Almost Famous

April 15, 2013 Leave a comment

famousGenre: Drama| Year: 2000 | Duration: 122 mins | Director: Cameron Crowe| Medium: DVD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 4*/5*

Fav Dialogue: “William Miller: I love you. And I’m about to boldly go where… many men have gone before”

This movie views the rock scene in in 70s through a nostalgic lens, yet not a hitting expose` or a tell-all story of the music era. The story is inspred by Cameron’s own experiences as a teeage music journalist, is about a 15 years old boy, willim Miller (Michael Angarano, and later Patrick Fugit) in 1973 going on a road trip with an upcoming rock & roll band, Stillwater.  For William, the trip with the band is about exploring his sexuality and learning how to live outside of his mother’s protective umbrella. In the process, he loses his virginity, rejects the drug scene, forms a few lasting friendships, and saves a life. He falls for a band groupie, Penny Lane (Kate Husdon) who already has a ‘thing’ going with one of the lead singers of Stillwater, Russell. The film’s ecstatic atmosphere is only briefly interrupted by the sense of longing that is associated with first love and the pain that accompanies the inevitable separation between a child and a parent.

Almost famous with its sheer exuberance is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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The King Maker

April 15, 2013 Leave a comment

kingGenre: Drama| Year: 2005 | Duration: 100 mins | Director: Lek Kitaparaporn| Medium: DVD (Magna Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 1.5*/5*

Among the awful movies, The Kingmaker set another standard of low in quality and story telling or direction. Period drama does require brilliance in direction, which this movie clearly lacks and is excruciating throughout its 100 minutes. One has to be a diehard lover of films to sit throughout the movie without dozing off or instead change to watching news!

The film is set in 1547 Thailand (Auytthaya Kingdom), when a Portuguese soldier Fernando de Gama (Gary Stretch) washes up the shores of Siam due to some ship-wreck, and is captured by slave traders. The beautiful Maria (Cindy Burbridge) takes fancy and buys him and introduces to her father, Phillippe (john Rhys-davies) whom Fernando recognises as the killer of his father.

Fernando joins the armies and eventually promoted as the personal bodygurad of King Chairacha. Queen Sudachan along with her lover and Phillippe plots to assasinate the king, and eventually succeeds and frames fernando. Fernando is rescued by the King’s brother. The movie ends with the Burmese invasion.

This movie, worth avoiding, unfortunately is my ‘Movie of the day’.

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The Art of the Infinite

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

books“We commonly think of ourselves as little and lost in the infinite stretches of time and space, so that it comes as a shock when the French poet Baudelaire speaks of ‘cradling our infinite on the finite seas’. Really? Is it ourself, our mind or spirit, that is infinity’s proper home? Or might the infinite be neither out there nor in here but only in language, a pretty conceit of poetry?”   – Robert Kaplan & Ellen Kaplan, The Art of the Infinite: Our Lost Language of Numbers

The Kaplans have brought out the beauty of math through an engaging mix of history, philosophy, science and lyrical prose, equations, geometric projections, exposition and explanation of a unique range of topics from Alcibiades  to Godel to Gauss.

Being a lover of numbers, this delightful book ‘The art of the infinite’ is my ‘Read of the Week’.

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The Sisters Brothers

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

9781847083180“Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.”
– Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
This books made me laugh with its adroit humor and cringe at the same time. Delightful. The story is narrated by Eli Sisters, a hired killer on the American west coast in 1851, around the time of the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada mountains. However Eli barely gives the American landscape a glance, and people met along the way are simple figures in his moral drama. Nor does Eli have any larger philosophical or socio-historical insights to offer for the century this story is set in. This hilariously anti-heroic and relentlessly compelling novel is my “Read of the Week”.

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The Tiger’s Wife

April 13, 2013 2 Comments

8366403When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

This novel full of historic and human complexities of Balkans through its principal narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a young doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century, is my “Read of the Week”.

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