This photograph, if I remember correctly, is from the film The Exorcist, the original part.
I have seen many horror movies, but I find this facial profile scariest. They didn’t go overboard with the make up. She looks possessed. She hasn’t herself become the demon. There are a few other things that make her scary: first of all, you can relate to the story, and everything gradually happens. People in this movie look so real. So everything in it becomes real. There are no exploding faces, bleeding eyes, people gorging people and turning them into zombies. There is this dark room, the girl is tied to the bed, and everything, even the exorcism, happens in that room.
Another thing that gives you the creeps is that this face has an attitude: you can actually see the devil looking at you through the ravaged face. Among all the scary movies, this still remains my most favorite scary face.
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In a first of its kind Spout, an online community of film lovers, have collaborated with the makers of Four Eyed Monsters to make the entire movie available on YouTube. I was wondering when this would happen, I mean, not just Four Eyed Monsters, but different films from independent small film makers. People are already broadcasting episodes through YouTube and I think it is a great platform for upcoming talented artists. According to a recent survey more and more people in the age group of 20-30 or watching YouTube and they are watching less television. In India the main problem is the connectivity. We have the “broadband” connection here at our place but most of the YouTube videos stop to buffer every two seconds and it is really annoying. The best way to overcome this is to let the movie buffer for a couple of minutes (depends on the length) by clicking the pause button and then play it.
Technorati Tags: youtube, four eyed monsters
OK, first Paris Hilton getting jailed and now Oscar winning Keira Knightley playing Princess Diana; no, this is not turning into a gossip blog, it’s just that my feed reader is throwing these stories at me. Now that they mention it, Keira Knightley does look quite pretty and in fact she is prettier than Princess Diana. I’ve always thoughts Princess Diana’s beauty was over-rated.
Other links on Keira Knightley playing Princess Diana:
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Quite an enchanting movie, although Renée Zellweger in the role of Miss Potter is too cloying sometimes. Miss Potter, the movie, is based on the true story of the best-selling children’s author and illustrator, Beatrix Potter, renowned for creating “Peter Rabbit”.
Miss Potter is a woman of 32 when the movie begins and she is seeking publishers for her illustrated children’s book. Two brothers engaged in the publishing business, just to humor her and give some work to their younger brother, agree to publish her work. As her friends and companions Miss Potter prefers her imagined rabbits, ducks and pigs and left on her own, she talks to them, and they too start moving about and creating tiny mischiefs. She has rejected many high-profile suitors and her mother severely looks down upon her passion for creating drawings and writing children stories. Her father encourages her, praises her, but more the way a father encourages a small kid. It seems, it is shown, that nobody takes Miss Potter seriously in her household. Reminded me of my own struggling times when my family members used to think I just pass time in front of the computer.
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Well, I don’t know when these guys will tire of making zombie-biting movies. It is something like this: an outbreak takes place and people go on a biting frenzy. And then the people who are bitten turn into zombies and then they bite other non-zombie people and soon there is this chasing game where a group of 5-6 people are trying not to become zombies themselves by constantly running away from blood-thirsty zombie crowds. Lots of blood and gore happens and finally you realize that there is no escape. Complete waste of time, and money if you go to a theater. The same happens in 28 Weeks Later, but the only twist is, this time it doesn’t happen in an American suburb; the zombie thingy happens in Britain.
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I didn’t use to follow news much when Idi Amin unleashed his reign of terror in Uganda. He not only massacred his own people in fits of fear and violence, he also expelled all Asians from Uganda. It’s a pity he died a comfortable death in exile somewhere in Saudi Arabia. Alka rightly commented after watching the film The Last King of Scotland, that if you kill a few, or a dozen people, you get a life sentence or the death sentence, but kill a couple of hundred thousand people and you can comfortably spend your last days in exile; with an exception of our good old Saddam (who too became a martyr). He killed around 30,000 people belonging to the Acholi and Lango ethnic groups.
The Last King of Scotland is a story of a doctor, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a young man from Scotland who doesn’t want to work in his daddy’s comfy clinic in Scotland. He wants some challenging job and hence, he lands up in Uganda bang in the midst of a coup. Idi Amin has just overthrown the previous president named Obote and the countryside is ecstatic, as Idi promises development, progress and dignity to misery-ridden people of Uganda. Nicholas, young and enthusiastic, is awed by the zeal of Idi because he too wants to play an instrumental role in the progress of the society. A short chain of vicissitudes brings Idi and Nicholas closer and after initial hesitation, Nicholas becomes Idi Amin’s most trusted advisor, at Idi Amin’s insistence. From here begin the travails of the young doctor.
Idi Amin, as the entire world knows by now, turns out to be a total anti-thesis of what Nicholas had liked about him in the beginning. He is psychotic, possessive and ruthless and soon the doctor from Scotland realizes that deciding to work with this inhuman dictator was the biggest mistake of his life, and perhaps a fatal mistake. Even a small, extra blink in the eyes of the person standing in front of Idi could trigger deadly reactions. He openly got people massacred, and there were so many people killed that, as some witnesses claim, they had to throw the bodies to the crocodiles. He was also suspected of eating human flesh, but I think that’s a common practice in some African and South American tribes. Idi Amin eventually becomes so phobic that he starts disbelieving even Nicholas and Nicholas begins to dig his own grave by impregnating the dictator’s third wife.
Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for the role of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and he has surely deserved this claim. I’ve always liked him in almost every role I have seen him playing so far, but this was a tailor-made role for him. I have never seen the actor (James Andrew McAvoy) who plays Dr. Nicholas Garrigan before. When I searched for Dr. Nicholas Garrigan I found that he is a fictional character.
I saw the movie for Forest Whitaker but it was a pleasant surprise to find Gillian Anderson in it. All the X-Files fans love her and I’m not an exception. She looks more stunning now with a chiseled figure and blond but disheveled hair in the movie. Pity she has such a small role in the movie.
Technorati Tags: the last king of scotland, movie review, forest whitaker, gillian anderson, idi amin, uganda
The movie, not the book — we saw it yesterday while Vasu splashed in her inflatable swimming pool. By the time we were half-way with the movie, there was more water on the floor and less in the pool, but then this was the only way she would let us watch it.
My first reaction was quite knee-jerk (something like, I wouldn’t pay to see this movie) but as Alka and I talked about it for a while, I gradually felt the movie is nicely made. I think accept for that movie she made on the Hindu widows, I’ve seen all the other movies directed by Meera Nair and the only movie I didn’t find up to the mark was Kamasutra. But I’ll talk about Kamasutra some other day.
The Namesake begins with Ashok Ganguly (splendidly played by Irfan Khan) traveling in a train trying to read a book by Nikolai Gogol. There is a train accident and Ashok’s life is changed for ever. He goes to America after recovering and then comes back after two years to marry a good Bengali girl. That Bengali girl is Tabu (Ashima, in the movie). As most Indian writers living in America do, the story revolves around an Indian family’s travails in a foreign land. There is this underlying, perpetual struggle to retain the Indianness while assimilating the Americanness. Everything is subtle and understated. You gradually begin to notice changes, very small changes, in the way the characters walk around, do their hair, how they talk, what they wear and how they eat.
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The dust has finally settled over the event of the Abhishek-Aishwarya wedding and various thinkers and writers are giving the stocks of what went right and what went wrong. For instance, Shobha De rues over the fact that the journalists were manhandled at the wedding and she thinks the poor things didn’t deserve this ignominy. About the journalists she writes:
They are the ones who have contributed hugely to the creation of the highly profitable Amitabh Bachchan brand\myth. And clicked away when the going was good, or more importantly, even when it wasn’t. Ditto for the entire high profile parivaar involved in the wedding. It is largely thanks to our energetic, occasionally over-enthusiastic lensmen that all the Bachchans have received national\international coverage on a mega scale.
Then, about the icons she opines:
Icons are owned by the public. They are created by the public and belong to the public. In my book, they owe the public. A big one, at that. We, in India are sentimental and emotional about weddings (and funerals). We don’t understand the new fangled rules that govern celebrity events. We sincerely want to participate in the joys and sorrows of those we bestow such unconditional love on. Like Aishwarya and Abhishek.
Somehow I can never understand this “icons are owned by the public” mentality. I think nobody owns nobody and the icons too have their personal lives and they too have rights to privacy. I don’t think we make them the icons, they become icons by doing what they do. I mean, why isn’t Deepak Prashar an icon, or why couldn’t Aruna Irani be the dream girl instead of Hema Malini or why doesn’t Johny Lever enjoy the same adoration as Rhitik Roshan? Icons become icons because of their inherent qualities (or characteristics).
We are highly selfish when it comes to our icons. Just look at the way our cricketers were recently treated. Dhoni’s house was demolished. Kaif’s family had to flee the town. The same guys become gods when they score runs and take wickets. As a highly self-serving society, we only bow to the rising sun, otherwise, given a chance we even make fun of or disregard Mahatma Gandhi, the biggest icon one can think of.
Amitabh Bachchan is a super star because the way he has catered to the emotions of the masses. His acting is at par with any international star you can name. He is highly erudite and he carries himself about with great élan. There are actors in the film industry who are far better looking (for instance, Dharmendra) than Amitabh but still could never match his charisma and dedication. So he has earned his iconic status all by himself and he owes his success neither to the media nor to the press. No icon does.
I’m right now reading a critical essay by George Orwell, and somewhere in the passage he observes:
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants.
This brought to my mind the kinds of movies Madhur Bhandarkar makes. I think consciously or unconsciously he is always making movies for the middle-class. Anything else elicits either derision, or an observant sympathy.
For instance in Page 3 and Corporate he highlights the grotesque contrivances that go on in the upper class society and he uses the lower-class people to poke fun at the rich. In his recent movie, Traffic Signal he focuses on beggars, peddlers and petty thieves that live around a traffic signal. In another movie that I haven’t watched, he featured the dance bars.
All these themes arouse curiosity amongst the middle class audience. He takes advantage of the “them and us” factors. The middle class audience gets a voyeuristic pleasure watching the smut of the other classes. I wonder if he will ever be able to make a movie depicting the ugly aspects of the middle class and make a profit.
I heard this news a few days ago but only today I came across this link mentioning that the film based on Waris Shas has been entered for the race of the Oscars. Well, being nominated for the Oscars as such is no big deal but the scope of the award is so big that a film can draw lots of mileage from it. I love the poetry of Waris Shah. I haven’t seen the movie, but I will as soon as I get a chance.
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