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.
