Watching Instantly

By Vijay Kumar

June 29, 2010

I hadn't realized it was that type of film. Nice!

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Browsing through NetFlix’s online streaming collection is not unlike those late Friday nights spent browsing through the movie maze in your local video store. The search for that perfect movie is often tricky. Sometimes you have to deal with a fuming partner and/or a melting tub of ice-cream in the car. The pressure is compounded by a listless, unhelpful store clerk in some cases. This column aims to be that clerk for NetFlix Instant Watch – maybe just a little less listless and little more helpful. This is what I waded through recently – at NetFlix.

Went Looking For…

Believe it or not, I sometimes do have a predetermined playlist while browsing for movie titles. Generally, there is a week between my adding them to the playlist and actually watching them. The movies under “Went Looking For…” are typically the movies that I had slotted as “Ended up with…” the previous week.

Rachel Getting Married

Brushing aside the snide remark “You are more involved in this wedding than you were with ours”, my wife claims that siblings (read sisters) tension cannot be written more accurately than in this movie. Rosemarie DeWitt is the titular Rachel, whose pre-wedding jitters are compounded by the presence of her scene-stealing sister, Kym, played by Anne Hathaway. In fact, more than the commonplace wedding anxiety, Rachel’s nerves face greater challenge from Kym, who is seeking closure from everyone, including her separated parents, for a tragic past. The engrossing screenplay and cinematography ensure that you are as involved as the rest of the cast. Involvement can take the form of either the bridesmaid, who seems to be itching for a showdown between the sisters, or the father of the bride, who is doing his best to maintain a safe distance between the sisters. The bridesmaid wins.

Two extended scenes stand out in their execution – the rehearsal dinner and the dishwashing competition between the groom and the father of the bride. Other unconventional plot points come in through the Indian style interracial wedding and the musicians among the family members.




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Food, Inc.

You can’t argue with the facts presented in this documentary. Most of it is public knowledge. Food in America has become incorporated to such a great extent that farms in the traditional sense exist only on the wrapping material. Although the filmmakers have commendably tackled the whys and the how for food processing today, no real solution for improving the process is presented. Maybe that is not the aim of this documentary. According to IMDb, “Neither Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan or director Robert Kenner are vegetarians, despite the film's spotlight on meat cultivation and processing in the United States”.

Again, they are not expected to be vegetarians, but it underlines the reason why a solution is not imminent. The eating habit is not going to change as quickly as is required to prevent the mass eating disorder available in this country. As a fact presenting documentary, it is a solid film and was awarded with an Oscar nomination for the year 2010. It is available in HD on NetFlix IW.

The Misfits

Famous for being Clark Gable’s and Marilyn Monroe’s last starring roles, John Huston’s The Misfits is a character study of a small group of people who get together as a group and try to coexist with each other. Set in Nevada, a recent divorcee decides to spend some time in the country side with an aging cowboy and his cronies. She is as sensitive and emotionally vulnerable as they come. This is in direct contrast with the take-life-as-it-is trio of men. Somewhere along the way she invokes the sensitive side of each one of them and their individual reaction to the change is as different as are their personalities. One fights with this change, the other rejects it while the last one does his best to embrace it.

The movie, done in collaboration with Arthur Miller, deals with a few concepts once deemed as lasting forever - like marriage, the wild west, motherly love and the American dream. Rather than glorifying these popular topics, the movie goes about deconstructing them during the course of the narrative and strips the "forever" label from each one of them.


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