Monologue @venusplus - Tumblr Blog

Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye

I watched this movie after a really long time and it made me want to write about it.

It’s a simple story, almost too simple, but that’s probably a plus. It’s a deeply sad film, if you were to pause and think at any point. But then, you don’t. The cinematography, the background music and the way the characters move about so surreally as though they are untouched by the profoundly sad reality that they inhabit in - don’t let you pause or dwell on the sadness. You just gently travel with them.

I think they set up a really convenient plot line so they could just focus on the delicate emotions revolving an inescapable truth. The male protagonist is terminally ill and the female protagonist who ends up developing an emotional connection with him, is in a troubled marriage.

Would this story happen if she was in a loving marriage? Would their emotional connection be shallower? Like.. I know the fact that she had a troubled marriage made it easy for her own self and those close to her to justify her developing a liking and attachment to someone else like “oh of course her husband is a lying, cheating, loveless fool, so whatever she needs to cope”

This makes the plot easy but also cheapens it a little bit. But then I guess, they had to also make her find a missing piece in her life as he did, for it to be something meaningful. And him not just being a charity case for her!

I think they were also trying the angle of how it required a dying man to wake her up from just being dead inside and going through the motions. Which, I think, came through quite nicely. I also liked the whole commentary about being a random person at a random slice of time and having the most intense of experiences but then fade away - back to reality, back to the background.

Overall, I enjoyed watching it. Still can’t say if I liked it because it was good or because I just hadn’t watched anything in a long time!

#charlottesweb #weekendreading

emmaduerrewatson

#me

#theoffice #dundermifflin #ihavenoidea

Nocturnal Animals

I saw this film after months long of not watching a film. And I saw this film with rapt attention, not doing anything else, not taking a break, not pausing to quickly look at reddit and I really enjoyed it!

Amy Adams is Susan - a successful artist who has her own gallery and lives in LA. Her husband is “handsome and dashing” and is always traveling. Their relationship seems to exist as a historic relic - loveless, passionless, and doesn’t even seem like a marriage of convenience. It still feels like she has an idyllic life, complicated only by what seem like “artist-world” problems until she gets a manuscript that her ex-husband wrote.

The manuscript is of a novel and is dedicated to her. As she reads it, she is consumed by it. Her insomnia gets worse and she lives through all the intense moments in the script. The novel is about a teacher and his family and their hellish roadtrip. Despite having no real connections to her life, Susan finds herself reminiscing about events from her past. She starts to find herself enwrapped in the darkness from those events. We can’t be sure if the events were indeed dark or if it’s Susan’s tinted glasses which give us that view, because she is the only narrator we have.

There’s no reason to mistrust her however, she is not unreliable in any obvious way. Although, there’s this feeling that she’s being needlessly deep and sorrowful (like those people on facebook who need to philosophize and generalize everything). The effect of this is her ascribing more weight to her memories and her actions in the past than what’s warranted.

The mix of scenes from the novel and her past is seamless and makes for an exciting viewing experience! She thinks she has brutally hurt her ex-husband by leaving him, but we can’t be sure. She thinks that the novel and his subsequent actions (or non-actions?) are his way of getting back at her, but once again we can’t be sure.

The film ends with her getting dressed up, going to a high-end LA restaurant and drinking up glasses of wine, seemingly waiting for her ex-husband to arrive. The night draws to a close. Nothing much else happens.

#film #nocturnal animals #amy adams #jake gyllenhaal

#patrick modiano #trysts

S-Town

---- Rant unrelated to S-Town.

So, now I have a long-ish commute to work and I also end up driving when there’s a lot of traffic. NPR feels exhausting (and oh so biased of late) and pop music feels wasteful, so I have been wanting to listen to podcasts for a while now. With this want, there were these technological challenges that I had to first solve. How I love technological challenges! (I even remembered this old post and reinstated it on my old blog http://the--un--thing.blogspot.com/2017/07/technological-challenges.html) The first challenge was that, I realized my car’s bluetooth only worked for phone calls but not for music or other stuff from my phone. So I got this bluetooth receiver which had an aux cable to connect it to the aux port of my car. That worked, but it was rather patchy and it ran out of charge very quickly. The USB port in my car didn’t have enough voltage to charge it efficiently. Thus, I had to shelve this solution. Next up I thought of using the aux cable directly. But the new iphone doesn’t have an aux output. It needs that lightning port to aux converter which was languishing somewhere in the house. I was also very unmotivated to search for it because the aux mode sucks any way. For a few days I tried listening to stuff without connecting to the car speakers, just having the phone at the maximum volume. That wasn’t a long term solution either. Finally I asked my partner if I could just buy a new car, ‘cos I don’t exactly love my car and I really really wanted to listen to podcasts while driving and they promptly opined that it wasn’t the greatest idea. I agreed.

So, any way, after a lot of googling for better solutions, I decided it was best to look for that goddamned converter and looked for it one of these nights at midnight. I found it and the next morning I was so happy I could listen to S-Town!

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I first heard about S-Town on Serial’s facebook page. It was going to be produced by the producers of Serial and TAL. After being sorely disappointed by the second season of Serial, I wasn’t too thrilled, but my interest was piqued after I heard a brief interview with Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder on NPR. The topic is right up my alley - the character study of an unknown, but hugely interesting guy whose life wasn’t hugely consequential to the world, but who led a non-uninteresting life any way! I dig this sort of stuff. I keep daydreaming about making tv shows with this idea - days of lives of seemingly ordinary people. Never famous, never rich or glamorous but just mildly interesting. It’s for the same reason I like reading memoirs, listening to the Moth radio hour, and the occasional personal TAL.

The narrator, Brian Reed did a fascinating job creating a picture of John B. Mclemore, a native of Woodstock, Alabama as a smart, enterprising, funny guy who spent his last days in a strange kind of paranoia, depression and loneliness. It’s a deeply sad story at many levels. It shines light on not just the systemic problems in some struggling communities but also on the human condition itself and how it’s so fragile and vulnerable.

It wasn’t a mystery like Serial was but I was moved much more by S-Town than Serial, although Serial was a better and more exciting podcast overall. I questioned the point of S-Town so many times as I listened to it but I just couldn’t believe how personal the interviews felt and how I had that odd catch in my throat at the end of every episode as I listened to “rose for emily” played. I guess that was the point. Or the absence of it.

I want to say I highly recommend it but I am loathe to say that because it is a depressing story! It will give you that “sad fix” if you are in that kind of a mood.

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This is such a useless post, but I’m happy to be monologuing again =)

#s-town #podcast #john b mclemore #brian reed #serial

If this is not a promising start, I don't know what else is.

#longweekend #elif batuman

Thoughts after SF MoMA

I was overcome with feelings of awe, frustration and a sense of supreme dumbness as I waded through all the art over at SF MoMA. I enjoyed it still, simply because I was with people I love. However, I felt amply ignorant.

I am not sure how it feels to truly “experience” art. At many points, I felt like, perhaps if I had known more about the artists, the historical context, the techniques, the experiences that shaped them - I’d have had better appreciation for what they did. And I’d probably have been able to relate a lot more to the art. But I feel like even that might not cut it.

I imagine art is supposed to evoke something in people. I imagine it’s akin to reading a great book or watching a great movie and being really moved by it. It’s not just an intellectual appreciation for the technical brilliance but something more. It’s with some sadness that I realize that I don’t think art like the ones I saw here would ever do that for me.

It’s not all bad, though. I still saw some fascinating stuff out there. I got introduced to so many great artists and saw some stuff that even as a pure plebe I could really admire.

This was probably my favorite, because I could relate to it so much! It’s called “intermission” by Edward Hopper. It shows a woman in an empty movie theater, by herself, looking mildly sad and contemplative.