Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up and Taste of cherry

Last weekend I got a chance to watch Kiarostami’s two movies Close-up and Taste of Cherry. I always have the zeal for Iranian cinema ever since I watched Children of Heaven.

I would say Close-up is more of a special report of a true story happened in Iran. It is about an individual who claims him to be a director Mohsen Makhmalbaf who directed Cyclist and gets in touch with a family. But when I got the DVD I didn’t know that this is such kind of movie where I was expecting something of Majidi Style. In the end, it is a different way of depicting an individual’s mind and his feelings.

I was more hesitant to watch this Taste of Cherry due to the effect of watching Close-up as I didn’t want to watch documentary kinda movies back to back. But you would get the feel of different taste in it. It is all about a man who wants to commit suicide and he is finding for someone to close the ditch which he had already made so that he can go and sleep having the sleeping pills. In the end, I didn’t get what he is trying to say in the climax. I had to do some research on that movie and found something here. Kiarostami refers to this style as “Unfinished Cinema”.

You get a different feeling after watching these movies that you would not get it in any other commercial movie. I got it after watching it. I would recommend it as a case study for all the movie fanatics.

Thamirabarani- A disaster

Iif you are worried that this is about some natural calamity to do with the river Thamirabarani, please don’t panic. This has got nothing to do with that. This is all about the latest movie in Tamil from the director Hari which I was destined to watch it yesterday night. I had few questions in my mind after watching this movie. Is this movie worth at least a little to be written over? Do the makers of a movie ever watch after taking it? Why Hari has to show his anger in this way to people? Is this his way of taking revenge for not making his previous ‘Aaru’ film a hit?

The story is the most creative story I had ever seen in Tamil cinema. Forget about Tamil cinema. It’s the first ever movie of this story line we ever had in world cinema. The story is about two families and its rivalry between them in a village in Southern Tamilnadu. A love story from the two families, and later they come to know that they are cousins. Everyone turning out to be good in the end and a happily lived ever after end. Wow. !!! How creative a director could go in Tamil cinema? Are there any standards set for that? If so, Hari has broken all the heights, limits whatever and set a new height for creativity.

This movie should be made as case study for all the students involved in film studies. Hari should be selected as Juror for all the film festivals happening around the world. C’mon he deserves more than that.

He should be given a ‘Life Time Achievement’ award and sent back to his native. The reason it has to be made the case study is so that the students should realize that they should take better movies as an act of condolence for the viewers who watched it.

In brief, one more disaster from Tamil film industry.