Feel free to contribute your own recommendations.
"Yi yi" directed by Edward Yang, a story about a middle class family from Taipei, Taiwan. Each member of the family is going through what each one of us goes through in our lives, and as they are living them they are trying to find answers to some difficult questions and in the process helping us to look at our past and find correlations.
NJ, the patriarch of the family is morse. His brother in-law owes him money, his wife is going through spiritual crisis when she is realizes that her life is "blank", his mother is in coma and he is trying to reconnect with his own past. His daughter is suffering through a teenage love crisis that each one of us have had, his son is 8 years old and living in an imaginary world where his quest is to tell people what they don't know in his own way.
A beautiful film, shows us that our own lives are not as big mysteries as it is for everyone else around us.
Getting back to my pathetic attempt to writing after a long time. But it's been a pleasant surprise for me to find out that a lot of people actually read my stuff. Thank you everyone for your tolerance.
So I started watching a lot Bollywood movies that I have been missing on lately. The case in point for now is Dev.D.
From the much acclaimed director, Anurag Kashyap, comes his attempt on an interpretation to the great Saratchandra Chatterjee's master piece Devdas. A story of a misguided Man, his intense love for his woman and then the other love with a mixture of alcohol. This story has been brought onto stage and screen many times before with varied degree of success. Dev.D is a modern year 2009 version. Anurag Kashyap who has created some interesting piece of cinema with Black Friday and Paanch brings his trademark dark grimy look onto the screen.
The movie started off well and immediately peaked my expectations. I loved the portrayal of Paro by Ms. Mahie Gill who brings a nice rugged feel to the character with her Punjabi/Jatt persona. The movie seemed filthy and I like filth, cant get enough of it. But that was it. Unfortunately it went downhill from there. I would blame the story line. The direction was good but lacked the story to match it. The side story of Chandramukhi seemed too long and went on its own accord. I don't think we needed to know about her story in detail. It was an obvious point towards the infamous DPS kand but didn't contribute much to the overall movie. The intensity of Dev's love for Paro was lacking and his drug and vodka binges seemed senseless. This movie helped me to appreciate Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas where SRK had flawlessly played the character. This movie was simply an unsuccessful attempt to modernize an epic story of love and its resultant trauma.
I was looking forward to watching this movie since I saw the trailer starring Sasha Grey. Who she is, if you don't know then I would leave it upto you to google her and then take some time off and "google" yourself.
This is Sasha Grey's first mainstream feature film, I could live with that. A feature film directed by Steven Soderbergh, peaked my curiosity and interest. This has to be done tastefully and I must say I was not disappointed.
The film has Sodebergh's much loved hand held camera look, which he uses very often. He does it well to the point that you don't notice it. As implied by the title the movie is about a high-end Manhattan based escort. She gets paid well for what she does and has a variety of clientele ranging from stock brokers, jewelry shop owners actores, etc. The interesting point is that the story is based during the current recession at the Obama election time period. Her clients are all very worried about their businesses which kind of puts her on high alert too. She has a steady relationship with a guy who is a fitness trainer. The guy must be earning $300 perday doing what he does and she earns $5000 doing what she does.
The movie is shown in time slices and jumps back and forth. This gets a little confusing. I think that on a second look it might make more sense. Sasha Grey. Well, her acting skills don't appear to be bad but I think that's coz she has an A list director guiding her. She is probably one the best in what she does, and feature films don't seem to be her calling unless she keeps getting roles with such directors. The movie is worth a watch.
"Adventureland" another movie based in Pittsburgh. Ahhh…. Pittsburgh. My home for 19 months. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I watch a movie based in Pittsburgh. This was the third one I have seen so far.
Lately I have seen few movies ("The Reader", "My Summer of Love", and some more) where the teen main lead spends his or her summer vacation indulging in endless sexcapades. I had to go to stupid summer camps. Do share what you guys did during your vacations. This movie though has a nice feel to it. Guy graduating from high school has dreams of studying in Columbia. His biggest nightmare is to be stuck in Pittsburgh and go to school there. (I took that offensively) At one point his mom suggests him to take up a program in U Pitt and he looks at her as if he is going to throw up. He has cut short his Europe backpack trip because his father was demoted. So instead to make sure he has enough money to reach newyork he has to work in a summer carnival. He meets interesting people there, I would say nice development of characters, that was one of the few positive points about the movie. Ofcourse he meets a girl and falls madly in love wit her. He is a guy who calls sex or "doing it" as "intercourse". Probably one of the reasons he was a virgin in the story. The girl is played my Kristen Stewart, the star of Twilight Saga. She shows interest in our guy, an interest which seems confusing to me because she is happily sleeping around with an older man working at the Carnival who is a part time rock star as per his claims. The lead role is played by Jesse Eisenberg who I have seen in a very nice movie called Squid and the Whale. His character is very similar in both movies.
When I watch such movies, they go really well until all comes crashing down in the end with a very atypical all happy ending. For once, show the guy not getting the girl. In this case our boy finally looses his virginity in New York where he finally comes running behind his "one true love".
