Monday, April 26, 2004

This is turning out to be an unusually intense movie-watching phase even by my standards. This weekend I watched 5 movies and started to watch another. 4 of them were in one sitting!!! "Once upon a time in the midlands" was so-so... the music was superb though... "The Clerks" was okay too.. in fact in parts it was very funny... however, the production values were tacky and performances non-existant... still, worth a dekko for some funny sequences.... "Reservoir Dogs" is pretty interesting watch... if you take away one REALLY violent scene from the movie, its has some pretty entertaining dialogue... Still, its not quite as good as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill... The "funny" side of Tarantino isn't quite as patent as in his latter movies... Moreover, that one scene is a bit too much... Pulp also had one such sequence, which can only be called "sick"... That is where Kill Bill is so different.. it doesn't have even one scene that I can call truely violent.. it was all pretty comic-book, eye-candy, popcorn-movie stuff... so even though there are more decapitations, limb slaughter and blood floods in Kill Bill than his earlier movies combined, its still not half as violent as some scenes in them...

"Meenaxi" was a bit too abstract... or maybe a bit too simplistic... you understand most of the things that are happening, but the problem is there isn't much happening in the first place.. all the three stories are so simple that it becomes boring... though I must say it wasn't quite as "unbearable" or "unwatchable" as many people are saying... the BGM and cinematography kept me going... in fact, I had rented it mainly to watch the song picturizations... and they were nice, though not quite orginal... "Noor Un Ala" is so much like "Kehna hi Kya" that 'resemblance' would be a gross understatement... "chinnamma chilakkamma" is a like a poor attempt at copying "Humma Humma"... "ye rishta" has a "Pachchai Nirame" feel to it... and "Rang Hai" reminded me of some scenes from "kandukondain kandukondain"... "Badan Dhuaan Dhuaan" has nice choreography though.. and not unoriginal either... however, Tabu's body sort of doesnt gel well with all the dancing... she must be one of the least graceful dancers around... anyway, I wouldnt say the picturizations weren't good.. after all, the fact that some of sehwag's shots remind you of Sachin obviously implies that Sehwag looks good too... I dont think they could've chosen many better songs to try and imitate than what they did...

"China Town" was the fifth movie I saw.. A Roman Polanski movie. Its a murder mystery and a good one too... Jack Nicholson did a good job as the private investigator protagonist... I dont know if he has done too many great movies in the past or is it a coincidence that I keep watching all his good movies very frequently... I have seen three good movies now, with Jack Nicholson giving bravura performances in all of them. The other two were "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" and "The Shining".

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