2024-04-21 02:07
Meena Kumari's character Sahibjaan in Pakeezah has an obsession with trains, just like me. Although the root cause of our obsessions are vastly different. She almost met (she was sleeping, s… Read More
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drummersdiaries.blogspot.com
Movie and book reviews. Hollywood, Bollywood, Malayalam, Tamil and Indian movie reviews. Book reviews of all kinds.
2024-03-26 03:32
Shane Nigam knows his strengths and chose the right story, location and director for his production house - Shane Nigam Film's maiden(?) venture. - Bhoothakalam. The angst ridden, depressed… Read More
2024-03-23 02:04
The age of black and white is here in director Rahul Sadasivan's The Age of Madness or BramaYugam. It was a brilliant idea to post-process the entire movie to monochrome black-n-white which… Read More
2024-03-10 04:51
Reading Amy Bloom's In Love helped me understand Robin William's final act. While there are nine states (Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Montana, New Jersey, Maine and Verm… Read More
2024-03-04 07:31
Ramayana and Mahabharata are two great epics from the Indian subcontinent. Many of the thirty three million Hindu gods and goddesses make guest appearances in these two epics. Some like Vish… Read More
2024-02-17 05:10
Twenty years ago in
2004 was my first summer with Leonard Cohen. I discovered him for the first
time during those days of midnight sun in Alaska. He played while I was on the
road in my red… Read More
2024-02-12 07:10
I met many Greek Gods for the first time last week. Thank you, Circe and Madeline Miller. I did not reach this far in life without hearing about Achilles' heel or Midas's touch or Herculean… Read More
2024-02-04 05:05
It was like opening a time capsule from the seventies. The movie is earthy, with shag carpet, a Gen X latchkey kid and long haired dudes. Unlike period movies of the sixties and sevent… Read More
2023-12-31 01:40
----------------------------------- NETFLIX SHOWS ---------------------------------------Bodies turns detective work into a time-traveling comedy, where four sleuths from different time peri… Read More
2023-12-29 07:11
This is one of those customary end of the year lists. My 'book' reading habit is on life support so I thought it would be a short list I could easily convert into a quick post. I could… Read More
2023-12-27 05:05
Oru Vadakkan Veeragadha (transl. A Northern Ballad of Valor) is Malayalam literary giant M.T. Vasudevan Nair's retelling of a sub plot from Vadakkan Pattukal (transl. Northern Ball… Read More
2023-10-08 23:25
Landed on Marty after Amazon Prime suggested I watch Marty next after watching Dead End. It was past midnight and Marty was only 90 minutes long and boasted 4 Oscars from 1955 includin… Read More
2023-10-02 02:53
This was a movie I watched in the theater when it was released, one ozhivukaalam (transl ~ vacation or summer vacation), a rarity in our family. We usually never went to watch new movi… Read More
2023-09-21 05:02
Balachandran Chullikkad's memoir Chidambara Smarana (pub. 01/2001) reads like a struggling young man's journal entries from 1980-90's India. Characters played by Mohanlal, Sreenivasan, Mukes… Read More
2023-05-27 17:59
Neelavelicham (literal translation: 'blue light', poetically liberal translation adopted by the filmmaker, 'blue radiance') is a famous short story by Malayalam literary giant and a renaissa… Read More
2023-04-26 02:43
The oldest scientifically dated remains of a modern human aka HOMO SAPIEN - which is you, me and every human being currently alive on this planet, is 300,000 years old, found in Jebel Irhoud… Read More
2023-03-07 06:22
In the absence of the specter of sin employed by monotheistic religions to keep their followers all sheep-ly and righteous, Indian religions and philosophy, use Karma to keep… Read More
2023-02-27 06:10
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution guarantees the right to trial by a jury. In case of a criminal trial, the jury consists of 12 people, citizens drawn from all walks of life… Read More
2023-02-13 07:15
Flowers for Algernon, the Nebula award winning 1959 sci-fi novel by Daniel Keyes is a crowd favorite for the last half century. There were several reasons I should not have tried reading it… Read More
2023-02-01 07:30
Tales of philandering playboys and gullible girls 'destroyed' by these men have provided fodder to many an Indian movie. Pakalkkinavu, (def:daydream) is a 1966 Malayalam film penned by… Read More
2022-12-31 03:49
One hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell identified the potential, the promise and the puzzle that is China in his book "The Problem of China." Russell is a multi-dimensional personality who… Read More
2022-12-19 02:26
We didn't start the fire in 2022 either, but a few winds of change blew into my life. Adjusting my sails to the changing patterns of currents and events kept me away from updating this blog… Read More
2022-05-31 04:29
TL;DR : Re-watching Oru CBI Diary Kuripp thirty plus years later was somewhat anti-climatic. Oru CBI Diary Kuripp (transl: A CBI Diary entry) is a Malayalam police procedural movie from… Read More
2022-05-29 23:31
We were all twelve once. If we had regular childhoods, I did, we know there is nothing like those endless childhood summers with our friends-in-arms. That pit in the stomach sense of nostalg… Read More
2022-03-31 05:11
1983 Prudential Cup is my cup of frisson on demand. I just have to glance at the pictures of a grinning Kapil Dev holding the '83 world cricket cup or people overrunning the stadium at Lords… Read More
2022-03-01 07:26
Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity is about the meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved. The… Read More
2021-12-26 08:18
This is my customary end of the year list post. I usually do best books, but this year I am going to the best TV shows I have watched this year. Some of them were even adapted from books! Th… Read More
2021-12-05 03:50
A county, a college, a national forest, public schools and dozens of other enterprises including an upscale hotel and a church memorialize the nineteenth century Protestant missionary Marcus… Read More
2021-11-26 03:46
Lijo Jose Pellissery(LJP) is the messiah Pooh Bear of the new new-wave Malayalam cinema with his growing ranks of proselytizing followers of the male kind. He had started amassing this… Read More
2021-11-03 04:54
Living in eighties and nineties India it was hard to avoid watching Silsila. The movie and its songs were always on some channel or the other. I absolutely could not stand watching Amitabh B… Read More
2021-10-31 06:56
It's hard to tell the biography of a freedom fighter without sounding jingoistic. Shoojit Sircar's Sardar Udham is an understated piece of film making we don't see much in Bollywood in these… Read More
2021-10-10 00:00
Like half of the planet, I too am majorly into Korean shows these days. No Squid Game or Korean rom-coms for me. But even if you don't watch rom-coms or fictionalized game shows where charac… Read More
2021-09-28 03:39
I try to stay clear of fads of all kind if I can. It is a bit easier for me than the general populace because I do not have any social media accounts to be bombarded by trends from friends'… Read More
2021-09-05 07:12
Walden is my chill-with-a-book book, my meditation guide, my psychedelic trip without psychedelics. I took that trip again this weekend and I want other people out there in the vast wide wor… Read More
2021-05-28 15:52
After the long drought brought about by Covid19 in 2020, which seemed to have affected Hindi / Bollywood movie industry more than the regional Indian movie industries, I finally saw a watch… Read More
2021-05-03 03:09
Before Oscars So White Redux (2021) I didn't care much about Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to write a review. I wished Riz Ahmed would win the Best Actor award, although like most people… Read More
2021-05-01 03:45
You could have watched several K-dramas but you might not still acknowledge that a real flesh and blood Korean family is nothing like in those K-dramas. Flawless, mother-of-pearl twenty s… Read More
2021-04-13 03:42
Joji is an operatic movie about a dysfunctional family, set in Erumely. The director Dileesh Pothan is on his way to becoming the Bard of Kerala's malanadu (the foothills of Western Ghats) … Read More
2021-04-03 21:37
Dear Edward is the story of a boy - Eddie Adler, the sole survivor of a passenger jet crash that killed 190+ people, written by Ann Napolitano. It is fiction and not a real-life incident alt… Read More
2021-04-02 21:18
There are movies made from books after the book creates a current and a following of its own and catches the eye of an actor or a director. Then there are books written to be movies, like Re… Read More
2021-03-26 06:21
It was counterculture Sunday for me last weekend, starting with The Trial of the Chicago Seven. Then I went down the tube through Prague Spring, hippies & flower children, LSD &&hell…Read More
2021-03-17 02:18
Once upon a time there was a deluxe KSRTC (Kerala State Road Transport Corporation) express bus, the most majestic of its kind, connecting Thiruvananthapuram and Kannur - the southern and no… Read More
2021-03-05 04:32
K.G. George movies explore the darker side of human nature. If you go to the movies for the popcorn, you should never go watch a K.G. George movie in the theater. Not that they are playing… Read More
2021-02-18 05:13
Fresh off the boat, San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley was my first home in the US of A. Above is a screenshot of an old blog post from my now defunct Live Journal describing my ve… Read More
2021-02-17 06:37
CID Nazir, 1971 Malayalam blockbuster stars Kerala's evergreen movie star Prem Nazir as Malayalis' James Bond. For the uninitiated Malayalam movie star Prem Nazir holds two Guinness rec… Read More
2021-02-12 04:44
su·per·nat·u·ral /ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/Learn to pronounceadjective(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force b… Read More
2021-02-11 04:46
All the four paths would diverge after that One Night In Miami. Two will be cut shot prematurely. Two will go on making their contributions to the world of sports and entertainment. It is th… Read More
2021-02-07 01:15
White Tiger, blue moon, albino alligator, purple carrot, double yolk egg - all these vagaries of nature catch our eye because they are rare. Aravind Adiga's novel The White Tiger bowled over… Read More
2021-02-03 04:56
Race, immigration, stories about the people of color and immigrants have been brimming my reading list for the past few months. Is it because of the current state the country prompts more wr… Read More
2021-01-21 23:06
The Great Indian Kitchen: the recipe for success as below.IngredientsOne measure of the goodOne measure of the badOne measure of the uglyDirectionsTurn back the clock a hundred years. Retain… Read More
2020-12-30 03:40
2020 was/is a year unlike any year we have lived so far for the most of us. In terms of reading, it was just another year for me though. The only thing I tried to do differently this y… Read More
2020-12-21 21:48
Nine Hours to Rama (1963) was the first foreign film banned in India. It was based on historian and Indophile Stanley Wolpert's novel of the same name and is a fictionalized account about th… Read More
2020-12-17 02:25
I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did ha… Read More
2020-12-08 18:39
Jeff Speck's paean to walkable, bike-able cities makes me want to plan a city. The only place they allow someone like me to plan cities is Minecraft and I don't even have the patience of my… Read More
2020-12-08 05:59
Almost a decade after Scandi noir or Nordic noir had migrated from books to TV screen, I happened to watch of one the flagship TV shows of the genre - Bron | Broen or The Bridge.&nbs&hell…Read More
2020-11-02 04:23
Tl;dr - VERDICT : "Tremendously Unfit"To get rid of the last iota of indecision (ROFL) before dropping my ballot in the ballot box, I brushed up on the biography of one of… Read More
2020-10-14 01:57
It is a leaden gray Saturday evening, raining dense into the night. I am stuck on Guru Dutt. Pyaasa (Thirst/Yearning) rests heavy on my mind, Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers) is not lig… Read More
2020-10-08 01:26
Why did Glitch not show up in any of the best of Netflix lists? Glitch, an ABC show, picked and co-produced by Netflix from its second season onwards is one of the highly bingeable shows on… Read More
2020-10-04 03:33
I am a fan of movies and TV shows based in the American West. Not all of them have to be Westerns. In fact I have not seen any movies of John Wayne, the classic Western icon. Maybe I… Read More
2020-09-25 05:24
Five boys happened to be in some corner of an 843 acre park when a white woman got raped in the same park. The five teens who had nothing to do with the crime are charged with it. Black kids… Read More
2020-09-22 04:49
I picked up Two Sisters from a suggestion list in the Overdrive library catalog when I was searching for another book. I had always wondered how kids who grew up in Western societie… Read More
2020-09-07 00:14
JL 50 is a commendable first attempt. This is the first time an Indian TV series have tried hands at the material that is usually found on The Twilight Zone. I am a fan of the Rod Serl… Read More
2020-09-06 03:14
The title of this 2020 movie comes from Mohanlal's famous dialog in the 1980s film Mazha Peyyunnu Madhalam Kottunnu. It is his answer to the general knowledge test question posed by the U.S… Read More
2020-09-03 05:09
Years ago when I was working in downtown Anchorage, most days after my lunch I used to take a walk from downtown to the water's edge (Cook Inlet.) The year was 2011 and I remember it was not… Read More
2020-09-02 03:07
Another K.G.George gem from the early eighties, Irakal is the debut film of Ganesh Kumar. I didn't have much of an impression of Ganesh Kumar as an actor till I saw this movie. He make… Read More
2020-09-01 03:08
Movies about movie industry are fascinating to a curious audience. If that intersects with true crime or unsolved mysteries genre, it is even more captivating. Lekhayude Maranam Oru Fl… Read More
2020-08-28 05:22
Broody, black and white shots of Swapnadanam come up in my mind at least once whenever I go down the rabbit hole of dreams, interpretation of dreams, psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and the whol… Read More
2020-08-21 06:29
Edmund Pettus Bridge is silent, quietly bearing the weight of history. Last month on July 26, the man who lead the march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL… Read More
2020-08-07 03:34
.....As you return home, to your home, think of others(do not forget the people of the camps).As you sleep and count the stars, think of others(those who have nowhere to sleep).As you libera… Read More
2020-08-06 03:07
SUSHANT SINGH RAJPUT 1986 - 2020Bollywood actor, amateur astronomer, physics and space research enthusiast, National Physics Olympiad winner, engineering drop-out, life-long learner, philant… Read More
2020-07-24 07:30
Jobless youth were some of the frequent protagonists in 80s Malayalam cinema. Probably because the directors and writers of most of these movies rose from that cadre, before they found their… Read More
2020-07-24 03:31
This was a movie I so wanted to watch as a kid. Because it had snow. It was shot in Kashmir. In India people used to associate Kashmir with beautiful winter scenery and snow, inaccessible an… Read More
2020-07-23 01:18
After countless searches to fill “My List” with movies and shows to watch on Netflix, I usually reach an impasse. There is too much stuff on Netflix that I like. On my watchabili… Read More
2020-05-03 03:36
Like a coworker who you run into occasionally in the hallway, with a comforting smile confirming things are just as it should be on this little marble of ours, Irrfan Khan was an un-intrusiv… Read More
2020-04-09 03:17
Living in an idiocracy. Freedom fails democracy. The emperor has no clothes, but the lone kid is comatoseThe idiot rules the idiot box, his country is a tinderboxHey Mr. Ninety nine percent… Read More
2020-03-16 16:08
Here is the map, updated daily every afternoon. The focus is on Washington State Covid19 numbers, represented as red dots. There is also an ESRI sourced layer (blue dots), which can be seen… Read More
2020-03-12 23:37
Coronavirus map - updated 1630 hrs PST Washington State - County-wise numbers Data from : https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en & Washington DOHClick open the post to view the map Read More
2019-12-24 00:46
Below is a list of the best books I read in 2019 in no particular order. Only one of them was published in 2019.When Breath Becomes Air (2016) by Paul Kalanithi : I am in awe of people who c… Read More
2019-07-28 07:00
Amazon Prime has stepped up its game to woo the global Indian audience. Prime is pushing out many Indian movies (all languages) at the same time as their DVD releases and is also beefing up… Read More
2019-07-27 19:32
Sometimes the specter of a dystopia is too real and close for comfort. There is no hiding from the fact that we live in portentous times. USA, Russia, China, India, Brazil - the masochisti… Read More
2019-07-10 01:16
Ishq is unsettling. The fine print of its subtitle – ‘not a love story’ warns the audience to get rid of their preconceptions about the title – Ishq (means love or pa… Read More
2019-07-05 03:57
John F. Kennedy was fascinating in his death as he was in his life. The mystery of his assassination continues spawning new stories, podcasts, books, movies and keeps the midnight oil burnin… Read More
2019-06-01 04:31
Blue and ocher. Blue walls and blue outfits contrasting with rust, mud and bronzed faces. As a visual person it was the color scheme of Super Deluxe which caught my eye first. The urban gr… Read More
2019-05-19 04:04
What is in a name? Mohanlal by any other name would be just as magnificent, then let's call him Lucifer. Lucifer is a sophisticated sobriquet with devilish undertones and would appeal to the… Read More
2019-05-18 03:07
Njan Prakashan is very much a Satyan Anthikkad movie, with occasional strokes of brilliance from Sreenivasan's pen. Sreenivasan continues being Sreenivasan. Njan Prakashan's script is Sre… Read More
2019-04-06 18:23
The American West is the stuff of myth and legends. While East coast was all about the original boat people aka the Puritans and the blue bloods, the West was the indefatigable frontier that… Read More
2019-03-27 03:30
John Steinbeck says he was born lost and takes no pleasure in being found. It feels good to be lost with Mr.Steinbeck, one of the greatest story tellers America has ever produced.I took a ro… Read More
2019-02-19 00:03
The Tale of Four Pegs & Other Poems is the debut poetry compilation from Anand Haridas, a journalist turned writer based in Kochi, India. The poet is a friend of a friend. Two degrees of… Read More
2019-02-18 23:51
Mid-century modern architecture. The Dude aka Jeff Bridges. Retro hippy California captured in amazing production design.Tautly suspenseful. These factors did me in, even before the movie st… Read More
2019-02-16 01:54
Thank you John Carreyrou for an un-putdownable expose on one of Silicon Valley's greatest screw-ups.Also highly commendable are the brave ex-Theranos employees like Erika Cheung, Tyler Shu… Read More
2019-01-27 07:18
Neena Gupta, the actress who plays one of the main characters in Badhaai Ho has a lot in common with Gloria Steinem, whose book I just read and posted a review about, than meets the eye. In… Read More
2019-01-27 06:57
I read Gloria Steinem rather too late in my life. This beautiful feminist (inside and out) writer, activist and organizer could have fitted perfectly as an icon I could have looked up to… Read More
2019-01-18 17:02
96 is a very topical movie. The only question was who would make the topic (more on the topic right after this) into a watch-able movie. Like many ground breaking moves they make (discovery… Read More
2019-01-18 16:56
I was of two minds. I do need to do at least one "best of 2018" list like the rest of the populace, that is a given, and I will do a non-fiction books list (and a movie list if I get time in… Read More
Rehashing Old Blog Posts: My Favorite Poet, Once Upon A Time When I Used To Read Poetry - Rod McKuen
2019-01-18 16:52
This is rehashed blog post, (not much of a rehash other than changing tenses to match the changed lives and times,) first posted fourteen years ago in my now deleted LiveJournal.The only rea… Read More
2019-01-06 03:02
Kannur is close to my heart, for undisclosed reasons. I have spent many childhood summers tearing across its red laterite hilltops and endless cashew groves with the local kid brigade. I had… Read More
2018-12-31 23:13
Cleaning up my drafts folder before the New Year, here are some posts I typed out but didn't post.&&&&I have been binging on true crime reading when I was not binging on str… Read More
2018-12-31 23:11
Varathan is a liberal Keralite couple's POV and experiences in a part of Kerala, which suspiciously feels more Bihar than Kerala (IMHO.) More on the Bihar situation later. In addition to h… Read More
2018-11-15 16:40
True Crime is a burgeoning genre, with it early beginnings in literature (Truman Capote's In Cold Blood comes to mind) and moving on to television with America's Most Wanted and similar show… Read More
2018-11-14 03:22
Theevandi has an old-timey charm. It brings to mind the un-pretentious story lines about the common man that was symbolic of mid to late eighties Malayalam cinema. In an age of omnipresent… Read More
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