The Ninth Gate

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

ninthGenre: Thriller/Occult| Year: 1999 | Duration: 133 mins | Director: Roman Polanski| Medium: VCD (Eagle Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating:4*/5*

 Fav Dialogue: “Liana : Don’t fuck with me!
Corso: I thought I already did.”

Perennial provocateur Roman Polanski directed this occult movie based on a part of the book El Club Dumas, and in the process made a very clever story. I loved the part of all the books and book fanatics in this film. The film is about this demonical book, The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows, chased by Dean Corso(Johnny Depp), an unscruplous & infamous dealer of rare books, to find the authenticity of the book owned by his client Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) and compare it with two other copies that exists with two other book fanatcis & collectors. The book seems to have been written in collaboration of the Devil himself with instructions on how to invoke satan and enter his realm.

Most of the characters in the film seems to be seduced by the evil, are on an unending search for the devil (which never appears throughout the movie, which is good direction and story telling). Balkan’s quest ended in death for him and Corso crossing the ninth gate, having witnessed the entire process during his detective work for the book, and helped by the succubus girl (Emmanuel Seigner) against all perils (and remains a mystery till the end in the movie). The movie is full of riddles being unfolded, and the last riddle is for the viewers to solve concerning the ninth ritual, which was forged in the book. The succubus girl have sex with Corso amidst the backdrop of flames, thus completing the ninth ritual, and corso returning to the castle to cross over.

Being a bibliophile, I truly enjoyed The Ninth Gate as my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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The Town

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

townGenre: Thriller| Year: 2010 | Duration: 125 mins | Director: Ben Affleck| Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 4*/5*

Fav Dialogue: “Doug: We’re fucked if we see a helicopter. We’re fucked if we see SWAT. We see a cruiser, stop, take out the engine blocks, keep moving. No one needs to get hurt.
James: Now these guards like to test you though. They wanna get hurt for ten dollars an hour, don’t get in the way.”

Ben Affleck as both director & lead star of The Town has done a good job with making a crime thriller. The movie is based at Charlestown, MA, which is (in)famous for producing largest numbers of bank robbers per capita! The movie is around the lead robber Doug (Ben Affleck) and his hot headed best friend James (Jeremy Renner) who takes Claire (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage after a bank robbery. After she’s released, Doug pursues her to see that she doesn’t give them up and begins on a romantic journey with her. They are consistently pursued by FBI agent James (Jon Hamm) which eventually breaks up their relationship and kills James. Doug escapes with the loot which he distributes among Claire and Krista (Blake Lively) who’s a past love interest of Doug.

The fast-paced movie filled with excitement, drama and comedy is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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American Gods

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

113767203What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” ― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

American Gods is a masterful blend of mythology and existential questioning, crafted with the confidence of a storyteller who knows how to make the unreal feel intimately familiar. The novel follows Shadow Moon, a man adrift after personal tragedy, who becomes entangled in a looming war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants and the new gods born of technology, media, and modern obsession.

Gaiman uses this supernatural conflict to explore what a nation chooses to worship, and what those choices reveal about identity, belief, displacement, and memory. His America is vast, strange, melancholic, and quietly magical with a landscape where roadside attractions become sacred spaces and forgotten deities cling to survival.

What makes the novel enduring is its atmosphere: moody, mythic, and laden with symbolism. Shadow’s journey is both epic and introspective, revealing the cost of faith and the fragility of stories in a changing world.

While the pacing occasionally drifts, the richness of character, imagination, and cultural insight more than compensates. American Gods remains one of Gaiman’s most ambitious works, an absorbing, thought-provoking modern myth that lingers long after the final page.

 This dark, poetic and thrilling novel across an American landscape is my “Read of the Week”.

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The Sense of an Ending

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

b3“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending is a quiet, unsettling novel that lingers long after its final page. The memoir like novel is narrated by Tony Webster, who looks back on his friendships, his first love, and a moral failure he barely understood at the time of his youth. What begins as a calm story in nostalgia gradually turns into an examination of how memory deceives, and flatters us.

The author is less interested in what happened than in how we remember what happened. Tony believes he has lived an ordinary, decent life, but a late-life inheritance forces him to confront the possibility that his past actions had darker consequences than he imagined.

The writing is spare, precise, and simple. Barnes resists sentimentality, allowing ambiguity to do the emotional work. The novel ultimately asks unsettling questions about responsibility, guilt, and time. Do we ever truly understand our own lives, or do we merely settle for a version that feels bearable? It is a small book with a profoundly disturbing aftertaste.

This 2011 Booker Prize winning, witty, cynical and ironic novel is my “Read of theWeek”

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Pathfinder

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

pathGenre: Action/Adventure| Year: 2007 | Duration: 100 mins | Director: Marcus Nispel| Medium: VCD (Excel Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 2.5*/5*

The story is of a viking boy (Karl Urban) rescued from a marooned boat by a native american woman, who grows among the natives, and is haunted by his origins. Later when norsemen (whoses costumes were so bulky and overdone!) returns to plunder these villages, he fights them off to save a handful of natives. The only high in this movie is its graphic violence. Like many movies of its genre, it too had a bried love interest and the rival suitor, but thankfully Nispel decided to dedicate less than 10 mins of the movie to the whole thing. The idea that Norsemen came to America before Columbus seemed fascinating. There was literally no defined story, and only glossy cinematography.

Even though I didn’t enjoy it much, Pathfinder is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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