Two Existential Films in a Day

Khush Hai Wahi Jo Thoda Betaaab Hai
Zindagi Mein Koi Arzoo Kijiye

Some of us are pot-bellied contented folks, resting our fat asses on cushioned lives, and then the creativity goes away, leaving us disillusioned and ignorant of our loss. But then, happiness hardly ever lasts forever, and then we get hungry again and start creating. So, technically, if you are happy and satisfied, you can't really create anything of significant value, thus the adage of the hungry artist in rags - the brilliant poor, intellectually rich, but materialistically void.

Happened to see a couple of superb existential films yesterday - Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist and Blade Runner (I know the latter is a classic and I am a film student, but I am weird like that - I just saw the Back To the Future trilogy for the first time the other day!). Nick and Nora takes place in the course of a single night in NJ/NYC. It also champions the cause for gay rights, effectively IMO, but then again, apropos to my companions these days, I am extreme left, so maybe my opinion is biased. There is also the universal search for essentially nothing but Lewis Carrol's century old White Rabbit, and a time when two right people meet each other during the wrong time in their lives. As the script suggested, Michael Cera was rightly overshadowed by Kat Dennings. The movie was not a commercial success and only has a rating of 6.9 on IMDB (that oracle of an invention).

I don't know if it was the Jack or not, but Blade Runner, I thought, was phenomenal. I had read Asimov as a kid, and thought it to be pretty straightforward - let's not get carried away with technology, it'll fuck us over some day. Peter K. Dick's Bladerunner is that along with a few more layers. Harrison Ford doesn't play Harrison Ford for a change. The director's cut helped, doing away with the redundant voiceovers, I am told. In any case, I think it was a very mature piece of art, especially, for 1982. Little details like the blood mingling with the liquor into a shot glass when a bleeding Ford drinks from it. Set design was phenomenal, and the film was almost like a film noir set in the future. Would have loved to light that film. Didn't pinpoint the ending because it is a departure from the mental thriller that the rest of the film is, IMO, or probably, because the twist was so huge that it turned 360 degrees. Indeed, the greatest trick the Devil played was to make the world believe he didn't exist.