Cinema

I am a film buff. I have lost count of the movies that I’ve watched over the years. I wasn’t much of a movie freak till I had reached high school. I used to watch Hindi, Malayalam and English movies sporadically till then. The proportion was also roughly equally distributed. Then cable TV entered my life and I was glued to the idiot box watching Star Movies, HBO, ZeeMGM(now Zee Studio), Hallmark and TNT. I watched a lot of Hollywood movies and frankly, I fell in love with them. These were the originals, which were being so crassly remade in vernaculars. They had a certain finesse, which was sadly lacking in most Bollywood and Malayalam movies.

In the year 2000, a personal computer entered my life, and I had never foreseen that it would become so much a part of my life, as it has become now. It had a 50x compact disc drive and I got myself the membership of some four or five video rental shops. I and my friend made their business lively by regularly picking up obscure titles and watching them. Hollywood isn’t all good, all the time. There is a lot of shit that Hollywood turns out every year. Yet I was hooked to them. Also there were a lot of European films that came on cable TV, which I really adored. Their level of artistry and sensitivity left quite an impression on my mind.

These days, I have graduated from the business of renting movies to watch them. Nowadays, I procure movies which are with my friends. I got the chance to Apocalypse Now Redux in this manner. Its one of my favorites now. It was Coppola at his best. The movies I get to watch are mostly pirated/downloaded. But for an addict like me, it is manna. A recent trend that I have observed in me is that, I have started to fall in love with the cinema of the Orient – Korean, Chinese and Japanese films. Park Chan Wook’s Vengeance trilogy is uparalleled. So is Hero, a Jet Li movie, which I cherish for its being sheer art, in motion. Its acknowledged that Kurosawa movies are classics.

Ingmar Bergman and Bertolucci seem to have invaded my time these days. A frantic friend of mine had got a goldmine from his cousin. The goldmine was a 200GB collection of classic movies, music and comics. Ah! It seems like I have my schedules made up for me.

How many movies did I watch today? I am a bit fuzzy in the head. I have to check to find it out. It seems that I saw Ladri di biciclette(The Bicycle Thief), Le Mari De La Coiffeuse(The Hairdresser’s Husband) and Infernal Affairs(Chinese) today. Three beautiful films. The Bicycle Thief saw me yelling out to the protagonist who seemed to be destined to doom. Infernal Affairs keeps its audience glued to the monitor. Le Mari De La Coiffeuse was a movie which was poignantly sad. In it, the beauty of woman is perfectly captured. An excellent movie it was.

I think that if I die and go to heaven, it would be a storehouse of movies, of all sorts, and genres. If its hell, the monitor might be broken or something of that sort. But then..what do I know, I am just an ignoramus.