Books, Books. Just finished Haunted. Re-reading Asimov’s Foundation. Finished The Kite Runner week before last. Half-way through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (for the nth time) and Malgudi Days.
How many of us feel, time and again, that books that were made into movies later, were much better in print than the celluloid version? LOTR is one that sorta does justice to the book’s fantasy world, but that apart, invariably, books portray brilliant imagination with a vividness that surprises me time and again.
The difference, as one can understand, is that in books, most of the story-building is left to the reader. The boundless imagination of a million minds embellishes each printed manuscript with its own world, its own aura of an existence. Whereas in a movie, visuals, sounds, and experiences are defined by us, by the director, who also happens to decide the pace of consumption of the story.
As humans, stories inherently hold us spell-bound. And here’s something I chanced upon in the Afterword section of Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted:
A book is as private and as consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives the reader every chance to walk away.
A book is about slow consumption, reflection and construction, of an edifice that exists brick by brick, only in your mind; that only you can visit, experience and enjoy. Won’t take more from the Afterword, and yea, this is one book definitely NOT for the weak-hearted. But I loved it all the same, for its creativity. For the way, it kept me hooked, in spite of being one of the grossest books I’ve read.
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What can I say that’s not already said about this movie? It’s a moving comic book, just like the other movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novels, Sin City. It is a visual treat beyond compare, each frame art-worked with extreme love and a panache for violence. There’s no story, no sir. So please don’t use the tight-upper-lipped “it didn’t do justice to the artistic expression of the medium of cinema, while attempting to explore an unnecessary gamut of bloodshed… yada yada…” Leave the criticism tightwrapped at the farther end of your colon.
This movie doesn’t need critics or fans. It needs begets worshippers. It sets out to be an entertaining two hour visual and aural spectacle, and that’s exactly what it is. The right rock mix at the right action-packed moment, the right camera angle that gets you into the skin of the soldier who is taking a spear pounding from a Spartan, the anger in the eyes of a king and the pride that makes a queen.
Definitely worth a watch at the cinemas. Rather, make that two visits to the screens, not one.
When a Brazilian movie running subtitles is rated IMDB Top 250 #17, it usually intrigues me. And when the movie finally came to Indian theatres 3 years after it was released world-wide, thanks to the ever-enthu buddy of mine, Vivek, we landed in a theatre so empty that it seemed to be a private screening for us.
We had no shit clue about what to expect from the movie, and that made all the more impressive. It is set in a slum-town near Rio, ironically named City of God. It was a place where it was a rare blessing to live beyond 20, if one lives past disease, poverty, plunderers and gang-wars. A place where kids do drugs, the police are gun-runners, and everyone shoots first, talks later. Where survival is an everyday challenge, and losing your kin is an everyday occurance.
It is in this setting that the hero Rocket discovers his love for photography. The film is about the delicate game one has to play in the City of God to just stay alive, and about a passion that pulls a boy out of a living hell and gives him some purpose in life.
This movie is no fairy-tale, nor does it promise a feel good ending. It just tells a story as plain as truth itself, in its brutal and shocking self.
Again, definitely worth a watch. And definitely worth reflecting upon.
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Just finished the book “Shantaram”. Although the ending didn’t live up to what preceded it, every page of the book was a delicious revelation, every paragraph had a dash of genius in its ideas. From the back cover:
” In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia’s most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay, he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. His debut novel, SHANTARAM, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay. The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, SHANTARAM is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.”
It makes for compulsive page turning, and there doesn’t exist a single dull moment in the entire 900 page volume. Some quotes worth re-reading the book for:
“You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.”
“A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call it a nightmare.”
“I?d only give you advice if I didn?t care what happens to you.”
“Suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end ? the end that the master holds in his hand.”
“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope, sometimes we cry with everything except tears. in the end that?s all that there is ? love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that?s all we have - to hold on tight until dawn.”
“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart
that only loneliness can help u find them again.
Some truths are so painful that only shame can help u live with them.
Some things are so sad that only our soul can do the crying for it.”“If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you just don’t get the joke.”
“Sometimes you’ve to surrender before you win.”
I am hooked for life. Happily :)
There are some movies which are beautiful because they are romantic, simple, natural, whatever. Ever heard of a movie that was beautiful because it was gory and too direct?
Thats Fight Club for you. A brilliant script (not at all for the weak hearted..) commensurated by brilliant performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton helped David Fincher create a movie that remains unparalleled in terms of technique, embedding the story in the psyche of the viewer and creating a thought chain that only great movies or experiences create.
IMDb Top 250: #32!
I give you some of the very memorable quotes from the movie:
Tyler Durden: [pointing at an emergency instruction manual on a plane] You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?
Narrator: So you can breath.
Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here. Emergency water landing - 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.
Narrator: That’s, um… That’s an interesting theory
Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Narrator: Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving friends.
Narrator: With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.
Marla Singer: A condom is the glass slipper for our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, and then you throw it away. The condom, I mean, not the stranger.
Narrator: What?
Go watch the movie… and be amazed at what creativity can do with 140 minutes of your attention.
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"Each one of us is nothing but a collection of memories. It is up to us to give those memories enough meaning that we don't feel a life wasted when we, or for that matter, others, look back at us."