DesertTalkies Film Reviews!

  Ici Et Ailleurs - Here And Elsewhere [1976] Direction by Anne Marie Miéville, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Kean-Luc Godard Language: French & Arabic I'm not going to lie to you: this movie was difficult to watch at 10pm on a Friday night. It was intensely philosophical, and there were points were I was losing my train of thought. However, I will say this much: when I realized what this movie was really trying to say, I was very impressed. This documentary was actually a perfect complement to the book I have most recently read: Orientalism, a book about how Occidental, colonial views continue to distort how the Near East, or the Orient, is seen globally. The first thing that was interesting about this movie was the parallelism: it documented the intertwined stories of a domesticated French family and a group of members from a Palestinian tribe fighting for independence. It was through this plot where this idea of 'Here and Elsewhere' came in: the movie's point, which I do un...

 Here is something a little bit different: because of my exams, I have not been able to watch any movies, and so I thought that a different type of post would be good to do.  Today, I'll be sharing some of my favourite Bollywood film posters. Bollywood films in the 1950s to the 1980s were advertised through print media; handcrafted posters painstakingly drawn, coloured, and replicated on a wide scale to provide an insight into the movies they were advertising. Bollywood films rely on strong visuals to be appealing, and that has not changed during the several decades that Bollywood cinema has been such a large industry.  The posters that strike me are the ones that focus solely on women, or have women as the dominant entity in the frame. The one on the right is Bandini, a movie from the 1960s that was known to be one of the first feminist movies in the Hindi-language film industry, and industry otherwise so bogged down by antiquated gender stereotypes. Adding to this, the ...

  Midnight Express [1978] Starring Brad Davis, John Hurt, Irene Miracle Direction by Alan Parker, Adapted from Billy Hayes' novel, Midnight Express  Language: English  When you hear about a movie about an attempt to escape from prison, you would typically think of some oversensationalised drama, dramatic to the point where the story is devoid of realism. It's a very childish genre when it is fictional: a staple of 'young adult' or preteen film. There has never been a situation until know where I have seen a movie that is so raw, so real. I loved everything about this.  Firstly, it was an interesting choice to have extended scenes in untranslated Turkish; whenever there is a scene in a film where something is not spelled out for you, so are almost forced to revert to a basic, human level of emotion, to empathise with the untapped emotions of fear, of suffering, of longing, of disillusionment. To see everything from a point of view where you are the one feeling this sw...

PAKEEZAH [1971] Starring: Meena Kumari, Raaj Kumar, Ashok Kumar, Nadira Direction & Screenplay by Kamal Amrohi Language: Hindi To be honest, I have no idea how I came across this film, but I am so unbelievably glad I did. I have watched the movie just shy of a dozen times since the winter of 2020, and I can safely say that it never loses its appeal in my eyes.  Filmed in 1971, the story centres around Sahibjaan , a courtesan who unexpectedly falls in love. After an unfortunate series of events, drama and tension builds up and reaches a climax in the final scene (which I can remember verbatim).  It is without a doubt that the fourteen years it took to film the movie was completely worth it. The stereotype surrounding old Bollywood movies is that they are really slow, which is often the case. Whilst this film was relatively slow, and points of tension within the production were few and far between, I was completely hooked the entire time I watched it, which is a rarity when ...