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by Luv Mehta Welcome to August.
I’m not quite sure about the title for these series of articles. They’re supposed to have a mix of various types of media for consumption, so I can’t really say “here’s a list of things played/read/listened to”, but “consumption” isn’t a word I’m that comfortable with. Either way, let’s see if I find a new title or stick with this one. If you’ve noticed, I’m not great at names - this blog is named “The Amateur Media Blog” because I only thought about making the most literal name for the website. Anyway, here’s a ranked list of all the things I consoomed this month.
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by Luv Mehta Two months have gone by since that last post! Work’s become even harder, this pandemic-stricken world has no change in its new status quo, and I’ve had a lot of trouble writing anything about any of the stories I’ve seen/played through.
But work’s winding down, and I finally have some time. I haven’t written anything but code in a very long while, so I wrote all of this in a span of two hours. So here’s a bunch of impressions of some media I’ve consumed, ranked in order of least to most enjoyed. by Luv Mehta April has come and gone like a dream. Not the pleasant kind, though - the kind where you toss and turn in your sleep, constantly trying to force yourself to wake up.
This is a hell of a downer to start this article with, but I wanted to show you, the reader, what conditions it was written in. As of this article’s release, we’re all still under lockdown, and my office work’s only gotten harder. The area I live in is a designated red zone, and I keep getting notified about infection zones expanding further towards the building I live in. And with all of that going on, I’ve had the bare minimum time available for self reflection. So I figured, hey, you know those clip-show episodes in a lot of TV shows? The ones that play back specific scenes from earlier seasons and show you how far we’ve come, and how we used to be? Let’s do something like that. And thus I decided to read all the articles I ever personally wrote for The Amateur Media Blog, to see what I thought of them today. Would I cringe at my earlier writing? Would I find something great and wonder how I ever wrote any of it? And, well, both of those things happened.  The year is 2007. Unbeknownst to the world, cinema will be changed forever. The year is 2007. Himesh Reshammiya is a superstar. He's everywhere - from music channels to reality shows (back when they were distinct), he's embedded in the public consciousness, a fountain of songs and memes (back before we called them memes). He possesses the most famous cap in India, in addition to the most famous nose. And all that is before he gifts the world with a decade-long career as a movie star. I've always wondered - why did he suddenly decide to become a movie star? What drove him to acting? Did he need more fame? Did he require more adulation? Was he simply full of money and willing to spend it on vanity projects? The answer to that can be found in the very first entry in the Suroor Cinematic Universe - Aap Ka Suroor - set in the picturesque location of Somewhere In Germany. by Luv Mehta  Guru is a Mani Ratnam movie, released in 2007, starring Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai. While Abhishek Bachchan isn’t always considered to be a great actor (something I occasionally disagree with), very few people dispute that his performance in Guru is fantastic, one that holds up even today. This is a fairly popular movie. It’s also a movie I had a lot of conflicted feelings about, back when I saw it twelve years ago. Because of some recent circumstances, I recently sat down and watched it, to see if all those problems of mine would resurface. They did. But not in a way I was expecting. by Luv Mehta  Dhoom 2 is, if you have any doubts even after seeing the title, the second movie in the Dhoom series. It’s an interesting trio of movies, with each being quite different from the other. The first is more of a standard heist movie with bikers introduced for some sweet chase scenes, while the third completely ignores the heist part to focus more on the antagonizing forces in the movies and their backstory. It’s the second, however, that I’ve watched more than thirty times, and am mildly (or, in the words of my friends, unhealthily) obsessed with it. I wanted to talk about why I like it so much - but I couldn’t really put much of my reasoning into words. Frankly, the only times I’ve written anything nowadays have been when I’ve composed mails in the office. Life’s moved on like a racecar on a highway, and I’ve been chained to its bonnet as dragged behind it all the way through. But as I opened the Google docs tab on my laptop at night, ready to write something, anything, no matter how rushed it was - the transformer in our locality went off with a silent, unassuming boom, and I was left in a PG room, with the lights and fans off, and a laptop with steadily decreasing battery. So I went to sleep, woke up the next morning, and spent the whole day touring Bangalore, with a mobile at 3% battery capacity and no one to accompany me but my thoughts. Here are those thoughts, compiled below. by Luv Mehta  So BoJack Horseman just came back for a fifth season this past weekend. Predictably, it's excellent in all the best ways, of course - but in the end, I wasn’t very sure about what I thought of it. After every season of this show I’ve watched before, the first thing that’s always come to my mind has been, “This is the best season of BoJack Horseman yet”. That thought did not come to me this time. There were a lot of criticisms I had, first and foremost being this - how many times are we supposed to see BoJack’s character hit rock bottom? How many times are we going to see another attempt at becoming better being so completely botched? How many times do we have to see him hurt other people? So I rewatched the whole season again. I’ll have to recap some parts of the season, but before all that - there are a lot of plotlines related to other characters in the series that are extremely interesting and worth an entire article on their own. I won’t be able to do justice to them, however, so this article will solely be focusing on BoJack’s plotline. This article is extremely spoiler heavy, so if you haven’t seen the most recent season, now would be a good time to close this tab. |
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