There are very few movies that i have started watching and could not get through with. there have been times when me and my friends have taken more than an hour to select a movie, and then by the half-time, i have been the only person watching it while everyone else would be asleep. this might have little to do with the movie and more to do with my willpower. but nevertheless. then i watched...no correction, tried to watch Eat, Pray, Love. i chose to ignore the bad reviews. a movie which has Italy and Italian food ? it possibly cannot be too bad. i could ignore the parts in India (Pray) and Bali (Love). both the concepts are anyway over-rated, as per me. also a significant portion of the movie had James Franco and Javier Bardem. two men who can make any movie worth watching. Javier Bardem has always been a favorite. James Franco is more of a recent one, not just for his movies. he is very academically oriented, currently is a Ph.D student at Yale and at one point in time, he was simultaneously enrolled for classes in Columbia, Tisch and Brooklyn College. Julia Roberts isn't a favorite, but i find her as smart as hell. so i weighed my odds and they were in favor of giving this movie a try. it might have looked like i was watching this movie with a lot of expectations. many many people forbade me from watching this movie. but i just decided to see the good things in the movie, a.k.a. (as mentioned before) weighed my odds, adding the fact that i have a pretty good threshold for tolerance.
i guess nothing could prepare me for the woefully slow pace of the narration, the unattractive shots of food, the unflattering angles of the actors and terribly contrite dialogues. a good quarter of the movie was about Italy and the Roberts' characters' obsession with food. i was amazed at how little the movie captured the feel, beauty, colors, richness and flavors of Italian food. such unappetizing shots of pasta in marinara sauce ! and barely any shots of pizza of the Naples. now if you are trying to show a woman who decides to go on a binge with Italian food, don't you think there ought to be more emphasis on the food than anything else, like people making time-pass and lame conversations ?
it is pointless to even go to India and Bali and talk about her "amazing" discovery of prayer and love. it is so hard to feel her anguish, her feeling of being trapped, her struggle. by the time she reaches Bali and Bardem had come into the screenplay, i decided sleep was a much attractive option. i had seldom come across a movie with contrite dialogues like Roberts' character yelling "i need to find myself" time and again.
a movie that screwed-up in-spite of having food and Italy.
D I S A P P O I N T I N G.
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P.S.: Probably this is an apt time to admit that i have a special thing for food. a dialogue in the movie was: "i am having a relationship with my food". i wouldn't be too far from such a character. i can have a relationship with a one-item food like khichdi/pongal/bisi-bele-baat or multi-item-mind-boggling-weird-sounding ones. one act of kindness on God's part would be that he put me in a non-vegetarian household. i must admit that being a mansahari gives me great liberties to be able to at least try out a lot many things. in-spite of having a very close staunchly vegetarian friend who had been trying to convince me to become a veggie by showing me videos of animal cruelty and verbally dueling with me on (im)morality of killing animals for food, for the last two years and still not giving-up (S, you deserve a post on you). oh wait, S is a vegan. who am i kidding ! anyway, the up-short of all this is basically i like food. the sight of a king-size snickers for breakfast fills me with as much joy as an exquisite Crème brûlée. erm....this "P.S." is almost another blogpost :P
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