Stranger on Earth

After the thought-provoking 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), film aficionados everywhere have come to expect nothing less than brilliant from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Biutiful (2010, Oscar noms for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film) is exactly the socio-political yet (uncomfortably) intimate portrait we waited for. Not much needs to be said about Javier Bardem’s performance as the anguished father burdened with a manic-depressive, nympho ex-wife, two young children, and a whole slew of other personal demons. Film critics have extensively dealt with it, and besides, when was the last time anyone saw Bardem act below par? Bardem’s character Uxbal is complex, replete with all the human flaws and frailties you can fathom, and as irony would have it, he is also being incapacitated by prostate cancer and is due to expire in months. This leaves him with a dirty conscience which he is desperate to scrub clean before his time comes. He attempts to reconcile with h...

Edward Morgan Forster penned Maurice (1913) at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime and generally viewed as an abomination in the UK. The intervening years have been relatively kind to this persuasion, with the softening of laws on homosexual behaviour in Wales and England in the late 1960s, which led to the publication of the novel in 1971, the year after its author’s death. New readers of Maurice are often surprised by two factors: (1) the tenderness every page exudes, and (2) the uncharacteristic happy-ever-after ending. It is also for these reasons that the novel was dismissed by eminent critics upon publication. It was somehow deemed unrealistic that the novel’s homosexual characters should go on to lead a life that even heterosexuals dared not dream of. Several decades later, with our understanding of homosexual life having evolved to a more sophisticated level, we know better. We now see that what Forster proposes in Maurice is anything but a sentimental fant...

An allegory? A Moby Dick imitation? A morality tale? A (semi-)autobiographical account? How should Ernest Hemingway’s signature work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) be read? One fact is carved in stone. The work has a gargantuan reputation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and reminding the Nobel Prize committee that acknowledgement of Hemingway’s genius had been long overdue. Readers come to the novella with certain expectations, and usually leave slightly puzzled, unsure of its “message” and yet utterly convinced of the power of its composition. The novella showcases Hemingway’s laconic prose style at its most sophisticated. It contains only bare bones, devoid of longwinded character and setting descriptions. The reader is given little, and must therefore work twice as hard to steer through Hemingway’s “cruel sea.” Ostensibly, the novella is about an aged, down-and-out fisherman who has to fish alone and finds himself entangled in a body and mind battle with a giant marli...