book/movie review : The Beach

The short of it :
a bunch of junkies set up camp on an island which has a beach with white sand and a poppy field next door with armed guards who enthusiastically discourage prospective tenants by shooting them in the head . Some more junkies join them.

The long of it :
our hero ,friends and the odd girl (odd, not queer ) manage to get past these guards (surprise) and join the group on the island and everybody lives happily ever after. No wait, that would be too boring and would cut the movie in half

To keep the story going , our hero valiantly screws someone else's girlfriend ( all the bikini-ed chicks are someone else's girlfriends coz he hasn't brought his girlfriend to the party - smart move, that ) - and kills a baby shark.
The baby shark's mother bites the leg off of one of the guys, partially in retaliation, and partially out of being bored to death out of having nothing to do

and oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the movie starts off in a cheap hotel room where one of the junkies gives our hero the map to the island, and then kills himself , making a bloody mess in the process. This and the shark-biting-leg scene make up for much-needed variety in color in the otherwise white-sand-white-sky-blue-sear-blue movie.

Baby-face Leo makes it impossible to take the whole living-outside-and-beyond-civillization thing seriously ...

As usual, the book is better.

The book is about a bunch of junkies who find running a house and family, even on a beach with nintendo gameboys around, is not very addictive and not easy at all .. that you have to keep going to town for supplies .... and that the thing about 'there are good neighbours wherever you go' came out of some stoned hippie's skull , whose friends should've fed him to a shark at the first given opportunity

The moral of the story is that the drug trade is doing pretty well, and that if stock from the Beach makes it to the mainland, prices around the world might just come down ...

exorcise

you wake up with a jerk, the dream images fade away to the back of your head as your eyes stream new ones to your brain. The dream's gone. Finally, everything fades except the warmth. Then that too goes, leaving behind just a memory. You hate this. A memory is interchangeably similiar to other memories, and can be forgotten. You don't want that. you fumble through old photographs, run fingers across them hoping to remember that which is gone. It never works. you've tried to move on. Found new people, immersed yourself in hobby projects, self-improvement regimens, gorged on fatty foods.... friends give you space, listen to your tale over a beer, clap your shoulder supportively. In the end, you get off the topic, you're secretly afraid of becoming a bore. You are extra careful with people now. once in a while, you lie on the couch, stare at the t.v and sob you keep wondering "what if .. ?" you actually end up boring a lot of people to tears. You don't want to talk about what's on your mind. You can't talk anything else. You come up with a lot of talk that goes nowhere. things end up going for a toss more often. Reality runs by like an unscripted movie. You can only shrug...
six-to-eight months have gone by. Meaning has returned, so has sense, the scars are more or less healed, but the happy-sad memories come in waves once in a while - reminding you of the immense happiness of those days . You sit at work unable to concentrate, and play little animated games while your boss watches helplessly - yet you are surer of yourself and at peace. you are adrift, looking for a ride to hitch. and you still keep looking back while the memories get smaller, shorter and dryer with each passing day until finally you can look back and not shake -and then you can now start removing the pieces of shrapnel - the thorns, one by one, piece by little piece ...