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...