Chuck it

After reading about something twice, you start to wonder how it would really like to be, as it is described in it. Sometimes it is difficult to find the reason behind the seeming madness described, and it is very easy to dismiss all of it as mindless rantings of a sick mind. Or a very, very depressed one. And then again, some times, the reasons stare at you stark naked and your mind immediately flashes passages where the exact same thing was described. Epiphany.

Evening. A famous sweet shop, in a very prominent location in the city. The place is filled to bursting, and then some. There are guys, I can’t say men, because they are wandering about in shorts and sunglasses, and looking absolutely lost. ‘US returned’. Tag them thus, and indulge them for what they really are. Strangers in their own land. But it’s not like nature let them loose in the grime and sweat of Chennai without any help. Oh no, she wouldn’t do that. She created the Wife.

The female of the species, to give credit where it’s due, knows the modus operandi of any kind of shop almost by instinct. So, Sunday evening, everyone’s tired of having cooked stuff at home, and it’s time for the holiday for the kitchen.

Maybe we’ll go out for dinner tonight, to a nice quiet restaurant.
Yes Dear.
And if we leave a bit early, maybe we could pick up something at the Sweets’. For the rest of the week, something for the momentary hunger.
Yes Dear.

It was a generation of men brought up by women.

Or, for women.

So let’s have half a kg of this, and another half of that, and a half of what-not.
Yes Dear… Wait, the last one… half a kg of…
What-not.
Right, What-not.

Trained thus in the workings of the inner worlds of sweet-making and its delivery, the guy is no ready to tackle the final frontier standing between him and cholesterol heaven. The serpentine queue. So the guy, shorts and all, waddles up to the counter, places the order, seems extremely amused by the whole token system, flashes the MasterCard or Visa or whatever and collects the goodies. And of course chivalry demands that the lady just stand and watch all this. The above procedure takes nearly thirty minutes. Not the three lines as described here. Serpentine queues don’t just disappear in three sentences of process description. Resulting in quite a sweaty ‘US return’ at the end of the whole thing. Summers in Texas aren’t so hot.

And then, it’s a drive to the restaurant. Nice, decent place, which offers good food and a quiet atmosphere. Along with the small problem of a hundred other families who figured the same way about the place. So, drop the lady off, and go in search of the parking spot. Up and down the road, with growing frustration. Hands clenching the steering harder, legs cramping up because of the incessant switching between clutch and brake. That, and all other obstacles such as cross-parked bikes and annoying auto guys later, the car finally slots home, rather awkwardly, but it’s parked. Then it’s off smiling towards the lady, who, again, to give credit where it’s due, has secured a nice, quiet table when seemingly none was available.

Because, it’s her holiday, and she has worked all week.

Of course, it’s his holiday too. And there was a Cup Final that evening. Maybe someone will message him the result.

That old saying, about how you always kill the one you love, well look, it works both ways.

Half-Time

It's not always that I sit down and write, and attempt to make sense. It's not that I never write anything that has a point, it's just that I find it easier not to make a point. But this time, I'm going to make an exception.

There's a very intriguing list. This one. I've always been fascinated by lists, ticking things off them, starting from the top, starting from the bottom, starting from the middle and working both ways, all kinds. And this list is no different. And now that I've seen 125 movies out of the 250 on the list, I can act quite knowledgeable about the subject of movies and movie-making. And also watching.

There is no way that I'm gonna dissect each of the 125 frame by frame, pointing out moments of brilliance and not-so-brilliance and all such. I don't even remember some of those movies too well. There's no way you're going to read it even if I do. So, only a select few movies. And maybe the one that I think should top the list.

Most of the top 50 movies are there because, well, they belong there. The LOTR series and Godfather series for their sheer technical brilliance and acting respectively. The early Star Wars movies for being the trend-setters they were. Citizen Kane, for the first movie to use a non-continuous screenplay. Shawshank, Usual Suspect, Se7en, Eternal Sunshine and other such movies for being the kind of movies that you watch, and come out shaking your head in wonderment. With all these wonderful movies up there, I never understood what Rear Window was doing at 13th. It's not nearly a murder mystery. Neither is it a full-fledged, heart strings-tugging love story. It's about a guy who broke his leg and had nothing better than to snoop into the neighbour's house through his window. Heck, it's indecent, if nothing else. All through the movie I waited and watched, and waited for something to happen. And then just like that, poof, the movie was over. What the...

It's not like I have anything against Hitchcock. Psycho was everything that the hype about it promised, Vertigo and North by Northwest had screenplays that motored along very nicely indeed. Rebecca too had a strong story to back it. Strangers on a Train is, in my opinion, the best Hitchcock movie I've seen. The whole concept on which the movie is based is quite novel, apart from the fact that it IS actually based on a novel, of course. And again, I never felt the time fly by as I was watching the movie. That takes quite some doing, I get bored easy most of the times. Which is what happened with Rear Window. And yet it's the highest rated Hitchcock movie. Clearly, my tastes are not refined enough.

Akira Kurosawa is the man who showed the world that the Japanese too can make movies, and then went ahead and showed the world how to make them. Shooting into the limelight with Rashomon, he went on to make other Samurai-based movies such as Yojimbo, Seven Samurai and Ran, the last one based almost entirely on Shakespeare's King Lear. Japanese movies are a different world by themselves, with the characters running around barefoot clutching their swords to their hips, the mostly expressionless protagonists with their Samurai stunts and of course, Sake. Quite different from the dour-faced, pinstripe-suited characters of the Hollywood movies, which alone is enough to make them worth watching.

In fact, most foreign films come as a refreshing change for someone who has watched Hollywood churn out near-similar fare year after year after year, citing the reasons of 'formula of success' and other such nonsense. Amelie was an incredibly nice feel-good movie, Life is Beautiful was well, beautiful, if only for the fact that it was a war movie and yet the war itself only formed a somber background to the individual's life that it affected, which was the focus of the movie. And then again, The Downfall managed to do both, concentrate on the war as well as the individual simultaneously. It helped of course that the individual in question was Hitler. But still. Hispanic movies have an obsession with drawing different story-threads and then joining them at one point. Credit to them though, that they do it seamlessly, with each story being great in their own right, eventually coming together to create the movie which is greater than the sum of its parts. Like what happens in Power Rangers. Or the New Zealand Cricket Team. Or City of Gods and Amores Perros, in the context of this post.

Stanley Kubrick is probably the man who has most movies in the Top 250. Not without reason too, on evidence of Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and even Full Metal Jacket. It's just generally accepted that he's the man, notwithstanding the fact that I slightly slept through the second half of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just like it's accepted that Quentin Tarantino is the man. Based mostly on Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bills. Not that Reservoir Dogs is any less a Tarantino special, and even Sin City which he guest-directed with its graphic-novel feel throughout. Another movie that provided a welcome break from the usual.

All this apart, there are only two movies which I know by-heart, line by line, frame-by-frame. Apart from Minnale, I mean. Fight Club, for its sheer denial of everything that humans have ever worked for, century after century. It's not that the mere rebellious nature of the movie draws the hot-blooded teenager towards it, it's just got so much to say- things that were always around and that pass by us everyday and yet, we never realized, stuck as we are in our mind-set of following the flock. You have to see the movie enough times till you can say the lines along with it. Then, will you realize the impact of each of them, like the one in the description section of this blog. And then, once you've watched the movie, you go and read the book. And realize why the movie had to be a great one. The book just cannot be made into a bad movie.

And yet, for all that, if Fight Club can manage only second spot in my ratings, there must be something else which defines movie-making. Maybe it's not a technical wonder, maybe it's not got an edge-of-the-seat thriller story or a gut-wrenching emotional drama. Maybe it's not a movie which you can be inspired by, or maybe it is. But it's probably the lack of all these which make that movie what it is. The story is naked, told with a brutal simplicity and moving at break-neck speed. The book was a melange of different stories, the movie tries to pick out only one which has a workable chronology to it, and succeeds perfectly. The lines, its always the lines, are again, so simple that you wonder how they've never struck you before. There is enough of an emotional roller-coaster through the length of the movie to call it well-made. It's not without reason it's on top of my list. It's not without reason it is the heading of this blog.

After all, we're not stupid. At least, we're not that stupid - Mark Renton.

This. Is the crack.

Perfect :)

So Long, and Thanks for all the 'Oh Fish!'

I was reading my blogger archives yesterday. I don't know how/why I got there, but very appropriately I had landed on the post I had written right after last Saarang. Apart from the usual banter about Saarang and nothing coming out of it, I've been pretty funny in parts, if I've not reached the absolute nadir of sadness in saying so myself. And now, one year down the line, that post has made me realize something. Slightly scary maybe, but a revelation which had to come, and better sooner than later. I am not the person who wrote that post.

Sure, the world is changing and it inexorably causes everyone in it to do so as well. There is this rise of Mega(goog)lomania, that omnipresent brainchild of Brin&Page that is now an integral part of every corner of web space that you'll ever visit. There is the plummeting cost of Cell phones and service providers that the average cell phone density in an area might be more than the human density itself. There is the fact that one reality show with a small bit of controversy can make front page news for a whole week while ISRO's recoverable satellite thing (Well, there were not enough details! I know Jade Goody's biography by-heart though) gets one corner of the third page. There is the fact that George Bush is sending more troops to Iraq. No wait, not that.

So with all these changes imposing themselves on the average human being, it is only natural that the person also change. But in my case the change has been much greater than what could be put down as normal updating. It's a paradigm shift, or rather paradijim shift, as a famous singer who came to judge LM group finals at Saarang put it. Without doubt, this past one year has done, taught, created, destroyed and shown more for me than the 19 preceding ones. And I am glad for it.

This was supposed to be a post on what happened at Saarang '07. For me in particular, and the world in general. But I found to my dismay that I simply couldn't put my finger on what to write about, leave alone the question of how. That is something new, I haven't had too much difficulty thinking of a topic to write about. At least I'd have a vague idea of what my point was, though I admit, most times I don't have one. This post is merely an amoeba in my head, a germ of an idea (pun unintended). Shapeless, pointless, and waiting to go wherever its pseudopoda take it. In this case, my fingers on this over-abused keyboards. And it's going nowhere.

So, Saarang 2007 was good, I guess. Though my personal opinion might be heavily biased, due to a lot of reasons. It was cut down to four days from the usual five, thanks to he-who-must-not-be-named. And then all the usual brouhaha happened, events, professional shows, workshops blah. I'm tired of writing about Saarang. And about the melange of events and the kaleidoscope of feelings and the ultimate concoction of cultures which eventually makes Saarang, Saarang. Cliched so much that I want to puke. I also wanted to puke after I went sleepless on one night this Saarang too. But my stomach held its own and I pulled through the next day comfortably. Comfortably Numbly in fact.

Leave all that. The one year between Saarang 2006 and Saarang 2007, what has it left me with? Agony. Elation. Ecstacy. Joy. Depression. Frustration. Anger. Satisfaction. Jealousy. Hope. Fear. Calmness. Surprise. Shock. Craving. Boredom. Bliss. All of the above, surely. And then a bit more, which none of these can encompass.

There are somethings which words can't explain. For everything else, there's Wikipedia.

50 Posts. I'm the man.