Directors: Mike Nichols, Victor Nunez

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

MISSISSIPPI MASALA

Great Britain USA (118 mi) 1991

Film Intuition Jen Johans

Denzel Washington stars in Mira Nair’s follow-up to her critical smash Salaam Bombay! as Demetrius, a young black man with his own successful carpet-cleaning company who meets Mina a beautiful, young Indian woman after she crashes into his van. The two exchange a few coyly interested looks along with their insurance information and after a second chance encounter, they begin dating, much to the chagrin of their families who disapprove of their interracial romance in the Deep South and both wish they would instead “stick to their own kind.” Mina’s situation is further complicated by the history of her family who, along with many Asian Indians, were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 and to add more fuel to the plot, her father has been privately trying to sue his former homeland to get his property back. Nair has much to say and the viewer recognizes at once that it is a personal film for her since she herself is married to a Ugandan husband. Unfortunately, possibly still influenced by the neorealist elements of her first work and her love of sociology, Nair tries to work in too many elements and the story that the viewer most connects with (that of the two young lovers) gets a bit lost in the process. Possibly, she would’ve made the movie differently today (those who have seen Monsoon Wedding might agree) but as it stands, it’s still a worthwhile and wonderfully directed film with another cool, charismatic and sexy performance from Denzel Washington easily upstaging the nervous newcomer, Sarita Choudhury. Nair fans will delight in the film which, like its name implies is best when it’s colorful, brilliantly hot and spicy in its portrayal of prejudices, hypocrisy and family duty and far less when it tries to wrap up details from its too brief beginning at the end of the film, as the viewer is simply anxious for the romantic resolution.

Austin Chronicle (Kathleen Maher)

The lure of the exotic attracts the characters played by Washington and Choudhury and that's this movie's primary appeal as well, but it is the tender love story and sweet human comedy that makes the audience commit for the long haul. When the two young lovers see each other across a crowded dance floor, they're unaware they're looking across a chasm of old history. And when they come together, inevitably drawn by chemistry, they little realize they've set into motion old forces that will make love more difficult than lust. Like the proud African-Americans in Mississippi who have never seen Africa, Choudhury plays Mina, an Indian woman who has never seen India. Her family lived in Uganda for generations and considered themselves Ugandans until Idi Amin's anti-Asian campaigns drove them from their country. In exile in Mississippi they've joined other Indian families who run a string of motels along the highway. Mina's father nurtures resentment towards blacks and specifically an old childhood friend in Uganda that he doesn't even recognize until his daughter's affair with Demetrius -- Washington as a handsome carpet cleaner -- brings it to the surface. For the rest of the clannish Indian community, who consider Mina too dark to be a suitable wife, her affair with a black man highlights their own racial prejudices. Nevertheless, the Indian community identifies with the black community in the face of southern racism. There is much that is funny in human inconsistency and in the petty squabbling that families indulge in and Nair exploits this while she makes more serious points about resentment and loss. Nair begins Mississippi Masala with Mina's family's exile from Uganda, focusing on their luxurious lifestyle and the wrenching pain and fear of their panicked departure. Frequent flashbacks of the achingly beautiful Ugandan countryside emphasize the overwhelming sense of loss felt by Mina's father. In America, the Indian community hangs on to their traditions even though they are forced by circumstances to live in tiny motel room cubicles stuffed with glittering Indian ornamentation. A wedding scene is a sumptuous swirl of color featuring women in gorgeous saris. The soundtrack shifts from Indian pop to delta blues and a later scene provides just as much pleasure with the downhome simplicity of a backyard barbecue at Demetrius's house. It takes love to bring all these elements together into harmony, and Nair makes it look easy even when it's most difficult for her characters.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

Indian director Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala" is a savory multiracial stew that boils over the melting pot and onto the range -- as in home on -- when Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury turn up the flames. An utterly infectious romance between an African American and an Indian African emigre, this seductively funny film measures the pull of roots against the tug of heartstrings. It is also a lesson in the pitfalls of color-consciousness.

Though set mostly in provincial Greenwood, Miss., the movie opens with Idi Amin's expulsion of all Asian Africans from Uganda in 1972. A native of that lush African country (Roshan Seth), his wife (Sharmila Tagore) and their little girl, Mina (Sahira Nair, who grows up to be Choudhury), tearfully leave their home and friends behind for a much poorer life in an Indian-run motel in Mississippi. Here Mina grows into a voluptuous Americanized beauty the color of ripened tobacco. A vivacious 24-year-old with a smile like a crescendo, she dazzles the camera as well as the affable Demetrius (Washington), who initially uses her to make an old flame jealous.

Demetrius, a sweet hunk, is almost living the American Dream as the indebted proprietor of a one-van carpet-cleaning business. His clientele by and large are the Indians whose extended families run the motels in the vicinity, a business relationship that is jeopardized when Demetrius is drawn to Mina like a cat to a sunny ledge. An amazingly sensual couple, they fall truly, madly, deeply in love. But this is a "West Side Story" for the '90s, and both communities decry the relationship -- all for a few shades of brown, as Demetrius points out.

Nair underscores this thought with her warm, richly visual portraits of the quirky motel Indians and Demetrius's close-knit family. A Harvard-educated Indian, she proves every bit as savvy an anthropologist in Greenwood as in her streetwise Indian film, "Salaam Bombay!" She uses the skill here to emphasize the parallels between the diverse groups while never losing sight of the new generation's Americanization. "Traditions are handed down like recipes, you have to know what to eat and what to leave on the plate," Demetrius advises Mina, who's just getting the hang of coping with hidebound relatives.

Sooni Taraporevala, who wrote "Salaam Bombay!," took Nair's idea of making a movie about the hierarchy of color and turned it into this masala, which in India is a collection of hot, colorful spices. Certainly Nair and Taraporevala's story is both spicy and multihued. Not only black and brown, but yellow and white folks are all sent up for their prejudices. One good ol' European American suggests "the Indians be sent back to the reservation." Brahman in moccasins? In this ever-shrinking world of ours, anything seems plausible.

The story loses its focus when it leaves Greenwood to return with Mina's father to Uganda, but with Seth in the role, it is a poignant detour. Seth, who played Papa in "My Beautiful Laundrette," brings a note of pathos to the more often playful story, as does Ugandan actor Konga Mbandu as his estranged childhood friend Okelo. Charles Dutton, TV's "Roc," also stands out as Demetrius's carpet-cleaning partner, which is no small feat opposite a couple as radiant as Washington and Choudhury. When it comes down to it, there is nothing quite like people in love.

DVD Verdict Michael Rankins

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE

India (117 mi) 1996

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

Mira Nair, the director of Mississippi Masala and Salaam Bombay! delivers a sexy, good-natured, and slightly self-indulgent meditation on love and sex in 16th-century India. Indira Varma plays Maya, a saucy servant girl talented in the art of love. Her beauty and cunning take her from the palace to the street and back again in this sexy Cinderella story featuring bare-chested hunks wrestling and dark-eyed beauties making out with each other. Nair's visual sense is stunning and lush, cinnamon and rose-colored; you can practically smell the spices on the breeze. The sex scenes are torrid too--Nair has apparently confounded the censors in India, who allow depictions of violent sexuality like rape but prohibit the portrayal of direct physical contact. It's easy to commend Nair for wanting to introduce positive images of sexuality to Indian cinema; it's a little more difficult to sit through the second half of Kama Sutra, after the plot starts to wind down and all the principals have already done the deed with each other.

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

Mira Nair's voluptuously pretty "Kama Sutra" follows Maya (Indira Varma), a 16th-century Indian Cosmo girl, as she learns the ways of love. Not all these ways are what you might expect, given that the film takes its title from the fourth-century Indian text famed for its enterprising sexual diagrams. For every interesting use of a phrase like "twisting of the creeper," the film carries plenty of other baggage. Much of it follows Maya's troubles in finding Mr. Right.

In a visually lovely film that summons an alluring impression of her native India, Ms. Nair concentrates so deeply on sensual detail that the audience can almost smell the incense wafting from the screen. Shining silks, brilliant colors, Sufi music, intricately adorned bodies and languid movements all conspire to create a seductive mood. The film's atmosphere becomes so palpably inviting, in fact, that its story seems only an afterthought. It's not only when they engage in carefully choreographed soft-core sex that the film's characters seem merely to be going through the motions.

Maya, first seen in girlhood, has a lifelong rival in Tara (Sarita Choudhury, a star of Ms. Nair's "Mississippi Masala"), who is a princess. Maya is Tara's servant, though it is immediately clear that Kama Sutra training is a great leveler in this culture. The young girl who shows a flair for the Dance of Enticement, as Maya does when both girls are trained by a top-seeded courtesan named Rasa Devi (Rekha, a popular Indian film star), can expect definite advantages in life.

Sure enough, on the eve of Tara's wedding to the handsome king, Raj Singh (Naveen Andrews, who plays Kip in "The English Patient"), Maya glides into his bedchamber and shows exactly how the Dance of Enticement gets results. While the virginal bride is being taught by her elders that she should allow the groom to put a beetlenut in her mouth, Maya takes a more direct approach. As a consequence of this candlelit tryst, Raj Singh becomes obsessed with her, and Tara becomes her permanent rival.

"Kama Sutra," which is subtitled "A Tale of Love," then moves on in sari-ripping style to involve Maya with a second virile, long-haired hunk. Jai Kumar (Ramon Tikaram) is a sculptor who becomes fascinated with Maya's form and enlists her as a model. Maya falls in love with him, though the increasingly dissipated king also continues to pursue her. Poor Tara, who embodies the powerlessness of women without Kama Sutra skills in this culture, must take comfort in her queenly stature while Raj Singh smokes opium and chases courtesans.

What will be better remembered than this story, or than Rasa Devi's occasional instructions in how to bestow scratch marks, are this film's exotic look and its enjoyable languor. It is best not to wonder too closely why Maya's two lovers strip down to loincloths and engage in a wrestling match, or how Maya puts on or removes her chain mail made of pearls.

Ms. Varma, a swanlike actress making her film debut, has the physical grace her role demands and makes a lovely ornament at the center of this story (written by Ms. Nair and Helena Kriel). She and the film's other players are captivatingly photographed by Declan Quinn, who shot "Leaving Las Vegas" and whose work is equally luminous and colorful here.

Planet Bollywood - Film Review Amy Laly

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)

Salon.com [Laura Miller]

Scott Renshaw

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]

MONSOON WEDDING

India USA (114 mi) 2001

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

Rarely do films come along that are as intelligent, exuberant, and moving as Monsoon Wedding. Director Mira Nair's kaleidoscopic portrait of an Indian family preparing for their daughter's marriage takes a cue from Robert Altman and succeeds in creating a vivid panoply of characters and telling a variety of stories. In under two hours, Nair manages to reflect on Indian culture, class differences, and matters of the heart, all the while entertaining her audience immensely.

The bride of Monsoon Wedding is Aditi Verma (Vashundhara Das). Her parents, Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) and Pimmi (Lillete Dubey), have arranged her betrothal to an engineer named Hemant (Parvin Dabas), who lives in Houston but has arrived in Delhi looking for a spouse. Aditi, being more modern than her traditional Punjabi folks, bristles at the enforced nature of the marriage and still holds a candle for her older (and married) ex-boyfriend, Vikram (Sameer Arya). But when Hemant suggests they meet and talk quietly and separately from the hubbub surrounding the event, she is surprised to find how much she genuinely likes him.

The complexity inherent in marrying someone one barely knows is only one of the many subjects swirling through Nair's film. There's a lovely romantic subplot, which limns class differences in India without hammering the point home, between the marigold-munching wedding planner P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz) and the Vermas' comely housekeeper, Alice (Tilotama Shome). Equally delightful is the depiction of Aditi's young brother, Varun (Ishaan Nair), whose love for dancing and cooking shows amuses his mother but perplexes his father. Not everything is sweetness and light, though — a more serious situation involving Aditi's cousin, Ria (Shefali Shetty), and her revelation of childhood abuse arises and threatens to throw the whole ceremony into turmoil.

It's a pretty big challenge to keep up with all of the characters in Monsoon Wedding, and some of them get short shrift. Kamini Khanna — as a zaftig, earthy cousin named Shashi — steals all of the scenes she's in, which are too few. And the members of Hemant's family are given equally scant screen time — even the wonderful Roshan Seth as his father, Mohan. But the stories Nair chooses to tell in-depth are so worthwhile that the ones not narrated aren't missed so much.

Besides Sabrina Dhawan's terrific script, Monsoon Wedding also offers gorgeous decors and entrancing music. The colored strips of cloth used to garland the wedding area recall the long bolts of silk hung throughout Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou. The costumes and jewelry, especially in the climactic wedding scene, will send aspiring designers into paroxysms of sketching. And the songs — from Shashi's a capella performance to the harmonizing at a henna-painting gathering to the beat-infused numbers played during the festivities — will have many rushing out to buy the soundtrack.

What makes this film more than just a cultural celebration is the particularity with which the story is told. Terrific scenes like the ones where Lalit breaks down in front of his wife or when Ria expresses her relief at being freed of her secret wouldn't work if Monsoon Wedding's characters weren't developed as well as they are. After the disastrous Kama Sutra, Nair has returned to make good on the promise she showed in Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala. Like the torrential rainstorms that permeate India and threaten the wedding of Aditi and Hermant, her Monsoon Wedding will sweep viewers away.

Exploding on the screen in a riot of movement, music and color, "Monsoon Wedding" gives the lie to Diana Vreeland's observation that pink is the navy blue of India. For sheer ubiquity, in this film at least, that honor rightly belongs to orange. Not since Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red," "White" and "Blue" series has a color been paid such lavish cinematic homage.

A spirited, sprawling tale of the days leading up to an arranged marriage, "Monsoon Wedding" combines the voluptuous production values of the most lurid Bollywood musicals, the class dynamics of "Upstairs, Downstairs" and the family melodrama of "Dallas" to create an exuberantly vivid portrait of contemporary India. If the movie ultimately becomes a bit too besotted with its own beauty, it nonetheless provides a visually dazzling and deeply affectionate glimpse of the tensions and traditions that animate much of modern Indian life.

Directed by Mira Nair ("Salaam Bombay!," "Mississippi Masala") and written by Sabrina Dhawan, the film takes place in Delhi at the dripping peak of monsoon season, when purple clouds hang low over the city's verdant suburbs and everyone's skin takes on a lustrous, sweaty sheen. The action opens on Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) nervously overseeing the impending marriage of his daughter, Aditi (Vasundhara Das), riding herd over Dubey (Vijay Raaz), a manic wedding planner, and keeping track of the dozens of cousins, nieces, nephews,imminent in-laws and other members of the Delhi diaspora who seem to arrive every minute.

Aditi's intended, Hemant (Parvin Dabas), seems like a nice enough bloke, but she still has issues with her former lover – the married host of an edgy TV talk show. Her hands may be beautifully hennaed, but her feet are decidedly cold. Meanwhile, the bride's cousin, Ria (Shefali Shetty), knows more than she's saying about a visiting uncle, the bride's little brother (Ishaan Nair) is rehearsing a dance number for the reception with too much enthusiasm for his father's comfort, and Dubey finds that he is the target of many a doe-eyed glance from the Vermas' lovely maid, Alice (Tilotama Shome).

Few of these narrative strands will lead anywhere surprising, but the appeal of "Monsoon Wedding" doesn't lie in its story so much as in its captivating visual style and loose, off-the-cuff verve. Cinematographer Declan Quinn, who gave Las Vegas its super-saturated look in "Leaving Las Vegas," does the same for Delhi here, capturing the city, its posh suburbs and its outlying countryside.

Nair and her crew shot "Monsoon Wedding" on a skinny budget in some 30 days, and Quinn's photography reflects that pared-down energy. Whether he's moving through teeming Delhi streets in the middle of a rainstorm, observing masses of orange marigolds pressed (and cut and garlanded and woven) into service for the wedding, or intimately observing the mendhi ceremony during which the bride's attendants decorate her hands with henna, he brilliantly captures the texture, palette and indefatigable energy of a culture in which dot-coms and cell phones exist side by side with the most ancient and cherished of rituals.

In the production notes accompanying "Monsoon Wedding," Nair says that she sought to capture "the intoxicating zest for life" of the Punjab culture whence she came. For the first hour or so of the film she succeeds, to the point where the audience can almost smell the food, flowers and perfumes that engulf the film's startlingly beautiful cast of characters. But for all the visual appeal and momentum that Nair builds up, once the wedding day is upon the Verma family, more begins to feel like less. The director lingers particularly lovingly, and tediously, over two scenes – one during which Aditi's sexy cousin Ayesha (Neha Dubey) entertains the wedding party with a steamy dance number, and another in which Alice is touchingly wooed by the wedding planner – until the movie threatens to collapse under the sheer weight of its own imagery.

By the time the groom arrives, crowned with the ubiquitous marigolds and riding a richly festooned white horse, "Monsoon Wedding's" narrative limitations are clear. But they are easily forgiven in the face of Nair's infectious love for the fervid energy of her homeland, and the many sensuous felicities with which she conveys it.

AboutFilm [Carlo Cavagna]

Part of the sorcery of movies is their ability to transport you to a place you've never been. Even more magical is if, when you're done marvelling at the unfamiliar land and culture, you discover that the people inhabiting this strange world are not that different from you. Love, anger, hate, pain, guilt, longing, and loss--these basic human emotions have no cultural limitations. The humanity pulsing beneath the trappings and traditions of any society is common to us all.

With Monsoon Wedding, director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) returns once again to her homeland. If you're as unfamiliar with modern India as I am, then the education in Punjabi culture alone should be a treat. Modern India is a bewildering mix of the age-old and the contemporary. Cell phones appear in the middle of traditional courtship rites and preparations. Third world power outages plague modern homes. Characters don jeans in one scene and ancient garb the next. Panelists debate the corrupting influence of Western entertainment on a modern talk show. Families send their children off to college in Australia and America and then complain that they aren't "Indian" enough when they return. Virtually everyone uses English interchangeably with Hindi or Punjabi. None of this is bewildering to the Indians themselves, who don't seem even to notice the apparent contradictions. The contradictions, however, find ways of making themselves noticed, creating tensions over the course of the film that require difficult choices by some of the characters.

Set during the rainy season in Delhi, Monsoon Wedding is a romantic comedy/drama that unfolds during the three days that elapse between a traditionally arranged engagement and planned wedding of two young people who have never met, Aditi Verma (Vasandhara Das, an Indian recording artist) and Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas). Concentrating two vast families in a confined space, the celebration causes an explosion of subplots, some comedic and romantic and some decidedly not.

To get to the point at which the movie begins, Aditi and Hemant have agreed to allow their parents to choose their lifelong mates. The anomaly is that there's seemingly nothing traditional about either one of these young people. Aditi is getting over an affair with her married and somewhat smarmy ex-boss, a TV talk show host. Hemant is an engineer who lives in Houston, Texas. The Western mind wonders, why would these two agree to an arranged marriage? Heck, why would anyone agree to an arranged marriage nowadays?

Nair and writer Sabrina Dhawan never spell out an explanation, but the bitter taste of the affair may have something to do with Aditi's motives. As for Hemant, he doesn't think there's any substantive difference between meeting in a bar and being introduced by one's parents. He means that any marriage is an act of faith. The foundation of a successful marriage lies in the kind of trust, communication, and intimacy that takes years to build. Any marriage is a risk, and even if it is born out of romantic passion, the partners can never be certain that their foundations are solid enough to build a lifelong union.

Is he right? Aditi's parents, Lalit (the great Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah) and Pimmi (Lillete Dubey), are an illustrative example. A product of an arranged wedding themselves, they seem to be a typical married couple--but is that a good thing or a bad thing? They seem distant, and they argue about their young son Varun (Ishaan Nair), whom Lalit sees as too soft and wants to send to boarding school. We don't get a sense of their marriage's health until the end of the film.

The bride herself is having second thoughts. Sensing Aditi's apprehension, her unconventional cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty) begins to stir up trouble. Meanwhile, alongside the arranged wedding proceedings more modern romantic liaisons develop. Another cousin, sultry young Ayesha (Neha Dubey), sets her eyes on Rahul (Randeep Hooda), a college student home from Sydney. The abrasive, talkative tent/catering/decorations contractor, P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz) is suddenly smitten with the Verma family maid, quiet Alice (Tolatama Shome).

Even when exploring difficult areas, Nair keeps the tone light and lively. With her premise, she has given herself a great deal of room to explore her own culture and the full palette of human relationships. One can argue that the presentation of some of the conflicts and unions is a little facile, particularly given the short three-day time frame.

With overwhelming beauty and charm (not to mention great music), Monsoon Wedding gets you not to care about any of that. Even the most improbable storyline, P.K. and Alice's courtship, is delightfully rendered, with a picture-perfect ending that will resonate for lovers of romance for a long time. Explaining that she wanted to make a movie about a complex, thriving society free of "colonial complexes," Nair has characterized Monsoon Wedding as an attempt to invoke Bollywood (Indian film) conventions in order to capture the masti (the intoxicating zest for life) of modern India. Without knowing India first-hand it's hard to say for certain, but it sure seems like she has succeeded.

Monsoon Wedding: A Marigold Tapestry Criterion essay by Pico Iyer, October 19, 2009

Monsoon Wedding (2001) - The Criterion Collection

Delhi Deluge of Colour and Movement in Mira Nair's Monsoon ... Rose Capp from Senses of Cinema, December 29, 2001

BFI | Sight & Sound | Henna And Cellphones Geoffrey Macnab interviews the director for Sight and Sound, January 2002

Monsoon Wedding (2002) | PopMatters Jocelyn Sczepaniak-Gillece

Monsoon Wedding (The Criterion Collection) | PopMatters Shaun Huston, November 12, 2009

Planet Bollywood - Film Review Akshay Shah

World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurrier

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "exactly and approximately" (7/10)

Dragonfly, Monsoon Wedding, and Big Bad Love reviewed. David Edelstein from Slate

“Monsoon Wedding” - Salon.com Charles Taylor

Nitrate Online (Emma French)

Images (David Ng)

Criterion Confessions: MONSOON WEDDING - #489 Jamie S. Rich, Criterion

Monsoon Wedding Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Monsoon Wedding - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review ... Thomas Spurlin, Criterion Blu-Ray

Monsoon Wedding Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Dredw Taylor, Criterion Blu-Ray

Jerry Saravia

Film Journal International (David Noh)

The Tech (MIT) [Jonathan Choi]

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

DVDBeaver.com - [Albert Michael]

New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

Monsoon Wedding Blu-ray - Criterion Mira Nair - DVD Beaver

HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS

USA (96 mi) 2002 HBO movie made for TV

San Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]

"Hysterical Blindness" is proof that miscasting doesn't have to wreck a picture. In the HBO film showing Sunday, Uma Thurman plays a high-strung 1980s New Jersey woman with a nowhere job and few romantic prospects. Thurman sticks out like a tall, exotic thumb in this modest setting, her accent too broad and her emotional outbursts, well, too hysterical.

Yet Thurman so commits herself to the role, eyes blazing and body akimbo, that you start to believe that such a creature could exist -- an exquisite- looking woman so spastic and needy that she repulses regular Joes. Thurman has bent the role to her will.

As the film's executive producer, she also surrounded herself with some very talented women. Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands, both pros at playing quiet desperation, ground the film as Thurman's best friend and Thurman's mother. Director Mira Nair invests the movie's working-class New Jersey milieu with the same emotional immediacy she brought to "Monsoon Wedding."

Female movie characters usually get to be difficult and neurotic only if they're also upscale and adorable, like Meg Ryan. Working-class women generally appear on screen because they're heroic or criminal. Nair and writer Laura Cahill dare to build a movie around some flawed but rather unexceptional women, emerging with a fine character study that's short on plot but rich in the tiny revelations of real life.

Thurman's character is tough to like. She's so stressed that she temporarily loses her sight ("hysterical blindness") while toiling at her data- processing job. It's not enough to be uncomfortable in her own skin; she has to make everybody else miserable, too, like the handsome construction worker (Justin Chambers, intriguingly aloof) whose mild show of interest fuels her wild romantic fantasies.

Women will always look for love in the wrong places, and men will continue to not call them back. The picture didn't need to be set in 1987 or in New Jersey, but it helps in evoking a mood of casual sex, Lycra and drunken swaying to soft-rock hits. Having these women bop to Phil Collins is somehow less pathetic than seeing their latter-day counterparts struggle with Moby.

Lewis seems at home in this acid-washed world, as a single mom who's more stable than her friend but just as stuck. Lewis' face catches about five emotions per second, showing this woman's guilt at leaving her kid home while she carouses, mixed with a fear that she might miss something if she goes home.

In her ability to play poignantly real women, Lewis resembles Debra Winger.

And Gena Rowlands. Rowlands' aging waitress here is bone-weary and wincing, a woman who's been delivered a steady stream of disappointments. She's still got enough fire, however, to respond to the attention of a customer played by Ben Gazzara. These two Cassavetes vets bring a cozy, well-worn affection to the romance.

Thurman's character is threatened by her mom's boyfriend, and the difficult relationship between the women is the film's foundation. The mother, like everybody else, must walk on eggshells around her flinty daughter. There's a lovely scene where Thurman crawls in bed beside her mom, and Rowlands seems fully capable of soothing the misplaced anger right out of her.

Handheld camera work gives "Hysterical Blindness" an easy intimacy, but the gritty nature of the film precludes director Nair's other signature: Bollywood- style exultation. Except in one scene, when the ladies -- Rowlands and Lewis' kid included -- dance to Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" as the camera swoops around them. The moment is forced, too cute by half -- and positively wonderful.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham)

What Hysterical Blindness lacks in compelling plotting, it makes up for with great direction, sharp dialogue, and a stellar cast. It's an interesting slice-of-life character piece, but not much happens, and what does isn't deep, or complex, or worthy of much analysis. Instead, we spy on three women as they go about their lives in a small town in the mid-1980s; we share their sadness and their desperation, and we leave them, not understanding exactly the significance of their stories, but caring about them deeply as characters.

Debby (Uma Thurman) and Beth (Juliette Lewis) are instantly recognizable, the kind of girls who finished high school but never bothered to leave home or move on. They're stuck in dead end jobs, their only means of amusement the local bar (which they visit every night, high hair sprayed into submission, clad in garish spandex). Debby is particularly unbalanced—she is so sad and stressed by work and romance, she suffers bouts of anxiety-induced blindness. She gloms on to guys at the bar, mistaking their casual politeness for something more, unaware of the waves of neediness she exudes. Beth, meanwhile, distractedly cares for her daughter, not quite mature enough to handle her responsibility, and Debby's mother Virginia (Gena Rowlands) shyly starts a relationship with a retired man (Ben Gazzara) who always sits in her section at the diner where she waits tables.

The script, written by Laura Cahill and based on her play, delights in the small details—the nightly routine at the bar where the two friends drink, the social hierarchy in the break room where Debby works—but loses the larger details. We watch Debby and Virginia moving through their respective romances, see them experience pain and small pleasures, and after an hour and a half, I feel like I've gotten to know them intimately, but I'm not sure why—there's little to analyze, other than the obvious symbolic nature of Debby's fits of sightlessness. This is certainly apparent at the end, when Cahill forces an emotional climax and resolution, rushing her characters towards a happy ending without allowing then to wallow properly in their depression. It's very disconcerting, and a little false.

Mira Nair is the perfect director for the project. Her work has a compassion and warmth that allows for immediate identity and empathy (see Salaam Bombay! or Monsoon Wedding). Her loose, handheld style here is entirely effective—it feels like we're watching these people from the corner of the room, darting here and there to get a better look.

Nair is also obviously a whiz with actors, as the three leads all deliver outstanding, wrenching performances. Juliette Lewis is a little broad, but that's ok; her character is the comic relief, after all, and her chemistry with Thurman is genuine. Uma Thurman is, literally, so good, it's painful. She strips away all of her usual tics, her measured, aloof mannerisms, and delivers an emotionally naked performance that's never less than devastating—she cuts her heart open and lets Debby's misery and anguish bleed all over the screen. Rowland is softer, more controlled, but no less heartfelt—she has a scene in which she has to react to some very bad news over the phone, and just by watching her face, you understand what she's hearing as clearly as if you could hear the other end of the call.

Hysterical Blindness might work better as a play. On film, even with Nair's assured eye, it feels stage-y and stifled. But watch it for the performances, passionate and alive.

DVD Talk (Jason Janis)

DVD Verdict: Hysterical Blindness Elizabeth Skipper

VANITY FAIR

Great Britain USA (141 mi) 2004

The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]

Our culture of celebrity is such that, during the opening scenes of Vanity Fair, Mira Nair's exuberant screen adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's darkly satirical novel, I found myself thinking of Vanity Fair the magazine—specifically, the September issue's cover story on the movie's star, Reese Witherspoon. There we learn that, though she brings home a $15 million paycheck, she still looks great and makes time for the children.

What woman wouldn't want to have it all? Thackeray's heroine, Becky Sharp (played by Witherspoon), certainly does. She rises from obscure and shady origins through early-19th-century polite society to conquer the hearts and wallets of more than one bourgeois or aristocratic gentleman. Toying with the limits of propriety, she reveals the social order's hollowness while reveling in its splendors.

One might have imagined an updated Vanity Fair (à la Clueless) unfolding between Park Avenue salons and the carefully manicured lawns of East Hampton. Instead, with a nod to scholar Edward Said, the Indian-born Nair keeps the novel's time frame but highlights the role Thackeray has reserved for Britain's colonies, where his characters keep flitting to amass vast quantities of wealth or escape romantic disappointment. The colonial presence is felt everywhere in Nair's movie—from the cashmeres thrown over the ladies' shoulders in Hyde Park to the servants in their drawing rooms. Amid the film's gorgeous, sensual riot of movement and color, this subtly underscores a deeper point—that the vast edifice of British Empire hierarchy rested upon a lie and an illusion.

As the movie opens, orphaned Becky leaves the loathed Miss Pinkerton's Academy in the company of her only friend, gentle, highborn Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), to take her new position as governess in the country estate of the eccentric Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins). From that humble post she launches her assault, enchanting by turns the baronet; his wealthy, city-dwelling, spinster sister (Eileen Atkins); and his feckless second son, a military man played by the magnetic James Purefoy.

And that's only the beginning. Thackeray's tome runs to some 700-plus pages, with an unwieldy cast (for the most part, ably embodied here) and epic scope that moves from a young girl's love letters to the Battle of Waterloo. (The corpse-strewn battlefield is one of the most striking set pieces.) For the film, a team of screenwriters had condensed it into a hectic 140 minutes. But the pacing feels choppy, and the characters' emotions are sometimes too sudden to be believable. (One exception is Rhys Ifans, affecting as Amelia's long-suffering and neglected suitor.)

Witherspoon's Sharp seems tailored to fit contemporary feminism's Third Wave—a can-do heroine of unstoppable ambition. It's a role that's worked for her before (the Tracy Flick of Election), though here her ability to play herself seems a jarring limitation. She's best with Becky mid-career. When the story turns darker, she's all New World—she can't do decadent. Thackeray doesn't let us resolve our feelings about Becky too easily; we read about her exploits with a kind of abject fascination. But Witherspoon can't risk her likability. At the end of Nair's film, we cheer her; Thackeray's novel leaves behind a taste of ashes, and a deeper memory.

Film Threat [Pete Vonder Haar]

Every year, it seems, movie audiences are subjected to another period film that reminds them once again of the glory of the British Empire and allows a few American actors to practice their British accents. This year’s offering is “Vanity Fair,” based on the William Makepeace Thackeray novel (which I’m sure you’ve all read), scripted by Gosford Park’s Julian Fellowes, and directed by Mira Nair of Monsoon Wedding fame. It’s a lavish production, make no mistake, with opulent locales and extravagant costuming, and for the most part it’s a good film. Unfortunately, Nair reigns in some of her protagonist’s more unsavory traits, defanging what might have been a fine adaptation.

Vanity Fair, the novel, was an exposé of the greed and corruption in English society during the Napoleonic wars, while Nair’s film is…less so. Thackeray’s characters were written almost wholly without sympathy, which led critics to accuse him of being too cynical. Contemporary scholars tend to find him overly sentimental, which doesn’t prove much, except that academics can never make up their minds. Nair, on the other hand, presents her protagonists in a more sympathetic light.

The character of Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), the orphaned daughter of an English artist and a French chorus girl, is the template by which all gold diggers in subsequent literary and cinematic efforts should be judged. In Thackeray’s novel, she is conniving, unsympathetic, and dedicated to her own social advancement over anything else, including being a wife and mother. When we are first introduced to her, it is apparent that she will stop at nothing to achieve what she perceives to be her deserved place in high society.

She starts by leaving Pinkerton’s, her orphanage/finishing school, with her best (and only) friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai). Becky has a job waiting for her as a governess, but she takes some time to flirt with Amelia’s socially awkward brother Jos (Tony Maudsley), whom Amelia thinks would be a good match for her. The idea is nixed by George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), Amelia’s effete prick of a fiancé, who convinces Jos that Becky is beneath him.

Undaunted, Becky assumes her job looking after the children of Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins), where she wins over his household and, more importantly, his rich aunt Matilde (Eileen Atkins), who finds something of a kindred spirit in Becky. Soon, Matilde has invited the governess to come with her to Mayfair. Becky agrees, knowing that a move to London is the best way to insinuate herself into even higher ranks of the aristocracy. She starts off with a bang, eloping with Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy), Matilde’s nephew and heir to the Crawley fortune. For a wedding present, Matilde disowns him (seems she wasn’t as fond of young Becky as she let on), leaving the newly pregnant couple with barely a farthing to their names.

But there’s no time for that now; Napoleon is on the march, and Rawdon and George, both soldiers, are soon sent off to Europe to fight him. George, before disembarking, marries Amelia, which causes his father (Jim Broadbent) to disown him (disinheriting someone was apparently the 19th century English equivalent of taking away the car keys). As if that wasn’t bad enough, George dies at Waterloo, leaving Amelia penniless. Good thing she doesn’t know her late husband tried to get Becky to run off with him, I guess.

Back in London, things quickly reach a boiling point. Mired in debt, Rawdon and Becky’s marriage becomes strained, a fact not helped by the entrance of the Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne), a benefactor - of sorts - with more than charity on his mind.

There are some good performances in “Vanity Fair.” Witherspoon continues to show her range after stalling a bit with Legally Blonde 2 and Sweet Home Alabama (it’s hard to believe “Freeway’s” Vanessa Lutz is all grown up). Her Becky is canny enough, but lacks some of the venom of her literary forebear. Besides, the best lines are reserved for Atkins, who has the bulk of the film’s laugh out loud moments, and Byrne, whose verbal assault on his wife and daughter-in-law at their dining room table is the stuff of movie legend.

(And if the Academy gave an Oscar for Best Cleavage, “Vanity Fair” would be the odds-on favorite. Guys, if period pieces aren’t your bag and the missus is forcing you to see this, at least you’ll have plenty to look at.)

Pacing is a problem, however. Nair must have reached a point about three-quarters of the way through principal photography when she realized she’d barely shot half the script. From about the 90-minute mark on, "Vanity Fair" seems rushed and disjointed, as major plot points come fast and furious with little narrative exposition, and none of this is helped by the sheer tonnage of melodrama playing out on screen. The hurried fashion in which the movie wraps up and the tacked on “happy ending,” where hope is found anew and all dangling plot threads are wrapped up in a scant ten minutes, transforms “Vanity Fair” from an examination of a woman who will do anything to get what she wants into a below par love story, albeit one with great costumes.

Nair’s use of her homeland as a significant element adds color to the proceedings, but a tacked on scene where Steyne puts Becky in the Indian version of “A Chorus Line” stops the film dead. And one can't help wondering if enjoying the film’s denouement in India isn't somehow insincere, seeing as how we’re inadvertently cheering for the colonial interlopers.

“Vanity Fair” offers a generally clever and well-acted respite from the usual seizure-inducing summer movie fare. It’s by no means a classic, but the dialogue and high caliber of performances mean you’ll get your money’s worth, especially if you’re really into empire waistlines and that infamous English haughtiness.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Slate [David Edelstein]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Film Journal International (Erica Abeel)

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Guardian/Observer

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane)

Rediff [T.P. Sreenivasan]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

THE NAMESAKE B+ 90

India USA (122 mi) 2006

We all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat.

Something of a feel good movie, based on Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel, the film takes us through a global immersion of mixed cultural messages, most of it saturated in the distinctively Indian musical score by DJ Nitin Sawhney, along with a colorful palette accentuated by the distinguished camerawork of Frederick Elmes, David Lynch’s cameraman on ERASERHEAD, BLUE VELVET, and WILD AT HEART, a man who finds amazing street venues in both Calcutta, India, and New York City, both cities teeming with the rhythms and vitality of life. The appeal of both locations is necessary in this film, as it’s the story of a family that is rooted to their home (India), as well as their home away from home (America). What follows is little more than a typical family evolution, newly arrived immigrants feeling dislocated and out of place in a strange new land, their offspring carrying something of an Americanized chip on their shoulders about the “old country,” feeling every bit the selfish entitlement of any new generation, as the focus of the story shifts away from the parents to the younger son after college, but it’s given a sensuous texture awash in acute female observation that makes all the difference in the world, as the director has a keen eye for small details that raises the level of interest simply by the way it’s presented.

Opening on a fateful train ride in India where a man is reading Gogol’s short story, The Overcoat, the story follows that young man, Irrfan Khan, into a curiously liberated family arranged marriage to the lovely Bollywood actress Tabu, both emigrating to America where he has a job waiting as a college professor. The imagery tells all, as the scenes from India are bustling with vibrant street activity contrasted against the young couple’s claustrophobic apartment walls in America, showing them spending their first winter together stuck indoors. Using beautiful back and forth time sequences as well as a sustained interest in continual visits back home, eventually they have two kids, the older, Gogol, is Kal Penn, while the younger is Nair’s own daughter, Sahira. While the kids become totally immersed in American culture, represented by their indulgent and carefree lifestyles and slang, the mother retains close ties to the local Bengali community and to her family abroad. Despite a strong and quietly tender performance by Khan, the film is largely her story, as she’s the least vocal, the one with the fewest choices, yet her strength and resolve are the mainstay of her family. Linking themes of Motherhood and Mother India, the film lovingly captures her influence, which is to remain behind the scenes, yet have the most profound impact on each one. Nair tends to fall back upon mainstream narrative devices, as does much of Bollywood, but she intersperses the light commercial touches with attempts at social realism, which can be startlingly effective, such as the use of a few off center revelations, an open display of pot smoking, a mixed racial romance, which really did more than just explore the subject, as the time the son spent with the other family really did have an adverse effect on his mother, who was largely kept out of the picture, and it was one of the most anguishing moments in the film.

Some of the best scenes are communal images, the crowded wedding sequences, a family retreat to Oyster Bay, various family gatherings with friends that feature plenty of food and spirited conversations, and a stunning funeral sequence on the Ganges river. There’s even a family pilgrimage to the Taj Mahal which is without pretense, that revitalizes Gogol’s interest in architecture, and that is in keeping with the story, while some of the more forced cultural exchanges reveal Gogol’s initial infatuation with an overly pampered WASP princess, Jacinda Barrett, becoming closer to her family than his own, which actually brought a few gasps from the audience when they realized the effect this was having on his own mother. But these diversionary cultural explorations are treated as exactly that, a temporary phase before coming to their Indian senses, where they’re all one big happy family by the end. After a few serious emotional setbacks, Gogol finds a nice Bengali girl (Zuleikha Robinson) that his mother would approve of, smart and just a bit sultry, but like him, she’s been immersed in European culture, living previously in Paris and London, which from this film’s perspective seems to suggest “damaged” in some kind of way, leaving them smarter but more alienated, less at peace with themselves or their extended families, leaving them less able to fully grasp what's special about the Indian culture, which is so fully enveloped in people, population, socialization, art, and even transcendence. Their marriage is consummated in Bollywood song and dance, baring a hint of nakedness that will probably not be shown in India, and despite their best laid plans, apparently you can’t take Paris out of the girl once she’s been there. The film ends, but doesn’t really provide a satisfactory conclusion, as so much has been left unaddressed and unresolved. But despite the missing pieces, this is an expertly crafted film, filled with loving touches and tender observances, most of which is a joy to behold, as this feels like a sumptuous treat throughout the enjoyable journey.

The pangs of migration, which run through much of Indian-American writing was the theme of the film. And the audience comprised those who could resonate with it by virtue of their own variety of the experience.

A Salman Rushdie-Padma Lakshmi-Mira Nair billing guaranteed the success of the premiere of The Namesake as the opening event of Aroon Shivdasani's sixth Indo-American Arts Council film festival in Manhattan on November 1.

The event was Indian American to the core, with its celebrities thronging the hall and delaying the performance by chatting away much beyond the social hour.

What sets The Namesake apart from the other Indian nostalgia-cum-rebellion movies is the sensitivity with which the writer Jhumpa Lahiri and the director Mira Nair have treated the story.

Tabu, apparently Mira's third choice for the lead role, lifted Ashima, the Bengali bride, who had more than her share of stress and trauma, to the level of a heroine of legendary proportions. The serenity and calm on her face even at the height of emotional drama, speak volumes of her innate strength, which initially prompts her to accept the challenge of a life abroad.

When she is told at the traditional 'bride viewing' about the loneliness of housewives abroad, her response is that, after all, 'he' will be with her and she hardly knew him! She faces adversity stoically and has a life as a singer beyond the dissolution of her family and her husband's death. Her grief is dignified and her acting restrained.

Irrfan Khan as Ashoke Ganguly is the perfect Bengali intellectual, to whom books gave the joy of travel without moving an inch. Nikolai Gogol, the mystic writer from the Ukraine inspired him more than the Bengali masters to the extent that he gives his son the name Gogol, which has a Bengali ring about it.

It is a copy of Gogol's Overcoat that changes his life in more ways than one, but he does not even try to persuade his son not to change his name into Nikhil, an uncanny adaptation of Nikolai. He is an extraordinary liberal father when it comes to his children and there is hardly any clash between father and son on account of their cultural identities.

He clings to his values and culture, but does not resent the customs of others, even a peck on the cheek by his son's girlfriend. He accepts the transition with dignity and even trains his wife for a life without him by moving to another city for a while.

Even the way he faces death, without protesting against his having to wait in line for medical attention makes him an embodiment of pathos. He may be a bit unreal in the context of desi culture in the US, but not exaggerated or artificial. His Bengali pride and sense of history stand out in the film.

Kal Penn is an unusual Indian name, but as Gogol, he is the epitome of the second-generation desi in America. He is tethered to the rock of an Indian upbringing, but he pulls it as far as he can to be part of the culture that he has to live in. He is extremely loyal to his parents, but sees no contradiction in having a family of his own by virtue of a relationship with a white girl. He quickly accepts his mother's suggestion to marry an Indian, but ironically finds that his Indian wife is disloyal.

Gogol's relationship with his mother and father is portrayed in a subtle manner and he becomes the true hero of the movie when he handles his varied roles with equal devotion.

Others in the film, except Jacinda Barrett, Gogol's American girlfriend, are just part of the wide canvas that Mira Nair uses to tell her story. None of them commands individual attention. But all of them merge into the scenery and accentuate different aspects of desi life in America. The slice of desi life that the film presents is authentic.

Jhumpa Lahiri was not at the premiere, but it is her genius that permeates the film. Mira Nair did justice to the novel by her casting, her sympathy for the theme, which, she said, was her own story in a way, and her superb sense of timing. The opening scene in an Indian train and the accident that follows bring in the change in the Ganguly family with a bang.

The film is likely to lose a couple of its explicit sex scenes when it opens in India. But the scenes are integral to the movie and the first scene of Ashoke and Ashima in bed with all their clothes on contrasts with the prompt shedding of clothes by Gogol's Indian girlfriend. Migration, it is clear, changes even the way people make love.

Indian Americans love to delve deep into their own lives and they lap up all the desi literature and movies about themselves. But they are very discriminating in their taste. The Bombay Dreams musical, which did well in London, flopped in New York because of the exacting standards of the Indians in New York.

Many tearjerker tales of desi nostalgia have disappeared without a trace. But The Namesake is sure to be received well when it is commercially released early next year. The celebrity audience on November 1 has already passed the verdict: "Excellent!"

T P Sreenivasan, who recently retired from the Indian Foreign Service, was India's ambassador to the United Nations, Vienna, and governor for India, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna.

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

The Namesake begins at Calcutta’s Howrah train station. Crowded, raucous, and large, the place is full of travelers going in different directions, mothers and fathers, sons and sisters, imagining themselves into unknowable futures. Inside a train car, a mother fans her child, a thin arm dangles from a bunk, and the camera picks up a young man, Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan), his head buried in a book, Gogol’s The Overcoat. An older man encourages him to “see” the world: “You’ll never regret it.” Ashoke smiles, “My grandfather said that’s what books are for, to travel without moving an inch.” Quiet and respectful, their exchange lasts only a minute or two. And then the train crashes.

In this moment, amid wreckage and noise and moaning survivors, The Namesake begins again. Ashoke next appears in bed, his face bruised nearly beyond recognition, his leg in a cast. Though the movie doesn’t specify the process of his coming decisions, this briefly held image intimates his thinking. He will see the world, he will move. In fact, he moves to New York City, with a PhD in fiber optics, and becomes a university professor. Still, he reveres his family and traditions, and in the film’s third sequence, he selects an Indian wife to accompany him back to America.

Or, you could say, she selects him. Ashima (Tabu) makes her first appearance as she scurries to meet Ashoke at her parents’ home. The year is 1977, the marriage is arranged, and their first encounter is perfect. Just before she walks into the room where they wait, she peeks inside, then looks down at the shoes left outside the door. She pauses, removes her own embroidered slippers, and slides her bare feet into Ashoke’s stylish American shoes, trying out the fit. The meeting that follows is charming in a gentle, pleasant way—she recites Wordsworth ("I wandered lonely as a cloud"), Ashoke shyly smiles—but throughout, the lovely moment of the shoes lingers in your mind’s eye, an indication of their now unknowable future.

Adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel by Sooni Taraporevala, Mira Nair’s movie is laced through with such details—of color, gesture, and understanding—moments at once metaphorical and explicit, revealing complex subjective states. Attentive to surfaces as well as nuances, The Namesake is about legacies and responsibilities, ambitions and dislocations. It is also about searches for homes and origins, as these lead not back to where you’ve come from, but instead to unexpected places.

Ashoke and Ashima’s travels take them to one another and beyond. In the movie, their roles and discoveries are extended from those in the novel, such that they lead not only to their son Gogol, the novel’s protagonist, but also to one another. Thus the film offers three protagonists, their experiences intertwined, embarking on journeys back and forth in time and between New York and Calcutta. During the first weeks of their marriage, as Ashima adjusts to life in Ashoke’s one-bedroom apartment in Yonkers, they recognize in one another desires to see the world, to taste, feel, and share it with one another.

Their initial realization is provoked when Ashima, in an effort to be a good wife, takes Ashoke’s clothes to the laundromat, shrinking his favorite sweater to child’s size. His upset soon becomes empathy, as she locks herself in the bathroom, the full weight of their separate choices to move to America with a stranger suddenly clear. As she cracks the door, they see one another anew.

Their mutual commitment expands with the birth of Gogol, whose name is a function of the slippage between old and new that informs the Gangulis’ lives. Waiting to receive a “good name” (a public name) from Ashima’s grandmother back in India, they give the infant a private, familial name, after Ashoke’s favorite writer. The boy’s own relationship to the name adjusts over time, as does his relationship to his background. Raised in the States, he and his younger sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) imagine themselves Americans, eager to slough off the backwards old world. He embraces the name’s oddity as a four-year-old (played by Soham Chatterjee), as Ashima notes, “In this country, the children decide.” But a rock-music-loving teenager (played by Kal Penn), Gogol wonders at his parents’ selection. Listing the facts he’s recently discovered—Gogol was a hypochondriac and starved himself to death—he asks, “Did you guys know all this stuff about him when you decided to name me after him?” Ashima’s response is oblique but to the point of their evolving generational and cultural divide: “Don’t call us ‘guys’! Sometimes when I close my eyes, I feel like I’ve given birth to strangers!”

It’s a funny and surprising little explosion, especially as Ashima quite embodies patience throughout the film. But it speaks to the incongruities all the Gangulis come to feel at some point or another, in relation to each other and their various settings. A trip to India occasions still other changes. While Ashoke and Ashima look back, briefly (he wonders why she agreed to marry him back in 1974), Gogol seeks his own ground. Rejecting a ride in a rickshaw ("It’s feudal, it’s exploitative"), he discovers a calling when they see the Taj Mahal. “I want to major in architecture,” he announces, “It’s got everything.”

As the family travels from New York to Calcutta and back again, they pass by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s “Travelogues” installation at JFK Airport’s international terminal. Holographic images transform depending on passersby’s positions, such that dark-skinned figures become light and vice versa. Identities are fluid and location affects perspective slides easily into the film’s interests in individuals’ mutating self-understandings over time and places. Their arrival home again, now the burbs, brings to bear the other side of living in the U.S., when they find graffiti on their mailbox. Gogol fumes that he’ll exact revenge on the “racist punk” responsible, but he soon finds other ways to define himself anew.

The fact that his major decisions along this route are embodied by girls he loves—the exceedingly pale and rich Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a fellow student at Yale, and the “exotic” world traveler and fellow Bengali Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson)—is vaguely tiresome. They’re less characters than elaborations on Gogol’s fleeting desires. Still, the film’s more consistent focus, on Gogol’s relationships with his parents, is increasingly rewarding, as their pasts and presents come together in a kind of collage—much like the colorful cutout cards Ashima pastes together at Christmas, their experiences don’t so much blend as they intersect.

Though Gogol imagines himself to be sophisticated, enlightened, and “American,” he’s also drawn back repeatedly to his family, and more specifically, to the traditions they revere. Rendered in visual impressions rather than plotty assertions, these complex relationships are affecting and unforgettable: during a phone call to Ashima, Ashoke presses his hand against the phone booth’s glass, his flesh paled by the pressure; visiting his father’s temporary apartment (during a semester when he’s teaching at another college), Gogol slips his feet into Ashoke’s shoes, much as his mother did so many years before, a gesture of intimacy and longing. Such moving details make The Namesake both exquisite and expansive.

Film Journal International (David Noh)

Mira Nair's compelling family unit of The Namesake makes this her best film to date. Adapting Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, she tells the story of Indian immigrants Ashima (Tabu) and Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) who emigrate from India to New York and bring up their children, Sonia (Sahira Nair) and Gogol (Kal Penn). The latter has been named after the famously depressed and depressing Russian writer, which proves a source of contention, as well as inspiration, throughout his entire life.

Few film directors have captured the real immigrant experience with the uncanny empathy which Nair has here. It's refreshing to see such a tale, less wrapped up with economic survival than it is with the emotional. There are no cutes-y immigrant jokes about assimilation or funny accents: This family is, like so many, just as well-heeled--if not more--and sophisticated as any upscale American clan. Scenes of Gogol's encounters in a posh white world, whether at his architecture firm or with his blonde, culturally challenged girlfriend, Maxine, and her family and friends, have a fresh authenticity that will click in audience minds.

The film feverishly cuts back and forth between New York and India, aptly depicting the heady schizophrenia of immigrants torn between two homes. Aided by Frederick Elmes' lusciously sensitive cinematography, Nair's movie is alive to things seen and experienced for the first time by the newly arrived, be it the frozen twig Ashima notices from her first shabby Queens apartment window to the Taj Mahal itself, which her children gaze at in wonder. And just as perceptive is Nair's way with her actors, who deliver a gallery of unforgettably affecting performances.

One hopes, by the time Oscar nominations are announced next year, that Tabu's magnificent portrayal will not be forgotten. Her range is spellbinding here, going from the exquisite, painted young bride who, in her New World innocence, tearfully shrinks her husband's entire wardrobe at the laundromat, to a traditionally possessive mother ensconced in her elegant Westchester pile, and finally, the heartbreakingly dignified widow who realizes the need to let go of what she loves most. Khan has the less showy role, but he impresses mightily nevertheless, with his nobility of spirit and quiet intelligence. Penn goes way beyond the facile comedy roles he's seemed trapped in and is utterly convincing, whether playing the callous young yuppie, too busy with Maxine (an amusing, affecting Jacinda Barrett) to be with family, or the maturing soul who finally realizes the depth of blood connections. As Moushumi, the Bengali girl considered the perfect wife for him, Zuleikha Robinson conveys potent sensuality and smarts, as Elmes' camera worships the beauty of the line of her throat on a first date.

The Namesake is also graced with one of the best music scores heard in years, by Nitin Sawhney. It's a pungent masala of modern raga, urban hiphop and a lovely, surprising--and obligatory--Bollywood musical moment on Gogol's wedding night.

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

You wouldn't envy any filmmaker entrusted with the task of adapting a novel as delicate as "The Namesake." In Jhumpa Lahiri's book, which opens in the late '60s, a young Bengali couple, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, move to Cambridge, Mass., to start a new life and a family. When their son is born, they don't have a name for him -- the name is to be chosen by Ashima's elderly grandmother in India, and the letter has somehow gone astray -- and so, spontaneously, they decide to call him Gogol, a name that has special significance for Ashoke, enamored as he is of the great Russian writers. Gogol will be his pet name, the one used at home by his family; Ashoke and Ashima will know his "good" name -- the name by which he'll be known in the outside world -- when that letter finally arrives.

But it never does, and so Gogol keeps his makeshift name, one that begins to bother him as he reaches adolescence: It represents all his conflicted feelings about who he is and where he's come from.

All of memory, and all of life, is made up of mundane details, and the novelist's job -- as well as the filmmaker's -- is to sift through and find just the right ones. In her adaptation of "The Namesake," Mira Nair hits it right at least half the time. In places, the movie feels aimless and misshapen; it doesn't have the gentle but focused energy of Lahiri's book. And sometimes Nair goes overboard in heightening the cultural contrasts -- the inevitable incongruities between East and West -- that Lahiri navigates so subtly.

Even so, Nair (whose previous movie was the 2004 "Vanity Fair") manages to infuse the movie with not-too-cloying sweetness, perhaps partly because she knows when to back off and allow her two older actors -- Irrfan Khan, as Ashoke, and the Bollywood star Tabu, who plays Ashima -- to carry the movie. Their scenes together (and luckily they have many of them) are so lovely, and so deeply believable, that the movie's other flaws momentarily melt away.

The movie version of "The Namesake" -- the script is by Sooni Taraporevala -- opens in India, first with a flashback, and then with the arrangement of Ashima and Ashoke's marriage: Ashoke and his family have been invited to Ashima's house, where the prospective bride and groom will meet for the first time. Before Ashima, a nicely mannered young girl with an interest in singing, even meets Ashoke, she sees his shoes in the hallway -- they're two-tone wingtips unlike anything she's seen before. The label inside these exotic oxfords reads (a bit too clearly, given that the shoes are so worn) "Made in U.S.A." She impulsively slips her feet into them, as if trying a new life on for size, a detail drawn straight from Lahiri's book.

Nair has moved the story's early setting from 1960s Cambridge to 1980s New York, specifically Queens, and we see Ashoke -- a bespectacled professor who must have looked middle-aged even as a teenager -- explaining the intricacies of a subway map to his timid and bewildered wife, or offering to make her a cup of tea. Ashoke and Ashima eventually have two children, Gogol and Sonia (from adolescence to adulthood, they're played by Kal Penn and Sahira Nair), who grow up to be so-called typical American kids, even as their parents unthinkingly cling to many of the old ways: We see Gogol and Sonia plopping down to eat at the family's kitchen table, with knife and fork, while Ashoke still scoops up rice with his fingers.

Gogol doesn't exactly reject his family, but he gradually distances himself, becoming engrossed in the new life he's found with his sophisticated, upper-class American girlfriend, Maxine (Jacinda Barrett). Gogol's confusion and frustration are the cornerstone of Lahiri's book -- and the focus of Nair's movie, too: The problem is that Penn isn't, at least not yet, a graceful enough actor to carry so much dramatic weight. Penn is wonderful in the picture he's best known for, the 2004 "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" (a pleasurable stoner comedy that speaks volumes about race in America, specifically for what it doesn't say). Penn is an extremely likable actor, but he clamps down on the character of Gogol a bit too hard; Gogol's internal conflicts come out a little too aggressively in Penn's line readings and not enough in his gestures, his expression. This is a performance that's almost there, but not quite.

It also suffers in comparison with those of Khan and, especially, Tabu. Nair's approach is sometimes too heavy-handed in "The Namesake": For example, she has Maxine show up at an Indian memorial service in a dressy black tank top, while everyone else is covered up with sleeves and saris. Clueless as Americans can be, a character like Maxine would certainly know that you don't wear a tank top, even a nice one, to a funeral, but Nair seems to have added this detail to enhance the distinction between Maxine's world and Gogol's, and the extra hammering isn't necessary.

But Nair clearly feels at ease with Tabu and Khan. Their scenes are the ones that breathe most naturally; their grace feels unforced and unrehearsed. Nair shows us the newlywed couple in bed together, modestly clothed, and suggests, without overstatement, that the tentativeness with which they respond to each other's touch has more to do with passion than with restraint. In a later scene, Ashima teases Ashoke when he offers a thinly veiled expression of his love for her. She asks him, flirtatiously, if he wants her to say in response "I love you," as American couples do.

Khan plays Ashoke not as a bumbler but as a shy, thoughtful person who takes satisfaction and pleasure in having built a good life for himself and his family; Khan gets subtleties like that across with just a glance, or a small half-smile. And Tabu -- a great beauty with deeply expressive eyes and a smile capable of betraying a little sadness in the corners -- plays Ashima as a woman who's frustrated and slightly heartbroken by her wayward son's indifference. Yet her children aren't everything to her. The movie version of "The Namesake" -- like the book it's based on -- isn't just about the bond between parents and children, but about that between husbands and wives. Ashima and Ashoke barely touch in "The Namesake." But their romance -- one that, like real-life romance, includes all kinds of suffering, joy and petty annoyances -- ends up being both the backbone and the heart of the movie.

Reel.com [Tim Knight]

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The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

Slate (Dana Stevens)

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Nair, Murali

A DOG’S DAY B 86

India (74 mi) 2001

Terrific, tongue-in-cheek humor, a kind of mock documentary about the perils of democracy, told in a kind of “King Lear” style set in this tiny riverside village, where the village Lord decides to honor his noble servant by bestowing upon him a medal and giving him a dog, from which the villager’s lives are forever haunted, as the dog kills a duck, bites a young boy, and is rumored to be carrying rabies just to wreak havoc on the villagers by the Lord, who has freed them from his imperial servitude. The deadpan humor of the hair salon and the Lord’s elders could be out of a Monty Python skit, and it is only after a meeting on the plains where the villagers return the dog to the Lord that any peace prevails. The film features non-professional actors, local folk music, and brightly colored costumes, the camera captures wonderful portrait images, there’s very little dialogue, and the film meanders at a languorous pace, clocking in at 74 minutes, produced by flying elephant films.

Nakache, Olivier and Eric Toledano

LET’S BE FRIENDS C 72

France (100 mi) 2005

A film that treads no new ground, it’s a light breezy comedy that mixes silly, ridiculous humor with the serious difficulty people have relating to others, especially when they’re single and lonely. Using Vegas-like jazzed up music that could just as easily be Tom Jones or Robert Goulet, where it’s actually the style of music played at weddings, Gérard Depardieu latches onto the shyest guy at a wedding, sour-faced and insecure Jean-Paul Rouve, and turns this into a buddy movie that resembles the zany antics of a road movie, or Felix and Oscar in THE ODD COUPLE, as the two of them move from one misadventure to another, clinging to each other for support, even joining a singles club that works on improving their self-esteem while charging them exorbitant fees on their credit cards. Depardieu is an expert at crashing wedding parties, thinking that’s the easiest way to meet girls, but the two of them are soon taking their chances at speed dating, speaking to seven different girls in seven minutes. Rouve is obviously the more sensitive and tender of the two, used to being responsible, taking care of his humorously forgetful mother, Annie Girardot, even providing better fatherly care and concern for Depardieu’s children, while Depardieu disguises all his problems with an air of confidence, but is still hurting from a marriage that doesn’t work leaving him separated for two years. They go back and forth arguing with one another, getting into more and more mischief, and eventually make no more progress than where they were at the start of the film, except now, they have a better understanding of one another. But this is a film about getting rejected with the line “Let’s be friends,” and trying to rebound the next day and try it all over again. While it has some laughs, it was largely due to how ridiculous the situations are, particularly musically, as this kind of music has been out of date in films now since the 50’s.

Nakamura, Eric and Michael Idemoto

SUNSETS B+ 92

USA (98 mi) 1997

A disturbing, Jim Jarmusch-style social documentary about alienated youth in Watsonville, California, filmed in grainy Black and White, featuring an overwhelmingly real performance by a character Gary, Josh Brand, a Neal Cassidy-style temperamental redneck hothead who goes in and out of prison and just lights up the screen. Dave, a low key Latino, works in a comic book store, while Mark, an Asian-American teen (film director Michael), is quietly planning to attend college in the fall. Together they drink beer, cruise, vandalize and steal, for lack of anything better to do, all the while discussing issues of life and mortality, revealing how race and class differences have already determined where each of these men will end up. This is a summer of Beat heaven which is marred somewhat by a rather amateurish intro and ending in a diary-style narration, but images of this film, particularly Gary, are indelible.

Nakashima, Tetsuya

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO

Japan (130 mi) 2006

Memories Of Matsuko (9.5) Luna6 from Lunapark6

Sho, a young teenager that lives by himself in Tokyo, receives a surprise visit from his father. His father is carrying a white box, the he explains to his son, contains the ashes of his Aunt Matsuko. She was recently found murdered by a river in Akawara. His father explains that Aunt Matsuko lived alone and because he has to go back to his hometown, asks Sho to go to his aunts’ former apartment and clean up any mess that may be left behind.

Once Sho, arrives at his Aunt’s apartment, he discovers that she lived in a filthy old apartment, full of trash bags filled with junk that she has had collected over the years. Sho does not remember ever meeting Matsuko, nor does he know of anything about her past. As he goes through her belongings and speaks with some of her neighbors, he gradually pieces together her life which was filled with tragedy and heartbreak.

From the very beginning of the film, Memories of Matsuko had me floored with a mix of admiration, melancholy, and laughter. I have seen the director Tetsuya Nakashima’s prior film Kamikaze Girls, so I was prepared for some stylish & visually arresting camera work. What I wasn’t prepared for was an epic story, told through flashbacks, in which the audience experiences a technicolor like 1950’s musical (think Bob Fosse) interspersed with a truly heart breaking story that would make Billie Holiday’s life seem like a walk in the park. Although Kamikaze Girls had its moments, Memories of Matsuko is just leaps and bounds superior to that film and for that matter, just about every other film that I have seen.

One of the strongest aspects about the film would be the story of Matsuko’s life told through those amazing flashbacks. Once Sho arrives at Matsuko’s former apartment, we quickly learn about Matsuko’s past and what a tragic past she had! The first flashback scene shows her as a popular high school music teacher. She is summoned to a meeting because of a reported theft that occurred at a local inn. The principle believes that the theft was perpetrated by one of Matsuko’s students. She is told to confront her student, named Ryu, and find out whether he really stole the money. This is where the tragedy starts to begin. The student refuses to admit to the theft and Matsuko attempts the solve the problem herself. She takes money from Ryu’s room and goes to the inn keeper to pay him back. When the inn keeper asks to see Ryu for a personal apology, Matsuko makes the unfortunate decision to take the blame for the theft. Soon, her career as a teacher is ruined and eventually she gets disowned by her family. Through another flashback, we learn that Matsuko had a chronically ill younger sister who always seemed to have been favored by her father. Since those early days, Matsuko has always sought after men that would give her the unconditional love that her father failed to give to her e.g., the desire to please for affection (trying to solve the theft dilemma with her student). Tragically, just about every man she got involved with turned out to be extremely cruel and abusive towards her.

Beyond the stellar script and the creative camerawork in Memories of Matsuko, you also have an ensemble cast of actors that ranged from very good to amazing. Most noteworthy would be Miki Nakatani, playing the main character of Matsuko. The range of emotions she had to display during the movie pretty much encompassed every single human emotion possible. Interestingly enough, Kou Shibasaki (Battle Royale/Crying Out Love In The Center Of The World) plays a small role in this film as Sho’s girlfriend. The resemblance between Miki Nakatani and Kou Shibasaki are so strong, that at a certain points in the film, I thought we would discover that Matsuko had a daughter and that daughter would turn out to be Sho’s girlfriend! Another standout actor in the movie would have been Eita, who played Sho. Although his character did not require the level of difficulty as Matsuko’s character, his role as the storyteller and calming influence after some of the more difficult to watch flashback sequences were appreciated. Another thing I can say about Eita, is that he gets to play in some seriously great films (Summer Time Machine Blues, Sukida, Hanging Garden, Waterboys, Azumi and now Memories Of Matsuko)!

Memories of Matsuko is like a very dark fairy tale wrapped around technicolor art and a soundtrack to drool over. From the beginning to end you will likely be inundated with these different emotions that comes at you in waves. I did find that during the ending - I had to take a break from the film. The emotions were just getting a little too heavy if you catch my drift (*sniff* *sniff*). Check this one out - what an amazing film!

Nakata, Hideo

Hideo Nakata: Director of dread - CNN.com March 11, 2008

(CNN) -- Japanese writer and director Hideo Nakata has been hailed as the modern master of macabre.

His 1998 film "Ringu" -- adapted from a novel by Suzuki Koji, the Japanese Steven King -- redefined the horror genre, propelled Nakata into the international spotlight and soon had Hollywood calling.

Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1961, Nakata enrolled at the University of Tokyo to study journalism.

On graduating he went on to work in Japan's Nikkatsu Studios, the same place where renowned director Akira Kurosawa started out. He didn't' start out aiming to make horror films, but it was Nikkatsu Studios that Nakata met Hiroshi Takahashi, the screenplay writer for "Ringu."

An international hit, "Ringu" centers on a cursed videotape that kills whoever watches it.

It appeared in cinemas at the same time mainstream western horror films were churning out gruesome violence as the means to get audiences hiding behind their popcorn.

Nakata's artfully directed and terrifying film was a nether-world away from these schlock horror and slasher flicks, instead utilizing suspense and a pervading sense of dread.

Western audiences expecting to watch good-looking teenagers getting chopped up in a blizzard of gore were treated to something much creepier.

For Hollywood producers, Nakata has been a gold-mine of remake material. If dread is the word that has become synonymous with Nakata's work, there was a great sense of it among many of Nakata's fans when it was announced that there would be a Hollywood remake of "Ringu," starring Naomi Watts.

Despite fans claiming that the terror of the original was lost in translation, Nakata himself was given the opportunity to direct the Hollywood sequel, "The Ring 2," in 2005.

The series' success has spawned a third installment, due to be released in 2009 that Nakata will also be directing.

Shunning computer generated monsters or gallons of fake-blood and guts, "Ringu" and other Nakata films including "Dark Water," which was also remade by Hollywood in 2005, use glimpses of mysterious abstract images -- a reflection in a TV screen, an unsettling, spreading damp patch of water -- to ratchet up the terror.

Fans and critics have compared the chilling atmosphere of his films with that of Roman Polanski's work, in "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant."

Nakata then has been credited with turning on a whole new audience to Asian horror films with an altogether more subtle approach to scaring the wits out of people.

Hideo Nakata Norman England at Fangoria from Horror Directors

While majoring in applied physics at Japan's top ranked Tokyo University, Nakata attended a seminar on cinema given by a professor who was also a renowned film critic. Influenced by this, Nakata switched his major to liberal arts and began watching movies feverishly. Upon graduating he landed a job at Nikkatsu Studios as an assistant director, and spent the next 7 years working on dozens of productions for a variety of filmmakers, including Kumashiro Tatsumi and Kudo Elichi.

Eventually Nakata began directing a documentary. However money was tight and he didn't have enough to complete the project. Badly in need of money he wrote several synopses for horror films and submitted them to Takenori Sento (who would later produce RING). One of them was GHOST ACTRESS, and it became his first feature. Unfortunately the film was an utter failure, but after it came out on video, it started to get good word of mouth.

One of those who watched the movie was RING author Koji Suzuki. A best selling book, RING had already been adapted as a TV movie, and its publisher was looking to turn it into a motion picture. Nakata and scriptwriter Hiroshi Takahashi were asked to take the job and between them decided to strip the story down to its basics and present it with constant forward motion. Through meticulous attention to its structure, Nakata sought to create a film that unsettled viewers, rather than one utilizing traditional shock tactics and startle effects. Perhaps the best example of of Nakata's method can be seen in his creation of the "revenge' video of the story's ghostly antagonist, Sadako. The mainstay of the narrative, this tape leaves its viewers dead of fright a week after viewing. Nakata knew this element was key to the film's success and had to be truly disturbing.

"The video was a major part of the RING production" Nakata explains. "In the book, it runs about 20 minutes and has a concrete story. I decided that it should not describe anything in solid terms, as it would play several times in the film. I felt that if it were too explanatory, it would become boring after repeated viewings. Only eight shots long, it took two days to shoot. I then spent 24 hours editing and processing it using computer effects. The sound was important, and I underlaid several unsettling noises that added to the visuals. The video in itself is not scary, but it's unnerving and leaves the audience feeling anxious"

Nakata confesses that he considers himself not a horror director, but a celluloid craftsman who believes that the careful assembly of scenes can make viewers experience a wide variety of emotions. "As a professional filmmaker, I look at it as a challenge to describe on film whatever feeling the story demands. To me, describing love, laughs or screams are not much different. By playing with expectations, I found I can create a multitude of base feelings - in the case of RING, total fear."

When queried on the state of modern horror, Nakata is quick to reply. "Horror as a form has changed greatly over the past 20 years. I don't believe that blood, ugly creatures or scary monsters work any longer. The reason is that young people have become accustomed to not only overstimulated movies, but to true terror as well. In Japan we have a rising tide of children killing parents, parents killing children, as well as killer cults. As a result, if I create a monster for a film, even if it is effective, young people will see it in relation to this true terror and respond with laughter. Horror in the future should address not specifics, but concern itself more with the construction of the terror of the environment and a horrific atmosphere.

Hideo Nakata > Overview - AllMovie bio from Jason Buchanan

Hideo Nakata Filmography Fandango

Hideo Nakata - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine, April 26, 2004

Hideo Nakata heads into 'Chatroom' - Entertainment News, Film News ... Patrick Frater from Variety, November 4, 2008

The "Ring" Master: Interview With Hideo Nakata Interview by Donato Totaro from Offscreen, July 21, 2000

The Ring Two Interview with director Hideo Nakata on YouTube from Spike, January 20, 2005 (4:52)

Quint interviews original RINGU and current RING TWO director ... Ain’t It Cool News, January 25, 2005

Hideo Nakata Interview Martyn Palmer interviews Hideo Nakata – Ring 2, from Made in Atlantis (2005)

Q&A with Hideo Nakata - News - Film - Time Out London Interview by Chris Tilly, April 1, 2005

Hideo Nakata - Japanese Horror Films Interview by Kateigaho International Edition, Winter 2005

'Ring' director's spooky tales | The Japan Times Online Jasion Gray interview, August 3, 2007

Twitch - Hideo Nakata Talks FOREIGN FILMMAKERS' GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD ... Jason Gray interview, April 1, 2009

Hideo Nakata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GHOST ACTRESS (Joyû-rei)

aka: Don’t Look Up

Japan (75 mi) 1996

User comments from imdb Author: cecil2

This film is great at putting ideas into the viewer's subconscious. The whole simple idea of the story is great, by having the characters shoot a film such that the viewer almost feels like they are separated from the characters and in tune with the supernatural. Since you are watching people making a movie investigating another movie, it brings you into the action, as if the same things could happen to you. The blandness of some scenes on the surface is really fun when contrasted against the supernatural events that happen later. An example is a line where the director tells the actress not to "look down" when saying her lines, when she really shouldn't be "looking up" later when she encounters the ghost. One of the most interesting things about this movie is that you wouldn't even think this was a ghost story in some scenes until you realize the context it is in. Definitely this is one of the best ghost detective stories, it has an almost meditative nature and makes the movie more scary. The over the shoulder scenes of the ghost are very scary, partly because the movie often shows people filming from the opposite angle, so you are actually watching them film, scenes in which you could become the ghost. By concentrating on the existence of the ghost, the whole movie becomes more scary.

Flipside Movie Emporium (Jim Harper) review [C]

Two years before the release of Ringu, Hideo Nakata directed Ghost Actress (Joyû-rei), his first full-length film. Although it wasn't a commercial success, Ghost Actress attracted the attention of writer Koji Suzuki, who asked Nakata to direct a theatrical version of best-selling novel Ringu. Since then, the film has sold well in Japan and has been picked up by U.S. company Dark Horizons for an English-language remake.

First-time director Murai (Yûrei Yanagi) is trying to complete his debut film, but the shoot keeps being interrupted or impeded by a series of strange events. Scenes from an unreleased (and presumed destroyed) drama from 1971 keep getting mixed up with his negatives; his actresses see a shadowy figure looking down upon them. Predictably it's not long before people start to die. Clearly some supernatural agency is at work, but Murai has only three days left to find out what is going on and finish the shoot.

As with Nakata's later films, Ghost Actress concentrates heavily on atmosphere. If you've seen Ringu and Dark Water (Honogurai mizo no soko kara, 2002), you'll be familiar with the main technique used to establish this mood: glimpses of a ghostly figure, out-of-focus and often partially hidden behind characters in the foreground. Unfortunately, Nakata allows the ghost's early appearances to last far too long, instead of using brief flashes that make the viewer wonder what exactly they've just seen. Nakata himself has stated that his main mistake was to reveal the ghost too early and too completely, and it's hard to disagree.

The film's second major flaw is the absence of a satisfactory climax. While both Ringu and Dark Water built up inexorably to a high-tension finale, Ghost Actress has a brief, almost cursory climax. There is no momentum, no build to a final, devastating scene. Given that the film is barely 75 minutes in length, Nakata could have extended it by another half-an-hour without stretching the patience of the audience. In keeping with Dark Water, however, Ghost Actress does boast an enigmatic epilogue that seems less than completely necessary.

Leaving the flaws aside, Ghost Actress is well-made film that shows definite signs of Nakata's latent ability. The use of the film-within-a-film motif works well, with the disturbing nature of the secondary story -- a woman murders one of her friends and then takes her place, bringing up her victim's young child -- reinforcing the main story's unsettling atmosphere. Certain scenes are shown during rehearsal and again in the finished form, with lines from the script assuming new significance in the light of events in the studio. The cast is competent and professional, including several well-known actors. Yûrei Yanaga appeared in Ringu and Ringu 2 (1999), as well as the original V-cinema (direct-to-video) Ju-on (2000). Veteran Ren Osugi is well-known figure on the Japanese exploitation scene, having worked with Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Toshiharu Ikeda, to name just a few.

For the most part, Ghost Actress is exactly what you'd expect it to be -- a less well-developed but still promising precursor to Ringu. To criticize the director for not being as good in 1996 as he would be later is childish however; Ghost Actress is still an enjoyable experience for anyone who appreciates a ghost story with a couple of cheap shocks thrown in.

Black Hole DVD Reviews

Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [3/5]

EvilDread.com

RINGU

aka: The Ring

Japan (96 mi) 1998

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4.5/5]

While there have been many slasher and monster films that shock us with excessive gore, few recent horror films actually create that overwhelming sense of terror that stays with us long after the film has finished. Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s Ring is a rare exception, making it one of the most frightening films since The Shining.

While investigating the sudden death of a group of students, reporter Nanako Matsushima (Reiko Asakawa) discovers a cursed videocassette. Watching the video, she then receives a phone call telling her she will die in exactly a week. After having discovered that this is also how the students had died, Nanako reluctantly enlists the help of her ex-husband to track down the source of the tape.

Rather than resorting to sudden surprises or gruesome effects, Ring slowly builds in tension and dread by not only exploiting our fear of the unknown, but by exploiting the terror of everyday things taking on unfamiliar meanings. The steady camera work, restrained performances, long silences and macabre sound design all combine to generate the nightmarish sensation of an uneasiness that cannot be explained, only experienced.

Refreshingly free of social metaphor or self-parody Ring is proudly content to simply be an incredibly scary film.

Midnight Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Jasper Sharp

As a rule of thumb, Japanese horrors have traditionally either been grounded in folklore and legend in ghost stories such as Masaki Kobayashi's portmanteau of Lafcadio Hearn short stories, Kwaidan (Kaidan, 1964) or Satsuo Yamamoto's The Bride From Hell (Kaidan Botandoro, 1968), or merely oriental riffs on transplanted Western gothic staples, such as Lake of Dracula (Chi O Suu Me, 1971 - Michio Yamamoto) or The Ghost of the Hunchback (Kaidan Semushi Otoko, 1965 - Hajime Sato).

Ring takes a leaf from the sanitised teen-pitched US genre revival spearheaded by Wes Craven's Scream cycle in locating its story in a contemporary setting, but adopts a considerably more sombre and narrative-driven approach to the material, marrying the urban mythological basis of The Blair Witch Project (1999) with the vengeful ghost scenario so rooted in the Japanese chiller.

Adapted from the popular novel written by Koji Suzuki, Nakata's high-concept popcorn movie was a box-office smash when released on a double bill with Joji Iida's Spiral (Rasen, 1998, another Suzuki adaptation) in February of 1998, rapidly becoming the top grossing horror of all time at the domestic box office and setting in motion a torrent of terrors that included Shikoku and Tomie.

The story centres around a video, which once seen causes the viewer to die mysteriously within the space of a week. An investigation into the deaths of two teenage girls by TV journalist Reiko (Matsushima) and her ex-husband Ryuji (Sanada, the former 70s action hero and a frequent collaborator with Sonny Chiba) unearths the malefactor, the vindictive ghost of Sadako Yamamura, a child psychic pitched down a well thirty years prior now manifesting herself through means of the aforementioned videotape. To say any more would reveal far too much of a script that leads Reiko through a succession of different locales to the heart of the mystery.

With nothing in the way of gore or nudity and an unobtrusively even editing style, Ring evokes the innate uncanniness of its central premise over the short, sharp shocks one usually associates with modern horrors, and sports some incredibly effective moments, all laid down to an electronic soundtrack of onomatopoeic groans and whirs. You can feel the goosebumps during Sadako's manifestation through the cathode ray tube. Given the sheer artificiality of the film's central concept, not to mention the odd hole in the convoluted and occasionally lackadaisical plotting, it's all down to Nakata's subtle handling of such impressive set pieces that the film works as well as it does.

A sweeping success across Asia and later critically well received upon its European release, Nakata was back to direct the inevitable Ring 2 , released the following year. Neatly picking up from where the first film finished off and adopting pretty much the same formula and approach, the sequel does a pretty good job of continuing the story in an inventive enough fashion. Though neither markedly better or worse than the original, it added little new to the proceedings, and Nakata sensibly stepped aside from the franchise to helm the love story Sleeping Bride (Garasu No Nô). After a spin-off TV series (Ring: Saishusho), Norio Tsuruta took the helm of Ring Ø: Birthday (2000), but by this time the formula was getting decidedly stale.

Ring's remake rights were rapidly snapped up by Dream Works in the US, though at the time of writing, this adaptation has yet to be seen by the general public, going on release on October 18th 2002. Judging by the pre-release trailer, the approach used by director Gore (The Mexican) Verbinski is a marked contrast to the austere restraint of Nakata's original, though advance reports have been positive. No doubt comparisons between the two will prove a futile exercise. Unlike viewers in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Denmark, Germany, the UK and a host of other territories, Dream Works optioning of the remake rights means that the original was never released in the US, meaning audiences there will be unable to decide which approach is the more effective.

The Ring's producer Roy Lee has apparently already acquired the remake rights for a whole host of "unknown" hits from a number of Asian countries, including a couple of Korean films and several more of Nakata's films, the disorienting kidnap thriller, Chaos (2000), with Benicio Del Toro slated to star, and the recent Dark Waters (2002). Either unable or unwilling to compete against Hollywood bombastic market practices, the producers of the Japanese original of the Ring have literally given up the ghost - on Sunday 11th August 2002, during the Japanese public holiday of O-Bon, the Festival of the Dead, a symbolic funeral for Sadako, the leering apparition at the heart of the series was held in Tokyo's Harajuku district.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ring (1997) Mark Kermode, September 2000

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) review

Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV

Flipside Movie Emporium (Gauti Fridriksson) review [A]

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Ebben

DVD Times Colin Polonowski

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

RING Keith from Teleport City

The Ring/Ringu Kent Conrad from Exploded Goat

JackassCritics.com (Tom Blain) dvd review [6/10]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

David Dalgleish review

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Town (Hock Guan Teh) dvd review

DVDActive (Malcolm Campbell) dvd review [6/10]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

Mondo Digital

KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka

The World's Greatest Critic! [J.C. Maçek III]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

Classic Horror review Chrissy Derbyshire

Cinescape dvd review Brian Thomas

Cinema Crazed (Felix Vasquez Jr.) review

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]

Bill's Movie Page Review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Kinocite The Wolf

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

The Digital Bits dvd review Dan Kelly

Mike Bracken review [3/5]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Sarah Stark) review

The Village Voice [Edward Crouse] Focus on New Japanese Cinema

RINGU Bill Chambers from Film Freak Central, while Walter Chaw reviews the American version of THE RING

DVD Times [Kevin Gilvear] The 4-disc RING Trilogy

VideoVista review Peter Schilling reviews the 4-disc RING Trilogy

Digital Lard - Trilogy DVD Review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Variety review

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Blood Feast

CHAOS (Kaosu)

Japan (104 mi) 1999

Time Out London review

This efficient but routine thriller from the director of ‘The Ring’ has been sitting on the shelves since 1999. Hitchcockian to the core, it concerns the kidnapping of banker Komiyama’s (Ken Mitsuishi) wife Saori (Miki Nakatani) by a young handyman (Masato Hagiwara), and from that simple premise soon slips into a whirlwind of blackmail, deceit and double-cross, with an undercurrent of psychosexual role-playing. Nakata handles the material dexterously, using unannounced flashbacks to keep the audience on their toes, but never leaving them so far behind the twists that they can’t appreciate an excellent turn by Nakatini as the unhinged, manipulative Saori. Indeed, it all unfolds with such precision that the greatest shock comes when it becomes clear that Nakata doesn’t quite know how to end things. A slack final ten minutes aside, this is a fine, if ultimately unfulfilling, exercise in thrills by rote.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

A well-tumbled jade of thriller triple-crosses and noirish iconography, Hideo Nakata's Chaos lacks the subterranean frisson of his Ring cycle but maintains their concision and fearsome ellipticality. Blithely cha-cha-ing its way back and forth in narrative time without so much as a clue for the viewer, Chaos begins with a simple kidnapping—an executive's lithe, ravishing wife (Miki Nakatani) disappears from a restaurant's front curb after lunch, and almost immediately she's hog-tied somewhere, the threatening kidnapper (Masato Hagiwara) making a confident ransom call to the all-business hubby (Ken Mitsuishi). Soon enough, however, our concept of the crime gets capsized: Doubling back, we see that the wife had enlisted Hagiwara's baffled handyman to fake the abduction, a process that goes smoothly enough to summon s&m impulses in both faux victim and thug.

Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.) Nakata continues to get the most out of the accusatory glare of gorgeous women, and Nakatani constitutes an irresistibly luscious femme in the James M. Cain mold. Perhaps it's the clammy residue of the Ring films, but Chaos also seems to collect a mood of rainy, outland menace even as it stalks around daylit urbania. The night visits to a shallow grave and a neglected aquarium full of dead fish resonate as memorable genre tropes, although in the end that may be all they are. However surefooted and wicked, Nakata's film may seem a trifle routine; contemporary thrillers have become so much more baroque than any real-life felony that they tend to resemble one another. The convolution becomes the end, not the means. Still, devotees of corpse-swapping betrayal orgies will find expert filmmaking awake to the realities of apprehension and unease.

Chaos Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

As a general rule, foreign filmmakers whose work inspires multiple Hollywood remakes tend to be hacks. A cynical observation, perhaps, but it certainly applies to Japan's Hideo Nakata, whose Ring (1998), a largely tension-free horror flick about a killer videocassette, became last fall's (much superior) sleeper hit The Ring, starring Naomi Watts. Likewise, Nakata's Chaos, made a year later, is currently in development as a project for Robert De Niro and Benicio Del Toro, and one can only hope that director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (Lantana) will find a way to turn this clumsy, derivative thriller into something fresh and arresting.

One aspect they should retain is the film's deliberately confusing structure, in which the narrative jumps back and forth in time without warning or signposts, demanding that the viewer keep track of subtle details (a bandaged hand, a tank of tropical fish) in order to stay oriented. We first see the bandaged hand in the opening scene, which finds a man (Mitsuishi) and a woman (Nakatani) eating lunch together at a posh restaurant. That the man's injury goes unexplained immediately piques our curiosity, since genre films rarely offer irrelevant details. Soon afterward, the man receives a phone call at his office, informing him that the woman—now revealed as his wife—has been kidnapped. At this point, the film abruptly shifts its point of view from the husband to the kidnapper, who has his terrified victim trussed up in an apartment dominated by a tropical fish tank. But the very next scene shows the woman arriving at the kidnapper's home with a naughty smile on her face. What's going on here?

As it turns out, this chronological jumble is doubly effective. Not only does it expertly evoke the condition promised by the title, but the more baffled you are, the longer it'll take you to realize that the plot, which involves a kidnapping that goes awry, closely mirrors that of a very famous Hollywood picture made by a very rotund British director—except that in this case the plangent yearning has been systematically expunged. Once you become conscious of this similarity, the inexpressive mien of Hagiwara (who played the hypnotic killer in Cure with a similar lack of affect) becomes almost intolerable, as you're now mentally juxtaposing his performance with that of [Really Famous Dead Actor]. But even if you have yet to see [Enduring Masterpiece of the Cinema], Chaos's painfully dorky ending is sure to break whatever spell the film has cast. With luck, De Niro will demand another draft

Hideo Nakata's Latest Maze of Death, 'Chaos' - indieWIRE Steve Erickson

An exceedingly grim Hitchcockian riff, Hideo Nakata's "Chaos" is a thriller as obsessed with narrative intricacy as film gets. Compared in Kino's press release to "Pulp Fiction," although it's far harder to follow, this film's spiraling plot is more than just a trick. If Tarantino used his convoluted structure to resurrect a sympathetic character, Nakata uses his to emphasize everyone's essential dirtiness. A despicable person soon winds up as a victim, and vice versa. To lift a phrase from Philip K. Dick, it's a maze of death.

Nakata is best known -- to say the least -- for his 1998 horror film "Ring," which spawned two sequels and a prequel in Japan, as well as Korean and American remakes. ("Chaos" is currently being remade by Jonathan Glazer with Robert de Niro and Benicio del Toro.) The popularity of "Ring" led to a whole wave of Japanese horror films. However, it suffered from a flaccid middle third and an ending blatantly designed as a sequel setup. By contrast, "Chaos" is so tightly plotted that it leaves the awkward structure of "Ring" in the dust. Even so, Nakata has reached higher levels of dread elsewhere, particularly in his more recent "Dark Water."

As "Chaos" begins, businessman Takayuki Komiyama (Ken Mitsuihi) is enjoying lunch with his wife (Miki Nakatani.) He soon returns to his office. Immediately, he receives a phone call informing him that she has been kidnapped. With his apartment full of cops, he gets another call asking him to meet the kidnapper. However, the kidnapper eventually extorts money from his victim's sister. Then the screen fades to black, and we see these events from Mrs. Komiyama's point of view. It turns out that she knows the kidnapper, Goro Kuroda (Masato Hagiwara), and that they have arranged a fake abduction in order to test Takayuki's faithfulness. She seems to enjoy the situation, especially when Goro ties her up.

If it sounds like I'm giving away too much of the plot, trust me: I'm not. The screen cuts to black for the first time at the 20-minute mark, continuing to do so periodically. These cuts indicate a shift in protagonist and time. Takayuki is the initial protagonist, then his wife, then Goro. As each character progresses further and further, they begin to resemble icons in a video game, every "level" (represented by a cut to black) bringing the audience closer to the heart of the story. Mrs. Komiyama even describes her relationship with Goro as a game of tag. "Chaos" never overtly references computers, but it describes a version of virtual reality: an imaginary situation becoming real and doppelgangers coming to life.

Even so, there's something rather arid about Nakata's convoluted story. For all its bite, it never quite connects to the real world. The characters feel like secondhand anti-heroes, femme and homme fatales. Kenji Kawai's score pulses with tom-toms and bass drums as if trying to kickstart their hearts. Many of its exteriors are almost paradoxically sunny and pretty, counteracting the rest of the film's neo-noir feel.

Fear of technology, whether TV and video ("Ring") or the Internet (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse" and the anime series "Serial Experiment Lain"), has been a recurring thread in recent Japanese films. "Ring" clicks with genuine worries about video technology's potentially harmful aesthetic and moral impact. "Chaos," which depicts a world where physical and financial desire trump any sense of responsibility or family ties, won't be mistaken for an ode to the Japanese bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it never feels like a real portrait of Japanese society, just three extremely screwed-up people and a director and screenwriter who use them as though they're participating in a cockfight.

Eventually, the cuts to black become meaningless. Time shifts back and forth, with a major revelation about each character coming every other minute. Each detail is important. For instance, the entire plot turns around the reason why Takayuki wears a bandage around his right hand. Paradoxically, the film may be best seen if one knows nothing about it, but that state may also make it incomprehensible. Considering the utterly cynical 90 minutes that preceded the ending's dark romanticism, it doesn't ring true, but Nakata's gloomy vision of mutually assured destruction loses none of its power. Love will tear his characters apart.

Neil Young's Film Lounge - K is for Chaos | Neil ... - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young, originally written for Impact magazine

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

DVD Times [Kevin Gilvear]

User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

VideoVista review Steven Hampton

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]

DVD Times [Dave Foster]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

LoveAsianFilm.com Martin Cleary

Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [5/5]

Hong Kong Digital (DVD Review) John Charles

DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]

New York Times (registration req'd) Dave Kehr

Ringu 2

Japan (95 mi) 1999

Arrow in the Head ("The Arrow") review [2.5/4]

The heroes from the original "Ringu", Reiko (Matsushima) and Okazaki (Yanagi) have vanished off the face of the globe. It’s up to Mai (Natakami) and the law to find them. At the same time, the little brat from the first film (Otaka) is now acting all ESP-spooky while mumbo-jumbo driven scientists try to decipher the power behind that undead dame that haunts videotapes. Talk about a busy evening!

Here’s a little Ringu history lesson before we begin: "Ringu" (1998) the film was inspired by Kôji Suzuki’s book of the same name. The film "Rasen" (also released in 1998) was based on Suzuki’s book sequel for Ringu. "Rasen" flopped miserably at the box-office, but when "Ringu" became a big hit, they decided to pretend that "Rasen" was never made and in 1999, put out a new Ringu sequel. This second sequel had nothing to do with Suzuki’s book and they appropriately called it "Ringu 2". Got that? Yes? No? Fuck you, Arrow? Either way, let's move on!

Although I boogied to "Ringu" way more than to this sequel, I do have to prop this follow-up for playing it smart. It brought back most of the likeable cast members from the original film while changing the focus as to who the leads were. That gave us a Ringu tale from a fresh perspective even with the same players in the house. And instead of doing the usual “sequel” no-no of rehashing the same old jive again, "Ringu 2" took all of the layered goodies that the first film put out and ran with them as far as it could. I have to respect any “Part 2” that stays true to its source material and that manages to give us something fresh (loved the possession angle) at the same time. Lastly, the flick sported some mucho effective moody directing and a double whammy of crawl-under-skin scare scenes which split my skull open like nobody’s bushwhacks. Ouch! I felt those! CREEPY!

Where Ringu 2’s tape got mangled was that its main game was to deconstruct and attempt to tag an explanation to everything that Ringu subtlety communicated. From Sadako’s history to how the videotape really works, all was deeply and painfully anally probed. Personally, that didn’t go down too well for three reasons. #1) What made "Ringu" scary was the mystery behind it, so yes, this nosier-than-nosy sequel was therefore much less frightening. #2) The film was heavily axed on long-winded dialogue sessions and thorough dissections of the events at hand. Hey man! I give a fudge about how the tape works! Stop talking about it and show me already! #3) Let's just say that the “out there” explanations they came up with were pretty damn hokey. We get lots of scenes with peeps being plugged to machines and have to endure lots of drivel about energy and water acting as conduits or some BS like that. The abysmal "Exorcist 2" actually popped to mind a couple of times while watching those scenes (not good).

Although I was somewhat underwhelmed by it, I will admit that "Ringu 2" still had me trapped in its web the whole way and that counts for something. The fine acting, the chilling atmosphere, the fascinating narrative and the handful of potent horror bits (all about The Well…brrrr) made sure to keep me looping with this ring to some degree. Now play this tape and die!

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

In the course of his follow-up to the most successful film in Japanese history, Hideo Nakata attempts to continue his narrative while expanding upon the genesis and phenomena found within Ringu. During the process, unable to maintain the many irons in which he has placed within his less-than-humble fire, Nakata loses his viewer by presenting a convoluted plot which, though seemingly sound, fails to intrigue his audience enough to merit and retain their cognitive interests to arrive at his less-than-rewarding point.

Upon the death of her boyfriend, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), Mai Takano (Miki Nakatani) attempts to learn of the mystery surrounding the rumor that a video cassette that, if watched, will kill the viewer of fright exactly seven days later. In her quest for answers, she discovers that Takayama’s son, Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka), is still alive but finds him comatose yet developing odd powers similar to those said to be possessed by one of the figures in the video, Sadako Yamamura (Rie Inou).

In many respects, Ringu 2 is a mere reimaging of its predecessor in that it presents Mai--much like her counterpart in the original, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima)--attempting to piece together the mystery of a cursed tape as he nonetheless tries to save the life of the same character, Reiko’s son, Yoichi. However, in polar opposition to the simplistic genius of its forerunner, Ringu 2 tries too hard to create an unnecessarily complex mythology which the narrative fails to sustain.

It is obvious that Nakata uses the film, first and foremost, to tie together narrative loose ends in that we are quickly issued a summation of what came before as Okazaki (Yûrei Yanagi), journalistic friend to the late Takayama, restates that to beat the curse, all one has to do is have someone else view the video within seven days. Shortly after this, Nakata delves into exceeding depth upon the phenomenon of Nensha, which Sadako, and now Masami Kurahashi (Hitomi Sato)--the sole witness to the death of Yoichi’s cousin, Tomoko--possesses. After this, the director disbands from the history of Ringu as he perpetually obfuscates the narrative, forcing it in unnatural directions which overburdens the bridge upon which the viewer’s disbelief is suspended, such as when it is revealed that, like her boyfriend and nonetheless conveniently, Mai houses extrasensory perception, which Nakata only posits in order to expand his already overly convoluted storyline.

The director also abandons the metaphysics put forth in his previous tale to facilitate his new storyline and presents the theory that the tape’s prowess is not due to any explicit curse but rather the transference of energy in the form of fear. However, in order for us to arrive at this synopsis, a dense narrative quagmire must be wadded through, all to little effect as the director becomes too consumed in attempting to keep his new vision intact, so much so that he forgets that the primary intent is to evoke fear and apprehension in his audience (doubly so considering his aforementioned narrative agenda). What’s more, the dense narrative fog shrouding the tale never lifts, even at the film’s climax, as the theme of the supernatural superceding science is lost amid the chaos.

Obviously, Hideo Nakata’s sequel to his highly successful Ringu becomes an unintentional Möbius Strip not only for the viewer, but for the director as well. Perhaps fearful that if he utilized the same creative structure he implemented to produce Ringu that his follow-up would stagnate, Nakata becomes consumed in his presentation of another simplistic idea via a narratively verbose storyline. Instead, the feeling one gets is that Ringu 2 is the malnourished, bastard hybrid of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou. Whatever the reason for the director’s cinematic faux pas, Ringu 2 is one of the most disappointing sequels in that it posed so much promise given the weight of its predecessor and failed to deliver considering its rewards are few while its audience expectations are inversely demanding.

RING 2 Keith from Teleport City

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [2/5]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

FeoAmante's Horror Thriller (E.C. McMullen, Jr.) review

Horror View Black Gloves

Dread Central Michelle Lee

Horror Fan Zine

Black Hole DVD Reviews

KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

DVD Times [Kevin Gilvear] The 4-disc RING Trilogy

VideoVista review Peter Schilling reviews the 4-disc RING Trilogy

Digital Lard - Trilogy DVD Review

TV Guide review

BBCi - Films Michael Thomson

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

DARK WATER (Honogurai mizu no soko kara)

Japan (101 mi) 2002

Time Out review

From the director of the original Japanese Ring comes, if anything, an even richer tale of everyday terror, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki. In the midst of a messy divorce which threatens a custody battle, Yoshimi (Kuroki) moves her small daughter Ikuku (Kanno) into a dump of an apartment block which is all she can afford. Trying to start a new life on her own is stressful enough, but she could hardly have anticipated the wet patch on the ceiling spreading alarmingly, very strange bumps and noises from upstairs, and much, much worse. Unfolding events defy rational explanation, but if Yoshimi comes across as too flaky, she risks losing her child to the ongoing legal proceedings. Hideo Nakata works wonders from this admittedly slim outline. While Hollywood tools efficient, teen-oriented scare machines, here is character and atmosphere shaped in harmony. The mildewed palette, stomach-spooking sound design and slowly escalating supernatural implications aren't just deployed to exploit the heroine's frailties - they're an expression of damaged emotional bonds in a tough, uncaring world and the follow through they precipitate in realms beyond. Dark Water stands as a masterclass in direction, not just for the precise control of tension, release and implacably tightening unease, but for the insistence with which it plumbs our deepest feelings, drawing on a child's fear of abandonment and a parent's dread of loss yet never cheapening them for the sake of a shock moment. All of which pays dividends in an extraordinary finale that's a marvel of both nerve-shredding suspense and heartbreaking compassion. It'll leave you wrung out, terrified, tearful, but, most of all, elated to have seen a great horror film worthy of the description.

Midnight Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Nicholas Rucka

My apartment building is a 100-year-old 6-storey walk-up in Manhattan. The building leaks, creaks, bangs, has questionable electrical wiring, and is not fire safe.

The first night I was in my apartment, I awakened in the middle of the night to a loud BANG. I chose to roll over and go back to sleep rather than stare down whatever or whoever had made the sound. The next morning, I discovered that a book I had left on my living room bookshelf had somehow been thrown to the floor - on the other side of the room. The book was Wang Shuo's "Don't Call Me Human"; I knew then that I had a ghost.

A year later I learned that the old lady who had lived in my apartment before the previous tenant had been found in an advanced state of decay on the kitchen floor. The sole survivors of the apartment were the deceased's cats, who were discovered circling their owner's body - perhaps gingerly feeding off it for the previous three weeks.

My apartment is alive and I know it has a lot of stories. But this makes sense seeing as it is an unrefurbished tenement. Hideo Nakata understands the concept of the old building that is alive and chose to set his film Dark Water in this type of location: an old, moldy, concrete apartment building. Nakata realizes that often times in horror, the location is an additional character in the cast - often co-starring.

Hideo Nakata first scared the loose socks off of a generation joshikosei's with 1998's Ring and followed this with a number of other horror films including the 1999 sequel Ring 2, and the same year's Chaos. As a result Nakata has been typecast as one of Japan's foremost horror directors. In the program for Dark Water he states, "If you were to ask me whether I love horror from the bottom of my heart, I would have to say no." But there's no denying that he excels at making creepy films, Dark Water included. However, whatever atmosphere he generates during the course of the film is squandered by a lazy, safe ending that reeks of producers meddling with an otherwise solid - if not hackneyed - story (based on the novel by Ring author Koji Suzuki).

Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is in the middle of a terrible custody battle over 5-year-old Ikuko (Rio Kanno), with her abusive ex-husband. To compound the situation, Yoshimi has a history of mental instability sparked by residual abandonment anxiety connected to her mother's neglect when she was a child. Fearing that she will mentally damage Ikuko the way she had been and needing to show her independence to the family court, Yoshimi is dead-set on successfully living as a single mother raising her daughter.

Yoshimi and Ikuko move into an old apartment building on the outskirts of town. The building is a run-down concrete block, mysteriously short on (sane) tenants, but filled with little creepy touches like dripping ceilings, slow elevators, and banging sounds. Ikuko is the first to see the shadowy figure of a little girl wearing a yellow raincoat, but soon Yoshimi, who is already well on her way to a permanent mental vacation, starts seeing her in quick flits out of the corner of her vision.

Yoshimi starts to lose it when a pesky red bag that she repeatedly tries to get rid of keeps reappearing. All the while, her custody battle becomes more heated and for the family court Yoshimi's mental fitness is brought into question. When it seems that the situation could not get any worse, Ikuko falls into a coma after coming into contact with the mysterious girl in the yellow coat. Yoshimi is tortured and mentally fractured; everything seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Reflecting both Yoshimi's mental and the stories' thematic decline, the film becomes more and more saturated with water until it seems to reach a point of bursting...

Dark Water is a victim of its good points. The location and settings are so strong that they overpower the rest of the story. This coupled with weak story resolve and mediocre characterization discounts this film from being a worthy follow up to Ring to being a simply passable horror viewing experience; spiked with the occasional dynamic moment. The weakest point in the film is the end of the film when Yoshimi's actions just seem to be inconsistent with her character motivation that had been established earlier. This seems to be so inconsistent in tone to the rest of the film that I can only attribute it to bad writing that was reasoned via some pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis; primarily, Yoshimi's fear of abandonment and not being a good mother. Not to spoil the ending, but I did not believe Yoshimi's major decision at the end of the film and therefore did not find the last 15 minutes convincing.

Further proving my point, as if illustrating the inconsistency and confusion of the film's conclusion, the story enters into Ikuko's (alternate) present/future. This, ostensibly, is to show how Ikuko (now 16) is coming to terms with her life and ultimately the positive effect of Yoshimi's sacrifices for Ikuko. This sequence, outside of being saccharine and overwrought, is problematic because it doesn't exist within any sort of logical narrative space and time. I found myself so preoccupied for the last 15 minutes, trying to figure out when it was suppose to be taking place that I no longer was in the film world. When was the story supposed to have been set? The only conclusion I could make was meta-textual: the producers took the original story and changed it so that it would have some sort of safe / happy resolve that the audience could walk away from and not feel totally depressed. Narrative consistencies of time and space didn't matter.

Notwithstanding this, Dark Water is worth watching for a good chill. To fully enjoy it, my recommendation is, like all horror films it is best viewed in a dark room with all the lights off. This will help reveal two very solid aspects of this film: 1) great atmosphere, and 2) one really great scare. While watching it, if you hear the sound of something in the next room - and there shouldn't be any sound coming from there - ignore it until it is daylight outside...

DVD Outsider Slarek

Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [9/10]

Kamera.co.uk review Edward Lamberti

Talking Pictures (UK) review Peter Anderson

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [B-]

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Region 3]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Amateur Movie Reviews review Peter Stockton

Classic Horror review Dellamorte

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) review

Dark Water (2002) - DVD Movie Reviews The Vocabulariast

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

FilmsAsia [Soh Yun-Huei]

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

Arrow in the Head ("The Arrow") review [3.5/4]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Dread Central

Exploded Goat review [Kent Conrad]

KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [1/4]

Variety (Derek Elley) review

Guardian/Observer review

BBC Films review Jamie Russell

The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

THE RING 2

USA (110 mi) 2005 unrated version (128 mi)

Slate [David Edelstein]

I don't want to overpraise The Ring Two (DreamWorks), but it's refreshing to see an eerie little coastal ghost movie without a twist ending. Directed by Hideo Nakata (who made the original Japanese Ringu), it hits deeper emotionally than its scarier but junkier predecessor. The emphasis here is not on that videotape from hell; it's on the vengeful child-ghost Samara, who's trying to take possession of the son (David Dorfman) of the heroine, Rachel (Naomi Watts). As the boy's body temperature drops, the physical world, bathed in ectoplasmic bad vibes, becomes a Gothic dreamscape, with swirls of long black hair, twisted trees that spontaneously combust, and moose of death. (That is not a misprint.)

The Ring Two is basically an, uh, allegory of motherly love: Accused of child abuse and brought to the brink of child murder, this mother will go to the pit of hell—depicted alternately as a dank well and the inside of a TV—to save her lost child (in this case, from another child come back from the grave to find a mother). Naomi Watts is really some kind of actress. When she casts herself into Samara's demon sea, she's like Brunnehilde in Valhalla, only much thinner…

Time Out London review

‘Fear comes full circle,’ announces the poster tagline. Appropriately so, since Hideo Nakata’s fine film is closer in tone to his own Japanese original than to Gore Verbinski’s 2002 re-make. A grown-up sequel, it mostly eschews the cheap scares, redundant sub-plots and join-the-dots plotting of its American predecessor, pushing the cursed video tape into the background and focusing instead on the gradual ‘possession’ of Rachel’s son, Aidan (David Dorfman), by Samara’s unquiet spirit. There are echoes, too, of the water imagery and mother-child bond seen in Nakata’s ‘Dark Water’, as Rachel (Naomi Watts) and the maternally abused Samara struggle for control of Aidan’s soul.

Having pursued Aidan and the now neurotically over-protective Rachel to a small Oregon coastal town, Samara makes her ghostly presence felt, appearing in Aidan’s dreams, in mirrors, and in digital photos. But when Samara gradually invades Aidan’s body, things become more complex and more affecting. With cruel irony, Rachel’s obsessive mother-love drives a wedge between her and the Samara-influenced Aidan, and creates suspicions of child abuse in work colleague Max (Simon Baker) and hospital shrink Dr Emma Temple (Elizabeth Perkins).

Once again, Nakata fuses arresting water imagery and emotional involvement, culminating in a stunning bathroom scene in which Rachel – sucked into a watery vortex of confusion – realises that she may have to drown her son in order to save him. There is also a quiet, devastating meeting between Rachel and Samara’s real mother, played with painful, convincing lucidity by Sissy Spacek. The final confrontation between Samara and Rachel is anti-climactic, but up till then, Nakata’s emotional undercurrents create a dark whirlpool of terror.

Twitch Dave Canfield

Wow! I'm in the minority on this one. I liked it. Hideo Nikata does recycle elements from Dark Water and other Ring films but he remains truer to the essence of the Ring mythology than many fans have given him credit for. And he has the guts to tell a more interesting ghost story than most directors who are content with a simple series of loud BOO!'s.

The ad campaign is incredibly dark promising a scarier more amped version of the American remake. People keep asking me what I thought of this film. “Was it good?” “Was it scary?” “Was it as good as the first one?” Almost none of these people have seen any of the Japanese source material for this film Ringu, Ring O, Ringu 2 or the Korean Ring Virus and probably won’t. And while director of the original Ringu, Hideo Nakata picks up where Gore Verbinski left us off, with a terrifying act of betrayal this is a film that dares to be different than what my American friends are probably expecting. And while I plan to put it on the shelf with all the films that have explored the compelling mythology of evil. I won’t be surprised to hear complaints from many who would have been satisfied with a darker or even less complex blend of humanity and horror

Rachel and Aiden have fled to small town to start their lives over again. But Samara has found a way to follow them and soon the familiar blank black cassettes create a crime scene that Rachel, in her role as reporter for the town’s small newspaper, recognizes immediately. Ready to run again Rachel realizes it is too late. Samara has taken over her son ready to be adopted and replace him. As Rachel fights to get her son back she realizes she may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Nakata is to be praised for taking his narrative in such a bold direction. The scenes in which Samara communicates through Aiden demand a lot of the viewer but not nearly as much as they could. It is after all a compelling idea. Samara, a little girl, formerly our personification of unstoppable evil, is merely doing what any child with her powers would do. Children make terrifying entities in horror films precisely because they lack inner moral structure. They will do almost anything to gain what they want.

For those who suggest that Samara should never be anything other than a symbol of evil I would answer that the above is probably a pretty good general definition of same. And I would also add that Sadako in Ring O is also made much more terrifying by virtue of her human origins. Her otherness is what makes this female entity so frightening, not just in the physical sense but in the metaphysical. She destroys our sense of security in our own goodness and it's ability to keep us safe. We are rendered abject, twisted into something that is and yet is no longer us.

Watts is an actress capable of holding her own with situations where the audience might not otherwise suspend disbelief. Cynical critics won’t surrender theirs without a fight but it could be noted that Nikata picked the wrong battle. Viewers of course will have to decide for themselves but I remain intrigued enough by Samara’s search for a mother to give the film a few more viewings- even though I would agree Nakata’s film wraps up the threat too neatly in the end. It could be argued that this film would be stronger if it had the ending of Nakata’s original Dark Water since the film does borrow it's central motiff from that work.

It could also be argued that Nakata westernizes his film too much. There are moments here that wink so hard at the audience that they lift the viewer firmly out of what makes much J Horror so superior to it’s American counterparts. A scene in particular where Rachel shouts in apparent victory at Samara is tailored directly to the sorts of expectations people bring to the lowest of American horror films.

There are scares a plenty including beginning and ending sequences that bookend the film with moments as nerve wracking and haunting as anything in any of the other Ring films. Some will be expected and are merely fun but the ending involving an absolutely harrowing and even unpleasant chase up the side of Samara’s watery resting place. In a time of year when horror fans are sifting through dreck like Boogeyman and Hide and Seek Ring Two is an intelligent and human horror film that despite it’s occasional genteelness will likely survive the weekend box office and win fans into the fold over time.

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) review

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

American Cinematographer essay ["Back to the Well"] 4 page essay by Jon Silberg, April 2005

Teleport City Cinematics review

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [1.5/4]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [C]

The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps

David Dalgleish review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Pamela Troy

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Kamera.co.uk review Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review