Movies, Work, etc. etc.

Ahem. I never thought that the price of a professional job would be going blog-less for a month. And that's not the only handicap either; in fact, for some, that would actually rank among the least annoying of the miseries brought upon them by the headsore called work. Take, for instance, the fact that you are made to intermittently suffer positively awful spells of exhaustion, or that you are reduced to regularly having magnificently bland food disguised as lunch, or, the most painful misfortune of all - that you are forced to cut down on your sleep! So the real question at the end of the day is - is the money worth it? To be very truthful, no amount of money can ever be worth all that, but being truthful went out of fashion a century ago. So yes, the money's worth it. But it isn't really worth it. Okay, my rant is getting really incoherent now. I must move on to less muddled things.

Watched three movies in the last week. Cheeni Kum is surprisingly funny, it has no airy pretensions about it and succeeds at bringing out the innate humor in an unconventional love story. Amitabh Bachchan is in his element after a long time, and Paresh Rawal is dependably funny as always. But it is Tabu, that long-forgotten actress of sparkling caliber, who holds the film together with her wonderful naturalness. It's amazing how sometimes a simple role that doesn't require too many histrionics or intense emotions can make us appreciate the real quality of an actor. It happened with Kareena Kapoor in Omkara, with Rani Mukherjee in Bunty Aur Babli, with Akshaye Khanna in Dil Chahta Hai, and if I may dare to club him with Bollywood actors, with Al Pacino in the Godfather. I guess it's just one of the things that make movie-watching such a delightful experience.

Shrek The Third was probably my most anticipated movie of the year (well okay, my second most anticipated movie of the year - Harry Potter 5 grabs top spot without any kind of a fight). But the movie turned out just good - not outrageously funny, not amazingly pleasant, and not even completely devoid of boring moments. It would've been an exhilarating joy-ride if it weren't for the inescapable feeling of repetitiveness about the humour - there's only so many times you can roll on the floor with laughter at Eddie Murphy's Donkey jokes. And while I'm definitely not among those who hate Justin Timberlake with a passion, his Artie was downright uninteresting and even a little irritating. Mike Myers, Antonio Banderas and Cameron Diaz continue with their good work, but the whole film has a little staleness to it which not even the novel subplot involving the feelings of the perennially hated fairytale villains and the whole bit about how fairytale heroines can be anorexic party-loving bitches when away from the public glare can erase.

And that brings me to the movie that dwarfs all others in terms of scale, budget, length, box office returns and a whole lot of other things. The title of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not the only thing that is excessively long about it. The official runtime of the movie is 2 hours and 48 minutes, and that beats most of Bollywood's overlong melodramas by a distance. Everything about the movie is enormous - the star cast, the budget (it reportedly cost a whopping 300 million dollars to make), the action sequences, even the supernatural goddess Calypso. Personally, I enjoyed every single second of the movie - I'm a die-hard Pirates fan, I've been one ever since Captain Jack Sparrow said, "But why is the rum gone?". It's infinitely better than Dead Man's Chest, and comes very close to being as good as The Curse of The Black Pearl, which is saying quite something. I'm sure plenty of people hated the movie heartily, and perhaps even more were left thoroughly confused by the many twists, turns and double-crossings in it, but that is wholly understandable for a trilogy that evokes as sharply divided reactions as does Pirates. The film actually looks as expensive as 300 million dollars, and is a grand epic in every sense of the term. The added bonus is, of course, that it is a very funny epic. Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy and Geoffrey Rush are, expectedly, the stand-out performers, but the support cast does well too. The CGI is ridiculously breathtaking and the fight sequences are going to end up as the defining cinematographic achievements of the decade. Admittedly, the pointless Calypso sub-plot, the frustrating complexity of the Dutchman curse and, of course, the somewhat tiring length of the movie do sour things a bit. But otherwise, it is a very worthy finale to a fantastic series and is quite easily the best movie of the year. Yet. Harry Potter 5, remember?