Eternal Sunshine on Polka Dotted Boxers

It is 10:34 am and I am sitting in my second successive meeting of the morning. The caffeine has thankfully started taking effect and I don't feel like I have been hit by a meteorite anymore. Let me go ahead and crib a bit. Thursday is the only day that I have a 9 am meeting. It's usually 10:30 am when I drag my feet into work on other days. Now you might envy me after knowing this, but c'mon, it's not fair to expect me to be at work by 9 when my body is conditioned to wake up after 9. OK OK. Cribbing over.

There is another reason for my lack of beauty sleep. No, there are no cricket matches on at ghastly hours, nor am I in a saat samundar paar long distance relationship, and no, I am not forcing amnesia, no, nostalgia, arrey I can't remember the word, that sleeplessness condition, on myself, to appear pseudo-intellectual. I am fun editing. The phrase hasn't made it to the Oxford dictionary yet, but if I have my way, the Queen's English will be violated a little more by the next release. So, I am working on this 20-25 minute short film as an AD and partly as Lighting Designer (and partly as Cinematographer when crew members vanish into thin air, no not after dieting too much, they just leave: "I have a family emergency", "proctologist's appointment", "I am henpecked and my wife is from Bush's, I mean Hitler's, lineage"; you get the idea), but I recently got Final Cut Pro 6.0 (industry editing software) and so I am playing around with the footage. The first night I got the software, I created this sequence of the protagonist in the bathroom (shower and hair gelling only, in case you kinky ones were getting excited) with the only footage I had at the time - bathroom shots and cutaways of a fire alarm. Go figure!

Watch Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na for very good acting by an ensemble cast so fresh, they still possess that new car smell. Standout cameo performance from Prateik Babbar, product of Smita Patil's mistake with a random bloke. Watch Aamir for a very visual few opening few sequences, directed by Anuraag Kashyap's AD. Watch Wall-E for that good feeling you get after eating dessert (please beware; this feeling maybe exclusively a Bengali thing, but you can relate to it I am sure; as my probashi friend SuGu says, everyone is Bengali anyway, moreso French footballers - MalouDa, Saha etc. etc.). It's already #19 in IMDB's all-time top movies. I am in a Kurosawa-Mifune phase, partly because I was reading Donald Ritchie's The Films of Akira Kurosawa after I heard about it at Jabberwock. Red Beard is their best work till date that I have seen. Beats Rashomon and Seven Samurai for me. Mifune's restrained performance was a revelation. Its a pity that he couldn't shave his beard and thus had an argument with Kuro since he lost contracts of films from other "directors" at the time, and never made any more films with him. Probably for the best. I don't think I would have liked to see him in color (Red Beard is Kuro's last B&W film).

Received a lot of messages since this blog was on standby (OK fine, just two, but you know who you are; thanks - makes a difference in this age of individualism). Read Aamir Khan's and Amitabh's blogs and realized they write very often despite their busy schedule. So, I should not disappoint my "fans" either. OK boring meeting over.

Love