To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

My introduction to Veturi began with the ETV programme ఝుమ్మంది నాదం years ago. I was so overwhelmed with his repertoire that whenever I heard an interesting song – సరళమైనవి, లోతైనవి, చిలిపివి, గమ్మత్తైనవి, అద్భుతమైన భూతులున్నవి  – whose writer I didn’t know, I attributed it to him. I still do and I might continue to for songs written long after his death. It might be because even though he may have not written those songs, it seemed that he could easily have written them with his other hand while attending another mind-numbing awards ceremony.

After his recent death, I listened to a number of his songs hoping to transcribe another of those. I finally settled with ఝుమ్మంది నాదం itself. The music director with the first sound of percussion sends a wave through the legs, and by the time it climbs up the body the lyricist with his first word sets the heart aflutter.

I don’t understand the lyrics completely, but that never hindered my pulse from rising and my mind from dancing beside Jaya Prada and Chandra Mohan. I don’t think the picturization could capture as jubilantly as the words did the resonance of the atmospheric phenomena with the emotions inside the mute protagonist’s heart. ఎల తేటి రొద probably means the sounds in a tender coconut; I don’t know what లెస in కలిత కవిత లెస and విరుపు in నీ మేని విరుపు exactly mean.

చిత్రం: కె విశ్వనాథ్ గారి సిరి సిరి మువ్వ (1977)
రాసినది: వేటూరి సుందరరామ మూర్తి
కూర్చినది: కె వి మహదెవన్
పాడినది: ఎస్ పి బాలసుబ్రహ్మణ్యం, పి సుశీల

ఝుమ్మంది నాదం సయ్యంది పాదం
తనువూగింది ఈ వేళ
చెలరేగింది ఒక రాసలీల

యెదలోని సొదలా ఎల తేటి రొదలా
కదిలేటి నదిలా కలల వరదలా
చలిత లలిత పద కలిత కవిత లెస
సరిగమ పలికించగా
స్వరమధురిమ లొలికించగా
సిరిసిరి మువ్వలు పులకించగా

నటరాజ ప్రేయసి నటనాల ఊర్వసి
నటియించు నీవని తెలిసి
ఆకాశమై పొంగె ఆవేశం
కైలాసమే వంగె నీకోసం

మెరుపుంది నాలో; అది నీ మేని విరుపు
ఉరుముంది నాలో; అది నీ మువ్వ పిలుపు
చినుకు చినుకులో చిందు లయలతో
కురిసింది తొలకరి జల్లు
విరిసింది అందాల హరివిల్లు
ఈ పొంగులే ఏడు రంగులుగా

chitram: ke viSwanAth gAri siri siri muvva (1977)
rAsinadi: vETUri sundararAma mUrti
kUrchinadi: ke vi mahadevan
pADinadi: es pi bAlasubrahmaNyam, pi suSIla

jhummandi nAdam sayyandi pAdam
tanuvUgindi I vELa
chelarEgindi oka rAsalIla

yedalOni sodalA ela tETi rodalA
kadilETi nadilA kalala varadalA
chalita lalita pada kalita kavita lesa
sarigama palikinchagA
svaramadhurima lolikinchagA
sirisiri muvvalu pulakinchagA

naTarAja prEyasi naTanAla Urvasi
naTiyinchu nIvani telisi
aakASamai ponge AvESam
kailAsamE vange nIkOsam

merupundi nAlO; adi nI mEni virupu
urumundi nAlO; adi nI muvva pilupu
chinuku chinukulO chindu layalatO
kurisindi tolakari jallu
virisindi andAla harivillu
I pongulE EDu rangulugA

This Friday evening a friend who wanted to get out of the office told me that he hadn’t been to a theatre in a long time. Actually I haven’t been to a theatre in a long time and he hasn’t been to one in a very long time. We decided to watch some movie, any movie. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 couldn’t be the one for various reasons – I watched it this morning – and after striking through every other movie playing in the nearest multiplex I stumbled upon Allen Coulter’s Remember Me. The title was desperate enough to match our impulsive neediness, and I vaguely remembered Roger Ebert’s review.

The hour-long schmooze before the delayed start and the three-hour-long drunk confessions after it overshadow the movie, but they didn’t need to. I wouldn’t anyway remember anything about the movie apart from its title. The good thing about the movie is that it is mediocre enough to shove me out of my slumber and tempt me to at least show the snarkier side of me. Though being snarky is my first nature, as I show every now and then, it is hardly satisfying being so for an insignificant movie that no one would remember. I am going to try something “different”, as we Indians – filmmakers and moviegoers – like to say.

Within a few minutes of the movie I got bored enough to embark on my own journey making vague references from any given scene. It was largely a purposeless and unconscious act of recalling recent movies and books through Remember Me. Being a fan of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past (which I haven’t read) and of the concept of involuntary memory, I found the exercise engrossing enough.

Update: Below is only a list of several things that I remembered, and not a description of any of the memories corresponding to them. This makes it boring. It makes sense to delete the post, but I’m tempted to preserve it for posterity. If it stirs any of your own memories, that may give this a little more value.

When the opening scene was set in 1991 and the next scene in 2001 I remembered the many anachronisms that commonly feature in the Goofs section of IMDB.

During the introductory scene of Robert Pattinson several girls sitting beside me gasped in delight on seeing his face. When he bent across a bed to reach for the phone his pajamas fell below the hips. I remembered all the metrosexuals consciously buying low waist jeans to ostentatiously wear and unconsciously walk around in them. Once I saw his face clearly I wondered whether he looked paler in the Twilight series and I couldn’t remember how he looked as Cedric Diggory. Most of all I remembered the year-old interview in which Stephen King declared that Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write worth a darn.

When I saw Lena Olin in the next scene I remembered her tattoo in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. I was saddened to see how much older she has become in a decade and remembered Kamal Hasan in Gautham Menon’s Raghavan. Later when it was mentioned that her character is a social service worker she reminded me of Urmila Matondkar in Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara.

During the post-funeral scene when all members pieces of the Hawkins family sat at a table, I remembered JD Salinger’s Catch in the Rye. When it was clear that the only person Tyler cared for was his sister Caroline, the image grew more intense. I quickly wrote off Tyler as the real empty phony, but continued to think of little Phoebe Caulfield whenever Caroline entered a scene. I also remembered Coraline, which I’ve neither read nor watched. (After watching the entire movie, I wish it had been about Caroline Hawkins, about her loneliness and “freakishness” and her way of dealing with the tragedies in her fragile life, because that character had a vivid story arc and because Ruby Jerins can act.)

During the classroom discussion in a Global Politics class about morals and ethics in the recent wake of terrorism (2001, before Sep 11th) I remembered the classroom discussion about the nature of fantasies in a Philosophy class in Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale. I wondered why there is hardly ever a second discussion in a similar setting in such movies.

When I heard Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich coming from the Craigs’ TV, I was sure that Sgt. Craig must have had a better time watching that movie than I would watching this one and than Ally would with Tyler on their first date.

When Ally started getting intimate with Tyler, I wondered why and how many girls fall for the damaged types. I invariably remembered Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dr. Allison Cameron and Stacy Warner, and winked at Dr. Gregory House. Of course, Tyler only resembles a violent vampire eternally sucked by teenage angst. Later, whenever Ally looked happily in love with Tyler, immediately after his displays of anger, I was reminded of the few such women I’ve heard about in real life and felt sorry for them.

When I saw Chris Cooper sulking alone in his apartment as Sgt. Craig, I remembered his several lonesome characters like in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Billy Ray’s Breach, and realized that I’ve never seen him play an upbeat character.

When the interval began I remembered an old Little Hearts advertisement. Reporter: “Which part of the movie did you like the most?” Moviegoer: “Intruvall.”

When Caroline was shading a drawing with a pencil while talking to her brother’s new girlfriend the soft scratching reminded me of couples rocking on beds, and then the scene where young Forrest Gump sits on the front yard listening to the sounds coming out of the room with Mrs. Gump and the principal inside, and inevitably of the subsequent grunts that the boy himself makes.

Pierce Brosnan showed a paunch in the movie. I don’t know whether it was a prosthetic, but the word (and he himself) reminded me of his panache, more as Thomas Crown than as James Bond. When Charles Hawkins missed his daughter’s art gallery exhibition, I imagined the irony of his Thomas Crown character enamored by Claude Monet. When he finally took Caroline to the museum, I remembered James Stewart looking dazed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When he argued with Tyler and Ally that some Yankee team member was not fat but only big-boned, I may have laughed louder and longer than anybody else in the theatre, thinking about Eric Cartman’s claim that he was not fat but big-boned and Stanley Marsh’s retort that Jay Leno’s chin was big-boned and that Cartman was a big fat ass. When the family album scrolled on Charles’ office desktop, I remembered Brosnan’s deceased first wife and their three sons. (The word ‘deceased’ is used in the movie once, by Chris Cooper.) When Tyler told Ally that he came from a family of Irish musicians, I wished that they had kept the Irish accent of Pierce Brosnan. The Irish connection sprang several other memories like its great works of literature (I recently completed James Joyce’ Dubliners. Involuntary memories play a significant role in his works like Dubliners and Ulysses.), the current golden age of Irish crime, the beautiful Irish accents, of how Meryl Streep disappointed me with her accent in Pat O’Connor’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and of the Magdalene Asylums.

During the scene in which Tyler was sitting in a theatre, apparently wondering why he is sitting there, I empathized with him. (Or did the director empathize with the audience?) I remembered another recent mirroring of the character in a movie with the audience, in a scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Towards the end of the movie, I remembered that namedropping books and writers was regular early on in the movie and quickly died down. Rereading this very post, I realized that it may have been for the best.

When one of the main characters died at the end of the movie, I thought not about Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, but about K Balachander’s antulEni katha and Mark Rydell’s Intersection. I have been particularly impressed by the latter movie (which I never saw completely), where the death of a character significantly alters the outcome of the movie, and it was not how the character died but under what circumstances the character died that made a difference. After thinking for a long time I also remembered VN Aditya. In all his movies that I’ve seen he gets the hero or heroine stabbed and then promptly recovered, and it felt insignificant in all of those movies. In Remember Me as well, the death is in the Sep 11 attacks. “What a croc of shit!” I thought, and remembered the wonderful monologue in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman. It would’ve made no difference had that character died of dysentery (like in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima), for the aftermath is only a montage of closed ones dealing with the death in due course of time. This also reminded me that I haven’t yet read any Sep 11 literature, and decided that John Updike’s Terrorist should be an especially good choice.

After walking out of the theatre I remembered that I seldom watch movies about teen angst as I can neither appreciate it nor tolerate it. This movie actually doesn’t fall under teen angst, for neither of the main romantic pair is a teen (both are college students), but the movie seems targeted on teens.

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Today is Roger Ebert’s birthday. Sixty-seven years young. I wish him a long prose-ful life.

A little more than a year ago, I discovered his official website and journal. It was easy to identify my role model in criticism and I started religiously reading his reviews and blogs, even though I have little chance of watching most of those movies and his anecdotes are sometimes difficult for me to appreciate. (Some of these journals will become part of his memoirs.) I read them for the pure joy of reading the prose written by a great writer and an amazing person.

I am greatly influenced by him and whatever I understand about film criticism is through his reviews, critiques and journals. While I am acerbic by nature, he constantly reminds me that my desire to be a film critic comes from my passion for writing and love not loathing for movies. Not long ago, I told a friend that if Roger Ebert was willing, I would buy a one-way ticket to Chicago and become his slave. (I stand by my “offer”, Master Ebert; we can keep it legal.)

I planned on listing some qualities to describe him, but the list was becoming longer than my English vocabulary. Two thumbs up!

Image Source: The New York Times
Image Description: Roger Ebert with Gene Siskel.

I watched only four Stanley Kubrick movies: Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

Spartacus did not feel very much like a Kubrick movie to me even though I had watched only three of his other movies by then. I later learned that it is the only Kubrick movie in which he had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, nor any say in the casting and that partly explained my feelings, or accentuated them.

Dr. Strangelove, the classic satire, is possibly the easiest of his movies for any average film fan to appreciate and a lot of credit also goes to Peter Sellers and George C. Scott.

After hearing of it as the greatest horror movie, The Shining disappointed me and that could be because I am strangely unaffected by Jack Nicholson in any of his roles.

I liked Eyes Wide Shut more than many others did. While all characters seem to have been under-played, as if they were all in a trance, the movie felt most intriguing. Now that I think of it, the degree of intrigue has increased from Spartacus to Dr. Strangelove to The Shining to Eyes Wide Shut as if Kubrick himself may have become increasingly aware of the intrigue in the world.

Among all his other movies, I wish to watch A Clockwork Orange the most, and then Full Metal Jacket. Not 2001: A Space Odyssey. I may not yet be ready to appreciate 2001 well enough.

The following is an excerpt from a New York Times interview with the Genius by William Kloman:

Q. One of the newspaper critics thought that in order to get across a philosophical viewpoint you needed more words than you used.
A. This, of course, is part of the word-oriented reviewer psychology. I don’t have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn’t do it with words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non-dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality – or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it – which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket. It’s interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off. There’s a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn’t lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories – it’s always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion. In a sense, what’s happening now in films and in popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of rationalism. One wants to break out of the clearly arguable, demonstrable things which really are not very meaningful, or very useful or inspiring, nor does one even sense any enormous truth in them.

I am a young man who still confuses rationalism with rationality and a naïve ambitious writer who has blind faith in the overwhelming power of words. That there are no areas of feeling and reality that are inaccessible to words even though they may be inaccessible to my own. In all fairness, I try to believe that the same is true about music and painting.

Image Courtesy: Wikipedia and IMDB

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