Gulaal

I was not much of an Anurag Kashyap fan before I watched Gulaal. I went for the movie full of skepticism. Especially because after watching Dev.D, I was convinced that all Anurag Kashyap movies are just dark and full of foul language!
Gulaal is no different in that sense - definitely dark, and the music lends an eerie feel too (I still dont get why the weird red and blue painted dancer accompanied Prithvi Bana)! But despite the weird dark feel, the movie is engaging. Performances of the entire cast are simply brilliant! I haven't really seen a movie based on this theme earlier, so the story was a delight to watch unfold.

[Spoiler ahead]
To me the most intriguing part of the film was - the manipulative natures of all the characters, especially the women.

Waltz with Bashir

This is the only Oscar 2008 nominated movie that I am blogging about (apart from Slumdog millionaire ofcourse), though I have watched atleast 5 of them (Changeling, Milk, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, The Reader). Not that I dont find the others worth blogging about, but this movie deserves to be mentioned.
Broadly, the movie is about events leading up to the Sabra & Shatila massacre of 1982.
The movie is presented in a very interesting way and definitely worth a watch.

Spoiler ahead:
For me the highlight of the movie is - discussions about how our memory behaves. Two examples of interest are:
- The experiment where they showed people images from their childhood, where 9 out of 10 aspects of the image were real, and 1 was fake. Since the mind recognizes the 9 / 10 aspects, it believes that the 10th one is true too!
- To survive the war, one of the soldiers imagined that he is viewing the war through a camera, and that he isn't a part of it, but a mere spectator. Hence, he could not remember even the most horrific images that he saw - because he had conditioned himself to believe he isn't a part of it!