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I’M a thriller junkie!!
Books…..Movies….
Throw me anything with a conspiracy theory, a whodunit build up and a racy plot I’m hooked, - hook, line and sinker. Add a socio political angle to it, maaan u got me droooling.

god forbid, if i lay my eyes on something like that before me, my physical life loops out to a stop and I’m off racing along with the story till i hit the page or frame marked the end or credits…

It’s not remarkable that a single industry has provided a high percentage of my ‘thrillo’ fodder for all these years. it is kind of a given when entertainment is a credo , when u have a zillion nationalities and races with a gozillian imaginations and experiences between them, you do get a steady stream of plots-multiple futuristic/apocalyptic/extinction level /disaster events, put it in a not so distant future and produced with a remarkable sense of realism. Melting ice caps, submerged cities, extinction level events, monster rock from space, monsters from outer space and the Jurassic, u name it they got it!

What are remarkable are the intermittent conspiracy thrillers which it keeps churning out. Thrillers they may be when they are released, but they hit sooo close to the truth, after a few years, that u shudder at the thought that u knew about this….that u had seen this …..
but to think a movie was so close to the truth and soooo close to happenstance and still was rubbished by critics and public alike…!!!

I am, most certainly, jack’s quintessential sense of wonderment!!

The movie was released in 1998 when apna country was going gaga over KKHH. i saw it the subsequent year, when it released in India, cuz it had denzel and willis together and cuz .. u guessed it was a thillllllllller!! And this is one of them which i classify as ‘woohoo’
(classification legend- woohoo - when u come out of the theater and act /behave lke the stars in the movie for the next few hours.. and rarely, when u come out of the theater physically but u r really in the ‘whatIF’ phase of mind going thru ur motions etc etc .)

When i saw it first, it was a taut plot, scintillating acting by denzel which kept me riveted. (the last 10 ghoulishly Hollywood minutes not withstanding). Then a few years later i was in the woohoo moment again, not once but a series of times spanning 2 years…all this time without even watching the frigggin movie again.
The first time was, at the usual hangout with friends sipping coffee watching the twin towers come down when it struck me!! WTF!!!!!!!!!
The second time and the others there after - whenever mr bush /rumsfeld/cheney came on the telly.
It was like a perennial sense of déjà vu all of 2 years….
Thereafter the movie had a new meaning.

(This still is one of the most chilling hollywood facts. They make the meanest calculated predictions - parts of which actually happen and what more they show the shit that’s coming. No wonder conspiracy theories blowup to huge proportions in the US, it’s all ‘cuz of Hollywood mates)

The movie was ‘THE SIEGE’. Pity it got droned out for all the reasons for which it should have been lauded. For the unidirectional monosyllable pyrotechnical thriller dimension of that time, this had depth and layers and layers of soul.
Yeah.. yeah ..the last 10 mins, well I’m willing to let it go cuz of the preceding 110 minutes .well i blame the studio for that. i blame the American public’s want for closure for tht.
They want the good guy/bad guy rhetoric more than anybody else. Come to think of it, hollywood and the american junta is obsessed with closure/labelling/definitions etc etc. public hates ambiguous endings. Even a hint of ambiguity and that’s it, the movie bombs. U give a good 110 minutes to the thinking moviegoer and add 10 more minutes for hollywoodland, u end up pleasing no one in particular.

But it was worth a watch.
Especially for the ‘whatIFs’ which happened thereafter.

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