RIFLE RANGE BOY

Nari! Nari! (Untuk Bacaan Rakyat Malaysia) Uthaya Sankar SB The moment the author started narrating part of his story at a book reading event recently, I was transported back to the late 1960s. My sister and I, both toddlers, enjoying the spring of lives, without a care or worry in our lists, were living in bliss in Brown Gardens. This is one of my earliest memory of my childhood that I can remember. Puthu Atteh (new aunt), the newly married lady (then) with an infectious toothy smile, was renting a room in my parent's abode. Every living day was a day filled with adventure, exploring new nature's gift to game play. With our neighbour's battalion of kids of two families, we played ' masak-masak ' - 'cooking' up a dishes with leaves, drain water and twigs! and 'robbers and thieves' - hiding behind trees and in culverts! Night-time was out of bounce for games and we were homebound. To let our imagination go wild, there were Puthu Atteh 's ...

Rahasya (Secret, Hindi; 2015) After watching the 'Mousetrap' in London, my interest in murders suddenly had a resurgence of sorts. I was pleasantly surprised when this Hindi whodunit came along. In the same vein as Agatha Christie's mystery murders, this film is mind boggling in its storyline. This story is, however, based on the real-life murder that took place in a middle-class household of the Talwars in New Delhi in May 2008. Aarushi Talwar, a 14year old only child of Dr Rajesh and Dr Nupur, dentists, was found dead in her bedroom. Before long it became a national scandal when their male servant was found murdered too. Pretty soon, the media had a field day conducting trial-by-media and practising yellow journalism. After much sensationalism with shoddy police work, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) moved in. Even though CBI could not conclusively implicate anyone for the double murders, the courts decided to pass life imprisonment for both parents along t...

Opening Night (1977) Another John Cassavetes' movie with the vivacious Gena Rowlands with yet the same topic of mental illness. Here, Gena Rowlands appears as a prima donna stage actress, Myrtle Gordon. She can be described as immature, uncertain of her abilities and easily swayed by external factors. She is no doubt a talented actress who wants to give her best in her roles. At the same time, the current role that she is acting, about an older lady with marital problem makes her reflect on her own life. She was not getting any younger, with no partners to share her life.  At the same time, Myrtle witnesses a fan get hit by a car just after she had signed an autograph. This tends to be her tipping point that pushes her over to a problematic quagmire. Her promiscuous relationship with her producer and failure to perform at rehearsals give quite a headache to the cast and crew. As the dates get closer to her opening night, everyone gets hot under their collar. Ever...

Thanks CG for contribution. A good one. Unfortunately, I did not laugh all the way to the bank! Speaker of any language, who can appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the language, if he had spoken it long enough and had spent time mixing with the cultures that use the language, will be able to come out with gems like these. All he needs is a crooked mind, wit and a good sense of humour. Coincidentally, a recent study showed that a person with a 'dirty mind' leads a healthier life.

I have the urge to laze around all day on a Sunday because I know that my services are not needed. I convince myself that I should reward myself by patting myself at the back and tucking myself to sleep. After all, I have been on my feet all week long. Even God who created the Universe rested on the Sabbath. Fine. I pamper myself on my rest day. My regular activities and clockwork-like demands of duties kind of puts my biorhythms in place. That is, I know I will need to do this and that with the satisfaction that whatever I am doing serves a certain purpose in continuity of life; of my life, my progeny, my lineage, perhaps the next generation and wishfully mankind on the whole. I shudder to think what will happen when I am given the standing orders or 'privilege' to stop doing all these. No more deadlines to meet and no more compulsions to present myself in person to perform my one thing I am given the pleasure of! What happens next? Am I going to slide down the pat...

Ms. Marple: Murder at the Gallop (1963) They say murder is no laughing matter, but this Agatha Christie based movie makers decided to give a light-hearted comedic feel to this one. Even the original title from the story is based on is quite sombre, 'After the Funeral'. Ms Marple, Agatha Christie's loveable freelance detective, is acted by Margaret Rutherford who looks like someone's eavesdropping granny rather than a window climbing, torch-light armed crime buster. She, however, does a marvellous job in this murder mystery based in a stable in the English countryside. As Ms Marple goes around asking for donations, she and her side-kick bumps into a dying rich man in his usual secluded mansion. Even though the police suspect it to be a death caused by natural causes, a heart attack, Ms Marple is adamant that it is anything but a natural death. She is further convinced when she sneaks in to overhear the reading of the old man's will. With the backdrop of a...

Back to the future (Trilogy) 1985-1990 October 21, 2015, has special a significance to BTTF fans, as in the second offering Marty and Doc go into the future. The future that they see in 2015 is a far cry from the real 2015! Absent in real life are the roadless highways, automobiles that run on thrash rather than fossil fuel, the gravity-defying hoverboard  (the futuristic skateboard), among others!  Back in the 80s when I first watched the first instalment of BTTF, I thought that it was the smartest storyline ever produced with its catchy dialogue. One particular scene that stuck on my mind is when Marty performed a lead guitar rendition of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode'. One fellow band member, Melvin, overhearing the tune calls upon his cousin Chuck to hear the 'fresh' tune that he was looking for his next song! Moving to and fro between times in their DeLorean speeding at 88mph with the help of a flux capacitor and 1.2gigawatts of power, Doc reali...

Murder She Said (1961) Come to think of it, she is a bit like some of the slightly older people in our lives that we know. (Hush, hush). All inquisitive and nosy at times. Poking their heads into unnecessary businesses and insisting what they saw was right and usually is. It sometimes can be annoying to the affected parties and invades into their something quite private called privacy. To the nosy-pokers, the older generations usually, this concept may be something quite alien! However, there are some who, under the cloak of privacy, do secretive transactions and pass it off as national security and insist that it cannot be questioned. That is another topic for another day! Margaret Rutherford Across the Atlantic, in a year's time, Ursula Andres would emerge from the waves draped in what was hardly accepted as garment appropriate for general consumption. Their British cousins were quite contended with casting a 70-year-old Margaret Rutherford, hardly a sex symbol, in a mur...

How to murder your wife (1965) After indulging in powerful stuff, decided to go light and easy with a romantic comedy. Even though sounds eerily to be filled with thrilling suspense, it is actually a Jack Lemmon's comedy. It is basically a fairer-sex bashing and an advocate of virtues of a single's life. The protagonists and his sidekick, however, succumb to the lure of the flesh at the time. Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon) has a well-choreographed life with his efficient butler to handle his daytime job of a newspaper cartoonist and his nocturnal flirtatious escapades. His dream life comes crumbling down after, in a drunken stupor during a friend's bachelor party, marries a whipped cream bikini-clad Italian-only speaking model! The morning after, after realising his folly, tries to untangle himself from the marital web. His cartoon strip soon mirrors the miserable life he leads and it continues to be a hit as before. Ford has his own team who would shoot photos of him r...

It looks a clip from 'Gremlins'. First they appear with their pathetic image. Their droopy eyes of melancholia, tattered clothes proof of their poverty, their unkemptness, their skin wanting of a tough scrub, the hole in their soles nut not is their souls evident of their many miles of rubber burning journey, their dehydration and their helplessness were sure to melt even the steadfast of a cold steely heart. If all fails, there is always, the kids! No one would be stone-hearted enough to hurt a child. With their curly locks, demure captivating blue eyes and tears rolling their cheeks, something has to give. Hosts receive them with open arms in the name of humanity. Despite their own cash-strapped coffers, they decided to share their bread. Live and let die, they said to their brethren, come and join our humble meal. Join their meal they did. Squat in their home, they did. So did, the competition for space, opportunities and place in the sun. As the sunny days were cast by a...

The Martian (2015) Sorry, but I feel that Apollo 13 which was directed by Ron Howard had me at the edge of my seat, literally as I watched on a flight, not this one. The suspense, the frustrations, the teamwork somehow was more apparent in the failed Apollo mission. Perhaps, from the word 'go', we, the viewers were aware how the course and the ending would be. There would be frustrations, failed attempts, frustrations, survival skills and earth shattering rescue missions. Sure enough, that was how it turned out to be. Sure, there were some new ideas in the film - like how decompressing a suit could rocket the astronaut to propel in space like a superman and growing potato and making water in Mars. Being Hollywood, we just take everything at face value. Anyway, most economies in the world would not spend millions and waste much of their resources just to save one individual. At a philosophical angle, someone mentioned the other day, "Haven't Man done enough dam...

True Story (2015) Bumped into this story as I was checking on the second season of 'True Stories'.  Initially, the movie was getting interesting as a mass murderer is arrested with a pseudonym that of the protagonist of the film, Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill). Finkel is an award winning journalist with the New York Times who was fired from his job for being untruthful in his reporting. As he was brooding in his misery in a secret hideaway in the wilderness, he is informed of this case. He decides to visit the inmate. Hence starts a series of interview with a disturbed man, Christian Longo (James Franco) who killed his wife and three children. Finkel gets absorbed into the man's story and is convinced that he may be a victim of circumstance. After that, the story becomes draggy and uninteresting as Longo, in his soft hypnotic dialogues, makes the film a bore to watch. In his actual trial, the accused tells his feats of killing his family to the jury. It appears as if th...

Religulous (2008) Written and Hosted by: Bill Maher Keeping with Bill Maher's trademark presentation, he does all the talking and does give his interviewee a very little chance to talk and express their ideas. He simply bulldozes them with bombastic jargons and downright, on-your-face hurls that make his guests tongue-tied. Furthermore, many of his guests were not native English speakers! Neither were they theologian philosophers in the vein of St Thomas Aquinas nor Augustin to rebut his cynical snarls. In other words, his approach is no different from the aggressive steamrolling approach advocated by the famous Indian Muslim born again, Dr Zakir Naik. It was a pure 100-minute ranting of the downsides of the Abrahamic religions who all proclaim that their God would save them and only them. All believers are portrayed to have a wish list of dying in a nuclear war. Many believers of various sects of Christians (Mormon, Scientology, Catholics), Jews and Muslims were interviewed. ...

I was fascinated with the concept of having a drawing room commonly seen in Victorian homes. All the while I thought it was a place where architects drew their plan or generals drew their strategies to cannonball another helpless native country. Only of late, I came to know that the drawing room is nothing as romantic as that. It is simply a room where the men simply withdraw after finishing their dinners while the ladies engage in tete-a tete or organise the maids to clean up. The men would withdraw, smoking their expensive cigars, sipping down their port wines and stir up the prospect of creating business opportunities. The same concept seems to work at pubs and smokers' room in country clubs. A place where same minded people would congregate and talk about small things that could one day eventually change the world. Many world decisions, engineering feats and history had been created in these spaces — a little indulgence in sin to build the camaraderie that would survive th...

Zeitgeist - Moving Forward (2011) Another compact presentation with loads of information to convince its audience that our civilisation is doomed to fail. The existence of the human race seems to be based on the pretext that everything in the world is infinite. Nature is there for our taking and abuse. It appears that our monetary system is flawed by creating more and more debt as well as the glorification of greed as a good virtue! In the first part, the film discusses human biology, behaviour and certain illnesses. The affliction of diseases is not so straight forward as our DNA makeup alone. Various variables like epigenetic factors, psychological and social environments determines our general wellbeing. Unlike other animals, a man's brain matures postnatally. As the human pelvis became smaller with its canal narrower when they became erect creatures, babies were, in a way, born prematurely. Neural connections were to complete after delivery and many events surrounding th...

Monkey Kingdom (2015) You see a troop of monkeys up high in the telephone cables walking a tightrope trying to get to the other side. You think nothing of the endeavour. Little do you realise that the tribe is actually a band of wounded soldiers trying to recoup their energy so that one day that they could reclaim their motherland. Well, these are some of the little things that you would learn after watching this documentary. That everyone, even low life animals with five senses, has a story to tell about their existence, their civilisation and their evolution. The film follows the behaviour of a barrel of macabre monkeys in a certain locale christened Rock Castle in Sri Lanka. There is an obvious hierarchical way of life, in that the supposed high-class ruling class, protector of the clan occupy the highest level of the rock. Perched high in the strata, they are privileged to savour the best of the fruits and the best of the food available the whet the primitive desire of any l...

Thanks to RS who knows I enjoy watching old pictures! The first picture of the Andromeda Galaxy in 1888  The first known picture of the Taj Mahal. 1855  The sonderkommando photographs taken secretly in 1944 by an inmate in Auschwitz, and along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz album are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers. At a segregated lunch counter in Tennessee, Elvis Presley is waiting for his bacon and eggs while a woman waits for her sandwich. she is not permitted to sit. 1956 A child is blinded by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. 1945  Kindergarten teacher Helen Hulick who was a witness to a burglary was given a five-day sentence and sent to jail for contempt only for wearing pants to court to give her testimony. Los Angeles, 1938 A French opium party in 1918  The first photo of the USS enterprise model and the men who build it. 1965  Onlookers reaction to the Challenge...