Movie Review: Call Me By Your Name(2017)

I recently rewatched this movie as it has been an all time favourite of mine and whenever I find myself moving into a dark place emotionally I always seem to turn to Call Me By Your Name for comfort (or more emotional trauma really).

I think what makes this film so enticing to me is the way the film uses not only the sense of sight but also of sound, touch, smell and taste to fully immerse the viewer into the story. It reminds me of how Caravaggio’s paintings seem to encroach upon the viewer’s space with their dramatic perspectives and lighting. This way, a simple story about a summer fling becomes a lot more.

The very concept of a summer in northern Italy c.1983 is a utopia in its own right. Something I have noticed during this film is the deliberate omission of background music in certain scenes. Instead our focus is directed towards the natural sounds of the environment around the main characters. Oliver brushing his hand against the walls of the old house, the floorboards and stairs creaking as people walk over them, doors slamming and voices being heard from a distant part of the house-all these make the house feel a lot more real. The noise of cicadas amid an otherwise silent atmosphere makes the summer heat almost palpable, the viewer is hit with a sense of still air and heat. I believe that even if one watches the movie blindfolded, they would still be able to vividly visualise the setting of the movie. Every visual is accompanied by it’s natural sound. Even when music is included, it is either somehow made a part of the scene, like Elio playing the piano. This way a utopia has not only been constructed, but also torn down by the end of the movie. The contrast of summer in the beginning of the movie vs winter at the end and the way the soundscapes and background music changes to fit that contrast. Not only light and colour but also sound are used to really drive home the tragedy that Elio is facing.

It would be almost a crime if I didn’t mention Sufjan Stevens’ album made for Call Me By Your Name. Every song on this album is my favourite and every single one of them evokes the spirit of the movie so accurately that just listening to the album might give the audience a complete experience of the movie.

While talking so much about sound and music I shouldn’t fail to commend the cinematography, which is, in my opinion, a stroke of genius. I could screenshot any point of this movie and it would be art. Indeed this is why even after six years the movie has a fanbase of it’s own. It perfectly utilises the idyllic setting of a mansion in an orchard in northern Italy in 1983 and shows what a wide range of emotions a single house can store.

Lastly of course one should talk about the screenplay itself. The book Call Me By Your Name focuses a lot on Elio’s internal dialogue. In the film, we get no monologues from the character whatsoever. In the scenes where he is alone, the only clues the audience has as to what is going on in his mind is the acting of Timothèe Chalamet himself. Luckily he does a great job at this too. He seems to have captured Elio’s character perfectly, so much so that I still can’t quite separate the character from the actor. While reading the book one might feel as if taking away Elio’s internal monologue might render the story lacklustre, but the screenplay would prove them wrong. One thing I liked particularly about this is how we get glimpses into what Elio has written in his journal after certain interactions with Oliver that he later goes and overthinks. This is a great way to keep the continuity of the film going while staying true to Elio’s reflective nature in the book that often bordered on overthinking.

All in all it is no surprise that Call Me By Your Name was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Timothée Chalamet, and won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It is a beautiful rendition of a beautiful story and always a personal favourite.

Movie Review — the grave of fireflies (1988)

‘grave of fireflies’ the animated master piece of war by Isao Takahatai. the movie is premiered in japan about 30 years ago. It’s is based on true story of Akiyuki Nosaka . who deals withthe trauma of second world war.

i believe that no themed film had ever done like this before ever. this is a traumatising way to conveys a strong anti-war message.  it touched me deeply and broke my heart into million 

pieces .absolutely aching inside at the beauty of the two lead characters, Setsuko and Seita, and the pain they were enduring during world war .“A beautiful movie that I would never watch again” is probably the best way to summarise the movie. 

i never imagined that this kind of thing can happen in world. this is only movie that held my interest kept my attention and impacted me.

"Grave of the Fireflies," is a story of innocence lost and two children who ultimately face a losing battle with trying to survive in a small Japanese village in the closing days of World War II. WWII was the conflict in world history, with millions dead.

centre part of it the Setsuko and Seita the two children started taking care of each other after her mom was killed in bombing attack . and their father was in off marine fighting in a war and there was no way to contact him. they are invited by their aunt to live with but after sometime she becomes very cruel and she forced them to live in near by bomb shelter. and the journey becomes very challenging.

This movie shows us how cruel the world is and how short and painful life can be, but it's up to you to cherish every movement and love as much as you can.

HOSTEL 

The last film I saw was 3 days ago and it is a movie named HOSTEL. It had been released on 2006. The movie starts showing two friends – Paxton and Josh travelling Europe meet a man who convinces them to visit a hostel in Slovakia. When they reach the hostel, they encounter something really terrifying. Exploring all manner of debaucheries activities, they befriend an Icelandic tourist named Óli. One night the trio are locked out of their hotel, and visit an apartment of a local guy named Alexei. After being told of a hostel run by seductive women in Slovakia, the friends make the journey to the rumored location. Upon arrival they are pleased to find that Alexei's story was true, a location overrun by nude foreign women. Soon things starts to get wrong, as Óli goes missing, the friends attempt to investigate his disappearance. Meantime, they are drugged by a pair of women that they had been associating, they individually awaken to a horrific underground torture event, lead by a secret organization. The company allows wealthy individuals to pay large amounts of money to torture, maim, and kill abducted innocent tourists, especially teenagers. Unwittingly finding themselves a part of the cult's activities, Paxton and Josh must fight for survival in the nightmare they've awoken in, or die by a series of gory events. The plot centers around a Slovakia criminal organization that lures innocent foreigners into their hostels, where they have wealthy sadists bid upon them for torture and murder. Over the course of the films, the hierarchy of the cult group is revealed to operate internationally. Josh gets killed by one of member of the group while Paxton fights for his survival till the very end. 

However the ending was quite satisfying. 

My review:

The film is really thrilling and there are lots of disturbing and gore scenes in it. The actors are good in their job, especially Jay Hernandez who plays the role of the only survival Paxton. Acting of the actors is to the point and is so natural. There were so many scenes showing, the victims getting brutally torture by the members of the event and those screams and crying for help are really blood curdling. I’m big fan of horror and gore films and this one is one of them. This film also has an ability to create a scenario of tension in your mind about what’s going to happen next! 

Now let’s talk about the cons of the film -  the first 20-30 minutes really bores and I consider myself to stop watching but the torture scenes and the suspense hold me to watch but I personally think, those torture scenes aren’t enough. It tries to combine the film with a psychological thriller but somehow lack doing that. Also some scenes are really shallow and have so much nudity in it. I feel like involving sexual scenes isn’t everything. And moreover the story line is simple and straight forwarded. 

Apart from these negatives, the film goes really well and is a decent film. Now if you enjoy ‘Saw’ franchise, then you gonna enjoy Hostel too but don’t keep high expectations. The climax is the heart of film, it is satisfying and justifying. From my side I’ll give this movie a rating of 7 out of 10.

So if I'll explain my connection with design like how did I get into this design college is kinda long story...

Since childhood, art has been not only my fav hobby but a comfort medium, whenever I used to feel low i did art, whenever I felt happy i did art, whenever i felt stressed i did art, so basically I did art whenever I felt any emotion...

Because that was the only thing that connected me with myself...

So not to elongate this but after 12th I decided to pursue art as my major... So i did a lot of reasearch for what to choose... Whether to go with fashion designing or interior designing or anything else...Also, appeared for Nift and got selected too but I wanted to with Nift Gujarat but I got Nift Chennai tho I was happy but not satisfied... And so after that I finally decided to go something with digital designing... So after lots and lots of research I finally got this college and yah now I'm finally here doing my bachelor in Digital Product Designing and gladly pursuing the thing that I love .

Review of a storybook

Misir Ali Samagra by Humayun Ahmed

Humayan Ahmed is a Bangladeshi writer and his extraordinary creation is Misir Ali, a para psychologist and psychiatrist. Misir Ali is also a teacher of psychology at the University of Dhaka. He is dark, tall, thin and is a middle aged person.

In most of the stories, he encounters people with parapsychological abilities such as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, telekinesis, mirror world experience, understanding animal language, another world etc, who come to him for help. As a logical person, Misir Ali searches for scientific explanations, and succeeds many times, but there are few stories where he was unable to solve the mysteries.

This book has a story named devi, which is one of my favorites, where a goddess comes out of her stone idol and possesses a girl's body she does no harm to the girl, instead saves her and  Misir Ali from a near death experience. This is a small example. There are a lot.

Every story is unique with great plot twists & climax and leaves a special effect on my mind. I feel like i'm in a different world full of mysteries every time i read, the effect is so strong that it takes me to a illusion and makes me think  this world is not real, and i just sit and think for a long time, i don't know if this happens with any other person but me and my mother feel the same. Humayun Ahmed's writings make me think how skillful one would be to engage the readers this way. The writing style and word choices makes the stories enjoyable and exciting.

Some of his stories end leaving a lot of questions in the reader's mind with a mysterious ambience, which is intentional ofcourse. And I also like making up my own answer for those questions. I've read this book a lot of times but I still get amused and thrilled by the complexity & the simplicity of the stories at the same time.

I wish I had one singular reason why I got into design or why I came here, but I don't. 

I've always liked art, like everyone else. We all have always liked art. 

However I've found that I don't quite like the concept of design. I don't like catering my creative process to someone else. I don't like doing projects outside of my comfort zone. I don't always like art, especially when I'm forced to draw something I don't want to because somebody is paying me or years down the line somebody will be paying me. I guess that makes me a bad fit for a professional artist.

But I don't want to do anything else either. I joined this college because a friend said they were going here and I looked up the description and it sounded like everything I had ever dreamed of. I was supposed to be a doctor. I didn't want to be a doctor. The competition of the medical entrance exams and the crowd I knew I'd fall into as soon as I entered college made me want to not go to college at all. But when I saw design school as an option I thought that would definitely be the way out for me. You're telling me I get to DRAW for a living? Sign me up!! The sense of accomplishment I felt when I made my portfolio from scratch and sent it and got accepted was unparalleled. 

Turns out design is a lot more than just drawing. 

"I'm here because I want to be an illustrator" I tell everyone who asks. 

Illustration is also a lot more than just drawing. 

I guess why I'm really here is that I don't know what I want to be. I just know I want to make art. I'm learning and this is a good place to be learning. I'm changing my mind and this is a good place to be changing my mind in. The more I know the more prospective career paths open up. Since coming here I've gone from designer to illustrator to animator to art history professor to writer, and repeat cycle. I guess the good thing about this place, and about design in general is I feel like I'm always learning. You always have to be learning if you're a designer. You have to learn about a lot of different kinds of things and a lot of different kinds of people and get interested in them and then make some cool stuff. I love learning things and then making some cool stuff out of it. Maybe that way I'm cut out for this place after all.

And I guess what I wanted to do by appearing kind of clueless throughout this post is put it out there that you don't have to know what you're doing. At all. You don't have to have a clear goal in mind. Oscar Wilde once said that people who know exactly what they want to become in life will become it. And that is their punishment. (I forgot what he said after that but this is the important part and now you can feel better about not having the foggiest idea what you're doing)

I'm figuring stuff out. I'm figuring out what makes me feel good about this place and what doesn't. And what got me here is just...the urge to figure more stuff out.

Technically, a design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product or a process. 

For me, designing is a broad term in association with art. I’ve always a love for drawing and paintings and doing something creative in an artistic field.

 Let’s get back in  time, from a young age, most probably from when I was just 5 or 7 years old, my father being an artist, started teaching me certain basic things in drawing like – drawing a circle or any shape and then coloring, also showed me a few techniques to draw human figure and village sceneries. But after a certain point of time I stopped drawing because I felt it so intimidating and boring, as it takes a lot of patience to do. Years passed and I was in 8th standard when suddenly something got triggered in my mind after watching a YouTube video showing ‘how to draw a realistic eye’, I got so inspired seeing the drawing and tried doing the same thing with a few materials I had but miserably failed. The eye that I drew back then looked like someone had squeezed the eye. But I didn’t gave up, I moved on to different references and tried to draw a few of them but never got satisfied. I still remember, I became so disappointed and annoyed seeing zero progress for my drawing that I almost cried. Time went by and with same kind of inspiration I tried drawing stuffs like, Indian village scene, woman figures, human eye, 3D art and so on. And finally I saw my progress, my works getting better and better. I gave countless hours of practice on drawings until I got a bit satisfied but never fully and hence, I became a self taught in drawing. My interest grew more on realistic drawings which looks alive. I drew plenty of realistic drawings since when I got the hack of it. I looked back and was glad to see my progress and how far I’d came. This led me to explore and enter into some other field of art or subjects related to it and that’s when I got to know about designing – Graphic designing. Designing is a whole new world in itself, it’s vast and have plenty of future opportunities. On my sophomore year, I decided to pursue designing as my career and further study because it is blended with my favorite subject – art. I started creating random edits in Photoshop for example, did a few poster designs, learnt manipulative design, did some random photo editing stuffs and started taking awesome inspirations from different designers and websites.  

Me before my finals I decided to get a college specified in designing because I was determined to enter in the world of art and design and explore it. I love creative stuffs and designing for me is a gateway to various creative opportunities as well as creative works. Now I chose design and I’m a designing student, doing my undergraduate course, under one of the famous college in Kolkata. Learnt some really cool ideas, new techniques and great creative processes in my college about designing and yet more to come. 

As a sum up, designing for me is everything. My future is with designing and I’m glad that I chose my career with no confusion because somehow I knew that this course is best for me!

“LIFE IS LIKE A SAILING , YOU CAN USE ANY WIND TO GO IN ANY DIRECTION”

Drawing being always been a method to express my emotion/love/interest. I never considered giving up my artistic ability. I never desired to be a doctor or engineer since my childhood. I wanted to be someone else, apart from this doctor engineer thing. started drawing when I was five years old and from that period I started taking interest in drawing my parents were so supportive they always encourage me to do more art. When started growing, I haven't realized when my hobby became my passion. After passing out

my higher secondary. I took admission in maharani kasiswari and did b.com course after 6 months of college I realized and questioned myself what am I doing? That was not my way and I skipped my college life and I started preparing myself for the entrance exam of the govt College of Art and Craft. I got selected till the viva process but the same day my middle toe was badly smashed by the metro gate I was not able not to walk properly and while walking my slipper slipped out and fell on the street due to rainy days, and I was about to fall over the stray dog but somehow managed to balance my body. Now I feel like that was the worst day of my life. After that attempt, I almost gave 4 attempts, but couldn't clarify. So with the preparation of govt college entrance exam, I thought why not join some boot camp courses to boost my skills, it will help me out in future opportunities too. So I started looking for boot camp courses and consult about it with my friend's brother who was in the same field and doing a graphic design course I got to know more in detail from him what is graphic design and how it's connected with our daily life's and found it interesting and took admission in hi-tech animation (shyambazar) as a graphic

and website designer. I spent a year thereafter when the pandemic came everything was online I passed out from there with good memories and then start earning my own. started working in digital marketing organizations. When I went for bigger companies like TCS PWC, I got to know that they don't hire without a bachelor's degree. So this turned me to look for a design school without wasting a single time. Started exploring design schools and took admission in Ecole. Ecole is one of the best colleges I found in Kolkata and continuing my journey to explore thinking.

the every path of my journey taught me something new and gave me opportunity to grow and come here to experience the world of design where people are full of creative  thinking and it encouraged me to be perfect each and every day of my life . thank you Ecole !! my boat is sailing towards challenging winds for which I’m ready .

i hope this brings some new set of experience

Drawing has always been my passion and favorite thing to do. My mother says that i've been doing it since i was 2.5 years old. Filled up the walls of my home, magazines, books etc, and then she assigned a teacher for drawing, that was the beginning. Years passed and my skill improved and I wanted to be an artist.

 When I was 7 / 8 years old, one of my uncles showed me some of his animations. I was very interested in that and wanted to become an animator. That had been my go to answer whenever I was  asked, “ what do you want to be when you grow up?” “ animator”.

 In class 10, I learned about graphic designing while having computer classes. The teacher explained this to me and I did some research, practices and freelance work. It was a new thing for me, and I liked it more than animation, so again, I wanted to become a graphic designer, and my answer for “ my aim in life” changed. 

 This time, I was sure about what I wanted to be. I wanted to design, but also carry on my art,  and graphic design seemed to be perfect for that. So I gave some examinations and took admission in the Ecole intuit lab, and my journey of becoming a designer started.

 I love how I'm learning everyday, exploring the world of design and art, having more energy, self confidence and enthusiasm towards my works.