RIFLE RANGE BOY

Bliss (2021) Director: Mike Cahill This is one of the movies that one will either love or hate; get it, or it just passes by! I thought it was good. It helps the rest of the population not be affected by the complexities of a confused mind.  Quite often than that, to the lucky ones unaffected by the hardship of modern living, it is sometimes how certain decisions should be made. And we cannot understand why the mentally ill repeatedly make wrong life decisions. They plunge continually into states of helplessness and hopelessness.  Greg (Owen Wilson) is a staff in a call centre-like office. Even though his superior keeps calling him to the office, Greg is immersed in his own pencil drawing of his dream holiday villa. We gather that he is divorced. Even though everybody else is huffing and puffing, busy answering calls, Greg is in bliss, adding details to his drawing.  When Greg finally meets his boss, he is shocked to find out he has been fired. Greg shoves his boss aside,...

Woman in the Window (2021) Woman in the Window (1944) After watching the 2021 version, which was entirely predictable, with a lot of screaming and display of feminine gusto, I also decided to view the 1944 one. I knew in the mind of minds that the older one, which has the classic black-and-white collection of nuances of acting and beautiful dialogue, will be a head-turner. I was not wrong. There have been many rip-offs of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 'Rear Window'. If Steven Spielberg was taken to court for making 2007 'Disturbia', I wonder what they say about this. If in 1954, James Stewart was homebound after picking up a fracture while photographing, here in 2021, a psychologist, Dr Anna Fox  (Amy Adams), is confined to the four walls of her apartment complex due to a bad case of agoraphobia.  We later learn that she had lost her daughter and husband in a nasty car accident during a winter retreat. She is the lone survivor, testing out a new medicine that may give sid...

Of Mice and Men (novella, film, play) Author: John Steinbeck (1937) Films: 1939,1992 This John Steinback's post-depression novel is still being used in schools on both sides of the Atlantic. Why use an old book when there are so many new ones with less objectionable dialogues and situations? I think that is precisely why such a book with depressing, flawed characters and bullying as themes be used for students. As days go on, society wants to sanitise everything for our growing minds. Everything needs to be politically correct, and social justice must be seen to be done at all levels. Imagine one school in the UK collectively agreed that opening a door for a handicapped person is actually toxic behaviour. By doing so, we are emphasising to the handicapped person that he is needy. Furthermore, with critical race theory permeating every level of our interaction with a fellow human being, we need to drill upon our young minds that it is perfectly alright for others to be different fro...

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021) Netflix Docu-series. This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do. In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she pour...

Trance (Malayalam, 2020) A sucker is born every minute, they say. Probably what they meant was that the rooting reflex was innate in all babies. Stroke the cheek and the baby would automatically turn its head towards the stimulus and initiate a suckling reaction. It also could imply to the many who are suckered up to racketeering and daylight robberies.  Watching this movie was a sort of a deja vu experience for me. A close relative had discovered Jesus late in life, and she made it her raison d'être to spread His word. And along she went to all four corners of the country praying for the sick and the fallen. She would personally harbour drug addicts and vagabonds in her home to nurse them back to functionality. I remember her style. To get her congregation interested in her sermon, out of the blue, she would blurt out 'Hallelujah' on top of her lungs to get approval what she was saying. And an often repeated phrase was that Jesus spoke to her in her dreams. How she would i...

  Capone (2020) Many movies about 'Scarface' has been made about his nefarious activities. This one, however, deals with its aftermath. All the evil deeds that you did at the heights of youth will definitely come haunting you back, all within your lifetime. You need not have re-birth as one is oblivious of past evil karma. You would not have the urge to repent in your next birth as you would be clueless of your previous misdeeds anyway. The 'learning'  and 'punishment' are directed at the consciousness, not to the seeds of life or cells as they get replaced many times over in a lifetime. And cells keep on doing their own specialised work without changing anything, I think. After about eight years of serving time for tax evasion, Al Capone, the man who probably coined the word 'money laundering' was freed for medical reasons. He had been diagnosed to have neurological complications due to tertiary syphilis. The term 'money laundering' is said to h...

Joker (2019) It was a time when I was a teenager. I had been selected to play the role of Jesus Christ in a pantomime. It was an Easter play depicting the Resurrection. Obviously, the most alluring girl in the Sunday class, Catherine, was cast as Mary Magdelene. Everything went on all, and the show was enjoyed by everyone. I realised the hard way that people are generally not nice, and children are imps. Life is not fair. There is no justice on Earth, and we are kidding ourselves that there is a higher judge out there who would mete out appropriate justice when the time is ripe. As if pacifying a wailing child, we convince ourselves, rather foolishly that payback may happen in the afterlife or next birth. After the show, the children started teasing me as 'Black Jesus'. Of course, I did not know then that Jesus may have had Negroid features, but I felt particularly offended with the word 'black'. The teasing went on, joined by the other. One particular chap, Jere...