Ginger drafts...

“Have you ever seen anything like this on celluloid?” I kept asking myself this question throughout the runtime of the movie. Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is an elegy to the art; it is something of the director’s mortal brilliance. The movie is the product of his brilliance gagging at him to the point of breakdown, and it appears that Gilliam has stripped all of the virtues of his previous movies and presented what was minimal. The art of minimal is what you get in Tideland. The movie is about a child who is fascinated with Alice from the wonderland, and so, paints her reality with wonderland brushes. She loses her father, meets a rather eccentric woman and her deranged brother. The woman with one blind eye disembowels the father’s body, stitches it up later to preserve the skeleton. Now this is an odd movie. There are shades of “fear and loathing” in this movie. Although the movie is frighteningly absurd, it is enchanting at times, for the viewer is expectant. You will stay expectant,

Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is a rare piece of cinematic excellence where wonder and power of imagination meet at the gates of fantasy. If you have seen “Brazil” and have since then, ensconced it up on your all time best charts, then you will acknowledge thismovie’s authoritative step into the wilderness. If Monty python’s Holy Grail is lying somewhere in your DVD collection, and instead of plugging in Scifi metadata on reviews of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, you have plugged in Terry Gilliam, then you would cherish this movie for a long time. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a movie that even the Gonzo journalists passed contentions, that the movie was virtually undoable, but somehow Gilliam and Depp made it possible. Then perhaps, Imaginarium is a frighteningly undoable project and has been, I believe given due credit for the accomplishment. Coming in 4 years after the vertiginous Tideland, Imaginarium sweeps the carpet under your floor, chair under your

Chapter 1 “Behind the pool, by the short valley between the thick bushes on either side is a green milestone” she paused, and with great tremulous voice continued “beneath the milestone, is a key hidden under the red slate” with those words, Nupur’s grandmother threw her head into the soft pillows “could you climb up?” yes grandma, Nupur obliged and patiently lent her weight to the sixty year old’s listless back. Grandma slept with her head down; nupur nibbled with her feet across the freckled blood rid white skin of her grandma, she observed “granny, your spine is curved near the shoulders”. Grandma was lost in her reveries. Cold breeze unfurled the drawn curtains and the yellow rose bush stalk was beating against the window sash; fog had lain its bare chest over the garden. At eight in the morning, one could only see eight feet beyond the nose. “Grandma, the key; tell me more” Nupur implored. She was nine years old, and had spent her summers with the granny for as long as she coul

There is an unbearable loftiness in the movies about movie making, novels or the art of writing itself. We are told a sort of highbrow frill, a play that espouses parallels to other writers or movie makers who might have trodden on this frighteningly monastic path. It is obscurantist, it is polemical and defensive. But not this one; ‘Wonder Boys’ is deceptively simple. A former writer is undergoing a period inimical to no writer; he can’t stop writing. It is not a writer’s block, Michael Douglas is under influence, and hence cannot make choices. Therefore the long winding detailed passages leading nowhere, Katie Holmes observes. She is a student of Douglas and a good one at that. She is enamoured by her teacher, his writings inspire her and she occasionally confronts him with mad passion. Robert Downey Jr., in his usual charm and grace flavours the indifferent voyage through a spinning and dizzying journey that usurps the viewer with its fleeting moments. Tobey Maguire, another stude

“The Ghost Writer” is an eloquent praise of the sublime. The power of evocation, Ploanski uses it to great acclaim. He alludes to the knots in the thread of the plot; hanging on to the knots, viewers are presented a local chasm in the plot. But what we don’t realize is, we may just as well have been fed the plot as different routes through which to reach the pinnacle of the mountain. Only the director holds the keys to the overhanging car, through which one can visualize for once the entire plot as it is created. Ghost writer McEwan is assigned the task of completing the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Pierce Brosnan. None of the characters are intriguing; they are pure, simple and almost possible. The writer finds himself mugged of his manuscript to begin with, later discovers that there is more to the memoirs than what he was made to believe at the beginning. The muddled history of wars and the prime minister’s involvement in it, the precarious upholstery on which the ghost

He was having those incessant bouts of sneeze again. Excusing himself from the conference hall, he stepped away into the corridor. He stood with his hands on the steel railing that had been cleansed with oil only recently. The gleaming evocative grandeur of the railing reflected the spasmodic image of his face. “ Kumar , are you alright?” His Project Manager Srinivas closing the conference door behind him, scuttled towards him in a hurry. The fitful sneeze had by now given up on Kumar . Thumbing his blackberry in one hand, he laid his other hand, the hand of comfort, on Kumar . Below them, the security guard was watching them both intently. They had prepared well for the client visit. The entourage from client’s office was sitting behind the closed door with the senior project manager walking them over the relationship. It was the third year of the relationship and also third consecutive client visit since the day it all began. Kumar was associated with the project since the beginni

The city was so dark, seething with sinister activity; it would have confounded an ordinary woman. But not her; within seven months of her arrival into the city, she had established a facility for lions to breed. Radha had eyes so dark that one could vanish into depths of abyss staring into her; she was a woman of outlandish hobbies. The hedgerows had vanished, spring time had never returned since the morning she blew the cover and announced to the world of her surreptitious experiments. But that drew the cover over the city, and it was never the same again. Covering the lion’s mane with her headdress, she broke into lollop around the place. She loved her pets, she moaned in pleasure as they groaned; ensconced firmly up on the back of her favourite male lion babbaq, she surveyed her surroundings. There was no light anymore, the sun had disappeared overhead, and they all blamed it on her. But she beamed with surprise at any allegations. Bemoaned owners of the castle, for having letting