The Movies!

I LOVEEEEEEEE the movies!!

I enjoy the whole shindig of movie watching – of popcorns, cola, crowds albeit that in an Indian context, it implies sshing other moviegoers who keep cellphones on chatting incessantly and other talkative sorts who don’t get that the rest of us paid good money to watch the film. I follow a typical movie routine – for English movies check IMDB, rottentomatoes for ratings, for hindi movies – check out Rajeev Masand’s and Raja Sen’s ratings (the sachharine sweet diabetic inducing Taran Adarsh and the rest are completely compromised in my opinion to the various industry camps). If they are good ratings, then I go check out the movie without reading any of the reviews. I hate reading reviews or discussing a movie before watching one – I’d rather to go into it with a complete blank canvas and be encompassed into the entirety of the audio visual ride the movie has set out for us. After the entire experience of the movie has been enjoyed, I come back and scan the net for every available piece of information about the movie – on rottentomatoes, imdb faqs, trivia, other reviews (nytimes), cast and director interviews, wiki on the production, making of movies etc etc….this (esp the review reading part where I love to see how others have experienced the movies, the parts I missed out or the reviewers didn’t get) is one of the greatest joys of the experience. Besides discussing it at length with Venkat, my friend and manic movie lover (by an order of magnitude) who has taken great pains to sensitise me to the various filmmakers, movements in film making and aspects of film making I had never thought of earlier (like camera angles or editing or the role of background music that is in the foreground sometimes, among the million other things); not to mention his timeless and priceless gift of pirated downloaded set of all time best 1000 movies (including IMDB top 500 movies of all time) to ensure I had a visual world to keep me sufficiently occupied while he left the country to see the world. And Vinu, who has an innate ability to quantify any subject matter, however abstruse to a crisp and precise rating on 5.

In some cases, if I don’t feel that I couldn’t capture the entirety of the movie in one viewing, I watch it again. And some times, again and again, 3 days in a row like the Dark Knight. Some of my all time favorite movies are The Fight Club, The Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, American Beauty, Shawshank Redemption, A Beautiful Mind and among Indian movies, a lot of the current bunch like Gulal, DevD, Peepli Live, Rang De Basanti, Jab we Met, Taare Zameen Par, Chak De, Sadma, Karthik Calling Karthik etc. Fight Club remains my all time favorite movie and its brilliant director, David Fincher, my all time favorite director - my best paintings have been inspired by Jack, its nameless protagonist which you can find here.

I also enjoy the business of movies and spend a lot of time talking to friends who are insiders, working in production or distribution houses. I check boxofficeindia.com every week, watch komal nahta on etc and bollywood business on zoom to know which film has made how much money. I would love to produce a film one day – there I said it. It is one of those things to do on my bucket list!

So here’s to more reviews of the many memorable movies ahead. I start with the first one, the social network, fittingly by David Fincher.