The Lives of Others got the Best Foreign Film award at the 2006 Oscars and I have rarely seen an award which was as richly deserved. The Lives of Others is set in the final years of East Germany amidst the paranoia and corruption which the communist regime had sunk into. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is an ace investigator and interrogator in the Stasi, who has been assigned the role of surveillance of a top dramatist Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) to ascertain his political leanings. Dreyman is suspected of having anti-left beliefs and Muhe’s boss wants to lock him up at the slightest hint of being anti-left. Muhe’s boss is also sleeping with Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a decent if struggling actress, using his coercion and influence in getting her roles in government funded plays and letting her have her daily dose of amphetamines/ drugs. Wiesler, in the first scene, is shown as a canny, relentless and ruthless interrogator who has completely bought int...

Black Friday Last February, Black Friday was finally released after a delay of over 2 years. I felt that at least in this one instance, the delay was justified in a way and not due to some censor board member’s whims or minister’s fancies. The objection to the movie was that it pronounced the accused as guilty even before the court has passed their judgement in the 1993 Bombay blasts case. Finally the movie was released in February 2007 after the court had passed their final judgement. I happened to miss it in the theatre due to some pressures at work and it did not have a long run. Finally I saw it on DVD. Black Friday got some good reviews and justifiably so. But there was something in the movie which did not work for me, something which made the movie fall short of being a truly good work. The story, as is well known by now, is about the investigation and arrest of the culprits behind the Bombay bomb blasts in 1993. The movie starts off like a police procedural unti...