To my three dearest (and only) readers,
I know I haven’t written in a while, and I’m aware I won’t be actually publishing any posts until school ends, but I have been watching movies and I have been writing about them, and I’ll probably fix them up and publish more of them during the summer.
This was written on 4/15/22. The post date will say 4/15 too, only to reflect when it was actually written. It'll be published in June.
American movies are weird. Most of them are under two hours, which basically qualifies them as short films to me because a good majority of the films I've seen are more than two hours. Is that because of the songs in Indian films? Yeah, but still. It's just awkward when you start the movie and it ends sooner than you expect. You sit there, waiting for more, and then it ends. Just like that.
Recently, I've been watching more English movies (or American movies, I'm not really sure what to call them). When I say I'm watching more of them, I mean I saw like three, which for someone who saw like a total of five English movies in the past four-ish years, is a lot.
Now, there are a few reasons I ended up watching more of these movies recently. Probably the biggest reason is the fact that we watch a lot of movies in ASL. We do small assignments and stuff, but we watch at least one movie a month, and it’s not just ASL movies or those dumb, low-quality docufilms. They're actual movies (because my teacher loves watching movies). We saw The Legend of the Mountain Man, The Silent Child, The Hammer, Eternals (yes, the Marvel movie), CODA, Leap!, Spider-Man: No way home, and a few more that I forgot the name of. I don’t think I have ever seen this many actual movies in a class before. We were supposed to watch A Quiet Place 2, but someone didn’t want to watch it, so we didn’t.
So there's that. I guess the next reason is that they're more readily available to watch on places like Netflix and Prime. I've seen most of the Indian ones out there that I want to see. The ones I still want to watch are stuck on some platform like SunNXT or something that nobody has. Either that or they just never showed up anywhere. Something or the other. The only movies I never saw on the subscriptions I already have are in English (or some non-Indian language). It would make sense to watch the good stuff you never saw.
OR MAYBE—Maybe the reason I haven't really seen many American movies is because of how different they are. I'm not talking about the Disney stuff, Harry Potter, or the children's films of Hollywood—Those are gold. Anyone can watch them, regardless of cultural background. That's just how they're made. Your average, mainstream American film, though—Now THOSE are different. I'm talking movies like the Marvel stuff, La La Land, IT, the Titanic, The Great Gatsby, The Matrix, etc., etc. They're different.
Different from mainstream Indian films, that is. You can feel the difference. In American films, structure-wise, it just flows on. In Indian films, the hero makes it CLEAR what the issue is. It's smack-dab into your face. If you miss it, you're basically dumb (no offense). American movies kinda let it slide by. It's explicitly told, but not so much that it's slapped into your mind. Whichever route the movie goes, though, doesn't matter. Neither is wrong—I just find the difference really odd.
Indian films are also very much defined by the star image and masala cinema, which bothers me SO MUCH. I absolutely hate it when a movie is solely made for a hero like that. Why praise the hero so much? He's not a god. He's just a person. This isn't to say that there aren't Indian movies that I like. There are way too many that I like, but it's much easier to complain about the ones I don't like. The ones where the hero has his own monologue. Where the hero never actually peaks in life because his character arc is nonexistent. The ones where they preach to aunties about how arranged marriage is outdated. The same ones where they preach to the girls about how arranged marriage is traditional and cool. The hypocritical ones. I hate those.
So coming back to my point, it's quite refreshing to watch an American movie after years of only Indian cinema. I saw La La Land, The Adam Project, Eternals, Black Widow, The Imitation Game, The Social Network, Catch Me if You Can, and some others I don't remember the name of. I liked nearly all of them. (The only ones I didn't like were the Marvel movies. I just feel that the comedic timing during action scenes is a bit much, and also, they're too dramatic. As someone who watches Indian movies like KKKG and KKHH, I find Marvel to be dramatic. I know)
What I actually wanted to discuss/rant/whatever about in this post was The Imitation Game, which I saw last night. It was exactly what I imagined American biographical movies to be, but BETTER, if that makes any sense.
I thought it would be some boring historical film, but I was obviously wrong. What kept my attention was very much Benedict Cumberbatch. He looks like a fifty-year-old man trying to free himself from his morphed thirty-year-old body. He’s the only person that can look old and young simultaneously somehow. Like they stretched some skin over his face. It’s so weird. His character was really interesting though. He's this anti-social, gay mathematician trying to not be persecuted for being a Soviet spy or for being gay while also trying to build a machine that can decode the Enigma. That's basically the movie.
The story was interesting and all, but it was his relationship that intrigued me. Initially, I thought, "oh lovely, an introvert." (You know, something relatable.) Then it went to a flashback of him and his friend as children, and it was kinda clear where it was going from there.
Cut back to the present, and he's interested in a girl. This is where I got confused. Then he proposed to her, and then he was caught for "public indecency" AKA being gay. Then he told his girlfriend that he was gay. She was fine with it, but the law wasn't, and he had to undergo chemical castration, and according to the movie, he committed suicide. That was basically the movie if you removed the historical part, and that's what I found to be the most interesting. It just kept going and going and getting stranger and stranger.
Don't get me wrong, a movie about this mystery of a man who broke an unbreakable code is definitely entertaining on its own, but still.
Now, that's all for this post. Thank you.
Edit: I reread this post just now, in June. All sorts of weirdness. I'll still post it so I can come back years in the future and read my weirdness all over again. I very much understood what I wrote, but I don't think others will. It's not very clear what I was trying to get across. The stuff in my mind didn't exactly come out nicely.
Comments