Tagged: movies

What are movies for?


So we were having this discussion a few days back. It all started when we watched some shitty movie. Then from somewhere someone mentioned what a great movie “Dil Chahta Hai” was; and naturally, most of us happily agreed. I love that movie. Some attitude man!

Anyway, so one of our friends, the movie critique of the gang — Anish Karindikar — gave everyone a piece of his mind. According to him, DCH was simply the better shit among the trash that Bollywood was dishing out at that time. The guts! :-O :-D He barely escaped a GPL, but sparked a heated debate in its wake.

We were all simply apalled at the very fact that someone could even dislike DCH. Anish’s main argument was that DCH was simply a feel good, non realistic, entertainment movie, with no “value”. Big deal, we said. Movies are supposed to be for entertainment, aren’t they? Sure a lot of good movies carry some moral-of-the-story as well. But if a movie is “purely” entertainment, isn’t it worth being called a good movie?

From there we went on to things like: movies reflect a society’s values. If a movie is just entertainment and nothing else, what does it say about the society? Others said that nothing is “pure” entertainment, and everything has “some” value.

Yuva


It happens with me everytime I watch a movie like Yuva. It happened with The Legend of Bhagat Singh, it happened with Sarfarosh and so on.

Basically, whenever I see such movies, I have an intense desire to do something crazy (but right) like the protagonists in these movies. Put everything behind the nation kind of stuff. But then I’m also a really selfish guy. Everytime I have such thoughts, I end up thinking about my family, and how they need me, and how I need them.

But thats not the whole story obviously. I’m also slightly cowardish in the sense that I really don’t want to get involve in anything dirty or corrupt, or that which involves beating/bashing up or things more sinister than that. Sometimes I feel India should have a rule like “everyone couple should devote a child to the nation”. Now I know thats a really extremist view, and I myself would be shocked as hell should something remotely like this happen in practice.

But I still think about it. I mean, just consider what would happen — we would have an army of young men and women completely dedicated to the country with nothing to distract them whatsoever. No family, no better halves, no fear, no shame. Just one goal, just one focus — the prosperity of our motherland.

So, here I am, with my dillemma. I love India, I really do. And I really want to do something for my country. Something that people can remember me by. Something great. On the other hand, I don’t want to get into politics, or deal with gangsters and mafia and gudas and other forms of corruption. At the same time, I want to be there for my family and spend enough time with them as well.

Its not really clear to me how all of this can possibly be managed all at once. A good solution, I guess, lies in teaching. Strike at the roots, build the nation bottom up approach. And you can do research as well, maybe with the DORD or something. That would be nice. But then somehow I’ve always been avoiding teaching, I feel its not really my forte. Then there’s also the economic stigma attached with teaching.

Confusion, confusion! Well, I hope one day I can find a good solution to this problem. Even an approximate solution would do I guess :)

More movies


So last night we saw another Hitchcock classic — The Rope. Awesome movie, and really well shot. The entire movie takes place in an apartment, and it doesn’t get boring at any point. Hitchcock plays clever camera tricks to make it appear as if the entire movie was shot in a single cut.

Anish says that it was shot in 10 minute cuts at clever places (like zoom into a guys back and them zoom out in the next cut). Absolutely marvellous performances by everyone. And I guess the gentlement of those times really had a charm that I certainly lack.

Today afternoon was a major debugging battle with Kashi, which we finally cracked after wasting a lot of time. I really hate Perl!!! Then I happened to take a look at the web page for CSE168 (its a rendering class) and they had the results of the final class projects up on the web page. And I was like, what a time waste we systems people do man! Vision and Graphics people always have this edge — they always have such cool demos!

Tonight we watched Yuva. Really impressive. Directed by Maniratnam and a sparkling cast — Ajay Devgan, Abhishek Bachhan, Om Puri and Vivek Oberoi. Not to mention Rani Mukherjee, Isha Deol and Karina Kapoor. For the first time I really appreciated Abhishek Bachhan’s acting. Maniratnam has really brought out this guy’s talent, and I guess the role really suited him and he carried it out quite well. Ajay Devgan was fabulous as always. Though Karina’s and Vivek’s characters were quite unnecessary and might have been just as easily eliminated. Karina’s definitely. She looks like such a w___e in the movie!

Next movie to watch out for is Girlfriend. Whats happening to Indian cinema!

First monday of summers


Today was the first monday of the summers. Its a weird feeling. Its summer. You’re supposed to be doing things that you “like” doing during summers, right? Now you like your research stuff. But thats “work” right? So how does research go during summers? Kinda weird I guess

Anyways, it wasn’t so bad. The campus was awefully empty today since all the undergrads have just vanished.

I’ve been watching a movie a day since friday, lets see for how long I can keep that up. I saw “Hum Tum” on Friday night and really liked it. The movie started of awkwardly with the direction a bit jerky. But it picked up really well as it went along, and by the end it came out really nice. It was fresh and both Rani and Saif have done a good job.

Then on Saturday night we saw “The Shining”. A Stanley Kubrick classic, the acting by all cast, Jack Nickolson in particular was amazing. But I didn’t understand the complete plot. Especially that painting in the last shot was supposed to tie some loose ends I guess. But it just created more confusion for me :-D

Last night was “Reserver Dogs”, the original of Kaante by director Quarantin Tarantino. Interestingly, Tarantino himself starrs in the movie, albeit only a cameo appearence. Some scenes are really gory (remember Kill Bill Vol. 1?) but horribly realistic. If you really want to know what happens to a man when he gets shot, you should watch this movie. Again, superb acting by all of the cast.

Finally, tonight I saw “Chronicles of Riddick”. Just one word — “pathetic”. The weird thing is, I still enjoyed the movie. It doesn’t have a gripping story, nor hair raising action. But I think Vin Diesel and the Necromonger babe were really cool, and the effects were awesome. Apart from that, there’s really no USP for the movie. I don’t know why its grossing so much in its first week. And tomorrow, we plan to watch Yuva. What a spree!

Sun God, Shrek 2


Today was UCSD’s 22nd Sun God Festival. There had been a lot of hype building up around the event over the past few weeks, touting is as the *most* social event of UCSD! So I thought I won’t do much studying today, and check out Sun God instead (as if I would have accomplished much anyways!)

The pamphlets said something about a large number of day time activities and a grand musical finale in the evening. What it turned out to be was a huge crowd of drunk undergrads prowling all over campus doing all kinds of silly stuff (jumping on trampoulines, riding mini bikes, bouncy rides, rope walking and anything else you can think of).

So the day time activities were more or less a disappointment — I mean they were not bad, but they were not organized. If you wanted to have fun, you’d have to be drunk. I was also curious about the musical concert, coz I’ve never attended a concert at UCSD before. People were quite excited about the bands going to be performing. Of course, I hadn’t heard any of their names before coz I don’t have that much history here yet. Busta Rhymes and Goldfinger were among the prominent ones.

Sadly though, when we reached the grounds, the stage was set (HUGE), the first band was just starting to play… BUT, there were only like twenty UCSD students in all there!! I’m convinced that UCSD is a big geeky school now :-D

Anyways, so after that we decided to ditch the concert and go watch Shrek 2 instead. Well to be fair, on our way back we saw quite a crowd headed towards the concert, so I guess we just reached a bit too early and left even earlier! But Shrek 2 was AWESOME and more than made up for the day. It was funny, and it was quite short — I mean I was expecting that the story would build up now now now… and it just got over.

I don’t know if thats good or bad, but the movie was fun. The new characted, Puss in the boots, is a cat with an attitude, and the voice over by Antonio Banderas is really good. Definitely worth a watch, or even twice! :)