The Secret In Their Eyes
Damn good Spanish movie, which mixes a subtle relationship story of a court investigator and his younger attractive female boss with a murder investigation, and is told in multiple flashbacks. Wonderful acting by all the players and the woman (Soledad Villamil) has such beautiful enquiring eyes.

@trix:
You've got dibs on reviewing this, but if you don't, I will :)

Death Wish II is a lot better than the original contrary to what Ebert would have you believe. It's better paced and has a pretty cool soundtrack with Jimmy Page sounding a lot like Jeff Beck. After his near catatonic daughter and Mexican housekeeper are brutally raped (shown in graphic detail), Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) decides the only meaningful and lasting relationship he can have is with his gun. Bronson is damn near perfect for this role with his absolute lack of expression/emotion, prune like face and thin reedy remorseless voice. In short order, he mows down all the rapist/murderers including a very young Laurence Fishburne. The film has this line that was used as a sample by some metal band or the other. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Bronson: Do you believe in Jesus

Mugger: Yes, I do.

Bronson: Well, you are going to meet him!
BANG

Started on Death Wish III which sees Bronson return to New York only to be wrongly implicated in the murder of a friend. He's now in prison with an asshole warden who knows he was the NY vigilante and throws him in the slammer. Bronson reacts to a broken toilet in his overcrowded cell with the characteristic equanimity of a man totally at peace with himself by slamming the offender right through the bars of the cell. This promises to be a lot of mindless fun.

Started on season 4 of Outrageous Fortune and the whole tone of the writing is a lot darker here and the first four episodes play out like a dark comedy about the most dysfunctional family ever. I thought season 3 dropped off a bit with the quality of writing but here things are as good if not better than they've ever been. Great writing, top notch acting and a whole host of memorable characters. Damn good stuff.

Also saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo about a young woman who is some seriously damaged goods and an investigative journalist who get together to solve what may have been a murder some 40 years ago in the family of a rich Swedish industrialist. This is the first part of a proposed trilogy based on a Swedish crime novel of the same name and subsequent parts under the millennium trilogy banner. The acting right through this movie is of a consistently high quality and the movie with a running time of little less than two and a half hours if constantly gripping thanks to the two lead actors. The girl especially, played by newcomer Noomi Rapace is fantastic and one of the most interesting female ass kicking heroes in a long while. The second part of the trilogy "the girl who played with fire" is just out and early reviews indicate its just as good as this one. Looking forward to the next two movies and this one is highly recommended.

Figured which song it was. The Serpent King by God Dethroned.

Just started with Reef by Romesh Gunasekera - I've heard this one is pretty cool.

CrypticMyth wrote:
Just started with Reef by Romesh Gunasekera - I've heard this one is pretty cool.
I liked it a good deal when I read it (which was some 15 years ago), even if it relies to some extent on its exotica flvaor.

Mesrine - Death Instinct Based on the life of notorious french criminal Jaques Mesrine this is the first in a two part epic movie with Vincent Cassel as Mesrine, an ex army officer who comes back home from Algeria and jumps into a life of crime with reckless abandon. Cassel is terrific as Mesrine and the movie is a non stop thrill ride showing off some of the exploits of the man without actually glorifying him in any way. Part 2 will probably round out the movie but so far things are great.

Dev Anand's autobiography - about a third in and it's \m/. At several points Dev Anand comes across more as a character written by RK Narayan.

Saw The Last Airbender yesterday. I haven't seen the source material this film has been made on and until I do, am left with the feeling a lot of the bad publicity and ill will directed at this film is the result of rampant nerd rage and because Shyamalan makes himself quite easy to hate. This is leagues ahead of The Happening, The Village and Lady in the Water, though given how awful those films were, that's not saying much. It's also leagues ahead of Clash of the Titans and ALL of the stupidass Narnia films.
The film is about the turmoil some parallel earth has fallen into after the disappearance of the Avatar, a character tasked with maintaining peace by kicking ass; turmoil caused by the relentless ambitions of the Fire Kingdom. Contrary to all the rumours about Shyamalan 'whitewashing' the races in this film, the split is Water Kingdom - Scandiavians; Fire Kingdom - South Asians; Air Kingdom - Tibetans; Earth Kingdom - Japanese. the Avatar is unwittingly discovered by a couple of kids from the Water Kingdom and through the film is persuaded to shoulder the responsibilities he ran away from. In the meantime, he's being hunted down by the disgraced heir of the Fire Kingdom.

Sure, the characters speak in a very stilted manner, the dialogue is clunky as hell and some fairly complex problems have very pat resolutions. But for all that, the film moves at a great pace, looks very good verging on awesome in a few sequences in spite of all attempts to destroy it via fake 3D - and the last battle is among the most spectacular things I've seen. On the acting front, there's not much to write home about. I mean Dev Patel is the best actor in this film FFS. Having said that, he does a helluva good job and is far less douchelike than he was in Slumdog. Some of the sequences are directed with a great sense of fun, like one in which Ang sneaks up behind Patel in typical Bugs Bunny style. I'd go so far as to say this film is a great return to form for Shyamalan and I hope he gets the budgets to make the sequel.

Sleuth (1972) - unforgivably long at 138 min with a flabby second half, and I wasn't particularly thrilled with Alec Cawthorne as inspector Doppler, but as a showcase of two magnificent actors - Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine - playing off against each other with some immensely witty dialog, worth watching.

Read Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson, the author's debut that came out in '04. Johnson has been compared to people like Kurt Vonnegut, and while he isn't as plain whacky as V, the sense of irreverent, rib-tickling humour surely isn't lacking. The story is told from a washed up anthropologist's retrospective and documents how he indirectly brings on the near-extinction of human civilization through the unearthing of a prehistoric skeleton. Johnson takes his sweet time getting around to when and how the shit hit the fan, but everything leading upto that point is beautifully and hilariously written stuff, packed to the brim with outrageous situations, some of which include a student whose thesis involves spending an year of his life living as a stone age caveman, trying to replicate living conditions of the era, and the anthropologist's arch nemesis from school, now a five-foot tall deputy sheriff.

Read Farewell, My Lovely another wholly engaging effort from Raymond Chandler, a man who appears to casually throw out lines us lesser mortals would slash our wrists to have thought of.
"She hung up, leaving me with a curious feeling of having talked to somebody who didn't exist."

Just finished watching Inception. This is very good. Easily my favourite movie this year. I won't get into the plot, but it will probably need more effort from the viewer than Memento or The Presitge did to follow the plot. Nolan does spend a good deal of the dialogue and visual narrative just to help the audience understand, but the goings on get so complicated that it's still not easy to follow. That being said, it's not a cruel mindfuck like the ending of The Shining, and even if you don't understand every aspect of the plot, it is still rewarding. The cast is decent. Leo is practically indistinguishable from his character in Shutter Island (That's where the similarities with Shutter Island end though. In terms of plot, Shutter Island is about as intellectually engaging as an episode of Scooby Doo in comparison). I love Ellen Page, but she was kinda pointless in this movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the best of the lot. The biggest star in the movie IMO was Hans Zimmer's outstanding score.

Will probably watch this one again. There are somethings I need to understand.

Just finished with the MAMMOTH Shadows of our Ancestors by Carl Sagan (10/10 btw except he gets slightly too technical when it comes to genetics). Midway through Reef and its pretty alright.

On the comics front, I read Guy Delisle's awesome, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. In this book, Delisle is commissioned by an NGO to draw for a TV series in North Korea. Being his first time in the country, Delisle has no idea what to expect. Stripped of his cellphone and any other communication to the outside world at the airport (internet, radio etc.), armed only with his copy of Orwell's 1984, Delisle tries to understand the atrocious equations that govern North Korean politics. Hilariously written and drawn in Delisle's typical b&w style would be highly recommended for anybody remotely interested in North Korea and its rule.

Saw Ganga Jamuna Saraswati and it was a comprehensive mindfuck. Like people in abusive relationships, I don't know whether I love it more or hate it more. Manmohan Desai takes a banal plot of revenge against an asshole uncle, throws in another banal plot about a love triangle and stuffs it to the gills with crocodiles, amnesia, Deus Ex Machina and raw unadulterated brain rapery. Unimaginative people would use terms like "on drugs" to describe this movie. But this movie transcends any pathetic hallucinogen men have known. Ganesh kept making statements like "You keep seeing movies like Jodorowsky-Podorowsky and you haven't seen this shit!?" which ordinarily would have made me want to punch the daylights out of him. But faced with the transcendent, riotous, casual surrealism of this film i could only gawk at the screen and pray it wouldn't leak into our world. Highlights of this film include:

1. Jamuna in the throes of labour suddenly running across her old tribe of gypsies on their way to the Amarnath temple. After the "Hi! Long time, no see" pleasantries are done with, they begin to stone her to death.

2. Nirupa Roy being suspended above a well for the duration of a whole fight scene

3. Amitabh using a cobra as a lever to pull his prodigious bulk from a scaffolding where he's been suspended upside down. And then returning to a wrestling ring with a crocodile strapped to his back.

4. The crocodile snapping at people's ankles like a badly trained dog and finally eating Amrish Puri headfirst.

5. Amrish Puri's Huxleysque social order, a sort of Indianised Brave New World where he deprives villagers of their land but keeps them entertained with wrestling and public vastraharans.

6. Jamuna's loss of virginity (by what looks like buggery) depicted by by a spider web tearing. If you ask me, that's the entire substance of Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare summed up in one scene. Think I'm shitting you? Jamuna is almost dead from hypothermia as she's being buggered back to life. That's a Cold Ethyl reference for you, right there.

I have barely scratched the surface of all the madness in this film. This was Manmohan Desai's crowning accomplishment as a filmmaker and a lunatic. I have a feeling after this film, his visions were of such blinding unutterable vomitous bizarreness, he realised that technology had not evolved to the stage where they could be filmed and the human mind was at least a thousand evolutionary clock cycles away from beginning to grasp them. I'd like to think he committed suicide to prevent the mundane inanity of the real world from interfering with the wondrous stories that populated his head, and that he, like dead Cthulu lies dreaming.