RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Hindus, An Alternative History Author: Wendy Doniger Everything that happens in life is seen from a particular perspective. One can say that a cup is half full or half empty, both indicating the same thing. A tiny structure that we see from the corner of our eye over the horizon is actually a mammoth ocean liner that dwarfs everything adjacent to it. It is all in its interpretation. It also depends on our understanding fueled by our past experiences and know how. We see what we want to see. We sometimes are blind to the elephant in the room. And the senses do not appreciate what the mind does not know! From the outset, the author, a holder of doctorates in Sanskrit and India studies, qualifies her work as an alternative interpretation of the history of Hinduism in India. Just like the picture of the markings on the moon which is depicted below, the impression on the moon can be interpreted as a man (Cain the wanderer and murderer), rabbit or duck, depending on his background...

Visaranai (விசாரணை, Interogation, Tamil; 2016) Screenplay and Direction: Vettrimaaran Generally, I do not appreciate too much violence on the screen. This time around, it was different. It was no torture porn, but it was necessary to inflict the correct emotion to the viewers. This is no showcase drama of Indian culture or positive virtues but is a story that can happen anywhere in the world. Maybe the setting would not be the dirty back alleys of India or the unkempt dark skinned underprivileged Tamil labourers; the narration is the same. That, everyone, works for the System, and the System decides what is right and who is correct. It does not matter how high you are in the social strata, how educated or how influential you think you can be, the System decides. Hey, this sounds almost like organised religion; everyone is same in the eyes of God, God is watching you, (bad) things just happens! No matter what people say about the division of powers between the legisla...

Somewhere in Time (1980) In the Hindu Puranas, stories were told of people completing various lifeforms (karma cycles) through dreams. Through this process, kings change roles to become slaves or animals and endure punishment or pleasure. Time travel films usually deploy complicated devices to get their characters move through timelines. Surprisingly, in this purely romantic drama, it is made simple. Self-hypnosis in the presence of ancient artefacts is suggested as the way transport one back to the past. Christopher Reeve (known for his role as Superman) plays the role of a playwriter, Richard Coulier. At a time when he gets a writer's block, he drives around aimlessly and ends up staying in a grand old hotel. He is drawn into the intriguing world of time travel after being fascinated with a portrait of a stage actress (the Queen of mini-series of the 80s, Jane Seymour as Miss Elise McKenna). He remembers receiving an old pocket watch 8 years previously from a mysterious ...

Antichrist (2009) Screenplay, Director: Lars Von Tiers One is quick to find a punching back, a casual link to all our maladies. They hurl brickbats at others, nature, animals, bad times and bad omen as a reason of their predicaments. If nothing can be definitely pinpointed, genetics and nurturing take the beating. The actual evil of the world, according to this film, is none of the above but is buried deep within all of us. Yes, the animalistic, raw, unbridled desires in us are the culprits! We can blame all the evil that happens to us upon ourselves, not our parents or our siblings. This somehow graphic and gory presentation takes us through the journey of a psychotherapist and his wife. The wife is grieved by the death of her toddler. The child fell to her death whilst she and her husband were engaged in a passionate act of love making. The guilt of neglect and joy at an emotional moment dragged her into depression. The medications do not seem to be working; it only leaves h...

Mulholland Drive (2001) Story and Direction: David Lynch I remember my school teacher telling the class a story about art and artists. A painter once smeared paint over his toddler's bare buttock. He then made him sit a white sheet of paper. What resulted was the silhouette of a perfectly shaped apple. He went on to exhibit his masterpiece which spurred rave reviews and stimulated great literary discourses. What he was trying to say was that behind a masterpiece, there is a story and that sometimes people are fooled by artists! I watched this David Lynch's film with the same thought. This movie was initially intended to be a pilot for a TV series. Unfortunately, it was rejected by the TV company, but they decided to make out a feature film out of it. I think that is why there are many unrelated gaps and seemingly unrelated characters infused into the story. Or am I missing something? Still, these are very reasons this film attracts many interests, spurned multiple viewing...

BBC Four. Genius of the Modern World, Karl Marx (2016) He is honoured as one of the greatest thinkers of the modern world together with Nietzsche and Freud. Their ideas came about at a time when the whole world was changing, pre-existing economic models were crumbling, science was changing religious beliefs and people started developing new ideas about life. In the first of the three episodes, a historian Bettany Hughes tells us the life and times of a 20th-century icon whose idea rocked the world for a good part of the century, Karl Marx (1818-1883). It is interesting to note that he did not invent Communism. Communism predates his ideas. He got his inspirations from the young Hegelian movement at the University of Berlin and the French Revolution. Growing in a society controlled by the aristocratic Prussian rulers who discriminate his background as a Jew, he postulated that capitalism was a self-defeating and an exploitative system that makes everybody unhappy in the end. Th...

Nymphomaniac Vol 1 and 2 (2013) Director, Screenplay: Lars Von Tier Humans demand that it is their birthright to demand their pleasures. It is one's fundamental necessity to live a fulfilled life where it is filled with various pleasures. After all, they say, you only live once. You are only given the opportunity to live once. You are supposed to live to the fullest. You should go the whole 9 yards to make it a reality. And you blame all your future failures and underachievement to these unfulfillments. Somehow, it seems legitimate to holds others responsible for your existence accountable to your follies. The fault is anybody's except yours. On the other end, another group would argue that life on earth is torture. Our time here is an opportunity to serve and gain merit points for an eternal afterlife. They live by preset rules, suppressing their innate desires that they perceive every temptation as a test of virtue from the dark side to commit sin . This 5-hour presen...

Babu (பாபு, Tamil; 1971) I remember this movie as the one that we, in our childhood, could not watch as our annual Deepavali film. Amma was disappointed when we could not get the tickets and had to watch something else instead. Many of its songs used to fill the airwaves regularly, and one of the songs, ' Kanji Varuthappa ', was a hit during Thaipusam at the refreshment stalls before movie songs were banned by the Thaipusam organising committees. Even though the song talks about the various avatars of Lakshmi and their roles, there is the uneasy colloquial association of kanji (broth) and vanji (woman)   in the same sentence! At one look, one can easily see that it sees its socialistic-communistic leanings. The story, written by a writer from Kerala, argues about the actual meaning of divinity and the division of classes. It tries to wake the general public from the slumber that God paves the way for us to follow. We are masters of our destiny. The signatur...

Dancer in the Dark (2000) Director: Lars von Trier The plot of this film may be all too familiar to followers of Indian cinema. Stories of self-sacrifice, white lies and concealment of the truth to protect the greater truth are all too common. In the western world, this type of pictures would make it to Cannes and earn many accolades!  There were too many loopholes in the story to be taken seriously, hence the mixed response at its premiere screening; it was booed and clapped simultaneously. Mainly because it was set in the early 60s USA and Björk (the Icelandic smiley superstar) did the music score and the acting, it was given a second lease of life. Björk acts a Czechoslovakian immigrant, Selma Ježková, a single mother with a preteen son. She works in a factory making sinks and secretly holds a secret tightly to her chest. Selma has a hereditary degenerative eye disease which is slowly making her blind. She realises that it is just a matter of time before she becomes...

There are three levels of verbalisation. One which is vocalised for all to hear. This would be the one that gives an impression of ourselves to the world. It is often used as a yardstick to gauge our levels of education, our politics, our upbringing, class and creed. The spoken words in this category are guarded and carefully worded so as not to jeopardise one's own image. It is our way to engage with the world which would compartmentalise us into our pigeon holes. The second level of spoken words is the one uttered amongst immediate relatives and close ones. Here, the words are less guarded, but still, a certain amount of restraining is always exercised so as not hurt the sentiments of the people around us. We also take into consideration that the younger ones are watching (and listening). We have to be careful with his choice of words to a certain extent. Sometimes emotion takes charge to prove a point. The threshold to lose our composure is lower as we are in...

Blue Velvet (1986) Story and Direction: David Lynch My impressionable young mind used to wonder when I used to read of random shootings in schools and somewhat bizarre behaviours of certain people in the so-called civilised world. I thought the deviant acts were the price one paid for development. The phenomenon of adolescent psychology was not even an entity in this part of the world till about 20 years ago. Is it a first world problem as we set different priorities as our target and different role models to follow? Perhaps this film, another David Lynch classic, is trying to tell us that the dangers were lurking inside all the while. It is just that avenues are available to express now. It had just been swept under the proverbial carpet all this while. It starts on an idyllic day in the 60s on a sunny day with everybody smiling and Bobby V's 'Blue Velvet' song in the background. A man is watering his lawn, and his family members are drawn to a TV series. The man...

Trance (2013) It is said that memory is a good thing. The memory of having the fingers' burnt, either by fire or the stock market, may act as a deterrent for one to repeatedly parboil his body parts. But then, the body also prunes its memories, to erase off some apparently too painful memories. Nature also becomes selfish by erasing the painful thoughts of childbearing just to continue progeny. If not for lactation and contraceptive measures, the business of baby making will never cease anytime soon. Are painful thoughts really detrimental to the development of a person? Franz Kafka would certainly say so. Almost throughout his short life, he could not come to terms with his father's abusive alpha male type of behaviour and helpless unhelpful mother. His unfulfilled career and failed marriages were attributed by him to the unresolved issues with his upbringing. Perhaps this chronically depressed state of mind must have made him susceptible to laryngeal tuberculosis. B...

Experimenter (2015) Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps. The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart. Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to ...

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Director: Stanley Kubrik There are many versions of Hinduism and their search for the truth and attainment of blissfulness. The Vaishvanaites seem to think that the conversation between the charioteer and his Master encompasses all questions of life whilst the Shaivaites accept the union of the male and female counterpart of Nature as the way to reach peace. A different group of Tantric followers refer to a time when Shiva is said to be in a carnal embrace with Shakti as bliss. The lustful union of male and female is described as like a serpentine union that arise from the base of the spine to reach its peak as it reaches the brain to give a feeling of complete enlightenment called Kundalini. Interestingly, the medical caduceus uses the picture of a pair of snakes coiled around a twig as a symbol of a human body in perfect health! The right-sided snake refers to the male component whilst the left is the feminine part. No, said yet another group. The left p...

Gayathri (1977) This must be one of the last few movies where Rajnikanth, the unmistakable movie icon of India, who could do no wrong, appears in a negative role. Soon after 1977, as soon as he started winning awards, playing villainous characters, with which he began his career,  became a part of a bygone era. After Murattu Kalai (1980), there was no turning back. He springboarded to a demigod status performing gravity-defying earth shattering stylistic stunts! In this movie, he is cast as the villain opposite the then hero who at his tail end of his career, Jay Shanker. It is interesting to see Rajni at the receiving end of the feisty duel. This is not your typical Tamil drama with the usual forbidden love and opposition, and finally, love conquers all. It is an adaptation of a novel written by a Sujatha and is described as a psychological thriller with some necessary elements for Indian viewers like comedy sketches (by Venniradai Murthy) and fist fight...

Locke (2013) The family unit is such a fragile institution. In a modern affluent family, when economic assurance is a sure thing when the family members do not have to border whether the next meal would be present on the table, they demand emotional supports. They demand loyalty and love. One wrong move that questions your undying commitment to the family, everything things else goes out of the window. It does not matter if you bring a sizeable bacon to the table or that you had sacrificed your whole life for them. One scratch and you are a discard. This British drama starts with a man entering his BMW M5 after a long day's work. At a junction, after much deliberation, he takes the other turn. That is it. The protagonist of the show, Ivan Locke, a concrete engineer by profession decides to do the right thing. He has many things on his mind now, and he has to handle all of them as he travels in his M5 all along the M6 in his one and a half journey from Birmingham to London. B...

Lost Highway (1997) Written and Directed by David Lynch An interesting concept. When you are already up there amongst the doyen who change the field, you can never go wrong. You must be right. Others just do not get it. It is not that you do not make sense. You are not playing with their minds. They do not get it, plain and straightforward. This is another of David Lynch's thriller which appears complicated. A man is leading a quiet life, but it is later convicted of killing his wife. In a closed confinement, he actually changes into another person! Unable to contain an innocent person, he is released. The released person meets a girl who is the same girl who was the wife who was killed. In a convoluted story, this man gets entangled with another murder and changes back to appear like the first man. After watching so many movies with a straight storyline, this is a good distraction.

Let me ink a word or two before the heat surrounding the news of the fatal shooting of one of the occupants of The Cincinnati Zoo sizzles out. One morning, Harambe, the Gorilla, must have got up to a chirpy new morning, minding his own business playing dance monkey to the visitors. It was the same old mundane life for Harambe till a young visitor literally decided to drop in for a surprise visit. Amused, Harambe must have swung his arm like a ragdoll, leaping from one corner of his enclosure to another as he knew this action excites his spectators. This time, however, they were not amused. They yelled, screamed and reciprocated with a sharp dart over his torso. His head grew dim... Almost instantaneously, keyboard warriors the whole world over sprung into action. On the blue corner, sorcerers were crucifying the zookeepers for their haste. The red corner was packed with those who question the integrity, the mental and criminal background of the parents for the child neglect, abandon...

Moon (2009) You work day in and day out with the conviction that your purpose in life is to do your job. You perform at your best from 9 to 5 or 24/7 or as and when you are required to do. You give your 101%'s effort with the gumption that you are the man for the job; with the motto, to serve is divine. Hold behold. At the blink of an eye, it dawns on you that you are indeed not indispensable. You are made to just to serve as a cog in the wheel of time. When your time is up, the task will still go on, with or without you, upon somebody else purview! You are just a pawn in the master plan of existence. That is how life is. You give your life and soul. You think the system would collapse without you. Believe it or not, everything just goes on, with or without you! This 2009 sci-fi nihilistic drama was directed by debutante Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie). It was set in an unspecified time in the future when the world's energy crisis is a thing of the past. Man has dev...

Kafka (1991) Director: Steven Soderbergh No, this is not a biography of Franz Kafka or a part of a time of his lifetime. It seems that it is like a fictitious account of making Kafka-like a superhero in a setting reminiscent of his stories. Like in 'The Trial' he appears to be working in a large office doing purposeless paperwork. He looks like a bored reclusive office worker who finds more joy in his hobby, writing fictions between his free time and after-works. Incidentally, he is writing about a man who had transformed into a roach! (think 'Metamorphosis'). All through the film, he is writing a letter address to his mother, inking his thoughts and relationship with his father. In real life, Kafka's over domineering and aggressive father is said to have contributed to Franz's perpetual melancholic predisposition to life. History has it that his mother, the weak one, never got around passing the contents of the letter to his father. Franz never resolves ...