This time with all the documentaries and audio commentary.

For the “how many-eth” time I’m watching this, I dunno. I watch this again and again and again. Countless number of times.

Alright, one knows at right at the beginning of the film when there is a voice-over talking about the two guns situated in the island of Navarone that those two guns are going to be destroyed at the end of the film by Gregory Peck ( a bit disappointng, despite his stunning looks) and crew. So why do I still click the “Worth Consuming” check-box? Simply because the sequences of the boat in the middle of the storm is very accurately done. I say “accurately” because I have a very shrewd idea of how a rough sea-sailing will be like. And ofcourse, Anthony Quinn who steals the show with his histrionics. And some plot twists. Four and a half on Five, only because of the altered Romance sequences. They irked me.

There are run-of-the-mill movies. And then there is Finding Neverland. And it’s not Johhny Depp’s strikingly handsome face that attracts me to the movie, rather, the character of Sir James Mathew Barrie. JM Barrie arrives home has a sort of a silent row with his wife, both of them open the door of their respective rooms. While her’s is a dark boring one, Barrie’s is depicted as if it’s lush and green – simply because he imagines it so. He says (to Sylvia), “Young boys should never be sent to bed… they always wake up a day older. ” Then this beautiful conversation between JM Barrie and Michael,( which unfortunately was deleted), who asks JM Barrie, “Why is it that you don’t have any children?” for which he replies, “That’s because only grown-ups can have children”. Get it? What kind of a movie this is?

There are books and movies which I watch and write about them. Pointing out the good and the bad. But with people like PG Wodehouse, I feel that writing anything excepting that the book was “HILARIOUS” would ruin everything. There-”Jeeves in the Offing” was H.I.L.A.R.I.O.U.S. More than worth staying up all night and reading it.

DVD rotates inside the tray – a very bright green country home, flowers every where, butterflies twittering, a happy tune being sung in the background – title rolls. “The little Elf” I thought it was an advertisement and decide to press Fast Forward in my remote. But just as I bend to pick it up, the music goes off, everything stops as though the disc has broken into two-then Lemony Snicket’s(Jude Law) voice “If you are hoping to see this kind of a movie, then I’m sorry, it’s not.” I straighten up. This is what I was looking for.

One part of me feels very happy for having read the books – mind you, the books belong to those genre which will make sense to both a child and an adult. Countless puns and literary allusions – for instance there’s a character named Mr.Poe (Possibly after Edgar Allan Poe) and a Herpetologist named Montgomery Montgomery. But this is not about the books, it’s about the movie – the first three books have been made into a movie with obvious but ‘welcomable’ changes.

SPOILER: What I mean by ‘Welcomable’ is the fact that the first book in the series titled “The Bad Beginning” ends with Count Olaf’s (Jim Carrey) failed attempt to inherit the Baudelaire fortune by staging a play – where he marries Violet. Violet comes off by saying that she didn’t sign the marriage certificate with her ‘right’ hand and so the marriage is invalid and gets away. ingenious, but flimsy. In the movie, Klaus focuses a ray of sun on to the marriage certificate using a huge lens and causing it to burn. This was much better. The movie has such small little deviations from the book, although it stays pretty close to the original story.

Jim Carrey steals the show as Count Olaf. Evil, vicious and twisted, yes, but nevertheless he is funny. Sunny Baudelaire is being wonderfully cast. The scenes involving Klaus thinking about something he’s read, is awesome, as is the opening of the movie.

I’d give four out of five – one each for the art direction, the small deviations from the book, Jim Carrey and Sunny Baudelaire. I take that one away – half each for Violet and Klaus.

Impulse made me watch this movie. I decided to watch it in 5 seconds or so. It wasn’t disappointing. Sean Connery rocks as James Bond. (Drool rating 5/5) If I may say so, he’s the best Bond so far. All his one liners are catchy. For instance, asking a security personnel to see to it that the (dead) man doesn’t escape. I would have checked the “Was this worth consuming?” box, if only the climax scenes were given a little more thought. The whole nuclear base becoming a disaster area could have been a little more elaborately done. And the DVD is a collector’s edition, so naturally it comes with documentaries and audio commentary. There isn’t much in the documentary, it only contains some see-through shots of Ursula Andrews, who plays the ‘Bond-girl’. Disappointing. But for Sean Connery.

This was the first Stanley Kubrick movie I’ve seen. Yeah, hit me. This movie is just as funny, just as satirical as ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell. Spoiler A complete mockery on the cold war, it was supposed to end in a pie-fight between Russians and Americans. That would have been too far-fetched and the present ending sticks to the mind. Peter Sellers is absolutely rocks, with playing the hapless but good-hearted Captain Mandrake and the POTUS, and the bizarre but funny Dr.Strangelove. His german accent for the wheel-chair bound character is a complete success and it still resonates inside my head, two days after watching the movie. And googling around I realized that not only is the movie a satire, but can be viewed as an allegory as well. No matter ho w people look at it, I’d bet infinity plus ont to one that they are bound to have a nice time watching it.

Five on five

After the advent of Intelligent thrillers involving cryptographic codes in the recent times, more and more books are set in that formula. The Four rules

(1) Period – Renaissance (there has to be pig latin, French, Hebrew, Greek, every language that Europeans spoke during that time)
(2) Theme – Involves some secret society or the other, concealing the ‘Truth’ that would shake the foundations of everybody else’s belief.
(3) Codes -Ofcourse, anagrams, Caesar cipher, anything. (Occasional and irrelevant Trivia on the iambic pentametre or Belladona plant, or even worse, the height of Napolean Bonaparte, is prominent. But ofcourse, I read these books only for the fascinating trivia, so no complaints!)
(4) Male protagonist studying art history/literature (and must talk as if he’d met Da Vinci or Dante personally) in an Ivy League American University.

The Rule of Four doesn’t deviate from this formula even to the slightest extent. To sum it up, One Rule to Rule them all: Hyped books always sell.

This version of Asterix adventure, had the Norsemen, or the normans landing in Gaul. Their purpose – to know what fear means. What the Gauls think of them? “These Normans are crazy”, more so because they have names like Cenotaf, Autograf, Nescaf (TEEHEEHEE) and so forth. The Norsemen landing on Gaul is a superb pun on the “D-Day Landing”. Asterix actually feels that the Normans can wait for a few more centuries (for it’s only 50 B.C.) My favourite bit -

Norman Chief: “Right. Bring him round. Come here, all! Make Haste!”
Nescaf: “Hasting’s the word”
NC: “Surely, it’s not 1066 yet?”