5 Things That Are Making Every New Movie A Pain

It’s been a really, really long time since I actually sat in a movie theater and saw a movie. It’s been even longer if you were to consider me actually sitting inside a movie theater AND enjoying myself. Even thinking about such an occurrence makes me raise an eyebrow in wonderment.

I don’t usually try very hard to think about what exactly it is, that is making something as badass as a movie so boring, but after having fried a million brain cells watching Charlie Sheen fuck random women while his dork brother made crappy facial expressions, and trying to figure out why almost every expression that an actor makes is interpreted by Tim Roth as either fear, contempt or shame, I decided that enough was enough and a long period of retrospection followed.

I'm thinking... constipated!

The really funny thing is that I didn’t even have to see another movie to figure out what in the blue hell was going wrong with the most beloved form of industry on Earth (maybe the moon too, and the rest of the Solar System). Here’s what:

#5 The 3-D Problem

One movie. That is how much impetus Hollywood needed to throw a shit-load of 3-D movies on our faces. That one movie, as you might have rightly guessed is Avatar. Because after or alongside Avatar came Clash of the Titans, Resident Evil – Afterlife, The Last Airbender, The Final Destination, My Bloody Valentine, Saw 7, Step-Up and tens of animated movies like Shrek Forever After, Up, G-Force, The re-release of Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, etc., all in 3-D. God help us, because there was also a Tamil movie, Chutti Chattan (or something like that) which can be added to the list.

I mean, what the fuck? I understand 3-D in action or fantasy movies, but Step Up? Saw? What was the idea folks? Blood/organs/limbs flying out the screen supposed to be the new USP of movies?

And there’s more. Notice the movies that have come out in 3-D. All of them are either crappy movies trying to continue the lame overworked storyline of a movie franchise or crappy movies with no storyline trying to start a franchise. And if you are still bonkers enough to go watch the 4th part of a mindless action flick like Resident Evil which also seriously lacks sense and story (but has Mila Jovovich), here’s another problem.

I have, so far, seen only one 3-D movie. That is Avatar. The experience was just a little bit better than the first thirty five seconds of What’s Your Rashee?  Not that Avatar was a bad movie. I love what Cameron did to Sam Worthington’s face, but the 3-D goggles were really problematic. Here’s a small list of problems/bad experiences:

a)     Your 3-D glasses raise the price of an already overpriced movie ticket by at least 50 bucks. 

b)     Your 3-D glasses are totally not worth that. 

c)     Your 3-D glasses can be totally smudged and dirty, making watching a movie irritating. For example, considering that the only significantly noticeable thing in Avatar was the Art Direction, what is the point in paying extra money watching a 3-D movie if all your glasses let you see are large, smudgy, blue and red shapes?

That would be an extra Hundred And Eighty Rupees, sir. 

d)     You might try to clean the glasses, at which point the cheaply assembled plastic-y lens might just pop out. You might have to rush out the auditorium to get a new pair, and guess what, by the time you return, Stephen Lang is already dead. 

e)      You might be wearing spectacles. Not a problem for those who enjoy irritation. 

In conclusion, 3-D = NOT happening.

#4 The Repeating Stories

There is a reason that we use the word cliché. Like, for example, most of the movies made in Bollywood are clichés. And the funny thing is, I find it hard to blame that on the directors and actors, because seemingly, the audience in our country very quickly sets up a list of expectations from each person and then expects the person to live by them come hell or high water. Therefore, Shah Rukh Khan cannot be seen doing a hit action flick and nobody imagines Manoj Bajpai doing a rom-com. But instead of finding progressive stories that fit the viewers’ expectations, we have repeating stories.

Therefore, once we realized that movies like Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, consisting of nothing but an above average soundtrack and aimless, idiotic rich youngsters who can’t distinguish between friends and lovers until the ‘airport scene’ could become a money making phenomenon, we immediately had Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Deepika Padukone , Imran Khan and Priyanka Chopra doing a series of similar bullshit, like I Hate Luv Storys, Anjaana Anjaani, Break Ke Baad, etc., all of which appealed to almost nobody except some deprived teenage girls and their boyfriends. You can suck on it Imran, because we hate love stories too, and guess what, we can even spell it right!

And this is not limited to the romantic flicks alone, because serious directors like Ashutosh Gowariker and Sanjay Leela Bhansali are equally monotonic. Apart from two romantic movies – Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and its disastrous experimental replica, Saawariya, Sanjay has made only one kind of progress: From deaf-mute in Khamoshi to deaf-mute and blind in Black followed by quadriplegic in Guzaarish. So touching.

On the other end, we have Ashutosh Gowariker, whose movies include patriotic villagers escaping land taxes by playing cricket in Lagaan, a patriotic NASA employee coming back to reform his village inSwades, a patriotic emperor Akbar who defends his territory, honor and bitchy wife Jodha with relentless zeal and finally a patriotic bunch of teenagers who take out their puberty related frustrations on the Angrez in his recent movie Kheley Hum Jee Jaan Se. I wonder if he wants a wet kiss from the ghost of Chandrasekhar Azad. Will he stop after that?

"Bhagat is OK too... This Bhagat."

#3 The Franchises

What Bollywood does with repeating stories, Hollywood does with franchises. Seems like every movie that makes it big in Hollywood has to have a sequel. While some of them do live up to one’s expectations, like the Bourne Series, or the reboot of Batman by Christopher Nolan, others are what can be called damp squibs, lacking the story and/or substance of their predecessors simply because they were made with not the fine art of movie-making, but profit in mind. Take for example, the Resident Evil series, watching which would be a pointless expense from the third part onwards or any long-drawn superhero franchise. Spiderman was a phenomenal movie, despite the fact that it had Kirsten Dunst and James Franco in the same cast; Spiderman 2 was also surprisingly good, but the third part murdered all that credibility in a ‘venom’ous blow. It was so bad, that the whole Spiderman franchise is now being revamped, with Andrew Garfield as the new Peter Parker and Sam Raimi no longer the director. Nothing like making two more mistakes to take it to a totally new level of terrible.

"Can Megan Fox be Mary Jane? Pleeease?"

Apart from that we have two equally disgusting Hellboy movies, 3 bad sequels from the X-Menfranchise with another two slated for release next year, 8 movies from the Potty  franchise, and 5 from the mind-numbing Twilight franchise. It seems the Harry Potter movie makers found it difficult to adapt a 607 page book into a single movie, when it was alright to make Order of the Phoenix (776 pages) into a single one. If that doesn’t shout profit, I don’t know what does. (Mere coincidence that the Twilight makers did the same?)

Talking of franchises, Hollywood makes one out of every successful movie which wasn’t made for sequels. The Oceans’ series is a good example, and so are the upcoming sequels of The Hangover (Seriously?) and Kung Fu Panda (pretty much a given considering what Dreamworks did to Shrek).

I’m afraid that a time will come when there will only be movie franchises and we’ll only see movies with almost similar names, completely similar characters and no story. Personally, I would save the tigers sometime later.

#2 Bad Acting

Bad acting is becoming more and more prevalent as we have more and more movies that rely upon mindless action, millions of dollars worth of CGI, and movies already assured to be commercially successful because of the perverse fandom of the books they were adapted from. Wouldn’t you expect an ageless vampire to be portrayed by a person who looks like he has seen the shit through the centuries? But no. It’s Robert Pale Patinson. In point of fact, it is very lucky occurrence that the Edward Cullen bunch of vampires stopped aging around the age of 20, because others ageless characters like, say Gandalf, will certainly not appeal to a high-school girl, even if she’s played by someone as stone-faced as Kristen Stewart. 

"Did you hear? Bella is dating that ageless dude!" "EW!" 

And bad though they maybe, Twilight cast members can hardly match up to Quinton Jackson in The A-Team, or Vin Diesel in any movie at all.

"Imma ANGRY... FOO!"

Back here in our country, we not only have the famous casting couch, but also something much worse. It’s the big names of Bollywood, ‘launching’ their beloved sons and daughters and nephews and so on and so forth. Imagine the whole of Bollywood salvaging itself and portraying actually talented people, if a lot of the following were not given a chance of their lifetime by a relative with references – Uday Chopra, Emraan Hashmi, Imran Khan, Sonam Kapoor, Jacky Bhagnani (LOLZ!) etc. There are many I’ve missed, and many, many more to come, like for instance David Dhawan’s son is being launched in a Karan Johar movie. And the last time I tried, I couldn’t remember the name of a single prominent struggling actor/actress who was also good at acting.

#1 Non-intelligent Cinema

There is a phrase in the English language: ‘Simple to the point of being stupid’. We here at Bollywood have adapted it with the fullest of positive thinking, and we pour it into every movie with delicate care. The characters, sets, conditions and situations in most of the movies are designed in such a way that everything hits you easily and comfortably in the realm of predictability. You know before going to almost every romantic movie that the hero and heroine will get a ‘happily ever after’ at the end. And this moronic concept will be sugarcoated with a crappy, obvious underlying message like suicide ain’t good for ya, or don’t hate love stories. Yawn.  

Hollywood movies are worse in that respect because although some of them might be intelligent, you walk out of most others feeling like you have been mocked. Here’s an example: In Salt, Angelina Jolie makes a freaking ROCKET LAUNCHER out of a fire extinguisher and some other crap like that. Also, in almost all recent Hollywood action movies with eight-figure budgets, the laws of Physics take a walk in the park. Take for example Iron Man 2, one of the STUPIDEST movies I have seen. Tony Stark and Pepper Potts carry the whole suit with all the weaponries and technical wizardry in a small briefcase that they flick around like it was filled with Monaco biscuits. The villain Whiplash, disturbs the shit out of a Formula Racing event and nobody could do anything to him despite the fact that 60 percent of his body (including all his vital parts except the penis) were uncovered. What are we, idiots?

But you have to watch ANY movie with Scarlett in tights

We really don’t have to go into those Salman Khan movies do we? If you want, you can check out my article on Dabangg.

My goodness, this article’s become as long as an Ashutosh Gowariker movie.

Oh, well. There’s always hope.

5 Status Updates Everyone Needs To Stop Liking

A very wise friend of mine once heard a very wise friend of his saying, “No one is too cool for Facebook… No one.”

He thinks he is, but he's just plain WRONG.

When he put up that huge cliché as his Facebook status, he got more than 15 ‘likes’. Now I am very cynical by nature and that by itself is generally enough for me to disregard such occurrences as something not really worth pondering about. But blame my joblessness and the frequency of such occurrences, that this time I decided to do something about it, instead of simply scrolling down and marveling at the bazillionth post about how Sachin Tendulkar is God/Baap/Greatest Man Alive. Not that I have anything against him anyway. That would be social hara-kiri.

Facebook statuses have become an important part of my life, and there are others for whom a Facebook status is life itself. Unfortunately, except the maximum number of characters, there is absolutely no specific rule regarding how one’s supposed to go about them, and things like punctuation, coherence and common sense have not yet been figured out by most (refer picture above). I can safely leave out innovation, since hardly anyone digs the basics of that concept in our country nowadays.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The practice of liking bullshit is even more rampant on Facebook. If you are a girl with good looks, you can pretty much put up any douchey nonsense, e.g. “OMG! OMG! OMG!... lyf’s sooooooooooooo goooooood!!!!!!!!!”, and you are sure to get around thirty likes for it. Not because your status is good, though. Mostly because that disgusting pimple-faced dude whom you reluctantly added just thought it would improve his chances.

"I FEEL WARM AND HAPPY!"

Seriously, we need to stop. In the name of decency. So think hard the next time your status update is:

#5 Clichés  and Pure Crap:

                                                     

We never like it when everyone keeps repeating the same stuff and tries to push it down your head forcefully. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how humans are, no big deal. But somehow everyone totally forgets it on social networking sites. Twenty thousand extra status updates cannot make the India-Pakistan match more interesting. You don’t have to tell everyone that your ‘exams suck’. They already know it. Having to read that thirty-seven times before they decide to open their textbooks is not going to improve anyone’s chances. And seriously, you think anyone is ever going to forget Rebecca Black and the death of music if we keep on talking about how she recites the days of the week in her song? NO! Please stop. You are making the internet boring.

And when there is nothing obvious to update about, we have a whole lot of nothing on the profiles of the same people. “Can’t believe I just farted in a restaurant.” “OMG!!! My sister looks so cuteeeeeee!!” It’s almost like their lives are so mundane, they need to get it out by giving a minute-by-minute account of every stupid happening. You can’t blame them; “Using a different toothpaste…. YUUUMMMM!” is probably the single most interesting thing that happened to them in a fortnight, but you don’t have to like it. Even if it is posted by a crazy hot girl or the handsomest hunk on the Universe, or even by Chuck Norris, there is simply no rule that says you have to like crap. 

Ok, I take that back. Sorry.. NOOO!!!!

On the other hand, even if an ugly, anti-social prick wins the Nobel Prize, please like that. That is infinitely more important than the bowel movement of your dream girl’s pet dog.

#4 Wisdom:

There are some many a lot of people I know, who turn themselves into Tony Robbins, Baba Ramdev, Socrates or whoever they think endorses their brand of philosophy better. 

You do need philosophy, though.

Day after day, their status updates will be a pearl of wisdom that will draw tens of likes. Why do we do that? The other day I came across this cosmically misunderstood truth, “Love not a person whom you love, but a person who loves you back”, on a friend’s Facebook wall. It had 23 likes. The number of likes was more shocking than the complete absence of logic in the statement, more so, because the 23 likes motivated this friend to continue posting great thoughts about who and how you are supposed to love for a fortnight. After that, I guess he ran out of material to copy and paste on his wall. It would seem as if these people were bestowed with a mystical force and depth of understanding that other, lesser mortals can barely fathom. However, it would seem that way only until you realized that the guy advising you about the ill-effects of booze has an album dedicated to his funniest moments when he was high.

#3 (mis)Quotes:

People just love quoting on Facebook. It gives them the feeling of pride and a sense of intelligence and a lot of likes, but that should not happen. Here’s why that shouldn’t happen:

a)     Because essentially all you are doing is commending the a-hole for logging on to Wikiquote, undergoing some really ‘strenuous’ keyword search, finding what he was looking for and copying and pasting it on his wall (most of the time without crediting the actual speaker/author). Do you now see how ridiculous it sounds? It is not like the dude came up with that smart clump of statements all by himself. You are praising him for exactly fuckall.

b)     Because just like wisdom, 90 percent of the quote-copiers have absolutely no respect for the application of that quote itself. They might be misquoting a person for the sake of propaganda, e.g. a friend of mine once very conveniently misquoted Werner Heisenberg, making it look like Heisenberg was respecting God in his all-pervasive form, when he was actually talking about Mathematics. They might even be douches who want to prove their own greatness or well-informed lifestyle. “Some men are born great; others have greatness thrust upon them”. Oh, really? Well you don’t seem to belong to either of the two, sunshine. Unless misunderstanding Shakespeare makes you great.

When you like a quote like that, it’s a plus for the moron’s inflated sense of self-worth. Hitler had a highly inflated sense of self-worth. Catch my drift?

#2 Intentionally Vague:

The creepiest bunch of your friends can be identified on Facebook. I don’t have a great amount of experience regarding the roots of creepiness, but here’s the general law – The creepiness of a person is directly proportional to the vagueness of his status messages. If you have read a series of increasingly vague status messages from a friend, you had better start the tiresome procedure of breaking ties with him instead of going ahead and liking the poor guy’s status.

Vague statuses irritate me even more than the bullshit statuses. “I screwed up”, “Yesterday was the saddest day of my life”, etc. Every time I see a status update of this type, there will be a zillion likes on it, and everybody would have asked the usual questions like, “What happened?” “Are you alright?” And the replies to these will either be a promise to certain specific people that they will be talked to later, or the favorite, “I don’t wanna talk abt it”.

Why being vague ain't cool.

Sad and attractive though the status might seem, it is actually more of an attention seeking stunt of the daily soap variety. If you’re looking for comfort, shouldn’t you at least tell others what exactly you mean? If you are too shy to tell the others what it was, shouldn’t you just think twice before posting the consequence of said events on a social networking site.

This person doesn’t really require your care and consolation. He/she just made you part of a social experiment. He/She is merely seeking the limelight by appearing sad.

And what does it mean when you like a status like that anyway? Did you actually LIKE the fact that somebody had the saddest day of their lives? 

#1 Hidden Hate:

Sometimes (thankfully not very frequently), I come across a status like, “Some people need to be taught the meaning of friendship”. 

SOMEONE needs a haircut!

This is a very dangerous type of status. It immediately makes you insecure and wonder if it was you who did something bad to the person in question. And frankly, keeping the disastrous ambiguousness of the statement aside, this is a very wimpy and cowardly method of getting back at someone. First of all, it is absolutely unnecessary to carry a fight/grudge into a social networking site. That’s similar to making extremely private decisions like, dying your pubic hair red, publicly. Secondly, if you want to be a gutsy buffoon than please keep the courage throughout. Instead of saying something like, “Some people in my class stink a lot” and making everybody sniff their armpits, you can be a mard and say, “Hey everyone, Atul Joshi stinks. He stinks so much, it’s like somebody crapped in a prison toilet and sent it through a kilometer of toxic waste before exploding it in a pig’s rectum. Somebody give him a fucking bucket-full of water every Monday morning!”

If nothing else, it’s to the point. I might like that, not the former version. Best case scenario might include Atul Joshi actually taking a bath and sparing you the misery.

Having said all this, I must admit that at some point in the past, I would have posted at least one status per each category on my own wall. That’s not the point though. The point is, no one liked it. Now you know this article has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just JEALOUS RAGE! ;)

First Post

The start of a brand new blog.

It is so damn difficult.

I’ve started-up on so many unfinished projects that I can bear perfect testimony to it. I even had a blog once, which fell into disuse thanks to what I call my chronic writers’ block, another polite excuse for my laziness. Whenever you start to write a new piece, you have the basic idea about the stuff you are going to put into it. Say you are going to write a novel. You would have figured out all the basic things, the names of the hero and the villain (lol), the basic plot, maybe even some kick-ass action sequences involving the protagonist. But ask yourself, would you have decided on what exactly you would write in the first ever line of the first ever chapter? Most of you will answer this with a ‘no’ and I’ve full sympathy with you (absolutely none if you said yes).

Beginnings are difficult. They’re so very surprisingly difficult, they could actually make you never begin, and today I face the exact same problem. I figured out that I really wanted to start this blog, after a certain article I wrote titled, ‘5 Changes VTU Had Better Make in Their Examination System’. VTU is the university under which I will finish my graduation, and the article, inspired mainly from the style of Cracked.com and fuelled by sarcasm and frustration wasn’t exactly the best thing I’ve put up on paper. But luckily I shared it on Facebook, and to further its popularity, I tagged some friends in it. This turned out to be a move as awesome as a Viking’s back-flip hammer blow (no, it doesn’t really exist, and yes, it’s senseless). I received a moderately good response to that article and that inspired some more ideas on similar lines of thought. Those lines of thought have led me to this blog today. Obviously, that did not help me with the beginning of this blog and here I am, still writing down completely irrelevant thoughts.

And boring!

Another very difficult, thing about starting to write something new, is deciding on a title. Your title is the first impression, the single most motivating aspect for a potential reader and probably the biggest factor in deciding how awesome your article finally is. I mean your article can have good matter and flow, but a messy title can wreak havoc with its image. Why? Well, take your pick from the following two:

• THE AWESOME BUST OF PAMELA ANDERSON
• THE BASICS OF BREAST IMPLANT SCIENCE WITH INCLUDED CASE STUDIES

If you chose the second, you need to bend down and check for signs of puberty.

We loved you Pam. Right up till around 1998.

After using up so much space in explaining the title’s importance, it’s a given that I would like to explain my choice of title. I call this blog Twisted Vision.

The title Twisted Vision comes inspired from the column of a famous Gujarati magazine called Chitralekha. Written by possibly the best satirist I know in the non-English section, a Mr. Tarak Mehta. The column is called Duniyane Undha Chashma, the most meaningful English translation of which would be ‘The World Through A Pair of Inverted Spectacles’. I know it doesn’t sound much. English kills it.

And cheesiness kills it's Zombie form.

In the column Mr. Mehta describes the life of a common Mumbai man (a Gujju) placed in certain highly uncommon situations (like umpiring an all-ladies cricket match) which are narrated in first person with a liberal dose of the two most important elements of a successful comedy. Sarcasm and Criticism of everything man ever made.

I chose the name Twisted Vision, partly from the imagery that Tarak Mehta must have had in his mind when he thought of his own title, and partly from the fact, that when you choose to be purposefully critical about something, you twist the facts to suit your own opinion.

Nah! Mostly I just chose it because it sounds cool.

Now that’s a pretty long beginning for someone who took two paragraphs to explain why they suck.

I guess I’ll end the beginning now.

Hey! A sigh of relief is RUDE!