Die Fälscher

i always used to spurn the stereotypical movies made by prakash raj's production house.. and the prime reason for this might be the frequent hearing of stuff like 'i liked kanda naal mudhal, i loved mozhi... i basically love these prakash raj kind of movies'...

the last line spoils it all.. no offence to folks who love kanda naal mudhal ( a good one ) or mozhi, which i found to be a bit cliched.. the contempt is not towards these movies...its mainly towards the last line.. its always put in this corniest way...

probably it is not the way the director intended the movie to be.. all these movies are pretty decent watches.. its analogous to the best dish in my office lunch menu.. or voting in elections.. all we can do is choose the best that we are served with..

its just that i am lucky enough to have identified a better lunch menu at a place around the corner.. and i havent voted till now..

i liked azhagiya theeyae.. mozhi was ok ok ( my alter is pounding me to let it outside to voice its actual views on that movie .. its a very harsh sardonic movie critic by the way )..

i happened to see the velli thirai when it was telecasted during diwali.. i missed the first twenty odd minutes... i didnt expect so much from that movie to be honest... i liked the movie very much..

there was a dialogue in that movie.. i couldnt actually believe that i heard that.. where prithvi raj tells how a movie should be... how it should not be manipulative... the ideal case should be that a director should not add sequences.. for the audience to laugh or to feel a particular emotion... the sequences should be dictated by the story...

i have great respect for the director viji .. and the main reason for this entire thing mite be the single dialogue.. its not just the dialogue.. its the way that he had done this movie in the exact way that the character of prithvi raj says..

the climax was supposedly inspired from bowfinger ... but thats perfectly ok.. since i was impressed a few good sequences.. nice acting by prakash raj.. thinking of this.. i occasionally feel that vijay is a better ACTOR than surya... a blog on that later (how i would love to be a vijay fan)




saw the movie Die Fälscher (the counterfeiters) yesterday.. winner of the best foreign film oscar for the year 2007.. it is fictional account of the greatest counterfeiting operation ever.. operation bernhard by the nazi govt.. where jewish prisoners from concentration camps produced millions of forged pound notes of smaller denomination.. and the plan was to mix them with original ones to destabilize the financial stature of United kingdom..

it tells the story of Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch.. who is a big time con man.. who gets moved from the concentration camps to work on this secret operation.. he is big wig of those people working in this... he gets special treatment for his talents .. sally is a great character and wonderfully acted by Karl Markovics...

to put it short, he is a true neutral character (in terms of RPG's)... i may not be the best person to give a definition for his character... so i have taken it from a site that describes such a character..



A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. She doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil-after all, she would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, she's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way.

sally gets attached to a young artist in the camp.. he does the max that he feels is correct and that is to deliver the nazi officials what they demand.. so he could save the people around him.. there are lots of different characters in the camp... and one is that of adolf burger... who wants sally to stop doing what he is doing.. that is indirectly funding the german military.. adolf burger is a real life character who has written memoirs on his time in the camp.. sally trying to save the ones around him might postpone the defeat of germany...

the humiliation he suffers by the amoral germal officials, questions his lack of conviction of anything, which actually is a virtue according to me.. the film has a very great climax... my kind of climax so to say...

a must watch..

The Road not taken

This post is the result of the personal dilemma that I am in now. I wonder if everyone is happy with whatever they are doing in their life. By whatever, I mean the work they spend majority of their time in. When someone is young, he has interests in the weirdest, oddest and the stupidest of the things. Ask him what he wants to do in future, he says with the zeal that is only possible for the young ones. But while growing up, one starts to push aside his interests, calls it a hobby and starts working on the so called talents that are very much needed to sustain in a world of harsh realities. From what I could remember, majority of my time during my childhood was spent for this. Of course, it is the main reason that I am like this now for which I am very much contented.

But occasionally I get these pangs of, call it regret and conscience that tells me that this isn’t what I should be doing now, which is pretty common, I guess. I am at vain in understanding the reason for which many toss away their interests and choose a smoother and an easier route that guarantees sustenance. I have already walked a few paces in the comfortable yet insipid path and this failure in understanding makes me hesitant to go back to the fork and choose a tougher route. I am in the same old vicious cycle that everyone else is.

I have met lots of people who had very quirky ideas for life during their childhood but finally retired to the ways and means that is comfortable. To be honest, all these interests are not quirky by themselves, but they now sound unconventional only because of the alternate vapid path they have chosen now. A few of my friends who have a disparate (not actually) array of interests that includes archeology, paleontology, linguistics, movie making, forensic science, sports, finally settled in to a very charming and enticing career in coding and testing software which they do relish; at least that is what they say. Don’t mind the sarcasm; it is mainly due to my personal distaste for the field that I work in now.

I do not want to add to the cliché by re iterating Robert frost’s lines, which I will leave to the reader, but what I like about it is that those lines have a downcast and gloomy feel that says that the other side might lead to a pretentious meadow of lush greenery. I don’t know why, but I hate much prevalent optimistic quote mails that I receive every day as it overlooks the possibility of failure in your quest for ‘success’, for the lack of a better word. And I love these verses for the reason that it doesn’t do so.

For any person who loves any art form, music, movie or books, part of the pleasure lies in identifying good art, appreciating it and searching for more of it. I think that I am very good at a few things that I would love to take up as a career but I am not sure if it is just infatuation. Weighing the pros and cons and giving my justifications as to why I should continue whatever I am doing now, I occasionally feel that I might be one who is blessed with the ability to appreciate something but not create it. But there is this insatiable thirst that might make me go crazy and choose the tougher route one day. I may fail halfway through it or make it up to the meadow to find it is not as green as I had imagined it to be, or reach the meadow to find it as I have perceived it would be. Whatever it might be, I wish I would go nuts soon, stop having second thoughts about a few things and just take the plunge. Wish that day comes very soon.

P.S: I am not as indecisive and mentally unstable as this post may lead you to think, or am I??? :)

Experiencing life

I have been thinking of writing a blog for a very long time... but i havent been successful in writing one till now... since my subconscious is very good in arguing and convincing me against writing one... Anyway i am writing this particualr post just to make a start and so it is going to be crazier than the rest...

As i have said in abt me, I love watching movies and reading books because it helps in paraphrasing my thoughts and opinions. But for them, i would find it a bit difficult to convey something... so while talking to people i usually give anecdotes from movies or personal experience to convey something... a lot many find my opinions a bit odd and i find it a bit difficult to convince them when they retort against my views..

I came across a video interview of one of my favorite directors recently and in that interview he had expressed his opinions, i have always felt that but never could put in words... This interview was with Tarkovsky on his film Andrei Rublev. I have watched a few other works of his, but i had watched only half of this movie before... and since it was very deep in philosphy, i discontinued it then, and i was not in a mood for it at that time, i never finished it.. but i ll watch it completely soon...

when i watched that video, i was amazed at the way that he had phrased it.. I have felt in that way before... I dont have strong likes and dislikes except movies :) ... so i find it odd when someone says something with conviction... and that when goes together with a condescending tone occasionally gets on my nerves.. in the recent past i have come across situation where in people have told me that i should be doing a few things in a particular way.. because they have been in the situation before... i feel like telling them that i prefer doing it my way and learning it myself... rather than from their experience...

This is an excerpt taken from the documentry 'Andrei Rublev: a poet of the cimema'.

The pressure Rublev is subject to is not an exception. An artist never works under ideal conditions, if they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist, the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art will be useless if the world is perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but simply live in it. Art is born out of ill designed world. This is the issue in "Rublev": the search of harmonic relationship among men, between art and life, between time and history. Thats what my film is all about. Another important theme is man's experience, in this film my message is that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say: Use your fathers experience! Too easy: each of us must get our own, But once we've got it, we no longer have time to use it. And the new generation rightly refused to listen to it. They want to live it but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning. We cannot impose our experience on other people or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experiences we understand life. Rublev, the monk, lived a complex life. He studied with master Radonevsky, at the Holy Trinity but he lived in variance with his teaching. He got to see the world through his masters eye. Only at the end of his life, that he lived his own way.

for more details on the movie.. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060107/

the video.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V27XlEDLdtE

I am not going to elucidate more on this because i feel that what he said was succinct... Its just that you either feel its rite or its not rite only by your experiences... I wont try to make u feel otherwise as i would be contradicting my stand till now.. :)

Thats it.. atlast i have completed my first blog... and i am publishing it immediately since my subconscious has already started its justifications as to why i should be deleting this blog...
Do write ur comments...