The much anticipated Shutter Island put me to sleep in the plush seat of PVR Cinemas in Bangalore. I have never gone this long (2 months) without catching up on a movie and the excitement post all the trailers and the personal guarantee from one of my close buddies on the quality of the movie (He had watched it 4 times already and was planning on watching it for the 5th time @ Sathyam Cinemas). The momentum for the movie built up gradually, with no takers initially, but I ended up making 7 separate reservations for 17 of my friends. The look of the girl behind me in the automated ticket printout queue at Forum Mall conveyed the message that I was crackpot to have done so many reservations when I could have done it in one shot. Forum mall was abuzz on the Friday night and it was just good to be out in the normal world after a 1.5 month hiatus. I tried hard not to give up on the movie more than once, but such was the plot and the flashing delusional images, that I doubted my then existence on the face of the earth. It was a night show post a hard exhausting week, and the pit-stop at firangi paani didn’t help matters much. The initial euphoria of getting out the campus and venturing into a mall died down, thanks to Martin Scorcese’s convoluted plot that seemed to me as a rehash of earlier movies of this genre. The most insulting impact came from one of my classmates who along with his walked out in the middle of the movie, and then later paid for the tickets as well!! The great guy that he was, in order to reduce my misery to tolerable levels, remarked that he liked the movie but had pressing reasons to stage a walkout.
