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To this day, I’ve never seen The Sixth Sense. Yes, I already know the big secret. It’s impossible to not know it if you’ve had any exposure to popular entertainment since its release. What this blissful ignorance of that movie means to me as a movie lover is that to me M. Knight Shyamalan is not M. KNIGHT SHYAMALAN(!), but just another accomplished director of popular cinema. You might think that means I don’t like his work or don’t give him much credit, but that’s not true. What it does mean is that when I’m watching any movie by this Writer-Director, that came after his stellar debut, I have the advantage of objectivity.

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The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was a masterpiece in every way possible. There is little wonder as to why it became such a smash box-office hit, because it had everything going for it. Not only was it extremely watchable and entertaining, but it was very impressive on many other levels. No doubt, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow brought in a whole new level of character dynamic into the dying pirate genre, but over all what set that movie apart was its extremely etched characters. Every one who ever said a line on screen had a very clear and well defined persona that came through strongly in the dialogue and the plot, and that endeared them to the viewing audience. Then of course there were all the regular technical accomplishments of lighting and cinematography, sound and special effects. Everything meshed into a very cohesive whole which dropped the viewer into a rich and well developed world that didn’t seem transitory.

I’m sure you’ve gathered by now that I loved the first Pirates movie. Unfortunately the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest, while impressive on a technical level, disappointed me in many ways. So, it was with more than a modest sense of trepidation that I stepped into a cinema to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 3 – At World’s End.

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Since I started actively maintaining the current avatar of this blog less than a month ago, I’ve been looking into blog carnivals and submitting some of my posts for inclusion into a few appropriate ones.

Scott Nehring runs the Carnival of Cinema over at his blog Nehring the Edge. Every Friday he links to a wide range of interesting posts and articles relating to the world of cinema — everything from movie reviews to film production tips. Scott has included two of my posts in his weekly listing. My comparative review of Babel and Guru was linked in last week’s carnival #31, and my review of Hot Fuzz was linked in this week’s carnival #32.

If you’re a film buff of any sort, Nehring the Edge makes for very interesting reading. It includes not only the carnival listings but also Scott’s own extensive set of movie reviews. Grab your popcorn and pay him a visit.

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I’m not part of the ardent business book devouring audience. I am not one of those who have a well arranged shelf of all the latest tomes featuring grinning gurus spouting the latest business wisdom. But I do read business books occasionally when the mood strikes, because when you come down to it I’m simply interested in everything out there.

I was a bit surprised when I came across Good Business in the bargain bin of a local book shop. While I hadn’t read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s previous famous work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I had heard of it and read a basic synopsis at some point. I found his ideas to be quite intriguing. He seemed to be one of those thinkers trying to blur the boundaries between disciplines, which I like, so when I came across Good Business I picked it up.
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What makes a good action movie?
The simplest answer is great action.

So, what makes a great action movie?
I would have to say great action embedded in a great movie.

It is precisely for that elusive quality that Hot Fuzz is in my mind the best action movie ever. There, I’ve said it and I’m not taking it back.
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I saw Spiderman 3 two days ago and just didn’t feel like writing about it. Sure, I could have gone into the post-mortem of every little piece in it that worked and didn’t work, but I realised that none of that would go far enough into explaining why I found it disappointing. In a seemingly un-connected event, today I came across a mention of this Slashdot piece about Blender on Blendernation [later I also saw a related thread on Blenderartists]. Lo and behold there was a large number of people doing post-mortems of every little piece of both Blender and the Slashdot piece, that either worked or didn’t work for them. Just as I was about to dismiss the whole thing and put it off to sour grapes on one hand and over zealous teenagers on the other, I realised there was a connection I was missing. While everyone was tearing everything apart and analysing every word, sentence and minor feature, we were all forgetting to ask the most important question: How entertaining is your 3D software?
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A trip to India usually includes a very liberal dose of cinema tickets for me. On this trip the first film to catch our attention was Babel. So on a random day when the mood struck us, my Dad, Vishal and I took a long bus ride to South Bombay and stepped into the historical Regal Cinema for our fix. The next day Babel won the Golden Globes Best Picture award. But a few hours before that I had walked out of the darkness of the cinema hall and I loved what I had just seen. In spite of the minor vandalisms by the Indian Censor Board, Babel was quite simply a beautiful piece of cinema. Movies are very much like people, and very much like people we can love them for many different reasons. There are those people who make us laugh, and those that make us feel special, and those that inspire us or make us proud. But if you look carefully you eventually find a small minority that we like not for these sometimes self-centred reasons, but essentially because they are simply impeccable human beings. They are bright and shining standards for the rest of us to live up to. Babel is that kind of movie.
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