Quantum of Entertainment

We interrupt the stalled story of the KF Panda to bring you matters that are even less relevant to reality

It is humbling sensation to realise that, in spite of all the efforts of the best humourists, the funniest things still remain side effects of human (mis)behaviour.

In other, possibly unrelated news, it turns out that you can still discover new fundamental particles even when the LHC is not yet at absolute zero. We refer, of course, to the discovery of the smallest possible particle of entertainment after watching the latest Bond movie.

The movie itself is nothing special (more on that later) but when you consider a remarkable conversation that the cricketer (bunking yet another collapse) and I were privileged to witness on our uncoordinated shamble towards the door (due to a regrettable combination of fairly evident factors, reproduction is, as mentioned in the disclaimer, likely to be faulty but covers the essentials):

"...I tell you man, this movie is only for the illiterates who have not read the originals by Iron Flamingo"

"Agreed - did you know that in the original, Felix Leiter was a white guy in a straw hat?"

Forgive us, O potential vegetable for our transgression. We shall not err. Or not more than the permissible error rate, anyway.

There then followed an unrepeatable discussion of the flaws and nonexistent virtues of the current actor, and a historical comparison to the disadvantage of most of the other actors except that Remington Typewriter guy. As we all know, there is only one real Bond whose first name is Fevi: it therefore seems redundant to comment any more. It might also be that you need to be female to appreciate the comparison, of course, which masterwork of logic seems to have crossed my ears more than once recently.

Quanta of Enjoyment aside, it is fairly obvious that someone at the studio has somehow misspelled Jason Bourne as James Bond, having him drive, of all things, a hybrid SUV? The DBS passes through too, as do some horrendous boxes driven by Holga that we will pass over lightly since any application of weight might lead to the unwelcome discovery that they are made of paper.

(Image stolen from filmschoolrejects.com)

No Bond movie is complete without eyecandy, and we're not referring to Aston Martins or gadgets which are conspicuously low key, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. In fact, I believe the last few movies might end up in giving a whole new meaning to the Bondmobile. Anyway, Holga is the delectable bond girl, and after Hitman, Max Payne and this, she seems well on her way to becoming Ukraine's answer to Milla and Michelle. Gemma plays the quick and the dead, in the process generating perhaps the only picture worth adding to this not-review. The real Bond girl, though is Dame Judi, with whom we even see (if one eye is closed, and the other squints sideways) Bond show a bit of emotion. Next thing you know, Bond is going to act in a good movie with Eric Bana about a senseless terrorist act.

Now this might even be better than Hitman, but one does wonder if Nicky Parsons smiled only because she knew that Jason would surface with yet another loss of memory, and find a pulp fiction paperback in his pocket that miraculously survived the Potomac to give him his name and a back story (which, by the way, is worth reading: the Bond website may be overly reliant on Flash, but the aggravation is worth the new backstory.)

We might, by the way, make an interesting comparison of Bourne and Bond:

• Chase sequences: Bourne excelled, and borrowing a roof or two from him seems to be Bond's way out of (and into) trouble


• Hot girls: We may be devout believers in the Theory of Dyevolution, but Bourne has Franka and Julia, while Bond has Eva and Holga. No contest.


• Conveyance: Both realise the utility of two wheels instead of four while travelling 'other' countries. I should probably not even mention the hybrid SUV again, but it strikes a sore nerve.


• Widespread conspiracy theories: Hell, Ludlum developed his Burnished Brass, while Bond sticks to physics instead of metallurgy.


• Lone psychotic with a gun against the world. No Jimmy, you cannot eat world - it is inedible.


• Both push back the boundaries of scientific discovery: Bond by demonstrating the difficulty of making a Focault pendulum using two people, and Bourne by staying sober in Goa


• Globe-hoppery


• Both treat hotel rooms very badly


• On a less serious note, both are major reinventions of the originals, to 'keep with the times'

In other, perhaps more welcome news, A Most Wanted Man is fairly high on the bestseller list that the city's practitioners of KF do their best to populate. Maybe there is indeed a God, even if it is dyslexic.

The Loaves of Others

Sometimes, a batsman hits a century in 24 balls. Sometimes, a director makes a movie so poignantly beautiful that my stock phrasebook of negative statements (most of which are machine translated from the original Dot) seems woefully inadequate to pan the movie. The Lives of Others is one such movie.

That paragraph above ought to be enough to encourage you to go and watch this movie, particularly since it's been rerereleased in Das Vaterland by the Bulla and Ch- sorry, wrong movie, that would be BharatBulla, er, BharatBala Productions, who were also apparently running an online fillum contest related to this movie.

A recent weekend back, yours truly, the cricket mad fiend, and another anonymous person goose-stepped our way to the local, highly expensive tent house to watch this movie. We interrupt the proceedings to remind you that local tent houses in the Pensioners Hellhole charge enough for the privilege of sitting in inflexible chairs with wobbly backs that it tends to attract our favourite breed of two-legged ape originating from the north of our favourite Carcinogenic line across the globe.

For no good reason, we will ignore the differently volumed people who tend to somehow get the seats to the edge of the rows in which the cricketer's good efforts to book tickets well in advance place us. After all, personal attacks ought to be made only on people who can help being what they are. And the bloggers, and the banjo players. And the old lady in (but you get the idea.)

For some reason, I actually had the foresight to take the seat between the two other unfortunates who accompanied me to this movie, which means that instead of having to actually listen to the thought processes of alien movie watchers, I was surrounded by popcorn, which is the sort of auspicious happening that makes me immediately suspect that the movie has a special appearance by Corrino K to balance things out. As it turned out, however, the cricketer had to spend an hour each time listening to edifying statements before he could run to the safety of the rather large and low-ceilinged restroom, while I could enjoy the movie more or less undisturbed. For my own amusement, and to test your patience, the usual nebulous statements about the movie will be interspersed with pearls of wisdom from the couple next to us (conveniently named H and S, for He and She.)

The movie opened auspiciously enough, with "Captain" HGW (no, not that Captain, who shall not be linked to in an effort to keep PageRank from dropping even more) teaching a class of aspiring Staatssicherheit officers how a person is to be interrogated (O Wilt, Wilt, wherefore art thou, Wilt?)

Naturally enough, once this successful demonstration commenced, we (for once, not the Royal we) were apparently treated to the following statement:


H: "Oye, is movie me sub taaitul hain"


We refrain from further comment, and merely observe that it is clear that the language of one Vaterland has inspired an official language of a Vaat-er land to do away with the Neuter gender, leading to much aggravation when we actually had to pass exams for such things.

Soon enough, HGW accompanies his facial-hair endowed superior officer to a play by "Laszlo"^[1], where we meet our heroine (or is it heroin? No matter) of the drama. One thing leads to another, and HGW is put in charge of investigating "Laszlo" for whatever form of thoughtcrime it is that Type 4 artists are supposed to indulge in. Aided in this noble endeavour by the great minister Schlumppf (no, Hempf), a listening post is soon established over "Laszlo"'s residence, and HGW and Sarge Udo settle down to listen in to our officer.

In what ought to be a characteristic of such situations, Schlumppf is apparently in lust with our very own Christa (who is, of course, the previously unnamed heroine of this movie), which is why the HGW's sharp instincts that suspect "Laszlo" of, shall we say, unwanted tendencies to put pen to paper, are allowed free play.

For reasons of his own that have no doubt to do with the listening to advanced classical muzique over telephone wire, a precursor of the modern and holy system of being put on hold by customer disservice, HGW lets "Laszlo" get away with quite a bit of stuff that he might have, with profit, shown to his boss.


S: "ooh he has started liking them"


We also discover that Christa has this annoyingly stupid habit of popping pills:


H: "What medications is she taking?"
S: "For depression" [Prozac in the eighties, of course. Very advanced,
these germans]


Which naturally leads in to a good reason as to why she would be unreasonably susceptible to blackmail. When the inevitable blackmail happens, we get:


H: "Bitchhhhh"


Ah well, the rest of the story need not be told, and while it ought to be worth the watch, you might perhaps choose a more congenial theater. Or, in normal countries, to buy the DVD. It's rare to see a movie that does not exactly go overboard with mawkish sentimentality when speaking about the triumph of humanity uber alles (if such a triumph does happen, you might be entitled to string together a coherent thought or two of suicide.) Instead, this movie sets the right note, and even though it could have profitably have ended about five minutes earlier, does not follow in the footsteps of the Melodious Monkeykar to screw it all up with a sermon at the end. In case you haven't realised already (and have actually had the patience to sit through disjointed ramblings to reach this point, I consider this the best movie of 2008 (er, no, 2006) so far. Which might actually be amusing, were it not for the fact that we watched Anthony Con Hai some time before watching this. And while watching Minissha Lamba might be distracting, we'd rather encourage the cricketer to put a large picture of Amrita Rao in the previous post.)

Of course, there only remains one unanswered question at the end of all this: What would H and S say if they watched something by E I Bergman?

[1] sz z? Zzz!!

Eh, what's up, doc?

Ultraviolence is a difficult concept to pull off in a movie, and apart from a few Arnie movies dating from the great eighties, there have not been too many good efforts in this direction by hollywood. QT did do an exemplary job in a two-part movie, but by and large, the best movies of this kind have always been made in India.

From Rojni saar's stunts that manage to violate both general and special relativity (usually at the same time), to Sunny paaji's attempts to imitate Bond, we have had an abundance of movies that make use of violence to distract the viewer from seeing the 747 that's looping the loop through a gap in the plot. Of course, this assumes that a plot exists: take, for example, consider yet another Pshaw Rooke starrer that (regardless of our opinion of both Sush and Amrita Rao) should never have been made.

It is therefore appropriate to consider Shoot 'em up as Hollywood's reply, complete with: fresh produce producing fresh corpses, bullet physics that overshadow Rojni saar's two-gun makeshift howitzer shooting bad guys behind a wall[1], and the particularly unique brand of humour that results from trying to do things seriously, much like a Michael Moorcock novel. In fact, when people set out to tell a story like this, they start by combining together chopped bits of 35mm reel stolen from the celluloid graveyard, stitch by painful stitch. When eldritch lightning finally powers up unknown devices made to give such a creature life, the creators end up running screaming from it, only to be pursued and caught, since the poor thing is lonely, and wants a sequel (or perhaps two or five, but that is beside the point.)

The movie opens innocently enough, with drunk Agent Smith sitting at a bus stop trying to drown his sorrows in lukewarm coffee. Er, no, make that Mr. Smith, and it's difficult to say if he's in Washington. A much-pregnant woman hobbles past him, pursued by a carload of trash driven by a lone thug, and Schmidt decides to pursue his duties to ze vaterland, by promptly dispatching the thug and all its clones, while simultaneously attempting to discover whether the mail-order degree that he received in midwifery was worth it.

To cut much of a long (non)story short, Mr Sch err, Smith ends up with a baby in his hands, and marches off to meet "DQ", played by the Bellucci herself.

Midway through this, Mr Smith suffers an identity crisis brought about by the consumption of fresh produce, and thinks he's the wabbit himself. Naturally enough, this means that Sam turns up, played ably by Paul Giamatti, an ex-FBI-profiler turned into hirer of clone armies for ze greater good of ze greater number. Much hilarity ensues.

Unfortunately, beyond this point, the story is really a tattered transparent cloak over the container lorryful of gunfights, which makes it rather difficult to describe much more, but certain items do stand out: the one rat-power Leonardo-made lock, the critical-velocity-defying vertical gunfight ending upon a helicopter and body-strewn rails, and of course la Bellucci. Doesn't leave much out, does it? An IMDB reviewer recommends watching the last part of the first trilogy of Bourne instead, but I'd suggest watching both: it's a quick way of propping up a few economies. And remember, for those people who cannot yet watch the whole of Kill Bill in one sitting, this is useful training.

[1] I've never actually seen this. Youtube links, anyone?