Seven Samurai is one of those movies that inspire. I Last night, I decided to watch Akira Kurosawa's seminal work.

I feel this was the movie that spawned the trend of a group of heros getting together to tackle an issue. The storyline is simple, but the execution masterful. A desperate village hires a bunch of desperate samurais to defend their village against a bunch of bandits.

Not a single second of the 207-minute long movie is wasted. Every frame packs masterful storytelling, technical wizardry, and visual riches. You never feel bored at any point of time in the movie. Kurosawa has this to say onthe movie: “Japanese films all tend to be simple and wholesome, just like green tea over rice. But I think we ought to have both richer foods and richer films. And so I thought I would make a film which was entertaining enough to eat, as it were.” He did not disappoint.

All I say is that this is definitely a movie that every one ought to watch.

]]> http://xavierroy.com/2008/04/15/seven-samurai/feed/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/03/31/stopping-by-woods/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/03/31/stopping-by-woods/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:53:28 +0000 Jax http://xavierroy.com/?p=33 It’s been a while since anything happened here. Things have been a bit hectic since my last post and a lot of progress has been made both professionally and personally.

It has been a while since I saw a good chase story. Having read a lot about No Country For Old Men, I decided to watch it last night.

At its heart, No Country For Old Men is a story of choices and their consequences. It is also a man-hunt story where the roles of the hunter and the hunted keep changing frequently.

It is the story of three men, a local sheriff Ed Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones), a war veteran Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) and a sociopath Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bradem). Moss finds some money out in the desert, a result of a drug deal gone bad, and keeps it. Chigurh is hired to retrieve the money and Bell, aware of Chigurh’s brutalism, wants to protect Moss. The game is played out as others join in and drop out.

Tommy Lee Jones as a wearied local sheriff finds it hard to keep the peace and wants to retire as he cannot keep up with the times. His time-worn voice opening the movie hints to us this is not going to a high-speed action chase unlike his role in The Fugitive. Javier Bardem is the mainstay of the entire movie. As Anton Chigurh, he brings to life a wonderful villainous character to fruition. I would say the Anton ranks along Antony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian. Josh Brolin, as war veteran Llewelyn Moss, tries his best to outwit the bad guys but as a tagline for the movie says, You can’t stop what’s coming.

If it was the wide open southern grasslands in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or the frozen grounds of North Dakota in Fargo, the Coen brothers have always used landscapes as canvases to set their stories. The opening scene depicts a peaceful West Texas desert which soon wil be overrun in blood. Having won an Oscar for the above two, I would be surprised if this movie doesn’t win one having been nominated in eight categories for this year.

]]> http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/25/no-country-for-old-men/feed/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/19/everythings-eventual/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/19/everythings-eventual/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:58:40 +0000 Jax http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/19/everythings-eventual/

Last week, I started Stephen King’s recent short story collection, Everything’s Eventual.

As I read the first story, Autopsy Room Four, I felt a connection to the story. It was not long ago when I was in a similar situation. Imagine waking up in a hospital bed with needles and surrounded by strangers. It was my worst nightmare come true. As I had written earlier, I was truly able to relish the story due to my experiences and that’s what made the story connect.

The second story, The Man in the Black Suit, brought to mind some of my nightmares(past and present). It was amazing how troublesome our memories are. How they can bring to mind your inner demons a long, long time when you thought you had exorcised them.

The first thought that came to my mind as I read the next story, All That You Love Will Be Carried Away, was Twitter. The protaganist collects restroom graffitti from his travels. As he plans to commit suicide, his thoughts are to what would happen to his collection of graffiti. Would they affect people’s perception of his suicide? All I could think was the last tweet that I had posted before picking up the book. what if I were to commit suicide; what would my last note say?

When you say Stephen King, not many identify him as the guy who wrote a short story called Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption, the story the movie Shawshank Redemption was based on. The Death of Jack Hamilton shows the softer side of Stephen King as someone who can spin a story of a person’s death into a wry heart-touching tale.

The rest is classic Stephen King stuff - sensitive at times, frightening at times, and oddly reassuring that everything's eventual in Life.

]]> http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/19/everythings-eventual/feed/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/10/it-takes-two-to-tango/ http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/10/it-takes-two-to-tango/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:29:30 +0000 Jax http://xavierroy.com/2008/01/10/it-takes-two-to-tango/ I am a staunch believer in the Reader-Response theory which calls upon readers to participate more actively in the interpretive and creative process of a novel. As Umberto Eco describes in his The Role of the Reader, “novels are machines for making possible worlds.”. And these worlds are not meant to be universal, but unique to each reader.

The way I understand and assimilate a novel is definitely different from someone else’s experience with the same book. And this is what that makes the experience of a novel the most interesting. It is not the story that matters, but how you perceive it, based on your experiences, is all that matters. I believe there is a scientific word to describe it, which I cannot recall.

As Stephen King puts it in his introduction in Everything’s Eventual (the reading of which inspired this post), “We’re in it together, after all. This is a date we’re on. We should have fun. We should dance.”

“And, by what you buy and by what you read, so are you. You most of all, Constant Reader. Always you.” - Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual