The Shawshank Redemption

1994, 141m

A riveting drama about life in a US prison. A young banker is awarded a double life sentence for killing his wife and her lover, a crime of which he is fact not guilty. The story is mainly about the corruption and brutality of the officials as well as the inmates towards each other. It has many twists and turns and tests one's credulity at many points. It is based on a clever and skillful Stephen King yarn, after all.

It might be termed a modern fable about the travails of imprisonment, with a somewhat far fetched happy ending appended which was probably responsible for it's popularity over the years. Somewhere along the way it gets confused between chronicling the harsh realities of prison and it's determination to insinuate the soaring human spirit, in this case not unaided by luck.

The fairy tale finale seems like a conjurer's trick. In any case, to escape from the prison after thirty and forty years respectively and land oneself into an idyllic Zululand-on-the Sea is a conclusion lacking in depth and power hardly qualifying for the word redemption. Brooks as the aging librarian who is paroled after fifty years but fails to connect with the world he encounters outside, choosing to end his life, is a more convincing figure, apiece with the magnitude and duration of the suffering. Andrew Duresme is no Count of Monte Cristo with the cleansing vindictive flame--he remains a clever Mozart loving banker, a sore thumb in the environment into which chance lands him. Dead Man Walking was a far more consistently knit and powerful film of the genre.

Overall, a juvenile romance with touches of soap, which manages to grip your attention for it's long running time. So now we know that good does triumph over evil, and how.

Washington Post Review

Shoeshine

Vittorio de Sica, 1949, 84m

This is de Sica's first film and a favorite of Pauline Kael. It tells of two boys working as shoeshines in harsh post WW2 Rome. They fulfill their dream of buying a horse by entering into dubious transactions but are eventually framed and arrested for a burglary of which they are innocent. The movie is about the heartbreak and dehumanization of these youngsters as they are thrown into an overcrowded prison for young offenders.

This first of the director's film is marked by the humanism which runs through his entire work. The film is restrained and realistic and nowhere tries to project the law enforcing establishment as excessively wicked or perverted. The cops too have a human touch. It is a portrait of the period it depicts and human beings, specially children, trapped in an environment and circumstances which they have learnt to regard as the norm of life. This is humanity waking up from the dream of war.

Notes towards a film about India

Pasolini, 1969, 33m

This is a film about a film about or set in India which never got made. Pasolini was in the process of formulating a plot as well as exploring with his camera. He starts by asking a variety of people whether they would be willing to offer their bodies to feed a starving tiger. Sadhus, rivers, eagles hovering, faces, autorickshas, the Indian parliament. Pasolini indifferently roves over the images which one imagines a tourist to associate with this land.

Once upon a time there was a Maharaja, who, after India became independent, decides to give up his palace and luxury to fend for himself as a commoner. The family falls into ill days, and the film concludes with a cremation, presumably of the scion.

The movie includes some interviews, with farmers, industrial workers, people on the street, news paper editors, eliciting dull responses to dull questions.

The film has nothing to recommend it except the director's name and the short running time. It is no surprise it never got made, which attests to his sound judgement. It is a relic and a curio.

How to Die in Oregon

2011, 107m

Physician assisted suicide became legal in the American state of Oregon in 1994. Such a law already exists in three European countries.The documentary examines the working of the law and the experience of some patients who chose this route out of their suffering. The main focus of the film is on Cody Curtis, a middle aged woman stricken with liver cancer. The film mainly consists of interviews of patients, doctors and family members, and the travails, sorrows and emotional upheavals on the route from taking the decision to it's final implementation. It is a story made up of tears, courage and laced with much humor, black or white, as for example when one person describes the taste of his dispensation, for posterity's benefit, as "woody". This is a film which may disturb, but which can hardly be devoid of interest to anyone subject to the law of mortality.

Suicide has always been with us, for all the moral and legal sanctions attached to it. Death is scary, but life being painful as it is, one suspects that what keeps a lot people from doing oneself in is the ignorance or unavailabity of the means and the messiness of the whole business. Not least of it's attractions is the economy it effects, which may positively dispose those miserly inclined. An intelligent person contemplating it may yet make it his study. But with the mushrooming of legislation like this making it a graduated painless reversible choice under the supervision of the best that medical  science has to offer, it's popularity could well increase. Five hundred Oregonians have already benefited from the law.

One of the fundamental features of life, the very foundation stone of philosophy, are the uncertainties attached to death. By reducing, if not eliminating, these, the way we view life alters considerably. As such, this may be the ultimate luxury, or trip, that science can offer. If, that is, convenience and comfort is what you seek.

One must hasten to add that the benefit of the Death with Dignity Law is only available to terminal cases and circumscribed by other stringent conditions, making it's use as a convenient escape route difficult, if not impossible. From the back of Jack Kevorkian's Volkswagon, to the gleaming interiors of hospitals, and reassuring no nonsense practitioners, is a long way.

You Don't Know Jack: the Life and Deaths of Jack Kevorkian

Levinson, 2010, 134m

Medically assisted suicide is a procedure where the patient is provided with the facilities to terminate his life but must pull the plug or press the switch himself, making it a voluntary act and absolving the administrator. In euthanasia or mercy killing the mechanism is triggered by the doctor. Currently, euthanasia is legalized in Belgium, Switzerland and Oregon, USA.

Jack is Kevorkian, nicknamed Dr Death. He attained fame and notoriety for facilitating 130 assisted suicides, all furtively and often with makeshift arrangements like the back of a car. Finally he carried out an act of euthanasia , video taping the event. The tape was nationally broadcast on TV. Kevorkian was tried and convicted for second degree murder and sentenced from 10 to 20 years. He served eight and half, after which he was paroled. He died in June 2011 at age 83.

The movie stars Al Pacino in the title role. Going by the film, Kevorkian, apart from his humanitarian concerns as a doctor, seems to have been a zealot fighting for what he made his life's cause. He even went on hunger strike on occasions protesting the unjustness of his arrest. "If Gandhi could do it, so can I." The film is absorbing and informative, with an excellent script and acting all round. The concluding drama at the Supreme Court is particularly well done.

The question, the ethical side, the legislation, the social consequences is a complex enigma of a far reaching nature touching the core of life and cannot be lightly discussed.

At least, We Know Jack Now.