India Day 1: Reached Delhi just past midnight, went through immigration, went and collected bag, rechecked it to Trivandrum, went through security, and reached my gate. The Trivandrum gate is Gate 58 out of the 62 gates in domestic departures. The ends of the earth. I am surprised at all the American eateries in the Indira Gandhi International airport. Krispy Kreme??? Good lord. I guess globalization means Americanization. It also appears to be a universal fact that all airports feature hostile design in their seating–they want to make sure that nobody sleeps or lies down. You have to sit upright. In Frankfurt, there were 3 or 4 seats that were sort of reclining; here I found a few gates had them. But overall, it is sit upright like a stick, buddy; we don’t want you to relax under any circumstances.
I am one of those people who can sleep on command. I normally fall asleep as soon as I board the plane if I want to do that. This time I watched two movies: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s wacky novel. The film is equally wacky; I had a big smile plastered on my face the entire time. Tight script, and fantastic performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin. It is this big bad world of awful men and all that, but Pynchon and Anderson and Phoenix and Brolin make it all so entertaining.
The second movie was Sister Midnight. It must be me, but I did not like it at all. I am all for the blue and black gloominess of Mumbai but I hit my threshold with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I also disliked the soundtrack intensely; full of western roots and pop music and much of the movie felt like a music video for nostalgia pop. I was instantly distanced from the movie when it began with Radhika Apte as this petulant bride on a train with Howling Wolf’s “Moaning at Midnight” as the soundtrack of her state of mind or whatever. Howling Wolf? Good heavens. Similarly, with a wannabe Paris, Texas feel with “Dark was the night, Cold was the Ground” and Blind Willie Johnson. What is the exigency to use these great blues masters for this movie? I am unable to tell. So on it goes with T. Rex, Stooges etc–it all felt very self-indulgent on the director’s side. I didn’t like it at all. Radhika Apte’s character felt false to me, though Apte herself tried her best to make her believable. The movie has a single tone. It has single look. And it felt derivative. I was thoroughly underwhelmed.
The Red Earth 