Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (Applause Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)Having just waxed euphoric about this book in a comment regarding her upcoming project Shantaram, it reminded me to come over here and talk a little about why the book is so great. I posted a review along with an excerpt a while back but I guess it was deleted because it was too long.

A shame because the excerpt was so insightful and beautifully written and it was about the film Kama Sutra.

Muir does an in-depth study of all of Nair's films with a chapter for each film, how it was conceived, the filming process and the common themes of her films (identity is the main one), and he also includes interviews with Nair and the people who have worked with her on almost each project over the past two decades.

I love this book because it is about an incredible woman and her passion for film and how it illuminates her work. It also talks about the critical aspects of films in a way that the average reader that doesn't know much about it will understand and thoroughly enjoy - and then learn to recognize the next time they watch one.

In the Namesake DVD's extra features section, there is also terrific footage from Nair's film course at Columbia...it's an awesome primer on how much work is involved in bringing the project to the screen and short of going there to learn more and taking the class yourself, this book, at a fraction of the cost, delivers.

For those of us who don't WANT to go to film school but are intrigued by the process, I also recommend The Devil's Guide to Hollywood by the irreverent Joe Eszterhas. WOOT!!!!

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Product Description:
"I want my films to explode with life." -Mira Nair. This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West. Her twin themes of realism and romance make for dazzling cinema. John Kenneth Muir analyzes all of Nair's work, including: * Salaam Bombay! (1988), the groundbreaking story of a young boy abandoned by his family on the streets of Bombay. * Mississippi Masala (1991), an interracial small town romance between an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and an African American businessman (Denzel Washington). * Monsoon Wedding (2001), featuring a Bollywood carnival atmosphere, one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the United States. * Hysterical Blindness (2002), the HBO film featuring Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, looking for love in all the wrong places. * The big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the Thackery novel Vanity Fair (2004), starring Reese Witherspoon, Gabriel Byrne, and Eileen Atkins.

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