Culchah Ketchup

No, I cannot make a kulchah if my life depended on it. Nor am I one of those die-hard ketchup fans who will eat it with anything (including jalebi, if you can believe it!). No, I'm just a humble wordsmith that thought the title was catchy. (To the uninitiated, it is a play on the words Culture Catchup... keep the "Ah!"s at low volume to avoid embarassment)

What this post is, then, is my sheepish return to writing movie/ book reviews and their ilk. Duties that have been neglected in light of certain humongous events.

So I give you the review of one book (Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveler's Wife"), several movies (Sergio Leone's big three spaghetti westerns: "A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More", and "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", "Music and Lyrics", and "300") and one documentary ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"). I've also come up with a list of books/ movies I'm looking forward to immensely in the stores and on the screens... this is going to be one heck of a heavy, heavy geek year...!

Book: The Time Traveler's Wife

I once heard Science Fiction described as literature that dares take an idea to its absolute extreme. It is my favorite definition for the genre. Of late, what is actually 'space opera' has replaced much of the popular perception of science fiction, when actually the some of the richest writing in the genre is anything but that. This book takes the baton from all the pop culture that precedes it, and hands it back to a realistic, extreme portrayal/ exploration of the human psyche and society, given one small projected scientific phenomenon.

Small I said? Well, this is the tale of a man who spontaneously time travels, to land up in some other place and time, buck naked. Through his (pardon the pun) chronic temporal condition, he manages to meet, fall in love with, and marry his wife. So this is primarily a love story, albeit a very weird one.

What I love the book for is three things: 1. The way it projects the reality of the man's condition... he can never get fillings in his teeth - he leaves the cement behind all the time! He has to be a very fast runner/ hardy fighter if he is to survive showing up naked in rough neighbourhoods...

2. The way the author has managed all the fallouts of the temporal shifting neatly. For instance, when they first meet, the guy is 40 something, and the girl is around 8 - he is from a future where he is already married to her! Although it could get really bewildering for the reader really fast, the author starts each chapter a short note (He is 40, She is 8, or He is 22 AND 38, or He is 45, She is 36) and has told the story mostly in a linear fashion. Sigh... difficult to explain this is. Just call it intricate, smart plotting.

3. How the moral implications of the most extreme conditions the characters are exposed to are explored. Questions range from - Is it immoral to sleep with your own self (from another time) who's come to visit? Is it homosexuality, or just masturbation? (This one really got my goose), Is it fair, or prudent to warn a person of impending doom? Is it even possible? How much room is there in a fated universe for one man's free will? What kind of mind can survive being capable of constantly reliving the most traumatic moment in its life, over and over? What sort of love would make one person wait, and wait, for another whose very existence may well be in doubt?

All in all, a mind blowing book... and if you haven't read it yet... get moving and buy it! I read it on a 16 hour sleepless flight from JFK to BOM, just so you know. It kept me so engaged, I forgot the in-flight video!

Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns

Finally watched these three movies (ordered off of Netflix) a few days before flying to India... and I can completely understand why Stephen King was inspired by these movies in his invention of Roland Deschain, last Gunslinger of Gilead.

To me, A Fistful of Dollars is a 4 star movie, For A Few Dollars More takes 5, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly actually takes only 3 (I thought it was overly long, and got too sappily moralistic about the Civil War at the end).

I guess the thing that got me about these movies was Clint Eastwood - his Man with No Name is almost casually portrayed, but comes across as mythical. I think I understand why these movies made his career! But the other thing that got me was the aesthetic. These movies take "gritty" and "stylish" to a whole other plane, without taking themselves too seriously.

Mind blowing stuff... but then I'm sure almost everyone's seen them already!

Movie: Music and Lyrics

This one is easy to review, as most rom-com movies with the shelf-life of a banana are. So in a nutshell, this is the near-perfect date movie, that you will not regret watching, but will not remember the name of about six months down the line when the next Hugh Grant movie comes out. :) That being said, this movie may leave an impression - a phrase here, a song there - that might remind you of it pleasantly some times, and make you smile a little.

Hugh Grant plays an aging pop-star, who played second fiddle in a one hit band from the 70s... The band reminded me of A-Ha and "Take on Me" for some reason... Or if the band were "Take That" this guy would be the Gary Barlow (but not quite the Robbie Williams) of the lot.

At the fag end of his career, he gets a chance to write a song for a rising pop diva (modelled on Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera) known more for her gyrations and mysticism than her sugary music. But given that he hasn't written a song in decades, and that he cannot work with any lyricist other than the guy that played the Lennon to his McCartney (enough band references, methinks) he is in a pickle.

Enter a flaky wannabe-Phoebe-Buffay-but-cannot-quite-manage-it Drew Barrymore, a girl that does odd jobs and is a closet writer/ lyricist whose life got torn apart when an insensitive teacher/ boyfriend wrote a book on her sad life that became a bestseller and is being made into a movie.

Oh wait... I think I wrote about half the plot down already... the rest is your usual cuteness, and serendipity and so on, and (predictably) after the usual faux-pas, and foolery and pseudo-emotionalism, the guy gets the girl (GASP! I gave away the ending!). Complete candy-floss.

Like I said, this one won't win any Oscars, but then it wont win any Razzies either, and is a must watch if you're on a date (as I was). Ahem. Moving on...

Documentary: Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room

I've been on something of a documentary kick lately. Watched some award winning docs - "The War Room" (about the Clinton campaign, featuring George Stephanapolous, who inspired the character of Sam Seaborn on the West Wing), Super-Size Me (the wonderful anti-McD flick), "Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price" and so on. In fact my next Netflix batch is all documentaries ("An Inconvenient Truth", "The Matrix: Revisited", and "This Film is Not Yet Rated"). But easily the one that has impacted me the most as I watched it so far was this one.

A tale of caution, this story chronicles the rise and fall of Enron, the energy giant that was all about ideas (whose marketing campaign claimed they constantly questioned the "Why?" behind any concept/ product/ system)... I had heard a lot about Enron of course, most recently, when Kenneth Lay died. I had wondered why everyone seemed to be demonizing the managers (Kenneth Lay, and the former CEO Jeffrey Skilling among others. I knew the downfall of Arthur Andersen was tied in to Enron. And of course, as an Indian from the infrastructurally hyper-stretched, load-shed state of Maharashtra, I knew about Dabhol.

But this documentary still took me by surprise. Personally, I came out of it vaguely disturbed... because the mistakes that were made at Enron were voluntary. They were fed by an urge to make 'artificial money' or 'hypothetical money' as I call it. While the managers unerringly kept their eye on making the stock price go higher, they gradually gave in (forgive a geek's idiom) to the dark side.

Small white lies and slightly grey practices eventually turned to huge larcenies and before they knew it, the company was running entirely on hot air. The collapse, when it finally came, was nearly Shakespearian in how it unfolded.

But the dry facts weren't what disturbed me. What disturbed me was the fact that I could actually understand the regression of morals that unfolded. Much like how one feels when one empathizes with Peter Keating in a reading of The Fountainhead, I empathized with Lay and Skilling on some points. And that was a truly numbing experience!

This documentary caused a resonance in me. It made me ask questions of myself. It made me wonder how one defines personal competency, or the worthiness of a product, service, or commodity that one is selling. It made me wonder if the whole world is in reality a con game in the truest sense of the word, where a hollow confidence is all that keeps us from a feeling/ reality of worthlessness. It made me evaluate the validity and longevity of my plans, my core competence and my ideas of productivity... I cannot say all those thoughts and evaluations led anywhere personally, but it is an ongoing and worthwhile exercise, as so many others are!

In a nutshell, my somewhat Freudian allergic reaction aside, this is a must watch.

300

Frank Miller never ceases to amaze me. Much like Neil Gaiman, this guy's imagination, his choice of subject matter, and his storytelling just fill me with awe. And so we arrive at what is easily the best movie I have seen in 2007, the tale of a few men that defied an Empire.

This is the tale of the battle of Thermopylae, of how 300 Spartan warriors stood against an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) in a small mountain pass. Their initial victories, and their ultimately heroic defeat would inspire generations and immortalize their name in history. What set this apart for me from the overly cliched and oft-repeated tales of martyrs is that their martyrdom is depicted as defiant and well, macho, to the very end. These were Spartans after all!

As cinema, this movie sets new standards in camera work, graphics and art direction. The mood setting CGI backdrops, the costumes, the setpieces and the action sequences... are absolutely poetic. As a movie adaptation of the graphic novel (which I have glanced through) it is superbly crafted. It remains faithful to the mythological/ fantastical allusions and elements that were part of the book. As an experience, much like Sin City, this movie is a sensory overload.

Although the thing you will notice most about the movie is the breath-taking action, (and please stifle those queasy stomachs - the gore and the nudity is controlled, and well justified, I thought), what you will take away from this flick is actually its nuance and attention to detail. Every word is precious, and belongs in the movie. And in a movie as short as this, with as epic a story to tell, not one moment, not one shot is out of place or rambling.

A truly epic feast for anyone who loved, say, The Return of the King, or even our home grown Omkara, this movie is the one to beat in 2007. And speaking of 2007,

Looking Ahead to Summer!

For some reason this year is completely wrapped in the number 7. And no, I don't mean my personal life alone. Two HUGE literary events and several movie events are coming up, that I have been waiting so long for...

The first, which you would all have heard of is of course the release of Book 7 in the Harry Potter series from J K Rowling. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" comes out (as everyone and his uncle knows) in July. I wont even bother speculating about it on this here blog. Suffice it to say that I will be in line, and reading breathlessly on the day of release.

The second, which almost no one in the readership of this blog would've heard of or perhaps be interested in, is the release of another book 7. "Reaper's Gale", the seventh part of Steven Erikson's mega-epic "Tales from the Malazan Book fo the Fallen", easily (and without exception) the best of fantasy literature out there right now. I'm actually salivating more for this one than for Harry Potter!

Coming then to movie events...

March 23 - COWABUNGA baby! So call me juvenile, but aren't you excited about the release of an animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? Huh? Whazzat? *dodges insult and sulks in a corner*

April 27 sees the release of "Pathfinder" - a movie starring Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR) as a Viking child raised by Red Indians in North America who is resisting a returning Norse invasion for his foster tribe. Interesting plot, gritty trailer.

May 4 will see the release of "Spider-man III", which I am totally hyped about by now, having devoured the various trailers, posters and so on that are meted out by Sony's marketing juggernaut.

May 18 brings with it "Shrek The Third". I'm guffawing already! Maybe.

May 25 sees the release of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"... and ooooh... just thinking of the end of the second movie in the series, "PoTC: Dead Man's Chest" gives me goose pimples. Cannot wait to see it.

June 8 brings out the popcorn with "Ocean's 13". The Ocean's movies bring a huge grin to my face... in spite of the disappointment that was Ocean's 12. Cannot wait to see Al Pacino, George Clooney, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon in the same frame!

June 22 will see the release of "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer". While the first F4 movie failed to really impress me, the Silver Surfer is a character I have come to truly love in these years of following Marvel on and off... and from the initial teaser at least, the visualization seems spot on. Will Galactus be in the movie as a bonus, me wonders...?

Come July 4... I'm in geek heaven. Jerry Bruckheimer releases The Transformers... Optimus Prime baby, yeah!

July 13 sees the near-simul-release with the book of the fifth Harry Potter movie. This is easily the worst book of the lot (and hopefully will stay that way even after book 7 releases) so I'm happy its getting made, but not really.

July 27 sees the release of "Stardust", the Neil Gaiman book I simply adore. Hopefully this will be a good adaptation!

And the year is rounded out by the release of "The Golden Compass" in December, bringing the beautiful His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman to the big screen!

To round it out, there are the honorable (?) mentions... Bruce Willis in "Die Hard 4" (I refuse to call it "Live Free or Die Hard", as I refuse to lose faith in it), "Beowulf" releases in November, starring Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, "The Bourne Ultimatum" in August, and "The Simpson's Movie"...

Whatta year, Whatta year, Whatta year...

Peace... Out!

PS: Like a major loo session that resolves much constipation, you may have noticed that this was a horrendously long post :D

PPS: Note to self - buy Isabgol!