Silverado

April 23, 2013 Leave a comment

silverGenre: Western| Year: 1985 | Duration: 133 mins | Director: Lawrence Kasdan| Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 3.5*/5

Fav Dialogue: “Cobb: We’re gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging.”

Silverado is a western to its core with with wilderness, cool gun fights, lonely good guys and bad guys on a killing spree. Kasdan has approached a 50′s & 60′s story from a present-day standpoint, which is quite refreshing. The film is about four cowboys, Emmett (Scott Glenn) an ex-con, who while travelling to Silverado meets Paden (Kevin Cline) lying in the desert after being robbed and left to die. They travel to Turley and rescue Emmett’s brother Jake (Kevin Costner) who is waiting death by hanging in the jail for killing a man in self-defense, with some help of Mal (Danny Glover) a black cowboy suffering racism from the sheriff Langston (John Cleese). The story bends and take new turns on freeing Silverado from the hands of corrupt officials and local businessman, and re-building its future by these four lonesome cowboys.

This humorous yet somber cowboy film is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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CAPTAIN CORELLI’S MANDOLIN

April 17, 2013 Leave a comment

220px-Mandolinfilm1Genre: Romance/Drama | Year: 2001 | Duration: 131 mins | Director: John Madden| Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 3.5*/5

Fav Dialogue: “Dr. Iannis: When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No… don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!”

Even though am a fan of Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz, I enjoyed this movie mostly because of its beautiful cinematography. The film’s story, based on Louis de Bernieres novel, is of a beautiful greek girl falling in love with an infantry officer from the occupying Italian forces during the second world war. Captain Antonio Corelli (Nicholas cage) has a love for music and keeps his mandolin in his knapsack insead of an officers’ baton, and strumming on his mandolin charms the gorgeous Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) off her feet (and her pants too!). However John madden fails to capture the essence of music transcending the brutality of war and nationalistic boundaries. Cage didn’t sound Italian enough and nor did Cruz did justice with the Greek accent. The movie does show brilliance in parts in bringing out the pathos and grit of war time romance.

This flawed, yet sweet war-time romance is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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Ball & Chain

April 17, 2013 Leave a comment

BallGenre: Romantic Comedy| Year: 2004 | Duration: 90 mins | Director: Shiraz Jafri| Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 2.5*/5*

A romcom set among ABCDs in Texas, could have been funnier with a better storyline or direction. The story is of Ameet (Sunil Malhotra) whose marriage is ‘arranged’ by his parents to Saima (Lisa Ray) against their wishes. They try everything in the book to break-off this engagement with the help of Ameet’s best friend, Bobby (Kal Penn), only to fall in love with each other during the mayhem.

This delightful & hilarious in-parts film is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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The Shadow Lines

April 17, 2013 3 Comments

shadow-linesThe Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh | 288 Pages | Genre: Fiction| Publisher: Penguin Books India| Year: 1988 | My Rating: 8.5/10

“He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried once beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s imagine in the mirror.”

— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

Amitav Ghosh captures the lines connecting time and events, and people with each other bound by ties of blood and history. This work of fiction is narrated by and follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta with his grand mother and parents, and later in Delhi and London for his higher education. His Grandmother and Mayadebi are sisters, who grew up in Dhaka pre-partition. After the death of her husband, grandmother works at a school to raise her son without depending upon any charity, while Mayadebi marries a Diplomat and lives a life of luxury. Two characters plays pivotal role in the narrator’s life are Ila, a distant cousin of his from Mayadebi’s side to whom he is attracted yet his yearnings go unrequited, and Tridib, who’s Maya’s son. The story unfolds through flashbacks, then progresses occasionally in the present.

This book with numerous characters and intricate web of memories moving back and forth, is my Read of the Week.

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Zero

April 16, 2013 Leave a comment

zeroZERO: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife | 248 Pages | Genre: Mathematics/Science | Publisher: Penguin Books| Year: 2000 | My Rating: 10/10

“The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for the theory of everything. Used unwisely, Zero has the power to destroy logic.”

Charles Seife has presented the complexity of esoteric math and philosophy for popular readership without taking the beauty of numbers throughout his book, Zero. The books starts with the prehistory of numerals, before the number system was discovered. It was only with the advent of numerical notation and arithmetic that zero as a discrete concept became necessary, first as a simple place holder in the Babylonian number system, and later, with the Greeks, as an important astronomical tool even though they didn’t like zero at all.

It was India that first domesticated zero, through the Hindu familiarity with the concepts of infinity and the void. Rigveda states, ‘There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the skywhich is beyond. What stirred? Where?’ Zero is between the void and the absolute.

This elegant and enlightening book about the strangest number in the universe is my ‘Read of the Week’. This book is among my most favourites forever.

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