To reach your destination in comfort or reach there anyway?

I have put down in words these two occurrences that happened this week over a short span of time. One of it happened in my scope of work and the other to someone I know.

The first person was a lady who was having menstrual problems for years altogether. Her GP, whom she saw last year, hurried her to have her problems sorted out ASAP as she appeared like an apparition to her, paler than a clean sheet in a deathly shade of pale that would make Casper the Friendly Ghost appear tanned! She, however, morbidly fearful of the people who use stethoscope as their trade tools, decided to procrastinate. Eight months later, she presented at my workplace to be told of a large growth in the cervix that needed to be removed via a simple surgery but after treating her severe anaemia. Her haemoglobin level was 2.9 g/dl! (Normal female range: 11.0 - 14 g/dl) The last time I heard she was trying to get admitted at a medical facility near her house. Good for her...

My friend, who has been suffering in agony for the past 25 years, had finally thrown in the towel. He has decided to lose some of his wisdom by putting a final stop to his recurring problem of exacerbations and remissions of an impacted wisdom tooth. After having a painfully lousy experience with a similar problem in the past during surgery on the contra-lateral side, he decided to procrastinate. Come Valentines' Day, he would lose his wisdom under general anaesthesia. Oh, no! If you indeed have specific memories erased from your brain as an effect of anaesthesia and you lose 2 of your total 4 of wisdom teeth, are you less than half smart? Anyway, it cannot be that bad as 35% of the population do not develop wisdom teeth at all!

Not a yawn!

I do not know why this 1946 movie is called 'The Big Sleep', it definitely did not put me to sleep. Especially when America's No.1 male actor of all time, the cigarette lit macho icon, the smart-talking Humphrey Bogart acts in it delivering his punch dialogue in a matter-of-factly way as if he knew everything that is going on around. Set in a dark smoky environment to set the mood of the genre of the movie (film noir), most of the movie is shot in dim lighting and most characters puffing away like steam trains! FYI, Bogart succumbed to oesophagal cancer at the age of 57.

Here he is paired with Lauren Bacall who acts as a sultry and flirty rich man's daughter. Bacall, almost half his age at that time, appear to blend quite well. This romance must have continued off-screen and ultimately wrecked his matrimony. Watching this movie, you would realise that many of things that most present viewers would know as a big 'No, No' in case of homicide like turning the body and touching things in the crime scene, is done. Well, viewers at that time were not exposed to 'CSI' and 'Law and Order'!

The police appear toothless and have to depend on Bogart to set things up who is at the liberty of doing what he pleases (with the interest of his paying clients at heart) which in the present day, be known as obstructing justice and tampering with evidence.The highlight of the film is the powerful dialogues and witty, incisive talks.

A General Sternwood hires Marlowe, a P.I., (Bogart) to investigate the debts of his gambling daughters discretely. Marlowe's work uncovers General's two pretty daughters who are pretty wild, the murder of the creditor (blackmailer), a gamut of a topsy-turvy rollercoaster of an adventure where the bad guys get killed or caught, and the good guy (Bogart) get the girl. Interestingly, I found a glimpse in one of the scenes of Marlowe spotting a wedding ring! Interesting!

Some lines of interest...

Sternwood: How do you like your brandy, sir?
Marlowe: In a glass.
Sternwood: I used to like mine with champagne. Champagne cold as Valley Forge and with about three ponies of brandy under it...I like to see people drink...You may take off your coat, sir...Too hot in here for any man who has any blood in his veins. You may smoke, too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.  

The emaciated Sternwood describes the dreariness of his existence. The humid hothouse is necessary for his survival, and he is waiting for death - the "big sleep" of the title - in the temperature-controlled greenhouse:

Sternwood: You are looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life - crippled, paralyzed in both legs, very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. The orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?
Marlowe: Not particularly.
Sternwood: Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.      

Masterpiece from the unheard decibels of a scream of a lunatic!

During my visit to the Louvre, I had arrived just at opening time. In spite of all the fantastic artwork and relics around, people were not interested. They were all zooming in to view the highlight of the revered museum- The Mona Lisa! Only to be disappointed be its miniature size dwarfed by all the surrounding mammoth work of art.
Ask anyone which is the second most painting in the world, chances are that they would probably only about Mona Lisa, Da Vinci and the mystery surrounding the identity, the masala and the uncertainty of the gender of the subject. The second, No!
Just to prove my point, I asked my two sons. Just like throwing a pie on my face, they matter-of-factly told me even without looking at me, The Scream. On probing, I found that they found it out from watching 'Sponge Bob Square Pants'. Yeah, the show which is accused of shortening attention span! They are more knowledgeable than I thought they were.
Just like all works of art, 'The Scream' has its own story.
I first saw it in primary school (painted by a student) decorating the hall without me knowing what it was. And it appeared again in secondary school as somebody's linograph printing in art and craft class. When the posters of 'Home Alone'was staring all over the world, little did I know that it was mirrored after the famous painting.
'The Scream' was painted by Edvard Munch, a Norwegian painter in 1893 in a street in Oslo.
This street housed a mental asylum in a country with the highest rate of suicide in the world. Walking along the street, one could hear screams of its inmate. Hence, the painting and the scream.
In 'Home Alone', the posture of the boy is meant to accentuate the scream of a boy forgotten by his family and is left to to fend for himself an otherwise innate piece of paper!

“I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” Edvard Munch, 1893

Oh Muruga! Where Art Thou?

Shiv family (North)

Siva family (South)

Coin, 200BCE, Indus Valley

Somebody said that Hinduism is amalgamation of believes of many in the one God with various manifestations and names. The earlier settlers who jump started the civilization in the Indus Valley had their own Gods of worship. Along came the culture from the North, either by cultural or physical invasion. Their mode of worship was forcibly or by diffusion infused into the society. Some society members never forgot their predecessor icons and continued worshipping them in their own way and stories were created to substantiate their practice.
With that background in my mind, I was not at all surprised when the secretary of the temple, on his routine weekly announcement of events of the following week, totally omitted Thaipusam in his list. He was faithfully reading out on this prayer and that prayer and Shivrathri. That's it!
Actually, Murugan (Kaarthikeyan) has been hanging around the scriptures since the first millennium BCE. Somewhere along way, Murugan who appeared as the elder son of Shiva disappeared in some scriptures and appeared in other the younger brother of Ganesh and the eternal manifestation of youth. From the middle ages, He disappears from the North but makes sporadic appearances in certain parts of India like Haryana, Punjab, Bengal and Maharashtra.

Happy Thaipusam! Just call his name and He will come flying down in his peacock....

Lovely locked modern day Sherlock!

Meet the new 21st century occupant of 221B Baker Street, London. Yes! It is yet another version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictitious crime buster, Sherlock Holmes - 2011 BBC edition.
Thanks to UniFi and BitTorrent, we are not at total dependence for the strewn our way by our unfriendly satellite TV to view new shows.
I just finished viewing the three 1-hour episodes of the entertaining Season 1 series of Sherlock which were released in the UK in 2010. Refreshing, cocky, conceited tenant of Baker Street terrorizing the streets of London doing what the present day CSI team should be doing.  Only this time, the streets of London appear clean and breathable and the London Black Cab is Sherlock and Watson's frequent mode of transport , not hansom cab as in the original Doyle's novel. Also missing are the paraphernalia frequently associated with Holmes- the Sherlock cap and the pipe (Sherlock is on nicotine patch now). I wonder if he is still on dope. Holmes is still the mysterious character frequently in his own world but I did not hear him say, "Elementary, my dear Watson!". Watson is an Army doctor who injured himself in tour of duty in Afghanistan. His injury turned out to psycho-somatic as thought by Holmes and towards the end of the first episode, he was running together with Holmes after the bandit!

Another gem from the bygone era!

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Yet another blockbuster movie produced by an oft-misunderstood under-appreciated blacklisted director who was way ahead of his time, his 1948 release film noir of 'The Lady from Shanghai'. This bigger than life flamboyant megalomaniac but empty in the pockets Orson Welles did this movie whilst his relationship with wife, the WWII pin-up poster queen, Rita Hayworth, was rock bottom and he was blacklisted in Hollywood after the grandeur disappointment of Citizen Kane at that time. Before the film was released, they finalised the divorce and  'The Lady' also received poor reception by the critics! That is until many many years later...again!

Rita Hayworth, the pin-up
with her signature locks

Viewers were disappointed with Hayworth's bob cut and could not understand Welles' weird camera angles, its convoluted story-line, sense of humour and tongue-in-cheek type of narration. Almost an hour of the movie was cut from the final release to pacify the audience!

Michael O'Hara is a seaman with a bad police record who meet a promiscuous mysterious married lady, Elsa, on a strange night in New York. He is harassed to partake in a yacht trip from NY via Panama Canal to San Francisco by her and her husband, a crippled attorney with a drinking problem, Arthur Bannister.

The journey becomes weird with suspicious characters aboard - Arthur's partner (George), a butler (a private detective who is hired by Arthur to keep an eye on his wife), maid and the flirty Elsa. The trip takes them to exotic locations including Acapulco. It gets weirder when George offers O'Hara a cool $5000 to sign a confession of killing George! George wanted to disappear and go incognito to claim his insurance money whilst O'Hara cannot be prosecuted without a body. The plot gets complicated and darker. A devious elaborate plan is laid out by George with alibi and witness. The only problem was that George and the PI are killed, and blood is in Michael's hands.

Arthur defends him in a court filled with mockery and pandemonium. It seems that Welles' had an inherent dislike for lawyers. That was his way of taking a swipe at them. For example, when Arthur is at the witness stand, he is asked whether he is admitted to the Bar to the laughing crowd, obliviously referring to his drinking habit and the bar with alcoholic spirits! The judge is playing chess in his chambers whilst the jury deliberate!

Aversion to smoking in slowly setting as seen in the signboards around courtrooms and prison rooms -but they are still smoking anyway. Maybe Welles is trying to convey the message that the lawyers themselves do not respect the law!

O'Hara escapes from the courtroom in a comedy of errors to clear his name. At the final scene, we discover that Elsa is femme fatale who masterminded the whole plot to have both George and Arthur killed for her to claim the insurance money and run.

As in all of Welles' movies, the dialogue is the powerful tool that never fails to fascinate me. When O'Hara is held in an amusement park as captive (it was a new concept in the 40s), he realises that he is the fall guy and falls into a roller coaster slide - this type of wordplay is indeed cheeky. 

There is an unusual creepy scene in a public aquarium with weird looking fishes in the background that accentuates the suspense is worth mentioning. The final confrontation scene before the curtain fall is revolutionary in a crazy Magic Mirror Maze.

An excellently gripping watch..... and let me ponder upon some of the lines...
At the start of the movie...introduction...

When I start out to make a fool of myself, there's very little can stop me. If I'd known where it would end, I'd never let anything start, if I'd been in my right mind, that is. But once I'd seen her, once I'd seen her, I was not in my right mind for quite some time...me, with plenty of time and nothing to do but get myself in trouble. Some people can smell danger, not me.

That's how I found her, and from that moment on, I did not use my head very much, except to be thinking of her.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

Before the closing credits.....

I went to call the cops, but I knew she'd be dead before they got there and I'd be free. Bannister's note to the DA would fix it. I'd be innocent officially, but that's a big word - innocence. Stupid's more like it. Well, everybody is somebody's fool. The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I'll concentrate on that. Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die trying.

Hitchcockian humour in a musical?

Waltzes from Vienna (1934)
At a time of financial weakness and desperation, Alfred Hitchcock must have made his first and last musical drama. It has a lot of Hitchcockian eccentric comedy of sorts , poking fun at the life of the rich Viennese aristocrats. Johann Strauss Jr., a disillusioned young man ridiculed by his famous composer father for his 'laughable' compositions, tries desperately to have his composition heard.

He befriends a young pretty countess who takes a liking to his abilities and takes it upon herself to get his composition public. This infuriates Jr's baker's daughter girlfriend, Rasi who is quite contended with him donning baker's hat and getting his hands dirty with flour. 

The countess plans a devious scheme to delay Senior Strauss' arrival at a private presentation whilst Jr. is coaxed to lead the rostrum to the demands of a boisterous Viennese aristocratic crowd to lead the  waltz 'Blue Danube' to a petrified crowd. Through a spat of confusion of events, Johann Jr. reconciles with Rasi and countess leaves the young lovers alone.The animosity between father and son continues, however. 

This is an adaptation of the story young Johan Strauss, in real life, whose father wanted him to be a banker. The music in him could not be contained and the result is the evergreen, ever popular "Blue Danube'.

One memorable moment in this movie is when Rasi is caught kissing her boyfriend by her baker father. He said' "Do you know that I was allowed to kiss your mother only 6 months after the wedding?" To which she replied, "Father, is that why you were 50 when I was born?"