A Cinematic Exploration of the Evolution of Film Noir – Se7en

Originally published at PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/a-cinematic-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-film-noir-se7en/

Insomnia

Insomnia of the worst kind. Staring at the high grainy white ceiling with bags under the sleepless eyes. Sitting up and staring at a bleakly lit profile in the larger than life adjoining mirror. Thinking about the dichotomies of life - both professional and personal, of whether to stay warm and let the beads of sweat trickle down over the tiny black hairs on the legs, like transparent caterpillars in transhumance, or listen to the whirr of the invisible little fan and watch the blinds of the window move themselves in perfect rhythm, as if played by the ghost of some dead Rasta musician's veiny dark hand.

Don't follow your dreams. OK fine. Do it, but make sure you have enough money before you jump onto the back of the unicorn. They'll tell you you are cool, that you are just about the second person they know after that skinny dark kid with those big eyes and floppy hair from Andaman who decided to be a professional snorkeler, to follow their dreams and all that crap, but they aren't here now to sing you lullabies as you listen to the rumbling of your stomach echo off your empty life. I hope the snorkeler at least is still sinking.

Holy shit. Didn't Edward Norton's Jack have insomnia which led him to create Fight Club? I don't like where this is going. Great, now insomnia coupled with paranoia. What would the pacifist in me say? I don't have an anarchist in me. Or do I? Maybe it's been dormant all these years so as to use its most potent weapon - the element of surprise. Maybe atheists don't get the little versions of themselves as the angel and devil having the cute little stand-off with their oh-so-British halos and tridents. All they get is an uber-ugly UFC fight between the pacifist and the anarchist versions. And boy, do I know who to bet on in that fight?

In A Lonely Place - 'hedunit?'

Originally published on PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/in-a-lonely-place-hedunit/

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – We the People

Originally published on PFC:
http://passionforcinema.com/mr-smith-goes-to-washington-we-the-people/

Ang Lee

I am a fairly regular reader in bed (the only other place I read in is the toilet) but today I am scared to go to bed. You can thank Aravind Adiga for that. The anger of the pages from last night seared the tips of my fingers enough to force me to think a million times about returning. The fire, the fire within is affecting the temperature in the room. I am sweating on a mildly chilly October night, creating islands of imprinted sweat on my otherwise solid pale blue sea of a shirt.

Contemplating between Zeppelin and Budweiser to quench my anger. I have gone with the former and Jimmy's solos help a little to escape the apathy of the bourgeois of Delhi described in The White Tiger, the failed attempt of the combined effort of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in Couples Retreat, this feeling of forever running on the treadmill towards an invisible angel who sounds real from far, far away, cleft lips of Bangladeshi babies in neighboring aisle seats and translating their angry wails at six thousand feet up in the air, men invading the maternal pores of cows with their ugly tools.

I don't wanna get up tomorrow and get sucked into this vicious cycle of fervent email checking that will sustain me till the End. I want to spend a week in bed like John, of course alone, without my Yoko, and then maybe they'll give me a Nobel too. I want to feed my credit card bill to August's frog, and maybe he'll turn into a bespectacled bureaucrat and serve me some fresh red tape, which I can't spell and have to rely on the fucking spellchecker to salvage me. I want to arson the ashes out of the watchtower while Hendrix plays on a burning lotus in the background as Saraswati pole dances around her curvy tanpura next to him like a teenage hippie on LSD. I wanna hold Raj Thakerey's hand and take him to this place he's never been before - Bombay. I want to introduce a friend to that jack in class - subjectivity.

Jet Lagged, Listening to Leonard Cohen and Missing Bombay

The amateur photographer in me always wondered whether sunrises look any different from sunsets, aesthetically speaking. Not being a morning person traditionally, I knew I would never find out for myself. And then there was jet lag. My love affair with this romantic concept is very erratic. It's been six days since I've been back and yet the flirtation continues, alternating like the mood of a petite plump Madame in a seedy downtown Beijing whorehouse.

I have discovered a new soul-soother, impressive almost solely because of its lack of alcohol. It started unlike most love stories in real life do - at the first meeting. I marauded in after a usual satisfying but expensive lunch at the neighboring mall, conniving in my head for ways to pass the time till it was time to go home, and not think of any more ideas of selling nutritional drinks for children between the ages of 8 and 12. And then I heard him, in his guttural Dylanesqeness, singing about tea and oranges that come from China and about being somebody's man. And the immediate life was a little more bearable, much like when I had first heard Comfortably Numb. I have always maintained that the greatness of a certain piece of music (which includes lyrics, the voices and the accompanying instruments) should be determined by its intoxicating effect, comparable to your choice of poison.

I miss Bombay, yes Bombay, not Mumbai, but Bombay. I miss the constant energy, the noise pollution, drivers swearing at pedestrians suggesting they were regularly intimate with one of their creators, moviegoers frustrated at Hollywood science fiction, a glimpse of those perfect feet peeking from the anonymity of an auto, the traffic cops with their meticulously pressed khaki uniforms matching the color of their piping hot evening tea slurped from dirty little glasses, the not-so-cheap food - junk and classical, Kingfisher and its accompanying free nuts, the unwritten poetry on the walls of Leopold (no, I haven't read Shantaram yet) between mouthfuls of Steak & Onions, the bargaining foreplay with roadside t-shirt hawkers in Town, the mysterious Marathi of the maids, the visible ribs of the cows - loitering the streets like drunk, poor poets, Vodka in the inside room for the kids and Whiskey for the uncles in the living room, overtly salty Vada Pao, the apathy of security guards everywhere, everyone's unpunctuality, the excessive honking, the distant sterility of the AC buses, the omnipresence of mineral water - even at gola stalls in Shivaji Park, the phorenesque ride on the new Worli Sea Link, that lonely face in a grilled window in one of those few crumbling buildings in this city of thirteen million, the crazily long lines of Ganpati fanatics in Shiuri, the rickety old Premier Padmini Fiat cabs - drudging on like the tired lungs of its drivers, the expressionless face of the peon assigned bathroom duty, the punctuality of the breakfast bearer at work, those conversations about skipped lunches with the elevator guard when it was just the two of us, the People dancing on the streets with total abandon in front of unmoved clay idols, outdated Communist desktop wallpapers, those violet lights in the window with the banyaned potbelly.

An Ode to Scarlet

We've grown old together - hand in hand

Lying on one other all these years,

Holding on to words that take a stand,

Soaking in all Scarlet's dried up tears.

He had a lot of style back then.

All his friends who heard Him write

Would throw their tools and pick up pens

Like children tearing books and chasing kites.

But then His friends grew bigger

Than His spoken and written words

Since their wages were too meager,

Leaving nothing but poetic shards.

Scarlet collapsed from too much love

But still hungry from too many fasts,

Leaving us behind - two jailed doves

And His bottles - empty and unchaste.

He comes in here now and again

Talking to more bottles about Scarlet,

As both of us cry out to him in pain

"Let's find something new to abet".