I knew it after this movie...

Movies are my favorite pastime.  Apart from entertainment they have shown me the different worlds.  It has shown me people, places, cultures, lifestyle and more. These are things that I wouldn’t have known if not for the movies. Might sound like an over exaggeration, but then you got to read through to understand what I mean.

Indian Motorcycle

When I first saw the title “The world’s fastest Indian”, I didn’t have the slightest clue that Indian could mean a motorcycle! Moreover I did have a huge fascination for cruiser bikes but some how never came across it. The only motorcycle that I knew to be iconic was the Harley Davidson. But the truth is, the Indian is considered more exclusive and costlier than the Harley’s! We wouldn’t get to completely understand its grace. Probably it’s the Americans who knew the Indian better!

Wine Tasting

Sideways is a must watch for wine lovers. If you aren’t one, you could still get to see the magic and passion in a glass of wine. I believe that only the French have a real taste for it since its been a part of their lifestyle for ages. And for the rest (most) of us, we never knew that tasting wine was such an art; People look for color, smell and a lot more before they make a choice. There are a numerous other ways of tasting wine and seeing how they do it could drive us nuts. But it really is a huge business by itself. A lot of wine evaluators have made a fortune out of it. Though not my cup of tea (wine), to my content I would wish to taste a Bordeaux some time :)

Frog rain

The screenplay of Magnolia had to loosely connect a lot of smaller plots. Not an easy task but was done with great excellence. Everything was fine until this scene of frog rain that came in. I was wondering like the rest of the audience,  what went wrong with the director here!! I later went on to dig about it and found that it has happened a lot many times in our human history! A lot of possible reasons were given and the most convincing to me  was this... Its a tornado that picks up frogs and other smaller objects from a lake and drops it over a distant place.

Travelling Twins

Contact is my favorite Sci-Fi film to date, an adaptation from a book of the same name. The story revolves around a scientist who is curious to reach out and make contact with Extra Terrestrial life. And there is this particular scene where Jodie Foster talks to her friend before she makes her travel on the space ship. Interestingly they talk about the relativity of time. By then I understood how bad I was in my Science basics! It goes some thing like this, as Jodie makes her trip at a speed close to that of light, what seems like a few days on the space ship would relatively be years on earth.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/hotsciencetwin/

Monty Hall Problem

Life is full of chances and we tend to pick one over the other without a rational mind. But there is a time when we need some logic for our actions; at least that’s what the sensible do. There is a scene from the movie 21 about the famous Monty hall problem. It took a little time to understand the concept of Variable change but then the fundamentals seem quite clear though it expands to a lot of other areas to compute the odds of an event. It kindles your interest towards Math, on the contrary it just did a little for me coz I’m the kind who fears Math... even more than science :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXqDIFUB7YU

My understanding of Love

Seeing the title, I was afraid if this would turn out to be a confession note. But that would be boring for people, especially Divya. Because for my last post she said “Life is already depressing and why do you add more to it?” Very true, so I decided to give a shot and take this test. I wanted to think of something nice and sweet and the first thing that came to my mind was Love.

My understanding of love has changed over the changing phases of time. Because unfortunately like the millions of kids in this generation, a lot of ideas revolve around movies and so does LOVE. Since movies tend to be an easy analogy, I pick three movies that closely portrayed my idea over the years. Here we go...

Mouna Raagam

I was a seven or eight year kid when I got the first impression. Now I could hear you saying ‘u little brat…’ :) Anyway I vaguely remember that it left a deep impact due to one reason. It was one of the few Video Cassettes that was lying in my granny’s place and on a summer vacation my aunts and cousins watched it over and over until it was worn out.

But I didn’t really understand a lot in the movie that time, in fact even now. Why should Revathy go out for a coffee if she doesn’t like Karthik? How could she fall for him even after he said ‘I love you’ from a principal’s mic? At any cost how could she marry someone when she really didn’t want to? After marriage why was she so arrogant to her husband? Finally why did she change her mind to live with him? If anyone can answer any of those I’m grateful to them! But this was my first understanding of women. They are complicated and hard to be understood.

On the other hand I was so impressed with Karthik. He was like a gutsy dynamite who lived his life and it made a lots of sense to me. Running after the girl he loved, cooking up a story to take her out of class, daring to call the girl’s dad for coffee, trying to change his whole lifestyle for this girl. Everything was simple and easy. Wish Mani sir didn’t let him die. But I forgive him for his need of twist and turns in the script. Likewise Mohan was not a tough one either, he loved his wife no matter what she did. So is this easy for an eight year old to understand? Well Dads love moms even after all those quarrels and days of silence at home, don’t they? 

Alaipayuthey

This was at the age of 15 and for me this is the best love story of my time. Days after the movie was released, I was hearing more about the hero rather than the movie. Girls were going gaga over him and I was too curious to watch it right away. The screenplay was confusing to my low IQ brain. Shuffling past and present didn’t seem like a great idea for me. Funny isn’t it?  How would the director react if I had passed this criticism by then? That’s how many of the movie reviewers write these days.

Coming back to love, by this time I understood better and like every teenager I believed that I was matured enough and that’s why everything seemed to be in my experience. Guys rounding up the streets on a bike next to the girls’ door, giving out blank calls, running all the way down to her medical camp, the secret wedding with friends all around, a half done apartment with just the two of us, every little thing was fascinating like a teenage dream.

But there was a missing piece of information even now. Why did they fight and quarrel so bad in just a few months after marriage? Weren’t they the same pair who broke with their families to live together? After all that they had gone through,  this would be the worst nightmare they could have “Days of prolonged silence”. This was so bitter and I decided not to take it seriously and for that the only convincing idea that I had was, not every couple face it. But you very well know the reality.

VTV

There were many expectations for this movie for two reasons. Gautam had given“Vaaranam Aaiyram” before this and that had already set a benchmark for him. We were even more curious for another reason. Why on earth did he pick Simbhu for this movie??  He completely held a different image and definitely was the last person you could think as Gautam menon’s hero! But the movie broke all those pre-conceived notions and was really unique in its own way. The story was ordinary; the screenplay was not pacey; the music was an experiment with asynchronous notes; the hero is not seen as the greatest of actors. All this when seen separately would sound terrible. But there was magic in the director’s hands to craft this with all his strange ingredients.

How could someone really break up in an SMS?? Really this is too weird and cinematic for those people beyond their thirty’s. But this is how my generation works. I even have a friend who said his love affair to his dad on a SMS. I was awe struck and took days to digest that! But if this is the information age, this is how we would be heading right? Gone are the days when lovers stood behind a pillar and scratched the paint all the way to open up their affair to their parents.

What kind of impact this movie can leave in you? It clearly brought the lives of the larger audience to the silver screen! There was a whole bunch of real life hero’s who said to me that the story was just like his own. Not so strange, because you could have seen someone say that to you too! I was getting crazy over time and asked them how many of you loved a Mallu Christian girl?  But actually this defined the success of the movie.

“Why Jessie when there are so many girls out in this world?” No one could find an answer to that question in their real lives. Why did I pick this girl/guy? How could someone walk out of my life instantly while they took months to walk in? Is there a difference between love and lust? And finally is it really worth it? (Like Ganesh asks). To me parents or society doesn’t really have their say when lovers have decided what they want. So you are the one who decides whether to leave heartbreaks or rose blossoms!