Retrospection: One

Welcome Back.

I’ve been gone long. 3 months, near about. 3 months of slack acknowledgment of life’s suckiness. I am hoping for that to change.

A lot of changes took place, yet somehow I am still as indolent as ever. Rains gave into Fall, which gave into Winter. The music playing changed with seasons – Jazz for the rains, Slowcore for the fall, Johnny Hollow (listen on it) and a whole lotta Gothic ambiance for the winters. The lack of good books to read was apparent in much scarce thoughts on the blog. However, I pulled myself up to read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and I find myself completely blown away. I haven’t read a more complex novel. The writing style, I presume, is part reason for the complexity. I also watched Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and it is an amazing adaptation of Heart of Darkness. If you aren’t much into reading books you much watch this classic of a war movie. I am currently trying Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

A lot of pending DVDs found their way to the screen. Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Dead Poet’s Society, The Dreamers, El Topo, Everything is Illuminated, Fargo, Silent Hill, and some more. Many old DVDs went into a lot of heavy rotation too – Casablanca, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Godfather I & II, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, To Kill A Mockingbird, Vanilla Sky and a lot more.

So, all-in-all, I haven’t done much again. It is high time I do something worthwhile.

There’s lot to write about but words aren’t flowing the way they used to. I feel more and more like Winston Smith starting his diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, wanting to write, afraid to write, but when he writes it seems more like babble than a meaningful discourse yet the babble makes complete sense.

So I’ll leave you guys here hoping that at least one or two of the old readers would return. While I club my notes and thoughts for a serious introspection of the last 3 months, you keep reading and talkback on this routinely mundane post.

PS. Took quite a part of these three months to redesign this blog. Wait and Watch. Work In Progress.

The Not-Yet Last Stand

I made it through X-Men: The Last Stand. It was supposed to be the last X-Men movie, the trilogy. X-Men, for me is the greatest superheroes’ movie ever, apart from The Incredibles – which was the greatest animated experience ever. (Thanks-rant: I thank Brad Bird. I thank Steve Jobs for buying out Pixar from George Lucas. I thank Javed Jaffery for an excellent dub making it the best-ever Hindi dubbed movie.)

But back to The Last Stand.

I am calling it The Last Stand, just like everyone at JoBlo’s does. Why? Because this is not an X-Men movie. Not for me. Not for the many movie and comic geeks out there. Hollywood is filled with movie makers who make the movies as in produce. They are part of a bigger creature called THE STUDIO. Now, a studio has the power to make or break a movie. It can bet huge and come out with a surprise – New Line Cinema’s greatest gamble called THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It can bet small and come out with a success - CRASH. It can also bet HUGE and fall head-first – TROY (In this case heel-first). All these amounts to a single most important part of movie business – creativity. Creativity in Hollywood is second only to probability of success. When quick-buck stands against a possible-bucks-in-future, the former wins hands down.

FOX could have waited for Bryan Singer. Apparently Singer was busy in the greatest re-incarnation in Cinema History. But they were looking for some quick bucks. When they got Matthew Vaughn on board for X-Men 3 I was all ready to forgive their urgency in pushing the movie. I love Vaughn. He just directed one movie and I love it. It’s called LAYER CAKE, See it. But as luck should have it Vaughn moved out. Instead of waiting for Singer or Vaughn, FOX goes ahead and assigns BRETT RATNER. I only saw Ratner’s Rush Hour and I can say without any reproach that it was very bad. More so, because a mumbling Black actor and an accented-asian actor hitting out on some gang isn’t my type of movie. I saw part of AFTER THE SUNSET. It didn’t interest me much even though anything with Salma Hayek would.

I am indignant. The Last Stand depends more on the mutants’ powers rather than the character itself. Most footage was wasted on CGI sequences and more on the various entries of characters – Wolverine jumping from the jet and using his claws to make an easy landing (Crap!). Storm changing weather because she was sad (Crap!), didn’t she felt bad/sad/angry in the last two movies. The movie was like, “Alright we don’t have much to tell, so we’ll put in whatever mutants we can think of”. But it wouldn’t have been that. The story was awesome. In the hands of Singer or even Vaughn the plot would have culminated to the greatest X-Men movie ever. I didn’t want to see half-assed mutants. I never want to see Storm acting up like a main character. I hate Storm. She would have been great if she died or just disappeared or whatever. I just can’t stop raving about how BAD this movie is. Not a shred of reason. No story telling at all. I don’t know how some great online reviewers found this movie good. My man, Joblo gave this sucker 5/10, which is bad but not bad enough. I can’t think of a number higher than 3.

The best part of The Last Stand was that it was very short. Clocking a little over 90 minutes, I was happy for the movie to end. The end was a bit like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and woman). (Sidenote: I saw LXG in the theaters, first day. Crappier than X3, I was laughing even before the intermission.) With an Indian POV I can say this movie is gonna make money that it didn’t make back in the west, LXG did. We are going to have various language versions – Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and all. And everyone will rush to see YEX-MEN in their preferred language. I can’t believe VAN HELSING (in Telugu) is still running in some theaters here. The current craze is Underworld 2 (again, in Telugu). They even change the titles of the movies sometimes. Right now, Superman Returns’ Spots are coming on the TV and the Hindi version has conveniently bumped off Returns - It’s now just Superman. But whatever the name Superman is going to Rock and I’ll be there to witness the amalgamation of an iconic hero and the best Superhero director there is, Bryan Singer.

Random Thoughts Vol.2

Reasons are the same as before. Hence: Random Thoughts Vol.2

• Mission Impossible 3 finally arrived in Hyderabad. Saw it releasing day - Friday. Awesome action. J.J. Abrams has made it to my list of great action directors. Tom Cruise, always brilliant. Hoffman came out as a great villain. The slight suspense was no surprise, already knew who was behind it before the intermission. Maggie Q - HOT. I was looking forward to see Billy 'Russel Hammond' Crudup after quite a long time in a huge movie. He was great too. A great movie. No bad things to say except the lack of THE THEME in the movie most of the time. But still, the music was good. The Vatican and Shanghai sequences were brilliantly shot. Will watch again this week.



• Been reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. A geniune story of innocence and human dignity. Looks like I finally found the life-changing-book after all. Will write all about it in a post quite soon. Started reading it for the second time. This stuff should be in primary education curriculum.
  



• Kal El will return on June 30th in IMAX 3D. Book your tickets, I'm booking mine as soon as advance starts. There will be 20 minutes of 3D Supes. Can't wait. The reviews are good not excellent though. Some say it is more of a Chick movie. Some say Spacey wasn't used much. I say fuck off! I say, "I HEART SUPERMAN".



• Listening to James Blunt's Back to Bedlam. Listen. Wallow in the beautiful melancholy. Also playing all live performances by Pearl Jam. Also in the loop are the Verve, Soundgarden, Fort Minor, Lynyrd fuckin' Skynyrd, Helen Stellar, My Morning Jacket.



• Also playing Counter Strike and Condition Zero. Trying to throw a LAN party at Copy Junction, Banjara Hills. Need more friends/players.

Random Thoughts

Don't have anything to write about, hence: random thoughts.

• People are always asking me, "what are you doing?" This is what I am doing these days. Go ahead and click, its an improvisation of a blogger template. It is Work-In-Progress and there's more where this came from. So whenever you need a different looking blog, catch me on Yahoo! IM.


• Joblo gave it 9/10 and Arrow would butcher his family to see this again. And they saw it at the Cannes. It's my most awaited movie this year. Much awaited than Superman Returns. And I know it won't be released in India/Hyderabad. It's mucho-gloomy and uber-creepy. It's Guillermo del Toro's "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth). Download the creepy trailer, already.


• Next in line is Richard Linklater's live-action, rotoscopic-animated sci-fi, A Scanner Darkly. Three Words: PHILIP K. DICK (shame on you, ignoramus). It stars some of my favorite actors, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. I believe I don't have to repeat the trailer line from above.


• Year's biggest disappointment, Southland Tales, courtesy, Richard Kelly. I had hopes. Damn you, Richard. Please give me a Darko, again.
  


• I am back on to music real hard, courtesy: iPod Nano. It's:
  
  
  
  • The Who's Baba O'Riley
  
  
  • Elton John's Tiny Dancer and My Father's Gun
  
  
  • Helen Stellar's Io (This time around)
  
  
  • Fleetwood Mac's Big Love (Acoustic)
  
  
  • Pearl Jam doing the Who's Baba O'Riley (live)
  
  
  • Wheat's Don't I Hold You
  
  
  • Lindsey Buckingham's Shut Us Down
  
  
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird
  
  
  • D-Mode's remix of Starsailor's Four to the Floor
  
  
  • Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker
  
  
  • Beck's Guero
  
  
  and more movie soundtracks and scores. I DIG MUSIC. (whoever got it, comment. hint: tiny dancer)


• Got nothing to read. Going for book-shopping tomorrow. Looking for Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird, David Vise and Mark Malseed's Google Story and anything minimal (spanbauer, hempel, palahniuk, coupland, camus, lee). Meanwhile, enjoying The Lord of the Rings for the don't-remember^th time.


• I am also going back to my web devlopment basics. Learning CSS again. Learning Modularization in XHTML 1.1. Trying to learn JavaScript for the n^th time. I even have a CSS Reference on my iPod. Thanks, Westciv.

That's all folks! Will return with more thoughts in the near future.

Intelligent Suffering

Oh, is it not but intelligent suffering when you read Edgar Allan Poe with despair and melancholia? Is it not love, when you suffer at the words of Maupassant or Kafka, out of willingness and anxiety?

I have, in my early reading years, read through many an insomniac nights the works of Poe and Maupassant. These are two great authors who share more than their genres – the art of weaving a tale of morbid fear, gloom and hopelessness around everyday life. Edgar Allan Poe, I would later find was sort of an inspiration for Guy De Maupassant.

There is a kind of an enigma that surrounds tales of a darker nature. For me it is one “genus” that is most close to our hearts, most human. But dark for one is not exactly dark for others. Simply saying, dark is not a genre in itself. It is evident, not by saying, but by reading something that would seem dark to you. I’ve read those fat plot-driven novels, stories taken from the pages of the daily newspapers. I read the Da Vinci Code, I was ecstatic (until I read other books by Dan Brown). I read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, I was clueless. And these are best sellers by best selling authors. Not one of the many books I’ve read had any effect on me. Alternatively, I read a short story by Maupassant. A story which has neither a plot nor a shred of reason. A story about a well-to-do French man who wanders around Paris one night and ends up starved to death. By the end I felt as if I had gone through that deadly ordeal myself. It was so powerful that I kept reading it again and again, till I lost the book, and lost the name of the story in my memory. I still don’t remember the title, yet I consider it as my favorite Maupassant story ever.

The thing about dark tales is they are, in essence, sad and emotional. Because in the end you aren’t afraid, you are just sad. But people don’t want to feel that emotion. I look around book stores; I look at people buying books. Everyone wants a book that makes them feel happy. Ah! They so love their happy endings. Even when people go “over the edge” they buy a sappy book, books loosely written to induce emotions that are not true to the soul of both the writer and reader. People are “afraid” to read books that feel true. So, they indulge in best sellers. I do too. If I ever get to lay my hands on the darkest of tales, I would never read the best sellers. But alas, is all I can say.

Books these days are full of cheesy plots and character-less characters that do not dwell in my after-thoughts. I mean, when was the last time I thought why Robert Langdon did what he did or why were there so many goddamn characters in State of Fear. The characters of these best sellers are just characters. What they lack is the humanness, the soul that exists in every character of a dark tale, be it French men, Princes, Hobbits, Wizards or humanoid mask-wearing villain who makes breathing sounds. And each of these characters, no matter how far from being human, is truly human.

When you read The Masque of Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe you can’t help but feel the movement of the story. The description, which goes from flamboyant to the darkest red, is simple and stark. The story is roughly a narrative description of a Prince’s party while the outside world rages through a plague. By the end of the short story you are as horrified as the Prince himself. Only Poe can make horror out of a series of rooms.

I love it when it ends like this. I am no sadist or pessimist. I am just more human than human. More sensitive to emotions those are rare and sad. And I suffer out of my will, out of my intelligence. I enjoy this suffering, this feeling of despair and eventual sadness. I enjoy them in my books, in movies, music, games, and in writing. I wish every passing day, I wish I could write such tales but I digress or am afraid. Of suffering what these men have suffered to flow words that are an intelligent suffering to the rest of us.

Franz Kafka once wrote, in a letter to his friend, Oskar Pollak

“I believe one should read only the books that bite and sting. If a book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a punch on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books which affect us like a disaster, which pain us deeply, like the death of someone dearer to us than ourselves, like being lost in the woods, far from everyone, like a suicide…”

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof. -v

My cousin, shoeb and I raced to the theater on his friend's bike. The show would start at 2:45. At 2:38 pm we were filling up the bike's tank. And at exactly 2:40 pm we were skidding, literally. The bike skid for approximately 10 seconds. Now that's a really long time in skidding-time. But none of us got hurt, inclusive of the bike. We even got complimented for the control over the bike. We arrived bang on 2:45. I ran over to the ticket counter, got two tickets (nice seats). And we ran to the IMAX screen. The show had not yet started.

The movie begins with the capture and hanging of Guy Fawkes, with the Guy Fawkes Rhyme going in the background. Then we see Vendetta wearing his mask and Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) doing her makeup. And then I switched off my cell and watched a Classic.


The movie is great. I don't see why Joblo.com gave it an 8/10. I'd give it 9. The screenplay is tight. All V dialogues and quotes are memorable. The scene where V introduces himself to Evey is excellent. Great intro. It feels weird at first watching V. Words coming out of a mask. And all his movements that compliments those words. Really weird.


The movie was inspiring not strong though, but just. And every word spoken by V makes the movie worth seeing for the second and even third time. The movie wasn't boring for a second. The only part which took the 1 out of 10 is the capture of Evey. You gotta see the movie to understand what I am saying. The cinematography is awesome. The falling blocks sequence (which you can see in the super bowl clip) is excellent. And yes there is a whole lotta wachowski in the movie. Bullet-time. Some scenes look very matrix-ish. But McTeigue does stand out on his own as a director.

The soundtrack is damn good. Specially the songs playing on V's jukebox, including Julie London's cry me a river. The count of monte cristo footage was excellent. And the Shadow Gallery was great too.

Overall a Classic if not Cult. Hugo Weaving as V was perfect, there isn't a better actor for this role. Natalie Portman outdoes herself. Specially in the jail part. Stephen Rea is good too. This is a must-see for anyone who loves a good movie. Not exactly an action movie, more of a political thriller. And yes it is truly Orwell-ish.

And you should see this movie.

No. Never download it. That's piracy. lol. No, seriously go and see Vendetta in a theater. You can wait for the DVD but I'd still see it in a theater. See it with a clear head and you'll have a much different movie experience than the rest of the audience. It will be like nothing you have ever seen. And remember A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having. Well, that line was actually irrelevant but you can't help but quote V.


P.S.: The RED Vs are courtesy of Joblo.com

Freedom! Forever!

V for Vendetta is now playing on the IMAX screen at Prasad's. I have already booked my tickets for the 2:45 show and am damn sure we are gonna rock, my cousin and I. Will give a huge review when I return.

In other news, Joblo.com has just reviewed the Good Night, and Good Luck DVD. Very enlightening review. Makes me wanna buy the DVD right now. But who knows maybe there's a SE or Collector's Edition in the making. So will wait and see.

Until then Good night, and Good luck.

P.S: Check out these artwork from Vendetta.

Kal El Returns ... 06.30.06

Even though you've been raised as a human being you're not one of them.

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They can be a great people Kal-El if they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you... my only son.

-

Just listening to these words on the backdrop of the first ever trailer for Superman Returns makes me think of how iconic Superman really is. The understructure for my iconic image of Superman is definitely the excellent final conversation of Bill (A.K.A. Snake Charmer) and Beatrix Kiddo (A.K.A The Bride, A.K.A. Black Mamba). Yea, the one about Superheroes and Superman metaphor. For those of you who weren't nice enough to check it out or probably too stupid to ignore the excellent convo in the movie Kill Bill Vol.2, here's some basic recollection.

The conversation is about superheroes and their Alter Egos. About how Superman is unlike any other Superhero. How?

This is how.

Superman is Superman. He isn't a by-product of some scientific research like Spiderman or some rich guy hitting it for revenge like Batman. He is Kal El, Son of Jor El, from the Planet Krypton. He is Superman. Unlike Peter Parker/Bruce Wayne etc., his alter ego isn't some super-powerful hero. His alter ego is a bumbling reporter, Clark Kent, who's weak and afraid like any human. And that's why Superman seems so iconic to me.

He isn't just about Justice and the American Way. He is more. His weakness and his fear tells more about us humans and his real-self tells us even more of how much we humans can rise up to.

So rise up. Fly to the nearest Cinema near you and get those tickets before they are taken. Kal El Returns. 06.30.06

DVD Coolness

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting MY DVD COLLECTION (in no order, as such).

• The Godfather Part I
• The Shawshank Redemption
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Extended Edition]
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [Extended Edition]
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Casablanca
• The Pink Panther
• Scarface
• Raging Bull
• Amadeus
• The Shining
• Taxi Driver
• Seven
• Troy
• Big Fish
• Hero
• Reservoir Dogs
• Kill Bill Vol.1
• Donnie Darko
• Fight Club
• Memento
• The Machinist
• American History X
• Oldboy
• Pi
• Y Tu Mamá También
• Diarios de motocicleta
• Trainspotting
• Layer Cake
• The Girl Next Door [Unrated]
• Ocean's Eleven
• Ocean's Twelve
• What the *Bleep* Do We Know
  

Choke Yourself!

I love Chuck Palahniuk's work, although I've only read Fight Club and a few other online write ups. He, i believe, is the Quentin Tarantino of writing. So, anyway, the news/rumor that is making rounds these days is that Chuck Palahniuk's CHOKE is being made into a movie. The scoop came up at AICN, the scooper seems to have heard about the movie from Chuck himself while interviewing him. But i guess we have to wait for something from the film makers themselves. The team behind the hellblazer movie, Constantine are supposed to be hooked with Susan Sarandon as the mother of Victor Mancini, the lead character. As for Victor Mancini himself, Oscar-Nominee, Heath Ledger and Ryan Gosling are hoping to star.

Choke is the story of med-school dropout Victor Mancini, an anti-hero of our deranged times. He is a con artist who works in a colonial-era theme park by the day, visits his addled mother, and frequents "sexual addiction recovery" workshops to pick up dates. His scam, is to choke on his food in upscale restaurants and then allowing himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him.