Imagine a world with a trillion Rembrandts

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Rating 4.75/5.0
where 5.0 is my favorite Wes Anderson film

I could have been a great filmmaker. You would say - Yeah! We could all have been great filmmakers. And my response to that is - SHUT UP, WILL YA, THIS IS MY FUCKING REVIEW!

I scoff at films made today -- I think they are crap and I believe I could do better if I had the chance. I know the truth but I like to live in a make believe world -- that keeps me sane. Till now I have been quite successful at living with the delusion that I'm a filmmaker in exile...and to make it more authentic I have made it a point not to use my video camera even once in the last 3 years. 

There are very few filmmakers who can humble this vain Antonioni in me. Wes Anderson is one of them. When it comes to his films, I find it very hard to say - "Hey, I could have done that with a 1 year diploma from a good film school" I want to suffer from a remotely possible delusion and thinking that I can make a film like Wes is not even remotely possible. Why? Because Wes Anderson films are not films, they are a trillion paintings flipping, floating, flying about with beautiful music playing in the background. Every scene is a perfect balance of color, emotion and movement -- it's fragile, it's ethereal and it's impossible to predict -- every moment in the film stands proudly as a testament of what movies can do if you could think, hear and imagine like Wes Anderson. 

Watch Moonrise Kingdom. After you're done, spend a couple of hours staring at the ceiling thinking about the film -- it might lead you to a world that's better than the one we live in. 


Imdb link here

The deeper you go the weirder life gets

 

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Rating 5.00/5.00
where 5 is a an amazing Orson Welles film which I'm going to watch again, soon.


My first post of the year. January has been a cruel month - my grandpa is no more, I'm traveling more often than I would like to and I'm watching more hotel room TV than I ever did.

I was very close to my grandpa and he taught me all about cows and trees and snakes and water and elephants and how dry leaves go crunch. When I was a kid, he used to wake me up at 5 AM in the morning and take me along for his daily round up - tending to the cows, watering the plants - and all the time he would sing songs which he made, songs about the tree laden with fruits and the stray cat waiting for her chance to raid the kitchen. My grandpa was different things for different people but for me he was the one who taught me to look beyond and explore, to embrace curiosity and to love without prejudice. When I would fall from the guava tree - a bloodied knee and crying eyes, grandpa would put dettoled cotton on my wounds but he would never tell me not to climb that tree again; when I didn't do well in school and spent my time telling stories to a patient cow and writing poems in my little diary - he was actually proud of me - prouder than he was when I did start doing well from a report card perspective. I should have taken the hint then but its not too late even now. Thank you Nana - its cliched but you do live in all the lives you touched.

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a film which encourages one to climb that guava tree no matter how bloodied and scratched your knees are; no matter how many ants slid into your pants. Its the film which says a lot of things and says it with the humor and strangeness that appeals to people who are sick of films that try to drive a message through your bored balls. An absolute delight to watch!

Imdb link here. And did you notice the poster - that is Bill Murray in his undies smoking a joint. Priceless!

On a separate note, Dabangg is a fantastic film because it has a story and it has style! The best part of the film was the characterisation - for Salman Khan's lead character what suprised me was that they don't try to show the goodness hidden beneath a tough exterior - a stupid concept most hindi movies would fall for - he is what he is and he is unapologetic about it - fantastic!