Idle musings

    In the early part of 2026,I read online that the movie director Christopher Nolan was involved in making "The Odyssey" based on the Greek poet Homer's poem. As https://fewidlethoughts.blogspot.com/2004/01/a-beautiful-book-fellowship-of-ring.html and https://fewidlethoughts.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-review-of-name-of-rose-by-umberto-eco.html discuss, I have read books after watching the movies. This time, I was determined not to let that happen. I read Homer's "The Odyssey" first, during my commute to work and back!    On a Saturday, my wife's brother, my wife and I watched the movie in IMAX format. It was a visual and aural treat! During battle scenes and scenes with people, the sound effect was such that our seats reverberated at the sound. It sent my heart racing.     This blog post talks about both, the book and the movie.     The book I read was a translation of the poem in prose form. In the book, the hero is Ulysses; in the movie the her...

  I watched the Hindi movie "Sholay" from beginning to end recently - again! I don't recall clearly how my fascination with Sholay grew. I have a vague memory of stumbling in the dark in the movie theatre, when my father took me to see Sholay in the early '80s. I seem to recall the sound of the train on the screen, but this may be a fake memory. As the movie celebrates its 50th anniversary today, here is a blog post that describes my views about the movie.     What I remember clearly is reading about Sholay, probably in 2000, when it completed its 25th anniversary. There was some print media buzz about the movie. Around this time, one of the cable TV channels hyped up the showing of Sholay for the first time on Indian television. Thanks to the length of the movie and the advertisements on cable TV, I recall that the movie took about 4.5 hours to watch! It was repeated at different times, on different days.    While channel surfing, one movie that made me pause s...

    Of late, I find myself enjoying movies from the '70s and earlier decades on streaming services.  In this phase, I watched Satyajit Ray movies, an underrated black and white Hollywood movie called "The night of the hunter" and an Italian movie, "The hand of God". I find now that "The night of the hunter" is regarded as a precursor to horror movies of a later age. It is a good thriller.     This blog post is on three other movies though, one of which is a Kannada movie that my wife and I watched in a multiplex near us.     The first movie I want to write about is "Judgement at Nuremberg". I stumbled upon this movie unexpectedly on a streaming service. For an English movie, it is  a long one lasting around three hours. It is based on the Nuremberg trials, which is discussed at https://www.britannica.com/event/Nurnberg-trials and https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp#general . The brutality of Nazism is brought out in the la...

The credit goes to my wife's brother for introducing me to the Kannada movie 'Daredevil Musthafa'. He told me that the movie was crowd funded. It made me interested, but not interested enough to buy tickets for the movie. NOTE: I will avoid names of people in this blog post. A couple of weeks later I called upon another relative. This is a person who is very knowledgeable about both Kannada literature and also Kannada movies. While talking, the topic went to movies based on books. We talked of Puttanna Kanagal, Nagara Haavu, Sharapanjara and other movies. The conversation veered to Kannada authors. My relative spoke of the literary giant Kuvempu and his equally talented son Dr. Poornachandra Tejaswi. "There is a movie called 'Daredevil Musthaf'a released based on Dr. Tejaswi's characters and stories. It is his fans who produced the movie. For the first time, there is a poster of an author in a movie theatre instead of the posters of film stars. This can hap...

    There are very few movies filmed like a documentary that are worth watching twice. "Gandhada Gudi - Journey of a True Hero", a Kannada movie by Amoghavarsha on Karnataka's wildlife featuring actor and superstar Dr. Puneeth Rajkumar is one such movie. When I saw that the movie is released on the streaming service Amazon Prime Video, I was excited. I wanted all of us at home to watch it. We began watching the movie together, my wife, my mother and I. For the next 90 minutes or so, all of us were engrossed in the movie. The photography, the music, the places and the people captivated us. At the end of it, I was left with mixed feelings: on one hand, we have lost a talented actor who retained his simplicity until his untimely demise; on the other hand, the places and the visuals in the movie made me feel refreshed and energised. A couple of days later, my wife's brother visited us. I told him about the movie - and again all of us at home watched it with him and his fa...

    For now, the cloud of the SARS Cov2 pandemic seems to have been dispersed. When I go out for walks with my mask on, I see people without masks look at me strangely. In my mind, I hear them say: "Look at this character, he still wears a mask !" The mask feels uncomfortable and it is off from my face more often than it used to be earlier, but I do keep it on in crowded settings like when I am in public transport. With cases in double digits in Bengaluru, a long weekend made me look for a good movie to watch in the theatre. On 16-Apr-2022, my wife and I went to a multiplex for the first time after two years, to watch the Kannada movie "KGF: Chapter 2". The rest of this blog post presents my view on the movie.     My summary: some movies are meant for the big screen. If you are an action buff, watch "KGF: Chapter 2" (I will call it KGF2 in this blog post from this point onward) in a multiplex/ theatre.      https://hombalefilms.com/movies/kgf...

We continue to be in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. India experienced lockdowns with some relaxations in the time interval between 24-Mar-2020 and 31-May-2020. It seemed unbelievable that a country could be shut down for this duration, but all of us have lived through it. In the lockdown, a close friend suggested that I should write a blog post about the experience. I did think about writing about how our lives have changed, but since I was unduly optimistic, I thought that normalcy would return in three months or so ! I thought I could write looking back at the previous three months or so ! How wrong I was ! It has been now more than seven months since the first lockdown was announced and even now, the country is dealing with the pandemic, which slowly appears to be heading towards a semblance of control. The festival season is in progress now. I sincerely hope that there is no upward spike or second wave after this season. I see that people have become lax in using the mask in...