Good Book + Good Movie = Good Weekend

Since nothing much is going on in my life, the above equation is valid only for me! :) The experience of watching a movie with an open mouth and not wanting to go anywhere else because you are hung on a book is something I haven't experienced in the recent past. It's a feeling that always made me content and left me feeling amazed. Kind of a difficult feeling to explain! :) I thought I cannot pass upon writing something about this wonderful book and the great movie!


Good Book = The Magus by John Fowles

What a wonderful book! It wasnt that the story in it was extraordinary or a story that would be embedded into your life forever. What got me hooked was the writing!I am not much of a person to comment on the merits and demerits of writing, but this has got to be one of the best, if not THE best, piece of writing I've read.

As always, I will not tell you the plot of the book. But the story is about Nicholas Urfe, a british school teacher, who finds his life boring and uneventful and applies for a teaching post at a school located in a breathtakingly beautiful Greek Island. Here he meets the recluse Maurice Conchis, who takes him through a journey, one of the most bizzardest experience that Urfe has being through in his life. I will tell you only that much.

The book is very thought provoking. Psychology is at the center of its theme. The plot is so unsure of reality and illusion that you almost end up questioning everything about your own life. All credit must go to John Fowles, who is a brilliant writer. Reading this book is like sitting around a bon-fire listening to the best story teller of some tribe in ancient times. The entire story is woven right in front of your eyes, and instead of reading word after word, you listen spellbound. The book ends up in one of the best romantic lines I've heard:

"You can't hate someone who's really on his knees. Who'll never be more than half a human being without you"


Good Movie = Little Miss Sunshine

Great great movie!! If you ask me how the movie is, I will keep my thumbs up for a week!! Ok, I know that sounds weird, but it was that great!! The best thing about it is that it was nothing much! Allow me to explain.

"There are two kinds of people in this world: Winners and Losers"

Being the central theme of the movie, it is also the catchy line of the father of the family. The story is about a family. The father is a very unsuccessful businessman (or something like that) who has come up with 9-step program to make people winners, although his business is going nowhere. The mother is a very busy housewife, who commits her life to her family. Their teenage son has taken a vow of silence in order to bring discipline into his life with a dream of becoming a pilot. Their less-than-10 years daughter, is chubby and spectacled, and strives hard everyday to win a beauty pageant - the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Then there is the mother's brother, who is gay and has recently attempted suicide while the Grandfather is addicted to marijuana.

Ok, at first it seems like everything is chaos and it will end up as a movie that is bound to depressed you when you actually get a glimpse of the family life. But that is so far from the truth. The movie turns out to be about 2 hours that the whole family can laugh and enjoy thoroughly. The seemingly bunch of loosers protrayed through the family, turns out to be all winners after all. And that is the lesson that it is trying to send across. What makes a winner is not someone who ends up getting exactly as he/she wanted. But a winner is someone, at the face of adversity, stands up and still says I am going to try because this is what I have strived for. A winner is someone who accepts the suffering that life has to offer because it is a part of life and that a winner is someone, who wants a loved ones dream to come true and who stands by his/her family despite everything.

I sometimes watch the names of the cast and crew at the end of the movie until the very end. And I only watch them because I loved the movie so much that I do not want to press the stop button or get up from the chair, but be absorbed into it just for an extra second. This was one of those movies!