GOT RELIGION? YOU WON'T FIND IT IN 'NIRVANA'.Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic FORGET ABOUT Burning Man or Woodstock. Those teeming teem 1 v. teemed, teem·ing, teems v.intr. 1. To be full of things; abound or swarm: A drop of water teems with microorganisms. 2. masses have nothing on the 30 million to 70 million people (with that many bodies, who can keep count?) who gather every 12 years in India for the Kumbh Mela Kumbh Mela (Devanagari: कुम्भ मेला) is a Hindu pilgrimage that occurs four times every twelve years and rotates among four locations: Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik. spiritual festival. Never heard of it? Join the club. Here in the States, the Kumbh Mela is virtually unknown, despite being the biggest heap of humanity in history. It's probably impossible to capture such a far-flung, enormous event with any degree of authority, particularly for a couple of first-time filmmakers who have never been to the festival. Those limitations reduce Nick Day's and Maurizio Benazzo's ``Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela'' to a haphazard travelogue that captures the event's strangeness and size without giving you any kind of context for what you're seeing. While ``Short Cut'' didn't need to be a lesson in Hinduism 101, it would have been nice to have a little history and a few basics just so we know why all those people are wading out in the Ganges to get some long-lasting karma. Instead, the movie often feels like a circus show, with the camera focusing on the man who has held one arm aloft for 20 years or the woman being buried alive for a three-day sojourn or the guru who knots his penis around a lead pipe and smiles beatifically while two men jump up and down on said pipe. Now that's spiritual commitment. Or at least it is for the filmmakers, who are more successful in conveying how noisy and stinky and just plain uncomfortable such a large gathering can be. Put tens of millions of people, along with elephants, camels and more run-of-the-mill creatures together, and you've got a sanitation problem that would stump even Ed Norton from ``The Honeymooners.'' There's also a spiky-haired nurse from New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of who turns the head of a young monk and a brief appearance by the Dalai Lama Dalai Lama (dä`lī lä`mə) [Tibetan,=oceanic teacher], title of the leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Believed like his predecessors to be the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, 1935–, , who stresses the commonalities between Buddhism and Hinduism Buddhism and Hinduism are two closely related religions that are in some ways parallel to each other and in other ways divergent in theory and practice. The Vedic, Buddhist and Jain religions share a common regional culture situated near and around north eastern India - . In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke" put differently , there's a little something for everyone, though not quite enough for anyone looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. spiritual truths to go along with randomly assembled glimpses of a modern-day religious carnival. Glenn Whipp, (818) 713-3672 glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA: KUMBH MELA - Two and one half stars (Not rated: guru tying penis in knot) Director: Nick Day, Maurizio Benazzo. Running time: 1 hr. 25 min. Playing: Landmark's Nuart, West Los Angeles
In a nutshell: Documentary about the world's biggest gathering of humanity captures the stink and the sounds but skims on the context. |
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