Posts Tagged ‘Hollywood’

7
Apr

RIP - Chalrleston Heston

   Posted by: gargi    in Passing On

The Arun Govil of Hollywood is no more. my dad got bleary eyed while seeing the news. Someone else called up from Chennai to talk about 'the death of Moses'

 He was one of the first Hollywood Actors that i saw on the big screen. There was this film called Earthquake and someone in school (it could even have been me) took a bunch of us to see this film in Eros for a birthday. I remember crying when the lead pair died - ( I was in the 7th standard, and didn't understand too much else apart from that). In later years i realised what a terrible film it was.

I saw more films with him in the nine year stint in London. His movies would be dusted out every Christmas and Easter or other Bank Holidays and shown without a break. He was definitely a man who seemed at home in a costume drama. Be it Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments. I enjoyed neither of these films. Possibly because they were big screen spectacles and by the time I got around to see it in the late 80's it was on television and these kinds of films look really funny on the small screen.

Moses

(the picture is from the net…. the reason why there isn't any link back is because it is from one of the poker link back sites) 

Having said that, I enjoyed Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, El Cid, and of course The Touch of Evil. I also enjoyed the spin off of Dynasty, The Colby's - in which he played the patriarch… (yes, i watched it)

 I felt sorry for him in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. I thought that the film maker was being completely anal. But, despite Moore's bad behavior Charleston Heston came across as a gentleman.

finally, I am sure that there is a whole bunch of Jewish and Christian kids who grew up with the image of Heston as Moses, Just as there is an entire generation of Hindu kids who visualise Arun Govil as Ram. 

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16
Apr

Re viewing The Truman Show

   Posted by: gargi    in Films

Last week, while the PC was playing dead, I re-saw Peter Weir’s, almost prophetic, The Truman Show

Long before (well actually, a couple of years before) popular reality shows that dot the tv landscape, or the 24 by 7 Big Brother style coverage, The story, for those who haven’t’ watched it, is simple. Truman Burbank - played by Jim Carey - is the star of the 24*7 reality soap - The Truman Show . Except that he doesn’t know that his life is a soap, and all his friends and relatives are characters. As he slowly begins to realize that his life is not quite what it seems, he begins making plans to escape it.

Ed Harris who plays God - the TV producer Christos - whose brain child is the TRuman Show - is chillingly accurate when he says:

We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.

If any of us wonder, why reality is doing well, this is as good a reason as any. At the core we see everything hanging out, and that is what hooks us to come back. We want to see the ugliness and the naked emotion. I am not sure whether we want to see people win as much as we want to see them lose.

The Truman Show remains one of my two favourite films on the media, the other one being Network If you haven’t seen either film, do try and snatch a view. Both are very different in nature, and both are entertaining views.

Apart from being a comment on the nature of TV, the film is primarily about individual liberty. It asks the intrinsic question, is a well ordered, comfortable, ‘prison’ better than an uncertain future ?

There are moments when I feel like Truman. I want to drown my mobile, unplug my computer, burn my credit cards and go off into the mountains. But, is that really freedom?

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