Is it just me or do you also get distracted by the sub-titles that most movies shown on Star Movies, HBO etc. seem to have nowadays?
I mean, I was just flicking through one of the most intense scenes of The Dark Knight, a scene which had really moved me when I saw the movie in a theatre, and all I was trying to do was to somehow, just somehow, focus on the acting and expressions rather than just flicking to the sub-titles before they were delivered.
This practice means that I end up reading the dialogues sans any intonation, pause or intensity. Jokes lose their punchlines, sinister mobsters' threats become comical and heady romantic lines look corny and teenager-ish. And it's nearly impossible to prevent the eyes from just moving to the subtitles. They move with every frame and the eyes are just drawn to them.
I have mixed views about the sub-titles. I don't like them, at the same time I do because whatever one says, there is always some character with a strange voice and accent in every movie whose dialogues you just cannot understand. (By the way, I'm sure there is some sentence construction fault in the previous sentence. Please feel free to let me know how that sentence should've been constructed). And that's where such sub-titles help.
Anyway, I guess I'll just have to learn to live with it.
Saw 'Wanted' the Hindi movie last night. Must say I really enjoyed it. Especially some dialogues which had so much double meaning and sexual innuendo possibilities that I was rolling on the floor.
Also saw 'Stanley and Iris'. Very, very nice, gentle movie. A simple story told extremely well. Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda are just fantastic in the movie. And such poignant scenes. So little said, yet so much said with simple gestures and subtle expressions. Highly recommended.
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Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Monday, April 12, 2010
Monday, March 10, 2008
Weekend Diaries continued...
Well, its been a bit of time since I regaled all of you with tales of my adventurous weekends in Bangalore. To tell you the truth my weekends have not been very interesting for some 3 months now. I mean I enjoyed them but they wouldn’t make very interesting reading. Going by the high standards of entertainment I maintain on this blog a tennis game in the morning followed by sleeping all day long does not exactly match up as the most exciting day ever. And that’s what I’ve been doing consistently for the last three months.
However, this weekend was radically different and was in sharp contrast to the staid weekends of yore. There was no tennis as the guy I play with was visiting home. Thus began the debauchery filled weekend again.
Friday: The favorite day of the weekend began on a rather frustrating note (By start of course I mean after office). I was supposed to go to this pub called Purple Haze with a few of my colleagues but ended up getting lost. Yes, yes BEFORE I even hit the pub. It so happened that I missed the entrance to the pub and then had to use my amazing direction sense to come up with an alternate route to reach the place traversing through myriad one-way streets scattered around that part of the city. As is a well known fact my sense of direction is consistently wrong, without fail (In fact if Delhi was not a circle I would never have been able to reach any unknown destination there). It didn’t fail me on Friday either. I finally managed to reach the place after driving around for an hour – in a 3 kilometer radius.
Anyway, after that it was just super. It had been such a long long time since I had so much fun in a pub. It was good company and I had a rocking time – head banging to unknown songs, playing the air guitar, jumping around, tipping waiters and attendants, getting into small challenges, jumping some more, recognizing some songs and getting totally excited about them. Really amazing evening. It had been way too long since I had such an evening out.
Saturday was even cooler, if that was possible. Bangalore open, the Women’s Tennis Association event, was going on and Saturday had some very interesting matches lined up. These were semi-final level matches featuring Patty Schnyder and Yan Zi and Venus Williams and Serena Williams. AK, as usual, was enthusiastic about trying new things so we tried to get tickets for the matches but failure loomed ahead as no tickets were available online or at the Café Coffee Day outlets that the newspaper ads said would have them (The Coffee Day I went to to ask, the guy gave me a gentle smile you give to a child when you tell them that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and told me that no such thing was happening). But did these failures keep us down? Or did the indomitable spirit of adventure nestling in our heart seize the day and shouted out "Carpe Diem"?
Er…slightly melodramatic…but anyway AK drove us down to the stadium which was a decent distance away and we managed to get tickets for the evening.
We reached there by 7:30. A word or two about the stadium. Excellent. Just walking inside the stadium (Kingfisher Lawn Tennis Association stadium in Cubbon park) transported us to a new place. Brilliantly floodlit with excellent facilities and international looking courts and stands. Excellent display screens for scores and previous set highlights while the players rested. Everything was hassle free and well managed. Seriously, this Vijay Mallya is amazing. He puts his hands in all glamorous endeavors but executes them to perfection. Seriously we need entrepreneurs like him to highlight the importance of quality and flair.
We missed half of Schnyder’s match but it was really cool seeing these top players of the world. Patty is ranked 11 in the world right now, Serena 9, Venus 7 . But the game itself was not particularly fast paced. It was more gentle and forehands were going well over the net rather than just skimming the net. Patty was playing more with slice and top spin than with power. Her opponent Yan Zi was trying to put power in the game but it wasn’t enough. Patty had way more guile and execution ability and ended up winning in straight sets.
The next match was the big one. The Williams sisters facing off against each other. And man, they’re huge. Venus is 6’1” and Serena is 6’0” and looked way way bigger with tremendous reach than that.Both are extremely athletic though Venus is more lithe. Now this was a game with a totally different tempo altogether. Both of them had so much power and their strokes were burning up the court. Excellent game that went right down to the wire (6-3, 3-6, 6-6 (7-4)). Serena won the game purely because she was more composed on the important points. Venus seemed to get ruffled, though Serena also did her share of double faults and unforced errors.
All in all a wonderful way to spend a Saturday. Seeing world class athletes slugging it out in a sport you love.
Sunday was interesting as I met a couple of friends, discovered a great lunch place and ended up watching an inane movie (Bombay to Bangkok. Don’t ask, just please don’t ask) on a 42 inch LCD tv at a friends place. Very very cool TV. I can just imagine what it would feel like to watch some gripping match on that large screen!
All in all a very good weekend. These are the kind of weekends that pump you up and make the previous five days worth it :)
However, this weekend was radically different and was in sharp contrast to the staid weekends of yore. There was no tennis as the guy I play with was visiting home. Thus began the debauchery filled weekend again.
Friday: The favorite day of the weekend began on a rather frustrating note (By start of course I mean after office). I was supposed to go to this pub called Purple Haze with a few of my colleagues but ended up getting lost. Yes, yes BEFORE I even hit the pub. It so happened that I missed the entrance to the pub and then had to use my amazing direction sense to come up with an alternate route to reach the place traversing through myriad one-way streets scattered around that part of the city. As is a well known fact my sense of direction is consistently wrong, without fail (In fact if Delhi was not a circle I would never have been able to reach any unknown destination there). It didn’t fail me on Friday either. I finally managed to reach the place after driving around for an hour – in a 3 kilometer radius.
Anyway, after that it was just super. It had been such a long long time since I had so much fun in a pub. It was good company and I had a rocking time – head banging to unknown songs, playing the air guitar, jumping around, tipping waiters and attendants, getting into small challenges, jumping some more, recognizing some songs and getting totally excited about them. Really amazing evening. It had been way too long since I had such an evening out.
Saturday was even cooler, if that was possible. Bangalore open, the Women’s Tennis Association event, was going on and Saturday had some very interesting matches lined up. These were semi-final level matches featuring Patty Schnyder and Yan Zi and Venus Williams and Serena Williams. AK, as usual, was enthusiastic about trying new things so we tried to get tickets for the matches but failure loomed ahead as no tickets were available online or at the Café Coffee Day outlets that the newspaper ads said would have them (The Coffee Day I went to to ask, the guy gave me a gentle smile you give to a child when you tell them that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and told me that no such thing was happening). But did these failures keep us down? Or did the indomitable spirit of adventure nestling in our heart seize the day and shouted out "Carpe Diem"?
Er…slightly melodramatic…but anyway AK drove us down to the stadium which was a decent distance away and we managed to get tickets for the evening.
We reached there by 7:30. A word or two about the stadium. Excellent. Just walking inside the stadium (Kingfisher Lawn Tennis Association stadium in Cubbon park) transported us to a new place. Brilliantly floodlit with excellent facilities and international looking courts and stands. Excellent display screens for scores and previous set highlights while the players rested. Everything was hassle free and well managed. Seriously, this Vijay Mallya is amazing. He puts his hands in all glamorous endeavors but executes them to perfection. Seriously we need entrepreneurs like him to highlight the importance of quality and flair.
We missed half of Schnyder’s match but it was really cool seeing these top players of the world. Patty is ranked 11 in the world right now, Serena 9, Venus 7 . But the game itself was not particularly fast paced. It was more gentle and forehands were going well over the net rather than just skimming the net. Patty was playing more with slice and top spin than with power. Her opponent Yan Zi was trying to put power in the game but it wasn’t enough. Patty had way more guile and execution ability and ended up winning in straight sets.
The next match was the big one. The Williams sisters facing off against each other. And man, they’re huge. Venus is 6’1” and Serena is 6’0” and looked way way bigger with tremendous reach than that.Both are extremely athletic though Venus is more lithe. Now this was a game with a totally different tempo altogether. Both of them had so much power and their strokes were burning up the court. Excellent game that went right down to the wire (6-3, 3-6, 6-6 (7-4)). Serena won the game purely because she was more composed on the important points. Venus seemed to get ruffled, though Serena also did her share of double faults and unforced errors.
All in all a wonderful way to spend a Saturday. Seeing world class athletes slugging it out in a sport you love.
Sunday was interesting as I met a couple of friends, discovered a great lunch place and ended up watching an inane movie (Bombay to Bangkok. Don’t ask, just please don’t ask) on a 42 inch LCD tv at a friends place. Very very cool TV. I can just imagine what it would feel like to watch some gripping match on that large screen!
All in all a very good weekend. These are the kind of weekends that pump you up and make the previous five days worth it :)
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Fiction so pulp is ! awesome…
Ok people, I just saw Pulp Fiction the other day and have been completely blown away by the concept of non-sequential cinema (er..as you may have noticed from the title of this post [that’s ‘Pulp Fiction is so Awesome!’ for the slow people amongst you, though I’m sure most of you would’ve got it {yeah, right!}])!
OK, moving on..or back..or sideways, I’ve written about my experiments with downloading movies. Of course, even though the first attempt wasn’t all that successful (I downloaded a movie in Japanese with Swedish subtitles – ok, ok now shut up. I’ve had just about enough of people laughing their heads off on this. Yes, yes, you know I’m talking to YOU – you’ve had just about all the entertainment you could’ve derived from this episode, and that’s a hell of a lot – now just SHUT UP already…), I have persevered and have finally managed to get some great movies (in the right language) on my laptop.
So I started with Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock – Pretty nice movie – an interesting mix of adventure and romance. (As an aside, women with high cheekbones look sooo alluring in black and white – Ingrid Bergman in this movie, Madhubala etc.)
Then came the movie made out of the best book ever – To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck’s performance as that amazing hero Atticus Finch is just amazing. Just the right amount of reserve, steely grit and the sensitive side of a man who deals singlehandedly with two young curious, innocent kids; protecting them as much as he can from the gathering wave of hidden dark prejudices coming to the surface, while at the same time doing his duty to his conscience. Wow. I’ve said this before (too many times many would say J ) and I’ll say it again – if you haven’t read it, go read the book – NOW. Even the movie is a pretty true adaptation of the book (unlike most movies made out of books) and should suffice for those allergic to reading, though of course reading it is just amazing)
AND now we come to the movie that inspired this blog – Pulp Fiction (Next one to watch, I.e. downloaded already is ‘Thank you for Smoking’- its come recommended)
I just love the non-sequential story telling used by Quentin Tarantino in this movie. For the record I hadn’t watched any of his movies because going by the trailers of Kill Bill I thought that the movies would be dripping in gore and violence with shocking scenes created just for that – shock value. What a mistake!
AN amazingly stylized movie with amazing lines
Bruce Willis’,
”Zed’s dead baby, Zed’s dead”
“So..we’re cool?” (To Marcellus)
“You really want to pick that gun don’t you?”
Marsellus
“…this Mr. ‘spending the rest of his short life in agonising pain' here..."
And of course all the arguments between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson - brilliant.
Its such a fast paced movie where you gotta sit on the edge of your seat to stay on top of the ball. And then when in the end all the inexplicable things that came across at different places in the movie click together and you get a glimpse of the sequence of events - it gives a series of 'Aha' moments.
Like Travolta and Jackson wearing beach volleyball attire when they go to return the briefcase to Marsellus. Travolta getting shot by Bruce.
And the briefcase itself! Its a mystery thats still going on. All you see is a golden glow emanating from it, no idea about its content. (This kind of object which is just and just a plot device with no value of its own is called a MacGuffin [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin ])
And and I forgot to mention Winston Wolf - such an amazing character. A professional 'cleaner' for the mafia. When there's trouble that needs to be managed - the mafia turns to Wolf to get it all clear. He was in a tuxedo, driving a Porshe Acquira and talking about respect (Somehow I find it awesome that all mafia movies/books talk a lot about honour and respect)- He was the epitomy of cool...
All in all, there's so much to be said about this movie - it has its own fanclubs etc. - but i gotta rush to download the next movie - so i'll leave you here :)
Update: Saw half of 'Thank you for Smoking' - absolutely hilarious!
Update 2: Another interesting movie concept I heard of recently. A colleagues friend was involved in the making of this ( http://www.rewindthefilm.com/ )film. Its a film thats shot entirely in reverse (Story: Three men including a blind man crack a safe, and then mutual deceits start to get the money for themselves). Even the dialogues are in reverse. And still it somehow makes sense. So many experiments with the traditional art of story telling. Its all good, all good. Evolution and experimentation is definitely the path to growth.
OK, moving on..or back..or sideways, I’ve written about my experiments with downloading movies. Of course, even though the first attempt wasn’t all that successful (I downloaded a movie in Japanese with Swedish subtitles – ok, ok now shut up. I’ve had just about enough of people laughing their heads off on this. Yes, yes, you know I’m talking to YOU – you’ve had just about all the entertainment you could’ve derived from this episode, and that’s a hell of a lot – now just SHUT UP already…), I have persevered and have finally managed to get some great movies (in the right language) on my laptop.
So I started with Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock – Pretty nice movie – an interesting mix of adventure and romance. (As an aside, women with high cheekbones look sooo alluring in black and white – Ingrid Bergman in this movie, Madhubala etc.)
Then came the movie made out of the best book ever – To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck’s performance as that amazing hero Atticus Finch is just amazing. Just the right amount of reserve, steely grit and the sensitive side of a man who deals singlehandedly with two young curious, innocent kids; protecting them as much as he can from the gathering wave of hidden dark prejudices coming to the surface, while at the same time doing his duty to his conscience. Wow. I’ve said this before (too many times many would say J ) and I’ll say it again – if you haven’t read it, go read the book – NOW. Even the movie is a pretty true adaptation of the book (unlike most movies made out of books) and should suffice for those allergic to reading, though of course reading it is just amazing)
AND now we come to the movie that inspired this blog – Pulp Fiction (Next one to watch, I.e. downloaded already is ‘Thank you for Smoking’- its come recommended)
I just love the non-sequential story telling used by Quentin Tarantino in this movie. For the record I hadn’t watched any of his movies because going by the trailers of Kill Bill I thought that the movies would be dripping in gore and violence with shocking scenes created just for that – shock value. What a mistake!
AN amazingly stylized movie with amazing lines
Bruce Willis’,
”Zed’s dead baby, Zed’s dead”
“So..we’re cool?” (To Marcellus)
“You really want to pick that gun don’t you?”
Marsellus
“…this Mr. ‘spending the rest of his short life in agonising pain' here..."
And of course all the arguments between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson - brilliant.
Its such a fast paced movie where you gotta sit on the edge of your seat to stay on top of the ball. And then when in the end all the inexplicable things that came across at different places in the movie click together and you get a glimpse of the sequence of events - it gives a series of 'Aha' moments.
Like Travolta and Jackson wearing beach volleyball attire when they go to return the briefcase to Marsellus. Travolta getting shot by Bruce.
And the briefcase itself! Its a mystery thats still going on. All you see is a golden glow emanating from it, no idea about its content. (This kind of object which is just and just a plot device with no value of its own is called a MacGuffin [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin ])
And and I forgot to mention Winston Wolf - such an amazing character. A professional 'cleaner' for the mafia. When there's trouble that needs to be managed - the mafia turns to Wolf to get it all clear. He was in a tuxedo, driving a Porshe Acquira and talking about respect (Somehow I find it awesome that all mafia movies/books talk a lot about honour and respect)- He was the epitomy of cool...
All in all, there's so much to be said about this movie - it has its own fanclubs etc. - but i gotta rush to download the next movie - so i'll leave you here :)
Update: Saw half of 'Thank you for Smoking' - absolutely hilarious!
Update 2: Another interesting movie concept I heard of recently. A colleagues friend was involved in the making of this ( http://www.rewindthefilm.com/ )film. Its a film thats shot entirely in reverse (Story: Three men including a blind man crack a safe, and then mutual deceits start to get the money for themselves). Even the dialogues are in reverse. And still it somehow makes sense. So many experiments with the traditional art of story telling. Its all good, all good. Evolution and experimentation is definitely the path to growth.
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