SAM'S RANDOM MUSINGS - In my effort to catch up on this year's best-reviewed films, I saw "Monsoon Wedding" over the weekend. As I watched it, it was impossible for me not to compare it to this year's biggest box office surprise (and recent Oscar-talk bait) "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." A comparison may be unfair, because they are very different films; but watching the two films in fairly close succession has given me some clarity in articulating what I didn't like about "Fat Greek Wedding" (which itself might be redundant and unnecessary). Using a camera that remains in almost constant motion, "Monsoon Wedding" succeeds in submerging you into the frenzy of the few days preceding an upper middle class "dot com" wedding in New Delhi, India. The script, which has characters speaking interchangeably in English and Hindi, offers only scant help in sorting out the various and sundry family members; but what you get is a wonderfully chaotic portrait of a family in transition. Despite reports that the characters that make up Nia Vardalos' Fat Greek Family are based on actual family members, the film is still a canvas painted with a large, cartoonish brush, and the script is little more than a series of hit-and-miss punch lines. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” still works on the strength of the actors, but no better than an above-average sit-com. The extended family in Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" looks, feels, and sounds like a real family. When the film strays from character into plot, the film loses momentum and occasionally comes off as contrived, but I found these mild distractions. The sheer volume of ideas and characters and sights and sounds that the film introduces is intoxicating. Nair doesn’t condescend to any of her characters; instead, she mines humor out of a community of (very un-cartoonish) individuals who are provoked to sometimes outrageous fits of passion due to extraordinary circumstances. The extraordinary circumstances in this case being a wedding that brings together a bride and groom who have only met days before their wedding (it’s an arranged wedding); family members who have used the springboard of the global economy to leave New Delhi and India; and members of opposing classes and castes who struggle to shed the burden of history, while still embracing tradition. Not everything works in Nair’s film, and end is more cathartic than it is dramatically sound; but there is a contagious spirit of well-earned fun to the film. Definitely one of the better movies I’ve seen this year.

Something on a related topic that my girlfriend raised after we watched “Monsoon Wedding” that Adam and Eric might have an opinion on: Are actors in foreign films inherently more believable than actors (particularly well-known actors) in English-language films? I don’t watch a lot of foreign films, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them either; and I think there’s some truth to this. I know with “Monsoon Wedding” I shut off the part of my brain that, with American films, is used to identify examples of illogic or inconsistency. I don’t know anything about traditional Indian customs, so I paid more attention to the story and the relationships. Ignorance is bliss. The same could be said for the power of unknown actors. Joaquin Phoenix is great in “To Die For” (for example), but the impact of his performance was all the greater because we had no expectations of him. There are a thousand examples of this; I just can’t think of any. Guy Pearce and (the relatively unknown) Russell Crowe in “LA Confidential;” Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused” (it’s impossible to watch that film now and not see “Matthew McConaughey;” whereas, when I first saw it, I thought to myself: “where did they find THAT guy?”). There are some films out there that I’m convinced I would have loved if they had been re-cast with unknown actors (“The Thin Red Line” comes immediately to mind; or basically any war movie where you know the guy played by Bruce Willis or whoever probably isn’t going to die). Thoughts on this, guys?

Final thought on the best sports movie of all time. I insist that anyone who claims that “The Natural” is their favorite sports movie should go and watch it again (as I did less than a month ago). It is atrocious. Terribly cast and boringly acted, it has almost nothing to do with baseball. It is moralistic, misogynistic and trite. I can’t believe I sat through it as a child. What a boring movie. A single caveat: the scene at the end still gives me chills. But that’s because it’s a baseball fantasy, and I love baseball. The music, the cinematography. You don’t need the rest of the film to appreciate that. “Hoosiers,” which I also saw again recently, is hands-down the best sports movie of all time. No question. Three things allow it to trump the entertainment value of “Bull Durham”: it’s based on a true story; it makes you feel like shooting hoops; and it’s got Gene Hackman’s laugh (which, in the event of his passing, should be put in the Smithsonian).