Boredom

The mental side of sports has always fascinated me. Earlier, I thought Cricket to be the most demanding of mental game but then every sports, be it Tennis, Golf, Motor sports etc. has got it's share of mental gumption. But Test Cricket is gotta be at the top of this list. You play 6 hrs of Cricket for full five days in front of a sizeable crowd. You gotta be at the top of the game at all times. You cannot slug out there and if you have a reputation to fight for and are an ageing star, currently struggling with form and facing an almighty bowling attack in a foreign land, in front of a hostile crowd who loves to hate you, you just cannot stop fighting. This deadly combination will devour you day in and day out. And that's exactly what happened to Alastair Cook in the first three Magellan Ashes Test Matches. He went 10 innings without a fifty and for a cricketer who is a veteran of 150 Test matches with more than 11000+ test runs, that's as much a dreaded nightmare as one cou...

I was watching David O' Russell's Three Kings yesterday and after the first hour which was accentuated with brilliant comic timing from it's many characters, I thought the film opted out for a 'preachy' rout which was undoubtedly a right one but too easy to predict. My point is that after Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, everyone got the real point of a worthless war and the true meaning of films such as 'Three Kings' got lost in translation. It doesn't really matter now whether it was Saddam who was bad or Bush Sr. Or Jr. They all did some things right and some things terribly wrong. But at the end, only poor people died and more suffered. All in all, films like Three Kings lost its context in year 2017.

A few days ago, one of our fellow contributors posted a question about our likeness for a 'guilty pleasure' movie and favorite selections. I didn't comment on that thread but mine would have been most probably 'Harry Potter films'. But then, we have all got our list of favorite actors, actresses and their combinations. I have a favorite pair of my own and that's Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine, two of the most decorated Academy Actors of last five decades. I just love seeing Jack in action and as far as Sir Caine's abilities are concerned, I haven't watched a lot of his films but whatever I have seen of him, it has endeared him to me. So when I came across a film where this dream pair was cast and then too in an A-List capacity, I jumped onto it. Film's name was 'Blood and Wine' and it also starred a young Jennifer Lopez and Steven Dorff. My dream pair cooks up a great conspiracy and since it was a bad plan with bad payoffs, it inevitably f...

The Harry Potter Film most endeared to me is 'The Prisoner of Azkaban' and I grew fond of it because of it's two headlining Villainous​ (aka anti-Hero) characters: Professor Lupin and Sirius Black. I have watched it four times if I correctly remember the count. And just like the film and these two characters, I also grew fond and respectful of acting prowess of Gary Oldman and David Thewlis. I had Googled them then and came to know that Gary Oldman had already became an acting giant by then and his primary motivation for doing that film was money. Since then, he has become an eternal favorite to me. But, but I was simultaneously taken aback by Professor Lupin's acts in the film and David's performance and his powerful voice which was as magnificent as his fellow compatriot, the Mighty Alan Rickman's (Severus Snape), were just too good to ignore. Till then, his most high profile and Breakthrough role was that of a motormouth Manchester homeless person in Mike...

A day before yesterday, I posted a series of five topics I was to write about in few days. Well I am starting with the sixth 'unlisted' topic. It's an important one and like many important topics which I often forget to write about, I forgot about it as well. I am truly sorry. The topic in discussion here is 'Deadwood'. It was a western TV series produced by HBO for 3 seasons starting in 2004. It's often is clubbed as the greatest TV series of all time with 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire', coincidentally it's brethren on HBO. It was cancelled too soon by it's producers because production cost shot up too much and great recession of 2008 was already in motion and since then, and it is now 10 years, the fans of this show are begging HBO to bring it back. So why was 'Deadwood' so famous? Just like 'The Wire', not many people watched it (but they were certainly more than the nos Wire fetched). There were three main reasons...

My primary reasons for watching House of Cards are only two. First is Kevin Spacey who is an acting God and second the political hotchpotch that American federal system goes through. Now the Dynamics that inhibit House of Cards can be mind-boggling and that's in no small parts find it's origin in Frank and Claire Underwood's dirty deeds. HoC just completed it's fifth season run and even in it's fifth season, it scored four Emmy nomination and most importantly, one for outstanding drama series. Now if you ask me if it's really outstanding, I would say 'no' having watched it's first 8 episodes out of 13 for nothing really happens. It's like watching GoT season 6 where barring the last 2 episodes, nothing happened and it truly resembled like a Bollywood formulaic film. But we all know GoT is nothing without it's last two episodes and it always makes them grand through slow burning of it's preceding episodes. But how many shows can afford suc...

During the World War 1 years, the Irish lads were used to carry oats and barley as provisions in the battlefields. In the poem titled 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley', a young Irish lad bemoans the fact that he would have to sacrifice his true love for the love of his motherland but he must take pride in the fact that he is serving Her. In the film by the same name, the titular character Damien O' Donovan, played superbly by Cillian Murphy, says "When I wanted to serve diligently the Irish people in the war against Britishers, they didn't take me in. Now I don't like it but I cannot quit". Damien O' Donovan didn't want to serve anymore in the war not because he was tired of it or afraid of dying but simply because his own brethren defeated the purpose of the war he so personally fought. He was a brilliant medical student and could have ended up being one of the finest doctors practising in London but he succumbed to the vagaries of the war. He did...