The Sane Lunatic

There's a lot of pressure on most people for how they spend December 31st, better known as New Year's Eve. If you're a family person, you're guaranteed to spend quality time with your family as the bare minimum, maybe with some close relatives, or with another friend who also has a family. If you're with a partner, the least you might do is plan a nice dinner together with some drinks, maybe invite some close friends who are also coupled up, or at least one single person of each sex in case they might find each other's loneliness/availability attractive for the night. If you're just a person who is social, you try to organise a New Year party with friends of all sorts, or at least get invited to one. And if you've got no one to spend time with, you probably spent it in a desperate search for some sort of social gathering or event that would make you feel like you were part of something. A good chunk of New Year's Eve celebrations are for the last cat...

The category of racing games has been dominated by a handful of franchises over the last couple of decades. I've been lucky to play one or more editions of these games. Like any form of entertainment, video games cover a wide span of genres with sub-genres within them. In the broad category of racing games, there are two broad factions: Arcade and Simulations. Most competitive driving games offer a close-to-reality simulator experience, often with cars and tracks directly from global motorsport. Meanwhile, an arcade-style racing game needs to offer more in terms of entertainment as well as engaging driving physics. So, when XBOX needed a platform-exclusive title to expand on the success of its Forza Motorsport racing simulator into a more fun-to-play racing game genre, it gave us one of the best open-world driving games ever: Forza Horizon.   The title made its market debut on October 23, 2012, and it is now in its fifth generation, i.e., Forza Horizon 5. Developed by Playground Ga...

Walking up to the ticket counter of your nearest cineplex to see what's the next available show, irrespective of the genre, is an adventure I haven't taken in some time. But that's how I ended up watching this movie and it was an interesting experience.   This movie is so out of my realm, I had to read the title multiple times to make sure the title was as mushy as it sounds despite having a far more exciting poster design. I recognised the lead actors - Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton - which gave me confidence that the movie would at least pack a good performance. And I was right. The movie is clear to establish its overarching premise early on. It's a story about storytelling with the lead character being a professional academic in the field of narratology, Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton). On one of her adventurous excursions, the English lady somehow ends up with a trinket that houses a Djinn (Idris Elba). While trying to clean the glass bottle, she ends up summonin...

Movies and shows that fall under the genre of horror may have the same base objective – to scare you while entertaining you - but go about it in very different ways. The horror production toolkit includes jump scares, gore, suspense, handheld PoV and the grainy security cam where you can never see who did it. But the true key to any horror story is stupidity. The characters have to be exceedingly stupid to keep putting themselves in perilous situations while ignoring clear signs that something is not quite right with their surroundings. Worse yet, the dumbest and least aware character who tends to set things in motion is almost always a female.     I usually only watch horror movies by myself or with a friend of mine. The first half of the film usually focusses on individual hauntings and brutal killings before the dopey characters try to become ghost/monster hunters. Some side characters would get murdered or disappear to suggest that something evil is afoot. However, the d...

 It's quite common for movies to be made with no plot, a cast of popular actors with loyal fanbases and a big CGI budget. Red Notice is one of those movies. Netflix has been churning out an increasing number of platform-exclusive movies, but it's now harder to find good ones. When they dropped the first trailer for this action-flick starring Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson, I knew I was going to watch it as a fan of the Canadian funnyman. They also showed Gal Gadot as a key character to onboard a slew of horny teens as well. The movie plot is a treasure hunt for an Egyptian artefact, a bejewelled golden egg and part of a set of three, known as Cleopatra's eggs. It explains off the bat that the term Red Notice is the highest wanted level in Interpol, which is a sort of global police agency. The movie then introduces us to a generically-sassy boss lady Inspector Das, played by Ritu Arya, who's chasing one of the best art thieves in the world. She enters the scene accompa...

 Horror film sequels are usually a category to avoid. Most movie-goers give them a wide berth, and for a good reason: they're pretty disappointing, if not absolute shit. I'm glad to say that is not the case with 'A Quiet Place Part 2'. When the first one dropped in 2018 , the sensory experience of 'A Quiet Place' was unlike anything else I'd felt while watching a movie in the cinema. For most of the movie, there was little to no dialogue, and the audience was so engaged, they were scared to make any noise either. The sequel picks up where the first one left off: John Krasinski's character is dead, the family have figured out a way to beat/kill the sound-based monsters, and need to find a new haven. Plus, there's a newborn baby, something notorious for making loud noises at the wrong time. Evelyn Abbot played by Emily Blunt now has to lead her remaining family to safety. Her deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is trying to establish her own ident...

I'd be hard-pressed to name a movie starring Ryan Reynolds as a comical action here that I don't look forward to watching. So, when they teased a movie where this hilarious Canadian heart-throb plays as a self-aware NPC in a GTA-like video game, I was LITERALLY jumping in anticipation. Unfortunately, that first trailer dropped near the end of 2019, right before the pandemic crisis took over. I ended up having to wait 22 months to watch Free Guy, and I can say that the movie did not disappoint. *GAMER LINGO BASICS* Video games where players can explore a large map as they wish are also known as open-world games, like the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. In these games, you'll encounter well-written AI characters who have preset actions, can react to the environment and have their list of dialogues as well. These characters are called NPCs, i.e., Non-Playable Characters and almost all of them don't have a name if they aren't representing a crucial character in the game...