"DEVDAS" is Year's No. 1 Film, says TIME Magazine
01-03-03 | 03:16 PM
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"DEVDAS" is Year's No. 1 Film, says TIME Magazine
"Devdas" from India, this year's official Indian entry to the Oscars, is the year's best film, beating out 'Gangs of New York', 'Spirited Away', 'Minority Report', and 'The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers'.
Time Magazine hailed the film as the No. 1 film of 2002 in their list just released to media.
Official report :
http://www.time.com/time/europe/maga...ies/story.html
The 2-DVD collector's edition of the 'Devdas' DVD is already on sale in the US from www.indiaweekly.com and www.nehaflix.com
List highlights :
THE BEST FILMS OF 2002 by RICHARD CORLISS :
1. >>> DEVDAS,
directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India
For ages, Indian popular cinema seemed to outsiders as remote as Pluto. Now everyone wants to visit Planet Bollywood. The gaudy three-hour excess of wild melodrama mixed with orgasmic song-and-dance numbers is a tonic in an age when most European films speak in an emotional monotone. And there's no more colorful introduction to Bollywood than Devdas: the most expensive local film ever and the year's biggest Indian hit. The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-old family-values propaganda: rich boy (all-world charmer Shahrukh Khan, pictured above) leaves home, abandons girl friend (former Miss World Aishwarya Rai), dallies with prostitute (worldly-wise Madhuri Dixit), suffers dreadfully. And nobly. It's played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing — and singing about, in nine nifty production numbers. Beyond that, Devdas is a visual seduction, with huge sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved. True, the movie was partly financed by a notorious mobster ... but that's part of the Bollywood mystique too.
2. >>> HERO,
Zhang Yimou, China
A starry cast (Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Zhang Ziyi) lends glamorous gravity to a Rashomon- like fable of action and passion among would-be assassins of China's first emperor. The fight scenes are thrilling, the color design ravishing. And when Cheung and Leung, the warrior-lovers, finally settle their scores, viewers see one of the most startling, poignant farewells in film history.
3. >>> RUSSIAN ARK,
Alexander Sokurov, Russia
This could have been just an elaborate cinematic stunt — a single, 87-min. Steadicam shot that pirouettes through the Hermitage Museum to give us a tour of its artistic treasures and to encapsulate three centuries of Russian history — but because Sokurov is as much an artist as a technician, viewers can forget the degree of difficulty in this mammoth logistical challenge and concentrate on the cast of thousands playing out their dramas, leading to a coda that will leave the moviegoer gasping in exhilarated exhaustion and wondering, "What's the Russian word for 'Wow!'?"
4. >>> TALK TO HER,
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Movie-making sends more young phenoms into early burnout than Olympic gymnastics. But Almodóvar defies the odds: the quirky melodramas of this one-time bad boy get better, richer, deeper. Talk to Her is about two young women, each in a coma, and the two men who love them. Where does devotion end and obsession take over? How can violation beget a miracle? Pedro has all the answers in this unpredictable miracle of a movie.
5. >>> GANGS OF NEW YORK,
Martin Scorsese, U.S.
He's been dreaming of this project since 1970. Now the dream — which, being a Scorsese film, is an urban nightmare — comes true, in a teeming tale of Anglo gangs vs. new Irish immigrants in 1863. Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio nurse their rivalry within a huge fresco of greed, ambition, betrayal and skull-cracking hatred. What did those roiling emotions create? The American city. And, here, a grand and brutal epic
6. >>> SPIRITED AWAY,
Hayao Miyazaki, Japan
A lonely girl wanders into a bathhouse run by ghosts in this vigorous delight from the master of Eastern animation (pictured above). Tyrannical queens, boy-dragons and a fabulously stinky river god populate the finest example of traditional cartoonery since Aladdin. It's sweet, scary and, like any good ghost story, perfectly haunting.
7. >>> DIVINE INTERVENTION,
Elia Suleiman, Palestine
You were expecting maybe a suicide bomber pursued by a hand-held camera? Not from Suleiman, who brings a cool, Europeanized wit to these vignettes of life in an occupied land where the Israelis control everything but the locals' absurdist sense of humor. A chic young Arab woman performs Ninja moves that confound and defeat on an Israeli platoon. A helium balloon with Yasser Arafat's face on it floats across a checkpoint; do the soldiers shoot it down? Divine Intervention is the rare minimalist film that is as funny as it is elegantly spare. But just try keeping up with the explosive changes in tone. Farce mixes with fatalism — and fatalities. This is, after all, Palestine.
8. >>> THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS,
Peter Jackson, New Zealand
The Fellowship of the Ring seems like a stroll in the Middle Earth woods next to this episode of the Tolkien trilogy. Part 2, focusing on the siege of Rohan, is every frame a war movie, with eerie reverbs of the West's current fear of spectral terrorists. But the film's real battle is within Frodo the Hobbit as he comes close to surrendering himself to the sick glow of the One Ring. Spectacle, romance, wizardly film craft — The Two Towers is about three-fifths of everything movies can do.
9. >>> THE QUIET AMERICAN,
Phillip Noyce, Australia-Vietnam
A cynic with a suitcase, Graham Greene roamed the world in search of human perfidy. He found plenty in Vietnam in the early '50s, where Americans and Europeans argued over who would get to ruin this beautiful country. Noyce is alert to all the nuances — as is Michael Caine, a weary revenger defending his right to a lovely Saigon mistress. The movie twins nicely with another fine Noyce effort, Rabbit-Proof Fence, a true story about Aboriginal girls stolen from their families by the Australian government to be raised and "civilized" by whites. With crisp authority and deft artistry, both films speak sternly to would-be colonizers: Hands off! These people aren't yours.
10. >>> LES DIABLES,
Christophe Ruggia, France
Joseph, 12, and his autistic sister Chloé, 11, are two of society's castaways: raised in an orphanage, treated roughly, but daring to dream that they may some day find the home Chloé is convinced was once hers. They are abandoned, separated, reunited, doomed. All very sad and instructive — and only half the story, because Joseph cares for Chloé in a way he is a bit too young to realize. Protective, possessive, raptly devoted to her, he pours out all the tenderness he has bottled up. Where else would he lavish it? Where else would he get it? And is he too myopic to see where it will lead? Taut, dark and handsomely made, Les Diables is really about the bliss and pain of unconditional love at any age. And in the harrowingly expressive face of Vincent Rottiers, a 13-year-old who had never acted before, the movie finds a perfect vessel for that love
Time Magazine hailed the film as the No. 1 film of 2002 in their list just released to media.
Official report :
http://www.time.com/time/europe/maga...ies/story.html
The 2-DVD collector's edition of the 'Devdas' DVD is already on sale in the US from www.indiaweekly.com and www.nehaflix.com
List highlights :
THE BEST FILMS OF 2002 by RICHARD CORLISS :
1. >>> DEVDAS,
directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India
For ages, Indian popular cinema seemed to outsiders as remote as Pluto. Now everyone wants to visit Planet Bollywood. The gaudy three-hour excess of wild melodrama mixed with orgasmic song-and-dance numbers is a tonic in an age when most European films speak in an emotional monotone. And there's no more colorful introduction to Bollywood than Devdas: the most expensive local film ever and the year's biggest Indian hit. The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-old family-values propaganda: rich boy (all-world charmer Shahrukh Khan, pictured above) leaves home, abandons girl friend (former Miss World Aishwarya Rai), dallies with prostitute (worldly-wise Madhuri Dixit), suffers dreadfully. And nobly. It's played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing — and singing about, in nine nifty production numbers. Beyond that, Devdas is a visual seduction, with huge sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved. True, the movie was partly financed by a notorious mobster ... but that's part of the Bollywood mystique too.
2. >>> HERO,
Zhang Yimou, China
A starry cast (Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Zhang Ziyi) lends glamorous gravity to a Rashomon- like fable of action and passion among would-be assassins of China's first emperor. The fight scenes are thrilling, the color design ravishing. And when Cheung and Leung, the warrior-lovers, finally settle their scores, viewers see one of the most startling, poignant farewells in film history.
3. >>> RUSSIAN ARK,
Alexander Sokurov, Russia
This could have been just an elaborate cinematic stunt — a single, 87-min. Steadicam shot that pirouettes through the Hermitage Museum to give us a tour of its artistic treasures and to encapsulate three centuries of Russian history — but because Sokurov is as much an artist as a technician, viewers can forget the degree of difficulty in this mammoth logistical challenge and concentrate on the cast of thousands playing out their dramas, leading to a coda that will leave the moviegoer gasping in exhilarated exhaustion and wondering, "What's the Russian word for 'Wow!'?"
4. >>> TALK TO HER,
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Movie-making sends more young phenoms into early burnout than Olympic gymnastics. But Almodóvar defies the odds: the quirky melodramas of this one-time bad boy get better, richer, deeper. Talk to Her is about two young women, each in a coma, and the two men who love them. Where does devotion end and obsession take over? How can violation beget a miracle? Pedro has all the answers in this unpredictable miracle of a movie.
5. >>> GANGS OF NEW YORK,
Martin Scorsese, U.S.
He's been dreaming of this project since 1970. Now the dream — which, being a Scorsese film, is an urban nightmare — comes true, in a teeming tale of Anglo gangs vs. new Irish immigrants in 1863. Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio nurse their rivalry within a huge fresco of greed, ambition, betrayal and skull-cracking hatred. What did those roiling emotions create? The American city. And, here, a grand and brutal epic
6. >>> SPIRITED AWAY,
Hayao Miyazaki, Japan
A lonely girl wanders into a bathhouse run by ghosts in this vigorous delight from the master of Eastern animation (pictured above). Tyrannical queens, boy-dragons and a fabulously stinky river god populate the finest example of traditional cartoonery since Aladdin. It's sweet, scary and, like any good ghost story, perfectly haunting.
7. >>> DIVINE INTERVENTION,
Elia Suleiman, Palestine
You were expecting maybe a suicide bomber pursued by a hand-held camera? Not from Suleiman, who brings a cool, Europeanized wit to these vignettes of life in an occupied land where the Israelis control everything but the locals' absurdist sense of humor. A chic young Arab woman performs Ninja moves that confound and defeat on an Israeli platoon. A helium balloon with Yasser Arafat's face on it floats across a checkpoint; do the soldiers shoot it down? Divine Intervention is the rare minimalist film that is as funny as it is elegantly spare. But just try keeping up with the explosive changes in tone. Farce mixes with fatalism — and fatalities. This is, after all, Palestine.
8. >>> THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS,
Peter Jackson, New Zealand
The Fellowship of the Ring seems like a stroll in the Middle Earth woods next to this episode of the Tolkien trilogy. Part 2, focusing on the siege of Rohan, is every frame a war movie, with eerie reverbs of the West's current fear of spectral terrorists. But the film's real battle is within Frodo the Hobbit as he comes close to surrendering himself to the sick glow of the One Ring. Spectacle, romance, wizardly film craft — The Two Towers is about three-fifths of everything movies can do.
9. >>> THE QUIET AMERICAN,
Phillip Noyce, Australia-Vietnam
A cynic with a suitcase, Graham Greene roamed the world in search of human perfidy. He found plenty in Vietnam in the early '50s, where Americans and Europeans argued over who would get to ruin this beautiful country. Noyce is alert to all the nuances — as is Michael Caine, a weary revenger defending his right to a lovely Saigon mistress. The movie twins nicely with another fine Noyce effort, Rabbit-Proof Fence, a true story about Aboriginal girls stolen from their families by the Australian government to be raised and "civilized" by whites. With crisp authority and deft artistry, both films speak sternly to would-be colonizers: Hands off! These people aren't yours.
10. >>> LES DIABLES,
Christophe Ruggia, France
Joseph, 12, and his autistic sister Chloé, 11, are two of society's castaways: raised in an orphanage, treated roughly, but daring to dream that they may some day find the home Chloé is convinced was once hers. They are abandoned, separated, reunited, doomed. All very sad and instructive — and only half the story, because Joseph cares for Chloé in a way he is a bit too young to realize. Protective, possessive, raptly devoted to her, he pours out all the tenderness he has bottled up. Where else would he lavish it? Where else would he get it? And is he too myopic to see where it will lead? Taut, dark and handsomely made, Les Diables is really about the bliss and pain of unconditional love at any age. And in the harrowingly expressive face of Vincent Rottiers, a 13-year-old who had never acted before, the movie finds a perfect vessel for that love
01-03-03 | 05:05 PM
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