Kaa ho, Seth?

[uneditors translation of the above statement, made in a dialect marred by a mouthful of chewable carcinogen: "Death, where is thy sting?"]

Damnation (Karhozat)

Movies shot after the 60's should stick to colour. If not, it tends to give them a look that sometimes may wildly succeed (in spite of my initial objections), but more often than not, give the movie the look of a low-budget horror film.

Take this one, for instance: award winning and much tarred-and-feathered director, nameless (and anyway unpronounceable) cast, and in the end, the movie leaves you with a sense of -- but I'm jumping. Some amount of suspense is required.

So, the basic premise: it's the cold war, advisors say the analysts say that the golden age is just over, and production of minerals is at an all-time automated high. Ore cabs sail blithely over Notown, Communeastern Europe on their way to be processed into arms to continue the (Mexican) standoff. None of which actually matters, since the movie has nothing to do with weighty world events, except that the constant buzzing of the cabs provides background music to nonexistent conversations.

Enter into this, a solipsistic bar-hopping hero who spends his remaining time looking out the window and wondering why his calculator says that 1782¹² + 1841¹² = 1922¹², when he knows pretty well that the old man said it wouldn't.

Unfortunately for his peace of mind, the woman he stalks in whatever spare time his other occupations leave him is married. So he gets her husband a job, smuggling some unnamed material from a certain Khan, A. Q. to a nameless third power, via the long way (scenic trip, you know. Much easier on the tyres.) The aim being, of course, to convince the woman that he is capable of doing a lot more than just proving Fermat wrong.

A few thousand parties and bar-hops later, he takes the sensible step of informing the local CIA office that the husband (now safely returned from transporting his valuable cargo) actually smuggled something he shouldn't have to an undesirable destination. This masterstroke reduces him to conversing with dogs, who are the only company he has who don't actively bark back at him: naturally, he can bark a lot louder. Than the dogs, that is.

Oh, how could I forget the Oracle, making her first appearance here, as a woman whose hair went white because of the shocks that dealing with such heroes gave her? Her tendency to quote wildly inappropriate passages from holy books?

For a noir movie that pretends to not explain the meaning of life, the universe and everything else, it is the sort of slow-moving caterpillared plot-less egregious excuse for entertainment that would put a chess game between two rank (and smelly) amateurs playing underwater to shame. Anything else, however, is beyond its limited capabilites.

An imdb reviewer says "[the cameraman] Medvigy uses light like Ennio Morricone uses music." Quite true. It's overused, repetitive and the sort of thing you tend to carry in your mind for a very long time after watching the movie.

Now where's my Mithunda movie? I want my mithun movie! Dhormendro in "Garam Veer" doesn't quite cut it - warm beer is for the ancient Britons only...