Friday, April 27, 2007

haze and the gaze

Lying back on the second row of kairali theatre, gazing at the immaculately beautiful shots of "The Gaze" feeling the giddiness, the haze of alcohol and the full bladder, it was definitely a nice evening at the film fest last December.

I wanted to say "I love you " to two people. I wanted to say "Sorry, i am not as bad as you think" to somebody else. "I am just neutral, don't despise me for that". I was not too drunk but lazing in a very mellow mood.

They say the movie was a fusion of iranian and french styles of movie making. I loved the low light in which most of the scenes were taken, it was neat and a little strange. The characters were nice. But i failed to grasp all the nuances of the story.

Monday, April 23, 2007

I don't want to sleep alone

The first few sequences of the movie and the two pegs i downed was gone. Tsai Ming-liang was testing us to the max with his real time shots. One shot reminded me of the horrors of the climax of Wayward cloud, when Chua made Chyi give the comatose Lee an oiled hand job. Chyi and Chua work and live together and take care of comatose Lee. Its Kuala Lampur(KL) and the movie takes us through the poorest quarters there, but holy, the imagery in some of the scenes are too good. There is an other Lee who was beaten up by thugs and who will be saved by a bunch of Indians working in KL. If you watch carefully there is an abandoned mattress. The abandoned mattress as well as beaten up Lee gets new life thanks to the assiduous care of one of those Indian guys. The scene where all the guys carry the mattress from the street to the home is nice.

Chyi has the sweetest bedplace, its a tiny attic like thing, made of wood and she we can see all the other things happening in the house through the gaps in the wood. Absolutely loved it.
Another wonderful thing was the smoke that covered up the city at one time, Chyi and non comatose Lee making out with ridiculous gas masks made from plastic cups. In wayward cloud also there was one thing affecting the whole city, water scarcity.

I don't want to sleep alone, ya thats the name and the theme.

By the way DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE :), unless you are a Tsai fan. My poor ex-manager who came to the movie just on my insistence was nice enough not to beat me up after the movie.

Monday, April 16, 2007

sari

Shashi tharoor's article about saving sari got him a lot of critical retorts from blogoshpere. I found some parts of the article confusing but liked the part which says that todays younger generation is less willing to drape themselves in a sari as they associate it with an older era. I think while many women find it easy to criticize tharoor saying that he ignore the need for men to wear traditional garbs and find the reason for not wearing sari in the inconvenience factor alone, none will be ready to accept that part of the reason could be exactly what tharoor says. Its not just women, i and most of my friends have no experience in wearing a mundu outdoors. Its not just due to the convenience factor of a pant but also in part due to our eagerness to adopt fashion of the times, to not look out of place.
Lots of women say sari is inconvenient. Similar with us about mundu. One interesting point is how much does one want to see the opposite sex in these (controversial :)) traditional garments. How does a woman rate a man in pants versus the one in his mundu(for southies) and how much does a man rate a woman in sari versus one in churidar. I would like to make my side clear, sari is hot, body parts which are exposed by it doesn't make a woman look indiscreet. If many men are with me, i am sure sari wont die. If many women prefer men in traditional clothes then those wont die too. Or rather mustn't die, for i trust we will and we should try a bit to attract the opposite sex :).

Thursday, April 05, 2007

british sailors released

I felt that it was awfully sweet of iran to release the sailors as a gift to british people. Don't know whether diplomacy is behind it, but i would like to think that iran used it as an image building opportunity. Read the news of bbc. Whatever is behind this all, when i read about the incidents(from british press), i feel the warmth shown by the iranian president is heartening but the fact that british prime minister was not even ready to thank the Iranians once, looks like a stupid extension of his idiotic comments which blew this issue out of proportion.

I have heard that the women in Iran are very pretty. That definitely makes me love Iran :). Other than that i remember the movie Offside, which really showed the spirit of people there, specially women in the highly oppressive society. There are lots of things to hate about Iran, but looks like there will be always some things to love it.