Apples and Cheetos

I have watched my share of James Bond movies.  War movies.  Masala movies.

But, that is like saying that I have eaten my share of potato chips. Cheetos. Corn nuts.

The salty, crunchy, lip-smacking snacks are fantastic, but only once in a rare while.  An Ambrosia apple is my latest go-to snack!  Dangle an Ambrosia and a bag of Cheetos in front of me and the apple will disappear from your hand in a nanosecond.  These days, I do not even look at my old flame, the Honeycrisp.

We recently watched an apple that a movie was.  It was a Honeycrisp but not an Ambrosia 😀

Early in my life, when I was beginning to read about "art movies" that I was not able to watch, I read in the news that a Tamil movie had won the national award for the best Tamil film: Agraharathil Kazhuthai (A donkey in a Brahmin street/ghetto.) Commentaries were written in plenty about the movie, and plenty of people were upset too.  But, it was never screened anywhere for me to watch it.  (To date, I haven't watched the award-winning movie!)

From the time I got to thinking and acting for/by myself, which neatly overlaps with the end of high school and the start of the undergraduate years, I have gravitated towards the non-commercial, non-formulaic, movies. One of my greatest complaints in the old country was that the "art" movies were not shown in theatres anywhere near me.  Only potato chips are sold everywhere!

Fortunately, television solved that problem.

Thanks to the only government channel, I finally could watch movies that I had only read about in newspapers and magazines.  The movies that rarely ever played in cinema houses but won awards both at home and abroad.

In those art films, which did not cater to any set formula, the endings often left the viewer exploring the story and the characters because, well, there was no real ending.  No bow tie to wrap up the box.  A few years ago, I read an interview in which one of those art-films great, Mrinal Sen, described such storytelling as: "Life itself is uncertain and inconclusive,” he has said. “Then why should I make a creation conclusive? Thus, all my films are open-ended.”

Uncertain and inconclusive.  That's how the movie that we watched also was.  

Bulbul Can Sing does not play in any local movie hall.  Once again, viewing an art movie was possible only thanks to television.  Well, we watched it on television as it was streamed not via a government channel but a for-profit corporation.  Life has changed a lot since the bad old days.

As this helpful essay on how to find and watch quality films notes, there’s more to life than escapism that we find in the Cheetos that commercial movies are, and film has reflected that:

There have always been filmmakers concerned with pondering the realities of everyday life; with looking at and portraying the world with curiosity and compassion. (I am not merely alluding to documentaries, but to all kinds of films.) In the right hands, a movie can touch us – emotionally and intellectually, culturally and philosophically – in ways mostly neglected by the mainstream ‘product’ churned out as if on a conveyor belt, its raison d’être not artistic worth but profit.

The streaming world in which we watch everything has opened up the world of cinema to people like me who otherwise had to work hard to watch movies about peoples and cultures that are different from what I am familiar with.  It is like how Ambrosia and Honeycrisp are now waiting for me at the grocery store, and I rarely ever swing by the chips aisle!

The woman behind Bulbul Can Sing does it all: Story, dialog, directing, editing, producing, and maybe I missed something else that she did.  Yes, a woman, which is also unlike the bad old days of male storytellers.

What is the latest art house film that you watched?