The Consumption

Maybe someday I should start adding images into these, but for now, I just don’t particularly care.

FILM: Gone With the Wind: For some reason, I’ve long been apprehensive about this one. It’s always portrayed as the uber-romance, a heartbreaking epic of southern chivalry, damsels swooning and “yessum, mastuh” servants, which didn’t much entice me. There’s some accuracy to that, but I don’t know that I would even categorize it as a love story. It’s more a character study of Scarlet O’Hara, a mostly awful person with moments of true humanity. She’s manipulative, cold, calculating, seemingly incapable of real love… and a whole lot more interesting than the belles that surround her. Clark Gable is perfect throughout — he has an inhumanly perfect smirk, and while his character is nearly as self-centred as ol’ Scarlet, he’s both more honest about it and more prone to demonstrating the soul beneath the persona. Better than I expected, mostly because it’s more cynical than I expected. Anyone who talks about classics being overly saccharine just hasn’t watched them; mainstream movies these days are far more emotionally straightforward.

FILM: Zero Bridge: Halfway through the Indian movies now, and this one’s my favourite of the three by a good margin. That could just be me showing a cultural bias — the minimal production and low-key performances are a lot closer to North American indie filmmaking than the other two have been. Still, Mohamad Imran Tapa is great as the bright but self-centred main character, who verges on a life of crime because the world offered by his illiterate uncle (played superbly by Ali Mohammad Dar), and Taniya Khan is just plain gorgeous as the sort-of love interest. Has the same kind of documentary feel as films like L’Enfant and Police, Adjective… this one’ll be hard to top.