Losing that Disney feeling!

Looks like I'm not the only one out there
who thinks so. Courtsey : www.tumblr.com

 You know you have lost your childhood innocence entirely when you start asking 'What do you think this is, a Disney movie?' and what you are really saying is ,'That sort of optimism is crass and that'll never happen in real life' :-|

While I'm sure I still won't say no to Disneyland, Disney movies seemed to have lost it's magic for me quite a while back. I think I sat up and noticed it for 'Ratatouille'. There was/is/ever-will-be nothing cute about a rat in your kitchen. Unless he's Mickey Mouse. But even he's a mouse. Rats are a no-no, even if they are Disney endorsed! ARGHH. I lost my appetite for days thanks to my room mate happily saying 'ratatouille' every time she went in to cook in the kitchen! She was all for Disney rats! Bleh!

Another disappointing movie experience was 'Meet the Robinsons', and that's an understatement. I will not start on that because it's one of my pet peeves and I'll not know when to stop. Suffice to say that if someone forces me to pick between watching the movie again and sitting through 15 mins of nail scratching against the blackboard, the black board musical will have a better chance of having me in it's audience.

Tangled and Princess and the Frog, the last two animated offerings from Disney was not bad, but there was nothing truly memorable about either. Not like Toy Story 3 or How to train your Dragon, both of which were delightful to adults and kids alike. That's the sort of magic that Disney used to have.

Damn. I kinda lost control on the post. It was not really supposed to be taking an anti-Disney direction as much as loss of childhood innocence. I'm not even sure if it can be salvaged in that direction any more. :-/ Anyways, lemme try. 

One of the reason I cant relate to Disney movies anymore is 'black and white' nature of all the characters. They are branded 'good' or 'evil' from the start and they stay the same. No one ever really grows as a person. People don't get second chances if you fall in the ugly category, which is the same as evil in Disney's world. The old Disney movies from my childhood retain their charm more because of the happy memories associated with watching them.

[Warning: Spoiler Alert - Tangled]

The bad Mother? 

The Good Hero?

Least that ways I thought Tangled was refreshingly un-Disney. To be really fair, the witch might have locked Rapunzel up but never really ill-treated her. She did try her best to keep the girl happy in her tower. Getting Rapunzel all those expensive paints



 and letting the girl mess up the walls knowing that it'll kill the market value of the place if ever she has to sell it! I'm not sure her real royal parents would have let her do that!

And the hero of the movie though devilishly handsome was a relatively untrustworthy guy. He was a bandit and no Robin Hood at that either. He almost sold Rapunzel up the river to get out of trouble.

The menacing Crooks?

What is clear at the end is that Flynn ( the hero) is a good guy is because he chooses to not to give into his greed while the witch stops at nothing to satisfy her vanity. The fact that people become bad or good based on choices or actions they take is far more acceptable. And for once the bad girl was hot and there were ugly people who were good ( the crooks bar scene where all the really ugly people helped them hide and get away from the soldiers! You'll know what I'm talking about if you seen the movie!)

Of course one could argue that Jafar or Scar was evil because they were always power hungry. But we dont   really know why they became so. Maybe Scar was neglected coz he was a weaker cub? Maybe all work and no play made Jafar a cranky person. I mean even the most generous of viewers will not be under the impression that the Sultan was taking care of the country's admin stuff. C'mon! It was clearly Jafar who managed it. He probably felt a little under appreciated! There might be shades of grey we dint realise before. After all, Scar could have just killed the cub with one swipe. Surely it was always a possibility that the cub could come back to challenge him for the throne. So why did he let Simba go?

There are no easy answers in life and there are no people etched out in black and white. Sometimes we put people into boxes marked different colors because it's easier and not because it's true. And once we grow up and realise that, Disney movies are never the same again!

ps: Not a bad job, right.. I mean the salvaging bit, changing direction etc etc :-)

Rewind - Chapter 2

Wrote this two years back. World was so different those days it feels like it happened eons ago and I have aged terribly since then. Least that's how I've been feeling these days. Of course, it's more likely to be one of those quarter age crisis that seems to be all the trend these day with everyone :-) But what surprised me, very pleasantly I may add, was that I had already written this. I mean, that some ideas and thought have remained the same in me. Gives me a wee bit of hope that possibily, just that tiniest bit of possibility still exists, that I'm not entirely cynical :-)

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Courtesy:  http://3.bp.blogspot.com 

Finished 'ballet shoes'. It's actually a children's classic. Uncle G had got a book where they give the beggining of a whole sets of books and they stop right when the suspense peaks. But a lot of those books are, I think, british and it's hard to find those books. so I had read the initial chapters a long time back.. 


Even after I saw this book I dint read it for the longest time coz I figured I would have outgrown  the book and I dint want the magic to fade. It had happened before, where i re-read a book I had read when I was young except now I cant relate to it and all the magic I remember being associated with that book disappeared which was one of the saddest thing to have happened. That's a little bit of your childhood being killed then when that aura of magic melts away. So I dint read it till yesterday... and it's still a wonderful book. It dint disappoint one bit. It had the happy ending we expected but also a very different twist to it. I dont know how I would have felt about it if I was younger coz it would have been too bitter sweet... but now i realise that's how life is and i'm glad for that twist.

The story is about three lil orphans who gets adopted, or rather 'collected', by a eccentric old traveller.  The grls, pauline, petrova and posy, call themselves fossils since that's what the rest of the stuff collected by the old man is called and are given to the care of his grand neice and her maid. It's a lovely story how the grls find themselves, with pauline(eldest) an actress and posy(youngest) who pretty much breathes thru dance and petrova(middle and a russian by birth, the one I most identified with) with a knack for neither but loves cars and airplanes. I know you must be wondering why I would identify with petrova. With all three in a dance and drama academy, it's easy to imagine who would be a fish out of water. And right now it's just all too easy to identify with fishes out of water.

Anyways, it was lovely. With all the dance and drama and the grls in general. It's written in the most childlike way possible without sounding precocious. All of which is, honestly, rather surprising coming from a guy( Noel Streatfeild)

I swear, something it's seems almost surreal when a guy has such insight about being a grl. I still cant believe that John Mayer wrote that song all by himself, called 'Daughters'. He won the grammy for best lyrics and I could not have agreed more with a grammy award before.  It's just amazing how he could know without being a grl or even having a daughter. If he wasnt such a talented lyricist and songwriter I would have probably not liked him by now. Miss the John Mayer when he was new to the business... he was still cocky but it was not coz he thought himself as a great musician but more i felt coz an innate nature. Now that cockyness seems to come off more as arrogance than anything else, which is so sad coz i still love almost all his songs and wish i could look up to him! 


Listening to daughters now. I dont know for sure, but i do feel it;s true for almost all [women] out there. least both me and elu agreed with him cent percent. The first time i heard him sing I was in shock. more like, 'how could he know?'.  Well, still feel the same way. Doesnt seem to have the same effect on guys... dont know why?!


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In the mean time, you ever had a song a book which never loses it's magic no matter how many times you've gone back?

Viral Creativity... is it real?

The old saying was that the secret to creativity was hiding you sources, but when you flaunt openly where you have taken the inspiration from ( or the case that I'm going to discuss, the picture, the video, the song from!) what does it mean?

Is it merely another rip-off or can you truely credit yourself as a creative person with something, though not exactly original, but still new? Where exactly do we draw the line when it comes to intellectual copy right?

This was something that I had briefly wondered about when the Indian Pop scene was overwhelmed with 'remix'es. But since the original creators/music directors/lyricists were all dead no one was around to question it. But it had set forth the thought, 'If the remix is more popular than the original song, then who gets the credit?' The original music director or the remix Dj?

Now with the overwhelming popularity of 'Kolaveri D' song and the million spin offs based on it, the thought has resurfaced. And it's not just wtk*, but thanks to youtube and similar video sharing sites, you have covers being done of almost all the songs by tremendously talented people. As much as I love Adele singing 'Rolling in the deep', I'm almost equally addicted to this little girl's version of it.

The voice is clearly the girl's, but the song is Adele's. If they decide to market this video, what would it mean... who's song would it be? In this case it's simpler because there are not many modifications in the song itself, so the song is still Adele's. But had Vazquez added another riff , a few more beats, changed the tempo entirely then added a rap stanza as well, would it still be Adele's?

Another question which has been bugging me - can the spin offs be taken as creative outputs themselves? They are clearly creative outlets but does that mean they can stand on their own as creative pieces, independent of the inspiration? Hmmm... I think I just got an answer for my own question. I dont think they can ever stand independently.

Had Picasso made his version of 'Mona Lisa', it would still be only a version of Da Vinci's work. Without that reference it would be hard to connect to the painting. We might appreciate the new perspective, but only because we know what the original is like. But if someone who did not know Da Vinci or his works, then would it matter to him as much? Or will he be able to appreciate it more without being burdened by all the implications of what it means to be 'Mona Lisa'?

Looks like I din't answer it after all! :-/ Anyways, Do you have a take on this?
Let me know!


*Why This Kolaveri

Be Kind, Rewind... Chapter 1

This is something I had written in 2008. Just revisiting some of old stuff I had written to family and friends. I could not help post something about 2012 I had written :-/

You are likely to see more on these line, hence the chapter 1!
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Anyways, yesterday when I came back home I found Farah( my then room mate!) checking out a history channel program about bible codes. I dint follow it very well, but it seems when you take the original version of the bible( ie in hebrew) and arrange the words in a particular manner , it seems to predict history. Blah blah blah and more stuff I dont really buy,but what did catch my attention though is according to that it seems our end is coming around year 2012! so just four more years to go. Not that I believe it the way they mean it, but I cant help wondering if the life as we know it is going to exist in maybe ,say 10 years time?

Have you come across Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler? He talks about how we are not able to keep up with technological evolution happening around us. And not just the evolution but it's consequences. Every time I see a report about how we are inching our way to our graves( and there are more than plenty around) I cant help wonder why is that we still dont care. It is so hard to get even my friends to remember not to litter or not to waste. Frankly speaking at the rate we are moving I think only 20 more years, at the max.  That's about all the time, I believe, would be worth living on this planet. Already we are paying for water. At what point do we start paying for air? I think sometime soon a convention is going to happened, sponsored I think by the U.N, just to discuss what we are going to do with the billions of cellphones discarded each year. 10 years ago this was not even a reality, leave alone a serious issue. And in another 2 years, we'll be facing newer and worse problems.


Have I told you about drake's equation? I had read about it quite a few months ago. Anyways drake suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations suggests that technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather quickly. Sounds like where we are going or what? Quality of life on the planet has never been shorter for any generation like for the present one( in terms of fresh air, water, food). Sorry for just rambling on like this but I'm just getting more and more paranoid as each day passes. And in a funny way, I'm almost looking forward for the comet on dec 31st 2012( that's how we are gonna die! :-P) so that the rest of the planet might have a fresh start.  Face it, there was never as obnoxious a species like us before in the history of this planet. And think in such a lot of ways we have always left it a bit worse than how we found it. Like Athi always say, cant wait for it to go to the dogs!! :-)


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 In the mean time I had seen 'Home' on Youtube a couple of days back, a documentary on our planet. The visuals are beyond stunning, esp the first 15 mins. Just some food for thought that we could all take a stab at! :-)