Rhapsody in August

The rhapsody started with good intentions, but somewhere near the crescendo it lost me. I took it because it was directed by Akira Kurasowa, after Darsu Uzala I had realized Kurosawa was not that artsy as I had thought. But this one shattered all my expectations, not because it was too artsy, but because it lacked the quality of a master's touch.

The story is about an elderly woman, grandma to four youngsters living in the hills behind Nagasaki, still in the shadow of that dreadful August day in 1945. The story is fine, but the way the children narrate it to the viewers under the pretext of educating youner children, their frequent excursions to the city to relive the past - all seemed pretentious. As if they were laboring to make the viewers understand thru' some kind teacher - student technique. Richard Gere has a small role in the movie as the Japanese-American nephew of the old woman.

All in all, it seemed to me like a slow moving film, with special effects like thunderstorms produced by pouring milk in a glass of water and shooting it close-up, I am wondering where was Kurasowa?

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The Princess Bride

This is one wacky bed time story! Enjoyed every bit of it. It also stars my favorite kid of the TV land - Kevin Arnold a.k.a Fred Savage of The Wonder Years. The movie is built on a traditional framework of a grandfather reading a story for his sick bed-ridden grandchild(Savage), but don't that fool you. It is nothing but traditional!

The character are wacky and endearing, so are the witty dialogues. From the start it has the airs of an out-of-the-box fairy tale, which it lives upto through out the way. Robin Wright Penn is the Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner, it is a good entertainer for children and adults alike.

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Love and Death in Long Island

It had Jason Priestley on the cover - thats the reason I took this movie. I thought it'd be fun to see Priestley doing a serious role, other than the teeny bopper stuff of his I had been familiar with. I was a regular watcher of Beverly Hills 90210, the original series when it started airing in the early nineties and Brandon Walsh played by Jason Priestley was one of the goody goody chocolate box heroes who appealed to the age I was at the time.

Coming back to Long Island, it didn't doesn't ring up any high scores in my register. But its a different movie all the same - one could say its a bit quirky, even. It also stars the British actor John Hurt who plays an author in present day England who has just started discovering modern day contraptions like the Television and the Microwave and on the way he also discovers Ronnie Bostock(played by Priestley) and this leads him to Long Island, NY where Bostock's home is. I can warn you it is a slow movie and movie is mainly Hurt's rather than Priestley's.

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Whale Rider

An incredibly beautiful movie. Keisha Castle Hughes has presented a talent that is way beyond her years, if she was an American she'd have converted her Oscar nomination into an Oscar.

The film is set in the Maori heartland, ie NewZealand. Pai(played by Keisha) is a Maori girl who is the last descendent of a long line of Maori chieftains, but alas! she's a girl, which means she broke the male chain of chieftains - thus her birth was her unluck and her people's, so believed her grandfather. This heart rendering story follows Pai's efforts to prove that even though a girl she's fit to lead her people if a need arises. But her grandfather would have none of it. Though he inhabits a space-time of present day NewZealand, he firmly believes women are not supposed to be leaders.For the rest, watch the movie.

The photography is par excellent, so is the music and so are all the actors - a brilliant combination directed by Niki Caro. This film should be made a must-watch in all the countries which practise female infanticide, enlighten yourselves people, times, they are a'changin'..

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Chaos

My guess is all the women will love this movie, becuase in a way it represents them, their emotions and their struggles with the world in general and men in particular. Brilliant acting from the two leading women in the movie - Catherine Frot and Rachida Brakhni has added to its quality.

The photogrpahy has a home movie awkwardness, the kind you and me would do with our Sony handycams, I don't know how they have achieved it.Written and directed by a woman, Coline Serreau this is a must-watch movie for all the females of the species.

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The Deep End

Tilda Swinton has done good acting in the main role of the movie, The Deep End, as a mother who tries to cover up what she thinks is a murder comitted by her son. There were some parts of the story which I found questionable but all in all it was an average thriller with some very good sea blue photography. The actor Goran Visjnic who plays is a major role in the film, is a Croatian army-vet in real life was a quite a discovery for me, People Magazine had voted him the sexiest import in 1999. Maybe you can see it for Tilda, Goran and the photography.

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Pirates of the Caribbean

The Curse of the Black Pearl is an entertainer par excellence. So is Johnny Depp. I was blown away by his performance in this film, which also stars Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. The story is set in the times when the sea was still the final frontier(yeah Star Trek was yet in the future)and anybody with a dash of adventure in their veins made sure that they dashed to the sea and atleast spent a season or two exploring the far reaches of the oceanic horizon. I am not going to disclose the story, but let me just say it is an out and out entertainer and will definitely live upto your money's worth. Go Pirates!

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The Day After Tomorrow

Saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday, a week after its release. To me it seemed like Roland Emmerich had some messages weighing down his chest that he had to release to humanity as soon as possible and being a film maker he did what he always did - he made a film. The story is so made up, with a real loose plot, without any coherence or valid explanations, but the special effects are fantastic. The kind fifty years from now, some teenager watching the same movie would exclaim in appreciation, "Man, thats some special effects for a movie that old!"

The Day After Tomorrow,is where finally film makers have caught up with the environmentalists and have overtaken them sans effort. There are lavish CGI powered scenes like New York in a big freeze with a scene stealer of an accelerated super freeze of Empire States Building with windows popping out, snow blizzards in New Delhi and LA ripped open by tornadoes starting of course with the ripping off of the Hollywood sign on the hills.

Environmental activists who worked with Day After Tomorrow said that the exposure and media coverage they got while shooting the film was many times more than the what they received from decades of activism! Experts at Lawrence-Berkeley lab in CA warn that although the climatic changes in the movie take place at a fast-forward pace which in real time might take decades, the cause(the changes in the Gulf Stream) and the effects might be the same but not on such a compressed scale of time as depicted in the movie. In other interesting news, related to the movie, on April 1, 2004 NASA issued a memo saying, "No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with ... " the film, “The Day After Tomorrow.” (which they later retracted).

A global climatic change in a compressed time scale of a few days does give tremendous freedom for CGI and special effect artists, but if it succeeds in making the Americans with behemoth SUVs who drive 6liter-V8 engines in the urban jungles of San Francisco or New York (why do u need an SUV to drive in a city, to make up for you small u-know-what?), to take a second look on their choice of personal transportation, that’s the best that Hollywood can do for the environmental cause.

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The Piano

Mind blowing photography! It is one of the best aspects of the film. Set in NewZealand, it is a story of a mute woman, who is an excellent piano player, sent to NewZealand by an arranged marriage. She takes the piano with her but is forced to leave it on the beach she landed as it was too heavy to carry to her new husband's home, deep in the forest.

The film thrives on the bond between the woman and her piano and how far she'd go to have it by her side. It is also an interesting portrayal of new European settlers in NewZealand and their relationships with the native Maoris. I am not one who is drawn much towards intense emotional drama involving two or three people, so if you like that kind of story this one is definitely for you.

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Bitter Sugar

It is the story two young people, Gustavo and Yolanda, bursting with dreams in the communist Cuba. Gustavo is an idealist, who believes in the revolution, in the good that it can bring, whereas Yolanda is suppressed by the suffocating atmosphere around her brought about by the system. And then, they fall in love.

The movie by Leon Ichaso is shot entirely in black and white maybe to accentuate the funlessness in Cuban life. But I wish they had shot it in color, it'd have been more vivid(maybe thats exaclty what the director didn't want) and more informative. It gives a real and glaring picture of hopes and dreams being destroyed in the contemporary Cuba and how every Cuban aspires at least at some point in life to be in that dangerous raft heading towards Miami. Beautiful and thought provoking movie.

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Auberge espagnole, L' (The Spanish Apartment)

Barcelona, one of the cultural capitals of European new wave is the location for this MTV-ish movie. A Parisian guy spends a year in Barcelona on a student exchange programs where he shares an apartment with students from different parts of Europe. If you have shared an apartment and lives of your friends as a student or in your early adult year this is one movie you can easily empathize with. It is said that the applications for admisssions for EC's Erasmus (that is the name of the exchange program thru' which the protagonist arrives in Barcelona) program doubled after the release of this movie!

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Chocolat

It has all the airs of a best selling novel made into a film - in its style of narration, in the particular type of story involved and in the development of characters. Juliette Binoche plays a woman who opens a choclatarie in a remote French village with her small daughter, Anouk. The villagers first treat her as an unwanted guest who had invaded into their quiet peaceful lives with a mysterious and devious sweetness that goes by the name of chocolate.

The film follows Binoche's character thru' her encounters with villagers - some pleasant and some not so pleasant, her rebellions against the rigid village code and her meeting with a mysterious stranger - Johnny Depp. Its a modern day fairy tale directed by Lasse Halstrom which talks about things French and thus enchanting to the American audience.

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Rabbit-Proof Fence

This time, for a change, the movie is from Down Under. It is a look at the often disregarded piece of Australian history, that of the role of aborigines, how their lives changed in the process to change the bush country of Australia into a civilized world.

From 1917 to 1970, half-caste aborigine children(one of their parents will be an aborigine and the other usually white), were systematically removed from their aboriginal homes and placed under government custody. This was supposed to convert them into civilized human beings who'll speak English and will end up as maids and bell-boys for the ruling class(read glorified slaves). The story follows the escape of three little girls, forcefully taken away from their mothers and placed in a government camp.

The girls make their escape from the government camp on a rainy night and the story follows their trail 1500 miles across the bush country to their homes and mothers. Its a true story, written by Doris Pilkington, who is the daughter of one of three girls(Molly Craig) who makes this historic and unbelievable flight to freedom. Directed by Philip Noyce, this movie is a tribute to the struggle of, what is termed as the Stolen Generations of Australia.

(p.s: if you like this movie check out movies in a similar vein, like Skins and Smoke Signals about native Americans made by acclaimed director - Chris Eyre)

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Boys

A.R.Rahman is the best thing that happened to Indian movies in last 20-30 years or so. Oh God, what was it like in those days without the maestro, Rahman, can't believe I lived through them! And Tamil movie industry, is the massive juggernaut that rolls through the ancient relics which dictates the like of the rest of Indian movie industry and clears a path for things new, contemporary and exciting. Hats off to them.

Boys, is the latest offering from Tamil movie industry which takes on contemporary issues like dating, MTV, the youth culture and doesn't try to gloss it over with an overdose of 'Indian cultural values'. Ofcourse, the selling point of Boys is its music, composed by A.R.Rahman. I liked all the songs and they are very contextual, unlike most Hindi movies which takes off on a song and dance routine which usually will have no connection with main story line. Man, I am totally sold out on Boys, go watch and rate it yourself.

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Finding Nemo

Disappointed. After Shrek and Monsters Inc. the other famous animated movies I had great expectations for Nemo, add to the fact that our library never seemed to have a copy of Nemo it was always in circulation. The dialogs are very contemporary American, which makes me feel whether those viewers outside US be able to get the gist of the ideas implied. Its seems to be a family movie, intended to make children take the right route to adulthood.

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Anger Management 

Anger Management, it got on my nerves as much Jack Nicholson was getting on the nerves of Adam Sandler in the film. Sandler came off as a perfectly normal guy who was being sent off to an a 30 day anger management session with a wacho shrink, played by Nicholson. Ok, in the end we find out the whole thing was a set up, but the reason of this set-up was that Adam Sandler was not normal, he was edgy. For me he seemed perfectly normal right from the start who had to undergo this horrible experience to correct himself?!?!!?

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Spring Forward 

Its two men talking set inside a visual poem. The movie starts in Spring in Connecticut, when Paul(Liev Schrieber)comes to work at the local park system. His partner is Murph(Ned Beatty), a wizened old man. The movie goes forward thru' season along the conversations of these two men as Paul, an ex-convict tries to fall in with the system and Murph. The camera has captured the bounty of seasons in the fullest degree, there are lots of right-on philosophical dialogs. It was a slow moving film, I felt like I should take it like a vitamin pill 5-10 minutes daily, small snippets to drive life the right way.

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The Navigators 

It was Ken Loach's film Sweet Sixteen which made me look for more Loach movies at the library. Landed on this one, made a year previous, The Navigators centers on the railroad at Yorkshire. The socialist director in Loach had this time taken upon the privatization of Bristish Rail in 1995.

It is satirical, at the same time poignant and touching, peopled with real men trying to hang on to the only job they know how to do. The one thing I regret is the lack of subtitles in the DVD I was watching which meant that there were some gaps in my understading of the film since I couldn't follow their accent properly. Like any Ken Loach movie this one is also a fine portrayal of life as we live it - not very rosy.

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The Spanish Prisoner 

I took David Mamet's Spanish Prisoner from the library thinking that I had not seen it before, turns out that I had, but except for a few scenes I couldn't recall anything, not the plot or the story. That was good because Spanish Prisoner turned out to be quite an intriguing entertainer. The plot thickens at every new scene and you are caught up in the mystery. It stars Campbell Scott as the hero and for a change, Steve Martin as the villian. David Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon also has an interesting role in the film. Worth watching if you haven't seen it or have turned amnesiac like me.

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Water for Chocolate

Finished reading the book a few minutes before I started to watch the film of the same name written by Laura Esquivel and directed by Alfonso Arau. A treat for the senses, don't blame me you are overcome by a sudden urge to create culinary wonders.

Every chapter in the book starts with a recipe, an ethereal one at that, you wish you could atleast see how they'd look like once they are done. Watching the movie right after reading the book afforded me the simple pleasure of seeing how those wonderful recipes looked like in real life, although second best only to tasting them ourselves. It is a love story of Tita and Pedro, their troubles and turmoils and their final union after 22 years during which had taken place a marriage for Pedro and an engagement for Tita among other things. The book and the movie is an excellent primer for those who want to explore the "mystic realism" of Latin American writers.

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Envy

Envy was the last movie I saw in theater, the first weekend we came from the trip and struck by an irresistable urge to go to a movie hall we zeroed in on envy. It seemed promising starring two actors we like, Jack Black and Ben Stiller. Can't say much about the movie. Jack Black's role is not what could be termed as comical and Stiller's role is downright serious. A movie for a lazy afternoon, maybe not worth buying tickets, better rent the dvd/video when it comes out.

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Bowfinger

Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy together in a movie written by Steve Martin himself, it has to be funny. Steve Martin is the owner/producer/director incharge of Bowfinger films who is trying to make a film with the actor Kit Ramsey, played by Eddie Murphy. The problem is Kit Ramsey doesn't know that he's in the film! How Martin and his mismatched bunch of helpers go about shooting this film something of the innovative. And man, Eddie Murphy could really act, this is the first time I am givng him his due credits.

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Munnabhai MBBS - I

Thank God that Sharukh Khan had to decline the title role as he had to go to London for his back surgery and it came to Sanjay Dutt instead. The role fits Dutt like a custom-made glove and he's at his brilliant best as the Mumbai-don turned medical student Munna Bhai.

If you have lived in Mumbai, you'll certainly appreciate the rawness and the comedy of the film. There is not much forced tickling comedy, rather its the dialogues that make you chuckle over time. Arshad Warsi as Munnabhai's side kick Circuit is at times better than Munnabhai himself. Although there is some melodrama in the film, it is excusable for the rest of the film makes up for it. The success of the movie rides on the fact that all the characters are believable and gels well with the story.One of the funniest movies to come out of Bollywood in the recent times.

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Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

From the story by Alan Silitoe, Loneliness... is about the story about a rebellious and angry youngman who is sent to Borstal school after he's caught stealing from a bakery. Tom Courtney, as the rebellious hero, Colin Smith gives a commandable performance. This is a movie against the system or a person's statement against the system and how he wins by losing the race. This cinematic poem by Tony Richardson, picturised in dreary grey Nottingham, asserts itself from the opening shot itself and is touted to be one of the best British films ever.

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Maelstorm

This French-Canadian film by Denis Villeneuve is said to have won many awards. It starts with a fish, on the cutting table, which is just about to be cut and packed into cans divulging some of the great philosophies of life by telling us the story of a young woman. Water or shades of water is the predominant color theme of the film. It reminds me of the Kiezlowski films, Blue or was it White? There is too much stress on making it artsy and thereby unco-ordinated. Too much co-incidences and plots linked to plots thru' some random and seemingly senseless incidents at the time, but which are shown connected later on. Hmm... Iam getting confused already.

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Leila

Leila is a young Iranian woman, happily married to Reza living somewhere in urban Iran. All is roses and pearls till the couple realize that Leila cannot have a child, not that Reza is desperate to have one. The more conservative mother-in-law and aunt-in-law decides that Reza should remarry in order to have progeny. Leila meekly agrees to this and goes along with the proceedings.

To an extent I can understand the Leila's submissiveness to this decision considering the society she was born and brought up in expected her to be like that. What I don't understand is even though his wife agreed to his mother's decision of taking a second wife, why he himself went ahead with it although reluctantly? Add to this the fact that Reza's father and his three sisters were totally opposed to his second marriage. Its slow moving at times, I don't understand the mind games of the two main characters - Leila and Reza. One thing I learnt from the movie is Iranian cities are very modern - wide highways, turnabouts, ramps, modern apartments, cars and ladies in black chador.

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Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman

I bought this book for in-flight reading for a long flight from NYC to Seattle and then onto Anchorage. Finished it by the time we touched down. Set in London, it is about a middle-aged literary editor, Rose. As is anticipated by the title, it is about the mid-life crisis she undergoes.

I selected it from the rows of best-sellers at the airport kiosk because I thought it was the story of an everyday woman, some of us who have been thru' such things and some of us will get to that age in the future. Its an ordinary story, narrated in a way that makes you want to read. The setting could have been anywhere - London, New York, Tokyo or Rio. To me it feels like a story about women by a woman, for there are other interesting female characters in the story as well. An easy read, we should be hearing more about Elizabeth Buchan on this side of the Atlantic soon.

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Respiro

Shot at a beautiful Italian fishing village on the coasts of sun drenched Mediterranean, Respiro reminded me a lot of fishing villages in India. The only I difference I could see was the fisherfolk in Italy were white tending to be brown, whereas in India they were brown tending to be black, all the rest seems the same.

A beautiful film, about mothers and sons, husbands and wives, children living in a un-artificial world and a lot of Vespas. For me it is film about unfettered childhoods, about villages acting as one big family and simple human travails and joys. Emmanuel Crialese, the director sure is very talented, but why is it there are only three films, ofcourse more should be on the way. For now, I will try to get the other two, which I desperately want to see now that I am so moved by Respiro.

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Sex and Lucia

Sex and Lucia 

There's some sex, there's Lucia, there's a floating island somewhere in the mediterranean and there is an interconnected web of characters who are more or less unaware of their interconnections till the very last. Directed by Julio Medem, it follows Lucia who is a waitress and her writer boyfriend, Lorenzo, who is absent at the beginning of the film.

The story of the film is closely woven into a novel Lorenzo is seen writing. There are characters of the novel you meet in real life and then go off into the realm of fiction. The movie seemed to be slow moving in the beginning, its the second half thats real fast paced, good that I did not give up on it after the first half.

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Ararat

One thing I learnt from this movie, hitherto unknown to me is that there was a genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 which left a million and more dead. Thats all I got out of this film by Atom Egoyan. I am a true outsider with no knowledge about the enmity between Turks and the Armenians. It seems like the director's idea was to reach out to the world and remind them of the forgotten Armenian genocide. But it was a very convoluted way he took to get the message across and by the end I felt like he never got it through. It'd have been much better had he made a film directly focussed on genocide instead of incorporating plots, plots, more plots and then some sub plots.

First there is the Canadian-Armenian young man, Raffi, who I think is the main character of the film. There are subplots involving him and his mother, him and his girlfriend(who is his step-sister), then his mother and his girl friend(who is her step daughter), him and the customs-officer and by the end you lose track of everything and the film loses its emphasis. The main plot revolves around a movie being made(film-within-a-film), which is also called Ararat, centered on the Armenian massacre and Raffi is a production assistant for the same. I wish they had shown this movie instead of the real one because then it'd have been easier to empathize with genocide victims. All in all a hodge-podge in the name of a movie.

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28 Days Later

An interesting British sci-fi thriller from Danny Boyle, he of Train Spotting fame. It is the usual virus-feasting-on-humans flick, but minus the Hollywood's cheap tricks, which makes it one of the most believeable sci-fi flicks I have ever watched. Plus you get to see the the most eerie shots of London, with it deserted streets(fully evacuated for the purpose of shooting this film) and abondoned buildings which add to the character of the film.

The first half was pretty good, in the second half the movie seemed to have veered a bit off the common-sense way. Still it is a lot better than other virus flicks considering there were no cures discovered in the nick of time, there were not many super human acts from the protagonists, there were no microscopic close-up shots of the 'deadly' virus and its subsequent graphic run thru' the human system it attacks and for a change(a big one at that) it was not LA or NY under threat this time, it was the British Isles. A good sci-fi horror flick, after a long time.

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The Grapes of Wrath

Released in 1940, I saw this film in 2004, 64 years - after almost a lifetime in man years. The movie is one of the gems of American cinema, stars and stripes to the core. From now on whenever I think of the history of United States of America, Tom Joad and the Joad family is going to figure in my thought train as migrants within an land built by migrants. Going to California, is for many Americans like how moving to United Staes is to the rest of the world. Moving to the land of opportunity, moving to a place where you may not be welcome always but where you would still try your level best to blend in and build a new life because it is the land of the milk and honey - as it might have appeared to the poor migrant farmers from the Dust Bowl states.

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad and Jane Darwell as Ma Joad have given outstanding performances. John Ford's direction is also worth mentioning. The Grapes of Wrath is an enduring saga of human survival in some of the worst conditions in the very heart of America - the land of plenty. It is like reading a log book of those times of depression, of what people underwent, what people undergo, even now. That is what attracted me to The Grapes of Wrath, that human suffering perpetrates time, somewhere in the world, Dust Bowl migration is happening right now. If you are humane enough you can see the common threads, there is a Tom Joad and a Ma Joad somewhere out there trying to make the ends meet in a hostile world which tries to beat them down. For all the people who made this movie possible from the great author John Steinbeck, John Ford, Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and others - may your tribe prosper, here's to you all !

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Crimen del padre Amaro, El

The Crime of Father Amaro, is a Mexican movie starring Gael Garcia Bernal as the catholic priest Father Amaro. I'd say it is an average movie, for me it gave me a peep into the interesting country that is Mexico, the lives of its people, Catholiscm firmly planted into its culture. Its not rare that priests fall for temptation in the form of a beautiful young girl, here it is Amelia played by Ana Claudia Talancon for whom Father Amaro falls. Ana Talancon reminds me of Hindi actress, Kajol.

It's an ordinary film, I liked the charaters of the senior priest, Father Benito and Father Natalio more than Bernal's Father Amaro, with whom I could not relate to much. The other two characters seemed more humane inspite of the pressing circumstances whereas it was Amaro who could have been all that and much much more.

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Vertical Ray of The Sun 

One look at this Vietnamese film and it feels like someone emptied a pail of mouthwash into the camera, its so fresh looking a film. With green, blue, turquoise as predominating shades its like living in an aquamarine world. I have to check whether the director Anh Hung Tran is an ad director or a camera man in his previous life, because the movie seemed like a long chain of ads stringed together. Photography was out of this world, at some point it is as if the whole reason of making this movie is to showcase the photography and the color scheme.

The story of the movie revolves around three sisters (Hannah and her sisters?) , their lives and their relationships with the men in their lives. Its kinda slow at times, to give depth to the artsy feel, I guess. Technically a very perfect film, I wish the director concentrated a li'l more on the story part though.

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Frenzy

A very English Hitchcock movie set in a very English place, where else London. I don't know why I liked it more than his much touted earlier movies like Strangers On A Train, Rear Window and on par with Psycho. Frenzy takes place in London and we are hot on trail of a serial murderer of ladies who uses his nectie to strangle and kill them. I guess none of the actors who played the main parts are quite famous, read somewhere they were London stage actors.

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Emma 

Austen's Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow in a very English setting. The English aristocratic atmosphere of 19th and early 20th century never fails to put a smirk on my face. Very lady-gentlemanish parties, everyone treading oh...so lightly on false pretense, tea in the afternoon, liveried butlers, did they know there was a world outside? Jane Austen's fiction did one good thing - it provided a peek into the culture and life of a particular section of human society about whose workings 99% of earth's population was unaware of.

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Venus Beauty Salon 

Directed by Tonie Marshall, this 1999 French movie tells the story of the lives of three girls working in a beauty salon in Paris. The film revolves mainly around one of the girls, Angele played by Nathalie Baye who lives a life of loneliness pursuing meaningless relationships with men. For me it was a film to see how ordinary people in other parts of the world lived (in this case - Paris). It was surprising to note that the beauty salon, the beauticians, the surroundings is very much similar to that we have at home. People are the same whether they are in Paris, Vladivostok or Mumbai. Forgot to tell there is a very innocent looking vixen of an Audrey Tataou in the film too.

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Sweet and Lowdown 

Yippeee...Sean Penn made the Oscars worthmy watching! If it had been another year, my favorite director Clint Eastwood have won too. Anyway yesterday saw another movie which had given Sean Penn and Oscar nod few years back - Sweet and Lowdown. Directed by Woody Allen, this film tells the story of life and times of 30s jazz guitarist, Emmet Ray. Penn is funny and charismatic as Emmet Ray. The movie also stars Samantha Morton and Uma Thurman.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being 

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the leading role, this cinematic translation of Milan Kundera's famous novel confuses me, so did Kundera's writing. I think a lot of essence of the book is lost in the movie, because lot of the depth of writing need to be conveyed by the acting and who ever makes the film from a novel by Kundera, this loss is bound to happen. One good thing was I learnt about the Prague Spring of 1968,

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A Wild Sheep Chase 

Prominent Japanese novelist Haruki Marakami's post modern literary effort. It is definitely very different from any of the novels I have read recently. I'll have to reread it to understand properly. The first few chapters are confusing and more than once I did consider giving up reading it.

There absurd sub-incidents, hope rereading will throw some light on them. It is really what you can call an ultra-modern novel, with meanings at different levels. I am trying hard to understand, but I have to give it Marakami for his very distinctive and refreshing style of writing. The stroy is also enigmatic as the style, although it takes some time to get to the crux of the plot.

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