Ginger drafts...

‘She’s Hysterical’, Mike Corleone continues ‘she’s hysterical’. Loosening his necktie, he walks away from his wife. ‘don’t ask me about my business’ he responds to her inquiry ‘is it true?’ (that you killed your sister’s husband). Lights his cigarette and bangs heavily with an incredible mental power about him on the table before her. She stands incredulous of the man she once knew, who was now a total stranger to her. ‘no’ don mike Corleone replies, slowly the office door closes on her and the ending credits remind you vainly that it was just a movie. Nobody, not now, not anytime in the future could resist the temptation of noticing the gradual unceremonious accreditation of the young Corleone into the don. Scathing aggression delivered by men of sublime power ever so pragmatically. ‘Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately’ Corleones’ family lawyer conferring with one of their clients, opines at the dinner table that ends abruptly. The next shot is that of a...

Well researched articles, tightly constructed, with pieces of fact based observations have always been received with eventless appreciation. Contributors of news, research articles, journals, etc double check each and every phrase; citation of references is done with utmost diligence. Most of the literary geniuses of 20th century were columnists. These men contributed to the radical form of thinking, an unconventional set, in the form of opinions and essays that were not subjected to the endless scrutiny as the news articles were. However, opinions jarred the common man more than the straight forward news. It was, I must presume, the opinions that have given an opportunity for writers and columnists to express something intangible whether portent or otherwise. The essays were critically examined for the writers’ points of view in general, far away from the ricocheting abuse of fact based observations that was home to serious journalism . This was until web 2.0 exposed the common man to...

Coen Brothers never ceased to surprise me. My first impression, a good five years ago, when I watched ‘Big Lebowski’ was – the movie is like a worn out door mat of lower middle class, too impoverished the owner is that he cannot buy a new one; too fanatically obsessed with cleanliness the wife is that she soaps every last woven cord of the mat until it can no longer be picked up by a hand without tearing it into a million pieces. Today, if there is one director(s) that I cross my fingers and wait impatiently like a third grade child sitting before the school play field in the evening awaiting his father to pick him up, that is coen brothers-joel and ethan coen. It was the second time that it hit me, Lebowski was one of the most adorable characters ever to be created on celluloid. Since then I have seen all of their movies and in the end I was thoroughly devastated, for I had seen all their movies and no movie is the same to watch , second time around. 'Now, there was nothing left. ...

If videodrome bothered you, you should stay away from his master piece, the magnum opus ‘naked lunch’. Adaptation of Anthony burgess novel of the same name , who could have had the nerve to depict a novel such as ‘naked munch’ into a movie? Cronenberg spares no one, no object. ‘Literary highness’, the female protagonist murmurs after snorting bug powder; orgiastic typing of the male protagonist on a type writer that transmogrifies into a cockroach seducing him to type more and more; yellowish thick green liquid oozing out of a giant cicada’s antennae on which the author feeds himself voraciously; to stimulate his writing, author’s judicious application of bug powder on a gigantic cockroach’s lips; and the list can go on. Suffice to say that cronenberg has firmly positioned himself at the helm of non-mainstream, the master of visceral art. Cronenberg’s visceral art captivated me when as an undergrad student I first saw ‘eXistenz’. Everybody was talking about ‘the matrix’, but for some r...

I kept mum and waited patiently for an agonising week with my nerves taut like strings on Hendrix’s electric guitar. Presently, I turned my AC down, switched off my mobile, closed the door shut- I have made absolutely sure that there are no distractions. So I am not thirsty or hungry, I have had something to eat. Under one last conscious breath, arms stretched like a warrior on the battle field with his stuttering machine gun, I am typing as if there is no end to it. I have seen ‘Paris, Texas’. Movie opens with the protagonist caught up in the middle of a desert, no shadows to take refuge in; no oasis to grow expectancy for. No creature in the horizon, vision foggy, tears forming circles in his eyes as he looks heavenwards. But something is amiss in his demeanour; he is not a novice in the no man’s land. He is on a journey to the end of nowhere, is he running forward hoping to meet someone who can give him the answers that he is looking for? Is he running away from someone who has the ...

I am glad that I have seen ‘A Prophet’. Since Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘there will be blood’, there hasn’t been a movie as gripping with its deliberate slow pace and as eventual at the climax. ‘Prophet is the god father of prison tales’ I kept telling myself throughout the movie, it was not until the movie was over that it struck me-prophet the shawshank redemption’s doppelganger. The movie is around 3 hrs long and the delicate schemes that the main protagonist weaves keep the viewers amazed throughout. None of the schemes appear planned, but none are isolated and each one of the little schemes adds to the final revelatory climax. The protagonist himself is an emotionless, guileless imperfect newbie. The scar on his right cheek, long drawn eyebrows make him look like an unfortunate man who has found himself in the midst of nerve shattering egoistic racial environment in the most horrendous of the places. But, his lack of agility, promptness and hesitation make him a tad too serious, trus...