The Day After Tomorrow

The way the world's weather churning, Hollywood's The Day After Tomorrow -- may just be the apocalyptic vision for tomorrow. But may that day after tomorrow never come ... or if it does, may we all not meet it.

Still, the movie which is screening right now, is a pretty compelling action movie. Quite credible plot too. And it's easy to watch, unlike The Sinking of Japan, another apocalypse movie. It was so slow and painful, that we walked out of the movie after 30 minutes. Imagine falling asleep in a movie about death and destruction ;->

I love movies. Like books, they are a mirror of what's going on in the world today; a product of the cultural world at this point of time. They are little microcosms which future generations will observe and dissect and make analyses of our society now. Ditto on our books, our music, our performances etc. Every piece of literature is part of our rich human heritage.

Watched the critically-acclaimed Spanish film, Pan's Labyrinth on Saturday. The movie was brilliant as it's set up as an onion, layer by layer which can be peeled for its meaning and significance. However not exactly the type of movie to unwind to at the end of the week. It was less about the fantasy world which the lead child protagonist was inhabiting, but a lot more on the cruelty of the civil war, the cruelty of people in positions of power, and the cruelty of life. It was dark. And C Monk and I were united in our description of the movie: traumatising. I wanted to see an uplifting happy silly movie - Hollywood here I come ;) - and so far I've watched movies with a capital "T": Curse of the Golden Flower and Blood Diamond. Still, Pan's Labyrinth was an incredible film.

Curse of the Golden Flower was a beautifully filmed movie. The show of heaving bosoms of the women in the Tang dynasty was quite disturbing haha, but what was more disturbing was the sheer evil-ness of the King played to awesome perfection by Chow Yun Fatt. Thanks to the King, who tried to poison his Queen to madness, he caused a whole series of events which caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and the horrific deaths of his entire family. Watched this on New Year's day, what a way to herald the new year :P Worse, kings like these, men with such incredible ambition and sheer cruelty, actually existed.

Blood Diamond was another movie caught over the new year holidays. It was a fictional story about a hustler played by Leonardo di Carpio who smuggled and sold diamonds from Sierra Leone to the international market. Circa end 1990s. The profits from the diamond sales were used to fuel the civil war in that country, where the rebels used horrifying tactics like hacking off hands of villagers, abducting children to make them child soldiers, virtual enslavement in diamond mines and the list of atrocities go on .... I've read about this but nothing beats seeing it. A picture is worth a thousand words. Watching Blood Diamond was like reliving watching Hotel Rwanda, but that was much worse. Yet Hotel Rwanda was uplifting because it had a happy ending. Excellent acting by Leonardo di Carpio and Djimon Hounsou. Maybe this would be Leo's year at getting an Award. He was pretty excellent in The Departed too.

Almost forgot that I did watch one light, uplifting hilarious movie, Night at the Museum. It was a laugh a minute, just pure child-like fun. Ben Stiller plays a night security guard at the History Museum, where everything comes alive at night. Cool premise. Much of the movie focuses on his actions to reign in the museum exhibits and to ensure they do not escape the museum. I love the Huns the most. The Egyptian prince was a handsome chap!

To many more uplifting hilarious and silly movies in 2007!

Now reading The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, about his walk across Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. Too many good newspapers have placed this as one of the best non-fiction books (travelogue would be to diminish its worth), for me not to pick it up. So far, it's been pretty cool.

Rory's dedication reads:
This book is dedicated to the people of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible. They were not all saints, though some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant, and cruel. Some of them had robbed and killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more that five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I met - Sunni Kurds, Shia Hazara, Punjabi Christians, Sikhs, Brahmind so Kedarnath, Garhwal Dalits, and Newari Buddhists - gave me hospitality without any thought of reward.

I owe this journey and my life to them.

Life's truly a miracle.