Montu, Kanti Shah and Lenny

These days, when I am not sleeping or thinking about sleeping or recovering from oversleep fatigue, I am mostly watching.

Well, I am allegedly working on weekdays and on nights apparently solving puzzles on paper napkins in a South Indian restaurant run by unarguably the most mild mannered North Indian homo sapiens I have ever met.

But I am mostly watching.

And here's the round up:

Sarkar Raj is extremely ordinary.

Aamir is extra-ordinary. Hats off to the debutant director and his debutant team.

The Happening is good. Definitely better than Shyamalan's last few movies.

Blood Brothers, Vishal Bharadwaj's short film on AIDS awareness, was extremely disappointing. People might prefer the disease to this movie.

Ironman, to put it simply, is the best superhero movie to have come out in years. Far off from the usual syrupy stuff, this one has a tangy flavour of its own, and a brand of sarcasm that yours truly and a few other like minded demented souls devour.

Ghatotkatch puzzled me. I had trouble believing that Singeetham Srinivas Rao, the same man who gave us that Kamal Haasan gem, "Pushpak" could make such an apology of a film. The animation is of the tackiest imaginable variety. Any guy with a desktop and Macromedia Flash can do better, sitting in his drawing room. In fact, even the primitive cave-dwellers with stone hammers would have. Everything from the script to the treatment to the musical score, smells of disrespect to the intended target audience for the film - the kids.

Mr. Rao, making a children's film is no child's play. We don't expect you to do what the geniuses at Disney and Pixar are doing, but please don't do this either.

Jimmy: Aha! Finally I managed watching this. There is an old urban legend that when I was born, the first word I said wasn't either Ma, Baba or Rahman. It was "Jimmy". I was born so that quarter of a century later I could finally see what would be nothing less than Lord Vishnu's 11th avatar's leela.

And divine it surely is.

It is so invigorating, that show it to the physically challenged; they would get up from their wheel chairs and run. Screen it for the dead; they'd get up and curse you for bringing them back to life and beg you to turn it off.

And Mimoh? With his lampost-level expressions and oh-my-god-i-have-got-ants-in-my-pants brand of dancing, he is serious competition for all the cartoon characters you can think of. The fact that despite this movie Mithunda hasn't disowned him is probably due to the fact that Mimoh didn't disown him as his father 10 years back after his masterpiece called "Gunda".

Gunda: There is a theory that life originated from unicellular protein based beings and through successive multiplication and evolution life has reached where it has now. Let's call our ancestor, the first unicellular being, "Montu", for convenience. There would definitely have come a point in Montu's life when it had that weird butterflies-in-his-mitochondria feeling before he split into Ghontu and Jhontu and set the ball rolling for amphibians, monkeys and cave-dwellers to subsequently appear. The cave dwellers would evolve into city dwellers and some would turn out to be filmmakers. Like director Kanti Shah did. Had Montu been blessed with foresight and had he seen what millions of years later Kanti Shah would do along with Bengal tiger, He-Man's grandfather, Mithunda, then our unicellular ancestor would have preferred commiting suicide to giving into that causing-Kanti-Shah-a-million-years-later cell-division.

Want a detailed review?

Words fail me.

Oh, and yes. I watched that movie also, which made me pace my 12X12 room for around half an hour after it ended. And now, 12 hours later, I am still under influence.

I have seen very few films where the power of the medium called "cinema" has fully been utilized. And I have seen fewer films which challenge you mentally. And this is one of them. It's not like telling a story; it's like laying out a puzzle with clues deliberately thrown here and there. It's like involving the viewer into the proceedings. It's like throwing convention to the winds and creating a never-seen-before visual space. Where there is enough space for your imagination and interpretation. This is movie making at its best. Director Christopher Nolan, take 10/10 for Memento.

It's good that Montu multiplied after all.