The Fall

Occasionally, we see a movie we have never heard before and be blown away. And that's us being spontaneous.

It started with a spate of uninteresting Summer shows and ended up with "The Fall," a 2006 movie by Tarsem Singh. As I was watching the vivid visual wizardry, I couldn't help but wonder whatever was I doing in 2006 that I hadn't heard about this movie. Oh right. I was moving across continents and trying to catch a foothold.

"The Fall" is a story between Alexandra, a guileful little girl with a broken arm and Roy, an injured stuntman with a death wish, whose relationship blossomed amidst the atmosphere of malaise and death. Roy's despair drove him to device an ingenuous story of 5 mythical heroes, luring Alexandria to inadvertently abet in his suicidal attempts.

Roy's fantastic tales of valor, revenge and hopelessness were paralleled with his own desperation and the depressing reality of life at the hospital. Oblivious to Roy's ultimate aim and deeply immersed in the story, Alexandria persevered with Roy's seemingly innocuous requests and at one point frantically scrambled to do his bidding in exchange for a promise from Roy to continue with the story. And from this plot emerged one of the most poignant scenes cinema has ever produced: a little girl with a broken arm taking a fall for a friend whose life she believed she was saving but in reality, she was helping to put an end.

The surreal world Roy created for himself and Alexandria were matched vividly by the movie's stunning cinematography. Bold, dramatic scenes follow one frame after another that one would be tempted to freeze-frame at random and hang the flat screen on the wall as testament to visual art.

The earnest portrayal of the lead actors, and the striking visuals elevated "The Fall" from a beautiful movie to a memorable one. Catch it if you can.

Ordered Chaos

H and I are poster-children of arranged marriages, if only because we prove that regardless of our feelings and attachment to each other, our compatibility is almost zero. Simply put, he sporadically makes me want to punch his face and he to strangle my neck.

An arranged marriage would have juxtaposed our interests, manifestly indicating that every so often, we'll find ourselves in a situation in which I'd want to be anywhere but home, or play either tennis or badminton or at least learn some new sport, or maybe walk aimlessly into the woods or perhaps watch a funny movie that doesn't expect me to laugh just because the sidekick inadvertantly punched a character in the face, and will he feel like doing the same things?

And we would have found out that the answer was aboso-fucking-lutely NO. That far from being away from home, he'd rather not venture out of its comforting perimeter barring life and death situations, that he have no interest at all in playing, so much so that he didn't bother to define if he meant playing competitive sports or what about video games and just lumped all of them under the no goddamn way category, and that a movie is funny only because it is slapstick.

That when I do manage to drag his ass out of the house for a lovely meal at an exquisite restaurant, our choices would be limited to anything vegetarian, Indian and sweet. That for some miracle of nature he decides to take a walk with me, I shan't expect to break a sweat for going around the block, once, is more than what he'd bargained for. That weekend well-spent for him would be tortorous hours on the computer installing ubuntu, linux and their iterations, only so he could uninstall them and reinstall the operating system he had to begin with, to be repeated next weekend. And he'll be damned if you don't have something as interesting to do.

Arranged marriage would have told us that we are no match.

There goes a pillow, a shoe and some other random things that make noise; frustration thrown against a wall of....dissimilitude. We cry, we make up and we do it again.

And so the laughter that rings out in our home, the unforgiving perverseness we push each other to outdo, the comfortable silence we sporadically share, the late night talks in the dark about everything, from the mundane to the life-altering, the kitchen experiments that occupy us, the little games we play on each other and others, giving in to what the other wants, the paralyzing fear of it all coming abruptly to an end--they are an anomaly.

Technically, we should have killed each other by now.