Ju Dou

Ju dou wasn't that great, but it belongs to the genre that Yimou experimented with in late 80s and 90s- tales of feudal china. It was good, but not as good as huozhe (to live) or raising-the-red-lantern. yimou is completely different in these movies, and his cinematography is the best in all of eastern cinema I have known.

The difference between raising the red lantern and flying-daggers would be 10 times more than that between Spielberg's Schindler's list and 'jurassic park-the lost world'. You can't always compare two such movies from the same director, not in such case of Yimou by any means.

Apparently Ju dou was banned in Chine because it was considered to have shown the lead female character rebelling against the male authority.

Must watch

This are the movies I have rated 5/5 on netflix, and I think, they all must be watched by anyone who ever loved movies :

(reverse alphabetical order)-

Yojimbo
X2: X-Men United
Wild Strawberries
White
The Virgin Spring
Umrao Jaan
Trainspotting: Collector's Edition
Trainspotting
To Live
Throne of Blood
The Three Stooges: Curly Classics
A Story of Floating Weeds
Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Star Wars: Episode V: Empire Strikes Back
The Silence of the Lambs
The Shining
The Shawshank Redemption: Special Edition
The Seventh Seal
Seven Samurai
Schindler's List
Scarface
Run Lola Run
Rosemary's Baby
Roger Dodger
A River Runs Through It
Ridicule
Requiem for a Dream
The Red Violin
Red
Reality Bites
Rashomon
Raise the Red Lantern
Pulp Fiction
Psycho
The Pianist
Pi: Faith in Chaos
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Mughal-E-Azam
Moulin Rouge
Moulin Rouge
Memento
The Matrix
LOTR: The Two Towers: Extended Ed.
LOTR: Return of the King: Extended Ed.
LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Ed.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Jules and Jim
Human Nature
The Hours
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Good Will Hunting
Gol Maal
The Godfather, Part II
The Godfather
Girl, Interrupted
Ghost in the Shell
Full Metal Jacket
Forrest Gump
Fight Club
Fargo
Eyes Wide Shut
The Exorcist: Restored Version
The Exorcist
The English Patient
Driving Miss Daisy
Downfall
Donnie Darko: Director's Cut
Donnie Darko
Dial M for Murder
City of God
Cinema Paradiso: Director's Cut
Central Station
The Bridges of Madison County
Boys Don't Cry
Blue
The Big Lebowski
The Bicycle Thief
Ben-Hur: Collector's Edition
Ben-Hur
Bawarchi
Battleship Potemkin
Babette's Feast
Au Revoir Les Enfants
Andrei Rublev
Anand
Amores Perros
American Beauty
Almost Famous
All About My Mother
Adaptation
The 400 Blows

Songs

What folk music is... is based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs….All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels…and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all really something that nobody can touch....(the songs) are not going to die.

- Bob Dylan.

Through a glass Darkly

Bergman says it too. Believing in God is same as believing in love. If you can believe in love, you could rather believe in God as well. If by some rational explanation, God has to be completely ruled out, then by a similar reasoning there should be no reason for love either. A world without belief in God could be as dreadful to some as would be the world without any love, trust or friendship.

At the end of the movie, David asks his son, to stay calm and tells him that "God exists, because we all love Karin... Love is God! " We don't have anything to define our existence and so we have to pick up something and hold it to our heart. Whenever our holdings are gone, we pick something else up and hold that to ourselves. That is how we define ourselves - "Everything would be alright. Just keep faith in something".

I don't think anyone else can present existentialism better than the way Bergman does. He repeatedly makes me think that cinema is the best, most true, and most efficient form of art known to humanity.

Again, like in many other Bergman movies, I might not have understood all the connotations in the movie, including the title - Through a glass darkly, which is from a Biblical verse. In many of the dialogs there could be (and I am sure there were) allusions to Bible and some other writings, like a few by Dostoyevsky. Unfortunately, I am not too much aware of the literature that Bergman was expecting his viewers to be building the thoughts upon.

Nevertheless, the movie was terrific. It went boring for a while, especially the part after when the fact of protagonist's illness was known. But in around 20 minutes, the story picked up again and climaxed magnificently.

The performance by the protagonist was excellent. I don't know if anyone else could have done such a job. Harriet Anderson (Karin, in movie) suits very well to the character. Gunnar Bjornstrand played his role of the detached writer just perfectly.

The climax is magnificent, it rolls the whole movie into a few dialogs. All the chaos of the movie- Karin's pain, Minus's troubled juvenility and David's disconnection from it all, everything seems to survive just through faith - for faith is indeed such a powerful thing - the central theme of Bergman's movies.

Urdu Unicode definition file

Here is the Unicode keyboard definition for Urdu that I created to suite my intuition. I am sure this would be helpful for any Urdu/Hindi speaker who wants to write in Nastaliq. I would later write a key to help those who want to create a document in Nastaliq even if they don't know how to read nastaliq. Even better, I could write an ITRANS-> unicode converter at some point.

For now, just

i) download this file
ii) load the ukb file into Unipad or any other unicode text editor you may be using ( You can download Unipad from here)

and start using the keyboard.

اگلی پوسٹ تک کےلِیے الورہ


(good bye Until next post)

-created by entering the text "aglI posT tk kE lieY alvdO" in Unipad.

Patrice Leconte

Patrice Leconte is one of those typical intellectuals who know how to show off their exceptional ability in the their profession. On one hand, we see this gentleman who is very well aware of his status as a movie-director, and on the other hand, he could portray himself as being doubtful about his own career by saying that he didn't want to be classified as the classicism director.

Nevertheless, his movies, classicism or not, have been one of the best I would've ever seen. My first Leconte movie was Le Mari de la coiffeuse, and it blew me away. It was one of the moments, that told me how appealing to emotions, cinema could possibly become. L'homme du train was not as exceptional, but it told a truth with a fatalistic perspective, that Leconte seems to like a lot.

Then I watched these two classicist movies - le veuve de st pierre and ridicule. It is almost a time-travel into the early modern France, watching his movies.

Melancholy

Its not that I don't have sweet memories of Diwali from my childhood. Nor is it that I have lesser knowledge/adherence to Indian tradition(s). On the contrary, it is only because of my irrevocable adherence that I couldn't connect to the people around me who celebrate(d) Diwali.

Now, I don't celebrate Diwali anymore, nor do I think I would in the near future. When you can't relate to the people that celebrated Diwali, you don't really celebrate your Diwali with them; niether do they know nor would they possibly understand what Diwali means to you- is there any point, then, in just saying you do enjoy their celebrations while you don't?

I won't.

Happy Diwali? why not? to you!