wolfgang these past two seasons: couldn’t stand to see kala with rajan, always looked away from them, was sick with jealousy and drinking after their wedding, was only cheerful around rajan once after having literally fucked his wife the night before
wolfgang in the finale: somehow has no problem splitting the woman he loves with her husband and being the third party to their marriage (because they are clearly a couple and he is… the third part. which he has no problem with.)
kala these past two seasons: loved and respected rajan for being a good person but was never in love with him, only married him out of duty and kindness, acted like it was a struggle to show him affection more than once, was about to leave rajan to be with wolfgang, is also very clearly somewhere in the scope of demisexual
kala in the finale: somehow totally okay with starting a poly relationship with the man she’s been in love for the past two years and and the man she’s tolerated the past two years, suddenly in love with rajan, jumps straight into bed with them
Airports are fucking weird. Like I’m dressed like it’s ‘95 drinking wine and there’s a dude in a three pieced suit next to me, someone in pajamas, someone who looks like they’re going to the gym after this, and like a million button up shirts.
Update. I’m hammered.
Second update: I’m sober now but very fucking tired and in a different airport.
Additionally: I have no idea where the fuck I am
Important information: I’m fairly sure Douglas Adams was just fucking paged??? What the hell???
Have you checked if you’re alive?
Buddy I haven’t cared about blood pumping through my veins since 1920. You just gotta move on and do your own thing.
So you’re saying there’s a chance you’re tumblring your ‘airport’ adventures from the afterlife?
im saying it doesnt matter because i have access to the internet
If Kala truly had equal feelings for both Wolfgang and Rajan, then polyamory would have been a compelling, empowering choice. The fact is, Kala loved Wolfgang and only cared for Rajan. She has said “I love you” only to Wolfgang. The only person she’s shown a desire to be with romantically and sexually is Wolfgang. While she makes it clear she doesn’t want to hurt Rajan, this is not in any way equatable with the deep, enduring love shown between her and Wolfgang.
There was never a love triangle in Seasons 1 and 2. The choice Kala had to make was not between men. It was between duty and self.
She was denied the opportunity to choose what life she wanted, and I find this offensive and unacceptable. This is a woman who has battled her whole life with the expectations society has for her. Choosing to be with Wolfgang would have been an empowering response to these expectations. Choosing to be with both men implied that it was important for her to satisfy her duties to Rajan and her desire for Wolfgang – this isn’t something that is healthy, let alone empowering.
This arc destroyed Kala as a character, Kalagang as a couple, and erased the important representation that Kala provided.
Män som hatar kvinnor (2009) Låt den rätta komma in (2008) Flickan som lekte med elden (2009) Kyss mig (2009) Ronja (1981) Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (2013)
Music
Avicii Lykke Li Eric Saade Loreen Tove Lo Robin Basshunter ABBA Bjørn Afzelius
Here is also a nice video that teaches you the most basic Scandinavian phrases in all three languages at the same time.
I’ll continue to expand this list when I encounter more material I find suitable. If you need help finding a place to watch the TV shows/movies, send me a message and I’ll help you. Feel free to propose suggestions for this list :)
A Cmbyn fan took a photo of two old men outside the Press shop in Crema writing ‘Elio and Oliver at old age’. I think this is very touching.
*credit to the fan*
Another year another list, eh? Sorry I’m a few days late but I am finding it increasingly hard to write about cinema. What is there left for me (or anyone) to really say? The films in these lists of mine are almost always rooted in working-class or subaltern politics (even if only in some small way), fraught with intense emotional and sexual character conflicts, but still imbued with the musical aroma of commercial Indian cinema. So looking back on 2017, I no longer find it a marvel that India (and Pakistan) continues to create this curiously poetic brand of cinema that you can’t find in any other film industry. I just feel happy, fulfilled and excited to see what strange creatures 2018 can throw up. Enjoy!
10. Solo
An
undeniably ridiculous film where four short stories, shot in four different
styles, each end with the most overblown, left-field, mind-melting twists you
could possibly fathom (even one involving a great bit of comedy incest). Though
it’s impossible to say if the filmmaker intended it to be this hilarious, one
feels lucky that Indian cinema still has auteurs who dare to challenge and
assess the grammar of cinema itself (including a certain Anurag Basu, whose
film Jagga Jasoos unfortunately
didn’t find space in this list). Sometimes they fail, sometimes they soar and,
in the case of Solo, sometimes they
just show you a really great time.
9. Thupparivaalan
It’s
never been more thrilling to see an artist like Mysskin give up experimentation. Now that his years of throwing everything
at the camera and seeing what sticks have ended, he is focusing on making
great narrative films, that just happen to be full of his odd motifs and auteurial
obsessions. This Tamil Sherlock-esque thriller, which feels oddly like a period
drama smacked in the middle of the modern day’s claustrophobic shopping-center
culture, seems to be interested in the transfer of wealth, the exchange of
money for humanitarian services; the poor girl who becomes a servant to repent
for her pick-pocketing, the privileged child who hands over a huge sack of pocket money to a grown man, the
group of disheveled street kids who have notes thrown out to them, hands
aloft, after they dig a deep hole on a beach for a curious detective. This is a film
about compassion, about finding help from fellow humans in the midst of
capitalism’s all-encompassing crush.
There’s also some kung-fu, some disembodied limbs in a fridge…and I think I even spotted a saree with a yellow trim. Mysskin will be Mysskin. 8. Karsandas Pay & Use
2016
was without a doubt the year that brave films about caste defined Indian
movies, but this year we had another worthy addition. In a story that could only come from regional cinema, a man
who owns a public toilet purposefully blocks a domestic latrine so that the
family’s beautiful daughter will have to come and shit in his fine
establishment every day. This may not sound like a recipe for political
statements on the nature of caste (and indeed there are a lot of great poo
jokes throughout), but the treatment of our most natural bodily product is,
shamefully, one of the foundations of caste oppression. This film does through
humour what Sairat and Kammattipaadam did with serious drama
last year. And it’s a Gujarati film!
Who cares about the death of Bollywood…
7. Oru Mexican Aparatha
Malayalam
cinema continues to make great movies in its own curious genre it’s created
over the last decade; films with incredibly detailed character arcs that focus
on the mundanities of everyday life, with little “narrative” drive. In OMA, though the stakes appear high (two
warring campus political parties violently contest elections in an Indian state
where life and politics are one and the same), the detailing is in the people;
their hopes and dreams, their fuck-ups, their friendships. Shot with a
breakneck speed and intensity that doesn’t leave you looking at anything for
very long but still leaves you with an understanding of every single character,
big or small, perhaps the most radical thing about this overtly political film,
is that it never discusses politics.
6. Punjab Nahi Jaungi
The
first Pakistani film that has made it to one of these lists, but for good
reason. Films from “emerging” (or more accurately “re-emerging”) film
industries, especially in South Asia, seem to adopt certain tropes from popular
cinema (ie. songs, melodrama, action) before understanding the craft in writing
and direction that makes these tropes stick emotionally. Well the new Pakistani
cinema has arrived, and Punjab Nahi Jaungi is a richly textured character
epic, with a classic filmi love triangle that reflects modern Pakistani
societal issues with great nuance and insight (feudal politics and values,
class difference, the treatment of women, caste) without ever compromising its
script. It’s no wonder that the “help me Durdana” dialogue became so iconic
around the World this year; funny, pathetic, relatable, but also it’s a man begging his own cousin to have sex with him because he’s too horny to wait to
marry the woman he loves. Like I said, brilliant characters with a lot of subtext.
5. Fidaa
In
many ways Fidaa is nothing new or
remarkable. An adequately directed melodrama (with a lot of Soap-style staging)
about a spoiled NRI boy returning to his ancestral village, with some nice songs
and green scenery. Yet like Punjabi Nahi Jaungi, the script rises
above this. We believe these people, we understand them, and the filmi
silliness that the movie throws at us in its second half works because of this.
Then there is the most important
ingredient that made Fidaa work for
me: Sai Pallavi (I really love her a lot). The film revolves around her
performance (and female POV), and she plays it with so much energy, so much
care for her material, so much genuine conviction, you’d swear she wasn’t
acting at all (the heartbreaking scene where she wears a western dress to impress the NRI crowd is one
of many standouts). So while other elements may wobble around her, Sai Pallavi
truly shines in one of the year’s most important and overlooked
“female-orientated” (I hate that phrase) movies. Please don’t do a Nazriya and
get married and disappear.
4. Nikka Zaildar 2
The
first part in this series, though from the director of Angrej (my favourite Punjabi film ever made), was an excruciating
rom-com with no energy and no purpose. Here, Simerjit Singh returns to the type
of film-making of his best work. At first, NK2
appears to be a hugely populist slice of old-fashioned romantic melodrama. Then
the film-making takes thrilling detours. A vintage Mohd. Sidiq and Ranjit Kaur
duet is picturised on the lead actors. A 5-minute giddha sequence sees a group
of village women reciting folk songs and dances on the bank of a river with
location sound and zero production sparkle. The character motivations start to
crumble; they become weak, fickle, human.
Nikka Zaildar 2 has so much love for
true Punjabi culture, for the ethics of real film-making, and I hope Simerjit
Singh carries on making movies as understated yet thrilling as this one.
3.
Meyaadha Maan
Another
gorgeous movie that isn’t really about
anything other than a bunch of fuck-ups trying to navigate life and love, with
all the texture of a great piece of literature. The sense of place is
all-encompassing, the dirty streets of north Madras coming alive in a flurry of
masochistically re-appropriated Illaiyaraja songs and tumbling plastic water
containers in garish bright colours. The sun beats down on the wide concrete
roads, before the moonlight glints off whiskey bottles and vomit in shady government
bars. The thick beards, the even thicker accents and slang, and the checkered shirt and lungi combos, every tiny details brings these people and their
gloriously messy stories to life. There is a lot of darkness and melancholy
too. A manipulative woman who uses sex as a way to torment her parents, a
manipulative man who uses suicide as a threat to feel a sense of self-worth.
This is a piece of film-making that makes us wince, laugh and celebrate how
disgusting we all are deep down inside.
2. Arjun Reddy
Every
year, there is a film in India that shakes the foundations of pop-culture. 2017
was the year of Arjun Reddy, the heartbroken bearded man-child who abuses
opiates upstairs at a family party, cokes himself up before a court case, and
pours ice down his trousers to cure a raging erection. A sexist film, told from
the point of view of a huge asshole with little respect for women (or anyone
really), with an under-written female lead, that still communicates great
truth. Dirty, shameful truth but truth nonetheless. The film sweats with
anger, aggression and repressed sexual energy. The moments of intimacy between
the lead couple are more honest than a thousand Vikram Bhatt sex scenes, as
they try to pin down how many hundreds of times they’ve done it, or sit around
in their underwear eating post-coital pizza. You can smell the alcohol and weed
and sweaty bedsheets, the aroma of youthful freedom. While perhaps nothing new
to the Western world (and the self-destructive aashiq is a trope as old as India itself), the muckiness of Arjun Reddy, the drugs, the fucking, the
foul language, combined with the unashamedly populist language of Indian
cinema, makes it an exhilaratingly original bit of guilty madness.
1. Angamaly Diaries
A
hard movie to love, to keep close to
you and revisit like an old friend when you need a warm fuzzy feeling, but
instead a movie to be in total utter awe of. It’s just about two rival gangs in
the pig-meat business in small town Kerala acting like a bunch of knuckle-headed
morons over the course of two hours, but you’d be hard-pressed to find another
piece of work on Earth this year as alive and in love with the craft of cinema
as Angamaly Diaries. Every camera
movement is a marvel, every line of dialogue sparkles with intimate hilarity.
The violent action sequences make you shudder (almost as much as the haunting
pig squeals in the dirty abattoirs), the idiotic behaviour of these bored,
uneducated men makes you cringe and laugh in equal measure, and then the
closing 15 minutes; a breathtaking single-shot sequence that weaves in and out
of a thundering religious parade, into the side streets and drinking dens of
the town, tripping over washing lines and street dogs on the way, and then
ending in a horrific yet ingenious death. It’s really something you have to see
to believe. It makes me so happy that in 2018, after 3D and “4D”, virtual
reality and a thousand other gimmicks have tried to steal our attention, there
is still nothing as impressive as a filmmaker who just needs cameras and sound
to make our jaws drop.
So those were my faves from 2017. Shout outs to A Death in the Gunj, Munna Michael, Aramm and Rangoon for also being brilliant, and my apologies to the Marathi and Bengali film industries for their shitty digital distribution that means I still miss many great films each year. I’d love to know what your picks are, and I’ll see you next year :)
No one is complaining about the poly relationship itself.
We’re complaining about the lack of continuity and the fact that the Special rejected two seasons of development. We’re complaining that Kala’s representation has been dashed. We’re complaining that Wolfgang, who has loved only Kala, suddenly accepted a poly relationship with a man he barely knows. We’re complaining about the implication that Kala and Wolfgang fell for Rajan out of gratitude. We’re complaining that there was no discussion between the three of them about what being together as a polyamorous couple would mean. If polyamory requires anything, it requires communication. Where was it?
Lana sacrificed the representation that Kala and Wolfgang provided, separately and as a couple, for inaccurate poly representation.
If this Special was truly for the fans, then Lana misjudged what we wanted. Sense8 was her creation, but we fought for the renewal. We fought for this Special. This show is not hers alone and we deserved better.
I am forever grateful for the show. My life is better because of it. But the finale was bullshit and we don’t have to accept it.
Hey Everyone! When I was younger, I used to read a ton. As a direct result of that, my writing and reading were on point. Recently, however, I haven’t been reading as much, and as a result, my writing isn’t as good as I want it to be (albeit, still pretty good). I’ve decided to read all the books on this list over the next 1 and a half years to get back into reading and to improve my writing. Enjoy! :)
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