Perspectives and perceptions

Rarely have I gone and seen a movie on the first day of its release. By chance yesterday it was MI4. To give me the benefit of doubt, I haven't seen the previous movies but I'm guessing that shouldn't make my review biased. On the whole, I felt the movie was a lot of brawn and no brain. And the action was great, but I didn't come out feeling wow. First of all, my expectations were dashed when I booked tickets for an Imax screen, expecting a 3D experience! :P Clearly I didn't read the poster too well. That apart, the movie was fast-paced, kept you hooked, had some punchy dialogues here and there, and around average acting from everyone else. Tom Cruise was good, I mean he was great, but somehow my response was more on the lines of, 'At this age, he's doing this stunts, that's a WOW' Maybe I'm being scathing, maybe I'm being overcritical, maybe you would like it, but I was not so happy. The underlying plot without revealing much is that Tom...

Sitting at home, watching a great fun movie on a lazy Saturday, what could be better? Perfect life. Today I saw Chillar Party. So many months after it had released and boy what a movie! Absolutely loved it. A fun, light-hearted (though the amount of tears I shed are contrary to that), kiddy movie with a sweet purpose. It was like watching Stanley Ka Dabba only it was a lot more fun. :) Bunch of kids with nicknames staying together in a colony get introduced to a new kid who's come to wash their parents' cars. Only, this kid has brought man's best friend along with him, bhidu , an amiable stray. The kids whose team is called 'chillar party' begin to view this intrusion as precisely that and proceed to being mean to him. When one of their pranks go a little too far, they feel guilty for their mistakes, and they apologize. After that, the team has a new member, Fatka. Together they play, and they win many battles. Whether the battles were to make the kids realize the...

This post is written by my dear friend Shri who's graciously allowed me to cross-post it on my blog. Just reading it brought a tear to my eyes, and I don't know why.. maybe it's because life is beautiful if only we opened our eyes and 'saw', not just literally, but like the Na'vi's 'see'... ------------- Gold is a bubble, Diamonds spell trouble, you continue to get sold and the goblet of wine ads the zip to your soul-petrol. My waistline is 7 above my age-line which is 14 more than the size of my feet; which is in turn equivalent to my birth month; add 2 to it you get 13. 3+1=4 which is inconsequential. In short I completed 25 on the 13th of November 2011. Salutations to most, greetings to many and thank you all for wishing,greeting, participating, waking up, eating and driving your soul on this day. Things get complicated from here and I’m not Rahul Gandhi. You start assuring yourself, life, soul, the things you buy, the place you live the ...

I've decided I'm going to write a blog for every day for the next 30 days. I'm going to be in US for 3 weeks and I'm expecting that to give me enough content to blog about. :) So here goes: Finally the day when I am leaving for US. The morning was quite perfect actually, I woke up on time, actually managed to do laundry, get my foreign exchange sorted, reach office, finish and wrap off work in time, go to the parlour, come home, pack, skype, read, get ready, and then come to the airport. :) There's this beautiful tranquil kind of song playing in the background... not very elevator style music, but more like the kind of music you'd like listening to perched on a jharokha in a tall tower high up on the hill... the kind of music that makes you smile and breathe more calmly. There's a tiny place in the airport called Khao Galli. Ironically, amidst all this tranquility and silence, you can hear the person make hot doass on the tava with the noises of the ...

After the first two movies, I guess I had some high expectations. Big mistake. The second movie was obviously an exception. Sequels never work. (Except when they're in the form of HP or LOTR, except in both those cases, the story was already laid out! So it wasn't so much the director's thought process that made it work, anyways, will try not to digress) This movie seems like a product of a late night drinking session amongst some buddies, okay let's throw in some autobots that we have, let's bring back megatron, lets throw out megan fox, and replace her with someone, okay now that sam's done with college, we must show some progress, okay let's make him jobless. oh and where are his parents? let's send them on a tour and have them stop by for a drink! Hmm... so what should the story be? Ah, Independence Day was a success years ago, let's try and recreate that! I mean seriously, what was this movie?! Ideally it doesn't even deserve space on my...

My close friend warned me not to see this movie alone, she knew it would get to me in some weird way and I was stupid not to follow her advice. If you have any iota of self-doubt, if you have any streak in you of a perfectionist, don't watch this movie alone. Very few movies manage to leap out of the characters, out of the story and get to you. They grip you like nothing ever has, and they just sort of hurt you for real. This movie does precisely that. The movie starts in a dream that Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) has. She's playing the white swan. Nina is a ballerina in a dance company. Her mother, a failed ballerina herself, drives her daughter relentlessly in the hopes of having her life her own dreams. Ballet, is a dance form that requires years and years of effort and because of this, it requires not just physical strength from the dancers, but instead immense emotional and mental strength. To be able to stand on your toes might be easy, but to stand all the pressure, th...

So thanks to some prodding from my friend Shri, I decided to go watch this movie today. I'm not upset I did, but I'm certainly not happy. It was sort of like watching Love, Sex aur Dhokha in a way. Graphic, very close to reality, and loud. The movie begins with Anurag Kashyap saying that it's a just a movie and that he doesn't support the use of drugs, drinking and driving and that it's a fictional story which is debatable because like Dev D he used an actual incident as one of the pivotal moments in the movie, in this case the moment is when 5 kids high on coke, drinks, and generally on life, speed across town and in one of the turns end up killing two people who were on a scooter. They were driving a Hummer. Anyways, to come back to the timeline of things, the movie begins by shocking you. I know I've watched a number of movies which involve sequences of kisses in front of my parents / relatives without flinching. But I would not be able to watch this movi...

There are times when you need to hear things from someone else. Someone who has a third perspective about you and about your life. Today was one of those days, nights actually. :) I learnt a lot of things that I should've known or probably already knew but wasn't accepting or practicing. The thing about life is that it happens, it goes on and we can't afford to stop, second-guess or try and resist it. That's what I've been doing for a while now. Trying to contain myself, trying to avoid getting into things which I'm afraid of, and in a way trying to avoid letting go. While talking to a friend, he told me, very simply, you could be walking on a street and someone fell on you and you could get hurt, would that stop you from walking? If not, then why would an accident stop you from traveling. Yes, maybe it should act as a reminder to take things slow and to make slightly more logical decisions, but you can't live in fear of a 'what if' scenario. If ...

Okay so I've been on a rom-com movie watching spree lately. I have these mood swings in which I can't stand to watch anything non-fictional. I love watching happy endings and feeling all mushy-mushy. So I had this movie and hadn't seen it till now. I read up some reviews on IMDB and it sounded like my kind of a movie. The movie transcends through time and is told in a very beautiful fashion. About the lives of two lovers who meet when they were 17-18 and talks about how their lives span out. Allie Hamilton, beautifully essayed by Rachel McAdams, is the only daughter of a millionaire who comes to the town of Seabrook to spend her summer break. Noah, played by Ryan Gosling, is a worker at the local log factory. He happens to see Allie at the carnival night and finds himself immediately attracted to her. He pursues her and finally wins her over by getting her to agree on going out with him. He shows her what it is to be really free, to do things because you want to do the...

I'd had this movie for many months and for some reason it never seemed like the right time to watch it. Today, after having a lazy day... It seemed like the right time to watch a musical. What a beautiful movie! I'm kind of disappointed that it was over so soon. For those who haven't seen it, here's what it is all about. The movie is based on the book by Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam which was later turned into a successful Broadway musical which ran for some 4000+ shows and a movie, which is The King and I. There have been many versions of this movie and I saw the 1956 one with Deborrah Kerr and Yul Brynner. The movie opens with the arrival of an englishwoman Anna Leonowens (Deborrah Kerr) and her son Louis to the land of Siam, now Thailand in the city of Bangkok. She has been appointed by the king to tutor the royal children in a scientific and secular education in which the tutors before her had failed. She's shown to be a beautiful, strong woman...

Yes Cricket is a religion in India, and every citizen is a devout follower. Somehow you just can't get away from it. There's no place to run to. Yes maybe you can follow other sports too, but you can't get the cricket out of an Indian. Me included. I wasn't following cricket for the past some years, except some IPL matches here and there. This world cup thanks to our office I managed to follow some matches because the enthusiasm of a hundred odd colleagues is just hard to ignore! :) I came to Hong Kong the day we played against Pakistan and I had to leave I think when half the innings was over. I came to the airport and was having my dinner while I could hear people shouting in bits and bursts! I kept asking the waiter the score, and since the airport was practically empty, after serving the few people in the restaurant, he'd run to the screen and then come back to tell us the score. And then suddenly there was this huge cheer, and I knew we'd won the semis. ...

Yes I'm one of those people who hadn't seen this movie up until today! My roommate gave me the movie to watch just today... and I saw it! What a movie! I've always loved movies which take the base of sports to convey something more than just sportsman spirit... Like one of my all time favorites is Remember the Titans. Another favorite is The Miracle. This movie brought to light so many things that I wasn't aware about before... It made me go back to Wiki and read up on Nelson Mandela, on the Apartheid, on the struggles, the massacres and the growth of that nation. They've gone through so much in the last two decades, it's amazing! Morgan Freeman has won my respect and admiration all over again. He's such a perfect actor for almost all roles. But in today's movie he was the best. He fit the bill. He was inspirational. The time when Matt Damon walks into the prison at Robben Island, it was so moving to see the kind of circumstances in which he spent 18...

Today thanks a friend of mine I watched this beautiful animated movie Waltz with Bashir and what an amazingly well made movie. It's set in the times of the Lebanon Civil War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre . Directed by Ari Folman it's actually his true story. The characters in the movie are real people with whom Ari fought in the war. It talks about the post trauma disorder in a way because of the kind of memories that have been left on the characters in Ari's life. Depicted with animations which are more like comic strips and the use of dark colors, the mood of the film is very dark. It starts with one friend who comes to Ari talking about the nightmares he's been having and how they're related to the kind of things he'd done while being out at war. That sets the ball rolling in Ari's head where he's trying to piece together his role in the massacre, because although he has images of that, he does not recall anything to do with that day. He then t...

I must've been in school, maybe 13-14 years old, when I first saw an episode of Charmed. I used to follow it regularly always trying to avoid missing any show. The show was about three sisters, who are actually witches in the modern world and must learn the witchcraft in order to protect innocents by fighting off demons and other evil magical creatures. I think I must've followed the series for about a year and then lost track of it. I kept trying to hunt for it, but to no avail. Until I came to Hyderabad! Why, you might ask? Well because I discovered SurfTheChannel.com thanks to my friend at work, Anaisha. :) And voila! There it was 170 episodes with links to either Megavideo / Tudou to watch them. It took me nearly 7 months to finish these episodes mind you. :) Haha! But I did see them all. Though as the seasons went by there were fewer links available and a lot of times they just didn't stream. I'm planning to buy the complete DVD series, but I think I'll hold o...

For the first time I had not read about this movie before going to see it, had not searched for it on google, no research on IMDB, nothing. I was as blank, as a canvas. And what a painting the movie left on me when it was over, literally and otherwise. Bombay, my city, my home, has never looked so intense and so deep before. There was the chaos that I've grown up with, but there was this depth that I have failed to appreciate and to recognize. Maybe one of the most beautiful things that has been said about this movie is said by its producer, and actor, Aamir Khan, "The movie is like an artistic painting on celluloid" And that's it. That is how beautiful this movie is. If you're someone who appreciates photography, who loves the play of colors, the confluence of ideas and poetry, this movie will touch you. It's almost like an art film yet not. It's a very different genre of film, and it got under my skin. I'll attempt to be less vague about it and give...

So after 3 years of my passport being issued, I finally got a stamp on it. I didn't get a visa (unfortunately) because HK doesn't need a visa if you're staying for The city is beautiful. After the first few days I realized that I was clicking all photos in the portrait modes because clicking in landscape mode wouldn't accommodate the tall buildings at all, and ALL buildings are TALL! Really! The roads are spick and span, like my kind of roads, people throw the trash in the dustbins, and in the right dustbins. There is a separate thing on the top for cigarette butts. There are bins at most signals, and on most streets. The traffic signals work and show you when to cross the road, and all people patiently wait and abide. Thanks to this, taxis, cars and buses zoom between signals in the middle of the day at speeds like 70 - 100! This is unheard of on roads in Mumbai where you have to keep an eye out for the people crossing, animals crossing and the silly drivers. People d...