Paranoid Celluloid

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.



Hats off to the makers.

"Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free..."

It is difficult. Trust me, it's damn difficult to create that kind of an impact again.

He chances upon, amidst hundreds of books, a long playing record. He slides it out of the blue cover, blows off the dust and carefully places it on the player. The officer, busy with attending nature's call is caught totally unawares as Mozart starts flowing and filling up the space. The officer calls out to him. He, by then, is in another world altogether. He locks the restroom from the outside, with the officer caught within, switches on the public address system and brings the microphone close to the record player.

Music fills the air in the prison. His fellow prisoners, who were on with their daily bone-crushing jobs stopped for a while, amazed, staring at the loudspeaker which till then had only blared out orders, abuse and the siren. The warden, with the other officers rushes to his office and finds it locked from the inside. Through the glass pane he was visible. Sitting, leaning back on a chair, his hands behind his head and legs crossed on the table. And with a smile on his lips.
The warden barks at him; asks him to open the door.
He leans forward, turns the volume higher and looks up at the warden. At this moment you can catch a glimpse of the sparkle in his eyes. The smile has broadened.

Yes, they broke the door open and he was switched from his prison cell to solitary confinement for two weeks. But even there, as he says later, he had Mr. Mozart for company.
But how? They surely wouldn't have left him the record player in the "hole", as solitary confinement cells are known.
He taps his head and his heart and smiles. and says "I have it in here".

One of the best cinematic moments ever, this definitely would have had Mozart smiling from the heavens. Also the Lumiere brothers and definitely me. In my case, though, from my room. (Not that it can't be called heaven. After all this is where I sleep hours together, keep staring at the ceiling, day dream, get nightmares, and keep making plans for taking over the world.)
Was it the sheer defiance or the celebration of freedom that makes it this special?
It has to be both.
For those few moments, the man was nobody's prisoner. He could unplug from the constraints thrust upon him by life and create a momentary world which was entirely his own. That is freedom at its unadulterated, purest form.
Probably therein lies the lesson for all who keep being led by life rather leading their own lives. It's always a free choice whether to create "the prison" around, or to dissolve the constraints or rules that tie us down.
There can be no 'statue of liberty'. Liberty is alive and fluid, like the red viscous liquid in our veins.

And squeezing out even one such moment would be enough for a lifetime.

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.

Zero

Music, they say, is like painting with sound. Nature plays with music in its different sounds. There is a pattern, an unmistakably shrewd play of notes and tones in everything around us.

And then there is silence.

This isn’t the silence that only comes as a welcome relief after the neighbourhood loudspeakers stop blaring, or the sense of reclaimed sanity after that capped, bearded guy gives us a temporary respite.

This is soundlessness in general.

To say that there is music in silence would probably be too abstract an assertion and it does contradict how music is classically defined. But then, aren’t art forms to be felt rather than defined? Call it an extension of Aleatoric music, or a corollary to the concepts of divine silence in Zen Buddhism; when there is no commotion around, that is when you speak to yourself. What can be sweeter?

With time, this is becoming a rarer and hence all the more precious a pleasure. Away from the noise and the distractions, a little spell of calm sounds no less than Mozart or Rahman!

In popular music too, silence has been immortalized by the maverick composer John Cage with his experimental and controversial piece 4’33’’ in which the performer just sits in front of the piano or any instrument and does nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The time span actually amounts to 273 seconds and it was his tribute to the concept of absolute zero at – 273K, the theoretical freezing point of all motion.

That may have been too esoteric an effort, but in our own small ways, we can raise a toast to this purest form of auditory pleasure by probably sometimes switching off the FM monstrosities, unplugging the TV, turning the mobile off and holding our breath under a starry sky and listening to our own self.

A few teasers

1. There is a hypothetical creature X. The probability that X splits into two offsprings is p and that it dies without producing any offspring is 1-p. What is the probability that the family tree of X will go on forever?

2. If the sum of a set of positive integers is 2000. What can be the maximum possible product of the constituent integers?

3. A and B decide to meet up in front of city centre on 25^th April. They decide that each should arrive between 5PM and 6PM and whoever arrives first, will wait for 15 minutes for the other to turn up. If the other doesn’t turn up within those 15 minutes, he will leave. What is the probability that they successfully meet each other?

4. There are 124 prisoners. The jailor one day tells all of them, that he has a room which has a light bulb connected to a switch. The bulb is initially off and the room is not visible from any of the cells. He also said that next day onwards, the prisoners will be put in solitary confinement cells and there will be no communication of any sort possible between them. The jailor will each day, pick one prisoner at random and send him to that room with the bulb. He has the option of switching it on/off if he wishes. He also has the option of confirming to the jailor whether all 124 prisoners have been there in the room at least once. If he is correct, all of them would be set free. In case he is wrong with his assertion, all would be shot. The prisoners are then allowed to have a meeting to decide on a strategy before they are sent to the solitary confinement cells. What can be a strategy that the prisoners can decide on, which would guarantee their freedom?

5. There are three identical boxes with two coins in each. One has two gold coins, another has two silver coins and the third one has one gold and a silver coin. You pick one box at random and without peeping in, take a coin out. It turns out to be a gold coin. What is the probability that the other coin in the same box will also be a gold coin?