Fusioncore
10-30-10, 08:35 AM
Even after watching the film and reading some of the reviews on it, I am clueless as to what director Eyad Zahra intended to show in this movie. There are so many references that the main storyline doesn’t pertain to a single motif, in fact I doubt if there’s at all a storyline.
The film shows a bunch of USA based punk artists, all Muslims and ardent enough about their religious creed. The hardcore one is Taqwacore and the new entry is Yusef. However, the film doesn’t restrict itself to the interactions of these two characters as Jehangir Tabari and the always-shirtless Amazing Ayyub also has lot more to add. But what they all are up to isn’t clear.
So, it’s better to treat these characters as mere requirements for the story to keep going on. This is one of the areas where the movie falls short because characters appear as overly fictitious and when they are shown eager to find out their real identities in the modern day America, that doesn’t sound telling.
There’s a gamut of references covering Islam, drug-addiction, rock-culture, sex, ethnic heritage and many others in this film and this is something I appreciate, but these references often come up as disoriented, at one point I thought Zahra should have juxtaposed them, but due to the tempo of the film I ended up thinking Zahra wanted to make a documentary with the touch of a mainstream cinema and that’s the reason he allowed these citations to appear disconnected.
But then again, when I noticed the tacit effort to compile Islam and punk culture, I stopped making speculation about the film.
The film shows a bunch of USA based punk artists, all Muslims and ardent enough about their religious creed. The hardcore one is Taqwacore and the new entry is Yusef. However, the film doesn’t restrict itself to the interactions of these two characters as Jehangir Tabari and the always-shirtless Amazing Ayyub also has lot more to add. But what they all are up to isn’t clear.
So, it’s better to treat these characters as mere requirements for the story to keep going on. This is one of the areas where the movie falls short because characters appear as overly fictitious and when they are shown eager to find out their real identities in the modern day America, that doesn’t sound telling.
There’s a gamut of references covering Islam, drug-addiction, rock-culture, sex, ethnic heritage and many others in this film and this is something I appreciate, but these references often come up as disoriented, at one point I thought Zahra should have juxtaposed them, but due to the tempo of the film I ended up thinking Zahra wanted to make a documentary with the touch of a mainstream cinema and that’s the reason he allowed these citations to appear disconnected.
But then again, when I noticed the tacit effort to compile Islam and punk culture, I stopped making speculation about the film.