Like Crazy!

Being in bonded Love is a kind of intense addiction that manifests a deep yearning in your core pervading every moment of your existence with a sublime, ethereal bliss when together and an equally painful, breathless imbalance with reality when apart.

“Like Crazy” is one such story of the emotional journeys of two bonded souls learning to deal with their vulnerable hearts against the roughness of reality. Jacob and Anna are LA University students who meet in a class. There is instant chemistry between Jacob(played by Anton Yelchin,the funny accented Mr.Chekov in Star Trek) and Ana(delightfully potrayed by Felicity Jones) as she submits her paper in his car windowshield with a note that she is not crazy. They meet over coffee where the reticent Jacob and the quirky British born Ana exchange sweet nothings.

Falling in lust is commonplace. Falling in needy love is even more predictable. What’s rare is falling into an experience of earthy naturalness that sneaks under your skin like sunlight,spreading all over you,filling your abysmal depths with oneness,imprinting that feeling in your DNA, making you realize that this is Loving like crazy! Ana and Jacob get to that place slowly as Ana shares her first writings, Jacob builds a chair inscripting “Like Crazy” and they spend days in bed over the summer. As Ana’s visa expires, the impending seperation scares them. In a moment of fear of seperation, she decides to extend her stay violating her visa terms which proves detrimental. Ana is stopped from entering to US when she returns back from UK and is deported.

Sometimes when you find someone that shakes your being, your initial reaction is to reject it. You do your best to get away from it as you are scared about your ability to handle that loss. As Ana and Jacob realize that it is hard being seperated, they decide to move on with their lives. Jacob finds Sam in his office while Ana dates her neighbour Simon. The bond that exists inside though is hard to rip it out. Both of them realize that out of sight is not out of mind. Drake Doremus brings out that subtle loneliness even though Jacob is surrounded by many people. Jacob gives in and calls Ana in London as they both run out of breaths seeing their inevitableness to be together. Jacob moves to London and they get married hoping their Visa issues will get resolved in six months.

Reality strikes the couple as their visa application goes in limbo. In the emotional battlefield of “together and not together”, they succumb to the scars of loss and decide to seperate. Jacob gets back with Sam while Ana gets back with Simon. The compromises they make for convenience covers the wounds of their bonded souls. The movie ends on a whimper than a bang. Ana and Jacob do get together and you hope they can heal together.

Drake Doremus literally followed the characters with his handheld for this movie that gives an intimate uncinematic evolution of these protagonists. There is no set pieces that collide together in a climatic act 1,2 and 3. There is no big manipulating background score trying to accentuate the mood. Instead, it’s all real and quiet, very much like the characters. Infact Anton and Felicity wrote most of their dialogues.

I am not too crazy about “Like Crazy” but i like it for it’s courage to explore the concept of pain of seperatedness and in that respect, it achieves it’s goal more or less.

As Ana says,”the wholeness was rather a luxurious idea. Because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know, don’t know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.”!

You will find your gory bits somewhere in it’s ninety minutes!

Before Sunset!- Movie Review

Ever had that feeling where you are completely lost in your strange imagination of sequence of events between you and the most sophisticated woman you have met till that point in your life? She just gave u a smile, walked past you and is sitting three rows in front of you in the local Bus. You create in your mind those little impossible realistic events between you and her where she happens to live near your apartment; she is your best friend’s cousin; she gets stuck in the road because her scooter broke down. You miraculously happen to be in that exact spot helping her; You walk with her to her home talking politics, women and shoes, Men and infidelity, soul mates, your dislike for searching the missing pair of socks, her love for the depth in ghazals, cold coffee, Calvin & Hobbes, her dilemma with size of heels, why Men don’t file their nails, why kids always find the urge to shower u when u pick them up, everything and anything under the sun as if there was no one else on the road.You can’t help but admire her laugh. She can’t help but notice the way she is teasing you. You don’t want the evening to end but she is standing at the gates of her apartment. You try to act appropriately so as to not ruin your chances and she feels the connection strongly and doesn’t want to enter her home. The moment lingers on as u say, “Goodnight!” You are sure in your heart, its love! A hunch! An instinct! A voice deep within you telling, “She is the One”!.

And then suddenly,you are thrown from your seat as the Bus comes to a halt and you hold the steel bar in front of you trying to wake up from ur ‘realistic’ dream. She stares at you and gets down from the bus leaving you dazed, crazed, confused, happy and sad at the same time. You don’t know her name. Her number. You realize it’s too late to stop the bus and follow her. Suddenly you see those magic events you had built up,crumbling down but you are still hopeful. Hopeful that u will see her again. She might be sitting at the doctor’s office or she joins the company as new trainee and assigned to you or she is your sister’s classmate. Those sweet moments that you conjure up in the vacuum of daily drudgery lingers on for a long time in your life and brings a smile to your face every time you think about it!

“Before Sunset” is one such movie that takes you back into those moments of your life!

It’s about two people, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), who spent one great evening together (prequel-Before Sunrise) and decided to meet after six months in Vienna. They neither have each other’s phone number nor address. The first movie ends with that promise and the second one starts with Jesse signing his new book in a small bookstore in Paris after eight years. His book about that one night with Celine has become a bestseller. We understand Celine didn’t show up after six months as Jesse sees Celine standing in the corner of that little bookstore.

They have few hours before Jesse has to catch a flight to NY.

From the awkwardness of meeting someone very close after so many years, the characters chatter away slowly walking down the streets of Paris without any cinematic gimmicks. The movie is almost shot in real-time in the streets of Paris. It’s real. Honest. Emotionally charged. And like your ‘realistic’ dreams, it gives you a sense of ‘it could happen’. Both Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke have acted brilliantly. You feel for the lost opportunities of the characters involved yet get excited about the future possibilities between them. There are two kinds of directors. One who is visually oriented –Oliver Stone, Spielberg, Kubrick, Maniratnam etc. and the other who is dialogue oriented – David Mammet (Glengarry GlenRoss), SpikeJonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) etc. While the former genre amazes you, the latter stimulates your intellectual senses. You get a rare dose of that heavily dialogue-oriented movie genre that transports you in to a different plane as it plays along.What surprises you is that to make a good movie, you don’t need big actors,big budget,eye-popping special effects but just a simple strong narrative as this movie proves!

Intelligent, smart, witty, moving, emotionally honest, touching, slice-of-life movie after a looooong time!

Don’t Miss it!