Ian On The Red Dot

Sometimes the gf can make you unbearably mad. You get angry and you keep pushing against the gf, assaulting her with words and gestures. The scene devolves.

The five stages of a fight with the girlfriend:

1. The girlfriend is shocked.

2. The girlfriend is sad.

3. The girlfriend is frustrated.

4. The girlfriend is angry.

5. The girlfriend is indifferent.

The smart guy, usually sprinkled with a generous dose of callousness, knows how to keep the girl at stage 3, with the occasional shift in emotion to 2 or 4.

If you are a guy, never, ever push your girlfriend to stage 5. If not, you will be like Dan (i.e. Jude Law’s character in Closer) who returns to the room to find that Alice (i.e. Natalie Portman’s character) has stopped loving him.

Further notes:

Closer has, for some time, been my favorite movie about love. Excellent commentary about the movie over at IMDB.

An excerpt:

Marber seems to be preoccupied with the way a slighted lover will beg or even demand to know every excruciating detail about their lover’s infidelity. This inexplicable and seemingly masochistic phenomenon pervades Closer on both a literal and thematic level, because Marber has a very simple and universal idea to present. This need to hear these painful truths is the thesis of Closer. What we’re soon able to see through the weaving of the characters’ relationships is that this desire is a manifestation of any lover’s need to possess his or her beloved. The victim of an infidelity grapples not just with the pain of betrayal but also with the inescapable knowledge of a most intimate element of their lover that will never, ever be theirs. In the same way that a man might find himself unable to live with the knowledge of his girlfriend’s past sexual encounters (a la Chasing Amy), the cheated-on man or woman has to confront their pain, however irrational, for being unable to think of every element of their partner as their own.

Closer revolves around this theme. On the one hand, it does this through the literal story of a man wanting to know the details of how and where and with whom his wife cheated on him, vainly trying to take back those intimate moments and claim them as his own. On the other hand, however, Closer uses this theme in a much more general way. A man may grasp at the lustful experiences of his wife, trying to reverse his exclusion from them, but the way that grasping is employed in Closer shows us that even if it weren’t for the infidelity, he would be grasping anyway. We all would. Our need to feel we have complete possession of our lover is what drives us to desperately dig deeper and deeper, trying to gain some secret knowledge of who and what they are at their most pure and uncompromised level.

In the end, however, this level doesn’t exist. The digging, the struggling and the grasping is futile as no person can be reduced to a singular truth. We are an entirely different thing, practically a different animal, from moment to moment. As Natalie Portman’s character so perfectly illustrates by the end, even the most mundane details about who we are can turn out to be transitory or meaningless.

Slumdog Millionaire is a really simple movie. No twists, no special effects. It is a simple, but not simplistic, love story told with solid pacing, great acting and some fine cinematography.

Boy meets girl, boy and girl go through shit, boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy tries to find girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl again, boy and girl go through more shit, boy finally reunites with girl.

The beautiful thing about this film about love is that while it was in a way made for ‘western’ audiences, it still managed to stay faithful to one of the core principles that traditionally defined Hindi movies – no kissing and sex scenes between the romantic leads.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way the director teased us at the end of the movie when Jamal leaned in and kissed Latika on the cheeks. It would seem that the film would have ended with that shot and stayed true to convention, but the director allowed the film to go on, finally ending it with a shot of the romantic leads’ lips touching.

That was supposed to be the KISS. Yet it wasn’t the kind of kiss ‘western’ audiences are used to. It wasn’t some wet, slobbering kiss with tongues sword-fighting. In fact, it was really just the beginning of a kiss. The rest is left to our imagination.

Yet, not really.

Here is where simple brilliance was shown. The director combined the Hollywood and Bollywood way of expressing love on screen by interspersing a dance scene with the ending credits. So while the film had kind of ended with the shot of lips touching, the love story actually continued.

The dancing was love being expressed, love being made.

Some notes:
Richard Gere’s public kissing of a Bollywood actress sparked protests.

In truth, some Hindi movies do feature kissing, but there are very good commercial reasons not to do so.From here:

As you can see in the still from Raja Hindustani, sometimes the characters do. But it’s rare. The censor board is notoriously unpredictable; no one wants to risk getting Karisma and Aamir get personala rating that would scare away families. Also, Bollywood plays to a diverse range of people, from the illiterate and provincial to the worldly and urban. Ideas of morality differ widely from group to group. Why include a kiss when you can easily leave it out and avoid the risk of offending customers? Also, actresses don’t want to lose their conservative fans, nor do they want to endure salacious flak from journalists. So they’re not too keen on kissing on-screen, and many proudly trumpet their refusal to do it.