Jairam's Jives

The Wrestler chronicles some events in the life of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), a professional wrestling superstar of the 80s, who is well past his prime and now wrestles on weekends for various independent wrestling promotions. The title credits of the movie show us various snippets of The Ram’s past glory with newspaper clippings, TV show scenes, etc, which serve to remind us that The Ram was not a wrestler to be messed with during his prime. In fact, some of these vintage moments actually remind of Hulk Hogan and his Hulkamania days, well, at least some bits of it. The fact that I am a fan of professional wrestling, particularly of the WWE made these credits a little nostalgic for me.

Milk starring Sean Penn in his Academy Award (Best Actor in a leading role) performance is based on real life incidents of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in San Francisco, California in the 1970s. This film chronicles the period of time in his life where Milk decided to ‘come out of the closet’ so to speak, from which time onwards he didn’t feel the need to hide his sexual preferences from the rest of the world.

It is a reasonably safe assumption that any movie starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton will be a watchable film. Despite the fact that the main driver of any movie, in my opinion, is the script, the screenplay and then the casting, these are a few actors who ensure that they make the most of the characterization given to them, and ensure that maybe even a mediocre movie becomes at least watchable.

For starters let’s get a few things cleared out first. The movie Frost/Nixon is a dramatization of events with a lot of cinematic license being taken by the filmmakers to make it a little more interesting than it actually was in reality. Case in point, various articles on the internet have pointed out that unlike as depicted in the movie, David Frost never actually got Richard Nixon to confess about anything in his interviews.

I happened to catch this heart-warming movie "No Reservations" sometime recently on Star Movies and boy, was I glad I stayed up to see this entire movie or what. Although this movie has nothing earth-shattering or immensely path-breaking to write about, the fact that it conveyed a simple, yet reasonably strong message using an easy-going narrative was what makes this a must-watch movie as far as I am concerned.

Now the tough part about making movies out of stories like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is the fact that you have to be able to adapt it to the big screen in a manner that it actually retains audience interest for the proposed duration of the movie.

Now I personally am a big enough fan of both Tom Cruise and director Bryan Singer (of "The Usual Suspects", the X-Men series and "Superman Returns") that I didn't require too much more to get me interested in "Valkyrie". However, ever since just before the Oscar Awards this year, all the news that I heard about the movie, and the fact that it was a WW-II movie pretty much made it mandatory that I caught this movie before it became too old and too cold (read 'not hot news anymore' kind of cold).