Harper Lee's 2nd novel "Go Set A Watchman" to be released on July 14, 2015

Harper Lee in 2007

It's 55 years after "To Kill A Mockingbird was published..

Do read about it in The Guardian. Click the following url:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/03/harper-lee-new-novel-to-kill-a-mockingbird

Birdman: A Review by Chetan Shetty

Among the gems that the Oscar season has brought us this year is a masterpiece called Birdman, directed by Mexican-born director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Birdman is the story of an ageing movie actor Riggan Thompson (played by Michael Keaton) struggling to find relevance and self-respect by now directing and acting in a stage play on Broadway. To make up for lost time as a father, he asks his daughter (played by Emma Stone) to assist him on the  play. Edward Norton plays a popular Broadway stage actor, who can only "perform" on stage! And everyone of the rest of the small cast also have their own little characterizations nicely sketched out.

Riggan Thompson used to once play an action hero called the Birdman in the movies. That role, that brought him wealth and fame at one time, has now become his alter-ego, constantly berating him for scraping the bottom of the barrel on stage when he could be a superhero in the studios. Interestingly, one will remember that Michael Keaton has played the role of Batman in the past - before the Dark Night series made it such a great hit. In a line in this movie, the Birdman alter-ego berates Riggan Thompson, for "handing over the keys to the kingdom to these impostors"

Apart from the great performances by the cast of the movie, the conspicuous technical genius of this film is their attempt to give the movie a feel of being a single take. It's as if there were no cuts - as if the entire movie was shot in one continuous roll of the camera. Now of course that would have been impossible. They did take cuts, but just disguised them very well. You then have to marvel at the screenplay, the  cinematography and the sound recording that allowed this story to be told as if it was one really long take. 

While the movie is about a stage play, these long takes make the movie feel like a stage play. I can imagine that they must have rehearsed and rehearsed so much before shooting this movie. And one sub-plot of the movie is this rivalry and mutual disdain between the movie guys and the stage artists - between New York and LA. In one line, a stage critic tells Riggan "You may be a celebrity, but you are no actor!" The same could be said of so many movie stars - both here and abroad.

The script is powerful, not just in good lines, but in ways that a casual line, here and there,  in the early part of the movie become relevant as the story unfolds. 

I hesitate to say more about the actual story - as it is complex - and subject to your interpretation. Watch the movie - it is a masterpiece of cinematic story-telling!

The Theory of Everything : Review by Shama Vijayan

 “The Theory of Everything,” based on the life of the famous Physicist Stephen Hawking, directed by James Marsh,  is to me the best drama genre  film I have seen in the last one year.  The backdrop of the movie is the  University of Cambridge, where Stephen Hawking  meets Jane Wilde a fellow student, an Art graduate with whom he falls in love.  Actor Eddie Redmayne’s  performance is outstanding,  as the young Physicist, Stephen Hawking, whose  great future is  shattered when he is diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and is told that he has only two years to live. The heart-wrenching moments are  when  the actor as the brilliant  21 year-old student Hawking,  struck by the disease, struggles to walk with his weak twisted limbs and spends his time in the seclusion of his room believing that he has lost everything.    It’s a difficult role which requires tremendous physical efforts to simulate the crippling effects of the debilitating disease coupled  with emotional anguish. Stephen Hawking’s lopsided smile with his  head dangling on one side is familiar to the world, but to bring him alive on the cinema screen needed a great Director like James Marsh and a brilliant Actor like Eddie Redmayne.  Felicity Jones’ portrayal of  Jane Hawking is brilliant, as the  young girl in love,  displaying indomitable courage and  stoicism in the face of tragedy and helping Hawking win his Doctorate.  The  cracks that appear later in their real life marriage has references to Jane Hawking’s,  “Memoirs – Travelling to Infinity: My  Life with Stephen.”     Johann Johannson’s music score is  delightful.  The film has already won many Golden Globe and other  Awards.     I would like though,  to say  that the movie is more of a  layman’s delight because it focuses more on Hawking’s  life rather than his achievements as a great astrophysicist.  His famous utterance about the universe,   “A single theory explains everything”  evidently gives the film its title

The Imitation Game: Review by Seema Chinchore

A 2014  historical film about British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, The Imitation Game depicts a key figure in cracking Nazi Germany's naval Enigma code which helped the Allies win the Second World War.

Hidden codes, secret meanings and mixed messages pulse through the reliable, old-fashioned, buzzing copper wires of true-life British period drama The Imitation Game. The film gives us key episodes in the tragic life of Alan Turing. He was the mathematician whose biting, anti-social intelligence briefly ran in step with the needs of the British war effort in the 1940s when he was employed to help break the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

Turing’s wartime achievements – kept under wraps for years – counted for nothing when his homosexuality fell foul of the law in the early 1950s, sending an already fragile personality into freefall.

The film lingers on the war period and the Bletchley years, where it’s most comfortable as an ensemble, getting-the-team together drama. Turing’s initial conflicts with his Bletchley colleagues and his friendship with fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, who was briefly his fiancée. But perhaps the most moving, enlightening and sweetly played scenes are of Turing’s schooldays when we see a young Turing, fragile, stuttering and in love with a fellow pupil. Less delicate is a later scene where Turing is effectively presented as being in love with his big, awkward proto-computer – named Christopher after his schoolboy romance. The script tends to spell out its themes, repeating a corny slogan: ‘Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.’

You won’t need anything like Turing’s powers of detection to understand what the energetic, respectable ‘The Imitation Game’ has to offer. Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. The Imitation Game both brings to life and pays tribute to Turing's history-altering and pioneering work that paved the way for modern computing.

The Imitation Game / The Theory of Everything: Reviews by Kaveeta Keswani.

Two tales of two scientists, both brilliant, both damned, one gets a chance or several by the universe to overcome his nemesis, and one doesn’t.

I will start with The Imitation Game which stars one of my favourite actors of today – he totally floored me in Sherlock (the BBC series), which I can seem to watch again and again.  The film aspires to tell us the story of the unsung war hero Alan Turing (Mathematician, Crypto-analyst), who with his team and machine (his invention) cracked the Nazi code – ‘Enigma’, during the World War. He is said to have save two years of wartime and 14 million lives. The screenplay was written by Graham Moore based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

The film highlights key periods of his brief life, his lonely school years as a student, the success of his secret wartime work on the revolutionary electro-mechanical bombe (Christopher), which was capable of breaking 3,000 Enigma-generated naval codes a day; and the tragedy of his post-war decline following his conviction for gross indecency, a criminal offence stemming from his admission of maintaining a homosexual relationship.

What I loved about the film was Cumberbatches’ powerful portrayal of a character- lonely, brilliant, extremely caring in his relationships, but unable to make the emotional jump from emotion to lasting relationships, maybe because of his boarding school stiff upper lip upbringing, or his inner conflict to let reason win.

I like the way the director (Morten Tyldum) intersperses the present with charming english boarding school scenes from school and his best friend, Christopher, who he names his Bombe after. Though at times I felt it was a bit clinical in its treatment, leaving out large pieces of the puzzle called Turing, blank, especially in his relationship with his family and Joan Clarke (Keira Knightl). Some of the blanks were brilliantly filled by Cumberbatches acting, but when I left the film and even when it stayed with me the entire day- I had a lot of unanswered questions and gaps which I felt the film failed to address.

The Theory of Everything on the other hand did a much more well rounded job in comparison, it was thorough in its research, with all the background perfectly in place, the screenplay based on his ex-wifes memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Wild Hawking. It traces Hawkings life in Cambridge where he met Jane, whilst both were doing their PhD’s, and how they met and fell in love and together created a beautiful lifetime together, even when his own physician gave him two years to live.

Felicity Jones plays a determined, devoted wife to the fullest, and one wonders where she draws her strength from in the face of extremely demanding circumstances, and is a very inspiring figure in the film. She is the perfect foil for Eddie Redmaynes’ brilliant and historic performance in the film and I won’t be surprised if he wins the Oscar for this one. In fact I could bet on it even though I liked Cumberbatch in the other movie more, I mean he dons the character like as if it were an old worn coat and one really cannot differentiate between him and the real Stephen towards the latter half of the film.

Both the films are must watches (I Still prefer the treatment of going back and forth in time in The Imitation Game), the unsung hero in the first is the scientist himself and in the second, it is definitively, according to me Jane Hawking.