The Lives of Others

I happened to see this wonderful film a few days back. It is a gem of a movie, fully deserving of an Oscar ahead of Volver, Pan's Labyrinth and Water.

People make a loot of hoopla over Water in India, and I found the movie quite ordinary. Deepa Mehta deserves accolades for her courage and conviction, but I've never felt her movies are great cinema.

Back to the German movie I started about -- it's worth seeing for many reasons. There was one thought that struck me that I kept thinking about afterwards. While the movie was about the 1984-ish East Germany, in some ways it was about a simple scientific principle as well. In any experiment one cannot expect to be a spectator alone and not impact the actual experiment -- by observing we become a part of the experiment, and that changes the outcome.

I highly recommend the movie. On another, though somewhat similar, note, I finally managed to watch the Hindi adaptation of "12 angry men." The Hindi movie is called "Ek Ruka Hua Faisla" and it's now available in Indian movie stores here in the US. The movie attempts to make a point -- expressly menioned at one stage -- that as a jury we need to keep aside our emotions and prejudices and judge objectively. That, my friends, is hard.