The Blue Umbrella, directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, is too much fun.

How does one write the screenplay, compose the music and direct the movie? Fascinating!

I thought the cinematography was very interesting, although dizzying at times. But it plays part in the storytelling process, which I thought was masterful. That’s the aspect I enjoyed most about the movie. The way it tells this story. All this for an umbrella, haha, but the setup and the follow through were really well executed.

Pankaj Kapoor was brilliant. The kids could have been a bit better.

I enjoyed the movie a lot.

9/10

Krazy 4 - I got 20 minutes in, until the “item number” song. sorry, you lost me there. I thought the intros of the characters were pretty good, direction and camera work seemed to be done well. But… no.

Black & White - I’m not sure why I kept giving this movie a chance. The new kid, Anurag Sinha, acted well for the role he was portraying. BUT… the second time he shot someone for saying something, I had to stop watching. no.

Race - I wasn’t really interested in watching this one at all, but people kept saying good things about twists and turns and all. This movie lasted 10 minutes. Anil Kapoor didn’t even finish his intro-narration, and I had no interest in the characters. Yes, Saif Ali Khan jumps off a hot air balloon into an unmanned car, falls directly into the driver’s seat and stops the car right just before it comes to the edge of a cliff. Ummm… no.

Name: Hot Fuzz
Directed By: Edgar Wright
Written By: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg
Type: Romance, Drama
Year: 2007
Starring: Nick Frost, Simon Pegg

Absolutely fabulous!  Technically brilliant! and sometimes it’s even funny.

It’s just super awesome the amount of thought that went into the making of this movie. You can feel it right from the starting frames. The precision and attention to detail definitely stands out. The shots are so well designed and placed and paced. This movie could be studied in movie making classes and whatnot. I think it’s that good.

I’m sure with a second viewing of the movie folk would notice all sorts of things they missed in the first viewing.

I thought this movie was technically better than it was funny. Don’t get me wrong here, there is much funny in the movie, but I remember laughing more freely and louder while watching Pirates of the Caribbean:  Dead Man’s Chest (the second movie).

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

 From August 2003:

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Name: Company
Directed By: Ram Gopal Verma
Written By: Jaideep Sahni
Type: Action, Crime
Year: 2002
Starring: Ajay Devgan, Vivek Oberoi, Mohanlal, Manisha Koirala, Antra Mali

Company is about the Bombay (Mumbai) underworld.
The movie’s focus is on the relationship of Malik Bhai (Ajay Devgan) and Chandu (Vivek Oberoi), how it develops and deteriorates.

This is one of the best movies I have ever seen, in both Hollywood and Bollywood.
Directed to perfection with acting that’s no different. The movie has only one song and there are no useless scenes in this movie. I cannot say enough good things about this movie. If you haven’t seen it already, then go watch it. If you don’t like it, well that’s just too bad then.
Ajay Devgan is wonderful as Malik Bhai. Vivek Oberoi plays his role to the t, you’ll be surprised that it’s his first movie. Antara Mali plays a completely deglamourized role and does a great job of it.

Rating: 10 out of 10
no less.

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From September 2003:

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Name: Meet Joe Black
Directed By: Martin Brest
Written By: Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno
Type: Romance, Drama
Year: 1998
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Claire Forlani

The movie started off well. It seemed to me that it would be an interesting movie. William Parish (Hopkins) is a multi-millionaire about to turn 65. Parish has a date with Death (Brad Pitt). Susan Parish (Forlani) starts to flirt with Death.

The movie started off well. Parish’s encounter with Death’s voice and the coffee shop scene with Pitt and Forlani. After that, the movie turned to a crawl. It was so slow I almost died.

Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins are wasted in this movie and Forlani isn’t what some folks make her out to be.

Rating: 2 out of 10
stay away from this one, unless you have a lot of time on your hands…

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From October 2003:

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Name: The Count of Monte Cristo
Directed By: Kevin Reynolds
Written By: Alexandre Dumas, Jay Wolpert
Type: Adventure, Action, Drama
Year: 2002
Starring: James Caviezel, Guy Pearce

I haven’t read the book of the same name written by Dumas. But I’ll put it on my ever increasing list of books to read. For a person who doesn’t read many books, I like carrying this list around.

Back to the movie. It’s about an innocent man Edmond Dantes(Caviezel) and how he’s tricked and deceived into his imprisonment by people he knew and trusted.

Adventure, action and revenge, this movie is stuffed with all this and more. James Caviezel delivers a wonderful performance and Guy Pearce plays the jealous Fernand Mondego very well.

Rating: 9 out of 10
I truly enjoyed the movie, very very entertaining. it’s a movie made to watch.

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From August 2003:

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Name: Bend it Like Beckham
Directed By: Gurinder Chadha
Written By: Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges
Type: Drama, Comedy
Year: 2002
Starring: Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers

Jesminder Bhamra (Parminder) is a girl in love with soccer. She dreams to play professionally. There’s just one problem, her family is desi. The movie is about her fight against Indian traditions that prevent her from achieving her dreams.

I think the movie was okay; nothing great. There were plots, sub-plots and sub-sub-plots, and everything falls into place in the end. I didn’t “fancy” that.

Rating: 2.5 out of 10
I would have given it a 2, but the main actors acted well.
Watch it if you want, I’d stay away from this one.

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Originally posted: August 2003

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Name: Anand
Directed By: Hrishikesh Mukherjee
Written By: Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Bimal Dutta
Type: Drama
Year: 1971
Starring: Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Sumita Sanyal

Anand is about a happy go lucky man played by Rajesh Khanna (named Anand of course). Anand is diagnosed with a deadly disease; he has just 6 months to live. He moves from Delhi to Bombay to meet with his friend Dr. Prakash Kulkarni and spend the rest of his days in his nursing home.
Prakash is a good friend of a cancer specialist Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan) and wonders whether anything can be done to save Anand. Thus Anand and Bhaskar meet. Anand changes Bhaskar in the most subtle ways, and that too for the better.

I loved this movie. I can’t say enough how much I loved it. This is the only movie that has ever made me cry. Not “boo hoo hoo” cry, but it made me shed a couple of tears, which is infinitely more than any other movie has ever done.
I recommend this movie to everyone. If you haven’t seen it, you don’t know what you’re missing out on. If you’ve seen it already, go watch it again.

10/10

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I like watching movies. I like watching good movies even more.

I remember a time when I actually built an entire system to allow me to review movies. I even designed it to allow multiple users. It would grab all the movie details from IMDB, all you had to do was enter the imdb url, and it would grab the actors, director, year, language, length etc etc… It was pretty neat for what it was back then. This was in 2004.

I think I reviewed 15 odd movies before being sucked into work and leaving the blogging world behind. Methinks I shall pull in some of those old reviews into this blog.

I was trying to get the movie review site back up, but it was giving me technical issues. meh…

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I’ve been watching movies again lately, more than before. What’s with movies starting slow and picking up a little steam later on? (Gone Baby Gone, 13 Conversations, and a few others I’ve seen lately). I want to see a movie that captures my attention right at the start and keeps up the pace. Not that there’s anything wrong with slow movies (I loved Gerry, but that was slow all the way along). But there’s something else about the well paced movies… Fight Club, The Bourne Identity, Company come to mind, where I’m sold on the movie within 10 to 15 minutes.

Gerry

I’ve wanted to watch Gerry for a while. But it was always hard to find. I was going to watch ‘Gone Baby Gone’ but thought I should try and watch Gerry before that.

Gerry is a  movie about two guys named “Gerry” and their trek through a desert. They get lost, and they don’t have any food or water.

Gerry is a slow movie. There are stretches of the movie that have absolutely no dialogue. These last anywhere from 1 minutes to 10 minutes. There are multiple such stretches. The average shot length is 60 seconds! This is not your fast paced hollywood movie with an overdose of car chase scenes, blasts, evil villains, awful comic relief and romance/sex. This is just two guys in a desert. I liked this movie.

The lack of dialogue intensifies other sounds and visuals in the movie. You feel the sounds of the walking and the sounds of the winds that much more.

There were bits of the movie that were obviously adlibbed, some of them were great, others not so much. Matt Damon has better improv skills than Casey Affleck.

I will admit that I wasn’t able to watch the movie in one go. I had to watch it in two sittings. Generally I will watch new movies in the early morning when everyone is sleeping. Nights are for tv shows or movies I’ve seen already. I prefer watching movies in one go without any talking or interruptions otherwise. But Gerry, even with no interruptions, I could not watch in one go.

I also found the ending very disturbing. But I really enjoyed the opening of the movie. I will divulge no further information. If you watch it in one full sitting, let me know.

9/10