RIFLE RANGE BOY

Straw Dog 1971 Director:   Sam Peckinpah Nature has made the male species biologically different from their counterpart. Nature's constant need to improve the quality of their offspring to survive the competition with other species has made the male species fight it out to qualify to sow their seeds.   Their robust physical attributes made it handy when hunter-gatherers settled down in communities. The male gender is assigned to protect the weaker segment of the community. So, a male is expected to play his role as virile, aggressive and fierce.   With time, power is no longer at the tip of a sword or a fist's knuckle. Culture made people less volatile and able to reason out things. To ease this, the rule of law was rolled in. The need for women's empowerment also arose. Power is a zero-sum game. The women's gain must be indeed a loss to men. Increasingly, men are said to be domiciled. That is at a macro level.   At a micro, things may be different. A man is still ex...

Leave the World Behind (2023) Director: Sam Esmail (based on the novel by Rumaan Alam) A Tamil proverb goes like this. 'Never live in a town without a temple'.   The main structure of a Hindu temple, specifically those from Southern India, which is placed above the central area, the sanctum santorum, is a gopuram. On top of the gopuram is a golden vessel containing nine types of grain.   Besides being a lightning conductor, the gopuram is a storage area for various grains for use as a starter pack in the event of  a major catastrophe, like massive flooding when seeds are destroyed or even a nuclear meltdown. These reserves are said to be good to use for 12 years, after which they have to be replaced. In temple nomenclature, the act of replenishing new seeds is a kumbabishegam . With everyone in their comfort zone, having the illusion of being in control of it all, they built certain biases around them. They confirm their biases by reading materials reinforcing these preco...

Kiss of the Spider Women (1985) Director: Héctor Babenco Against the backdrop of a despotic Latin American regime and people's uprising, this story looks not at the cruelty of man against a fellow man but at the question of what makes a man a man.   Two men of opposing characters are confined in the same cell. The characters reflect what society defines men then and now, biologically or psychologically, or in modern terms, assumed gender! Is a man judged by his character or words based on a handshake?     Valentin is the epitome of machoism as defined by society. He is a tanned, hirsute, testosterone-driven hot-blooded member of the revolutionary resistance who is caught for subversive activities against the military dictatorship. The authorities are trying very hard to infiltrate his movement but in vain.   His cellmate is Luis Molina, an effeminate man, an unabashed homosexual, and a window dresser, who was arrested for corrupting an underage youth.   In the b...

1917 (2019) Director: Sam Mendes The story is written by Sam Mendes based on what his grandfather told him. Mendes' grandfather was a soldier in the Trench War, and this offering is in his honour for his heroic act of treading through the dangers of the enemy-line and the perils of Nature to pass over a piece of vital information to the advancing army. His deed indeed saved the day and many fellow comrades. I am a little perplexed. On the one hand, I am taught that violence is the primitive way of settling an issue. Violence can never solve any problems but instead, create new ones. An eye for an eye leaves the whole blind, they say. Yet in the same breath, the same people proclaim that turning the other cheek is stupidity. All through our civilisation, war has been part and parcel of our evolution. With each significant catastrophe that we go through, the human race seems to go up one notch in terms of scientific achievement. War propels the world forward. War stimulates ...

Derren Brown: Netflix special (2018) Push, Sacrifice Darren Brown calls himself a psychological illusionist. He devises elaborate scams with his team of actors, engineers, stuntmen and others to influence his subjects to willingly perform heinous crimes or sometimes unthinkable sacrifices. He does all these with just suggestions as if the subjects are doing it at their own free will.  In an episode named 'Push', four people are shortlisted from a pool of applicants to help out in a charity event. He used the famous test where applicants stand up at the ring of a bell without any rhyme or reason to pick his choice. This is a classical experiment done by psychologists to illustrate that humans are mere unthinking conformists. To cut the long story short, three out of the four candidates that Brown selected could be coaxed to push a man off the edge of the roof at the order of a person in authority. This result is comparable to the Milgram Experiment in 1963 to illustrate o...

The human race must be a resilient lot. Nothing will annihilate them except if they decide to self-destruct. We have been through tragedies in many forms, natural calamities to man-made ones, but we keep coming back strong, shaken but not stirred. All they need is time and space to prosper. This, I realised when I attended a wedding in Karak, a small town along the Titiwangsa Range which forms the spine of the peninsula, in the state of Pahang. Even though it is located only about an hour's drive from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, these two towns seem worlds apart. Away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle, Karak is nicely tucked between hills covered with lush greenery of the tropical forest and its fresh air. The wedding reception held in the modest premises of a Chinese temple, it covered all the bare necessities. Forget the razzmatazz of the city lights and unnecessary blatant display of bling-bling, the function was never deficient in any other department...