Whole Lotta Movies And Weddings
December 1, 2025
Hi friends,
Ratik here — for once — starting to write CC early. There’s still eight days till my end-of-month deadline. Good job, me! I can’t take all the credit though: It’s a Saturday after a busy work week. I watched a great film last night, which I am still thinking about. I’ve been basking in the winter sun for the last two hours. I just brewed myself a delicious cup of coffee. So, of course, I felt like writing. Multiple factors have come together to formulate the perfect vibe for me to write.
I finally watched Haider (2014) last night. Yes, I know, I’m very late. I usually am though so it's okay. Haider has been on my watchlist for many years. The decision to watch it last night was pretty sudden. My girlfriend and I were looking for something cozy to watch and then she suggested we watch Haider (which she loves) instead. Haider is the polar opposite of what one would call cozy. It’s dark and gruesome. It smacks you in the gut. But, it had been on my list for years and I’m always down for a Good™ movie. We put the movie on and let it consume us for the next three hours.
Haider is an adaption of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s the third in the series of Shakespeare adaptations by writer, director, and musician Vishal Bhardwaj. I don’t know much about Hamlet and went into the film with an open mind. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, I knew I was in for a treat. I was filled with the feeling of: Ah, okay, this is a proper, proper movie. The actors on screen were at the top of their game. The movie looked fantastic. The background score was just right. Modern Hindi cinema just does not make me feel this way. It’s sad to see how badly we have lost our way.
Haider is set against the backdrop of Kashmir and its long history of social and political conflict. I liked how the movie never screams its messaging on the viewers. It just shows you how things were (are?) and treats you as an intelligent consumer. There were countless scenes in the movie that made me say: "How the hell was this film allowed to release in India?!" That says a lot about where we are at as a nation at the moment. I am certain a movie like Haider would not be allowed a theatrical release in 2025 India.
The film's music and cinematography left me feeling all sorts of ways. It was all so expertly crafted. There were gut wrenching songs for emotionally intense scenes, and tracks with insane bass lines that would trigger the stankiest of stank faces in anyone watching. While watching, I thought the music was by A. R. Rahman but I was wrong. Vishal Bhardwaj co-wrote, directed, AND did music for this movie. What a guy.
The acting performances were stellar across the board. Everyone was at the top of their game. The standout for me was of course, Irrfan Khan, who I miss dearly. I have no idea why. I obviously never knew the guy, but his death made me sad, and continues to do so. Seeing him in a film again was really, really nice. At one point, I told my girlfriend that I think good Hindi cinema died with Irrfan Khan.
As for the movie’s story, I felt that the first hour and a half was superb. It had me in a stronghold. I was locked the fuck in. The last hour was weaker. The script dragged on a tad bit longer than I'd like. Perhaps they were trying to stick too tightly to Hamlet? Regardless though, I think Haider has lots on offer for film lovers. It's a masterpiece in my book.
Watch Haider if you haven't. Re-watch it if it's been a while. Pssst, it's available freely on YouTube in Hindi. For a subtitled version, you'll have to do some digging.
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Hello again.
Time has passed and I am now a few hours away from the CC deadline. ¯(ツ)/¯
All that early writing momentum went down the drain with me falling sick this past week. So, here we are once again, scrambling to publish. But publish we must!
Weddings Galore
November-December is wedding season in Delhi. It seems like everyone around you is either getting married or attending a wedding at this time. I attended two over the past month as well. The first was for a classmate from college at the start of November. As is custom at Indian weddings, it was a multi-day affair. I only attended the main event, the wedding day. It was really nice seeing old friends from college and catching up with them. Everyone seems to be 'settled', which was good to see.
The second wedding was last week. It was a family friend's wedding that I was attending with my family. We met up with other friends at the wedding and had a great time! The wedding itself was great. However, the circumstances surrounding it were quite annoying.
The wedding lasted for two days. Both day's events were at a far-off location from our house. Delhi's horrific wedding season traffic made commuting to the venue a nightmarish experience. To top that, the cold and air pollution from the first day's event made me fall sick. I woke up with an aching throat the next day. This made attending the second day's festivities an even bigger task. Once it was all over, time felt like such a blur. So much had happened. My body and brain felt like mush. Wednesday had arrived. I was back at work — unwell — with an important product demo to prepare for.
Moar Movies
As promised last month, let's talk about the movies I've been watching. I'm currently in the process of watching three movie series: (1) The Ocean's Series, (2) Pirates of the Caribbean, and (3) Daniel Craig's James Bond films.
I'm through with Ocean's Eleven (2001), Twelve (2004), and Thirteen (2007). I watched the movies with a group of friends (Hello, Movie Club! 👋). The 2025 Louvre heist made us want to watch the movies. We met for three weeks on Thursdays and gobbled up the films. What a trilogy! I loved it to bits. Eleven is probably my favorite. Twelve is by far the funniest of the bunch. Thirteen felt cozy and a return to form after Twelve's shenanigans. What a thrilling experience overall! Every single one in Ocean's crew was perfect (Basher has my heart though).
We're yet to watch the recent reboot in Ocean's Eight (2018). It got mixed reviews when it came out, but I am excited to watch it. What's not to love about yet another heist?
Pirates has been its own little wild adventure. I somehow completely missed the bus on these movies while growing up. Boy have I been missing out. I've watched the first two right now and LOVED both of them. The look and sound incredible. The Pirates movies come under the horror-comedy genre for me — which is SO cool as a concept. I'm eager to watch the third one. The cliffhanger at the end of Dead Man's Chest (2006) was ooooof. My favorite bit across both the movies has been Davy Jones playing the organ. Horrifying cool.
Daniel Craig's Bond films were my idea to watch. It started with me wanting to show my girlfriend Casino Royale (2006) — one of my favorite films. I wasn't sure if she would enjoy it, but to my surprise, she did! This led to us deciding to watch all five of Daniel Craig's Bond movies. We're done with Quantum of Solace (2008) as well, which was — just as I remembered — eh, okay. I'm excited about the rest of the movies, especially the last one, which I've never watched.
After watching films from the 2000s, I can't help but think about how GOOD they look visually. The Ocean's films were a stand-out in this regard. I absolutely loved how they looked. They were the right kind of contrast-y. There was so much character in each of the shots. Thinking about this reminded me of a Patrick Tomasso video titled: Why don't movies look like movies anymore? In the video, Patrick claims that modern cinematography's preference for shooting with high dynamic range (HDR) is the reason for this dissonance.
A gross simplification: suppose you have a scene where an actor is standing against a brightly lit window. Older movies wouldn't care about the window being over-exposed or "fully blown out" i.e. entirely white colored. These days, using HDR, cameras are able to capture the same shot with a blue sky and fluffy clouds in the window. HDR fans will argue that seeing more things in the scene makes it grand and immersive. I am on the other side of this argument. I think shots like this feel synthetic and over-engineered. Watching movies from the 2000s has been such a breath of fresh air.
I hate Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (I don't)
Reading has been a slog for me this winter. I blame Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (TTT) for this. I finished TTT at the start of this year and loved it to bits. I've since made my girlfriend and best friend read it as well. Everything pales in comparison to TTT. TTT was so gripping. I just could not stop reading that book. I've tried switching to non-fiction. I enjoyed it for a while, but then it quickly became boring. I went back to fiction recently and just failed to gain any momentum while reading. I'm pretty frustrated about this.
The search to find a book that captures my imagination continues. I'm looking for something short-to-medium in length, with a story that makes the book hard to put down. Reply back with recommendations!
Owning Your Work
I spent some time with my bud Claude this month working on a more fleshed out webpage for C'mon C'mon. I use Buttondown to power CC. Buttondown is great and offers a lot of neat features for newsletter runners. One of these features is a public archive and RSS feed for your newsletter. Until now, I was relying on the Buttondown archive to direct people to past issues. This works well, but has one downside. Relying on Buttondown to host the newsletter's archive means that they own my work, my words. I fully trust Buttondown as a service, but I wouldn't want them to be the sole owner of my work. For this reason, my personal website now has a CC archive on it with nice looking, shareable URLs (which I love!).
- https://www.ratik.in/cmon (index of past issues)
- https://www.ratik.in/cmon/1 (link to a particular issue)
While I was putting this together, I also created an RSS feed for CC that lives on my website:
Now you can subscribe to C'mon C'mon using your favorite RSS reader if you'd like!
Putting this together was a fun little exercise. My vision for this website feature was to use a script to drive page generation. I wanted to be able to run one script to update my website with content from the latest edition of CC. I spent around 2 hours working with Claude and ended up with a solution I like. I now have a script that lives in my website's codebase. Running this script fetches Buttondown's C'mon C'mon RSS feed for and generates a new webpage and RSS feed entry for each newsletter issue. Boom! I'm satisfied with how this works right now. Long term, I want to update this mechanism to also scrape images from Buttondown and host them on my website for the archive pages to use.
December is upon us friends. Christmas and New Year are near. I'm looking forward to many things. My girlfriend is in town in December (wooop!). The new Knives Out movie comes out soon. AAA! Christmas == Christmas cake (Plum cake), which has me drooling already. Time off from work!! Christmas music and movies!!!!!! What are you looking forward to in the coming weeks?
The year is ending and I have to start thinking about my year end review. This year would be the seventh (!!!) year of me writing and publishing one. I'm slightly nervous. LOTS of writing to do between the blog and this newsletter.
C'mon C'mon to me and to you.
More soon!
R
