Girl Interrupted

You know how we never eat cake with khichdi, or chicken shashlik with aloo-chat. The way we are told not to mix drinks. In the same fashion, you should layer up your movies carefully.

Girl Interrupted followed by Breathless, very hard to swallow. It seemed so pretentious. Also the expectations were high somehow. I expected to be a revelation. It comes off as a cheap thriller. They were trying to pass Angelina and Winona as crazy people, where the fact is they look less crazy than half the people I meet everyday.

The movie revolves around the lives of few loonies living in an asylum. There is one specimen each of the commonly understood psychiatric disorders. It’s a pathetic attempt to explain the psyche of mentally disturbed. The characters caricatured. It has bits and pieces of “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, floating all over it. Its like a remake, there is nothing new.

It moves on cheap gimmicks. For quite some time, it builds a threatening tone of wardens and nurses trying to prove you mad. The whole world abandoning you. The second gimmick when they suddenly unravel the seemingly sane Lisa’s (Angelina Jolie) diagnoses simplified to the world. Boiled down to few statements she makes at Daisy’s apartment. And the most pathetic of it all, how Susanna shines a ray of hope and triggers the realization for all the crazy people out there that they don’t want to be like that, they want to be normal.

A movie which mocks the vagaries of mind, and shows in gaunty shades those who have lost their sanity.

But then it can be called mildly entertaining, which this subject shouldn’t be. Especially projected in this fashion. And all said, mix your movies well.

Breathless

“It's silly, but I love you. I wanted to see you, to see if I'd want to see you.”


Its funny, its witty, its adorable. I picked it at random from the DVD shop. I though I should see a Goddard, I knew I had to see a Goddard from long time now. I knew I was going to like it, but forgot why. I also picked up Girl Interrupted as friend had once mentioned it reminded her of me, so it stuck.

As I walk away from the DVD shop, I am thinking to myself I should stop seeing disturbing movies. It was earlier me which liked them. I never liked “My life to live”. It was boring, I was being pretentious, and I never really liked it.

Funny I enjoyed breathless so, it is still with me and will continue to do. And I have realized I had already seen a Goddard. And I might want to see, “My life to live” again. And yes I definitely really liked it when I saw it. I was stumped. “This is how movies should be. You don’t need people then.”

“We're hiding like elephants when they're happy.” – Its happy.

It always confuses me when anybody screams at me “You can’t be serious! How can you not like ‘Before Sunrise’!!!?” I came to conclusion that I find a couple boring each other to death, boring. But, Michel and Pat are not your conventional mopey pair. If ‘before sunshine/sunset’ bored you and you don’t think you are not that cynical, you love romantic movies, then this one is for you. In addition there is a cop-chasing a criminal story at the base of it.



It talks of the confusion you face when weighing your emotions. It introduces you two different people. It introduces you to them. Above all it makes you believe, it is no pretense. It talks of relationships. I love the fact that it talks so much in 90 minutes.

“When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.”

Oh by the way, this movie is credited for the beginning of French New Wave and the birth of phenomenon that Goddard was going to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless. But that’s secondary.

My favorite is the scene where Michel makes those three expressions. They can not be named, they can just be revisited.

I loved all of these quotes.

Crazy day with the Ballad of Jack and Rose

It was a weird day. After a long time I was probed out of my shell. I was wondering who I am again. Who we are? Why we seek friendship? Why the need to share? Why are we mistaken? Why all that is important never absolute? Why do we compromise on affection? Why it hurts? Why we cry?

Anyway after having moped enough, as my plans were suddenly revised, I when back to my initial plan. Picked a DVD. The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Not a happy movie. Disturbing father daughter relation, always threatening to careen towards incest.

I hated to see Daniel Day Lewis like this. I know he was acting, but I felt bad for him. True actor. Not to the magnitude of Marlon Brando in “A streetcar named desire”, but still. Camilla Belle was good too as his daughter. But I didn’t feel rewarded by a beautiful performance, something was missing. Or maybe something was overpowering, “the sympathy for the eccentricities”.

It’s the same, “sympathy for eccentricities” which didn’t come out right. Somehow I just couldn’t see their (father-daughter) point of view. I mean I could maybe, but by turning my wheels, no help from Rebecca Miller. The effort tired me.

By the end, I was glad to cry, awful day it was. Jack died. Daniel Day Lewis flaunted all the bones in his body. Gave me a perfect excuse to vent it out. It was an unstable end, just like the movie.

The story too ambitious, Rebecca fell short of her devices. Still I take away what the story couldn’t say built on maybe by my own imagination. Makes you wish it was otherwise.

Deadened me.

It’s a Tuesday morning at office, worse than a Monday morning can be. It was a long weekend. Another year has started. And I sit here lost among people I don’t give damn about. Building packages and reports I don’t give damn about. I am lost in a sea of cubicles. There are voices and murmurs around me. I can hear people fretting over DART application not working. They are all in a panic to submit their DARTs which are their weekly activity vs. effort report. Our delivery manager had walked in. He was telling my co-cubiclee about some bug found in her application. I wanted to yawn and blow him out of the building. The deadness of the place has deadened me.

A sneaky restlessness started creeping in right after I declared to a lunch companion of mine that I felt complacent here. Settled with the way things were. Happy just following the routine. Having breakfast at home, spending some time in office somehow, coming back home to cook, eat watching TV, and go to sleep. Lazing around on weekends, shopping maybe(something that I despised, the sight of malls and happy people in it used make me make a disappearing wish.)

And now I cant take it, I don’t want to come to office anymore. I wish for different things. I want a life, where I don’t have to wear clothes which are called office clothes. I don’t want my work to be something which I don’t enjoy. I want to stop looking for gushes of travel escapades to bolster me up. I want to stop living life on little time which I take off from my work. I want my life to be lived every moment. I don’t want it to be rationed to me a morsel a day.