Meet Me in St. Louis is only partly a Christmas movie. The musical follows the Smith family of St. Louis from the summer of 1903 until the spring of 1904. The opening song goes “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louie, meet me at the fair” – and the fair is the St. Louis World’s Fair, known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. All four sections of the movie are magnificent, but the Christmas sequence is especially poignant, and it’s marked by the film’s star Judy Garland singing the beautiful, wistful “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

One reason for the sadness is that Meet Me in St. Louis is a wartime picture. It premiered in New York on December 30, 1944, right in the middle of “The Battle of the Bulge,” the German counteroffensive that made millions of people all over the world wonder if they would ever see another Christmas. Even though the story starts in 1903, the movie signals the profound changes coming to America because of World War II. The lovely, romantic gas lights in the Smith home will give way to more efficient electric lights, but for Americans in 1944, family life, courtship, food — just about everything — will change.

The Christmas sequence includes a big, colorful dance for young people, and they all get matched up with the person they most like. But hanging over the family is the father’s decision to move them to New York. When Garland sings, her despairing little sister Tootie, rushes out to destroy all the snow people in the back yard. And the movie honors her despair.

But Meet Me in St. Louis is also about how World War II diminished the power of men in their families — while the men were away, the women ran the home, worked in factories, ferried airplanes all over the world and were major figures in the creation of the first computer. So, many currents run under Meet Me in St. Louis, but the complexities only make the film more astonishing and delightful. Characters cope with change and through the movie find joy and excitement — as does the audience.

German-born Ernst Lubitsch brought middle-European angst and manners to his great comedies in the ‘30s and early ‘40s. Unlike Meet Me in St. Louis, The Shop around the Corner takes place in Budapest and not the middle America. The staff of the gift shop is a cross-section of Europe. Characters are evasive, and comically terrified of giving offense. Lubitsch loved indirection and suggestion. The movie came out in 1940, but doesn’t mention the war, yet you feel it all through the picture, and audiences in 1940 knew it for certain. Lubitsch loved the interaction of real life troubles and laughter in his comic fantasies. The shop owner is even driven to attempt suicide before the affection of his staff brings him back to himself and his feeling that this little store is for him a wonderful home.

The lead clerk, played by James Stewart, and the newest employee (Margaret Sullavan) feud throughout the movie. By the rules of romantic comedy, strife will turn to love, but the convoluted getting there is pure delight. Lubitsch and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson are masters of ironic comedy and of puncturing the pompous. When the owner tells the staff that he wants an absolutely honest opinion, which of course he doesn’t, one man over and over runs for cover. But in this tiny, self-absorbed microcosm, Christmas brings out the unexpected best in its people. A former head of production at United Artists called The Shop around the Corner a perfect movie. I agree.

Watch Meet Me In St. Louis for free on Tubi TV or on a variety of streaming services.
The Shop Around the Corner is available on many streaming services or for free here.

With “Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott returns to the bloody world of his Oscar-winning swords-and-sandals epic. Starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, a young prisoner turned gladiator, this sequel goes bigger and wilder than its predecessor, including monkeys, rhinos and even sharks within its grand action sequences.

To re-create the epic scope of the original film and reimagine it for 2024 audiences, Scott reunited with many of his longtime collaborators. That included special effects supervisor Neil Corbould. Joining him was visual effects supervisor Mark Bakowski.

Unlike Corbould, who’s worked with Scott for decades (he won an Oscar for “Gladiator” and was nominated just last year for the director’s “Napoleon”), Bakowski was excited to work with the famed filmmaker for the first time.

“He’s nuts,” Bakowski says with a laugh via Zoom, about the English director. “But obviously in an excellent way. He shoots quickly, and he likes to move. He’s like, ‘Get me going.’ It’s all rush, rush, rush. It’s great. But it took some getting used to.

“I heard him shout once, ‘I want four donkeys (there might have been a swear word in there) and I want them now!’” Bakowski recalls. “And somehow they turned up.”

Scott’s attention to detail went hand in hand with an instinctual approach to decisions big and small alike. Bakowski points to the choice to include baboons with alopecia in a key scene where Lucius first proves himself a worthy fighter in front of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a conniving former slave with wild ambitions for the Roman throne.

“They were showing Ridley the baboon because it was an interesting anatomical structure,” Bakowski recalls. “The idea was just to go look at the muscles and sinews that would be a good reference for us when we build it.”

But Scott was immediately taken by this hairless primate, insisting it be the creature Lucius fends off with his bare hands. That scene is but one example where “Gladiator II” used visual effects (and a number of 6-foot-tall stuntmen who stood in for those menacing baboons, a challenge in itself that Bakowski’s team had to contend with) to create the kind of set piece that would have been unthinkable 25 years ago.

Yet “Gladiator” still loomed large in the eyes of all involved — especially when it came to redesigning the film’s most iconic location: the Colosseum.

“When we started, we chatted with this professor of history,” says Bakowski. “He showed us what, according to his interpretation, the Colosseum should be. So we matched the Colosseum to his design. Then we started looking at it in shots, and it didn’t look anything like ‘Gladiator.’ It looks completely different. Basically, it might be right, but it just didn’t look as cool.”

The choice was simple: Lucius would battle in the same Colosseum Russell Crowe’s Maximus had fought in two decades before. In the end, the built set looked almost identical to the one constructed for the 2000 film.

It’s there where Bakowski saw firsthand how a master storyteller like Scott orchestrated some of the film’s most complicated sequences.

“He sets it up like a big symphony,” Bakowski says. “And then sometimes a scene will just roll, like the ship battle. He would roll for minutes upon minutes at a time with, let’s say it’s 10, 12 cameras. He sets up this kind of event, kind of like a little version of a battle. And all these cameras in there just record it.”

That battle takes place in a flooded Colosseum filled with bloodthirsty tiger sharks. There, Lucius and his fellow gladiators must mount a full-scale attack on a warring ship for the entertainment of thousands of Romans watching, including its unhinged sibling emperors, Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger).

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bakowski says. “It’s quite close in terms of the energy. It’s not crafted to a lens. The lenses all fit around the action.”

The crackling authenticity such shots create proved a welcome challenge for the entire “Gladiator II” crew. Especially because the original plan for how that naval battle was to be shot had to be scrapped.

“The actors’ strike happened right in the middle of shooting,” Bakowski notes. “We had this week and a half where all the actors had gone, but the stunties were still there because they weren’t SAG. So we had this time. And Ridley was like, ‘You know what we’ll do? We’ll shoot the Colosseum naval battle.’”

Except the water tank the special effects team was hoping to use for the sequence wasn’t ready. If they were to shoot that battle, they’d have to do so knowing that all the water would have to be added in postproduction. Which is exactly what they did.

The finished sequence required artfully stitching together shoots in four separate locations that took place both before and after the strike — some with in-camera water effects and some in completely dry conditions.

Such an outlandish spectacle captures how “Gladiator II” doesn’t merely retread what had come before. There’s a boldness to it that builds on Scott’s storied legacy.

“Technology has moved on,” as Bakowski puts it. “We can do more. We’re doing a lot more shots — 10, 12 times as many shots as the first movie. The action is different. But hopefully, the spirit of the original movie is there, and hopefully we’re honoring the amazing achievement that it was.”

For representative purposes.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Earlier this week, the Tamil Film Active Producers Association (TFAPA) filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court, seeking a ban on movie reviews on social media for the first three days of release. The counsel representing the TFAPA listed three reasons that necessitated the request — review bombing through reviews shot in cinema theatres, stage-managing fake reviews by purchasing bulk tickets, and intentionally propagating a negative image of the film through fake social media accounts.

These are pivotal concerns that need redressal and creators must be protected from targeted harassment. Paid reviews are real and, as Taapsee Pannu recently quoted Shah Rukh Khan as saying, are nothing more than advertisement spaces for sale. And so when the said space is used to unfairly demean a film, a business, or an entity, the legislature needs to step in and protect the affected parties. However, concerns also arise about the apparent discrepancies in how film chambers navigate these issues; like the ambiguity in using terms like ‘reviewers,’; the irony in how YouTube reviews are used when favourable and flattering; and who is referred to as a ‘reviewer’.

Who is a reviewer?

Every time a star film that had promised big bites the dust, we are reminded of the times when the filmmaking ecosystem tended to pride itself on one key aspect — that audiences have the final say and that the industry respects their judgement.

Closely observing recent discourses paints a startling picture of the idea of film criticism that remains. You exit a cinema hall on a Friday afternoon and are faced with a mike-borne journalist asking for your review — an industry-propagated technique used in post-release campaigns. Or you are an independent YouTube reviewer shooting a video review for your portal. If you shower praises on the film, it can be used to further promote the title; if you criticise it in a language the makers deem offensive, you might be slapped with a defamation suit or a copyright strike. Or, as a recent example showed, the partner of the film’s leading man would label you a pawn of a larger ‘propaganda group’. The very people who empower the audiences as ‘kings’ strip away their powers to decide for themselves.

A star like Vijay Deverakonda might argue that his film Family Starwas a victim of review bombings, and Jyotika might have evidence to call the Kanguvadebacle the handiwork of Suriya haters, but refraining from specifically calling out these fake accounts or nefarious internet entities serves no purpose or change. Instead, it suggests an attitude of intolerance towards criticism. Calling these reviews the work of a homogenous group called ‘reviewers’ or ‘social media reviewers’ also adds to the woes of the industry’s favourite scapegoat —traditional film critics. From being stigmatised as a profession as immoral paupers to being denounced as the killers of a ‘creator’s child,’ the film critic has always been the film industry’s favourite punching bag to vent its shortcomings.

Pensiveness, insight, and the ability to read films and write incisive pieces that celebrate and propagate film appreciation are what the pundits claim differentiate a critic. But in a democratised post-internet world, the know-how of film criticism is scattered but accessible, and the growing passion for movies has enabled audiences to read films more sensibly. In the competitive media space of today, the passion and resolve it takes to make film criticism a profession, build experience over time, and sharpen said skills are what sets apart a film critic from a film buff with a blog. In all their steps to tackle abusive trolls, film producers have maintained that their steps protect the interests of sensible reviews, but one wonders who the adjudicator of reviewing sensibilities is. A gag order censors every voice, good or bad.

Read the finer lines of TFAPA’s writ petition and you sense a generousness towards critics from notable newspapers and online portals, “who provide constructive criticism.” But what confidence does an ecosystem that attacks one section of the audience’s freedom of speech instil in others? In the past, names like Kairam Vashi and Amol Kamwal have been attacked for their unfavourable reviews. The irony is in how producers who claim to stand by noteworthy newspapers and portals, pigeonhole such critics as ‘niche’ and offer other film-related opportunities like interviews to the same sensationalist YouTube media they claim need regulation.

The industry believes that promotions and reviews, positive or negative, certainly influences the opinion of the audiences. Introspectively, even if film critics are shielded from any future censorship, a gag order on platforms meant for all would disrupt the quiet in an ecosystem that both film producers and film critics depend upon.

The law’s reaction

From what transpired at the Madras High Court during the hearing of the TFAPA’s arguments, one is certain that the court stands against curtailing free speech, lending an ear only to guidelines that can keep online platforms safe from targeted attacks and intentional review bombings. Earlier, in 2021, in hearing a petition to ban film reviews for seven days of the release, the Kerala High Court appointed an amicus curiae, who suggested a few regulations for movie reviews, including a 48-hour cooling-off period; avoiding spoilers in reviews; avoiding disrespectful language, personal attacks, or derogatory remarks; and constituting a dedicated portal to resolve grievances related to review bombings.

How the Madras High Court might navigate TFAPA’s complaints remains to be seen, but the ambiguous usage of terms by the producers’ body does raise concerns about censorship.

Published – December 06, 2024 11:04 am IST