Oh Yeah? Yeahhh.
- Mr. Mohra: So, I'm tendin' bar there at Ecklund and Swedlin's last Tuesday, and this little guy's drinkin' and he says, "So where can a guy find some action? I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake." And I says, "What kinda action?" and he says, "Woman action, what do I look like?" And I says, "Well, what do I look like, I don't arrange that kinda thing," and he says, "But I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake," and I says, "Well, this ain't that kinda place."
- Officer Olson: Uh-huh.
- Mr. Mohra: So he angrily says, "Oh I get it, so you think I'm some kinda crazy jerk for askin'," only he doesn't use the word "jerk."
- Olson: I understand.
- Mr. Mohra: And then he calls me a jerk, and says that the last guy who thought he was a jerk is dead now. So I don't say nothin' and he says, "What do ya think about that?" So I says, "Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him, then."
- Olson: [chuckles] Ya got that right.
- Mr. Mohra: And he says, "Yah, that guy's dead, and I don't mean of old age." And then he says, "Geez, I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake."
- Olson: White Bear Lake?
- Mr. Mohra: Well... Ecklund & Swedlin's, that's closer ta Moose Lake, so I made that assumption.
- Olson: Oh sure.
- Mr. Mohra: So, ya know, he's drinkin', so I don't think a whole great deal of it, but Mrs. Mohra heard about the homicides down here last week and she thought I should call it in, so... I called it in. End o' story.
- Olson: What'd this guy look like, anyway?
- Mr. Mohra: Oh, he was a little guy... Kinda funny lookin'.
- Olson: Uh-huh. In what way?
- Mr. Mohra: Oh, just in a general kinda way.
Source: imdb.com
Warm glow within, feels good inside
I really think I’m speaking only for myself, when I say:
All that anyone is un/consciously searching for in a relationship, in the eyes of a possible significant other, is just somebody to spend a few minutes of meaningful conversation with. There are only a finite number of things one can do together before starting to get tired of the whole thing. Sooner or later you’ve gotta make some conversation :)
Someday, when we’re dreaming
Deep in love, not a lot to say,
Then we will remember
Things we said today
= Things we said Today, The Beatles.
And keep having these bunches of hours rendered meaningful by each other’s presence, even when there are no words being said. When you’re so deep in love you stop thinking about it, automatically relegating the act of whispering little pledges of eternal love to the cliche chapters of the relationship.
I’ve had quite a few movie walks these last two sems. But none so beautiful as the one I took today after watching Before Sunrise. It’s always a wonderful thing, slowly ambling down the middle of the road, moving in and out of shafts of sodium vapour light, with nothing but crickets for a background score. It’s the best thing to do, to let the movie really sink in. Sort of allows one to revel in the post-movie fuzzy woozy feeling. I usually let the thought fragments float about, gently pulling each one out of its orbit, toying with it a little bit, and releasing it again.
A lot of strong, blurred, warm sepia feelings arise when I think about the movie. For sure, it is truly a Great Movie. One in which you can’t find a single thing out of place, no disruptions in the tempo or the mood, no mistakes. Great dialogues, a wonderful screenplay, and a couple of top-notch actors to pull it off. Great vignettes of conversation, a marvellous chemistry between the lead actors, and a thorough and honest exploration of the plot premise. An entirely satisfying watch.
It’s amazing to see how natural the interaction between Hawke and Delpy turns out to be. The calling-up-friends scene, with the fingerphones, is so well done! The poet on the river’s bank and the palmreader are two brilliant grafts in the story, so perfectly sync-ed with the development of the mood. The short Auden recitation, British accent and all, is so full of #WIN. The montage of all the locations of the individual scenes at the end, sunlight illuminating their features, and especially the deal-clicher delivered by Jesse at the beginning, convincing Celine to get off the train:
Alright, alright. Think of it like this: jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you’re married. Only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have, y’know. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you’ve met in your life and what might have happened if you’d picked up with one of them, right? Well, I’m one of those guys. That’s me y’know, so think of this as time travel, from then, to now, to find out what you’re missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you’re not missing out on anything. I’m just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you’re really happy.
What Celine tells him about God:
I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.
The poem, Delusion Angel, its theme resonating resplendently with the spirit of the movie:
Daydream delusion,
limousine eyelash,
oh, baby with your pretty face,
drop a tear in my wineglass,
look at those big eyes,
see what you mean to me,
sweet cakes and milkshakes,
I am a delusioned angel,
I am a fantasy parade,
I want you to know what I think,
dont want you to guess anymore,
you have no idea where I came from,
we have no idea where we’re going,
launched in life,
like branches in the river,
flowing downstream,
caught in the current,
I’ll carry you, you’ll carry me,
that’s how it could be,
don’t you know me?
don’t you know me by now?
What a great girl, Julia Delpy. What a bloody fucking good movie. You start off with a crazy-ass proposition, keep feeding it string, chart out the meandering course it’s taking, clip off the edges, smoothen ‘em a bit, fill it with light, with love, with sense, add a finality of time. I enjoyed all the mirth that was strewn about, all the joy. I don’t know why, but it seems to me more like a grandiose music composition, the work of a genius, slowly building up the action to a climax and then to a gentle resolution, making all the right moves, striking the right notes, watching the music resonate.
There I am, in the audience, adjusting my coat lapels and clapping hard. It isn’t quite apparent, but one can make out the goosebumps on my arm with some effort. Also, the hint of a tear in my right eye.
Source: imdb.com
Movies I watched in the last two months
Once Upon A Time in America
El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)
Donnie Darko
Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run)
The Machinist
Bitter Moon
The Graduate
The Bridges of Madison County
The Thomas Crown Affair
Cinema Paradiso
Withnail and I
Inception
Fargo
Eyes Wide Shut
P.S: Some of the images are VLC snapshots. Sometimes, Google Images just doesn’t quite cut it for me. There aren’t many images that totally capture the movie in a single frame, on the search results page.
A disjoint confessional
For me, watching a movie, whose class and level of perfection is previously known to me, is a religious ritual, to be performed with concentration and pious devotion. Now this here is a subject very close to my heart. This is the one cosmological constant of my universe. To explain, I reincarnate as the ex cathedra pontificator for a short while and sink deeper towards the end:
The auteur, the director of the movie, wants you to watch the movie in a certain way, paying attention to detail. (Aside: He actually wants his movie to be watched in a theatre, but we will adjusht; mimic the conditions and adapt to the situation.) He wants you to revel in the atmosphere of the movie, absorb the ideas and enjoy the camerawork, photography and acting. Please, O bored reader, pay homage to his vision, in the way you can. I do my bit by usually letting the credits roll, after the movie ends. I love to let the soundtrack bring a satisfying musical conclusion to the charged atmosphere, as I sit back and launch my “What. A. Movie. <garbled gibberish expressions of awe and reverence>” routine.
The ideal movie watching setup would be: Single room, at hostel, Winter. Two pillows and a warm blanket. Lights off. Something to nibble on, preferably a Bingo! triangles, or roasted peanuts, etc. But all this is common knowledge.
(a) Distractions that call for basic attention, like a door being knocked, hunger pangs, a train to be caught, fire, etc. are allowable. Attend to them as necessary. Traditional gand-mein-chullies are to be strictly ignored. People talking, and otherwise being disagreeable are to be dealt with ruthlessly.
(b) If you have to pause for any reason, do shift+left once or twice when you resume. A noticeable difference can be seen, between this approach and simply pressing play again.
(c) Reading about a movie beforehand on IMDB/Wiki is a strict No-no. If you’ve already known all there is to know about the movie, what the fuck is the point of watching it?
(d) If some portions are unclear from the first viewing, you have to watch the movie again, after reading about that part from wherever. This is compulsory.
-Entr’Acte-
This Holi I stayed back at college; didn’t go home. So I watched some movies.
I saw Spartacus, Kubrick’s 1960 masterpiece. There comes a scene in Spartacus, when Spartacus, having listened to a poet’s song, leads his wife to a shady bower, and sadly remarks that because all his life he was a slave, he knew nothing. Nothing at all, about the world and the finer aspects of life. “He wants to fight”, Spartacus says of the poet, “An animal can be taught to fight.” He goes on to say that he wanted to know, know why the wind blew, where the sun went every evening, etc. That touching scene lingers on in my mind. For two reasons: One, I inadvertently flashed back to the distant past, when there wasn’t any Internet, Google or Wikipedia. I marvelled at how people came by knowledge, disseminated it among themselves, and wrought a whole dynamics of passing down info to generations. How life was good back then, without the pains of social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and Myspace. The second reason is that I consider myself lucky to have received the gift of the thirst for knowledge, and thanks to the advanced tools of the present, information is obtained in a mere fraction of a second. Twitter, the Google machine, and DC++ have opened so many doors for me. Daily, I find new things to marvel about, to learn and know (e.g: TED videos, and epoch-defining movies). I have cultivated quite a few new interests after joining college, and am faced with an acute lack of time to indulge in them all. Verily, I am thankful.
I saw Diarios de Motocycleta (The Motorcycle Diaries), a movie depicting the events that led to the creation of the rebel guerrilla monolith named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Che authored the Diaries, which later got published, on which this movie is based). Besides the obvious good that came out of the movie (I finally learnt that the G in Guevara was silent) I saw how a meek asthmatic could rise to such a deserving cult figure and humble the world with the possession of such bigfatmegaballs in order to say, “Shoot, coward, for you kill only a man” to his executor as his last words. I marvelled; I sat transfixed at the thought of how a person of gentle nature could be so moved by an idea as to take up arms for it, and change the course of his entire life.
#sigh
I am a dreamer. All I do is sit and marvel at things. Hopefully one day I will actually do something, and make something of my life, make my time spent worthwhile.
I uddharikkufy from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
…
… for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
