Watching movies and writing blogs? HELL YES! It is every movie buff’s dream come true. With our internships and other work, we hadn’t been able to take out time to watch good cinema and our wishlists just kept on increasing. With The Oscars around the corner, we decided to watch nine oscar nominated movies and do a series of blogs on it. So go grab a bucket of popcorn and get ready for a cinematic week!
Here’s our take on the first three movies we watched:
The Shape of Water
-Reviewed by Mitali Khachi
Nominations- 13 Prediction for the number of wins- 5/6
Picturized in the backdrop of the Cold war, this is a fictional story about a mute woman named Eliza Esposito working as a cleaning lady in one of U.S. Government’s high security research facilities, whose life take a turn when she comes across one of the government’s top-secret assets- a mysterious human-like amphibian who has been captured from the Amazon rainforest and brought to the States. While the Government agents and the marine biologists are wary of this creature, Eliza strikes up a friendship with it which soon develops into deep abounding love. Eliza sees a similarity between herself and this amphibian which has been beautifully conveyed in a dialogue she has a with a friend of hers: “We both move our mouths but don’t speak. The way he looks at me, he doesn’t see me as incomplete, he sees me for who I am. He’s happy to see me.” This movie shows two isolated beings come together and fall in love with each other, even though they are two entirely different species!! It is kind of a modern take on the classic Beauty and the Beast.
The Shape of water also showcases friendship and humanity beautifully. While everyone else in the laboratory treats the creature like a science experiment, she is a true companion to him; she shares meals with him, plays music and dances for his entertainment. When Eliza witnesses the creature being mercilessly tortured, she resolves to rescue him from the facility and approaches her friend Mr. Giles for help. When he questions her about why she wants to risk committing a felony for someone who is ‘not even human’, she says, “It is not human, but if we do nothing, neither are we.” What follows is an exciting escape story, the budding romance between the two and a poetic ending.
Sally Hawkin’s portrayal of Eliza Esposito is absolutely spot-on, Doug Joneses has done a spectacular job playing the amphibian man (Kudos to the makeup artists who have done an unbelievably splendid job with prosthetics and the special effects/animation team for bringing this creature to life). Octavia Spencer brings her usual charm to her short role and Michael Shannon stays true to his role as a brutal government agent. While there are some loopholes regarding how she managed to sneak in to meet a top secret and valued ‘asset’, in one of U.S.A’s highly secured and heavily monitored research labs during the Cold War, the movie definitely gets a big thumbs-up from me. Go watch it now!
Dunkirk
-Reviewed by Manasvi Neyol
Nominations- 8 Prediction for the number of wins-2
The movie tells us the story of the Fall of France in 1940 and the subsequent evacuation of 3,00,000 soldiers from three areas-land, sea and air. I was really excited to watch this one because I love war movies (Band of Brothers is one of my favorite shows) and this one had all the elements of an amazing watch- Super handsome and talented ensemble cast (Tom Hardy, Harry Styles Cillian Murphy to name a few)-Check, written and directed by Christopher Nolan- Check and music by Hans Zimmer-Check. This war movie was a little different from all the others in the sense that it did not revolve around fighting, winning or losing. It was a battle of survival.
When 400,000 men couldn’t get home,
home came for them.
In this movie, dialogues are scarce and scarcely required. Every feeling and every fleeting emotion felt by the cast is conveyed beautifully. The helplessness of the soldiers who could literally see home but couldn’t reach it gives a whole new meaning to ‘so close, yet so far’. The editing was spot on and the cinematography was BRILLIANT (definitely winning some awards in that department). The direction was great as expected. The timeline was a little confusing (but I guess that is the beauty of all Christopher Nolan movies, they require the viewers to really use their brains). In the accuracy department, there were some loopholes as the roles of French and Indian soldiers were left out. All in all, the movie was a good watch.
The Post
-Reviewed by Mitali Khachi
Nominations- 2 Predictions-1
Meryl Streep+Tom Hanks+Steven Spielsberg= GENIUS!
This movie is set in 1972 when The Huffington Post published the ‘Pentagon Papers’ during President Richard Nixon’s time, exposing years of cover-up by the White House on the disastrous reality of the Vietnam War. It was a study commissioned by the then Secretary of Defence, John McNamara which was never to be made public, as it revealed that for decades the White House had been pumping billions of dollars and sending thousands of soldiers to Vietnam, despite being fairly certain that it was a wasted effort and not worth the price being paid. As is said by Daniel Ellsberg (He was a senior research associate at MIT and was a part of the study commissioned by McNamara) in the movie, “USA switched its strategy from basic security to active combat, all done to prevent American humiliation.”
Talking about the main characters, Mathew Rhys plays Daniel Ellsberg, the brave whistleblower who blew the lid off of this scandal by leaking these Top Secret papers to the press, when he realized that the then Government would continue to keep up its charade and send more men to the battlefield despite the results of the McNamara study stating otherwise.
Meryl Streep plays Katherine Graham, the owner and then publisher of The Huffington Post, who starts off as a clumsy, flustered, under-confident and a rather timid woman, but comes into her own in the latter part of the movie, when she decides to go ahead with publishing of the top secret documents against all odds- at the risk of her company shutting down and the possibility of going to jail. Tom Hanks plays the editor Ben Bradlee, who is truly committed to his job and desperately trying to play catch-up with the popularity of The New York Times. So when he gets his hands on the Pentagon papers, he is determined to publish them, even though he has the nearly impossible task of arranging 4000 papers in order, deciding which ones to publish, compile it, edit it, get an approval from the publisher and print in, all in just 10 hours!!!!
Apart from having good costumes and dialogues, great actors and acting, and wonderful cinematography, this movie raised two very important points, the first being Responsible journalism. It’s the duty of the Press to report true, factually correct news of importance to the public, without unnecessary sensationalization.The second one is Freedom of the Press vs National security. Governments cannot dictate coverage by citing concerns for ‘National security’ every time they don’t like what is being printed. How much information is too much? Where should the line be drawn at?
That’s it for now! Next up are- Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Phantom Thread and Lady Bird.
Talking about the main characters, Mathew Rhys plays Daniel Ellsberg, the brave whistleblower who blew the lid off of this scandal by leaking these Top Secret papers to the press, when he realized that the then Government would continue to keep up its charade and send more men to the battlefield despite the results of the McNamara study stating otherwise.
Meryl Streep plays Katherine Graham, the owner and then publisher of The Huffington Post, who starts off as a clumsy, flustered, under-confident and a rather timid woman, but comes into her own in the latter part of the movie, when she decides to go ahead with publishing of the top secret documents against all odds- at the risk of her company shutting down and the possibility of going to jail. Tom Hanks plays the editor Ben Bradlee, who is truly committed to his job and desperately trying to play catch-up with the popularity of The New York Times. So when he gets his hands on the Pentagon papers, he is determined to publish them, even though he has the nearly impossible task of arranging 4000 papers in order, deciding which ones to publish, compile it, edit it, get an approval from the publisher and print in, all in just 10 hours!!!!
Apart from having good costumes and dialogues, great actors and acting, and wonderful cinematography, this movie raised two very important points, the first being Responsible journalism. It’s the duty of the Press to report true, factually correct news of importance to the public, without unnecessary sensationalization.The second one is Freedom of the Press vs National security. Governments cannot dictate coverage by citing concerns for ‘National security’ every time they don’t like what is being printed. How much information is too much? Where should the line be drawn at?
That’s it for now! Next up are- Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Phantom Thread and Lady Bird.
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