The National Market plug

I went to the National Market on Saturday and bought eleven movie DVDs. Saying that it was a great experience would be inaccurate. It was a fabulous, wonderful, AWESOME experience. I went with a much older friend who watches a lot of movies and who I'd spent a wonderful weekend some time back with discussing movies interspersed with the general lives and times of Bangalore, India and the world. I had seen Heat on that weekend and the experience of watching the movie was magnified many times because of the well-informed and articulate company I was in.

He led me to a small hole-in-the-wall shop that looked like it couldn't possibly hold any more than the latest commercial films. If I had been alone, I would even have given it a miss altogether. My friend asked the shopkeeper to show me his collection of 'Art/European' movies and the shopkeeper placed a medium-size suitcase in front of me and unzipped it. From that suitcase emerged movies I wouldn't have dreamed he stocked – European films, Iranian films, Chinese, French New Wave, old Hollywood classics... I sorted out a few and wondered whether that was it.
And then he placed the second and then the third and then the fourth suitcase followed by piles upon piles of goodies, and I whispered a silent prayer. Here was the best bounty I had ever seen anywhere, and selecting movies amid the crowding and the mild jostling and with the knowledge that if you left your place at the counter someone else would take it made it an experience to rival that of browsing second-hand bookshops.

Now my peculiar problem is that I have these eleven DVDs and no one to show them (off?) to, no one to discuss them with. They're lying at the bottom of my suitcase and I can't watch them at home here because some are a tad explicit (which is also why home (the real one) is ruled out. In fact, I'm going to encounter some raised eyebrows when my Mom sees the back cover of Cat People, or worse, realizes what the hand in the tasteful black and white photograph on the front cover of Hiroshima Mon Amour is covering. It took a while to strike me. The picture, for the interested, is on Wikipedia's page for the movie.) and I don't want to watch them with people who aren't interested anyway. I have no interest in introducing people to high-brow cinema. We like things best when we find them ourselves.

This, then, is the list:
1.Wild Strawberries – Ingmar Bergman. I've only seen The Seventh Seal, and have always wanted to watch the film that has a title as evocative as 'wild strawberries'.

2.Blue White Red – Kieslowski. I wanted The Decalogue, but it wasn't available in full, so I bought just this collection. Collections and omnibuses exercise a peculiar attraction, they give us the feeling that we're buying a complete experience; not just a segment of the body of the universe but the entire mythos, lock stock and barrel.

3.Hiroshima Mon Amour – Alain Resnais. I hadn't heard of the movie or the director, but the blurb claimed that this was one of the cornerstones of French cinema and the cover looked artistic enough, so I bought it. I looked at five minutes of it later and it does seem promising.

4.Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut. I've obviously heard of the director and the French New Wave but haven't had occasion to sample any of its products, so I couldn't have left a movie that was one of the most celebrated of that period by one of its most celebrated directors. I just hope it isn't too dated. Good movies never age well. Only campy ones do.

5.Nayakan – Mani Ratnam. I've wanted to watch this ever since I've known about it. The Godfather is a powerful story in itself, and the story's elements adapted to the Indian context makes for what has to be a great watch.

6.The Hustler – This made me truly ecstatic (silently, of course) because I had just finished The Color of Money which was the sequel to the novel The Hustler and wanted the movie if not the book to complete my experience. The others I might find boring and might take some getting used to, but this is bound to be an entertaining watch. I watched the first five minutes, and they deliver.

7.Cat People – This is a movie that doesn't fit its company. Being idle some time ago, I had been reading Roger Ebert's reviews of his selection of the 100 greatest movies of all time and had loved the one for Cat People. I asked the shopkeeper whether he had the movie and he said he didn't. However, to my pleasant surprise, I found it in one of the final piles and immediately decided to keep it. However, Ebert's Cat People is the 1942 movie, while the one I have is directed by Paul Schrader and is the 1982 remake. All the same, the one I have was a hit and is a landmark of sorts for its eroticism and its cinematography and isn't smut (although smut's welcome too once in a while. I wouldn't buy DVD's though :).).

8.The Bicyclist – Mohsen Makhmalbaf. I wanted to buy an Iranian movie because the cinema of this little, conservative country is so well-regarded at film festivals. The only director I'd heard of was Makhmalbaf (although I can never pronounce his name right) so I bought one of his, having to leave plenty of other equally promising titles.

9.Kolya – I had to take this. It has the credentials – Best Foreign Film Oscar, and although the Oscars routinely pass up better movies for the Big Five, the Foreign Film prize is for a film from a much larger pool, viz. that of films in all languages other than English and some in English as well, and hence has a much lesser chance of being given to an undeserving film.
Aside: There is an interesting anecdote about Kolya. Apparently, Shah Rukh Khan was woken up at night (early morning, no?) to inform him that his film had won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. His bewilderment was explained when it was realized that 'Kolya' had won, and not 'Koyla' which had been released the same year, to a vastly different reception.

10.Possession (1981) – Andrzej Zulawski. This just seemed like a good movie, and I've liked Sam Neill since Jurassic Park and later Bicentennial Man. Wikipedia says it's a horror film/thriller. I love thrillers (who doesn't, after all, they thrill) and am afraid of horror, so I don't know what this one's going to be like, which is a good thing.

11.Death and the Maiden – Roman Polanski. I had to pass up Rosemary's Baby for this. Also, I think Rosemary's Baby might be available on the IIT LAN while this certainly isn't. I heard of this movie when I read that a movie released sometime back that had a beautiful poster but found no watchers, Dansh, was based on the play by this name, and the play had been filmed earlier by Roman Polanski with Ben Kigsley as the evil Doctor and Sigourney Weaver as, well, the 'maiden'. On Sigourney Weaver, what is wrong with her? Why is she so amazingly unsexy? Even Tabu is sexier, at least now. Or maybe there's something wrong with me.

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I had a great time yesterday with DJK. Apart from concurring on the aesthetics of smoking and our liking for Roald Dahl, and discovering the happy coincidence of both reading the same book presently, we also agreed that blogging was at least partly an exercise in vanity. I admit, therefore, that I publish the list partly because I want you to appreciate my eclectic taste in movies. But there are other reasons too.
For one, it's been a long time since my last post. The last post wasn't really a post. I wanted to publish something and didn't feel like writing much, so I wrote a short poem, which by the way I think came out not too badly (There I go again! I'm a Leo, what do you expect?). Since I make it a point to stress how jobless I am I think I should be writing frequently, and therefore I thought I'd use the influx of new stuff in my life as material. Secondly, I want to tell everyone that National Market is a wonderful place for movies. If you are an anti-piracy campaigner, however, please ignore these as delirious rantings of a terminally bored and movie-starved man. The third is a completely selfish aim that this is my best chance at fulfilling, but that I don't have much time remaining for, and that will remain unannounced unless it is realized.

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PS: It is maddening to have to add HTML tags to hundreds of words individually to italicise them or make them bold or underline them. Blogspot used to allow simple one-click options earlier but now the clicks mutilate the text in the making-post box beyond recognition. Also, italics etc in an .odt document don't import to blogspot. Why? Are you listening, blogspot? I've shifted blog once, I can do it again. Wordpress, they say, is good, and (arrgh! more pain!) it lets you take all your posts when you go. Think, my friends, and consider.