Movie Reviews:
Son of Rambow: [4 of 5]
At times, the novel recalls those unsettling films of Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni where something dire seems always about to happen, even as attractive young people, full of anomie and confusion, meander aimlessly through an ominous urban landscape.Overall, for someone who has read most of Murakami's work, I wasn't particularly thrilled. I have already read mirror images of the content in his other work. However, I've always enjoyed reading his books again and usually find more meaning from a second read. For the time being, I'll have to give After Dark and average rating.
Murakami's literary spiderwebs remind us that, though we may not be aware of it, something profoundly disturbing sits behind the mask of reality, that we are being stalked from its other side and that we are connected to our past the same way the ground under our feet is connected to the depths of the earth, through wells and tunnels.
I was rereading a lot of my reviews and realized that I'm one wordy kid. While I am moved to write about a book or a movie, I want to find a succinct way of getting my way across. I've settled on writing a Haiku (俳句).
According to Wikipedia, Haiku is:
a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 Japanese on (a phonetic unit identical to the mora), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively, and typically containing a kigo, or seasonal reference. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to equate to the Japanese haiku's three metrical phrases.I was telling K, yesterday, about this great new idea. However, after a quick search, the law of the Internets prevailed. The one that says that any idea that you may have is already in the Internets. You can find how unoriginal my idea is here, here, and here.
There's been a lot of buzz about the film. However, this is no typically bollywood film. Slumdog is a heart-warming crossover directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and the underrated Sunshine).
Typical bollywood films have the following characteristics and themes:
On my return trip from visiting Egypt and Jordan, I spent many miles to upgrade myself to business class.
United Airlines has been slowly rolling out "the next generation" of business class seats. Shown below, they're like miniaturized first-class cockpits.
These seats have all sorts of bells and whistles:
This Shadow is a Bit of Ideology, gathers a group of artists working against the darkness cast by a long, drawn-out war, a rancorous spirit in politics, a social landscape obscured by rampant information retrieval, and a crumbling economy. The artists in the exhibition do not turn their backs on current socio-political issues, but neither do they embrace propaganda. Rather, they harness anxieties—political, economic, personal—as productive generators for form. Introspection, reflective criticism, oblique commentary and cohabitation of past with present are just a few of the tactics by which these artists navigate progressively through the twilight.
