The movie experience

Just back after catching King's Speech at INOX, I am comparing in my head what counts as a good movie experience. For some people, a Friday night movie is quite the natural occurence, for some movies are mere entertainment and for some movies are pointless waste of time, money and effort.

Well for most part of my life I was in the last category as a direct consequence of my parents' tending to zero association with movies. Through childhood and school, the only movies I would have seen would be critically acclaimed arty movies by Mani Ratnam, Parthiban and their likes. There was of course the occasional night show with cousins during the summer holidays.

But entering college was such a eye-opener, I spent so many hours catching movies of all kinds - popcorn-and-masala, obsessed-with-authenticity, zilch-originality, dark-abstracty! Thanks to our laptops in hostel, all of us had a huge collection of DVDs perpetually in circulation. We used to have these crowd favorite movies - scenes out of which we used to watch during lunch breaks and group study sessions(to break away from the books routine).

Though the movie allure had hit me hard by then, I was still not into the theater and popcorn mindset. I was(and always will be) in favour of movie watching on the good ol' VLC Player. Nothing like the satisfaction of being able to skip the sickly lovey dovey and blood soaked violence scenes. Most Indian movies would take merely an hour and half max when we leave out these predicatable timeless scenes.

And to throw this movie-on-laptop obsession out of the window came my final semester! It all started with Abhiyum Naanum with a group of six girls and a poor lone guy! Then was the first day first show 'Unnai Pol Oruvan', the 'horror' of Eeram, the mass bunk 'Ninaithale Innikum', the post-semester 'Ayan' and so on. It was quite an experience to catch a movie with friends as the focus was solely in howling and whistling and not listening to dialogues and appreacting the camera angles!

My vote is still for the laptop movies - the fun of five people huddled around a laptop in pin-drop silence with the constant fear of being caught by the warden or the pause after every dialogue for the translation for the Telugu films cannot be compared. There was this time when we saw this eastman colour old movie 'Vennira Aadai' with endless laughter at the snail's pace of the characters in movement and dialogue delivery. Seeing the movie even at 2X speed was like seeing a slow motion movie!

The other time that I cannot forget is when we all oohed and aahed over Johnny Depp in Pirates of Caribeean. The most studious amongst us also could not resist ditching the exam preparation for checking out the cheeky actor. Equally wonderful to these illegal movie watching was the legal movie screening we used to have six months old movies in hostel grounds. Those nights were the perfect excuse for all the girls to turn to rowdyism and whistling and comments to every cliched dialogues! After all these movie screening nights, I used to wake up with a croaking voice like a toad - courtesy: all the screaming I had to do in favour of my class and department!

Now Bangalore with its INOX and PVR has spoilt me for choices and barely is there a week without seeing a new movie! Also my personal favourite in this city is the pirated DVD guys at every corner where I end up buying ten DVDs every weekend! It now looks like I have finally bitten the movie bug and am successfully on my way to being an addict.