Movie Review: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Very rarely we come across a movie which leaves us wondering what that movie was really about. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and I mean it in a good way. Is it about a man going through a mid-life crisis, is it a romantic comedy, is it about the quintessential search for meaning of life ? I just saw the movie and I couldn't be sure of anything. What I am sure of that after a long time I had a feeling that I watched a good movie.

Don't worry at all, it is not those Oscar type movies which usually bore us (the normal people I mean) to death. It is interesting, comic, tragic and exhilarating
in the ways that only a good little movie could be. It is written beautifully, shot brilliantly and anchored competently by the director and actor Ben Stiller.

He takes you from US of A to Greenland, Iceland, upper Himalayas in Afganistan before he coming home literally and metaphorically. Walter Mitty travels the world only to rediscover the past he left behind and what a fascinating journey it is for all of us to watch.

Ben Stiller is in top form, comic and tragic at the same time in the ways only he can be. Kristen Wiig is perfect in her role and there isn't a cooler actor to play the photographer than Sean Penn. He is absolutely riveting in the single scene when he meets Mr. Mitty in Himalayas trying to shoot a snow leopard.

Highly Recommended. !!!

No Strings Attached

Before we humans became too many, we were born with things that we don't get to see today. Everyone was born with strings attached to few other humans. These strings attached people whose destinies were inextricably tangled with each other. Some of them from the same families, some the best of friends and few the true soulmates. As one would guess, it definitely was a tangled mess. Living with strings attached with other people. There was not a single move you can make without affecting the other and therefore people learnt to live, move and act in harmony. They all just knew how to live together like one big connected group, like a flock of birds flying in the sky. They learnt just to be, there every move in sync, doing what everyone needed to do to survive as a group. Strings told them everything, a small vibration, a little tug, a jerk, a whip...it all meant something to them. As if the words were spoken through the strings. Not unnaturally, the world was a quiet place.Then we became too many. Strings got tangled, choked a few and to stay alive some have to be cut.

No wonder the language of the strings was soon lost and forgotten. We started talking, at times shouting because of the distance between us. At times, we weren't sure if we got heard, not sure if we listened as much we should have. The world without strings was a convenient place, not necessarily a happy one. We realized soon enough.

Stil we persisted to at least know the people who would have been attached to us through strings.

Some were easy, our mother, father and siblings. Mostly we found the strings were there, invisible yet undeniably present. For some, strings were conspicuous by their virtual absence. Like a phantom leg, which should have been there but wasn't. How does one know the absence of something which wasn't anyways supposed to be there ? Funnily enough, one always does.

Some strings were difficult to find because of so many false alarms one would find along the way. A thread less conversation, the tacit understanding and maybe similar views. These were the easiest to be mistaken for the strings that should have been there, but time most of the time told otherwise. As time would go, the false ones would breaks and affirm their true absence.Those remained through all the turmoil and roller coasterly ride of life were the strings that defined us. Our happiness, our greatest joys, our sadness and our deepest melancholy, these strings held through it all. These strings connected us to people who were connected with us not by blood, but through destiny, through kismet and most importantly through their own love and faith in us. Some were friends, some were lovers, some were just people who gave a damn about our existence.

Those who understood the play of these strings, realized soon enough that there is not much else to fuss about.Through these strings, they made sense of this world and life, as it was always meant to be. After all, life was meant to be tangled mess, since the day it started.

Stay Beautiful,
Amitabh

Movie Review: Besharam

One of the million dollar question while watching an intelligent actor in bad movie is, why in the God's name he did this movie ? Here is my theory about why Ranbir Kapoor did Besharam. He has now done a Rajneeti, Wake up Sid, Rockstar and YZHD, which means he is now a established actor in bollywood. For him, the next logical step is to become a bollywood superstar. What better way to do it than do a non-sense pot boiler without a semblance of sense or a script. If Besharam makes money, he becomes the 4th KHAN ,THE superstar and will finally grow out of the tag of the "next" superstar. Unfortunately, even for someone like me who enjoys his Dabang and Rowdy Rathore, Besharam hardly has any redeeming quality about it. It seems like a string of poor jokes and sequences where easy laughs are difficult to come by and any emotional connect is a distant dream with lousy characters, below average music and "mis"direction. It is hard to believe that this is the same director who made Dabangg. Maybe the claim that most khans ghost direct (yes even someone like Salman) is true.

Abhinav kashyap tries to be funny, slapstick and crowd entertainer through inane joke (mostly originating or referring to lower parts of the body) and forced situations. Ranbir tries his best to pull it off, but eventually fail to save this lazy piece of work from what we thought was a good director. There was a time when few directors used to believe that foreign locations guarantees their success and script or dialogues can be dispensed with. Besharam suffers from the same problems except that it captures the exotica of our times: "The small town". Anurag kashyap may disown his brother, only for the random songs which comes so often out of  nowhere, that their pointlessness seems some kind of secret joke that no one gets in the audience.

Neetu Singh looks like a million buck and plays the cutest corrupt cop ever with a great panache. Rishi Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor deliver as good a performance as a shoddy script and direction permit them to. Special mention is required for the actor who plays titu (Ranbir's sidekick in the movie) he is actually funny. Pallavi sharda is not bad for a first timer, and her character is written with distinguished lethargy.

For Ranbir Kapoor fans this is obviously a dampner. He has dazzled everyone with his choice of movies and roles so far, maybe we were expecting a little too much from him too early. Besharam seems to be for RK what Ram Jaane was for SRK.

Watch Besharam strictly only if you have nothing better to do.

 

Why I love Karen ?

Writing about why I love a TV Character is a dangerous thing. Considering the stage of my life, even more so ( I am a 30 year old male who is single and unmarried). So, if you can see past the weirdness of it all, I have something to say which you just might like.

Like a lot of single people, I watch a lot of movies and TV. One of the few TV series which I particularly relish is Californication. People who watch a lot of movies and TV have a tendency to fall in love with the on-screen characters, I am no different. It is nothing like Guddi in that old Hindi Movie, but I guess you get the gist. 

So moving on, there are women and there is Karen. For the uninitiated, she is the female lead of the TV series Californication. The show is superficial but insanely irreverent, reason enough for me to watch all of its six seasons. Here are very few of the reasons why I love her:

1. She loves a writer, an inconsistent, chronic under performer with little flashes of brilliance once in a while. I am not saying anything more.

2. No matter, who she is married to , who she is living with, there is no doubt who she truly loves.

3. She knows that the writer loves her too, but together they can't function and have no future. She takes it all in her stride and moves on with her life.

4. She looks old and mature, wise beyond her years. Her eyes speak of the pain she has endured and the world she has seen. In her smile, I see the world which sparkle and fade out, like a firefly, isn't that something ?

5. She gets mad at the writer but always forgives him, no matter what he does, because that is how it is meant to be.  

and I keep loving her.

The Letters

The girl was sick and she has been for a long time. People around her knew it, the ones who loved her knew it and she knew it as well. They all understood the imminent future, the unavoidable. Nonetheless, no one talked about it in open. The girl, however was little different from others, she was fond of joking about it. "I really need to fast forward my life, I don't have all day, you know" She used to say very often and that too with a weak smile, because that is all which her sickness permitted.
 
She wasn't always sick, but her sickness has had her for so long, hardly anyone remembered what it was like before. Once in a while, in her smile or the sparkle in her eye, one would get to see the girl that she once was, nothing more.

She used to sing, they said. She had the loveliest of the voice, nothing like the raspy voice which she has now because of coughing for so long.

She used to read, all the love poems. They were her favorites; she liked the melody that she could create by humming those poems in her voice.

She used to write, stories of times long gone by. She liked the charm of the old world. Things were simpler then, she'd say. You fall sick, you die.

She liked listening to stories of the magical world. The stories with angels, demons, gods, goddesses, fairies, witches, she loved them. She believed that fairies do exist. She wasn't so old, you know.

She had the weird habit of making friends with really old people. She had many friends who had seen a decade for her every year. More so, they all treated her like an equal rather than like a grandchild. Though she wasn't old, she wasn't a child, you know.

She believed in all the unbelievable things. Gods, destiny, karma and reincarnation because maybe she needed to. She never had the luxury to start with non-believing and take a U-turn after a few years. She hadn't got all day, you know.

Once she had met a boy at the places where sick people typically meet, a hospital. On one of her not so infrequent trips there. He was on the bed beside her bed. He was sick too and used to come there once in a while. They started talking; actually, she made him talk to her about things she liked to hear about. He was the shy kind, you know.

They were together for a week, and like it happens for sick people, they fell in love too quickly. She liked to hold his hand while talking to him, he liked that too. Their loved ones felt a little awkward, but they pretended that they didn’t notice it and nothing was unusual. Secretly they were happy for them and a little scared too.

The boy was discharged after a week and he had to go back to his home town which was some distance away from her place. They promised each other to write a letter every day.

They wrote letters to each other, every single day. They wrote about their childhood, of the days when they were not sick, of the days when they will get better, about what they could do if they were not sick, of the views from their windows, of the loved ones who were now tired taking care of them and their failed attempts to hide their sadness, of the funny relatives who would come to visit them and ask them silly questions, of the medicine they fake swallowed and spat out later, of the need to be near each other and  of the dreams of holding each other’s hands. They were sure that they couldn’t live without each other.

The letters kept coming and she kept replying. In the morning she will wait for the postman to deliver the letter, and then she will read it a few times. In the afternoon she will think about what to write and in the evening she will write the reply. The postman was one of her old friend, she would hand over her reply to him and take the new letter from him. Her whole life was no longer about her sickness; there was something more important in her life now, the letters.

Though, she was happier and a tad healthier (maybe because of letters, maybe because of love, who knows), she knew that she was getting attached to these letters too much. Her belief in unbelievable things made her believe that days of her life were tied to these letters now. She was going to live till these letters kept coming. She didn’t tell anyone but she hoped that they boy would know and to be sure, she wrote it in one of her letters too.

The letters kept coming and she kept getting better. One day she felt good enough to go on a trip to meet the boy and she went to his town. She reached his house and found his mother. She told her that the boy passed away a month ago, but he has made her promise to keep writing letters. So she kept writing. She told her that he wanted her to get better and live a long life.

The girl was heartbroken and she cried for days.One day, when she woke up in the morning, she smiled and told her loved one that she is going to get better. Later in her life she became a teacher and taught in a university. She wrote a letter to the boy every day, she never posted those letters and kept them in her diary.

 

The End

 

Inspired by:

"The Last Leaf" by O'Henry and Lootera (Movie) by Vikramaditya Motwane

My Sister's Keeper (Movie) based on the Book of the same name by Jodie Picoult