Terabithia and Imagination

I’m back with another post so soon! *BROAD GRIN*
Honestly, I thought that the chances of India winning the Cricket world cup was more than me posting once in a month. Thanks to some amazing blue-shirted superhumans (or subhumans), I’ll never ever have the doubt again.

I’ve been thinking about my blog of late. I realized that I’m confused about what to write. In fact, the only fact which I’m not confused about is that I’m confused about everything else. I was confused from the moment I created the punchline for my blog. That’s evident from the punchline itself. It’s always been cerebrations from my confounded mind. It’s always evoked laughter; either it was funny or it was so silly that you laughed at my plight. The only difference in the latter case was that the readers laughed away as they unsubscribed me from their feed reader thinking that this blog was a pile of crap. Because I see a steady dip in my readership of late. I think it is a vicious circle. A dip in readership makes me diffident and I don’t post often. That results in a further dip in reader count.
Anyway, instead of whining about this, I’ll write about something better.

The post actually starts here!
I remember I promised about several movie reviews long back. I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. (Go on! I don’t mind you heaving a sigh of relief!)
It’s actually going to be about another movie (no..not a review), and how it reminded me of my childhood.
The movie is Bridge to Terabithia
When it was released, I tried to get tickets for that in PVR once, but they were sold out. Later, several of my friends said that it was pathetic and not worth watching. But being an avid lover of fantasy that I am, I couldn’t say no to a free show of the film yesterday.
My immediate response after the movie was over (It was just 1.5 hours) was “Yaaaawn!”
The movie indeed was not that good.
But all our senses are so deceptive. I couldn’t help thinking about the movie after watching it.
Then I started realizing that there was something different in the movie.
It is not the normal movie-ish story. Our mind is so corrupt that we expect stereotypes in “good movies”. And stereotypes are exactly what is missing in this movie. Even the bullies are not stereotypical.

The movie, simply put, asks you to keep an open mind and imagine…imagine as much as you can. It tells you that you can weave fantasy too. The way Lesley and Jesse imagine things up… I suddenly remembered all the fantasy which I created when I was a kid. I used to go to my dad’s ancestral house for summer vacations. It was a rural area with lots of paddy fields and more macadamized roads than asphalted ones. My grandmother and uncles used to live in the house which was surrounded by trees for about a mile in all directions. All were our land, with cultivation in a part of the land. I used to love the uncultivated land, because it was the best one to explore.

The protagonists in Terabithia swing across a river to woods, where their imaginary land of Terabithia starts. They have all wonderful creatures out there including a giant troll. (which, by the way, are an important ingredient in any fantasy! Sigh! I had enough of trolls)

Even I had a treehouse constructed atop a mango tree in my Terabithia. Although I didn’t imagine trolls and all, I imagined myself to be living atop trees (Don’t get the wrong idea now. I’m still human!)
My treehouse was a kind of outpost made of sheets of wood perched on the mango tree. There were multiple entries (I took a cue from the hideout of the Three Investigators). My uncle had made rope ladders with knots, or you could use the plain old way through the tree trunk. I even had ropes to swing like Tarzan. It was real fun. Everyday, I would climb the tree to my outpost and consider myself to be the guardian of the jungle, keeping vigil on everything around. My company was a small kitten whose name I don’t remember now. I used to make stories where little animals used to come to me with grievances and I, being a good ruler, give proper judgments and advices. I even used to invite my little brother atop, posing as a doctor treating his ailments. Everything was complete…even the background music which I hummed myself when I did something kingly.

I miss those days. This movie made me miss those days, which were forgotten till yesterday. It brought about a sense of nostalgia into me. The movie was not good from a reviewer’s perspective, but it was good from my perspective. It was a touching story.

I wish I had some good friend like Lesley in my childhood. I fell in love with Lesley and her Terabithia.

8 thoughts on “Terabithia and Imagination

  1. We are not complete if we don’t imagine.. as children our minds conjured up innocent worlds.. as grown ups.. it’s better we keep to ourselves what our wild imaginations throw up 😉

  2. I haven’t seen Bridge to Terabithia yet, but it does seem very imaginative and I love movies like that. It’s awesome that it brought you back memories that you would have nonetheless forgotten and never thought of again. It’s cool that it’s not your typical screenplay as you said and it’s not stereotypical. I have to ask though, why do you seem to think reviewers think it was not a good movie? You guys should check out http://www.atthemoviestv.com The bridge to Terabithia received 2 thumbs up, one from Roeper who said, “It’s a terrific film…being marketed in a deceptive way,” Kevin Smith who was the guest celebrity that day, also gave it a thumps up commenting, “There’s far more here than what meets the eye.” This site has everything you need to know about current movie reviews, including past and future motion pictures. It’s also the only place for full length, high-production movie reviews of original content. I know this because I work for Disney! Don’t forget you can watch awesome guest celebrities, and if it couldn’t get any better, the site also has the most extensive review archive than any other!

  3. Nice One, Deepak..! Some movies, like you said avoid stereotypes and thus dont get the importance they deserve.. I think it`s a good movie, at least because it made you reminisce so much about your childhood, because it resulted in a good entertaining post, because more the posts from you, the more i am sure will be your readership.! 🙂

    With Best Regards,
    Srijith

  4. @Sanjiv: You cannot be wronger, my friend. You should not keep your imaginations to yourself. They are the real things which you do in life.

    @Anon: I was wrong. The reviewers are also rating it good. IMDB has given a rating of 7.2 which is not bad, and Rotten Tomatoes a rating of 85%. It indeed had good reviews.
    Damn those fools who told me that it was bad.
    That calls for a slight change in the post. 🙂

    @Srijith: I’m sure some people still will disagree with me. I have never felt so good for a long long time. It is difficult to explain. But I think you got the catch.

  5. hmm I haven;t seen the movie but reading from your it seems pretty much in my likeable category…specially if it has lot of imaginative stuff around it.

    and I would again vouch here again to watch PKSE :), just ignore MS :D!!

    And your readership I presume took a positive slope with this post..enjoy, see you soon at your new post..and also am not DOC yet 🙁 one more year to go, minimum!!

  6. Ohh. I thought you finished your thesis. Anyway, I’ll still call you doc, because I like asking “ehh..what’s up, doc?” 😛

  7. Oh this was beautiful…I loved the description of the tree house…I always wished for a tree-house all my life…just like the ones I read in stories.

    Hey how about the kitten..you still have it? My jiju was a single child and he used to tell me about this cat he had. Everyday when he used to come from school, he used to tell this cat everything that happened, and the cat would give him an extremely wise look. That story has stayed with me ever since he told me :)…

    About the imaginative stories we played out, hehehe 🙂 gosh, I am not even gonna mention them here. Me and my sisters had some really wild stories we enacted!

  8. It was not my kitten. It was my grandma’s. I don’t even remember his name. (I was too young then) He’s dead now, I think.

    I had a pet cat when I was in high school. She used to sit only on my lap when we were watching TV. My mom used to say she was very wise, and would respond to her orders.
    Unfortunately, she died in a tragic accident. 🙁

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