (even if not, for a $14 monthly fee [which you can cancel at any time] you’ll also get access to a host of other marvelous offerings, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom [George C. Wolfe, 2020; review in our December 31, 2020 posting] and I’m Thinking of Ending Things [Charlie Kaufman, 2020; review in our September 10, 2020 posting]).
The acting here is marvelous, there’s much to be learned about troubling aspects of modern India (a struggling democracy now encountering its own concerns with many social issues), and the conflicting-ethical-dilemmas facing the major characters make for compelling, thought-provoking drama, although you may think I’m trivializing it with my choice for the standard-review-concluding-Musical Metaphor by choosing Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” (1982 album of the same name) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERT_7u5L0dc, given its use in the soundtrack of Rocky III (Sylvester Stallone, 1982), but consider how these lyrics are relevant to The White Tiger too: “Face to face, out in the heat Hanging tough, staying hungry They stack the odds ‘til we take to the street For the kill with the will to survive It’s the eye of the tiger It’s the thrill of the fight Rising up to the challenge of our rival.” Different contexts, certainly, but not all that removed from each other in terms of the full Rocky concept of a social nobody becoming a winner yet still struggling to keep focus dealing with the pressures of continuing such a triumphant performance. Balram accomplishes his dreams, but given how cutthroat that his culture can be, will he find himself someday facing his own version of a hungry “Clubber” Lang (see the footnote just below if needed), ready to knock him off?*
*This video pairs the song with scenes from that movie, the last one where original characters Adrian (Talia Shire), Paulie (Burt Young), Mickey (Burgess Meredith), and Apollo (Carl Weathers) are all alive, as most drop off in the sequels, Mickey dies in this one. In contrast, Balram seemly looses all 17 members of his family in one-fell-Stork-swoop in retaliation for his murder of Ashok. "Clubber" Lang's (Mr. T) Rocky's up-from-the-trenches-opponent, who takes the top boxing title away for a bit.
SHORT TAKES (spoilers also appear here)
A former med student, still devastated by the rape, then death, of her classmate several years ago takes a form of revenge by acting passed-out drunk in bars so when a man takes her to his place for easy sex she sobers up, puts him on the spot with fierce confrontation; a doctor she was in school with shows up, tries to start a relationship with her, however she enhances her tactics for vengeance.
Here’s the trailer:
Before reading further, please refer to the plot spoilers warning detailed far above.
Cassandra (also name of a Greek-mythology-figure doomed to not have her accurate prophecies believed by anyone) Thomas (Carey Mulligan), 30, med-school-dropout, works in a coffee shop, still lives with her parents (in what seems to be a museum of kitschy décor) where Mom Susan (Jennifer Coolidge) constantly pushes Daughter to do more with her life, even gives her a suitcase to move out on her birthday although Cassie can’t afford to live elsewhere (Dad Stanley’s [Clancy Brown] more sympathetic), but Cassie has only one ambition: to avenge her lifelong-friend, Nina Fisher, like Cassie seemingly a wonderful-future-doctor, whose life was destroyed when she was raped one night while unconscious by their classmate, Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), whose crime was witnessed, cheering on by drunken friends, yet Nina suffered from the reputation of being a promiscuous, too-frequent-blackout-boozer so (fictional) Forrest U. Dean Elizabeth Walker (Connie Britton) was more concerned with protecting Al’s reputation while his fierce lawyer, Jordan Green (Alfred Molina, in a marvelous cameo), put so much pressure on Nina she dropped her charges, then quit school (Carrie quit as well, to help comfort her friend), seemingly killed herself some 7 years ago. Since then, Carrie’s been on a mission to scare some decency into the kind of men who’d approach a drunken woman in a bar, make an offer of help, but inevitably take her back to his place where he’d rape her, so Cassie regularly goes to local hot spots in provocative outfits, plays near-passed-out-drunk, lets the “but I’m a nice guy” potential offenders get her into their bedrooms where she suddenly confronts them, stone-sober, in an attempt to shock them enough to stop participating in this abuse (with warnings some women are more deadly than her in their actions to halt such misogynistic behavior).
One day former classmate (now pediatric surgeon) Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham) wanders into the coffee shop, talks with Cassie, tries to get a date but is turned down, gets another chance later with romance suddenly blossoming, but he notes Al’s back after having been in London for years. With Al around again Carrie ups her game, meets with old friend (now married) Madison McPhee (Alison Brie) for lunch at a hotel only to berate her for not being more concerned about Nina, gets her quite drunk, pays a guy to take her to a room, leaving the impression she’s been raped. Then Cassie picks up Dean Walker’s daughter, Amber (Francisca Estevez), after school one day, leaves the kid at a diner where her favorite boy band’s supposed to show up, terrifies the dean by telling her the girl’s now in Nina’s old room with a bunch of drunk male students. Next is lawyer Green; however, he’s so remorseful over helping men like Al Cassie takes no revenge on him. With encouragement from Nina’s Mom (Molly Shannon), Cassie’s finally ready to dispel her anger, focus on a future with Ryan.
⇒She gets a dose of her own medicine, though, when Madison gives her a phone-video of Nina’s rape, where she sees Ryan there that night so she breaks it off with him after demanding to know the remote location of Al’s bachelor party. She shows up, dressed as a stripper nurse, knocks out all the guests with spiked booze, gets Al upstairs where she handcuffs him to the bed, then reveals herself with the intention to carve Nina’s name on his stomach. However, he breaks one hand free, manages to suffocate her with a pillow. Next morning his buddy, Joe (Max Greenfield)—who shot the Nina video—helps him burn Cassie’s body in the woods; Ryan lies to the cops on knowing anything about her whereabouts; but, suddenly at Al’s wedding, police show up to arrest him because she’s sent the video to the lawyer, info about it all to her boss, Gail (Laverne Cox), along with Nina’s half of a necklace to match the half Cassie always wore, found in her ashes, leaving Al pre-recorded, later-assigned-delivery texts so he'll know she’s responsible for his earned demise.⇐*
*There’s a visualized-summary (8:02), like White Tiger's, plus extensive commentary (13:58) about the ending (Spoilers!) with Mulligan noting she did her own stunt work in that climactic scene.
This is an immensely-powerful, mixing the gruesomeness of the Al-Nina plotline with the breezy romantic interlude of Cassie and Ryan, using a lot of colorful art direction to contrast the darkness of Cassie’s soul, the dark-underbelly of “nice guys” with socially-sanctioned careers like Al and Ryan. Young Woman’s making a solid impact, scoring high on those Top 10 lists, getting attention for the picture overall, Mulligan, Fennell for both directing and scriptwriting, with the CCAL supportive: RT, 91% positive reviews; more-stingy MC, 72% average score. If domestic theaters (U.S.-Canada) in your area are still open you might find it there (out about a month, still in 1,333 such venues), taking in $5.8 million globally so far ($4 million of that domestically), but you’d probably find it more easily on several streaming platforms for $19.99 rental (I chose Amazon Prime). For my Musical Metaphor I’ll use Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” (from his 1981 Face Value album) at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WFkIKd6md6g due to lyrics (just below the YouTube screen on the video) such as: “I can feel it coming in the air of night, oh Lord And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord […] if you told me you were drowning I would not lend a hand […] I was there and I saw what you did […] So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been It’s all been a pack of lies.” I’ve used this song before (a good number of miserable tales await us in cinemaland), but it’s just too appropriate not to bring it front and center again. However, given Collins’ song was inspired by anger about his divorce and considering the context of .. Young Woman, it seems appropriate to also give you a version of the song in a female singer's performance so here’s one I like from Lorde.
Suggestions for TCM cablecasts
At least until the pandemic subsides Two Guys also want to encourage you to consider movies you might be interested in that don’t require subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, similar Internet platforms (we may well be stuck inside for longer than those 30-day-free-initial-offers), or premium-tier-cable-TV-fees. While there are a good number of video networks offering movies of various sorts (mostly broken up by commercials), one dependable source of fine cinematic programming is Turner Classic Movies (available in lots of basic-cable-packages) so I’ll be offering suggestions of possible choices for you running from Thursday afternoon of the current week (I usually get this blog posted by early Thursday mornings) on through Thursday morning of the following week. All times are U.S. Pacific Daylight so if you see something of interest please verify actual show time in your area for the day listed. These recommendations are my particular favorites (no matter when they’re on, although some of those early-day-ones might need to be recorded, watched later), but there’s considerably more to pick from you might like even better; feel free to explore their entire schedule here. You can also click the down arrow at the right of each listing for additional, useful info.
I’ll bet if you checked that entire schedule link just above you’d find other options of interest, but these are the only ones grabbing my attention at present; please feel free to dig in further for other possibilities. I will note, though, this particular group is all Oscar-winners of some type except for The Battleship Potemkin (no Oscars in 1925, not until 1929), although it has many other accolades.
Friday January 29, 2021
5:00 PM Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Still my All-Time #1 (even though Sight and Sound’s poll dethroned it in 2012 in favor of Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958] after 50 years on top); a triumph of script, acting, cinematography, editing, sound design, art direction, special effects, score, with Welles as director, star actor portraying Charles Foster Kane, an enormously wealthy (by chance as a kid) newspaperman (patterned on William Randolph Hearst) whose early progressive ideals succumb to pragmatics destroying marriages to 2 wives (Ruth Warrick, Dorothy Comingore) and a long-time-friend (Joseph Cotton), retaining loyalty only from his business manager (Everett Sloane). Except for the eye-of-God beginning and end it’s told in flashbacks with 5 narrators imparting their subjective accounts of his life (hard for us to know what’s true). Won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz [grandfather of noted TCM host Ben Mankiewicz]), no others.
Saturday January 30, 2021
12:45 PM On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) Deserving winner of 8 Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Marlon Brando), Supporting Actress (Eva Marie Saint). A mob/union boss (Lee J. Cobb) runs the waterfront but a sub-honcho’s (Rod Steiger) in trouble because his brother’s (Brando) witnessed a killing, is being pressured to testify by a priest (Karl Malden). Contains the famous “I coulda been a contenda” scene between Brando and Steiger during a testy cab ride.
Sunday January 31, 2021
9:00 PM The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) Considered among the best ever
(#5 on my All-Time list), the content here is a Soviet Union propaganda piece showing continuity
of rebellious action against the Tsar (culminating in the 1917 Russian Revolution) by focusing on events during the abortive 1905 revolution aboard this ship and the port city of Odessa, showing brutality against sailors and civilians. It’s focus on repression doesn’t bring up concerns about Communist politics as such, so I think you can watch this without objecting to ideological aspects. Today it’s praised for its fantastic use of the montage editing style where most shots run less than 30 sec., delivering an active cinematic experience akin to Picasso’s Cubism, especially the scene of townspeople massacred on a grand staircase. TCM’s info lists this as running only 70 min. (roughly the length of the original release) but the schedule calls for 2 hrs., so maybe there’s considerable additional info and analysis. This is a silent film but uses intertitle dialogue cards between shots.
Monday February 1, 2021
1:00 AM All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) Praised as one of this acclaimed Spanish director’s best works (beware: subtitles), about a nurse whose teenage son’s killed in a car accident so she takes his heart to a man in another city, then seeks to find the transvestite father in Barcelona who never knew he/she had a son; considerable complications follow which get too entangled to summarize here. Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA winner for Best Foreign Language Film, many others.
Wednesday February 3, 2021
11:30 PM In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) A rich industrialist builds a factory in Mississippi but is murdered; Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), visiting the area, is arrested for being Black with a fat wallet until he’s identified as a top Philly cop so local chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) asks him to stay, help with the investigation despite the racism Tibbs constantly faces. Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor (Steiger), Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound (nominated for 2 others).
If you’d like your own PDF of ratings/summaries of this week's reviews, suggestions for TCM cablecasts, links to Two Guys info click this link to access then save, print, or whatever you need.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: Here are some extra items you might be interested in; I know it’s late, but I just became aware of this info, although these offerings will likely be available for quite awhile: (1) New to Netflix in January 2021: (2) New to Amazon Prime Video in January 2021; (3) New to Hulu in January 2021; (4) New to Disney+ in January 2021; (5) New to HBO Max in January 2021. As usual for now I’ll close out this section with Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi" (from her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album)—because “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”—and a reminder that you can search streaming/rental/purchase movie options at JustWatch.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts.* Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage. If you’d like to Like us on Facebook please visit our Facebook page. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it!
*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problems’ been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.
AND … at least until the Oscars for 2020’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, April 25, 2021 we’re also going to include reminders in each posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which films have been nominated for and/or received various awards and which ones made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists. You may find the diversity among the various awards competitions and the various critics hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competitive-award-winners (which pales when they're compared to the even-more-noticeable-gap between specific award winners and big box-office-grosses you might want to monitor here as well as here due to many 2020 releases being tracked on the 2021 list, although the income situation for 2020’s skewed due to so many award-contenders getting limited or no theatrical releases)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices for success are as valid as any of these others, especially if you offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike many of the awards voters who simply fill out ballots, sometimes—damn it!—for films they’ve never seen).
Here’s more information about The White Tiger:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80202877
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV1JTKMx-5M (14:50 interview with director/screenwriter [Aravind Adiga wrote the original book] Ramin Bahrani, producer Mukul Deora, and actors
Priyanka Chopra Jonas [also an executive producer], Rajkummar Rao, Adarsh Gourav)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_white_tiger_2020
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-white-tiger
Here’s more information about Promising Young Woman:
https://www.focusfeatures.com/promising-young-woman/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu371Z4URpw (34:18 interview with director-screenwriter Emerald Fennell [you may need to boost the audio during her segments; it’s quite low compared to the others] and actor Carey Mulligan [strange interruption at about 15:00 from some baby monitor])
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/promising_young_woman
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/promising-young-woman
Please note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post. You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow connect
with us at that site in order to do it (most FB procedures are still a bit of a mystery to us old farts).
If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work. (But if you truly have too much time on your hands you might want to explore some even-longer-and-more-obtuse-than-my-film-reviews-academic-articles about various cinematic topics at my website, https://kenburke.academia.edu, which could really give you something to talk to me about.)
If we did talk, though, you’d easily see how my early-70s-age informs my references, Musical Metaphors, etc. in these reviews because I’m clearly a guy of the later 20th century, not so much the contemporary world. I’ve come to accept my ongoing situation, though, realizing we all (if fate allows) keep getting older, we just have to embrace it, as Joni Mitchell did so well in "The Circle Game," offering sage advice even when she was quite young herself.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check-out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile (quite an eternal while, in fact). Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker. But wherever the rest of my body may be my heart’s always with my longtime-companion, lover, and wife, Nina Kindblad, so here’s our favorite shared song—Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon"
—from the performance we saw at the Desert Trip concerts in Indio, CA on October 15, 2016 (as a full moon was rising over the stadium) because “I’m still in love with you,” my dearest, a never-changing-reality even as the moon waxes and wanes over the months/years to come.
OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.
Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 5,908 (as always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with our hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers); below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (with appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guy’s site):
No comments:
Post a Comment