After the end of the world

It’s exactly six months this weekend that the pandemic first hit me personally.  I was about to travel overseas for work.  I dropped the kid to a play date.  She called to say bye while I was at the pharmacy to buy malaria tablets, mosquito repellent, and hand sanitisers — standard fare for a visit to the tropics — when I received the text asking me to get in touch with my team leader immediately.  Before I could get to it, the team leader called — mission aborted, they are pulling everyone out from field, stay tuned for next steps.

Like most white collar workers in the western world, I have been working from home for the last six months.  My little town hasn’t had that bad an outbreak.  Schools opened back in July, and local Desi communities have already restarted dawats.  But the malls are still hauntingly empty even on Friday evenings, and people are still nervous.  No one expects anything remotely like normal anytime soon.

Still, the end of the world it quite ain’t here.  But there are evenings when it’s hard to ignore the fact that the world is not what it was.  And what better way to survive those evenings than to immerse yourself into a book or a movie about life after the end of the world?

The grand ending

Oh that ending was epic, right?

The nine-year-old exclaimed as we came out of the theatre one Saturday afternoon last antipodean autumn.  We had just finished watching what would eventually become the highest grossing film in history.

Couple of weeks ago, after watching the ending of another multi-movie (and in this case, multi-generational) saga, I asked him — Was that ending epic?

Yeah, I guess so.

The less than emphatic affirmation made me think — what makes an epic’s ending, well, epic?  Of course, I couldn’t but help throw in the biggest television series in history into the mix.

The Avengers, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones — three epics of our times — ended (well sort of, fine prints, see towards the end of the post) in 2019.  How do I judge these endings?  And here, let me stress that  I am particularly interested in the way the story ends, not necessarily on how the story is told (or shown).  That is, I am not going to get into arguments such as whether the Star Wars prequels were worse than the sequels (I change my mind on this all the time) or whether the last season was Game of Thrones poorer than the rest (yes, absolutely).

Now, we need some benchmark to judge these epics against, and what is better than the grandest epic of them all?

Wonder years

Thirty years ago today, Dhaka was shut down as the opposition parties — all of them, Awami League, BNP, leftists, Jamaat — demanded the resignation of President HM Ershad.  There were meetings and rallies around the city, many turning violent.  A working class man in his mid-20s was killed around the General Post Office near Gulistan.  He had the words shoirachar nipat jak (down with autocracy) painted in his chest.  Written on his back was ganatantra mukti pak (free democracy).

Of course, there was no school that bright crispy early winter morning.  Our impromptu game of neighbourhood cricket was ended abruptly by an auntie whose window was smashed by a square cut, or perhaps it was a cover drive, or an overthrow — I don’t quite remember after all these years.  I do remember what happened next.  We rode our bikes.  We didn’t care about politics, but coming from a heavily politicised family, I knew enough to avoid going towards the city.  Instead, we gathered on the new road that was being built near our neighbourhood, and then hit the runway of the old airport.  I don’t think any of us had a watch, but even if we did, who checks the time when so much fun is being had!  Before we knew it, we were in the heart of the Cantonment, and it was around the time of the Asr prayer that we returned home.

I was reminded of the adventures of that day, and the parental wrath thus incurred, while bingeing on the latest episodes of Stranger Things.  I am told it’s not bingeing if I am watching only one season.  But I feel five hour-long episodes straight in a weeknight, starting after the day’s chores are done, counts as binge watching.  Bingeing or not, the second season of Stranger Things is even better than the first one.  And that’s quite a feat considering the hype.  Like everyone else, I had no idea about the first season before watching it, liking it instantly, even if it was, to use the show’s self-deprecation, a bit derivative.  I feared disappointment with the new season, fears that proved unjustified.  This must be how it would have felt to watch Godfather 2 or The Empire Strikes Back back then, unfiltered by the accumulated weight of pop culture now-memory.

Now-memory?  From the show.  This post will have spoilers.  Read at own risk.

The force is strong…

… at least for now.  Upon watching it again, I tentatively, and partially, echo Brad DeLong:

Recommended Star Wars Viewing Order:

1. The Force Awakens
2. A New Hope
3. The Empire Strikes Back

And that is it. Everything else would simply be a letdown, and leave viewers disappointed.

Tentatively, because The Force Awakens leaves so many threads open that we cannot really judge it conclusively until the rest of the trilogy plays out.  Partially, because the rest of the refined canon (including the much derided prequels) has relevant material.  Both points, and more, will be elaborated in a long form piece soon.  Over the fold is some theory about the movie’s central plot twist.  (Spoiler alert).

Bond and the baddies

Bond movies, even the forgettable ones starring Pierce Brosnan, are to be watched as soon as possible, with a group of friends, to be followed by an adda where you can dissect the said movie every which way.  The new movie opened here couple of weeks after the worldwide premiere, and it’s hard to avoid the chatter in our hyper-connected world.  So I was very keen to watch it during the weekend.  Needless to say, the Black Friday in Paris cast a shadow.  But to let that tragedy stop us from discussing movies and books would be a betrayal of the joie de vivre and La Résistance that we associate Paris with. 

Hence this post, which is not really a movie review.  I liked Spectre about as much as Skyfall — not good as Casino Royale, but much better than Quantum of Solace.  

Is this movie too sentimental or emotional?  Does Bond fall in love too easily?  Is he not ruthless enough?  Well, this is what you get from Batmanisation — you can’t give the guy a backstory with emotions without turning him, well, emotional.  But it’s also Sherlockisation — am I coining a term here?  Let me elaborate.  In one of the very first scenes of the BBC show, an eccentric chemist deduces that his potential flatmate, a complete stranger, is an Afghanistan vet — a scene straight out of the pages of the first Holmes novel.  While not a strict adaptation of anything specific of Doyle, every other scene in Sherlock harks back to the cannon.  So it is in Spectre, which continues Bond’s evolution from a thug-with-a-government-paper to mister-suave, paralleling the evolution from the earlier, younger, rough-edged Connery to the later, older, smoother Moore.  If anything, the forthcoming fifth Craig-starter (don’t believe the hysterics about him not doing another) is set up pretty well for a…. okay, we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let me pause here and turn to one aspect of the Bond lore  — the antagonists, the villains, the baddies. 

Telephilosophy

I wrote about television waybackwhen, and tried to read philosophy even earlier.  Considering vision and philosophy translate similarly in Bangla, it’s only natural that I would pick up Everything I Know I Learned from TV: philosophy for the unrepentant couch potato at first sight.  And I read it in on weekend nearly a decade ago.

Anyone who likes to watch TV and read books should get this little gem.  Let me just note the shows and ideas covered.

The Force…

… is upon Rahman pere et fils.

We’ve watched all six episodes — starting with A New Hope, followed by The Empire Strikes Back, then the prequel trilogy, to finish with Return of the Jedi.  Then we started afresh with the first two prequels.  Now going through The Clone Wars — we will not watch Revenge of the Sith until the animated series has run its course.

That’s, of course, on TV.  On the iPad, between the homework, dinner and bedtime reading, endless loops of I am your father or you are the chosen one or goood, not to mention the lego or angry bird versions of the saga or eleventy million fan videos — that’s a different story altogether.

He has the lines from this memorised:

At this rate, I think the kid will have his first brush with disappointment because, let’s face it, sky high expectations are usually unmet.

Was it the unrealistic expectation that caused our disappointment with the prequel trilogy?  After thorough research (see the first para), I am convinced that the prequels are bad in their own right.  In fact, I can do better.  I think I have a good idea of what went wrong with those movies.  As long as these mistakes are avoided, I think I’ll be satisfied with the new one.

Politics in the Star Wars

No, not the politics of the Star Wars saga — been there, done that in what seems to be a long time ago….. (oh, the Daily Star archives don’t work! — note to self: must do something about old articles.  No, not the politics of the star wars, but politics in the star wars, to be precise, in the upcoming trilogy.

A few weeks ago, there was a debate about whether the new movies should dabble in politics.  I think I should note my thoughts about this very important matter.

Planet of humans

(Updated: 1353 BDT, Aug 24 2014).

Factors that have put the blog on a deep freeze are the same ones that keep me from going to the movies.  And in any case, who needs movies when you have Game of Thrones and Zia Haider Rahman?  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes?  A sequel to a prequel reboot — the second one in a decade or so — of a 1960s movie that spawned four (or five?) sequels in the 1970s, with a confusing title — rise before dawn, were the producers observing Ramadan — is it really worth making the effort for this, I asked myself.

I am glad I did make the effort.  The movie has received positive reviews, and is a box office smash.  And it has generated enough bubbles between my ears to force my fingers on the keyboard.  (Warning: this is not a movie review, and thus I am not confined by the ‘no spoiler’ norm — read at your own risk).

সাতকাহন

Seven trashes collected by the senses.