Creeper - The Play

"What will happen to our email address after we die" - this is the only takeaway, a notional thought, that I could come out with, from Creeper (directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham), the play staged at Rangashankara yesterday.

The play starts in an involving mode, gripping the audience for first 15 minutes with the occasional shrug from here & there - the start was comic in ways more than one, and one could ponder whether getting along the same lines would have made Creeper more entertaining than thought provoking. I call it thought provoking, not because I had to ponder over any social or mental issues, but more because it made me rattle my brains on whether I was the only one who's not getting the real drift of the storyline.

The male protagonist (forgot his name; he was some bong) walks away with the laurels in the play. The female one (don't remember her name either; I thought she was a punjabi, and she looked somewhat out of sorts - though at first sight, she looked like a batchmate from my MBA days - but then I knew she wasn't the same, anyhow) did her part well, but because she had to follow a monotone imbibed in her role, the script did not do justice to her, as she could not get opportunity to showcase various facets of her craft on stage.

More & more people of our generation (and by our generation, I would mean those who have more online presence than offline; those who take time out to check their orkut/facebook/hi5 profiles multiple times a day, though they might consider talking to their folks back home everyday unnecessary; for whom wikipedia (and not I Ching) is the sum of all wisdom, and iphone is the coolest thing to happen since stone age) are thinking along the lines different from the conventional ones. With every passing day, and every conversation with acquaintances, my belief in working for thyself (or in other words, working in a startup, or something of your own) reinforces. With all the investment bankers, all the consultants and all the onsite software engineers reaping in big moolah, some thoughts do arise questioning whether the thrill of working in a small boutique firm can compensate for the big moolah going either way, but then when you see all these big ticket guys insecure and worried about what they really wish to do, it brings back the confidence.

This play also had shades of whether you're leaning towards what you might wish to do, or what the mysterious universe has unfolded for you in form of public opinion. People are mad, but in an ordinary way.

Net net, one should spend some time watching this play instead of spending yet another hour checking orkut scraps, more for the reason that it would help you exercise your brains and will make you think for a change, about something you can't find on wiki or google. For first timers, the acting's appreciable.

The Ultimate Search for Bourne With Google

Much awaited Bourne is back - The Bourne Ultimatum is as much a political movie as an action adventure: director Paul Greengrass made it after the second Bourne film and United 93, the movie about what happened on one of the jets hijacked by terrorists on 9/11. All three movies take place in that anxious place between reality and perception, and The Bourne Ultimatum is made with the same shaky, documentary-style cinematography that invites us into the grey and faithless world of the spy. Not since John le Carre suffered the end of the Cold War have we had such a rich and adult view of what secrets mean.

Not that there’s much time to think about it. The Bourne Ultimatum is also breathlessly tense: Greengrass stages three chases with a beautiful eye for the suspense of the everyday. In the first, Bourne leads a newspaper reporter (Paddy Considine) through a London train station as assassins follow them both. It’s one of the movie’s several chases-within-a-chase: everyone has a cellphone, all of them are tapped, and Bourne orchestrates the journalist’s flight even as he is being followed and in turn following. It’s very long and unfailingly gripping, and Greengrass manages to convey the twists and complications clearly within its crowded reality.

The Bourne Ultimatum ends with the answers Bourne has been seeking. These turn out to be disappointing, maybe because the movie has to come to a shuddering halt while we go through flashbacks that don’t tell us much that we couldn’t guess. Bourne’s long run to find out who he is turns out to be not that important. What he was really learning, it turns out, is who we are.

I would rate it 4.5/5

Quick Trivia - Universal Pictures and Google have joined to promote the movie and at the same time tout several of Google's products to moviegoers.

"The Ultimate Search for Bourne With Google," is an interactive game that uses several Google products, including search, maps, images, translation and YouTube, to let players adopt the persona of Jason Bourne, the film's hero. Players are given challenges each week at a dedicated Google site, www.google.com/bourne. Another feather in the cap, I must say.