RIFLE RANGE BOY

Echoes of Beatles' 'She is leaving home' kept reverberating... play the song below as you read... It was 5 o'clock but on a Sunday but no one was snoring. He was leaving home all right but for all the good reasons. Grandma was red in the eyes seeing her grandchild leave home for better life, hopefully. The father and son were quietly leaving so as not to wake the neighbours, not because they doing anything clandestine. Stepping outside, son feels all alone. Leaving his home after so many years, never a day went without seeing his parents, he has to fend now things for himself. No more helping hands to order to prepare his fancies and to dance to his idiosyncrasies! Picks up his luggage and walks to the lounge for the appointment he had made with the airline, to take him to where he is to learn about trades. By 9 o'clock in the evening, he is so far away, waiting to dive into the sea of challenges to swimming ashore with glee. Hopefully, battle scars are n...

I can almost swear that his eyes were welling up. It is definitely not the spicy crab dishes that we were savouring for his eyes to glisten. It is understandable. More than 30 years ago, he vividly remembers how he feted his nephew who grew up in a sort of a ghetto, to clear himself of the mud of poverty and secured a place in the local university. That him, that was an achievement. It felt especially good as he himself had been a sort of a poster child to his side of his family. He grew up in a patriarchal environment where priority was for merriment. Satiety to gastronomic needs and entertainment to fulfil the basic primordial desires took precedence over self-improvement and general zest to come in life. His father, in his single generation, could the first writer of a riches-to-rags story (not the other way around). From a reputable strata in society with wealth to flaunt and parties to throw, they fell fast into the bottomless pit of poverty. His mother was a lotus. Despit...

In the high life; Bing Cosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra. Just the other day, I overheard a conversation at a party. No, there was no eavesdropping. It was plain for all to hear. Anyway, that is why parties are organised; for parties to be feted to meet to engage in small talks that would perhaps start the cogwheel of something big like a big money churning business venture. It is naivety to think that it is anything else but about economics. You thought it was to reap blessings from well-filled bellies and that nature would return in abundance what you offer upon others, a square meal and satiety? On the contrary, it is a case of throwing a small fish to bait a bigger one. There was this guy who so pleased to have met his old physician who had fixed his heart ailment many years previously when he was employed in a public hospital. After purging his problems of so many years, the patient was at a crossroads as he was receiving conflicting advice from his current caregivers. Afte...

Zeitgeist 2007 This one is a conspiracy theorists' galore. It just reinforces their belief that the world is not as it seems. There is always a hidden agenda and a hidden hand behind every occurrence around us. In this documentary presentation, the director looks at three aspects of world control, presented in 3 parts. In the first part, the film looks at religion. He infers that most religions in the world follow a particular pattern and is related to pagan myths and the study of astronomy. There are many similar narratives in the stories of Horus, Krishna and Greek gods. Even the symbol of the crucifix is pagan-derived and the Sun is the real God. The idea of religion as a tool of mind control is put forward to us. More murders are carried out in the name of religion than to save lives. The second part illustrates the many loose ends that do not tie up with the 9-11 hijack of planes and the Twin Tower disaster. They are selling the idea that the mishap was a carefully-pl...

Bullitt (1968) Now, the scene that everyone remembers of this movie is definitely the legendary street car chase of the undulating streets of San Francisco. This almost 9minutes car chase looked so real as if the viewers are actually seated in the car that is driven. Essentially, it marks the watermark of how car chases should be filmed! Naturally the Ford Mustang GT must have seen good sales that year. It must have created such an impression that the company decided to remake the model in 2008, all similar in shape and sound of the engine as well. The problem was that the earlier 1968 model had a carburettor whilst the 2008 one had fuel injection system. The manufacturers wanted the new car to sound old! And the sounds produced in the film was mixed with racing car sounds. Furthermore, the law does not allow cars to emit such loud sounds on the road. So they used sound technology to tweak the columns in the exhaust to attain near perfect replica. Ford Mustang GT 1968 Macho ...

Zeitgeist Addendum (2008) Back in the mid and late 70s, whenever there was free time, we would gather at the back of the class to talk about politics of the world. That child prodigy that we once knew, who used to rant gibberish of the things he had read from hardcover nonfiction books. We would all just awe in amazement. Well, he is back. He found him very much kicking and alive after much of life's hard dents. And now that he has got his bearings in order, he is ready to continue his discussion- in person and in spirit via Whatsapp. Armed with further 35 years of knowledge, he is ready to discuss and argue any subject at our pleasure. We, the same minded, have started a chat for this very reason. Bytes over megabytes are spent discussing over varied subjects encompassing religion, mysticism, realpolitik, history, civilisation, philosophy, psychology, economics, mankind, you name it. During one of those lengthy discussions, this documentary came up when we were talking about I...

Aylan Kurdi at Bodrum Beach It was just a picture to don the morning papers to say what reporters do best. Some of their photographs become international icons of a bygone era. Every living soul would be instantly aware of the American atrocity in Vietnam at one look of the picture of napalm struck confused girl running aimlessly with burnt clothes. This picture the dead toddler by the Turkish beach may one day be the reminder of the danger of stirring of a hornet in the highly volatile region of Middle East. For the perpetrators, the US, it is a European problem, not theirs. No rubber dinghies would traverse the Atlantic to reach their shores. You think a picture is just a picture, but you would be amazed at the dynamics and rhetoric that goes through before and after it goes to print. A dead body polluting the beach of a bourgeois beach resort. The child has no life. Death has engulfed him, but the picture is subtle enough not to appear gory. The violence and unc...

Bitter Lake (2015) Written and Directed: Adam Curtis The latest offering by Adam Curtis puts in perspective the genesis of the present-day firebrand fundamentalistic Islam that seem to rock the world and give other law-abiding Muslims a bad name. The author sets the blame squarely on the Saudi rulers for their efforts to spread Wahhabism. After World War 2, King Abdul Aziz of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) met FD Roosevelt aboard a ship on Bitter Lake in Suez Canal to strike a deal. The Americans were free to bring in money and technology to have their oil as long as the royal family was free to spread Wahhabism to the world. Splurge with oil money, KSA built many madrasahs in many countries, from Africa to the Indian subcontinent all the way to Indonesia. Hence started the nidus for the yearning for the practice of a primitive non-progressive 10th-century type of religion and total rejection imperialism, which is construed as corrupting Islam. Meeting at Bitter Lak...

Lelaki Harapan Dunia (2014) Written & Directed by: Low Seng Tat It has a long time since satires were made in this country. There was a time, in retrospect, after watching all those P. Ramlee's movies, when most of us used to laugh at ourselves whilst admitting that we are not perfect. Somehow, our the years we have changed. Perhaps due to inferiority complexes or fear of losing out and be steamrolled into submission by the others, somewhere along the way, we tend to take offence at everything when others comment on our follies and shortcomings. This movie is a brainchild of a product of our own Multimedia University and has a string of accolades to its belt. It, however, stirred the emotions of some writers who consider themselves the upholders of anything pertaining to Malayness! What more when the story was penned and directed by someone, not from the diaspora! Especially so, when this satirical offering not only re-created the aura and ambience of a Malay village but ...

I (ஐ, Tamil; 2015) Many recommended that I should watch this Kollywood outing which they say is different from the usual fare. I disagree. Throughout the film, I had the recurrent déjà vu that I had seen this and that. This 49 year old hero (Vikram aka John Kennedy Victor aka Chiyaan), is saying that he is no push over and appears with body toned and muscle contours chiselled out to perfection and have no qualms of exhibiting it. Nevertheless, his age shows in the form of crow feet and peri-orbital wrinkles. Just like his previous outing (Anniyan comes to mind), he acts as a deformed hunched back (ala Notre Dam) with neurofibromatosis-like papules. And the plot of vengeance involving calculated and varied manner of getting is so overdone. Perhaps the youngsters who throng cinemas again and again and burn the ticket collections must be mesmerised with the gaudy display of props, display of the female and male anatomy, the elaborate preparation of set dances with various motif...

Saw two snippets this week about the greatness of ancestors of two lands of which, in the present world need to show a lot to prove themselves. One giant had just awoken from a long slumber after yoke of colonialism and another which was prophesying philosophy to the world at a time when the world was inhabited by savages. Firstly, I found out about the engineering marvels of India in 1500 BCE when they could build a 35km bridge, Ram Sethu, between the southernmost peak of India and tip of Ceylon. In that age and time, they built a bridge with trees and flat stones that stood the test of time. The rise in sea-levels and priorities in other things in life made it a relic of the past. Now all that marvel is lost in the annals of time and its subjects live at the mercy of the international world for survival. Of course, there are tonnes of know-how too unevenly distributed around the country for comfort. Epicurus Next, turn to Greece. Now they seem the pariah who seems to be depe...

Soaked in Bleach (2015) This documentary dramatised presentation can be best described as a conspiracy theorist's assertion that Kurt Cobain's, the frontman of Nirvana, alleged suicide was no suicide, but a pre-meditated murder by his soon to be ex-wife, a fellow drug junkie, Courtney Love aided by a lackadaisical incompetent police work by the Seattle Police Department. It is based on the works of a private investigator, Tom Grant, who ironically was hired by Love to find Cobain who ran away from a rehabilitative facility. Grant recorded his conversations with his employer when he discovered that she started giving confusing and contradictory instructions to him. He thought its was better to document everything. For the record, Cobain was said to have pulled the trigger after a lethal dose of heroin and the event was deemed as a suicide. The film aims to show that perhaps Love hired the investigator to help to track down Cobain and with the help of another junkie help ...