I’m not a movie guy. This is kind of strange because it’s not like I dislike movies totally, I just find the act of planning to waste 2 odd hours and money for something that might not turn out to be entertaining throughout and that even might have subject matter that might antagonize me, abhorrent and that without the option of just flipping the channel to watch something else. I like TV better and rarely do I ever watch movies on it. I love watching TV and most of what I watch is centered on a few news channels, Discovery, NGC, AP and History. I even dig Shaun the Sheep and Spongebob on CN and how could just forget to tell you how much I love Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show. Basically I’m saying that I watch a lot of TV whenever I can.
However my views about movies are changing. It’s been a very gradual process and started when I tripped over a second hand book titled Close Imagining, written by a celebrated literature teacher Benjamin DeMott. We bought it at a book sale at the Parade Ground in Sector-17. It talks about how to read literature in the sense that how to make sense of literature. Anyone can read but it trains you in a certain way about the approach to understand the text. Somehow the training, whatever sense I could make of till now, also got extrapolated on to my interpretation of cinema. I’m still reading that book since I’m a very very slow and irregular reader and that is another thing I generally don’t like doing, reading. But I’ve grown to like that book and like picking it up once in a while and being bowled over by the poems and stories and parts of classical literature that form the examples of the book. In almost 10 odd months, I have watched four or five movies—apart from the ones I watched at the movie club of IMTECH—most of which I actually liked. It’s 1:15am and I just finished watching a movie on HBO (I think it was some other channel) a few minutes ago titled A lot like Love.
I was just surfing through the channels when I saw Ashton Kutcher (Oliver) looking rather silly in long hair then I saw a rather weird looking girl Amanda Peet (Emily) and paused to watch what was happening here. I was rather pleased to see that the movie had just started so just kept the remote aside and watched on. I liked what I saw, it was rather silly but I still liked it because I could really relate to this story; the craziness of the initiation all too familiar. The surreal time when you live in a sort of a dream with a stranger in sensual and fantastic world; you can either freeze it there and move on your separate ways or get to know the person and burst the lovely bubble. In the movie, it's frozen and thawed time and again. Of course I raised my eyebrow more than once at the silliness of the story at times when there’s a gap of two years and sometimes three in the story—people really do move on and don’t have those feelings anymore—but what I found to be nonsense was really a figment of my imagination and in a certain way, this really was possible, why not? It was put together well. I found Emily to be a little too complicated in the way she has the preconceived notion about what things should be like to work out—till the very end—but then it suddenly dawned on me that Emily, after all, was a girl and all of them are like that. If I can’t accept it then I’d just have to turn gay. Emily, I believe, is also a very passionate person which is reflected in the fact that when the story starts it seems like she’s down in the dumps and it really seems like Oliver is the guy who’s gonna make it big in life, but it really turns out the other way round. Her passion of photography, which she starts of after Oliver gifts her a camera the second time they meet (three years after they first met), brings her success. Anyway I felt really sorry for this Oliver guy who makes such big plans in life, is so confident and almost reaches there but doesn’t. Broken and broke he finally realizes that he should at least express the love that he feels for her, which she never allows him to speak, but it’s too late by then as Emily’s already engaged to some other guy. By the way, they both date and breakup with many people in between. It’s sad to see him at that time for they both have had such amazing moments by then in between those six years but they’re so fragmented to fully reveal the gravity of their value to each person. But deep down inside I believe they do…but it’s very deep I guess, hard to reach kinds. Though they realize that they’re in love, they never speak up about it. She never lets him say it as she feels that it was she who made the first move with him and doesn’t let go of it till she “finds out” that it was actually he who made the first move…umm! Six years ago. Now that is something I found to be extremely stupid but then again with a woman, it’s such a real possibility. Anyway when she realizes, it’s too late on the other side and just when I thought this sweet story would have a tragic end, it doesn’t. It was pleasant and I must admit that Amada Peet’s face just grew on me and by the end of the movie, I admitted that she was beautiful; something contrary to what I thought at the beginning of the movie but even then I loved her big bright eyes.
And by the way, I find the new Batman costume in The Dark Knight such a downer.
No comments:
Post a Comment