3 Idiots is a 2009 Indian Hindi-language coming-of-age comedy-drama film. Upon its release on 25 December 2009, 3 Idiots received widespread critical acclaim with praise directed towards its direction, themes, humour, story, screenplay, soundtrack and performances of the cast and was a commercial success. 3 Idiots is now considered to be among the greatest Indian films ever made. A Mexican remake, 3 Idiotas, was also released in 2017.
¡Three Amigos! is a 1986 American Western comedy film starring Martin, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Alfonso Arau, Tony Plana, Patrice Martinez, and Joe Mantegna. It is the story of three American silent film stars who are mistaken for real heroes by the suffering people of a small Mexican village.
Of course, I went to see Gladiator II on the night before the opening Friday. And? Acceptable, certainly, but essentially pedestrian, unlike the refresh of Top Gun (see Top Fun) and an unimaginative replay (without the emotional intensity) of its own predecessor:
Gladiator is a 2000 historical epic film directed by Ridley Scott. It stars Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, and Richard Harris. The film grossed $465.5 million worldwide (on a budget of $103 million), and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Strike One.
I had purchased Orbital by Samantha Harvey a couple of weeks back, not expecting that it would win the Booker, but because it was short-listed and it was short (I believe it is the second shortest to win) and although the review in The Guardian was not too positive, while the one in The New York Times was.
There are moments in Orbital when wonder, like happiness, writes white. Thrilled reports of exquisite light effects start to fall a little flat. The beauty of the book is at work less in its explicit hymns of praise than deep in its rhythms and structures. And it’s here that some of the most compelling thinking goes on – about the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy.
The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot. No alien race invades. No sentient planet turns people mad. The technology behaves. The astronauts are consummate professionals. One is described as the heart of the ship, another its hands, a third its conscience. No trial tests these claims, and no event comes along to reverse or strengthen them. “Orbital” is an assiduous day-in-the-life account of characters whose main business is to serve the riff — on deep space, cosmic time, climate change, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of progress. Always passionate and often moving, these riffs invariably come untethered from the characters who inspire them, and lack the mole of mediated thought.
And?
An enjoyable read, several passages are certainly lyrical, but not a “Booker of Booker” competitor by any means.
Space shreds time to pieces…
Oh, nice!
The mundaneness of their earth-stuck orbit, bound for nowhere; their looping round and never out…
This reminded me of Sartre’s Huis clos, usually translated as No Exit, or:
No Way Out is a 1987 American neo-noir action thriller film starring Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman.
Back to Orbital:
Strange how the most cutting-edge science brands itself with the gods and goddesses of myth…
Indeed. I believe the importance of mythology, especially in our childhood, is deeply understudied. As you know from my posts (see The Vedic in Me), I have not expunged the Vedic Myths from my worldview!
It’s probably a childish thought, if you could get far away from the earth you’d be able finally to understand it, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing…To see it a mathematical swarm. To see the solidity fall away from it…Don’t squander a life so miraculously given…All of these thoughts sound like a pulsar. They’re a rapid breathless beating percussion. What chance that any such life form will ever discover it, this golden-disc, much less have any way of playing it, much less decode what the brainwaves mean…In five billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that outlives spent suns.
As I mentioned in My Short List of Booker Winning Authors, here are some of my favorites:
Sense of an Ending. Midnight’s Children. Lincoln in the Bardo. The God of Small Things.
Strike Two.
And, yes, I went to see:
Anora is a 2024 American romantic comedy drama film written, directed, and edited by Sean Baker. Anora premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or.
Not Anatomy of a Fall (see Anatomy of a Godzilla). It did have a middle act that was laugh-out-loud funny for a while, so I give it that.
Strike Three.
What else am I watching? Streaming: Lioness (Season 2) and The Day of The Jackal. I will post about them after I watch all the episodes.
Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preferences…We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life…
So, let us make the most of it then! You already know about Terrance Hayes (see Poetry and Quantum), and the upcoming event with Emily Wilson (see also Comic Underliving).
Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator of The Iliad (2023) and The Odyssey (2018), will be visiting Pittsburgh to recite a selection of her work at the International Poetry Forum. Tickets are available here.
Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Let me take this opportunity to also make you aware of a 2025 Poetry Reading:
Srikanth Reddy
- Tuesday, April 15, 2025
- 6:30 PM-7:30 PM
- Carnegie Library Lecture Hall
Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. He is also the author of Voyager, named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and National Public Radio. Reddy’s writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. Professor of English at the University of Chicago, Reddy has been the recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the NEA. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, was published by Wave Books in September 2024.
Happy Thanksgiving!
