Or rather, blogging in snatches, since I'm well aware that every second I spend typing out this entry is a second I could spend more fruitfully sorting through the endless pile of work I've managed to amass already. Last week I managed to get a 3-credit project with a PhD student of one of my professors, and I was just as incredulous as you must be, dear reader, at learning that I managed to achieve such a thing. This PhD student, you might be interested to know, was also an intern at the company I interned at a couple of summers ago. Amazing how life has a way of coming back full circle. Maybe this incredible circularity is something I can incorporate into another theory of time on some neurotic night later this semester.
I have been reading and watching movies in snatches as well. If you need proof of how deeply I've become mired in work, let me tell you that the first thing that popped into my mind as I was typing out that sentence was that I am rather like a single-core CPU that has to cycle through multiple jobs to give the illusion of parallelism. My dear reader, I have officially ascended to a level of work-induced lunacy hitherto unknown in this world. Can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because I am officially not permitting myself to reflect on questions of that kind until I've dealt with the task(s) at hand. Incidentally, this is one method of dealing with endless work that in my experience works, just in case you want tips on how to deal with it yourself: Never question it. Just do it, and ask the questions later. "Why am I doing this?" Doesn't matter. "Is this how I want to spend my life?" Who cares?
I digress. Or divagate, really, but let's stick with digress. One of the movies I've been watching in snatches is the Hindi movie Ek Thi Daayan. It's a horror movie that's unusual among horror movies and Hindi movies alike in being relatively well received by critics and other people of penetration. I'm not done with it yet, but I think I've watched enough to write a review.
Here's my verdict: It's not bad. It's actually dark and creepy. A few things stuck out to me. I am now convinced that there's an unspoken rule in Bollywood against making movies that are 100% devoid of absurdities. In this case, the plot and even the dialogue (!) are relatively free from absurdity, but the protagonist's name is what keeps this movie from floating away out of Bollywood like a balloon. It's "Bobo". Yes, "Bobo". It's apparently a nickname, but he's Bobo even to complete strangers, and even when well-balanced adults are having a serious conversation about him in the third-person.
That was it for the absurdities, though, since the rest of the movie is really quite delightfully creepy without being over-the-top. In particular, young Bobo's acting was really quite remarkable. I'm usually not a big fan of kids in Bollywood movies, because they're invariably cutesy and quasi-retarded. I've written about it elsewhere. And it's probably even for no fault for their own, or at least not all the time. One can imagine directors with perv-staches directing intelligent child actors to put on the cutesiest, most stultified act they can come up with for reasons that one can only guess at. Perhaps they think that's what people think of when they think "children". Or maybe they're trying to appeal to the subconscious yearnings of disappointed parents whose children were total monsters growing up. I really don't know. But young Bobo was a refreshing departure from that. In fact, he acted astonishingly well. So well that I'm disappointed that he hasn't received more recognition for this role.
The witch in this movie is named Dianne, which is supposed to be a play on Daayan, which means "witch". I'm still not sure how to say it, in spite of the preschooley double letters in the romanization. She was creepy throughout, but the CGI witch stuff was a bit underwhelming when she finally revealed her true form. It would have been vastly creepier if they'd kept her natural. That's really all I have by way of a review right now.
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