— छह हज़ार एक सौ नौ —
Movies, movies, movies! Thanks to a post-Tasveer Film Festival "community screening" of
49 to 51, which won Best Documentary Feature at the festival, as of last night I went to see my fifth movie in a theater in as many days. I am scheduled to see yet a sixth in as many days after work tonight.
If you count Action Movie Night last Wednesday, I've
watched six movies in as any days, with a seventh tonight. Of those seven, though, only five were in conventional theaters, andonly four did I actually pay to see. All of them were in darkened rooms with the film projected on a wall, though. The Braeburn Condos theater, where our Action Movie Night actually happens, is set up like an actual theater, with fourteen theater chairs in it. It was actually last night's movie that was the least "theater"-like, as it was presented in an auditorium at UW's Alder Hall in the U District.
I still reviewed it, though—it was a feature film selected to be part of a legit film festival. I'm pretty relieved I liked it; to say it's an obscure film at this point is a bit of an understatement, and I discovered this morning that if you just google "Tasveer" and "49 to 51,"
my B+ review is at or near the top of the search results. Shobhit worried about this before the movie even began: he didn't think I should post a review if I didn't like it. "Just be careful," he said, no fewer than three times. It got so tedious so quickly that I said to him, "Would you stop?"
To be perfectly honest, I was less sure of how I felt about the film in its opening scenes. But, over time, it really hooked me, and in the end I found it both insightful and moving. I think its award at the festival is likely well deserved; it's difficult to say that with authority when I only saw four films from the festival total, and only two of them were documentary features. (I definitely liked this better than the otherwise-perfectly-decent
Hoop Like This, but that's because I don't know shit about basketball. People really into sports may very well like that one better.)
Shobhit had met the director, Ambalika Khadria, at the festival, but had been unable to attend the movie screening due to a moderation panel commitment at the same time, for a different movie. So I think he felt more compelled to see this at the "community screening" set up for last night, the day after the end of the festival, than he might have otherwise. And I was happy to join him because I love film, and will generally jump at a free screening of a film that sounds compelling to me, which this one certainly did.
I can't possibly be the first person to post a public review of the film—or could I? The question puts me in a peculiar position; I certainly have no desire to insult anyone involved in making the film. I have a tendency to pay attention to the technical achievements as much as I do the narrative content, and it's the latter in this case that makes the film worth seeing.
The topic, which concerns grieving a loss due to suicide, certainly makes for some awkward conversations, something Shobhit sometimes excels at, in a very kind of unknowing way. To Ambalika's credit, she fielded all questions in the post-screening Q&A with impressive grace—including when Shobhit brought up school shootings and how the younger college students in this audience were likely brought up with shooter drills in schools, which I found somewhat baffling. Shobhit may have gotten sort of halfway to a kind of relevance there, as mass shooters do often also take their own lives, but I still saw no direct relevance to this film in particular. It would have been far more relevant, for instance, to consider the grief of family members of such murder/suicide perpetrators, and still that would be a completely different movie from this one. This film is about suicide, and in this instance a suicide that has never had any evident motive (the kid was texting a friend about homework only 20 minutes beforehand), and has nothing to do with murder.
Shobhit did ask multuple questions, and to be fair to him, most of them were more relevant and coherent than this particular one. Several people asked questions that Ambalika openly appreciated. I would say Shobhit, though he did ask the first question, asked the second-most number of them; there was another guy with a camera hovering to the side of the auditorium seats who asked several himself. Among the rest of the audience, which was fairly small relative to the size of the auditorium (I would guess somewhere around 20 people, maybe 30), only two or three people asked questions. The crowd did indeed skus younger there, being on the college campus, and I did find myself wondering if the general timidity regarding asking questions in the Q&A had to do with the average age in the audience, or the delicacy of the topic, or perhaps a mix of both.
—Oh hey, wait a minute! The movie is on Letterboxd after all! Thanks to me! All it took was a bit of googling to figure out: I merely had to create an account at The Movie Database website, which hosts the data Letterboxd uses; add the movie there; and force an import to Letterboxd.
Voila, the film now has
its own Letterboxd page (with no poster image, but, I did what I could; I may try and figure out how to add that later), as well as
my logging and review activity. Whew! I feel so much better now; I could hardly stand the idea of having seen a feature length film and not being able to log it there.
Oh, wait again! I just managed to save a copy of the film's poster and add it to the TMDB page as well. I don't see a way to force-import that to Letterboxd but presumably it will show up in the next day or so.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ नौ —
— छह हज़ार एक सौ नौ —
Shobhit and I took the Light Rail to the U District to see that movie—Light Rail wins yet again! Before the Northgate Extension opened in 2021, we would have been far less likely to take transit to see a movie in the U District. In this case, we probably would have driven and parked so we could still go see the movie, but Light Rail remains a game changer: we did walk half a mile from home to the Capitol Hill Station and then the roughly four blocks from U District Station to Alder Hall, but the time it took between the two stations—a three-mile distance—was all of about five minutes. That's a quarter of the time it takes on the bus. Goddammit, I love mass transit!
Anyway, we did leave home at about 5:45 in order to walk to the station and get to the 6:30 screening time with a few minutes to spare. I was at work until 4:38 yesterday, therefore leaving about eight minutes later than usual, just to get something I was working on done without having to wait to finish it until this morning. I still got home at about 5:05, giving me just enough time to make chai and have some of the sambhar dinner Shobhit made, with rice and baked frozen naan from Trader Joe's.
The post-screening Q&A lasted a while, so it was after 9:00 by the time we got home, and I then needed to spend roughly an hour writing the review. This is the particular challenge with Tasveer Film Festival screenings: between special events I wind up at, and/or Q&A sessions, a lot of other stuff cuts into the time commitment, and unlike most other festival-goers, I still have a commitment to writing a review. Strange hobby, I suppose, to do so much work on writing about movies that I don't get paid for. (If you want to pay me, I'll see and write about a lot more movies I already know ahead of time I will hate.) But, I really love doing it; it's why I've done it now for 22 years.
One thing that did bum me out was the absence of
49 to 51 on Letterboxd, which prevented me from logging or reviewing the film there. Maybe one day someone will get it added, but for now, I think this is also just a byproduct of how obscure the film currently is. I do hope it becomes a bit less so.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ नौ —
[posted 12:34pm]
