Anthology films

Grand Hotel (1932)

A group of very different individuals staying at a luxurious Berlin hotel and their respective dramas. It is possibly the first portmanteau film and is noted to be culturally, historically and aesthetically significant. It won the Oscar for Best Film. They don’t make like these anymore.

Six in Paris (1965)

French anthological film made by six of the leading directors of the French new Wave collaborating to direct six segments.

The Illustrated Man (1969)

Based on the book by Ray Bradbury by the same name, it comprises of three science fiction stories as the protagonist recounts how he got some of the tattoos on his body.

Four Rooms (1995)

An omnibus film, originally intended to be Five Rooms, tells four stories set in Hotel Mon Signor in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino being two among the four directors of the segments.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

A series of 11 vignettes that all have coffee and cigarettes in common.

Three ..Extremes (2004)

An East Asian horror film, with three segments coming from Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, it can be unsettling to many. The three segments are Dumplings, Cut and Box in that order.

Paris Je’Taime (2006)

Features 18 shorts stories, each set in a different part of Paris .It was originally meant to have 20 stories, one for each of Paris’ arrondissements. Two shorts were dropped. However, it spawned New York, I Love you in the series of ‘The cities of Love’ with films for Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem being planned.

New York, I Love You (2009)

Comprised of 10 shorts, it is a tribute to the city of New York and a sister film to Paris Je T’Aime. Works both as a romance film as also a seductive travelogue.

V/H/S (2012)

A group of misfits hired by an unknown third party to burglarise a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape. They find more found footage than they bargained for.

From India

Darna Mana Hai (2003)

Six stories narrated by friends among themselves over bonfire as they are stuck in forest as they find shelter in an abandoned house. All stories have a supernatural or eccentric element to them.

9/11

September 11, 2001. You likely remember where you were, what were you doing. How you watched those twin towers fall to ground and reduced to rubble of concrete and steel.

I was in ONGC Baroda, participating in a regional U-16 football camp and saw the images on a television set up in the mess as me and my school mates sat down for dinner. We went home a day later and the media was still covering the most audacious attack on American soil till date. And by then the term 9/11 had not even been coined. That was a term that came later on to tag along with the vague, intangible but decade spawning ‘war on terror’. Before that countries went to war on countries. There was an aggressor and a defender, a venue and a warfield. The 'war on terror' was more approximation, guestimation, red herrings and failed leads that frustrated the allies to no end. 9/11 changed the world’s external affairs. It is a day that still haunts many. With consequences that we still live with .

The 9/11 hijackers demonstrated that the terrorist game plan had changed. And now all of a sudden, they were willing to die on a mission. Since then the allies have gone to war to Afghanistan and Iraq, tracked down and killed Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. While going after Al Qaida and Laden was an immediate priority, the invasion of Iraq was done on the back of an incoherent strategic plan and in search of WMD’s that were never there as shown in Paul Greengrass’ Greenzone. People, even American citizens saw it as the US foreign policy to drill holes in other countries and suck the oil out . And after a decade and wars costing 3 trillion dollars, America will pull out of Afghanistan and withdraw its troops.

More than the immediate impact , the damage to America has been more layered with it fighting wars with money from credit, it went from bad to worse as the housing bubble bust, followed by the fall of investment banks and an economy that got itself down-graded .Even Osama bin Laden would not have dreamed of this kind of impact . As for Barack Obama who won on agenda of change, the capture of Laden also wouldn’t do him much good .With plummeting ratings, sick economy, an eminent second dip in recession, unemployment and policies that have failed to work as he might have expected, it might not be surprising if he doesn’t stand for a second term and George Bush might be every tempted to ask him the next time around…

‘It isn’t that easy to fix things, is it?’

The US 10 years hence has build the 9/11 memorial and commiserates and remembers the 10 year anniversary on Sunday.

Twitter-Flickr

This map you see above isn't a picture of the earth, seen from space. Europe’s map seen was created by Eric Fischer, by geo-tagging. It’s a map of the locations attached to every tweet and Flickr photo. What results is a remarkable picture of how each service has spread across the globe.

At the very broadest levels, you have a map of the very different ways that Flickr and Twitter have spread across the world. Take a minute to look at this map of America, where Flickr use is shown in orange and Twitter use is shown in blue.It is noticeable that Flickr is everywhere, but Twitter most widely used in the eastern seaboard of the United States. One might have expected the Twitter and Flickr maps to have overlapped quite nicely, but it is not so. Flickr outstrips Twitter by far, especially in Europe, where it is dominant. Only Moscow sticks out as a blue plume of pixels.

In the geotagged maps of cities Tokyo, San Francisco and New York too the Twitter and Flickr tags again fail to overlap inspite of being both really popular.

Geotagged map - Tokyo Geotagged map - San Francisco
Geotagged map - New York

As interesting as these images are, I also found another image which has truth and humour in it which says – ‘From Space, no one care about your tweets’.