mere funde

Category: Movies

  • Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi – A Review

    The first question that comes to your mind after watching the movie is – why the hell is Chitrangada Singh not acting in any more movies? Damn – she is right up on my list after Scarlett Johansson.

    Anyways, the movie is based on the Indian society and the revolution and Emergency in the 1970s. The film is centered around the lives of three DU students Vikram (Shiney Ahuja), Shiddharth (Kay Kay Menon) and Geeta (Chitrangada). I already have a very high opinion of Shiney and Kay Kay and to me they represent the best of Indian actors, ahead of the Khans and the Bacchans, well at least one Bacchan.

    The movie weaves through their lives, while in college and then outside it, and is interlaced with the political upheaval in India in the 70s with Emergency, and Communism just about finding it roots. Siddharth, son of a judge, is attracted to the extreme Communist ideology and swears by the Naxalite movement. Geeta is initially reluctant about the movement but joins in later and starts working in a village. Vikram uses his networking skills to move up the social ladder. He is the man who can get things done. Though Vikram is manipulative and a political figure, he remains good at the bottom of his heart, and his love for Geeta is unending. Siddharth, though committed to the revolution, loses focus as the movie progresses. Geeta, initially not so optimistic about the revolution, works whole heartedly once she starts working, and in the course of her faces every possible misfortune and even gets raped by the autocratic police. Siddharht too suffers a lot at the end of the movie and is mentally disabled in a police beating. However, it ends on an optimistic note with him and Geeta coming together at the end.

    The movie is very well directed and very well paced, and the actors give brilliant performances. In all, a must watch movie. I dont know how I missed the movie when it was released. The movie draws its name from a Mirza Ghalib ghazal quoted below:

    हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी की हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले
    बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले
    मुहब्बत में नही है फ़र्क जीने और मरने का
    उसी को देख कर जीते हैं जिस काफ़िर पर दम निकले

    Another couple of lines from Rahim, which I really like and believe in are used once in the movie.

    रहिमन धागा प्रीत का मत तोड़ो चटकाए
    टूटे सो फिर ना जुड़े, जुड़े गाँठ पड़ जाये

  • The Horror – 2

    Its been almost a week since I saw Apocalypse Now. But it keeps coming back to me. This one line in particular.

    Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight… razor… and surviving.

    The next line is in because I was watching a documentary on the word “Fuck” yesterday, with Tera Patrick in it (Hell Yeah), and all I could think of was this line from Brando. Am I going insane?

    Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes because it’s obscene!

  • City of God

    I have been watching a lot of movies with blood and gore lately. City of God is no exception. Directed by Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles (of The Constant Gardener fame).

    Based on the real life story of journalist Wilson Rodrigues, it is based in one of Brazil’s biggest ghettos, Cidade de Deus, and is a story of a young boy Rocket and Ze. Rocket is a honest boy while, Ze is a pshycopath who wants to become the City’s biggest gangster and loves bloodshed. The movie is narrated in reverse fashion and is directed impeccably. Though Wiki tells me that most of the cast were rookies and many from the City itself, it seems hard to believe given the awesome performances of most of the cast. The movie gripped my attention, despite the subtitles which were bad at the best and pathetic generally.

    The most disturbing scene was at the end when you see a group of kids, the Shorties, killing Ze and proclaiming themselves as the new bosses. Remind me of Blood Diamond and the children soldiers, and how they get sucked in to the entire thing without really knowing the consequence. Also, the scene where Steak dies and you see Knockout Ned remembering how he says:

    “Listen man, I smoke, I snort… I’ve been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I’ve cleaned windshields at stop lights. I’ve polished shoes, I’ve robbed, I’ve killed… I ain’t no kid, no way. I’m a real man.”

    Insane. A definite must watch for everyone, though you need to tolerate a lot of blood.

    PS: Alice Braga is so hot!!

  • May the force be with you!

    30 years have passed since the day the first Star Wars movie was released. Rediff asks you about your favourite scene. I am listing down mine.

    • Princess Leia in the gold bikini – Hell yeah!!
    • Dooku vs Yoda
    • Vader vs Skywalker
    • Darth Sidious (Chancellor Palpatine) talking about good and evil and the Sith in the “Revenge of the Sith”

  • The Horror – Its Awesome

    “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” – Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now.

    When I had watched The Deer Hunter I was convinced that it was the ultimate war movie ever made beating Saving Private Ryan. That movie was so real. Apocalypse Now, however, is surreal. You journey in the movie not just through a river, but a gamut of feelings, begininng from aversion to war which slowly but convincingly changes to hatred for war and the related insanity. It is the darkest movie I have ever watched. You know Colonel Kurtz is evil. You pity him. You love him. You want to forgive him. As it is said in the movie, he is a broken man. Yet he acts as if he is God. A genius. A flawed genius.

    The actors are outstanding. Martin Sheen as Captain Willard captures your imagination right from the word go. Robert Duvall is exceptional as Colonel Kilgore with his now immortal lines.

    You smell that? Do you smell that? …Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…

    But for me Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz is a tuor de force. He blows away all the previous performances, and from when he enters the movie, its only him, till the end. His monologues. The look in his eyes. “The horror.”

    Col. Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
    Cap. Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
    Col. Kurtz: It’s no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
    Cap. Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
    Col. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
    Cap. Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
    Col. Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? …Are you an assassin?
    Cap. Willard: I’m a soldier.
    Col. Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

    And the best lines of the movie according to me.

    I’ve seen the horrors, horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me – you have a right to do that – but you have no right to judge me.

    It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

    We’d left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t say. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms, and I remember, I…I…I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, ‘My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure! And then I realized they were stronger than me because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men — trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts who have families, who have children, who are filled with love – that they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill – without feeling, without passion, without judgment – without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

    For those of you who haven’t seen it, watch it. Rating 10/10.