Lights, Camera, My Opinion

 Best Movie – V for Vendetta

 

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate.' This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valourous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose.

That is the best example of alliteration that I have ever seen. There are 51 Vs in that sentence and that is just the introduction of the character. A character played by Hugo Weaving (the same who played Agent Smith in Matrix). The movie’s writers are Andy & Larry Wachowski. But its story is based on the comic by the same name by Alan Moore which in my opinion is the best comic writer. The movie does change the characters and some events from the comic book but at times it is completely faithful as well. Before this movie I thought movies were the ready-to-eat versions of books, but this is not the case here. A movie here combines the plot and narrative of a book, the visual beauty of a painting and the tension & passions of a song.

The visual allegories provided in movie are simply awe striking at times. The way V draws his knives in a V shape, the fireworks making a V in sky, the red V mark on the cell they had kept V in. Then Ewey finding herself in the rain like V had in the fire (the names V and Ewey, not a co-incidence). But the biggest and most complex is the dominos scene which symbolizes the chain reaction that he has set and the way things are stacked up, everything will fall. The domino fall ends with one piece left standing with one red and one black side, which means only thing remaining in the end will be him and Chancellor Sutler. And they both are two faces of the same coin. And it’s not just the visual treat and the dialogues and Shakespeare lines (they are quite a few from Macbeth and Richard III) but also the eerie similarity to real life when V says “The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by the people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.”

To me it is the best movie I have watched, it has a good story, excellent dialogues, deeper meanings, fantastic acting by the entire cast, breath taking cinematography. But the biggest is the message that one man can make a difference. V is no superhero, he had the time and patience and most importantly the drive to what he wanted. A definite must watch even if you don’t see all the layers at one time.

FREEDOM FOREVER !

Best Villain – Malcom McDowell as Alex Delarge from A Clockwork Orange

Malcom McDowell is scary, no let me rephrase MM is making-you-hold-your-breath-fearing- what-he-might-do-next scary. He doesn’t all these nasty things because he is forced to do it by the circumstances or because of his greed for money or he is because somebody killed his mommy in cold blood. He does them because he likes to do them. He is inclined to what the movie says – Ultra Violence. So he drives people off the road, seduces two underage girls, beats up his rival gangs and his own gang members, rapes a young woman and half kicks her husband to death and finally kills a woman with a giant porcelain dildo. But he does with so much panache and Beethoven music to the background that it feels like he’s a musician at a concert, he was born to do these things. And in a way he was.

And that is what the movie’s message is; that if you forcibly make a man to do good he’s not actually good, but also the flip side that he is not bad just because he does bad things as well. And there is the question about morality. Is there good or bad in the world without choice.Stanley Kubrick's one of the finest works.

We find him in the most adverse conditions after his treatment, he is left homeless, beaten up by the his own friends, tortured to the sound of his favorite music but still it is difficult to sympathize with him because in the words of someone from the movie “he is rotten to the core”. But he is just a teenager with no megalomania or plans to destroy the universe, no multi-million dollar evil empires, he looks just like an average guy. He is the villain next door, and maybe that makes him so scary.

That’s why, the sight of him sitting in the Korova milk bar trying to make up his ‘razoodock’ still gives me the chill. And that is why the simple song  ‘Singin in the rain’ makes hair stand on my back.

Best Love Story – American Pie Series.

Ya you read that right, and this is not sarcasm. While to most people it was about Jim humping an apple pie, the pact to get laid, lots of toilet humor and Finch fucking Stifler’s mom at the end of every movie but to me it was not. It was about Jim and Michelle’s love story.  To quote from the movie :

Michelle: How did a little perv like you, turn into such a great guy?

Jim: How did a little nympho like you, turn into such a great girl?

Michelle: I'm still a nympho.

Jim: Well, I'm still a perv.

Jim: You know Michelle. To quote someone that I’ve learnt quite a bit from. I think you and I are a perfectly natural normal thing. Perfectly natural.

And that’s what they are, a perfectly normal couple (well not really). Love to me is that only, it’s about accidentally saying “This one time at band camp” and realizing you are in love, to take a walk on the beach with her alone when things go wrong, to look all over for her and smile when you see her on the top of the stair case, raising your glass to your friends when you finally get the girl. It’s about getting the sex bible to keep your girl and it’s about leaving the Lacrosse game to finish the duet.

That is how love in the real world is, it’s not about writing letters from beyond the grave, it’s not drinking poison after your loved one is dead, it’s not about arriving and saying “No one puts baby in the corner”.  When you are in love you don’t see angels playing harps, people dancing with you on the street; it’s the small things that tell you, and it’s the small things that matter in life, always.

And the best part is the soundtrack, it consists of my favorite love songs. 1. Sway - Bic Runga. 2. Into the Mystic – The Wallflowers. 3.  Honey & the moon – Joseph Arthur. And also worth mentioning here is Laid – James.

And the last line - Love isn't just a feeling. Love is something you do. It's a dress, a visit to band camp. A special haircut. ;-)

Best Neo Noir – Manorama Six feet Under

Inspired from the now classic Chinatown this replaces the darkness and shadow games of the original black & white movie with the barren landscapes of Rajasthan and lots & lots of nothingness. The result is even more unsettling. Instead of the darkness of the original where you think what lies in the shadows here you know that nothing lies in the light, there are not witnesses to whatever is happening and you are cut off from the world. And to confuse you further Navdeep Singh directly puts Mirage in context with an image of Yana Gupta saying that what you see in the desert might actually not exist.

It’s not a rip off or a cheap copy, but a re-interpretation of the original. Director even pays homage to the original by showing the nose cutting scene  on the TV at Satyaveer’s house (Abhay Deol). Nothing is reliable in the movie; the wife of the Maharaja who soon turns out to be not the wife of the Maharaja the, his irritable and nagging wife Nimmi who advises him good but he never listens, his brother-in-law and best friend, Brij Mohan (Vinay Pathak) with uncertain loyalties who starts his sentences with “Jeeje”. Manorama’s roommate played by Sen who plays his almost love affair. Even his prying neighbor creeps you out.

 The narrator is Satyaveer Singh Randhawa (Abhay Deol), a down-on-his-luck public works engineer. He compares Lakhot – dry, desolate and despondent – to the general downturn in his own life. An aspiring writer whose only novel Manorama sank without a trace, grieves about how he had once wished to be famous but is now resigned to a banal and unremarkable existence. “Is mardood raet ke jungle ,ae chote mote commission lekar apni choti moti pareshaniyon ke saath ek choti moti gumnaam see zindagi jee raha huun”. The movie serves up twist after twist and keeps the suspense going till the end.

Unlike Chinatown this however ends on a happy note and breaks away from the noir genre and says the big fish doesn’t always win, sometimes the small fish gets away. Watch it if not for Abhay Deol’s restrained performace or Vinay Pathak’s over the top one, then for the eerie backdrop of the desert. Rajasthan as I have seen.

Most Misunderstood Movie – Hancock

The whole list till now has been unconventional but this one is right out there. Hancock currently hold a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and isn’t a darling of the masses either. It could have been great but director made a mish-mash of the unique and the clichéd.

“A hard-living superhero who has fallen out of favor with the public enters into a questionable relationship with the wife of the public relations professional who's trying to repair his image.” This is its synopsis on imdb.com and it is far from the real issue.

Director Peter Berg tries to address the loneliness, lamentation and reluctance of a superhero who doesn’t want to be a Hero leave alone Super.  He rejects the public because they reject him, lives alone in a trailer on a barren hill; goes over the ticket of Frankenstein that he found in his pocket 80 years ago every morning, has amnesia and a drinking problem. The director could have explored this angle further and could have had gone to places where only Watchmen has gone before, that Superheroes are also normal people and have normal people’s needs, like the need to be loved, of company, of being appreciated, they are also embarrassed and afraid to open up in front of others.

But then the movie tries to get some comic relief in and quickly descends into banality. A goody two shoes PR guy comes in who is trying to make the world, has a quirky wife and a sweet kid. So then Will Smith puts on a spandex costume and tries to save a sexually attractive lady cop, things and cars blow up all around and you realize that this cannot recover from this abyss.

But still the movie has its moments, like the scene where Hancock wakes up alone passed out of his trailer and runs his hand the movie ticket, his sole connection to the past. Or when he makes drawings in his prison cell introspecting and the last and the most powerful when he walks away from a mortally wounded Charlize Theron knowing this is the only way she will survive.  All in all a great could have been movie.

Life. Is good

It was 2nd October. Approx 6:30 in the evening.

I was sitting in my brother's car as he was out buying booze, with time to kill I tuned into the radio. Oasis's Wonderwall was on, and I sat there listening to the song with my mind blank and the music coming in from my skin pores and I suddenly said to myself "Life is good"

Save for the rainy day

Save for the rainy day. Wait for the storm when it arrives. Study hard in school to get a good college.  Study hard in college to get a good job. Work hard at your job to retire early. Take consultancy work post retirement so you can get out of home.  Network rather than making friends. Be happy when your bank statement arrives in the mail. Forget that your son also had sent a Father’s day card. Instruct your parents to only call on Sundays at 9:00 PM. Hedge your risks. Google raison d’être when someone mentions it to you.

Buy the latest iPhone from the money you have saved for the trip to your sister’s. Use the word consumer when you meant people. Give up your dreams; get that 7 figure salary job.  Buy a glass case for your guitar. Remember more misery equals more money. Get a silk upholstered couch, have no friends to call over. Remind your sub-ordinates how many Diwalis have you missed because of work. Fire them when you realize your life hasn’t amounted to much. Have a firm hand shake, forget hugs. Regret the things you didn’t do rather than the things you did.

Stay at home to save for holidays. Have weekend excursions to revitalize; complain how tired you are in office after them. Look at old pictures and sigh. Get a face lift to look like that again. Ask your brother in law if his apartment building has 100% power backup. Worry about arriving rather than travelling. Work till late to buy automatic washing machines and dishwashers.  Be glad about how much time they save. Place your 

passions on a fucking cricket team that never wins. Break your 55 inch LED when they lose.

Work abroad to buy a house here. Wake up every day to pay EMIs. Wait for your ship to come in, wait for a bigger one when it does. Laugh at youth’s dreams; silently cry in the night because you had them too. Boast about your car; get irritated when 200 BHPs cannot get you back in time for your kid’s birthday. Buy expensive gifts for them; hate them when they don’t like it. Blast them about drinking; take a valium to calm your nerves afterwards.  Keep your lawyer’s number handy.

Look before you leap. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Laugh controllably, keep away from dance floors. Think about tomorrow’s big presentation while making love. Don’t step out in the sun without wearing sunscreen. Count calories to make sure you don’t go above 2500. Budget your entertainment expenses. Listen to elder, respect them just for being born earlier. See the weather report before planning a vacation. Take holiday packages; remember to get your medicine box along. Don’t talk to strangers. Always carry an umbrella.

Check email regularly, keep your status as Busy. Promise to call later. Control your emotions. Reprimand your wife for crying just because you insulted her in front of her friends.  Set reminders for dental checkup. Get drunk to forget than to remember. Wake up disillusioned. Wonder who the fuck you are on Sunday mornings. Get high end gym subscriptions. Tell your son you are too tired to play with him afterwards.  Save the appreciation mails, delete the birthday wishes. Drink your 18 year old scotch alone.  Don't marry the girl you love.

Fight for corner offices. Include your designation in your signature. Update your business card as soon as it changes. Follow the 7 habits. Get your kids self-help books as birthday presents. Plan your exit strategy. Don’t sprint; try to go slow and steady. Laugh inwardly at your classmates planning a trip just before exams. Look back and wonder why you don’t have a single photo of college time. Be happy that you have 3 bedrooms when you bring home your mistress. Of course you wouldn’t do it on your wife’s bed. Try to justify it to yourself. Fail. Carry-on to boast about it nevertheless. 

Snap at the waiter at your 10^th anniversary for bringing the cake late. Honk and swear at red lights. Order in rather than go out. Get ready to eat. Download the movies. See documentaries about Egypt. Make a point to always get extra virgin olive oil. Drink diet cokes. See smiling as a sign of being non-serious. Crib about your shit job as pillow talk; interrupt it to make sure you have the 5:30 alarm. Get a pre-nuptial.

Watch your baby's first steps on video. Get mad at your wife when you can't get it up. Take a house with a view. Put heavy curtains on the windows. Snarl at your unambitious co-worker who gave the onsite opportunity just because his wife was pregnant. Pay your fair share. Calculate other’s so they pay theirs. Tell everyone every day that it's a race. Get angry when someone asks where is the finish line. Lament you didn’t tell that girl in college how you felt. Chase girls who are 25 to make up for it now.

Ignore the pun when somebody calls you the Schrodinger’s cat. Move with the cheese. Blame the government. Watch debates on the TV. Wear earphones. Roll up your windows. Invest in a retirement home. Get mad at your daughter for not brushing after eating her birthday cake. Mention surfing the net as your hobby. Track the stock market. Get repulsed by pets. Suffer Insomnia on your 400 thread count bed linen. Don’t participate, Make fun from the sidelines. Write MMHROTD on wishes.  Don't smell the earth. But save for the rainy day.

Murder, She thought - Part 3

I was lost and I needed someone to bounce ideas off. And as always my feet turned towards Divya. She was my quiet place in between the rough sea that my life was. I went to her to imagine me. She was all I was at that age, or rather what I could have been at that age. Smart, cheerful, pretty, a genius and in love with somebody. Divya loved her husband despite all his faults. Despite all his faults.

It was an old fashioned arranged marriage when her parents had fixed her with a stranger who was of the same caste, same region and same line of work; finance as she had told to me. But there could be nothing same about them, the guy was lethargic, dumb, and in the belief that god, fate, the government and the frogs in the pond were against him. He was waiting his whole life, waiting for the economy to turn, waiting for his luck to change, waiting for the government to change and so on. He was some kind of small time day trader who always made the wrong bets.  Hustler is his own words though, “Hustlers never work, workers never hustle” he had said these lines before he had winked and took my 2^nd drink off my hand. Good for him he had only taken my 2^nd drink. 

But Divya was a love fool who was happy that any love had come her way, she made her peace that this was going to be husband and started adapting to it. He supported him and moved cities when he did, changed jobs and even stopped for 2 years when he had gone to Dubai. To work on his grand plan. The grand plan never worked and Divya had supported him till he worked from one random tip to another on the stock market. It was because of him that Divya was still a software engineer when she could have been anything she wanted. That was before I had discovered her and given the quality of work she deserved. Flip bit algorithms, AddRoundKey encryptions, hiding and modifying of data. She was a puzzle creator where I was only a puzzle solver. Our small IT Company had grown over 50 times when we had found a way to encode critical financial data of the companies from hackers and inside traders by using a special date based algorithm which made true financial data invisible till the time of publication  of it from even the CEO.

She was at her computer again, probably trying to read something in Wikipedia perhaps which she would enthusiastically recount to me again. I was happy to know about Masai drinking their blood from straws and latest nipple slip; because I was happy living my life through her. Surprisingly she never hated me for it. Like Kavita did, as most kids hated their parents for them to live their lives and correct their mistakes though them. But she wasn’t reading Wikipedia but some news report about a death. She turned towards Rajeev and said “It is still being considered a hit and run. No angles lead towards us”. Rajeev strolled around talking on the phone, came near her, kissed on forehead and started talking on the phone again. “Nahi nahi abhi bhaav aur upar nahi jayega. Kya Prasanna bhaai aap mere baat pe yakin nahi karte? Haan agle quarter ka agle quarter ka agla quarter bataunga. Lekin job bhi information hogi solid hogi. Haan haan … Jai shri Krishna” and he hung up.

“Next quarter ka kya scene hoga?” he asked Divya. “Agle quarter ka abhi se kaise keh sakti huun? Abhi to is quarter ke result aaye hai” she replied. “Apne software mae dekh ke bata na!” he shouted. “Kitni baar samjahu aapko? Ye koi alladin ka chirag nahi hai. Sirf financial postings respective GL accounts se decrypt karke batata hai kee is baar revenue aur profit kitna aaya”. “Haan haan” he spat back “Zyada funda mat jhaad, agli baar bhi bas result aane se pehle bata dena kee company ke stock pe position long leni hai ya short? Agli tip ke main apne investors se 20% charge karunga!”.

“Agli baar kiska murder karna padega ye sab chupaane ke liye? She quipped back. Anger flashed in Rajeev’s eyes and he strut back to her.

 “Kya boli?“

“ Wahi jo aapne suna. Is baar program modify karke ulta run karne pe ek insaan ko notification gaya tha. Usko aapne ye sun nae pe maar daala. Ho sakta hai agli baar koi aur PM ho, usko notification jaaye kee hum encryption program run karke unka data hide nahi read kar rahe hai, taaki unke financial results ka pata chal jaaye hume. Tab kya usko bhi maar daaloge?

He came and slapped her. She didn’t waste a second in disbelief, she got up and went to her bedroom to cry. Maybe she was worse than me, I would have left Naresh’s for doing this to me. Or maybe she was even better than me; she had broken the code that she and I had together developed to hide the financial data. Not only she had broken the code but also found a way to collate all the GL accounts to consolidate the total financial data to find out how was the company doing before it could declare the results and trade in its stocks.

Only problem was that I had built in a code which notified her and me whenever any other user tried to change the program. But her master stroke was that she herself had modified the program and I am the only person to know it, or rather was the only person to know about it. So now I knew.

I only imagined the happening of events. She was in office finally cracking the code enthusiastically telling it to Rajeev who would have instantly thought about somehow running a scam through it. He calling the people to tip them of the results before they were announced. She receiving an email with me cc in it and telling it to Rajeev in panic and he deciding to kill me to forever keep his secret. It was a good plan. Only someone with the intelligence of her could have pulled this off. I was impressed more than angry.

I felt like walking up to Divya and patting her back, I walked up to her room expecting to find her crying in the pillow. But she wasn’t; she was talking into the phone steel faced and eyes burning like a hunter. She went on “Haan Malik Bhaai jaisa maine bola tha waise hee kaam karta hai, Prasanna nae isi baar usi se paisa kamaya hai. Proof chahiye to us chutiye ko dekh lo. Haan lekin mereko pehli baar ka paisa nahi chahiye”. She drew her breath in and sneered at the other room “Haan ek aadmi ka naam batati huun, wo kisiko kabhi nahi milna chahiye. Naam hai Rajeev…” She continue with the description, whereabouts and finished with “haan jaane ke baad koi use nahi puchega, khush hee honge uske biwi baache, ye mujhse likha lo”. With that she put away her steel face and spouted a few tears and walked out into the hall.

I have no words to describe what I felt like at that point of time, maybe there were no words because nobody has felt that feeling. Somebody had taught me that to know a word is to know a feeling, but maybe it wasn’t that, maybe to feel a feeling was to coin a word. Maybe it wasn’t that either, it wasn’t anything.

If this was a love story I would have been found true love in Naresh and we would have kissed our last kiss, if this would have been a family drama Kavita would have repented at my death and would be transformed knowing that she was wrong all along,  if this was a horror story I would have haunted Divya, if this was a poem Malik Bhai would have killed Rajeev in a car accident only. But this wasn’t any of them.

Sometimes a story is just a story, it’s not a fable, there is no learning, and there is no metaphor in it. There is no denouement, the climax never arrives and the protagonist never has an epiphany. Sometimes a story is just a sequence of events which happened and nothing more to it. Maybe it was just to make me realize that only after dying you realize what you life was. And the last thought which comes to my mind before I completely fade away knowing the bittersweet truth is “For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike”