Movies: "The Aviator" and more

Three recent movies I saw:

The Aviator: A moving movie. I borrowed it from the lending library and then borrowed it again to see some of the extra stuff (like a documentary on Howard Hughes). The movie is quite true to life it seems, after comparing with the documentary and other stuff. Howard Hughes is a charismatic guy who quite captures my imagination. His struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder are very moving. Everything else in the movie is good, acting, moviemaking, background music etc.

Pelican Brief: I saw this initially a few days back on cable TV. The opening scenes were strong, and I got this prickly sense that doesn't come too often nowadays, that something of quality is coming up. I saw it for some time but had to abandon as Priya was around and she wanted to talk, and switch to some other channel and stuff. I got lucky and bumped into the movie at the lending library recently and saw it. It was a little bit of a letdown, technically strong and nicely taken but... not quite there. Still, nice one.

Then last night I had a difficult time sleeping, which happens sometimes. I ended up watching 3 (good!) movies on cable, though through my luck, not a single one fully. I'm really surprised to find decent movies on cable (the channel was Z Studio) and the ad breaks were small which was a huge plus. The movies were "About A Boy", "Legally Blonde" and "An Unfinished Life". About A Boy was playing when I first switched on the TV and started flipping channels. I've seen this before, this is a *great* movie and a *great* book by Nick Hornby. I finished seeing it and then they were playing Legally Blond. Another sweet movie so I started watching it, when Priya pleaded with me to come back to bed. I did so but wasn't able to sleep again, so got up and padded back to the hall to continue watching, but the movie had finished by then, which was highly disappointing. The next movie was "An Unfinished Life" by Lasse Hallstrom, which I hadn't seen and hadn't heard of either. It was pretty nice but not that fresh/original, quite easily pigeonholed into a class of movies (Brokeback Mountain, Snow Falling on Cedars). The power went off briefly while watching the movie, so I didn't get to watch this fully either :-(.
I'm glad I did the 'night shows', feels good to gorge on decent movies now and then.

BTW, I use headphones to watch movies nowadays, because a.) my hearing is definitely not that good, I've been referred to a specialist for this, something that I haven't followed through on yet, 2.) the sound on our Onida TV is pretty crap 3.) it doesn't disturb Priya when she's sleeping.


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Site of the day: Here's a good blog by an Indian author of childrens' books called Manjula Padmanabhan : http://marginalien.blogspot.com/