My wife recently got a stack of Mills & Boon novels from a friend and basically devoured them over a couple of sessions. Seeing them reminded me of the problem I’d always had with M&B — neither is it good writing in service of a love story, nor is it sufficiently raunchy to fit in the other category. So what exactly is the appeal? Don’t bother, I probably just have the wrong plumbing to understand it.

Anyway, when I see M&Bs, I am usually reminded of Kevin Smith. Why? Because he’s a bleeping good writer of both romance and raunch. Most of the time, he’s expounding on Star Wars, the more arcane causes of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the gayness of popular fictional characters (Archie & Jughead, Frodo & Sam etc.), all of it interspersed with more f-words than you can shake a bleeping stick at. But while you’re reeling under the profane verbiage, he manages to sneak in moments of true romance that remain in memory long after everything else has faded.

On top of which, he seems to have an uncanny knack of making his women unforgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever been impressed with Joey Lauren Adams in any movie other than Chasing Amy. Even if all the world recognizes her as either Arwen or as the girl who romped around with Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s Crazy video, I will always remember her has the video shop girl in Jersey Girl who got bored easily. Heck, he got J-Lo and Ben Affleck together on screen for 5 minutes and they were luminous. Tell me, who else has managed that?

And now, Elizabeth Banks as Miri. The woman is gorgeous, has an absolutely wonderful laugh and does justice to the profanity-laced dialogues that Kevin Smith comes up with. After having languished on the fringes for a number of years now, Banks is finally coming into her own as a leading lady to watch out for. I’d love to see how well she does in more serious roles. But when it comes to playing women in the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow universe, in her own words, she can “Meryl Streep the s*** out of this thing”.

Seth Rogen, that pudgy actor who has pretty much made a career out of playing lovable losers, plays her best friend and housemate Zack. When the two of them find themselves flat out broke, he hits upon the idea of making a porno with the two of them in it. The fly in the ointment — apart from all the obvious ones you might think of, and a few you didn’t have the imagination to come up with — their friendship has been platonic thus far. They manage to convince themselveas that they can convince their genitals to do the deed without their heads and hearts making a big deal out of it. But of course that doesn’t happen. When does it ever?

Outside of the rather unique way in which these complications arise, this is standard rom-com material. Other than the lesbian angle in Chasing Amy, I’d say that Smith has hardly ever been imaginative when it comes to his love stories. A big reason why they work is that his leads are usually very articulate and evenly matched. You want them to end up together if only so that they could keep talking.

While the plot chugs along to its predictable conclusion, Smith has plenty else to keep us distracted. Craig Robinson plays the financier of this little enterprise and finds among the best reasons to say “I love the movies”. Erstwhile porn star Traci Lords plays a character called Bubbles — rarely do people have a better introduction scene in the movies. Jeff Anderson (Randal from Clerks) plays the cameraman who finds that there are occupational hazards he might not have ever dreamed of. Justin Long and Brandon Routh make a cameo appearance that absolutely had me in splits — I don’t think Long has ever been funnier in any of his past work. But topping them all is Jason Mewes (Jay to Smith’s Silent Bob in the earlier movies) who manages, right at the end, to teach us that one can never presume to know everything there is to know about sex. Smith ought to file a patent for the Dutch Rudder — it’s unique, useful and non-obvious. Even to Traci Lords, I suspect.

ps: No, I’m not telling you what it is.

No, not Humphrey. I mean Boggarts with two g’s, the magical creatures that will take the shape of that thing you fear the most. The method of banishment involves thinking of something funny, pointing your wand and saying Riddikulus! If none of this makes sense, you might want to borrow a set of Harry Potter books from somewhere and get cracking.

Now, in case this Boggart thingy isn’t fictitious and there is a ghost of a chance that it might pop out of your cupboard and scare the crap out of you, I suggest you watch Zulm Ki Hukumat at least once. It is an Indianized remake of The Godfather with Govinda in the Al Pacino role (playing a character called Pratap Corleone Kohli), Dharam-paaji in the Brando role and Paresh Rawal in what can only be called a critical value-addition to the script — a fake Swamiji who deals in drugs. He even has a disciple (Archana Puran Singh) dressed as a sadhvi who, when the situation necessitates an item song, will change into something that Cher might’ve discarded as being too trashy.

For best effects, watch it every week. You will radiate such an aura of induced ridiculousness that Boggarts will find some other cupboard to haunt. I’m guessing that Govinda in a gold jacket and a yellow waistcoat that has a huge heart symbol on its back might also work as a patronus.

ps: Oh, and by the way, Aamir Khan did a Godfather remake as well — I think it’s called Aatank Hi Aatank, and features him with slicked back hair and a cheroot in his mouth and looking like a brand ambassador for Isabgol. It might not work as well as Zulm Ku Hukumat but might serve in a pinch.

I just got a glimpse of Nigella Lawson on Discovery Travel & Living. Like I mentioned in my earlier post on Julie & Julia, watching people cook isn’t really my thing. But for Nigella, I am willing to make an exception. In the interest of not getting kicked in the shins by my wife, who is sitting nearby, I shall not rhapsodize.

Anyway, the reason I write is because the woman looks distinctly thinner this time around. I’m sure this is healthy for her. I might even bring myself to be happy for her.

But the truth is, the basis of her appeal is the fact that she makes stuff that would send dieticians shrieking in horror, eats it all up (sometimes even wakes up in the middle of the night to do it), and — here’s the important part – looks all the better for it.

At least that’s part ofo her appeal. The other part… well, I promised I wouldn’t rhapsodize.

Just in case anyone ever accuses me of not having enough variety in my diet. Now, on with the reviews:

Julie & Julia

Imagine you’re a guy, and a vegetarian to boot. And someone told you that there’s this movie, about two hours long, featuring two women (and a couple of men by way of supporting cast) cooking for most of its running length. That there’s no plot to speak of really, and no major emotional upheavals. And that the climactic moment involves cutting open a duck and stuffing food in it. How likely is it that you’d drop everything to go watch this movie?

Let me sweeten the deal for you a bit. It stars Meryl Streep, who manages to keep her lead over Kate Winslet in the Oscar nominations race by the simple expedient of doing something brilliant enough to get nominated every year. It also stars Amy Adams, who seems to be closing in on Ms Winslet froom the other end. On top of which, it has Stanley Tucci, who is constitutionally incapable of disappointing.

Still, it’s a lot of cooking and very little plot to cram into two hours. Most people would give it a miss. Most did, if the box office receipts are any indication. I didn’t. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself engrossed in this simple tale of two women — one who blazed a trail by introducing French cuisine to servant-less Americans in the 1950s, and another who followed it half a century later by cooking her way through the former’s cookbook in a year.

Since I saw it on Sunday evening, I have been trying to figure out why I enjoyed this little movie so much. All I can come up with is this: the movie correctly identifies the secret to good food. It’s butter. Lots of it. Bon appetit!

All the Best takes the zany plot of Kaadhala Kaadhala (or Right Bed Wrong Husband, depending on who the makers want to give credit to), adds a bit, subtracts a bit and eventually comes up with a comedy with roughly the same hit rate. Much of it is due to the fact that the plot is madcap enough to cover a number of flaws.

The leads aren’t really in top form: Ajay Devgan (if he wants to stick that extra vowel where the sun don’t shine, that’s his business — I’m keeping it where it is) is just about okay, and needs to progress beyond the silly smile at some point if he wants to become a good comedian. Fardeen Khan seems, inexplicably enough, to survive in comedies despite the fact that he has the comic timing and voice modulation of the average dead bacterium. Bipasha Basu shows less cleavage than Ajay, but looks gorgeous nonetheless. Mughda Godse takes all the brownie points she earned for Fashion and blows them up here — if there is anything worse than how her role is written, it is how she plays it. Sanjay Butt looks like he ate a whole shark on the sets of Blue and hasn’t crapped it out yet.

But making up for all of this is a comedian who I confess I have never been a huge fan of: Johnny Lever. Playing a mute loan shark named Tobu, he brings the house down every time he appears on screen. How he communicates through his sidekicks is funny enough. But how one of them has trouble with “translating” what he “says” after having sustained an ear injury — that bit is almost Pythonesque in its mix of logic and wierdness. If the rest of the movie had managed to live up to that standard, I’d have been grabbing random strangers on the road and buying them tickets to this movie. As it stands, I can only suggest that you go watch it for Johnny Lever and forgive the rest.

ps: If you do watch it, look out for the reference to Slumdog Millionaire — it’s priceless!

First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following:

1. Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching it every night and wouldn’t even dream of giving it to you, even for a few hours, go online and order yourself a copy. I know you were expecting me to suggest that you kill that cranky old coot, but remember: any man who would watch this movie every night deserves to live, whatever his other qualities.
2. Optional: Once you’ve finished Step 1, consider reading the rest of this post. I plan to discuss a big spoiler here, so don’t tell me you haven’t been warned.

I’m serious about this, okay? Really, don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.

Now that the formalities have been dispensed with, let me get on with it.

The Shawshank Redemption spends most of its running time in establishing the steady rhythm of prison life. Even the establishment of Andy’s innocence and the jailer’s subsequent cover-up is done without unseemly haste. By giving itself space to breathe, the movie draws us in so surely that we find ourselves as “institutionalized” as the inmates themselves.

Apart from the pacing, which is a brave choice for a Hollywood movie, the other interesting choice is the use of a voiceover narrative. That the voice is that of Morgan Freeman, who plays one of the inmates and Andy’s closest friend, is definitely a plus. But narratives in general are tricky: if you don’t do it right, it would just seem like you just didn’t write the scenes well enough and needed the help of a narrator to explain things.

If you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), you will notice that the narrative follows the novel’s text to a good extent. A lot of it is in terms of commentary on a particular scene. In the one where Andy locks himself up in the room with the public address system and plays a Mozart opera on the loudspeakers, Red (Freeman) says:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Now, this is beautiful prose, but it doesn’t add anything to what you already realize when you see what happens. Like I said, redundancy. But then, a curious thing happens. Maybe it’s the timbre of Freeman’s voice, but you grow used to hearing it in the background. You begin to look forward to it, even if all it provides is a postscript to the events unfolding on screen.

I didn’t notice this on my initial viewing. Not even in the next couple of times after that. But there was this moment recently, when I was watching the movie on TV, that it struck me. There is a scene where Andy seems to have lost all hope, after the warden ensures that the only man who could’ve helped exonerate him is silenced. Red learns that Andy is now is possession of a stout length of rope, and lies awake all night worrying about whether his friend might have been pushed too far. And sure enough, the next morning at roll call, Andy doesn’t step out of his cell.

Darabont paces this scene deliberately, drawing out the suspense until we finally see the inside of Andy’s cell and find nobody there. It is a nice little moment of surprise, because nothing has really prepared us for it. But that is all I felt at that moment: a bit of surprise. A little later, you hear Red’s voice, over a montage of shots of the subsequent manhunt:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison.

Even today when I watch The Shawshank Redemption, I find that Andy’s escape really registers emotionally only after Red has said spoken of it. I guess in some ways, it’s another form of institutionalization.

Wake Up Sid starts off more or less asleep for the first hour, stratches and groans a bit for the rest of its running time and manages barely a few moments of absolute clarity in between. And yet, you don’t come away disappointed. If it does wake you up to anything at all, it is this: Ranbir Kapoor is the real thing. And now, since I’ve played enough with the title, I’ll switch back to sanity and get on with the review.

The film tells the story of an aimless rich kid who gets a crash course in growing up when he walks out of his house after a tiff with his folks. His saviour, mentor and ass-kicker-in-chief turns out to be a woman he befriended on her first night in Mumbai and helped settle into the city. That she is probably 6-7 years older than him makes their relationship a little more interesting than the ones we usually encounter. It is almost a cardinal rule in movies of this nature that the girl comes across as more mature than the guy, but to actually make her older is uncommon.

Since the plot itself isn’t earth-shattering, the movie rests on the strength of the writing and the performances. The performances are easier to talk about: Ranbir is in top form, and seems to be in his comfort zone in both the serious and the light moments. Konkona seems strangely ill at ease in what must surely now be called “the Konkona Sensharma role” when scriptwriters create characters like this. The supporting cast is uniformly good and, in the case of Supriya Pathak, absolutely sublime. I’ll get to her in a minute — she deserves more than a single sentence.

The writing is a curious mix of good and bad news. Much of the dialogue falls in the spectrum between obvious and pedestrian. The background score even supplies a chorus that says “Wake Up!” during key moments, just in case the audience is comprised of lobotomized bacteria who don’t Get The Point. The Meet cute, which features an extended conversation between the leads, might as well have been written on autopilot.

And yet there are moments of uncommon brilliance, such as a reconciliation between two estranged friends after one of them has just been dumped by his girlfriend. And moments where you can see how the writer made a conscious and sensible choice with regard to some stock supporing characters –  a potential romantic interest and a sexpot neighbour, to name a couple. And a few absolutely sublime moments, almost all of them featuring Supriya Pathak, who plays Sid’s mom. There are scenes where she (and the writing) accomplishes with a simple look what lesser mortals would’ve taken pages of dialogue to describe.

One in particular, where she visits Konkona’s apartment where her son is currently staying, stood out for me. Right at the end of that meeting, Konkona feels compelled to explain the status of their relationship to Supriya. How that moment plays out is one of the reasons why cinema deserves its place as a creative art in its own right: there is no way a book or a play (with its inability to close in on an actor’s face) could’ve done it exactly right. For the first time in the entire movie, I was gobsmacked.

It is precisely this moment of beauty that makes me so exasperated with Wake Up Sid. The movie shows itself capable of greatness, and but decides to stay off that pedestal and become yet another genre exercise. (Oh yeah, it’s a genre now — it’s called Movies Involving Characters Who Think Andheri Is On Another Planet.)

On the way back from watching Inglourious Basterds yesterday, I had a conversation with my wife that made me realize something. There’s no way you can actually convert someone to the Church of Tarantino. His style of filmmaking doesn’t lend itself to persuasive argument.

Consider the opening scene of Basterds, for instance. Set somewhere in Nazi-occupied France, it involves a protracted conversation between an SS officer named Hans Landa who is tasked with the job of rounding up all the Jews in France, and a French farmer who happens to be harbouring some Jews. You know, even if you haven’t read a word about the movie, that this scene will end in violence. Tarantino knows that you know. So he stretches out the dialogue — Landa takes his time to make his point. By the time the action eventually comes, like an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, you are primed for it.

This, the best written scene in the movie, is as good an illustration of Tarantino’s method as any other. His killers enjoy talking while they hold a loaded gun; they enjoy it so much and are so good at it that you don’t really want them to pull the trigger until they’re done.

I wrote the two paragraphs above in second person. Now, if it has occurred to you while reading these paragraphs that you aren’t really the “you” that they refer to, then go no further. If, on the other hand, the opposite has occurred to you, then again, go no further and watch the movie instead of reading an unabashed Tarantino fan ramble on about the joys of watching yet another of his movies.

You still here? Okay. Instead of speaking of the movie itself, which I will leave for you to discover, let me talk about Christoph Waltz, who plays Landa. Prior to this movie, I hadn’t even heard of the man. A Jewish actor (oh, the irony!) of Austrian origin, he hasn’t appeared in too many movies — the only one I’ve seen is Ordinary Decent Criminal, but I don’t remember it or him too well. This is not surprising — I hadn’t heard of Pam Grier before Jackie Brown, nor of David Carradine before Kill Bill. What will also not be surprising is that, every time I come across the man in the future, my first and fondest recollection will be of him playing Hans Landa. Tarantino is reported to have said that, had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he might not have made the movie at all. This may be an exaggeration, but this much is true: had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he ought not to have made the movie at all.

Watch how he chews his food before speaking, as if to indicate that he has all the time in the world before getting his job done. How he slips from cheerful bonhomie to cold steel almost in the middle of a sentence. His interaction with Shoshanna, the heroine of this tale. She survives the massacre at the farmer’s house and grows to become the proprietor of a cinema in Paris. There is a moment where she encounters Landa again — watch how Landa plays that scene. You always get the feeling, when he is dealing with an adversary, that he knows exactly what cards his opponent is holding. He doesn’t play with them, he toys with them. Now think about what a suitable comeuppance for a man like this would be and watch how the movie ends with him getting exactly what he deserves.

Pitted against him is an array of actors — Melanie Laurent is perfect as Shoshanna, and Diane Kruger does pretty much her best work in this movie as Bridget von Hammersmark. But by far the most delicious supporting performance comes from Brad Pitt, who plays Lt. Aldo Raine, chief of the Basterds. Pitt has done a variety of roles in his career, but his chief talent seems to be  a flair for comedy. Eli Roth takes all the dementia he puts into his slasher movies and brings it to his character of the Bear Jew. Mike Myers pops in for a little cameo but doesn’t seem to accomplish much other than make us exclaim, “Wait a minute, Austin Powers is the British general?”

My wife commented, after the movie was over, that Tarantino’s style was way too look-at-me-I’m-making-a-big-movie for her taste. She is absolutely right. Tarantino’s movies are seldom about their subject — they are primarily about themselves, and about his love for the movies. However, to quote Hans Landa:

Where our conclusions differ, is I don’t consider the comparison an insult.

I went on a spree recently and ended up watching three movies in more or less quick succession. Hey, people gorge on chocolate, I watch two movies back to back at a multiplex. So sue me. None of them really deserves a longish review (actually they do, but I’m a lazy bum), so here’s a paragraph or two about each of them.

Quick Gun Murugun

After a minor tribute to Tarantino’s Kill Bill right at the beginning, the opening credits of Quick Gun Murugun show our hero being ferried to heaven by Yama on what seems like Thailand’s answer to the buffalo. Heaven turns out to be something like a large Government office, complete with an old watchman sleeping at the gate. When Murugun alights, Yama asks him, half-sheepishly, “Saar, meterukku mela konjam…” And when the former walks on without even responding, the latter mutters what must be the most appropriately worded insult in recorded human history: Saavu kirakki. (My apologies to those who do not understand Tamil — my translation skills aren’t quite sufficient to make this joke work in any other language.)

With such auspicious beginnings, one would expect QGM to be an absolute laugh riot. Sadly, this doesn’t turn out to be the case. Like Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, it all sounds amazingly funny until you actually sit down and watch it. It’s eminently chuckle-worthy all right, and one never really tires of all the sly references (lines like “Make my day, machchaan” abound), but by and large, the movie manages to be clever without really tipping over the edge into laugh-out-loud-funny.

I have watched both of Shashanka Ghosh’s movies now — Waisa Bhi Hota Hai and this one. Neither of them will rank as a work of comic brilliance, but maybe these will turn out to be the opening notes in a brilliant career. Who knows, the man might even give us our own Annie Hall sometime in the future.

Dil Bole Hadippa

Dear Yash Raj Productions,

Despite my better judgement, I have watched most of the movies you have come out with in recent times. I do not need a refresher.

Sincerely,

Ramsu

The trouble with DBH, I suppose, is that while it isn’t really a bad movie per se, it doesn’t seem to be bothered much with being a good one. Then again, if all you have is the idea of an ambidextrous Punjabi kudi wanting to play cricket with the boys and masquerading as one in order to do so, just how good can it get? At least Twelfth Night added more complications (like the business of twins) to disguise the fact that it was basically just fluff.

Nobody really stands out. Rani Mukherjee tries gamely, but quite frankly, she just doesn’t have what it takes to elevate this material. The best you can expect from her is to do justice to a well-written part — this one isn’t. Shahid Kapoor moves his career up one square by playing an essentially likeable character yet again, except with a bigger banner paying him to do nothing this time around. Rakhi Sawant moves her career up one square by getting a more-or-less non-speaking 5 minute part in addition to her item song. Sherlyn Chopra turns up with seemingly one purpose — to increase the per capita exposure in the movie by a few dozen square inches. She does well at that. A non-speaking part would’ve been even better, but as it stands, it doesn’t really hurt the movie. The others convert O2 to CO2. On the whole, I’d have been better off doing the same at home.

Wanted

I doubt I can say it any better than Amrita has in her absolutely wonderful review of this movie. The best I can do is say the following: Wanted is exactly what it claims to be, and it is very good at what it aims to do.

I was initially skeptical about the casting choices — I felt Salman was too old for the part, and that Prakash Raj’s performance might not work as well in Hindi as it did in Tamil and Telugu. I was wrong on both counts. Both of them seem to be having the time of their lives, and from what I could see in the multiplex, the public absolutely loved it. Ayesha Takia proves yet again that, were it not for the occasional little gem like Dor or Socha Na Tha, all we might end up remembering of her is how she fills out a t-shirt. (Very well, I might add.)

As for the supporting cast: Vinod Khanna has a nice little role doing nothing. Inder Kumar seems to be raking in millions in steroid endorsements. Mahesh Manjrekar is suitably sleazy while managing to be a mite less over-the-top than his counterparts in the Southie versions — which is saying very little and very much at the same time. And a bunch of interchangeable goons seem to growl and die in the background often enough to keep the story going. One even commits suicide instead of letting the hero kill him — I’m not sure how he sees this as a better option, but I’m disinclined to argue the point.

On the whole, this is an absolutely wonderful B-movie. And if you need any other reason to watch it, here’s one: as toothpaste ads go, it’s much better than Hum Aapke Hai Kaun.

There was a short-lived show on TV called Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanagh as an A&R rep for a record label. In the pilot episode, he starts off by saying that he’s a crime fighter, and his job is to ensure that criminally bad music doesn’t hit the music stores. If I were to be so deluded as to describe my blogging about the movies in such terms, then this movie would have to be The Joker. And I gotta admit, I got my ass handed to me by this particular clown.

Manjal Veyyil stars Prasanna and Sandhya as childhood friends, presumed to be lovers by the world and its grandmother-in-law. Not that they are lovers, but none of this matters until the bad guy comes into the picture. Said bad guy is betrothed to her elder sister but decides that he wants her instead. It so happens that the sister is a diabetic, so he messes with her medications and causes her to collapse during their engagement. His parents throw a hissy fit and her dad offers Sandhya’s hand in marriage instead. This, after the groom’s mom gets abusive enough to warrant calling off the match, diabetes or not. And not once does the dad ask his daughter if she is okay with this, or even apologize after the fact. She reacts by running away with Prasanna. I’ll give you a minute to try and work out which asshole she was running away from.

While everyone thinks that the two have eloped, we discover that he is actually helping her find her lover (who went missing sometime ago). When the lover eventually turns up, so does the villain. Cue a standard fight sequence, in which the bad guy does, but not before badly injuring Prasanna. The doc says he’ll live, but will need someone to care for him for the rest of his life. So Sandhya tells her lover that she has to sacrifice her love in order to take care of her friend. He is disappointed, but agrees with her reasoning and leaves. Now, since the two of them have this conversation within earshot of the critically ill but conscious Prasanna, he decides to simplify matters by taking the breathing mask off his face and committing suicide while no one’s looking.

Now you’re probably waiting for me to tell you all that is wrong with the movie, in the most vitriolic language I can summon up.

I ask you: After that plot summary, do I really need to?

After having watched The Reader I realized something interesting: It is a movie about guilt and involves a former guard at Auswicz, but this description simultaneously tells you everything and nothing.

I will not spend much time on the plot, which is beautiful. Or on the writing, which feels like a punch to the gut. Or on the direction, which is unquestionably splendid.I will speak, instead, of the experience of watching Kate Winslet playing Hanna Schmitz.

When you first see her, she is a middle-aged woman, still beautiful, still vibrant, but possessed of demons that we can only guess at. She can be brusque, almost cruel, and yet is capable of tenderness and joy. You can understand the fifteen year-old Michael’s fascination with her. There is a scene in a church where she is moved to tears by the choir, and Michael observes her, smiling. Winslet is so radiant in that scene that you can understand what he feels like to bask in it.

When we see her next, she is on trial for being complicit in the murder of Jews at Auswicz. I cannot overstate how much heavy lifting Winslet does in this segment. The trial itself has some of the most interesting dialogue I have heard in the movies. Consider how difficult it might be to try and humanize someone like that. Oh, I don’t mean “humanize” in the sense of excusing her guilt with any kind of pop psychology. But think about how the only faces of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that we encounter in the history books and in fiction are the ones who are shown as obviously evil. Eight thousand people worked at Auswicz, yet only a handful were convicted of murder. Did the rest of them not know what they were involved in?

The third act shows Hanna as an old woman. It shows how a haggard, almost zombie-like prisoner suddenly finds herself rejuvenated when she begins to receive tapes of Michael reading out loud to her, as he used to during that summer years ago when they were lovers. From Hanna’s standpoint, she had two lives: one involving her job as an SS guard, and another involving her affair with the young Michael. It is in this segment that these two lives collide. It all culminates in a scene of surprising power between Hanna and Michael, where little is said but much is resolved. Watch Winslet’s eyes and body language in this scene. Watch how she tries to reach out from the world she lives in to the world she once had, and how she reacts to him as the scene progresses.

The counterpoint to her performance is provided by a pair of actors – David Kross playing the younger Michael and Ralph Fiennes playing the older one. While Kross has done an absolutely fabulous job, his role is more of a foil to Winslet’s character in the first two acts. It is Fiennes who really brings home how much these experiences have affected him. Watch how he struggles with his own guilt in the scene with a Holocaust survivor (played by Lena Olin) who testified against Hanna at the trial. It is amazing how much the man conveys while playing such an emotionally closed-off character.

As good as they both are, the movie belongs to Kate Winslet. The Oscars have had a dubious tradition of honouring the person rather than his/her work in a movie. What with Winslet being nominated so many times without winning anything, I always feared that she might finally end up winning for a decent performance in a weak year. The good news is, The Reader features her best performance to date — if she hadn’t won for this one, she might as well not have won at all. The even better news is, she’s still working.