I’ll regret doing this (like every other year) but here are some of the films from 2011, in no particular order, I haven’t been able to get out my head.

• Beginners: Mike Mills

(Sure, it wears its twee and hipster sensibilities on its sleeve, but it was sweet, honest and beautiful to look at.)

• Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn

• Kill List: Ben Wheatley

(I was completely blindsided by this perfectly executed, unrelentingly brutal film that transcends genres.)

• 50/50: Jonathan Levine

(I loved that this movie about a cancer patient in his 20s was funny, brilliantly written, amazingly well-observed and moving without descending into cloying sentimentality.)

• Attack the Block: Joe Cornish

(Genre-mashing done right.)

• The Guard: John Michael McDonagh

(The Guard was arguably the most I giggled through a crime-thriller since ‘In Bruges’.)

• Hanna: Joe Wright

• Super: James Gunn

• The Trip: Michael Winterbottom

• Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen

(I’m not going to apologize for loving this film. While it wasn’t anywhere near his best work, it was tremendously enjoyable fluff that only Woody Allen could come up with.)

Honorable mentions: X-Men: First Class, Delhi Belly, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Super 8, Fright Night.

PS: I still haven’t watched Hugo, The Artist and Shame.

(Image from Kill List)

I’m usually wary of talking about personal heroes because given enough time, they’re all bound to disappoint you. Christopher Hitchens, however, is the closest thing to an intellectual hero I have had and I’d be lying if I told you I agreed with everything he said. Nonetheless, he was a champion for reason and an incredibly articulate, witty and sharp voice against dogma and totalitarianism.

There never was and never will be anyone quite like The Hitch. I’m immensely sad but I look forward to telling my hypothetical children that I lived when Hitchens was alive.

I’ll be drinking a peg or two of Johnnie Walker Black in his memory.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. 

- Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

The year is 2044. The Great Recession is in its third decade, climate change has taken its toll, poverty and unemployment are rampant and things are just shitty in general. Millions have found an escape in OASIS, a virtual reality platform (a futuristic world wide web, if you will) created by an eccentric videogame designer, James Halliday. Halliday, who grew up in the 80′s and is quite naturally obsessed with the decade (chronocentrism?), leaves behind a will that gives sole control of OASIS (and his sizeable fortune) to anyone who finds the ‘Egg’ – the ultimate easter egg.

It isn’t just young disenfranchised nerds who take up the quest; there’s a shadowy multinational conglomerate (Innovative Online Industries) that has its eyes on the prize too (their plan – take over the OASIS and set up a paywall).

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is my favorite science fiction book of all time the year. If you grew up consuming unnatural amounts of media in the 80s and/or 90s, you might really enjoy this book. While most of the videogame references were lost on me, I geeked out at every Buckaroo Banzai and Monty Python mention. Cline’s managed to include an insane amount (and most often, extremely obscure) of shout-outs to pop-culture from the 80′s and 90′s – Blade Runner, Akira, Monty Python, Rush and Back to the Future, being a few .

I’ve read some fantastic science fiction this year but Ready Player One’s the only one I’d revisit.

[Note: The devoutly religious may want to skip this one.]

A few years ago, in a small village not far from the erstwhile Madras, a respectable and self-admittedly suicidal young man had a ‘divine vision’–or what the kids today would call a bad trip. God, who took time out of his relatively packed schedule (alleviating poverty in Africa and studying the implications of the rise of the Soviet Union closely), convinced this diminutive but sharply dressed man that he had been called on to preach the gospel. Overjoyed by the instructions he had received, he proceeded to spread the good news to anyone who’d lend an ear. As luck (or providence) would have it, not many people asked questions about parthenogenesis, spontaneous cellular regeneration or the second law of thermodynamics being violated.

Against all odds, this man grew quite popular among a sizeable section of people who distracted themselves from their poverty and illiteracy with the very appealing notion of an afterlife. Heaven, they were told, was a place constructed entirely of pure gold. (God, in His infinite wisdom, opted for gold because it was shiny, inert and because you can’t spell gold without god.) Money and adulation poured in and he saw that it was good.

Being a prudent investor, the man upstairs instructed our hero to go forth and establish an engineering college because He, being all-knowing, knew that the promise of a worthless piece of paper would be enough to lure in His children. Religious indoctrination and imposed virginity would be thrown in for free. And lo, the sheep did come.

Years passed and our hero, now a ‘prophet’, amassed enough wealth to buy small islands in the Caribbean. His fame spread far and wide and his sources of income now no longer included just the poor and down-trodden underclass; rich sinners living abroad bought their salvation from him, too. He purchased a number of mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. When asked about the inherent ethical problems with preaching love and humility while riding around in pimped out wheels, he told his flock that the cars and houses were gifts from God. The sheep seemed cool with that.

Understandably, God was a little confused. Had He been talking in His sleep again? Because the last time that happened, someone got nailed to a cross.

I’ve decided that by the end of this year, I will have relearned Matlab. Here’s a little Mobius band I wrote on Scilab with the help of a few tutorials.

Hopefully, I’ll keep at this.

Knowing me, I doubt it.

Short video of our trip to Morocco edited by the brilliant Joe K.

The Farthest West [Preview] from JoeKr on Vimeo.

The Ancienne Medina is a strange and fascinating little walled town. Walking through the dingy alleyways, it isn’t difficult to get lost, especially if your directional skills are anything like mine. The medina is in stark contrast to the rest of Casablanca; there are bustling souks and street hawkers selling everything from mint leaves to Hrithik Roshan films, children playing soccer, old men and women in traditional Berber garb and rickety mopeds that putter through the narrow streets. Fascinating (and claustrophobia inducing) as the medina is, few tourists really venture out there and frankly, it’s not too hard to see why. It does take a change in perspective to breathe in the details. Swen tells me it reminds him of Assassin’s Creed and that’s quite accurate.

We’ve not blended in like I thought we would. We’ve had at least four different men come up to us and ask us if we were ‘Hindi’ or ‘Paki’ and one of them proceeded to sing ‘Kabhi Kabhi’ while we tried our best to smile and walk away before he asked us for ‘chips’ (tips). We’ve stopped by some of the thousands of tiny cafes littered throughout the city and I’ve discovered the joy that is mint tea. I wish we had clove cigarettes.

It’s been only two days and this trip is already starting to feel like one of the best ideas we’ve had in years. Not only have I had the chance to reconnect with two of my closest friends but it’s been, to quote Joe, a jolt to the system.

Shots from the incredible live show by U2.

The boy with two left feet and the girl with three thumbs met over Turkish coffee at a Moroccan eatery. They connected over Kant, Chabrol and the insurmountable loneliness of being. He listened to her talk of lovers she never had while he spoke of a childhood that he didn’t quite remember.

He taught her to rap and she taught him to waltz. On some nights, while she lay speculating on the sex lives of midgets, he worked on his novel about a homicidal panda. Solitude was but now a long lost companion. They fought the urge to define their predicament; any one word would be too inadequate, they agreed. They placed bets on the love lives of their friends and laughed at souls who craved the validation of children and picket fences. She was de Beauvoir and he was Sartre, they joked. You see, they too were ‘left quite unmoved by the big serious things’.

They read the same books, smoked the same blunt and drank the same kool-aid. And in a haze of happiness and inactivity, the years passed by until they could no longer recognize themselves or what they felt for each other but godammit, it was never love.

Trust Woody Allen to make you sit through a film about an insufferable intellectual who calls children, “submental cretins”. Diminutive middle-aged man constantly ranting about death, sex and existential angst – never gets old. And always funny.

I’ve been drawn to Woody Allen’s shtick since college (there’s a dirty joke somewhere in there); I’m one of those very few people (going by the huge backlash from critics) who think that Allenesque male angst  and pathos are as socially and culturally relevant today as they were back in the 70s. And if you look a little closer, you’ll realize that Allen’s philosophy has somewhat evolved over the last 40 years.

Towards the end of  Manhattan, Issac Davis speaks into a tape recorder and asks himself why life is worth living. There’s Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and then, Tracy’s face. That scene has always appealed to the romantic in me.

Exactly 30 years later, an older and perhaps wiser Boris Yellnikoff seems to have gotten a little less materialistic.

My story is, whatever works as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filtch a little joy in this cruel and pointless life, that’s my story.

I’m willing to overlook the cinematic flaws for the simple reason that at the end of the day, his films tend to remind you that there’s always clever humor to be mined from meaninglessness and paranoia.