Thirteen days captures the 13 days in JFK's presidency when the world came dangerously closed to a nuclear war, a potential World War III. It started with USSR creating missile sites in Cuba. The movie captures the tensions pretty realistically; the armed forces Chiefs hell bent on a confrontation to salvage their pride after the bay of pigs fiasco, the back channel negotiations with Kruschev, and so on.
Frost-Nixon is a classic; brilliant screenplay and superb acting. It is a s much a reflection on the chemistry between David Frost and Richard Nixon as much as the interviews revealing the confessions of a fallen world leader.
The best thing about Lions for Lambs is that the narrative and treatment leaves you with unanswered questions. The parallel scenes presenting the political, philosophical and real action on the ground encapsulated my imagination. A charismatic Republican Senator breaks the exclusive story of a new strategy in Afgan war to a veteran journalist. A Professor of Political Science probes a bright student as to why has he stopped attending his lectures, while making his arguments based on two former students. And then we see those 2 students in action in Afganistan at the same time. Simply superb.
It made me wonder what was it that Kevin Costener, Ron Howard and Robert Redford had in common. Why can't such movies be made here, with our rich, diverse and complicated political legacy.
Other than partition, no other issue has really been dealt with credibly till date.
Maybe one of the reasons is a lack of mature enough audience. But is that the main issue? Come to think of it, is it really possible to objectively play political leaders of the past and present as characters in our country?
The answer is sadly NO.
We can't have a movie on our politics unless it's an all praise biopic of some leader. Or else, it has to be a war movie. We do have some good work in background of terrorist activities, but the center is never politics; it's either terrorism itself or a bunch of characters affected by it.
I've heard and read a lot of stuff, why not touch those topics?
1. Political upheavel when India carved out its states on linguistic basis.
2. Nehru's era post Chinese 1962 invasion.
3. Jay Prakash movement, emergency and Naxalism.
4. Reservations
5. The rise of regional parties
These came to my mind at the drop of the hat, and I'm sure there are many more out there. I soooo wish we had some good Indian movies based on Real Politic.
I hope it happens one day.
1 comment:
Bro........you watched these movies too late.......all three of them are awesome and thirteen days is definitely on top........you can also try watching JFK....its on JFK assassination controversy....
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