Movie Time

After much deliberation I decided to watch a few of the Oscar nominated movies this time. I have been consciously avoiding most of the Oscar nominations ever since I slept through Cold Mountain ( starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger) and labored through last year winner Million Dollar Baby. But I must admit this time the platter laid out was mouth watering.

To start with Spielberg's Munich was a slick movie. It could never have won an Oscar, no matter how much more real or fictitious it had been. The Academy seems to like something closer to home and present day reality than a 1972 Olympic Village shoot-out and the ensuing assasinations.

Syriana was an almost true-to-life depiction of oil politics, boardroom corruption and Islamic indoctrination captured beautifully through the tribulations of a young Pakistani working in the Persian Gulf. The best part of the movie was fast changing scenes that took the viewer from Langley to Washington DC to Spain to Geneva to Beirut (some portions shot in Hezbollah controlled compound) to Tehran to the French Antibes. There are far too many threads in the story that do merge efficiently in the end, but were definitely avoidable.

Crash deserved to win the Oscar ( I guess it will be reinforced after I watch Brokeback Mountain this week). The racial tensions amongst the LA blacks, whites, Mexicans, Iranian immigrants and their paranoia brought out through solid cast is well worth watching. The convergence of the apparently disparate story lines in the movie, towards the end is simply fabulous.