Came across this video at Listening Post on Wired blog.

Devendra Banhart stars alongside girlfriend Natalie Portman in his latest music video, for the song “Carmensita.” In the Bollywood-style video, Banhart portrays a prince with a “rebellious” beard who is trying to win (what else) the love of a princess, played by Portman, whose dad is a real stick in the mud.

- from Devendra Banhart’s Bollywood Video Features Girlfriend Natalie Portman

Rating: 10/10

When confounded by the mayhem that The Joker unleashes on Gotham City, and the ever-growing knowledge within himself that the people of his city are as prone to criminal urges as any super villain, Bruce Wayne builds a surveillance system that lets him keep an eye on everyone. This happens towards the end of the film. The idea that heroes with very powerful moral convictions about justice and freedom could lose faith in those very ideals is one of the big underlying themes of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. This film, more than any other graphic novel adaption sees the true potential of the medium which thrives on polarized archetypes - the good guy and the bad guy, the superhero and the supervillain. By using these archetypes to discuss the meaning of justice, vengeance, and very human flaws, The Dark Knight breaks from it’s genre trappings as a superhero movie and becomes an almost Shakespearean epic that works on every level.

I use the word ‘almost’, because the movie is not without it’s share of problems. There are subplots that don’t quite fit into the narrative, there are elements that are a bit too forced, and a large number of dialogues are expository in nature.  But these flaws can be easily overlooked due to the searing performances by the entire cast, a deft script, and the assured direction by one of the best filmmakers in business today.

After the watershed reboot of the Batman franchise with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan tackles a problem that a superhero can pose to the society - escalation. With criminals being pushed into a tight spot by Batman, the city’s mobsters turns to a “better class of criminal”. And that criminal is The Joker, played brilliantly by the late Heath Ledger. He has no backstory, and he has no motive. He is, in his own words, “an agent of chaos.” He is the anti-thesis to everything that Batman, with his rigid adherence to a moral code, tries to be.

Gotham city has three heroes that the Joker targets. Batman - the vigilante who takes law into his own hands because he does not believe the justice department or the law enforcement is capable of eradicating crime. District Attorney Harvey Dent - the “White Knight” who fights to bring justice using the law. And Lt. James Gordon - a policeman who fights the criminals on the street along with the corruption that exists in his police force. What these three men have in common is the desire to bring order to the city. And what Joker tries to do is break that order and break the three men. He breaks them by targeting their loved ones and the ideals they stand by. He tries to show that when pushed to the limit, the innocent will make the same decisions that a criminal would. And throughout the movie, Joker creates numerous situations where he tries to and sometimes proves this hypothesis.

When Bruce Wayne faces a villain of Joker’s caliber, he sees what Batman would have to become to stop him. He realizes the Batman isn’t enough to inspire people, and that in the new DA, Gotham finally has the true hero that it needs. Harvey Dent’s story arc is the backbone of the movie. It’s his rise and fall that underscores the film’s grand theme, which is defined in Dent’s own words - “that you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” And true to those ominous words, seeing the futility of his struggle to bring justice using the law alone, Dent becomes Two Face -  a man who kills based on the outcomes of the toss of a coin. What pushes him over the edge of sanity is the realization that everything is merely a result of chance.

Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker is the greatest performance in a movie so far, this year. His eyes are filled with malice and he walks with his head bent a little forward, like an animal on the hunt. He licks his lips, swallows his saliva and always has an eagerness for a kill. It’s an amazing transformation for an actor known for his melancholic performances. Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent gives the DA’s story poignancy and tragic gravitas. Gary Oldman plays Lt. Gordon as a hardened policeman with rigid convictions. Michael Caine is delightful as Alfred. He plays the servile butler with an ironic glint in his eyes, knowing that he is more than that, that he is a father figure and a mentor to Bruce Wayne. Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox adds credibility to a minor role.

Surrounded by loud performances, Christian Bale is easy to overlook. As in all his previous films, Bale is a very generous actor. He enhances the performances of his peers. It’s his understated performance as the angst ridden Bruce Wayne and the vigilante Batman that holds the movie together.

Christopher Nolan arranges the movie around easily discernible cores. There is the love triangle between Dent, Wayne and Rachel Dawes - played with fiery presence by Maggie Gyllenhaal. There is the ideaological battle between Dent, Gordon and Batman on fighting crime. And then there is the conflict within Wayne about his chosen path as Batman. The Joker is the instigator, commentator and often the catalyst for all these conflicts. The result is an action packed philosophical journey into darkness, out of which only a few of the major characters come out and that too damaged and transformed.

The Dark Knight is being sold as the best summer-action-blockbuster-superhero movie ever. That is not enough of a description for this film. What is being overlooked by the marketting gurus and the media reviews is how much more than that this film is. This is a groundbreaking film - audacious in it’s ambitions to discuss grand themes using well established characters, and inventive in it’s execution of these ambitions.

As is always the case when I see Radiohead playing live, I am left speechless. Found this video at Vimeo [link] of them playing “Bangers + Mash” from the bonus disc for In Rainbows. Thom Yorke on drums and lead vocals! The studio version of this song doesn’t sound all that different.

I have become very comfortable with my routine. It’s sort of monotonous. The monotony goes very well with my biggest quality - complacency. I get up, take the long drive to work, I work, take the long drive back, and sleep. I get drunk on Thursday evenings and catch movies on Friday nights. I squeeze in a few hours of reading here and there, along with a few hours watching TV shows and more movies on my computer.

Predictability is good. My sleep cycle is quite predictable. I sleep when I hit the bed, and can wake up without an alarm clock. I have the occasional dream. Applying simple Freudian interpretations, they can easily be attributed to my Id’s need for getting laid or beating the crap out of someone.

The other day, this prediatbility-monotony was disrupted by a strange dream. I had a dream with Vikram Seth in it. And I can’t understand why. It’s Vikram Seth, the author. I haven’t read anything by Seth in a long while, and I cannot remember coming across anything remotely having to do with him during the past few weeks.

The dream had no logic, and it was laced with discordant details. It starts with me waking up in the house at my family’s coffee estate. I haven’t thought about the estate in a long time either. Vikram Seth sits on the verandah reading a Malayalam newspaper, eventhough he isn’t a Malayali. He is the fleshed out version of himself from the sleeve photo on the dust jacket of his book - Two Lives. He asks me if I wanted to go for a drive. We drive through a long winding road in Oahu, Hawaii (I know this because it’s the same road that I drove in Test Drive Unlimited - a game I played for a couple of hours in college; crappy game, nothing remarkable). I can’t remember anything else about the dream except vague emotions.

My interactions with Seth were minimal in the dream, so I can’t really pin him down as a manifestation of any of the Jungian archetypes. It’s just an effing dream, but it’s been at the back of my mind since Tuesday. Just though I’d share it with you, see if you could maybe have any ideas about what it was all about.

With all the fuss about Iran’s missile tests and rumors of Israel’s imminent attack on the country, I thought I’d throw my two cents in the mix. But this clip from Syriana pretty much sums up what I wanted to say. Well, it gets the gist of it across anyway - that warmongering will lead to war.

After a lot of re-thought, I have put the list of my favorite films back up again. It is on a separate page title ‘Cinema’ in the navbar. I’ve made a few changes from the previous one that was up.

[Link]

I looked out from my office yesterday and I saw… THE BATMOBILE! The Tumbler looks incredible when you see it in front of you. Here are the pics.

Batmobile from my office

Batmobile Profile

Batmobile Front

Batmobile Back

Batmobile with office building in background

Needless to say, nothing this week will top the Batmobile. Except maybe Hellboy II opening this weekend.

The Quantum of Solace trailer, which is up at AOL is now available on YouTube. The trailer is pretty awesome, especially the final shot.

One of the unfortunate transformations that you will undergo when you don’t have people around you validating your existence, is from a confident person in-tune with his identity to a pessimist without a sense of self worth. And you don’t even feel happy about the fact that you are intelligent enough to be aware of that change. In fact, the awareness adds up to a cumulative feeling of resentment - I could have been so much happier if I wasn’t so aware of my sadness.

After a while, you become this cold pragmatist who studies his own flaws, even the slow death of idealism that occurs almost self-destructively. You kill the lie that everything is possible, bit by bit, to avoid being let down by the truth that only a few are. I am a dreamer unwilling to compromise at all. So it comes down to having every one of my dreams coming true, or having nothing.

So how do I manage to even exist? It’s simple. I have a searing knowledge of my own potential. A narcissism with a unique blend of nihilism at it’s core - that says that this is how it should not be. And an inexplicable realistic, existentialist, escapist fantasy that says that this too shall pass.

Director: Andrew Stanton Writers: Andrew Stanton Jim Capobianco Cast: Ben Burtt - WALL·E Elissa Knight - Eve Language: English [IMDb Profile]

Rating: 10/10

I will say this at the onset - WALL·E is one of the most rewarding experience I’ve had watching cinema this year. What Pixar has achieved here is something monumental. It is an ode to cinema, specifically an ode to the silent era of cinema. Andrew Stanton and his crew have created one of the most lovable and unforgettable characters. The film tells a decent story, it tugs at all your emotional chords, and as an animated film it pushes technology and storytelling within this genre to a new level. This is by far the best film from the studio that also brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

WALL·E, which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class, is a robot left back on Earth to clean up the garbage after the planet becomes un-inhabitable for humans. WALL·E is the only surviving robot 700 years after the humans leave. The film opens with epic wide-angle shots of the desolation that Earth has become. Piles of garbage covers the planet’s surface. And in between these mountains of filth, WALL·E goes about compacting trash and stacking them on top of each other on a daily basis. His only companion is a cockroach, and he kills his free time watching a video on an iPod.

WALL·E’s routine is interrupted when a massive space-craft drops a robot named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) near his home. He falls in love with EVE the moment he lays eyes on her. EVE’s directive is to find vegetation on Earth, which would enable humans to come back and re-occupy the planet. WALL·E gives EVE a tiny plant that he had found inside a refrigerator. The film follows WALL·E and EVE as they try to get it to the captain of the spaceship in which humans are staying. Standing in their way is a highly intelligent robot controlling the ship’s autopilot. Humans at this point have reduced to fat lazy hedonistic beings who are well taken care off by a large array of robots on the ship.

In terms of narration, plot and the audacity of making a largely silent film, Pixar has taken many risks. But they stick to the tried and tested when it comes to character design. There is a subtle resemblance between WALL·E and ET, and between the autopilot AI and HAL. However, this comes off more as a tip of the hat than mere aping. Visually the movie is splendid, not just in terms of the models, texture and animation, but also in terms of the camera. Though animated, the visual frames mimics those made by  wide-angle lenses perfectly. The saturation and color tones are balanced to make the frames gritty during the sequences on Earth and highly sterile and cold during the sequences in space.

The things that really stand out in the movie is the attention to detail and character development. You will genuinely fall in love with the characters. Though technologically the film pushes animation to a higher level, in the end it is the very human emotions that will stay with you. It’s almost Chaplinesque in it’s innocence and pathos.