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At a pre-Diwali party held recently, we had mirth upto our eyeballs and then some. And while it does no good to harp on the difficult year everyone’s been through; the enjoyment for me is enhanced because everyone I see on a daily basis is healthy and largely happy.
A bunch of us started playing a silly but fun game from our childhood and it let to crazy hilarity! In a nutshell, you play Simon Says but whoever gets it wrong, gets whacked by the person next to them.
In one case the person about to do the whacking was a very well-accessorized lady with rather large fingernails and elaborate rings. Seeing that the rings could end up hurting someone, a non-native Hindi speaker spoke up about taking off the rings before delivering the whack. But languages are funny things… if you get a vowel wrong in one place, the entire meaning changes and you can end up someone completely different from where you intended to go!
The lost in translation bit was: “Take off your thumbs before you hit her!!” And there were prettily dressed up women in their ethnic finery, rolling on the floor laughing. Total paisa vasool (aka ROI) on party entertainment courtesy an unintended slip of tongue!
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As far as disses go, it’s not the best one out there but it was weird enough for me to post it. -
I came across these while searching for something entirely different on Google and thought it would be a bit of a departure from my usual content…
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I used to love horror movies. I utterly enjoyed the heck out of them and I was ghoulish enough to rate them on the BCI- Body Count Index...you know where you check to see if enough people are ending up dead or not.
I realized early on that the BCI is directly proportional to my enjoyment of watching the movies. There’s an equation floating around in my head somewhere but I can’t seem to retrieve it right now. It essentially says that within the first 15- 20 minutes of a horror movie starting up, if atleast 2 people haven’t died then it’s not watching. There’s a Lame-O-Meter rating too but only teens get it since they primarily use the word lame. Or used to back in the 90s.
Note: Keyword is died and not *tortured*. I don’t get off on torture. It’s got shock value but beyond that it grosses me out. Hence my extremely short-lived relationship with Rob Zombie movies and why the Hostel series just wasn’t my thing.
But horror stories were my jam and I have beautiful memories (truly) of cuddling up with my fairly straitlaced mother and snacking on Hershey’s Pudding Cups while Jason hacked his way through Camp Crystal Lake aka Camp Blood. I didn’t however, contend with the inquiring mind of a child who would interrogate me about Jason, Freddy and Myers to the extent that I would lose interest in them enough to not carry out my annual Halloween routine of atleast one horror movie.
A comparison between killing efficacy is something I can get behind but when we start applying logic to why Myers did what he did, how Jason died as a kid but started killing as a grown man with a face like roadkill or how Freddy got those Wolverine claws and why only for one hand; it hurts your head and your horror-loving soul. And don’t even get me started about the questions TO had about Hellraiser and TCM (c’mon…you know which movie this is)!
Horror is horror. Logic has no place there. Especially for the lowbrow stuff. Otherwise there would be no way that Freddy Vs Jason would’ve seen the light of day or the idea of Jason X even leaving the drawing board.
I’m so glad that TO hasn’t had a chance to see The Exorcist yet. I bet he’d have had questions about the green barf and why it was green and did it turn into another color sometime down the line.
I spent my Halloween me-time watching Shaft (2019) and realized that the word MF has also transcended the boundaries of a profanity. It is now an adjective, an adverb, a noun, a pronoun and quite possibly a sentence by itself!
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TO was introduced to haikus in his English literature class. The introduction worked well but when he was asked to write his own haikus he faltered since haikus about extinct creatures or reptiles are not as easy as it seems. For all its focus on nature, haikus didn’t take into account that Komodo dragons might one day feature in its framework.
Anyhoo, once he started off with it and I got involved, I penned a few down and this is the only one I liked; kinda.
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TO just shocked me a few seconds ago when he found a bug crawling around in his room. He picked up my slipper (not his, mine) and said, “Say hello to my little friend!” and squished it into oblivion!!
When did he see Scarface and how did he even know this quote?!!
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If you aren’t a sci-fi movie, aliens and wormholes kind of person, then right off the bat; this movie isn’t for you. But if you are a Chris Pratt kind of person and want to see what more Owen and Star Lord can do when not running away from dinosaurs and Thanos then this movie is good as a one-time watch for sure!
Based in 2022, Pratt plays an ex-soldier turned science teacher in America who is looking for a way to get his hands on a proper lab and strut his stuff instead of teaching zombie (not actual ones, this is a sci-fi movie and not a monster one) middle schoolers about photosynthesis. His life is all about his therapist wife, played by Betty Gilpin, and his 9 year old, science enthusiast daughter- Muri.
The movie doesn’t beat about the bush because a few minutes into it comes in all the drama- soldiers from the future drop down in the middle of a soccer game being telecast for the whole world to see and announce that they’re from the future-2051 to be exact and announce that humanity is under threat and quickly losing the war to alien invaders called the “Whitespikes“. The travel back in time to warn everyone, make conscription mandatory, recruit more people to help fight off the aliens and give the armies a proper fighting chance.
The rest of the movie is all about whether they do get to save the world and what they end up learning about themselves in the process. But while the special effects aren’t out of this world (‘cuse the pun), the banter and emotions playing out here are different from the usual Hollywood fare comprising of Independence Day and its ilk. The movie is well-made and Chris Pratt rises to the occasion without going all Schwarzenegger (his FIL btw) on some alien’s intergalactic butt!
What seemed interesting to me is that Hollywood’s idea of what an invasive species from across the universe hasn’t undergone too many chances in the recent past. While we had H.G Wells starting the trend with War of the worlds, Ridley Scott’s Alien and John McTiernan’s Predator took it up a notch by making Hollywood and the rest of the world comfortable with ruthless aliens relentessly hunting down humans for food or to just exterminate them for world domination. So if there are aliens, expect crude bodies which are designed to scale walls, swims, take huge leaps and in this case, throw spikes. The gaping maws, sharp teeth and tentacles remain the same!
So watch The Tomorrow War for another churning out of a familiar Hollywood script but with better acting, a slightly different alien and pretty decent acting all around. I give it one thumbs up as a rainy Friday evening watch.
