AVENGERS: Age of Ultron

All superhero movies have one message to give; in a fight between good and evil, good prevails. But Avengers: Age of Ultron brings another side of the story to light. Evil is born, not always, out of evil intentions. In this case, Tony Stark aka Iron Man, in his attempt to create a global peace keeping program through artificial intelligence creates a very powerful and a very dangerous, you can say, program- Ultron. Now Ultron who was created with the purpose of peace cannot distinguish between saving the world and destroying it. However, he wanted to destroy the world so that a new world could emerge where humans would have a chance to rebuild and not make the same mistakes so, were his intentions really evil? This concept of destroying the world so that humans can start a new has also been explored in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Thus, evil is not always evil to everyone. But what all these superhero movies try to protect is humans. They reinforce, again and again, the idea that humans are worth saving; that there is grace in our mistakes and hope for us to improve; that the chaos we create is the only place that order can emerge. And so is the idea behind Avengers: Age of Ultron. 

As Ultron works towards world destruction, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow need to find a way to stop him and fight their worst fears. On this global quest, new alliances are made with the Maximoff twins and a new hero is born; the Vision, who yields the power of one of the infinity stones. 

The Avengers: Age of Ultron is an exciting movie which not only deals with fighting the demons of the world but also fights the demons within us. Thus we go on an emotional journey with these characters and feel what they are going through and a lot of times find ourselves identifying with them. After all, you don’t need superpowers to be superheroes. In this movie we see the human side of these heroes, what pains them, how they deal with it and how even they make mistakes.

As for the villain, Ultron is a program and thus makes multiple copies of himself and gets into every electronic in this tech savvy world. So, he is daunting and invisible at first. The way he says “I had strings, but now I’m free. There are no strings on me” gives him a creepy edge. However, I felt that Ultron looked like a mild copy of the sentinels from X-Men: Days of Future Past. But the sentinels were scarier than Ultron. So I would say that he was an okayish villain. 

However, throughout the movie there aren’t a lot of moments of tension or fear due to the constant one liners cracked by the entire Avengers team. Tony Stark is known for his one liners as a way to avoid the terror he is feeling but every other character, even Ultron, cracking jokes seems to take out the ‘world is about to end’ factor out of the movie. Another drawback is that the movie moves too fast and sometimes the chain of emotions is broken. We can’t completely feel the heart break of what the avengers have gone through because we don’t get the time to comprehend it. Some scenes leave the audience saying ‘what?’ and not in a good way. 

All in all, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a movie worth watching with an amazing cast, amazing acting and amazing special effects. However, if you like to sit at the edge of your seat and bite your nails off with suspense and thrill, I believe you will be a tad bit disappointed.

WHO MEASURES THE WORTH OF A HUMAN LIFE?

Boko Haram, a terrorist group, has been actively and violently working towards establishing an Islamic state in Nigeria. In its wake it has killed thousands and thousands of innocent people. On 3^rd January 2015 Boko Haram attacked the town of Baga in Nigeria, killing more than 2,000 people! The Boko Haram terrorists continued to massacre and burn communities to the ground till 7^th January 2015.

On 7^th January 2015, 2 masked gunmen shot 12 people dead at the office of Charlie Hedbo after the magazine published cartoons insulting to the Muslims in one of its issues. 1 policewoman and 4 hostages at a super market were also killed in the subsequent days.

While the 17 deaths in Paris, France received worldwide coverage, the 2,000 deaths in Baga, Nigeria received close to no coverage by the world or Nigerian media. While 3.7 million people in France took to the streets to support and honor the loss of their people, who rallied against the violence which Amnesty International is describing as the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram?

The Nigerian government itself did not mourn the loss of thousands of its own citizens, why? Has death seeped so deep into them that it no longer affects them? Have they given up all hope against this extremist terrorist organization that they no longer fight against it? Or has fear prevented them from standing up for their own?

While Nigerian government and media may have been faced with fear of Boko Haram, where was the rest of the world media? Why did they not give these helpless innocents a voice? Why did they not raise this issue so that organizations possessing the power to stop this violence could fight for them?

In today’s world, the worth of a human life is being measured by its race, religion and other materialistic factors. The reason for lack of coverage of the Boko Haram massacre can be traced back to the colonial era when the Africans were considered lower to the Europeans. It can even be traced to the hostilities between the Christians and the Muslims for the lives lost in Baga were pre-dominantly Muslim. Just because the west is more advanced does not make their lives worth more. The lives of Africans, Muslims and non-western people is just as important and deserves to be honored and mourned just as much.

While the world is divided along many lines such as political, religious, and economic, it is the duty of the fourth estate to rise above these divisions and report as truthfully as possible. There is dire need for the media to uphold its duties in these times, for today conflicts are many and the helpless unlimited. Only when everyone is given a voice and powerful organizations come to their aid that death and violence can be controlled.

EASTERN PROMISES: To be remembered through the ages

This is not a review but an interpretation of the complex movie Eastern Promises. If you haven’t seen the movie, I advise you to first go see the movie and then read further (there are a lot of spoilers).

Eastern Promises, a movie directed by David Cronenberg, is one of the most amazing movies I have seen. The movie follows the story of Anna (Naomi Watts) who after losing a child herself gets rather attached to a baby girl born to a 14 year old Russians who dies giving birth to her. To prevent Christine from ending up in the foster care system, she uses the diary she found in the 14 year old girl’s bag to look for the girls family thus Christine’s family. On her quest she gets involved with the Russian mafia group Vory V Zakone and realizes that Christine’s and her own life are now in danger. 

On this amazing quest we explore human nature alongside some amazing performances by Viggo Mortensen who plays Nikolai, Vincent Cassel who plays Kiril, Armin Mueller Stahl who plays Semyon and of course Naomi Watts.

On the surface it is a simple movie with bad guys and good guys, some gruesome yet amazing action scenes, a table turning climax and a somewhat happy ending, but is it? Rather than the action, Cronenberg focuses the camera on the reaction and as a result makes the movie more about the characters than the story. 

Kiril is the son of Semyon who is the London head of the Vory V Zakone. While he is a powerful man, he himself does not possess power. His main source of protection and support is Nikolai. While he seems like a bad guy I thought there was much more to him. He is more like a person who was born into this family and into the Vory V Zakone like he says “these stars are a birth mark for me”, but not really a part of them. He is loyal to his father and loves him but never really lived up to his expectations despite his numerous efforts. We see a more human side of him when he fights his father as he realizes that Nikolai’s life has been put in risk on his account and all that he feels when he is about to kill Christine.

Also, through his character the theme of homosexuality has been explored, mainly how homosexuality and masculinity are not seen to go together by the society. There are a bumber of instance that point towards the homosexuality of Kiril’s character. First, he gets a member of the Vory V Zakone killed because he is spreading ‘lies’ about him being queer. You don’t react as rashly to a lie as you do to the truth. Second, when he asks Nikolai to have sex as he watches. Like I said, Cronenberg revels more in the reaction and similarly throughout this scene he cuts between Nikolai and Kiril so we can see Kiril’s reaction which speaks volumes about his feelings. Third, when Nikolai tell Seymon about the reason why Kiril had a member of the Vory V Zakone killed, Seymon seems to already know of this and blames it on London calling it a place crawling with queers and blacks. Lastly, the various intimate scenes between Kiril and Nikolai also show vividly the extent of their relationship. Now that we know that Kiril is actually gay, it is the fact that he tries to hide it so hard to keep living up to his father’s expectations and that of being a Vor is what points towards the dominant belief that gays are not masculine. Throughout the movie we see him struggle between his emotions and his need to be violent and tough. He is easily convinced by anything and everything that Nikolai says, which is evident in the last scene when he convinces Kiril to let the baby and his father for they are partners now, but he keeps bossing him around to keep his feelings hidden. 

Nikolai is a driver but he is actually trying to become a part of the Vory V Zakone. From the starting of the movie we see him in a negative light when he passes a disrespectful comment about Anna and his violent act of cutting a dead guy’s fingers. A very eerie and untrustworthy feeling surrounds him right up to the point when he tells Anna to go back to the good people and stay away from people like him. After that we see a more emotional side of him. And as we approach the climax of the Movie we realize that he is actually one of the good guys bound to do things he would rather not had he not been in this situation. Towards the end, as he helps Anna save Christine we rather find ourselves loving him and feeling sorry for him. 

While we are talking about Nikolai, it would be a shame to not talk about his knife fight with Soyka’s brothers. Viggo Mortensen plays out a naked fighting scene in Eastern Promises which carries on for a few minutes with two men with knives. This fight scene is legendary. The violence of it all coupled with Mortensen’s nakedness makes it so rich and realistic that it leaves a scar on us all. And let us not forget the fact that despite not being Russian, he and Vincent Cassel gave the most believable performances as Russians. For a minute you start to think that these people are the Russian mafia because of the perfect accent and perfect pace of their dialogues, cutting between English and Russian as if it was their daily routine. 

Through these two characters we explore one more theme of the movie that is, bad guys aren’t always bad. Neither are strong always strong or the weak always weak. Had it not been for Anna’s courage and bravery maybe this little innocent girl would have died. Despite being ‘normal’ and scared a lot of times, she keeps going. 

While we dig deep into the interwoven messages of this emotionally rich movie, there is one issue that has been addressed directly, that of human trafficking. Cronenberg brutally shows us the harsh reality of this crime and addresses one of the key causes of it- when people leave their homes and countries in search of a better life but are tricked by unknown men. This is even evident from the name of the movie, “Eastern Promises” which refers to the promises of a better life made to people in the east to smuggle them to advanced countries like UK where they are brutally exploited. It also explores the emotional impact that it has on people, how people stop living and how people think of killing themselves just to escape...

Like I said, this is an emotionally rich movie and thus explores a number of other emotions. Some of them I felt but still can’t put a finger on. One of them was truth. Not saying the truth but of being your own true self. This theme was also explored in another one of David Cronenberg’s movies, a history of violence. Everybody puts up walls that hide their true selves. But what happens when these walls start to crumble down? Kiril has put up a wall that keeps his homosexual side somewhat hidden and Nikolai has put up a wall that keeps everything about him hidden. We see their true selves time and again but for short periods of time. Kiril’s true self is revealed through his feelings for Nikolai. Nikolai’s true self is seen when instead of killing Stepan he sends him away to live in a 5 star hotel and in the last scene when he kisses Anna. In that scene he is just like any other ordinary man, free of his duties and burden. 

As is visible, I’m completely entranced by this movie and all its aspects be it the direction, the characters, the story, the messages it gives or its setting which while based in London shows nothing of the London we are familiar with but rather completely transports us to this new and terrible world, the other side of London and every society across the world.  Thus it is generic not only on an emotional level but also on a social level. 

As for my obsession for movies, it is movies like these that have lead to it. It is amazing how much a movie which is only 100 minutes long can speak and show. How drastic an effect visuals combined with words and sounds can have. And that is why I believe that movies, movies like these, have the power to change the world. We should give more credit to these things that we so often dismiss as entertainment. It is these things that can teach us so much and make us a better person and this world a better place.

WHIPLASH(v): A strong jerk for us all

Whiplash is a movie about Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) who wants to be one of the great drummers and leave his mark on the world. The movie traces his journey at the cut-throat Shaffer conservatory. One of the main characters of the movie is Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) who is a music teacher. He leads a studio band of his handpicked musicians to the most competitive jazz competitions and Andrew is one of these handpicked musicians. At the beginning it is as if Fletcher sees a star student in Andrew and towards the end of the movie even says that he brought in another drummer only as motivation for Andrew. But Fletcher is not a hearts and compliments kind of guy. He pushes and pushes his students till they either break or become perfect. According to him there are no words in the English dictionary more harmful than ‘good job’. He pushed and pushed Andrew further and the question is will he be perfect or will he break? 

Miler teller and J.K. Simmons, both, give exceptional performances In Whiplash. J.K. Simmons portrays the fearful Terrance Fletcher to perfection. His gestures and words are both menacing and leave us feeling exactly the way Andrew might be feeling at that moment. Miler Teller embodies the scared, confused, unsure yet talented Andrew Neyman beautifully. We can feel his fear, pain and hard work through his expressions and body language. Great acting combined with Damien Chazelle’s acting and Tom Cross’s crisp editing make this movie reverberate within all our hearts.

After watching Whiplash, I was momentarily left feeling lost. The movie is so crisp and exciting that your body starts to vibrate to the thumps of the drum. But when it ends so abruptly you wonder what was it all for? One of the reasons this movie is so powerful and leaves such a drastic impact is because of the fast pace and the abrupt end. It takes you on a musical roller coaster and then throws you back out with a lot to think. Another reason why it is so powerful is because it addressees something that we all feel at one point or another, the need to push ourselves, the need to be great at what we do, the need to do something worthwhile... It's painful and beautiful at the same time and thus leaves us writhing with emotions.

Was Fletcher a negative influence or positive one? Was his method of teaching really molding greatness or inflicting emotional torture? What did his approval at the end of the movie mean to Andrew? 

This movie gives us a lot to think about and an overriding urge to do something worthwhile with our own lives. Thus, it’s safe to say even though Andrew’s journey ends abruptly for us, the feeling and emotions stay with us for a long time. Its not just Andrew's life but a universal story of how suffering can give rise to beauty and art.

  

The enigma that was Alan Turing: THE IMITATION GAME

SOMETIMES IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO NO ONE IMAGINES ANYTHING OF WHO DO THE THINGS THAT NO ONE CAN IMAGINE

The movie is based on the mathematician Alan Turing who designed a machine (Christopher) which broke the enigma code that shortened the Second World War by 2 years and saved millions of lives. 

Inventions don’t happen overnight. They take countess sleepless nights, even years to happen. But the beauty of The Imitation Game is that though it captures the process of the invention of this great machine that broke the unbreakable Nazi code of enigma, it also captures the social and emotional aspects of Alan Turing’s life. The idea was his but it was made possible only by the collective support and work of those on his team. 

This movie could have completely missed the mark and turned out to be exceptionally uninteresting but rather it was perfect, capturing all the technicalities and all the emotions. You feel excitement when the code is finally broken and the machine complete. You feel sympathy and sadness for Alan Turing. He brought the Second World War to an end but what did he get in return? Hormonal medication to cure his ‘homosexuality’...

Thus, the true enigma was the man who cracked the code. Alan Turing, a lonely boy had but one friend, Christopher for whom his first homosexual feelings developed (he later goes on to name his machine as Christopher). Thus he was a lonely boy with homosexual feeling and an obsession with solving puzzles. But not only did he crack the Nazi code he also married Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) so that she could stay and help break the code and do the work that she was so good at despite him being homosexual. He then tells her that he only married her because he wanted her help and now that the code was broken she should leave only because he wanted to protect her from the soviet agents amongst them. Also, when he was tried for ‘gross indecency’ he choose hormonal treatment over 2 years in prison because he did not want to lose Christopher (his machine) thus giving us a peek into the psyche of a child who never got over the fact that his first love had died and left him alone. 

Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the role of Alan Turing, is exceptional as ever. Keira Knightley and Mathew Goode (playing Hugh Alexander) also gave exceptional performances. The movie was written beautifully. While being full of emotions it was also very crisp, not dragging at any point. It was fast as well as slow, and perfectly so. So, Hats off to Morten Tyldum (director), William Goldenberg (editor) and the rest of the cast of The Imitation Game.

Alan Turing is a legend. I say this not only because of what he achieved but also because of what he endured. It was the suffering that Alan Turing had endured that made his life heart-breaking. He did not just break the enigma but he died without ever being recognized for it. He was socially awkward but he saved millions of lives. He was the man behind Britain’s victory in the Second World War but he was charged with ‘gross indecency’ and was chemically castrated. He kept the government's secrets while his own secrets were laid bare. It was all this that made his life even more beautiful. This reminded me of a quote from Troy, “The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” Thus the thing that made this movie truly beautiful for me was suffering. 

Towards the end of the movie, the character talks about his paper ‘the imitation game’. The paper talks about a game in which the judge asks a few questions and then determines what his subject is. The question to ask ourselves is, are we human? Or are we things incapable of emotion?

Nuclear Disarmament in the Middle East

Nuclear disarmament refers to the process of elimination of nuclear weapons and in the end creating a nuclear-weapon-free world.

 

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, at the United Nations General Assembly, said “as long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of their use exists”. This is the reason why nuclear disarmament is very essential. Nuclear disarmament in the Middle East is even more essential.

Of the four UN member states that have not signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Pakistan and Israel are two and nuclear power is possessed by Iran, Israel and Pakistan. Though Israel has never officially acknowledged the possession of nuclear weapons, however according to Federation of American Scientists, in a 2007 report, Israel has 75 to 400 nuclear warheads. Israel would use these nuclear warheads if it feels threatened by any nation in the Middle East like Iran. Till now, Iran’s official stand is that its nuclear research is aimed at peaceful purposes. But if it reaches weapon capacity, Israel will attack. Pakistan, which successfully tested its nuclear weapons in 1998, has stayed out of these conflicts. But Pakistan has close links with Saudi Arabia; Iran’s chief rival. Saudi Arabia has provided Pakistan with financial aid in the past, it is speculated that in exchange for this assistance, Pakistan agreed to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear protection if Iran developed nuclear weapons.

With Iran’s uranium enriched facilities, it can reach nuclear weapon capability anytime in the near future. If this happens, it could start a nuclear arms race (which may have already started) or a nuclear war. In order to maintain peace in the Middle East it is important to prevent Iran for developing nuclear weapons. This can be done with force by destroying the uranium enriched facilities but this may not stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and may even spark violence once again in the Middle East. To leave the lives of millions in the hands of a ‘may’ is not an option, for a nuclear war will not only take millions of innocent human lives but will also have a far reaching impact on the growth of the Middle East for generations as it did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Thus the safest option is to establish a nuclear-free-zone in the Middle East.

Establishing a nuclear-free-zone in the Middle East is not an easy task as it will be very difficult to prevent all the countries from using nuclear weapons. Even if ONE country continues to develop nuclear weapons, so will the others and the threat of mass destruction will continue to persist. The process of establishing a nuclear-free-zone in Middle East will be long as we need to realize that it is not just about a nuclear arms race but also about protection and self-preservation for the Middle Eastern countries. It will require confidence building and trust building along with other political measures. This nuclear-free-zone will not only prove to be beneficial for the Middle East but also the entire world; along with strengthening the peace process in the Middle East it will also ensure peace in the entire world, for a nuclear war in the Middle East will suck in the entire world one by one and be the end of mankind as we know it.