This is an ad for Abercrombie & Fitch. In any case, it just struck me as hilarious. If this is as far as some ad-creators imagination goes so as to depict the adjective of fierce, she, or he is in the wrong profession.
I personally am not a big fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing skills. his characters are marvellous, his stories, superb. Past that, he's at best a good writer. That said, I'd never thought that anything could make his sayings look plastic and amateurish; never till now.
Even olde english can carry a bad thing only so far!
In a world that's forever changing, what are the chances you find someone with who you can spend the rest of your life together?
I see my mom and dad and I wonder, almost 30 years of being together through plenty of hardships right from financial instability to moving base to bringing up two brats; and to think that theirs was an arranged marriage wherein they did not even know one another. At least not well enough in my terms to get into a lifetime of committment. They met I think just once before their marriage!
And now that I am old enough to appreciate the differences in temper and character, I know that it must have taken more than just the bond of marital status to hold them together as they are held maybe this is just one more form of love that we, the young and the restless, in our haste refuse to acknowledge or appreciate. I would give up a lot to be the way my mom and dad are right now -- happy, and at peace.
The jump in generations is actually a rather queer thing. Perhaps it is the difference in outlook and perception, perhaps it is the difference in exposure and expectations from life, perhaps it is something different.
I love action comics...I love Wolverine, Storm, Batman, Green Arrow, Catwoman, Cyclops, Hulk, Thor, Saturn, Elektra, Gambit...and I could go on and on and on. I had loved Sin City and 300. So when the promos for 'The Spirit' started showing with Eva Mendes and Paz Vega scorching the screen, I could barely wait to watch it.
I should have stuck to the promos!
The movie is a visual feast. The actors Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, Jamie Fox, Scarlet Johanassen, Sarah Paulson and Samuel L. Jackson are all good actors, some of course better then the rest. And this brilliant cast and fantastic graphics makes the bad direction and screenplay even more appalling!
First things first...the dark edgy Frank Miller graphic novel visual style DOES NOT go with the general camo tone of the film. Secondly, nobody wants to watch a camp superhero movie! And finally...and the worst of all; you CANNOT change the character of a super villain and make him look worse than a comic strip clown in the name of "...oppurtunity to be larger than life...". The Octopus is larger than life and making him period costumes will not change things for the better.
Why is it so difficult for people to leave the good things be? A menacing villain identified only by his gloves; whose face has never been seen versus a black man behaving like a queen who can't dress. Frank Miller is a briliant director...but he should stick to what he's good at -- edgy, adrenaline stashed movies.
Anyhow, now for the good things in the movie...Eva Mendes is the ultimate femme fatale. But then again, she's always that. She's the only woman I've seen on screen who can carry off orange lip tinge with panache! Paz Vega; very good and very underrated, is stunning as Plaster of Paris. Jamie King is alluring as Lorelaine - the angel of death. Scarlett Johansson and Sarah Paulson are prim, pretty and seductive. Samuel L. Jackson is wasted in a role that did not need him. And finally, Gabriel Macht, did look the best I've seen in any of his pics online. He should keep the dark hair look.
I am no great movie critic, and I am perhaps out of my depth here...but it's a very basic flaw in the entire show -- the director wanted to cram in too many things. He wanted the original camp humour of the comic series, he wanted the dark look of Sin City, he wanted a brilliant star cast, and he wanted to touch up the whole thing with his 'vision' of 'larger than life' costumes signifying the 'samurai, nazi, russian, and blaxploitation' movies.
Aaaarrrgh! It's a comic strip movie. Just keep it simple!!!
I had been a naive child. I had found out the details about sex much later than the rest of classmates had. This was partly due to the fact that I was a prudish no-nonsense sort of a child.
But things change, thankfully!
Anyhow, this is not a post about innocence lost, nor is this post about my escapades. (It amazing what feats one can perform with the correct choice of words!)
I was thinking of the general perception I have noticed amongst my friends and aquaintances pertaining to love, and sex. Its also a cross-cultural thing I guess. One important factor in this was that I'd recently read 'It Does Not Die' by Maitreyi Devi in its original bengali version 'Na Hanyate'. It is by far one of the best books I have read in any genre, in any language. Perhaps I will have audacity to review it here someday, but for now let's suffice it to say this book touched me in a way nothing had touched me in a long time.
This book told me what we have known since a while,which, very flatly put, will boil down to that the western perception of love is markedly different from the indian outlook towards it. The western concept of love ( as it appears to me) has a certain rigid structure to it, there's always the initial romance, persuasion and a final culmination in the physical expression of it. There's no doubt that I am indeed making a rash generalization of it, but if you should notice, all love stories in the western tradition need even a symbolic gesture of the physical for it to be complete.
Surprisingly, the indian perception seems to me to be more flexible; even liberal if you will. There are no guidelines as to how things should proceed and how they must culminate. The spiritual almost essentially overshadows the carnal here and any physical expression seems only to mar the concept of love.
All said and done, its still funny how the focus seems to be upon definitions and notions of how things should be and not on how things are. How can the definition of love be generic when the concept of it remains based on the intimacy of feelings of one, two or more persons?
I mention more options than two simply because I refuse to believe that intimacy must exist only between more than one and less than three. Who can claim for certain that the saga of Narcissus was a wretched tragedy and not the ultimate romance? Who is to say all menage-a-trois lack love or intimacy? Why must every Columbine need a Harlequin so she may dance? Why must the saga of Chitrangada need Arjun to be immortal?
If you had to choose between the sparks of a moments intimacy and lifelong insipid romance, what choice shall you make?
Thursday, May 22, 2008
My parents are visiting chennai now, and it's nice. Only, somehow, I've become so used to guarding my personal space, at times it becomes difficult to deal with them neing in the house. It's not a very nice thing I suppose, but I've been out of my house since the past seven years, and though it is nice to be pampered, it sort of gets to me at times. Well...all the worse as they are really not the nosy kind of parents...they leave me ample space...always have; right from childhood till now.
But the itch is still there, and its extremely self-deprecating!
PS: before you make any snide remarks about how young generation doesn't care for values and blah blah blah....well..i do, I love and respect them beyond most other things...but it still doesn't make things easy.
Friday, May 02, 2008
I bought myself a fountain pen again. After a long long time...
