This Immortal was the first novel by Roger Zelazny (published in 1966), and was of a level good enough that it shared the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year with Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. When I first read the novel many years back, it seemed very ordinary at first reading (in fact, I struggled to understand the meaning of many of the words and people in the novel - maybe if I had been born in the Greek Isles, I would have understood it better); however for the next few days, I kept on thinking about the novel, and read it again within a week. On second reading, it appealed much much more. Now, once every 1-2 years, I dust out the copy of the novel that I have and read it again (and I do not get bored by it at all).

I was reading a review of the novel in another place, and somebody pointed out something very pertinent about reading the novel - “the best way to understand “This Immortal” is to read Lawrence Durrell’s chronicles of the Greek Isles, most especially “Prospero’s Cell” and “Reflections on a Marine Venus”—or better yet, read Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” which is referred to more than once in this novel.” Seemed very pertinent. But no matter, this is a fascinating novel and I can understand why this book remains very popular (with a new print coming out in 2007) and a number of authors have claimed to be inspired by the author.
The book is set in an earth sometime in the future, where a nuclear war between human and human condemned vast sections of the earth to be uninhabitable; vast sections of humanity were saved by moving them through space to other worlds. All this was done by an alien blue race called Vegans. They also helped the small number of Earth’s population who remained to survive, but all the remaining places on earth were now owned be Vegans.
In the midst of all this, This Immortal refers to the character of the hero of this novel, a huge man who is also very ugly, with one leg shorter than the other. He was there from the nuclear war, but does not want to advertise his immortal nature by changing names. He is Conrad Nomikos, a Greek, born on Christmas Eve. In an earlier time soon after the nuclear war, he prevented the Vegans from converting the remaining portions of earth into resorts. He is otherwise not a person given to many displays, preferring to keep things quiet. He is just currently a caretaker and is also giving security to a rich visiting Vegan, Cort Myshtigo, who is traveling all over for reasons that are not very clear. There are many who want Cort dead, and it is upto Nomikos to keep Cort alive, and to figure out what the purpose of his visit is.
Earlier, Nomikos was heading an organization called the Returnist’s - getting people to return so that earthlings can recover their planet from the Vegans. He is now somewhat removed from that mission, and is ambivalent about the Vegans now. During the course of showing Cort around the various ruins, he also protests him from various attempts. Some of those attempts seem very complex, and some very simple, many of them placing Conrad in severe danger.
Amusingly, his wife Cassandra calls him a kallikanzaros’, which a Greek term for a little cloven-hooved satyr, who causes mischief of every kind. Conrad has already tricked the people around him about his origins and the death of the character who had his previous name. Now, he has to keep Cort alive till the end, when the surprising end is revealed.

On the Waterfront is a movie that is more than 50 years old now, but it can still make an impact. The movie was an incredible career booster for Marlon Brando, giving him a massive reputation in the Oscar-winning role of a man who was just passing through life as a ‘bum’, being the lackey of a mob boss in the union, until a couple of deaths and the inspiring words of a priest and the sister of one of the ones killed caused his conscience to slowly come back to life and get him to do the right thing. The movie portrays an end full of optimism, with the breaking of the control of the mob boss who controlled the union of longshoremen. The whole situation was that of exploitation of the dock workers, and corruption and use of force in order to retain the control of the boss.

This movie had a certain amount of history in terms of reasons for it being made. The movie was directed by Elia Kazan; he was controversial because he had reported names of possible communists in the American film industry in 1952 (2 years before the making of this movie) to the House Un-American Activities Commission, and he had been criticized for this action. The release of a movie in which the hero breaks the might of a mighty corrupt and evil authority by ’squealing’ / ‘telling the truth’ before a Government commission investigating the waterfront was seen as an answer to the claims made earlier against Kazan that he was a squealer.
Around the period in which the movie was made, the scene of the waterfront was indeed a place of oppression in which ordinary workers had no dignity, only those got jobs whom the boss of the union decided or were in his favor, and there was a systematic exploitation of these workers. The movie was actually based on a Pulitzer Prize winning series of 24 articles in 1949 in the New York Sun by reporter Malcolm Johnson called ‘Crime on the Waterfront’. The article was a harsh expose on the scene on the waterfront, detailing bribery, corruption, payoffs, kickbacks to union officials, theft, murder and a generally oppressive culture.
The movie was seen as such a striking movie with its portrayal of the activities on the waterfront, a great melodrama, and an incredible performance by Marlon Brando that it was nominated for a total of 12 nominations and won 8 nominations, putting it at a very pedestral in terms of awards won:
* Best Actor - Marlon Brando
* Best Picture - Sam Spiegel, producer
* Best Supporting Actress - Eva Marie Saint
* Best Art Direction - Set Decoration, Black-and-White - Richard Day
* Best Cinematography, Black-and-White - Boris Kaufman
* Directing - Elia Kazan
* Film Editing - Gene Milford
* Writing, Story and Screenplay - Budd Schulberg
Nominations that did not win
* Best Supporting Actor - Lee J. Cobb
* Best Supporting Actor - Karl Malden
* Best Supporting Actor - Rod Steiger
* Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture - Leonard Bernstein

The movie is about a former boxer Terry Malloy who is somewhat slow-witted. He manages to survive by being the odd job man for the union boss Johnny Friendly. His brother Charles Malloy, is the lawyer for Johnny Friendly. He is just content doing jobs given to him by the union boss and for his pleasure, rears pigeons. The chief property of the union is that no information is to be given to outsiders about anything, a policy of D n D (Deaf and Dumb) - similar to the mafia code of omerta. But, another young dock worker is about to report whatever he knows to an investigating committee, and this trouble-maker needs to be eliminated. Terry is used to call him, and then this young worker Joey is then thrown off a roof by 2 of the boss’s henchmen. This horrified Terry, since he is the conduit through which Joey was called to his death.
Slowly things start changing due to the impact of a local priest who is trying to rouse the workers from their lethargy; and more so due to a slowly forming attraction between Terry and Edie (sister of the dead Joey). Both Friendly and Charles see this change starting to happen in Terry, but are unable to stop him. Over a period of time, Terry starts to feel his conscience starts to awaken and he starts to shrug off his sluggish nature. He in fact almost breaks with his brother by blaming him for the way his life had turned out (his brother had asked him to throw a match against another boxer and his life had taken a turn for the worse after that).
Towards the end, his brother is killed by Friendly because of being unable to prevent Terry from giving tetimony, and Terry goes ahead and implicated Friendly in the death of Joey. In a bruising scene after that on the waterfront, Terry fights Friendly and then his henchmen, and gets badly beaten up. However, he has the ultimate triumph when the other workers all line up behind him and throw off the fear of the union boss.

The Indiana Jones series were pure action and adventure flicks, packing a heavy dose of adventure, travel and action, in the shape of an persona who could be described as the James Bond of adventure. This comparison is even more interesting because the first (and possibly the best Bond), Sean Connery was brought in to play the role of Indiana Jone’s father in this movie. The addition of Sean Connery and the scenes between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford (playing the role of Indiana Jones again) led to some interesting scenes including a fair dose of comedy in their interaction. By the time of this movie, the Indiana Jones series had already had 2 releases (Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark & Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and there was a lot of expectation from the third movie in the series.

Opinion is divided as to whether this movie matched upto the previous 2 movies; my personal opinion is that this movie had the required dose of action, adventure, villains, and historical legend in order to make it a thoroughly enjoyable movie. One comes out of the movie having thoroughly enjoyed the movie, and the addition of Sean Connery to the cast made it even better. Similarly, Harrison Ford seems a good fit for the role of Indiana Jones; one can watch his facial expressions and gesture during the various situations that he finds himself in, and find yourself rooting for him.
It is normally expected that a movie like Indiana Jones cannot be Oscar material (those are now seen as being for far more serious movies), but this movie was indeed nominated for 3 Oscars (none of the top ones though or for the acting ones):
* Best Sound Effects Editing - Won Oscar
* Original Score - Nominated
* Sound - Nominated
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade mostly won praise from critics, and most importantly, won on the popular front. On a budget of $48 million, it garnered a sum of over $470 million worldwide. The success of this movie was another milestone in the immense reputation of Steven Spielberg as a great film-maker and director.
The movie’s main cast was Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Sean Connery as professor Henry Jones (Indiana’s father), portrayed as one of the professor kind of person, always busy in his research and not much given to caring for his son.
In addition, the movie also had the following people playing important roles - Denholm Elliott as Dr. Marcus Brody: Indiana’s bumbling colleague, John Rhys-Davies as Sallah: A friend of Indiana and a professional excavator, Alison Doody as Dr. Elsa Schneider: An Austrian professor who is in league with the Nazis, Julian Glover as Walter Donovan: An American businessman who is in league with the nazis and wants immortality, and River Phoenix plays the young Indiana Jones in the film’s opening.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade went through a wide geographic diversity in terms of movie locations, with shooting happening at the following locations - Venice, Almeria, Jordan, Austria, Germany, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Texas.
The movie was released in 1989, and is set in the time of the Nazis, in 1938. The movie is based on the search for The Holy Grail, the mythical cup from which Christ drank during the last supper and which is supposed to give the drinker miraculous powers. The Holy Grail is a holy artifact that has been much sought after over the centuries, and spinning a movie around it would in fact inform a lot of viewers about what the Holy Grail was supposed to be.
Indiana Jones gets to know from a wealthy businessman Walter Donovan that his father, Dr. Henry Jones vanished while searching for clues to the Holy Grail. Indiana starts at the spot (along with Dr. Elsa Schneider) where his father vanished, in a library in Venice, and soon finds an underground set of chambers full of oil and rats. And then starts trouble. A cult dedicated to the protection of the Holy Grail ‘The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword’, sets fire to the oil in order to kill them. Indiana and companions manage to escape almost the entire cult except for their leader Kazim, whom they manage to convince that the they are looking for Indiana’s father and not for the Holy Grail. Convinced, Kazim tells them about the location of his father.
Indiana manages to rescue his father, while learning of the reality of Donovan and Dr. Else (they were Nazi sympathizers and betray Indiana to the Nazi); and they go through a series of adventures (including meeting Hitler), on a Zeppelin airship, on a fighter place, on a car, on a tank, all the time being pursued by the Nazis. These scenes are the core of the action of an Indiana Jones movie, with the action being varied, fast, and furious. And then they reach the ancient Canyon where the Holy Grail is situated. There are a range of booby traps that Indiana manages to evade, but he has now a person reason to get to the grail. His father has been shot so that Indiana has to get to the grail to save him. They (Indiana, his companions, Else and Donovan) reach the Holy Grail and encounter the historic knight (a knight from the First Crusade who is alive because of the grail).
Indiana manages to save his father, while Donovan, making a wrong choice, rapidly ages and crumbles to dust. In the end, it is the greed of Else which causes the whole place to collapse; they lose the grail but Indiana and his companions manage to escape.