Lincoln: Spielberg does it again

Politics is such a soiled playground, we’ve forgotten it was once peppered by great statesman with honour and ethics. It comes as a jolt of pleasurable surprise when confronted with the dramatically engaging and morally uplifting Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, as skilfully recreated by Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis. 

The time is January 1865, America is still bleeding with the ongoing Civil War, but Lincoln (Day-Lewis) is poised on the cusp of writing history — seeing the North win and slavery abolished, if he can somehow push through the unpopular 13th Amendment in the House of Representatives. 

But here is the crux of the matter — if the war is won before the Amendment is passed, it will not go through and will be resisted by the Southern States. Yet, even as Lincoln’s lobbyists (that include James Spader) are trying to drum up support for the unpopular bill among Democrats and Republicans, three commissioners from the Confederacy head up to Washington City wanting to negotiate peace. 

It becomes a nail-biting race against time, a chessboard battle of wits, nerve and legalese with Lincoln poised, no stooped, over the game board, nudging, moving, cajoling, calculating — with no guarantee of an assured win. 

To create such absorbing drama is no small feat when you are dealing with history and known outcomes. Kudos to Tony Kushner’s screenplay — based partly on Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – which is astonishingly effective. Unusually, it is a wordy screenplay that never loses the magic of the moment to verbiage — even as it allows politicians the privilege of exchanging linguistically complex insults or Lincoln, his quirky penchant for telling stories. 

Spielberg’s strength has always been storytelling — and he excels in that here, aided by long-time collaborator, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. The sombre mood and look of the time are painstakingly recreated, even as Spielberg keeps the focus taut; we are allowed entry into the agile mind of the President and his humanist heart as he negotiates on several battlefields.

Lincoln has to contend not only with the Democrats who hate the proposed amendment — but also negotiate with people on his side such as Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) or difficult mavericks such as the fiery Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones). If his highly-strung wife Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) still blames him for the death of their son Willie, there’s also a living son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who wants to defy his parents and enlist. 

Day-Lewis nails his Lincoln — physically with the beard, stoop and springy hair he effortlessly morphs into the President. With delicacy, rather than any ponderous sense of history, he assumes Lincoln’s many mantles: the man who is haunted by the death of his son, the ongoing war and the injustice of slavery; the lawyer and statesman who plots his way to pushing through the 13th Amendment; the amusing raconteur; the president who knows his power.

Vishwaroopam REVIEW

The surprise about Vishwaroopam is how straightforward it is, given Kamal Haasan’s track record. (It’s basically a big, dumb action movie, but with smarts.) What hasn’t changed, though, is the actor’s ongoing attempt to carve out for himself, within the commercial film mould, some space where he can be the hero as well as be more than just a hero. So we have, on the one hand, the kind of boosterism that no Tamil film hero can do without, as when an awestruck FBI agent asks Wisam Ahmad Kashmiri (Kamal Haasan), “Who the hell are you?” 

Then there’s the godliness of the name Vishwanath (also Kamal Haasan, this time an effeminate Kathak dancer), which points to the divine manifestation suggested by the title. And, of course, there’s all the express heroism, a Tamil who doesn’t just operate within his home state or the nation but whose heroics play out on a global stage — in a New York City that the jihadi villain Omar (Rahul Bose, in fine scenery-chewing form) threatens to contaminate with radioactivity. 

For a while now, Kamal Haasan’s films have acknowledged the interconnectedness of the nation — the Telugu-speaking love interest of Nammavar, the Oriya native of Anbe Sivam, the Bengali wife of Hey Ram, the cocktail of pan-Indian characters in Dasavatharam. But of late, we have seen an increasing interest in the world beyond India. In Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu, Kamal Haasan’s character got himself an American colleague, and in the Europe-set Manmadhan Ambu, he was married to a Frenchwoman. Vishwaroopam is very much of a piece with the actor-director’s recent work — the characters hail from Kashmir, Mayavaram, Afghanistan, America; there’s even someone from Nigeria. 

And this means, for one thing, that we have to deal with Tamil spoken with a glut of accents. It’s clear why this is necessary — because the film is in Tamil, and so that we register, at the same time, a semblance of foreignness, that this film is taking place outside Tamil Nadu, and with non-Tamils. But the ultimate effect is distracting. The film, for obvious commercial reasons, cannot feature extensive subtitles under characters speaking their own language — but how can we not giggle? 

Other Kamal Haasan staples are amply evident, like the writer’s unflagging determination to interpolate into his screenplays segues to pet philosophies (about God, Hitler), technology (nuclear oncology, Faraday shields) sexual hints (a wife walks in on her husband being unzipped by another woman), outré props (a Mughal-era dagger, nitroglycerin pills, pigeons that are decidedly not agents of peace, and even unceasingly dripping water), and a wicked sense of humour. 

The film’s finest visual gag is also its grisliest — a cell phone vibrating through congealed blood. Speaking of blood, is there another Indian actor who so loves being smashed to a bloody pulp on screen? In other words, fans will cheer him on; non-fans, as always, will find it all unbearably pretentious. 

But this cannot be denied. Vishwaroopam is further proof that Kamal Haasan is much more interesting, these days, as a writer-director than as an actor (he gives a typically solid performance; it’s just that, given the span of his career, we’ve seen it all before) — and the film’s finest stretch takes place in a jihadi settlement in Afghanistan, with the portions in Pashto subtitled in Tamil. Where Tamil cinema villains are usually demonised, these militants are humanised. 

Amongst the suicide bombers and opium traders, we see an asthmatic wife, a young boy who dreams of being a doctor, a father fluent in English but who doesn’t want his son to grow up speaking the language of the infidels, families and friends who smile and pose for photographs, teams of volleyball players, a mission-ready lad who sits on a swing and enjoys what are surely his last days of life. We also see the other side — bullets on weighing scales, being sold by the kilo, and a father’s pride when his blindfolded son can feel an automatic and identify it as an AK-47. 

And this is where the other aspect of Kamal Haasan’s character comes in, where he’s more than just a hero. In this section, he recedes to the background, playing a supporting actor’s part, while Omar occupies centre stage. A regular masala movie would never stand for this, especially one featuring such huge action set pieces. Even towards the end, it isn’t exactly the hero who saves the day (which also plays into the fact that few people in this “double role”-heavy film are who they seem to be; if only they’d been better actors as well — the cast includes Andrea Jeremiah and Pooja Kumar). 

The story doesn’t offer anything new, but these small subversions make the leisurely paced Vishwaroopam more than just another entry in the ticking-clock genre, where we wait breathlessly for the villain to be vanquished before everything goes boom. And the end isn’t so much about closure as a cessation. Our feeling at the end of these movies, usually, is that of relief, that the world is safe. Here, our emotions are a little less cheery: the world is safe... for now.

8.0 quake strikes Solomons, sparks Pacific tsunami earthquake-strikes-solomons-sparks-pacific-tsunami

Honiara, Feb 6: A major 8.0 magnitude earthquake was feared to have flattened villages in the Solomon Islands today, and triggered a tsunami with destructive potential for Pacific nations' coasts, monitors said.

 A small tsunami wave reached part of the Solomons and watches were in effect as far afield as Hawaii, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said. New Zealand was also on guard, but monitors said there was no threat to Australia. 

The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at 0112 GMT near the Santa Cruz Islands in the Solomons, which have been hit by a series of strong tremors over the past week, at a depth of 5.8 kilometres. 

 Two powerful aftershocks of 6.4 and 6.6 magnitude were also recorded. "Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated," the Hawaii-based Pacific centre said. 

"It may have been destructive along coasts near the earthquake epicentre and could also be a threat to more distant coasts." Australia's earthquake monitoring agency and the Pacific centre said a wave measuring three feet had been recorded at Lata, on the main Santa Cruz island of Ndende.

 "We know that a tsunami has been created," Geoscience Australia seismologist David Jepsen told AFP. He said depending on the location of the quake, bigger waves could hit elsewhere.

 "It's a big earthquake anyway in terms of just the shaking," he said. Locals in the Solomons capital Honiara, 580 kilometres from the epicentre, said the quake was not felt there, but some villages on the Santa Cruz islands were destroyed, according to a hospital director.

 "The information we are getting is that some villages west and south of Lata along the coast have been destroyed, although we cannot confirm this yet," the director of nursing at Lata Hospital told AFP. "There was continuous shaking in Lata but no damaged buildings here," he added.

iPhone 6 packs 4.8" screen

The iPhone 6 is preparing to enter production ahead of its mooted launch date in June, reports indicate, as the start of a new year brings a slew of new rumours around Apple’s plans for 2013.

In a note to investors, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek claims that Apple is already undertaking trials of the next iteration of the iPhone and the fabled iPhone Mini, presumably in the environs of its Cupertino campus, before they enter production in March. 

Misek also corroborated persistent rumours that the iPhone 6, also informally dubbed the iPhone 5S, will be home to a 4.8-inch screen, up from the four-inch display that debuted on the iPhone 5.

That tallies with a separate report from the China Times, also claiming that Apple will enter the fast-growing phablet market this year with a device that teams smartphone functionality with dimensions that verge on tablet territory.

The industry expert also backs conjecture that the handset will be equipped with a super HD camera, Near Field Communications technology to up the handset’s credentials as a digital wallet, improved battery life and 128GB of storage.

Apple is also thought likely to make its seventh-generation handset available in a host of new colour options, including pink, yellow, blue, green, purple, silver, red and slate.

Tweets Made Easy Now

There is good news for Twitter users as they can now look for tweets which are more than a week old. The microblogging site is now planning to update its search capabilities to accommodate this long standing demand for including older tweets too in search results.

The infrastructure engineer of Twitter, Paul Burstein, in Twitter blog confirmed the news about the update and also said it may take a few more days for the update to come out officially. Twitter search results earlier displayed results that contained tweets going back about a week. Twitter is now developing an option to include all the older tweets.

The infrastructure engineer also said that users will be able to see only a small number of tweets out of the total tweets sent once the update is complete. Twitter will now surface older tweets in its search results based on various criteria.

The tweets that will be arranged and featured on the search list include favorites, clicks and retweets. The percentage of tweets featuring on the search list will see a relative increase in steps over time. The aim of Twitter primarily is to surface best content for users' query. The recent update comes from the site after its update of iOS, Android and mobile web apps.

The recent plan of Twitter to update its search capacity is definitely a welcome move considering the steep increase in number of posts each day. It is to be noted that the Super Bowl performance of Beyonce alone is said to have received 5.5 million tweets.