TOP 5 VILLAINS OF ALL TIME: PART 2

2. Amon Goeth: Schindler’s List

( I thought he was scary in Red Dragon, but this performance by Ralph Fiennes beats it by a mile)

Amon Goeth is the product of the brainwashing of soldiers of the Third Reich through propaganda, and throughout the movie he manages to show the depths of cruelty the human mind is capable of. You expect Amon to portray all the delusions of Hitler’s Germans, their arrogance and belief in the Superior Race and you shudder when you see his treatment of Jews. But none of us expect there to be any room for subtlety in the role. I mean, the man SHOOTS Jews for target practice in the morning!!! Surely there can’t be any self-doubt…

What makes his performance epic is that unlike a soldier following orders, he pauses to reconsider. Twice in the movie, for an instant, you can see evil undecided – when he stands in front of the mirror and goes – ‘Go, I forgive you’, and when he walks into the basement trying to come to terms with his feelings for his Jewish maid. You see on his face the battle raging in his mind. You can’t help but pray for his salvation, because you believe that once a person is aware that there is a choice in the matter, he will always do the humane thing. The struggle lasts for an agonizingly small period, you see that he has made his choice – and what horrifies you is that he chooses to be the way he is.

The monologue in the basement is one of the best expressed struggle of a divided mind trying to come to a decision because it makes you yearn for the good in him to win. Chilling performance…

 

1. HANNIBAL LECTOR: LECTOR TRIOLOGY

( Check out the scene when he bashes a cop while listening to music…and boy, talk about ice cold!!)

The novel describes him as a guy whom even psychologists have labeled a ‘monster’. A man of incalculable intellectual power and a penchant for human meat, Hannibal the Cannibal is the most suave and devious villain of modern times.

Anthony Hopkins plays the role of his lifetime, depicting the monster in all his facades with consummate ease. The books are unbelievably scary because the author has created a monster that appears normal at all times, a distinguished member of society even. Hannibal is an aristocrat, a food and music connoisseur, but at no point of time is his monstrous nature hidden. This is where Anthony Hopkins scores. As a society, we have ‘evolved’ into a bunch of people who do not pay attention to our most basic of abilities – sight, smell, touch. Throughout the movies, you feel a sense of revulsion at the way Hannibal stares, sniffs and how he reaches close to a sexual climax with just a touch.

Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs is especially scary, with the mask giving him a feral look. The guy smashes a cops head with a baton while swaying to a piece of classical music. The book says that his pulse never goes above 72 while he’s beating the cop to a pulp, and Hopkins essays the same freaky calm with elan.

This awareness of his surroundings, we discover, is due to the traumas of his childhood, but even after he has taken his revenge on the guys who destroyed his family, he never stops. He even feeds his guests the brains of an orchestra member who didn’t play well to his guests at a party!!!!

The character, combined with the acting, make him quite simply the best villain of all time…

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What you are missing from the Barmy land

America has stamped its authority on a majority of goods in our country- so much so that our economy is heavily dependent on the status of the US population’s spending. The Indian TV market for English shows is monopolized by American shows completely. Every television show we watch are American or adapted into an American version. Forget Indian soaps, they do not feature in the lists of any Indian youth today. But, are we missing some classy small screen action from our ex-rulers and current No.1Test team, England? You might not like the Brits and could have preconceived notions based on jokes and stories on their arrogance and attitude but their television work is something admirable.

There are numerous American shows based on the UK versions that the average viewer would be experience a ‘440 boltba’ going throught the list.The omniscient Wikipedia holds possesses this data here. For many of us, Hugh Laurie is probably the only name that comes to mind when asked to name an English small screen actor. That toois primarily attributed to his stupendous work in House M.D. Through this article we hope to give you enough reasons to follow the Brit TV scene. We promise, you won’t be disappointed!

1. Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry: If you haven’t seen these guys bring the roof down in any of their shows, you haven’t experienced TV yet. Blessed with immense talent and great camaraderie between themselves, the pair rocked the theater scene before moving on to TV. The first featured together as the inimitable Wodehousian duo Wooster and Jeeves. Brilliant would be an understatement to describe their performance. They carried their success to A Bit of Fry and Laurie, performing on screen sketches they themselves wrote. Now you can find Laurie and Fry in House M.D. and as host of the quite interesting quiz show,Q.I. respectively.

In the Wooster and Jeeves get ups..

2. Language:Every American show that you ever saw would have at least one utterance of the F word. The English shows too extensively employ the word but atleast we get to hear ‘shite’ or ‘bent’ in between the ‘fuck’ and ‘faggots’. The language is new to us, the Indian audience. Yeah, it is. We Indians, are not sure of the language we use and end up following the UK version for the spellings and the US idea for the constructions of sentences. Brit English is classier than the American English.

What do you get when you put 4 imbeciles together? The Inbetweeners

3. Originality:As mentioned earlier, some of the most popular American shows are copied from UK. And there is a reason it was copied, right? The original versions of these shows, The Office, Skins, Coupling, X Factor, Pop Idol to name a few are better than the American counterparts. You have to credit the creators for coming up with such awesome stuff! I mean you don’t see a character like David Brent every day. Like his counterpart Michael Scott says: David Brents don’t grow on trees. There is no David Brent tree.

Ricky Gervais rocking as David Brent

4. As short as they can get: When someone said a work of literature/cinema is more appealing when the characters grow with the audience, the Indian soap producers took it a little too seriously. The melodramas stretch to the limit. The characters literally grow with you everyday with Baa probably being the only exception (she grows old at half the rate of others). American shows continue for seasons together each with minimum 15 episodes. The Brit shows on the other hand are crisp and you can do away with them in a matter of days if you have the entire collection on hand. No season lasts more than 7-8 episodes.

5. Humour:Americans have a great sense of humour as is evident through the numerous hit sitcoms that are known to us. Some might be surprised to hear that Brits too have a sense of humour. Nevertheless, it is true and boy, are they good at it!Watch a few stand-up acts of Bill Bailey, an episode of Wooster and Jeeves from the old times or an episode of Q.I. The comedy in Brit shows is not predominantly racist or about immigrants. Guys like Bill Bailey take it to a whole new level where there is no particular template that the performer follows. It is more of a jocular interaction with the audience.

The master man Bill at work

Well well… what are you waiting for now? Get the best Brit show collection, sit back on the couch and enjoy the beautiful accent and humour, sipping a pint of lager without giving a shite to any wankers bothering you.

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TOP 5 VILLAINS OF ALL TIME: PART 1

Imagine Batman without The Joker, or Superman without Lex Luthor – makes the existence of heroes kind of pointless right? Villains probably have the toughest role to play in the movie, and that is why unlike heroes, only a few manage to remain in our psyche years after watching the movie.

Kindness, Loyalty, Courage and Honesty are qualities that the world preaches, and hence we tend to have a very clear idea of what ‘good guys’ are supposed to behave like. It also doesn’t hurt that the ‘hero’, as a rule, is a good-looking guy with a ripped body that we can admire and look up to. 

But what scares us? What disgusts us? What terrifies us? These are topics we usually don’t have a straight answer to, because the only way to know the answer is to experience it, and that’s pretty damn scary a prospect. There are many ways to go about when it comes to playing a villain : you can be a ruthless, merciless mobster with a meek and submissive alter ego; you can be a psycho with a very demented view of morality; you can be a man in power, misusing it. These are all ‘bad guys’, and the following is my list of the characters that have defined ‘evil’ in the modern world:

(A note on a technicality – I have considered pure bred,all-out evil guys, not anti-heroes. One might argue that Al Pacino in Godfather 2 or in Scarface is not really a ‘hero’ in the traditional sense, but neither is he a villain. With that difference in classification, a lot of otherwise groundbreaking performances (for example,Robert di Nero in Taxi Driver) have been left out.)

5. Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint/ Keysor Soze: The Usual Suspects

                           

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Fellowship of the ring…yeah right, crazy dopeheads

(They are ALL looking in the WRONG direction,sort of tells you how wasted they all were at Elrond’s party)

I must admit at the start, I am a huge fan of the novel, and I keep reiterating (as if Peter Jackson gives a fuck!) for everybody’s benefit that it is the one movie that lives up to the novel.It is the single most awesome novel I have ever read, complete in all ways. It also is a landmark movie considering it single handedly brought about the rise of sci-fi novels, which I like to call the Potter Syndrome (the movie made the other novels in the genre more popular, because people never bothered to read the books) and at the same time made a 12 hr long movie totally acceptable to a generation that has an attention span of only 15 minutes.

On a side note –

Fortunately, even with the short attention span, people haven’t started tattooing shit on themselves like Ghazni/Memento. That is an extremely inaccurate way of holding on to memories, and I can see SOOOO many loopholes like –

· What if you run out of body space? Or

· What if you get your revenge and still wake up and search for a dead man?

Man, if I found out that someone around me had memory loss and that he tattooed “post it” notes on his body – I would mindfuck the guy. I would tattoo stuff like –

‘You fucked your dog’ , ‘You had a sex change operation’, ‘You organized the 9-11 attack and your family worked in the WTC” on HIS body and hang around when he wakes up to see his reaction. I would observe him EVERY morning, because his reaction would NEVER get old…anyway, coming back…

LOTR is one of the biggest hits of the century, but consider the premise the movie/novel is based on:

1. There is a village of 4” tall man-children (man-childs? Men-children? Men-child?) who live in holes and admittedly spend the day smoking Shire’weed’. This also explains the dragon stories Uncle Bilbo keeps talking about –“There was a giant dragon who lived in a cave full of treasures”-

Yeah right uncle, next you’ll say you’ve met giant eagles, spiders, dwarves and man-bears…OHH, YOU DO BELIEVE THAT SHIT TOO…(refer The Hobbit)

(SHIT!!!! I am sorry for doubting you…I totally agree with your dragon theory, Jesus!!!)

2. Then enter the local Drug Dealer, Gandalf the Grey(it is a very ghetto sort of name, the name itself indicates a shady(grey) character). He comes with a cart full of “STUFF” and everybody runs around to greet him and sample the wares. He visits the house of his Most Loyal Customer – Bilbo – and informs Bilbo that there is a Mother-of-All RAVE party being held at his boss’s (Elrond’s) house – Rivendell. Obviously, it is by invitation only, and Elrond wants to thank Bilbo for his loyalty.

3. Now there is obviously more than 1 drug dealer in the area. Gandalf and Saruman are fierce rivals, and in the beginning Saruman is the stronger one. Let me explain the flow of drugs:

• Galadriel (from Lothlorien):

She is the main supplier of the best STUFF in the country. There are other centres in Mirkwood (where Legolas comes from), but the best shit comes from these forests.

• Elrond, the muscle, and the financier (Rivendell):

He organizes the parties for the who’s who of the fantasy country and promotes Galadriel’s Stuff. They decide to tie-up with Gandalf, the dealer, who has great sales techniques and is familiar with the common people.

Together, they are the most powerful drug cartel in the country.

(Yes, the cartel has the stereotyped rings for identification, to the doped out customers these rings supposedly allow the wearer to communicate telepathically)

4. So, now at this RAVE PARTY, dwarves, elves, men and the hobbits have all come. There, in a pot session like the ones in ‘That 70s Show’, they all decide the RING(a poor simple wedding band) is evil and must be thrown into a Volcano. And so, they form a Fellowship, and swear to stay together and always be there for each other and stuff like that which is spoken when one’s high.

Elrond explains to them that he has been to the Volcano( which is some sort of highest peak you can reach when you are high), and that he was blown away by it. Unfortunately, a friend of his (Isildur) couldn’t handle it, and died due to an overdose.

Now, everybody at the party wants to get to that high, so the drugs start flowing in earnest.

Of all the celebrities in Rivendell, 4 came close to the “Volcano” – Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli. A few hours later, Frodo and Sam appear out of nowhere, looking disheveled and walking awkwardly. They explain that they reached the Volcano, and that touching each other helped them go over the edge (well, they are borderline gay throughout the novel anyway, hugging at the drop of a hat, and they even had a threesome with Gollum).

(Gollum after the threesome)

Still high, Gandalf urges them to “take care” of his rival – Saruman, and they all go and kill Saruman by throwing him out of his window.

On the way back to Rivendell, Aragorn says, “I am the King of Gondor”, and everybody salutes him. Gandalf gets off his horse and stumbles over to him, placing an imaginary crown on his head. Aragorn smiles happily, knowing even he will get to the Volcano, after all there is no other use of Arwen in the whole damn movie. Might as well have put a sex scene so that we could have seen Liv Tyler naked(refer pic below)

(If I was the director, I would have convinced her that the character required her to strip….damn waste)

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