Filed under: Currently Watching | Tags: Amitabh Bachchan, Black, Currently Watching, Hindi, movie, Rani Mukherjee
It’s a Hindi movie that was really good. Though at first, it felt like a rip-off of Helen Keller, which it was for the first half of the movie, then it got interesting as it diverted on a more original storyline. It was a Helen Kelleresque girl, in the same situation, but the teacher instead of being more like Anne Sullivan, seems to be rather loopy himself. But he is brave and persevering and manages to make her come out of her shell. The story continues onto how she goes through university, up till she graduates, which takes a very long time. But a parallel story shows her teacher’s gradual progression to severe Alzheimer’s which was sad. In the end, it sort of ends up as a teacher-student role exchange thing. This sounds vague but it really was heart-breaking yet inspiring to watch. Amitabh Bachchan did a great job, but Rani Mukherjee was so good that I didn’t even realize it was her until the end credits!
It’s one of those movies that you just have to see. I really want to see Jodhaa Akbar, Dhoom 2 and Deepa Mehta’s stuff soon, too.
Filed under: Currently Reading | Tags: Currently Reading, Escape from memory, Margaret Peterson Haddix, memory
This book, Escape from Memory, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, was a great book from a great author. She’s also the one who wrote Just Ella, which was enjoyable, but this one was very different in tone and genre. It was more of a mystery genre. It had a lot to do with memory, and the general story follows a girl named Kira who finds out that she is not who she thought she was all her life. I don’t want to spoil it, so I shall say no more! But it has a lot of plot twists that I didn’t expect and it was definitely one of those books you couldn’t put down. One of the things that was really interesting about the book were the characters who could remember everything and I was sort of wistful about that. I’ve always thought that having a photographic memory would be really cool; you would probably be really smart =_=. But I understood, I think, from reading the book that sometimes there are things you don’t want to remember, and as a result, remembering everything that ever happened to you- or in the book’s case, even stuff that didn’t happen to you in particular- would be painful…
Filed under: Currently Watching | Tags: Currently Watching, drama, family, Korean, My Girl
I just finished watching My Girl, this Korean drama. I’d bought the DVD set last summer, but was busy watching Goong (another great drama : D) with my mother (yeah. you read that right.) and that one was really long. So, I watched the first couple of eps of My Girl last August;then about 9 days ago, my mother asked me to put on this one. And we started watching. It’s basically about this girl (who is good at lying) and this somewhat rich guy she runs into, who asks her to pretend to be his long-lost cousin in order to save his grandfather. The rest is about how she fares, and of course the inevitable emergence of the love triangles…more like a weird web really. It really brought that quote about lies to mind- “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”. It was pretty funny; though I think I still preferred Goong, which was a bit more on the serious side than this one.
The funny part was that when me and my mother started watching, eventually the whole family ended up watching (dad, grandma, brother). And it was really funny to see my parents, who usually keep clear of my love of East Asian culture, saying “That actress is really good.”, and “Tamil stuff sucks compared to this”, etc. Even at the end, my parents loved it so much that they wanted me to burn a cd with the My Girl OST. I was really happy to have brought them over to the dark side, muahahahaha. The only thing was that my mother wanted to watch 2 hours worth every day, and as a result, we didn’t really get to watch anything else for over a week, but alas, that is a small price to pay : ).
Anyways, it’s a really good drama and I would definitely recommend it to anyone. The songs are great too; very addictive. XD Next I’ll probably watch One Litre of Tears which I heard is really good, even though my mother says she doesn’t like sad stuff cause it makes her cry. : p
