I'm moving!

Now that I've reached a minor milestone (100 posts), I'm celebrating by moving my blog to Wordpress. It's not a major deal - I just found that I like the features better. So the new URL is:

http://celluloidrant.wordpress.com

Screw delayed gratification

For those of you that regularly visit this blog (insofar as there are any that fit this description), the plethora of posts might come as a surprise. Since I refuse to blame myself for anything other than global warming, I blame Blogger.

Here's what happened: I had a whole bunch of little snippets written down for my Freeze Frame series, and instead of leaving them on my comp, I decided to leave them as drafts on Blogger. Yesterday evening, I spent a fair bit of time uploading them. The plan was to post them one a day, so as to create the illusion of being a regular blogger.

Trouble is, Blogger apparently indexes posts based on the creation date, not posting date. Which means that, even if I held off on posting any of these for the next 20 days, they'd still appear online dated 18 July 2007. Which I find damned inconvenient. So I decided to screw the whole plan and post them all. I might go back and edit a few here and there, but there it is.

The downside, of course, is that I might be all blogged out. Which may or may not be a good thing from your point of view.

Strange chords

This series of posts is aimed at educating the teeming millions reading my blog (okay, three people including me, if I'm optimistic) on some lesser known aspects of well-known songs. Things like an odd instrument playing an odd note somewhere in the background that adds something to the song. Read on, and you'll find out more...

Now why am I here...

I haven't spoken on this to Ramsu, but I got an invite, and now I'm here. Some people, like me, feel compelled to say something.

I don't know what I'll say here. Maybe I'll say something about the (perceived) fact that Abhishek Bacchan would lose his power if he shaves or takes a bath (please plot unshaven movies like Sarkar or even Refugee against shaven movies like ...what? you don't even remember? ...like Om Jai Jagadeesh...eesh!). Maybe I'll go on to say less is more in his case, and the more understated he gets in his acting and dancing and romancing, the more the beard obscures his face, the more he covers up - like maybe wear a burqua in the next movie, the better he'll become.

Or maybe I'll wander on to topics like does Rakhi Sawant need an asset management company, does Shakti Kapoor need 'professional' help, was toneless singing the origin of Rap and so on. Maybe I'll also put down a few words on how for everyone, leaving on the right note is a desire but that does not really happen everytime (remember Aaj Ka Arjun / Jadugar / Toofan / Lal Badshah / (Ramsu will kill me for not mentioning this) Ajooba)? Maybe maybe...

For now, I just meant I'll write about anything when I feel like saying it, treat it like a disclaimer if you will.

Freeze Frame!

This is going to be a series of short posts about specific moments in movies that I loved. Sometimes it's the way it was set up in previous scenes, sometimes it's the acting, sometimes it's the unsaid stuff that speaks volumes... mostly, though, it's me feeling kicked about what I saw in that scene, or what words I found to describe it.

Disclaimer

I have this habit of writing reviews of movies I've watched, and I'm gonna post a bunch of them, written over the years. But before you go on, I should put a little disclaimer here first. A long time ago, I wrote a review of a movie called Jaanam Samjha Karo and posted it on a mailing list of my friends from my undergrad college. One of them pulled my leg about it, so I replied in a similar vein. That paragraph is probably the best disclaimer I can provide, so here it is:

Leg-puller: General writing does not a review make, either. Hows that? :)

Me: General writing *does* a review make, dude. That's the whole point of a review - write anything, make a few literary allusions to prove your erudition to an audience that doesn't care either way, add a generous dose of sarcasm wherever warranted and maybe even where it isn't, and you have a review. Oh yeah, try to make it look a bit technical - add a few references to the screenplay here and there. Junta doesn't know what a screenplay actually contains, so they'll think you know what it's about. A few stock phrases like "tight screenplay", "innovative lighting" (with reference to some particular scene, even one that is simply shot in broad daylight) and so on add to the effect. But underneath all that crap (as underneath all *this* crap), it's just general writing.

Nothing like a good dose of sarcasm to brighten up one's day, is there? Now, on with the reviews. You have been warned...

So, what can you expect to see here?

I've been in love with the movies for as long as I can remember. For a long time, it was just entertainment. Then, at some point, it became a medium. And then, in some ways, a dictionary of metaphors to describe moments in my life.

I can still remember watching Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon for the first time. I came out of the auditorium feeling dazed, my mind a confused jumble of thoughts trying to grab my attention. Since then, there have been so many instances when I've been faced with a bunch of conflicting accounts of the same situation, and Toshiro Mifune's face would just pop up in my mind's eye.

This blog wasn't my idea, actually. A friend of mine, who has heard me rave about one too many movies in the past, suggested that I put my thoughts down in a blog. And I figured, why not? Maybe someone, somewhere, will read it, feel the same way, and smile.