turk_rooster

For me, Life of Pi was a yo-yo between overt romanticizing of vignettes of Indian life and times by a non-Indian author, and a movie that has some seriously profound insights in spite of the same. The quaintness of a zoo in Pondicherry, finding religion, the mystique of Indian dance, the uprooting of a family owing to economic circumstances - all had an overtly lyrical, if not particularly original - aura. Then, suddenly, we find Piscine Molitor Patel aka Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) - a castaway in the middle of the Pacific ocean - with all his beliefs called into question. Is there a point to overt faith? Can a human and a large carnivore be (to borrow from Star Wars) symbionts? Where does a man who has lost everything find hope, and the will to move on with one's life? Somewhat if not profoundly moving, Life of Pi is about how we are shaped by our bouquet of experiences, and how, from those experiences, one can draw upon great reserves of strength

In times when one's existence in the real world is troubled, one watches a movie like The Grey. Simplicity itself. Ottway (Liam Neeson) leads six survivors of a plane crash – a rough and tough oil drilling crew – across the wilderness of Alaska towards possible safety. One by one, the grey wolves pick on them, decimating their numbers, apparently unmitigated by little heroic acts of bravery. So does man trump wolf or vice versa? The Grey simply suggests that it perhaps does not matter – "Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day" – authored by none other than the director of the movie (Joe Carnahan). Yes, live and die on this day. Based on the novel "Ghost Walker" by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, The Grey is a stunning movie, elemental and stark. Like life at present – stark and elemental, and live and die on this day ergo, the rest of one's life

Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie)'s talent for the action heroine is obvious, her choice of plot is two decades too late. It is distressing that every aspect of the plot seems to have been drawn from some currently irrelevant Cold War cliché, and, in spite of the same, some of the sequences are barely believable. Cut to the story. An interrogation of a Russian defector reveals that the CIA interrogator – Evelyn – is possibly a double agent (why he gives this information voluntarily to the CIA at large is but one of the faux pas of the movie). In any case, Evelyn performs her dubious role admirably in battling the forces of law and order while fulfilling her near-impossible assassination missions through various decent to good action sequences, and suffice to say that many realities are stretched. When you have finished yawning through the Defcon II and suicide bomber and Universal Soldier-like sequences, the movie trails off rather ambitiously in the quest for a sequel. All the best on that one, Evelyn