RIFLE RANGE BOY

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/old-town-in- stockholm-sweden-gm523395133-51237318 Stockholm Syndrome never really happened, at least not how they described it to us. A little background here... Back in 1973, in Stockholm, a convict on parole, Jan Erik Olsson, attempted to rob a bank with a gun. He took four bank employees as hostages. He held the hostages for six days in the bank vault, demanding that the police release his friend, a celebrity criminal, Clark Olofson, from behind bars, some money and free passage. The police did not budge, but they managed to smoke them out by drilling a hole through the vault and infusing noxious gas inside. The puzzling thing throughout the whole fiasco was that the hostages were said to have sided with the assailant. They viewed the police as the bad guys and did not take the opportunity to escape when the police purposely laid the plan for them. It is said that the hostages later crowdsourced funds for the robber's trial.  It was later revea...

Manjummel Boys (Malayalam/ Tamil; 2024) Director: Chidambaram I was intrigued by this movie after reading two articles. The first detailed a legal dispute between Ilaiyaraaja's side and the producer. The dispute arose when the producer used Ilaiyaraaja's song composition as a background without obtaining permission. This incident added an exciting layer to the movie's production. The second article discussed the Tamil Nadu Home Secretary's directive to the Kodaikanal Police to investigate police brutality against complainants, which also played a role in the movie's plot. This is a gripping tale of a rescue mission that took place in 2006. A group of young men from Majummel, Kochi, embarked on a trip to Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, a popular tourist destination. While exploring, the men made a fateful decision to venture into a restricted area. Tragically, one of them fell into a seemingly bottomless pit. The story unfolds as the remaining men, faced with a group of ap...

Society of the Snow (La sociedad de la nieve, Spanish; 2023) Director: J.A. Bayona We have discussed this movie before. Check here . This is yet another version depicting one of the greatest human stories about survival. On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 flew over the Andes from Uruguay to Chile. It was carrying 45 passengers on board, mostly Uruguayan rugby players. It crashed into the most inaccessible part of the mountain. Presumed to be dead by the authorities after failing to find them in their search-and-rescue, the 29 initial survivors were left to fend for themselves. A few died due to their injury, and some in an avalanche that ensued. Exposed to the element and having no food to eat, they had to use the last of their survival skills, teamwork, and spiritual faith to hang on to their dear lives. When food became non-existent, somebody suggested that they eat the remains of the dead. Initially, the passengers thought a rescue mission would ensue. After seeing ...

A Nearly Normal Family (Swedish, Season 1, E1-E6; 2023) Director: Per Hanefjord Maybe there is no one there watching you. You are just out there alone on the small blue dot amid all that emptiness.; a blob in that awful waste of space. That’s all. Above us, only sky, and there is no hell below us. Perhaps the wise men who came long ago knew about this all the while. They also knew that an observing eye in the sky ensured conformity and obedience. Could they know about the double-slit lamp examination findings and how the results vary when an observer is included in the experiment? The reality changes when observed. Putting the fear of prancing eyes would ensure people act within social mores. That would prevent straying from the needs of the societies, sticking together against the elements of Nature and from predators eyeing the exact needs. As time passed, things were added and amended to suit the demands of the times. A certain amount of legitimacy was sealed by infusing a divin...

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...

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...

Naked and Afraid: S2E5 (Malaysia) Purists are still jumping mad over this Discovery Channel reality TV show. The crew was given permission to do shooting in Malaysia but little did the authorities know that this survival show would be done with the contestants in their birthday suit using the unforgivingly harsh Malaysian tropical jungle as its backdrop. The conservatives are fuming mad because they do not want to be seen as condoning these type of exhibition of flesh. And they are still scratching their heads wondering how that one slipped through while the rest of the world does not give much thought this unstimulating show which I would not have bothered to view if not for the mania stirred by holier-than-thou vanguards of moral code of my society! For all fairness, the necessity of the contestants to go full monty is purely an economic strategy (ka chinggg...). The donning of single drape to cover their modesty is not in any way going to alter their survival in the cruel tropic...

  Alive! (1993) I remember watching the trailer of this dubbed (Mexican) film named 'Survive!'. My sister and I were fascinated by the cinematography and the desperation of the passengers to survive in the freezing temperatures of the Andes. We never watched it till now. After the MH370 mystery, I thought of giving it a go. This survival film shows the fighting spirit of humans to live in the treacherous, freezing, barren mountainous terrain of the Andes over two months. A group of young boys and relatives were travelling from Uruguay to Chile. As they descended, misjudgement caused the plane to lose a wing, part of her fuselage and the other wing and finally crash in the middle of nowhere, making it impossible for anyone to search and rescue. With no telecommunications and a limited food supply, staying alive in the cold was a Herculean task. If that was not enough, an avalanche hit the unfortunate victims, killing more passengers who were not killed earlier. The dilemma ...