Crush and Throw: Death Note | Review

Death Note had taken the anime world by storm when it released way back in 2003. Quickly gaining a cult following, and a massive approval rating of nearly 99% on nearly every review aggregator website, it was about time a film adaptation was made, and if its to gain international viewership, who better than America to produce it, and who better than Netflix to distribute it? And who better than a seasoned viewer to <YAWN> through the entire thing? Yeah, you get my drift.

Borrowing from the original story of the Manga/anime series, a genius high school student and recluse by the name of Light Turner finds a book titled ‘Death Note’ dropped by Ryuk, a Shinimagi (Japanese demon of death) with which one can kill anyone on the planet by just writing his name and mode of death on the book. Having misguided yet seemingly noble intentions, Light adopts the identity of Kira, and goes on a murderous spree, killing everyone and anyone he deems to be ill-fitted to exist in society, safely from the comfort of his desk. He enjoys his anonymity for some time, until an enigmatic detective ‘L’ takes up the challenge of revealing Kira’s true identity.

The original Death Note manga 

A good, just thing to do when evaluating such a movie, is to see how well it connects with a viewer being introduced to the story for the first time, and hasn’t seen the original manga, because an adaptation is rarely successful in keeping up with the standards set by the original and accordingly expected by the fanboys.  Death Note falls flat on its face, either way. Too much story has been tried to be cramped in between 1 hour and 40 minutes of runtime, and the result is a speeding train missing nearly all points of coherence. I know I said we should do otherwise, but if we talk about the original series, there is enough creative content to stretch out to at least 2 well engineered movies. The way the original manga skirted along the thin line between good and evil, moderate and extreme, eventually making us side with the conflicted murderer, is completely absent from the movie.

Nat Wolff as Light Turner

Nat Wolff, known for his performances in Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars plays the angsty teen, Light Turner. Where playing a good-natured, normally behaving boy seemed right up his alley, playing a self-righteous murderer doesn’t. Most of his performance is plastic, and he seems like the stereotypical weak teenager who’s angry at his father, gets beat up by bullies, and speaks at a flat single scale unless acting out, and there’s a LOT of acting out. Weird, random acting out. Rather than the genius his character was supposed to look like, he comes off more as a meticulous, socially awkward boy trying to find kicks in murder.

Ryuk, voiced by Willem Dafoe 

Willem Dafoe voices Ryuk, the Shinimagi who is the antagonist of the film and the series. A bored demon of death, he passes on his notebook to anyone and merely enjoys the show. Dafoe is probably my favourite choice for a negative character – the man’s voice has this natural creepy touch, it couldn’t work more perfectly. And he was the only redeeming factor in the character of Ryuk, a cheap CGI rendition of the original saga’s primary villain, who turns out to be more of a Sesame Street stock character, than the demon apathetic to any concerns of man and his world.

One aspect the film does fine is its cinematography and establishing the mystique around the detective ‘L’ played by Keith Stanfield, who appeared last in the Jordan Peele-directed film ‘Get Out’. He does fine. Just fine.

Verdict: 1 and a ½ / 5 toots of the bugle

You don’t need a Death Note to be able to passively kill someone. Show them this movie, and boredom will do it.

Wakefield: Bryan Cranston, the powerhouse

So this week I came across Wakefield, and naturally seeing the face of Bryan Cranston, this couldn't be put aside. Let's read on to know more.

Seriously though, Bryan Cranston. The best. Period.

The Story - Directed by Robin Swicord, the screenwriter for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the movie revolves around Howard Wakefield, a successful lawyer in New York City living the standard family life with his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and two daughters, out in the suburbs. He is accustomed to his clockwork life of working, eating, sleeping and having a strained marital life, and is visibly frustrated. One day, while returning home, Howard trying to chase a raccoon away, follows it into his garage’s attic in the backyard. He discovers that he has a nearly perfect view into the affairs of his house from the attic window, and stays to see how his wife behaves in retaliation to his absence from dinner. One thing leads to the other, and Howard stays in the same attic for several months, leading his family to believe he has left them, and observes from the window how they go about their life and how much they’re affected by his absence.

The entire film, and every character portrait we come across, is from the view of the protagonist Howard Wakefield. He gives an account of the circumstances in which he met and married his wife, makes shoddy profiles of every person coming to his house post his disappearance.

The interesting thing is, despite his being the protagonist and the pivot of the story, for nearly half the movie, Wakefield comes off as a selfish, shallow, manipulative man who despite his own share of bad deeds, believes himself to be the victim of the relationships he’s bound himself in. For a movie balancing itself on the narration and point-of-view of one single character, it is remarkable how they achieve the feat.

As a viewer, we are installed next to Howard in his attic, and in a conventional cinematic setup, a viewer always empathises with the protagonist, especially in a situation like this, but this film takes a different trajectory: In the initial sequence, we see his family, seemingly curious about his absence, but equally undisturbed. In this time, we feel for Howard the breadwinner, whose life is spent providing for the very people whose lives are going on uninterrupted and uninfluenced by his absence. In the following sequence, Cranston shows us the more diverse hues of Howard’s personality, where he is deeply contemptuous towards family and peers, and has arrived to a point where he expects some sort of returns for all the things he does for them. He objectifies and trivialises his wife, accusing her of being flirtatious with other men.  Moving further, he recounts how he played his colleague to win over Diana’s hand in marriage, and it is here that Cranston inadvertently enters the final sequence of the film, where he starts realising all the faults within himself, how dependent he had been on the various luxuries in his life prior to his living like a homeless man in his own attic, and how they have affected his life and relationships with people, and prevented him from realising their true worth.

I loved this movie because of the unique way its narrative is handled, with every scene of the movie being a flashback into a memory of Howard, handpicked to suit his side of the story yet subconsciously painting a detailed picture of Howard’s personality in the process. There is a steady revelation of his person - bad, terrible, even downright despicable, but sometimes surprisingly enlightened and compassionate - with every step of his story, one that he himself isn’t aware to be affecting. None of the story as narrated by him has a particularly linear structure, and he tells it as it comes to him, ranting away as if he’s complaining directly to the viewer without even peeking into the fourth wall.

The only other significant known actor in the movie is Jennifer Garner, playing Howard's wife Diana. No specific judgment upon her, and nothing out of the usual good performance, but the character should have gone to an older actress, or at least one who'd look the same age as Cranston.

Wakefield, all in all, is a bitter-sweet (bitter mostly) drama about the mid-life crisis and the identity crisis that any family man could and must face in today’s frantic and seemingly uncaring world, and despite the dryness of its concept, brimming with significant, curious emotion, accommodated delicately with the complexities of its protagonist.

They could have done better with the epilogue, where they chose to end on an ambiguous note, but hey, is anybody perfect?

The Lost City of Z: An Ode To The Spirit Of Discovery

The subject of historical geographical exploration is one that has been depicted in cinema usually as a taste of exaggerated fanciful adventure (cue: Indiana Jones), animation (cue: Tarzan), or comedy cue:  the upcoming Jumanji 2). As a medium of information apart from plain entertainment, there was a dearth of cinema that could showcase a detailed picture of the physical and emotional journey of an explorer, wandering in uncharted, potentially dangerous regions, invested into the fact that this journey could well cost them their lives. 

Then you come across this absolutely beautiful piece of cinema – a beautiful account of a British explorer and soldier, Major Percy Fawcett, a name forgotten over time, and one of the most influential figures linked to the mythical land of El Dorado believed to be harbouring a secret civilisation much ancient and more advanced than any other known the world over. The film covers Fawcett’s journey, from his admittance into the Royal Geographical Society of England, upto his eventual disappearance in the dense jungles of the Amazon. Major Percival ‘Percy’ Fawcett is assigned to an expedition near the Brazil-Bolivian territory for mapping uncharted territory along with Corporals Henry Costin and Arthur Manley. On his first trip down, he faces threats such as extreme climatic conditions, rampant disease, invisible bloodthirsty tribesmen, and in the least, a piranha-laden Amazon River, surrounded by an unfriendly forest that cannot be relied upon for subsistence.

An unblemished vision and its raw portrayal, and an extremely well-picked ensemble come together to make this film a lush, intricate account into the darkness faced by explorers working to discover new lands to the point of obsession, and continuing on despite continuous challenges to their reputation, health, lives and sanity.

Robert Pattinson as Corporal Henry Costin,
Fawcett's aide-de-camp

Fawcett is played by Charlie Hunnam, most well known as Jax Teller in the long running Sons of Anarchy, Raleigh Becket in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, and the title lead in Guy Ritchie’s crime-comedy-fantasy film King Arthur: Legend of The Sword. One could say Charlie Hunnam’s naturally brooding look and demeanour helps him fill Fawcett’s shoes quite well, as he captures the turbulences faced by the explorer and his aide-de-camp Costin, played by Robert Pattinson, another gem of an actor (discount the Twilight saga, and you’ll know what I mean), and how the obsession over the possibility of finding a hidden civilisation came to become the defining account of his life as the world knows it. Sienna Miller delivers a splendid heartfelt performance as Nina Fawcett, the major’s devoted wife who is nearly equally dedicated to him accomplishing his objective.

Enough said about the cast. Coming to why this film struck such a chord with me, I would point out a particular sequence in which we get to witness the near-summation of the dire straits Fawcett and his men find themselves in, halfway through the movie. On their second trip down the Amazon, they are intercepted by a familiarly aggressive group of tribesmen and forced to retreat to the opposite bank of the river. Trying to reason with the indigenous people, Fawcett bursts out into song and using a book as a shield for his face, moves forward towards them to attempt communication. Suddenly an arrow comes flying and pierces the book, missing Fawcett’s face by bare inches. The incredible build-up to the sequence pauses with a heart-stopping instant. But if I wasn’t invested enough in the story, Fawcett instead of being the stereotypical film explorer and brushing the arrow aside, momentarily phases out, and we see his life and everything he yearns to return to, literally flashing before his eyes and he tries to compose himself, all the while maintaining his stance and composure, and despite the same, proceeding to broker peace with the very same tribesmen.

Though for a short amount of time, Tom Holland appears as Jack Fawcett, Percy’s son who accompanies him on his final journey to the Amazon before their disappearance, and gives a more-than-decent performance, showcasing his serious chops, a grade above what we see in his latest Spiderman: Homecoming.

Hunnam and Holland caught between two tribal groups

In the age of larger-than-life commercial cinema, which hinges on extreme camera work, high profile names and style above substance, I feel glad that sometimes filmmakers like James Grey move out of the track to make cinema such as this – cinema that manages to evoke a hundred emotions other than plain exhilaration from intermittent one-liners, something we’ve become way too used to owing to commercial cinema. Where most films manage to establish a scenario where we view events through a window and feel a fraction of the thrills, the few like The Lost City of Z gets you holistically and deeply invested into the journey of their characters, where after a point you build an almost personal emotional connection with them.