Leon: The Professional is a film by Luc Besson made in the early 90's and stars Jean Reno as a socially challenged hitman who drinks a lot of milk and kills with startling precision and efficiency. It also stars Natalie Portman in her film debut at age 11. And man is she awesome!! Her performance is faultless, brilliant and touching. There is also Gary Oldman who plays a corrupt, volatile police officer who is hooked to either opioids or amphetamines. And boy is he scary. I had my jaw wide open in the first couple of scenes where he was featured. What surprised me all the more is that this is the same man who plays Jim Gordon in Nolan's Batman Universe!! What a startling contrast and a testament to how good, nay, brilliant a performer this guy is. PS: He plays Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies as well!! Portman and Oldman should have won Oscars for this, in my opinion.
Acting is one profession that I have always been interested in and I also like to mimic sometimes. I would not be lying to you when I say that I mimic fairly well too. While we see the glamour of the acting world and the money and the limos, little do we realize how difficult it actually is to play another character apart from yourself. And to do it for a sustained period of time, take after take after take, is hard. Of course cutting through a man's insides and removing his appendix is tough too, but the point is that these guys have put in their dues in training and deserve at least a part of the money coming their way. They do get paid outrageously high amounts though, I must admit.
Couple of other notable performances that haven't won Oscars; let me know what you think too:
Sharlto Copley: District 9
George Clooney: O brother where art thou?
Aaron Eckhart: Thank you for smoking/The Dark Knight
Christian Bale: American Psycho
Gary Oldman: Bram Stoker's Dracula
Meryl Streep: The Hours
Julianne Moore: Boogie Nights/The Hours/ Far from Heaven
Ralph Fiennes: Schindler's List/The end of the affair
Robin Williams: Insomnia
Mark Walhberg: Boogie Nights
Josh Brolin: No Country for Old Men
Heath Ledger: Brokeback Mountain
Alan Rickman: Die Hard
Denzel Washington: Philadelphia
John Cusack: High Fidelity
The list in only a few people whom I felt were not given their due share during the award season.
Indian Performances:
Sharman Joshi: Life in a Metro
Boman Irani in anything!
Kay Kay Menon in anything!
Konkona Sen Sharma in Omkara
Farhan Akhtar in Rock on/Calling Karthik
Abhay Deol in Dev D
Agree? Let me know what you guys think.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Hello Ladies and Gems.
As of this minute I'm sipping a Carlsberg and browsing the web and seeing a couple of my friends' blogs. I haven't done this is a while I must say!!
I am also doubly at leisure today because I had a presentation in my Unit yesterday and, as all presentations go, was conceptualized and executed in the wee hours of the morning and I had barely slept. The presentation had gone on a bit better than expected and so I was more relieved than happy when it was over 'cos I really wanted to sleep after that!
What made the experience more palatable for me was that one of the faculty members, whom I have a lot of respect for, told me that I had done a good job with the presentation and basically a well done comment was made. I was quite happy actually, and that comment sort of made the day for me.
Please bear with me here. This is not an ego trip I assure you!!
The need for validation by outsiders is a phenomenon that I have been quite fascinated by. In an ideal world, one should generally be secure in one's own identity and have a sense of worth that is independent of praise of criticism.
In reality, it often doesn't work out like that. Self-actualization is a process which, according to my understanding, is where one is finally comfortable in one's own skin. Knowing your strengths and more importantly, limitations. And also knowing there are somethings your limitations will prevent you from obtaining. I have come across a few in my time here in NIMHANS and I have noticed that they are often so calm and composed and seldom go all "I am going to screw the residents today"
I guess this process takes time. You need to experience a lot to know who and what you are, what are the things you can do and what you can't do. And coming to peace with that, not allowing outside static to change your point of view or your disposition,at the same time being a man of action and not caring about the reasult, is what I would term self actualization. I find it to be a Buddhist way of being.
Mind you, Hitler had a lot of the characteristics I mentioned above!! This applies to men of peace, not war!
As of this minute I'm sipping a Carlsberg and browsing the web and seeing a couple of my friends' blogs. I haven't done this is a while I must say!!
I am also doubly at leisure today because I had a presentation in my Unit yesterday and, as all presentations go, was conceptualized and executed in the wee hours of the morning and I had barely slept. The presentation had gone on a bit better than expected and so I was more relieved than happy when it was over 'cos I really wanted to sleep after that!
What made the experience more palatable for me was that one of the faculty members, whom I have a lot of respect for, told me that I had done a good job with the presentation and basically a well done comment was made. I was quite happy actually, and that comment sort of made the day for me.
Please bear with me here. This is not an ego trip I assure you!!
The need for validation by outsiders is a phenomenon that I have been quite fascinated by. In an ideal world, one should generally be secure in one's own identity and have a sense of worth that is independent of praise of criticism.
In reality, it often doesn't work out like that. Self-actualization is a process which, according to my understanding, is where one is finally comfortable in one's own skin. Knowing your strengths and more importantly, limitations. And also knowing there are somethings your limitations will prevent you from obtaining. I have come across a few in my time here in NIMHANS and I have noticed that they are often so calm and composed and seldom go all "I am going to screw the residents today"
I guess this process takes time. You need to experience a lot to know who and what you are, what are the things you can do and what you can't do. And coming to peace with that, not allowing outside static to change your point of view or your disposition,at the same time being a man of action and not caring about the reasult, is what I would term self actualization. I find it to be a Buddhist way of being.
Mind you, Hitler had a lot of the characteristics I mentioned above!! This applies to men of peace, not war!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
A Million Little Pieces
I am in the process of reading "A million little pieces" by James Frey the second time around. This book, this wonderful work of art, is about the author's struggle as a drug addict and his struggle in a rehab center and how he befriends the other recovering inmates of the center and their individual stories (to a much smaller extent)
The author was criticized by the keeper of our collective world conscience,Oprah Winfrey in 2006 (not sure about the year), when it was revealed that he had manipulated certain elements of his true life story into something more dramatic and readable. As a person who has worked in De-addiction Psychiatry, let me be the first to tell you that the lives of these people are anything but readable. They are powerless over a crippling addiction, their families despise them for who they've become, and they are alienated by society in general. And they are angry at the world for looking at them with unsympathetic eyes. Yes, it is also true that they lie, they cheat others and they steal in the process of them becoming dependent on the substance they very often wish they could do without.
While Frey may well have manipulated certain aspects of the book, the book is in itself a haunting portrayal of one man's reluctance to seek help, his anger and defiance while in rehab, and his coming to terms with his own problem. And it should be read by anyone who is interested in addiction, or who has a substance use problem, or thinks they might have a substance use problem. In short, it is a masterpiece.
The author has publicly gone on to say that he thinks addiction is not a medical illness and that the element of free will involved in the process of becoming dependent is not present in most of the other medical disorders in current literature.
While I do agree that the environment plays a key role in any illness, let's look at this from a different angle. Is it possible to choose that you keep on drinking daily and consistently until you wake up every morning with trembling hands? Is it not possible to make a conscious decision to stop when you feel that things are going out of control?
I feel that it takes something far more than personal choice in order to make a person want to drink repeatedly and repeatedly. It might be easy for us to say that it is an illness caused due to a lack of will power. Aside from James Frey, I have not come across a person who has overcome the illness who feels that it was something of their own making. The responsibility to seek help for their illness is their own, but whether or not they choose became a habitual, problematic drinker or not is something I am not truly convinced about.
Personally, it was very hard for me to identify with many things that these people were going through, until I realized that there may be something more than a lack of pure will power involved here. The external manifestations, or phenotype as it is called in genetic language, is such that these people often have a history of cheating, stealing, lying to everyone-including the treating team, that makes it very difficult for a clinician to feel sympathy for them. However, once things are seen from a biological perspective, I think our outlook on these people will change.
Alcohol Dependence is the classical bio-psycho-social disorder, meaning that the person's biological constitution, environment and social milieu are all to blame for the illness. I think it's time we spent more effort in hoping to unravel the biological mechanism behind this illness while promoting social therapies like self help groups as a cornerstone for the treatment, or maintenance of this illness.
The author was criticized by the keeper of our collective world conscience,Oprah Winfrey in 2006 (not sure about the year), when it was revealed that he had manipulated certain elements of his true life story into something more dramatic and readable. As a person who has worked in De-addiction Psychiatry, let me be the first to tell you that the lives of these people are anything but readable. They are powerless over a crippling addiction, their families despise them for who they've become, and they are alienated by society in general. And they are angry at the world for looking at them with unsympathetic eyes. Yes, it is also true that they lie, they cheat others and they steal in the process of them becoming dependent on the substance they very often wish they could do without.
While Frey may well have manipulated certain aspects of the book, the book is in itself a haunting portrayal of one man's reluctance to seek help, his anger and defiance while in rehab, and his coming to terms with his own problem. And it should be read by anyone who is interested in addiction, or who has a substance use problem, or thinks they might have a substance use problem. In short, it is a masterpiece.
The author has publicly gone on to say that he thinks addiction is not a medical illness and that the element of free will involved in the process of becoming dependent is not present in most of the other medical disorders in current literature.
While I do agree that the environment plays a key role in any illness, let's look at this from a different angle. Is it possible to choose that you keep on drinking daily and consistently until you wake up every morning with trembling hands? Is it not possible to make a conscious decision to stop when you feel that things are going out of control?
I feel that it takes something far more than personal choice in order to make a person want to drink repeatedly and repeatedly. It might be easy for us to say that it is an illness caused due to a lack of will power. Aside from James Frey, I have not come across a person who has overcome the illness who feels that it was something of their own making. The responsibility to seek help for their illness is their own, but whether or not they choose became a habitual, problematic drinker or not is something I am not truly convinced about.
Personally, it was very hard for me to identify with many things that these people were going through, until I realized that there may be something more than a lack of pure will power involved here. The external manifestations, or phenotype as it is called in genetic language, is such that these people often have a history of cheating, stealing, lying to everyone-including the treating team, that makes it very difficult for a clinician to feel sympathy for them. However, once things are seen from a biological perspective, I think our outlook on these people will change.
Alcohol Dependence is the classical bio-psycho-social disorder, meaning that the person's biological constitution, environment and social milieu are all to blame for the illness. I think it's time we spent more effort in hoping to unravel the biological mechanism behind this illness while promoting social therapies like self help groups as a cornerstone for the treatment, or maintenance of this illness.
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