Sameed Ahmed

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CinemaPaglu
An Insta cinephile on twitter.

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

Tez Dhaar se Do Naina
Naujawan ka kya kehna
ShoorVeer Arjun ka Sarbala
Badey Dilwala! 🎶🎵🎶🎵

[Peak Lyricism @yoonshabnami]

that one Sukhwinder Singh song is so timeless

[vishal dayama @VishalDayama]

The Grateful Bastards.

A few days ago, Assam was flooded again. Since it occurs every year, I think floods should now be referred to as a season. Summer, Monsoon, Flood, Winter. Just like how we wait for good mangoes in the season of summer, we should also wait for our good lives being uprooted in the season of floods. When you can’t solve it, normalise it. Sounds a bit dark, but reality doesn’t care about empathy. Which is also what I want to discuss today: empathy.

During the floods, there were many posts that went ‘viral’ showing the terror of water. Villages were submerged, people died, dogs were rescued, overall a catastrophe that we should have gotten used to by now. But still the scale manages to shock us every time. The rest of India witnessed all of it via reels sandwiched between kuchus and puchus. There were donation links being put up and people were sharing them all over social media, with captions demanding us to help. “Assam needs you”, “someone help them”, “donate as much as you can”, etc. Some were reposting just the heartbreaking videos. I managed to click all of the donation links that were being put, and over 90% of them were not working. When I asked the resharer of the links, a friend of mine, that it isn’t working, he replied that he didn’t check. And many recent comments showed that none of them checked.

My problem is not with people not donating, my slight issue was with the way everyone was being empathetic towards the cause. It has become easy to be empathetic. You can repost and move on with your day, and you don’t need to care if the links are working. A sad video breaks your heart, you share it, and your heart is fine again. One argument can be that maybe more the views more the attention it will get, but does the argument stand its ground when anything and everything goes viral. Is digital empathy just words?

When the CJP protest ended a week earlier, a few friends of mine were sad because they didn’t get a chance to be there as they were waiting for the weekend. When they were admitting this to me, I laughed, but later I realised all of them were serious. They had scheduled their outrage for Sunday, after gym and before lunch. I am not saying they didn’t feel bad for the students. They genuinely felt bad, they genuinely wanted to be there, and they genuinely were not going to move a Thursday for it. We have built a version of caring that fits neatly into free time, where protests are welcome as long as it checks our availability first. That being said, I, too, didn’t do much; except maybe trying to be a warrior on twitter by fighting against fake news. That’s not enough. But it feels like it is enough. And that’s my problem with internet empathy.

Being empathetic and being grateful is now how people live their lives online. You possibly can’t be grateful for everything, but we try anyway. Grateful for the traffic because it gave me time to sit with my thoughts, grateful for being ghosted because it taught me my worth. Grateful for the rejection, the burnout, the breakup, the fever, and somewhere a man is grateful for his kidney stone and everything it taught him about pain. Every bad thing that happens to us gets converted into content within 48 hours, opening with “grateful for” and closing with folded hands emoji, because we have outsourced our healing to long captions.

Is this the generation of grateful bastards? Probably, but bastards at least know what they are, and we have convinced ourselves that we are something else. That the sharing was the helping, the feeling was the doing, and a heart on a screen is a hand in the water.

Assam will flood again next year, same water and same month and the same reels wedged between the kuchus and the puchus. Nothing will be fixed because nothing needs fixing in a season, a season only needs to be survived. We will repost, we will feel it briefly and honestly, we will be grateful, mostly that it happened on a weekday and somewhere far away.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

If you dig deeper, “40 cinemas” is an exaggeration. The actual number is smaller and stranger.

Only about 25 to 30 screens on the entire planet can show The Odyssey the way Nolan actually shot it. And not one of them is in India.

Let me explain what’s happening; trust me, the tech here is genuinely wild.

The Odyssey is the first feature film in history shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras. Not a few scenes, like Oppenheimer or The Dark Knight. The whole movie.

Now, IMAX 70mm film is a monster.

A normal cinema shows you a digital file at 2K or 4K. IMAX 70mm film holds something like 16K to 18K worth of detail. The frame is nine times bigger than the 35mm film old movies were shot on. When it is projected properly, the image fills your whole vision, top to bottom, almost like a square.

One 70mm print of The Odyssey is about 11 miles of film. It weighs around 600 pounds. IMAX's own CEO said each print needs two platters and a dedicated team just to run it. And each print costs about 80,000 dollars to make.

They only struck around 30 prints for the entire world.

So this is not a software update you can push to every screen. It is a giant strip of physical film that has to be shipped, loaded, and babysat by trained people.

That is why so few theatres qualify.

To show it the true way, a cinema needs the real 15/70 film projector.

To help you understand a 15/70 film projector, 70 means the film is 70mm wide, much fatter than the normal 35mm strip old movies used. 15 means each frame is 15 sprocket holes long.

In a normal projector, film runs vertically, top to bottom.

In a 15/70 IMAX projector, the film runs sideways, horizontally. That sideways bit lets each frame be huge, about nine times the area of a 35mm frame.

That giant frame is where the 18K clarity comes from.

So the projector is basically a special horizontal film machine built to pull that oversized film through fast and steady.

As I said, the reel is 11 miles long and 600 pounds, so it uses two big rotating platters and needs a trained team to run it without tearing.

That is why so few exist. It is a rare, heavy, hard to maintain machine, and most cinemas switched to simple digital projectors years ago.

And wherever the projectors exist, a lot of them had not been switched on since Interstellar in 2014. One theatre in Las Vegas had to pull theirs out of storage, and IMAX sent technicians to certify the booth.

They even had to buy two humidifiers at 16,000 dollars each. The film has to stay soft and moist or it cracks while running.

Most of these screens are in America, around 24 to 25 of them. A few in Canada. London has the BFI IMAX and the Science Museum. That is basically it.

India has zero.

We have plenty of IMAX screens, but they are all the digital laser kind. Very good, but still a translation of the original. The top and bottom of Nolan's image gets cropped away, and the 18K film detail becomes a 4K file.

So as an Indian fan buying an IMAX ticket for this is seeing maybe 40 percent of the frame Nolan built.

Imagine, we are the biggest film-watching country on Earth. We make more films than anyone. We sell more tickets than anyone.

And we cannot show the most ambitious film of the decade in its real format, because nobody here invested in keeping one 70mm projector.

This is not about Nolan to be honest. It is just about being a serious film country that does not have one room capable of the highest end of the craft.

South Korea has one. It is in the list of places that got certified. We did not make the cut.

If you actually want to see this the right way, the honest answer is you have to fly. London is the closest true 70mm IMAX to India.

For everyone else, the digital IMAX here will still look great. Just know it is the postcard, not the painting.

Sad that we are a country that lives and breathes cinema, and we have that one film built to be seen at the absolute limit of the format, but the nearest seat that does it justice to the movie is in London. :)

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

#dhurandar so far has been really engaging and interestinng with it's prommotional material , really wish it translates the same into the movie!

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@jammypants4 He looks Shaumik from bads of bollywood but with a decent hairstyle (i am not refering you jammy)

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@Its_CineHub Mr.Faizu Lag raha hai

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@imashishsrrk Phirse Chings ka ad hai aur kya ? Ranveer is Agent Ching

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

Saif and Akshay looked so fun together in #twomuchwithtwinkleandkajol , i hope their energy is utilised well by priyedarshan in #Haiwaan

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@Apna_Bollywood @iamRashmika @JasmineSandlas I want someone to make a Hawan karenge edit on it! it's not seductive , it looks so forced and out of box!

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@AbhishBanerj You could have proved your stupidity by so many ways , i wonder why you chosed the most obvious one! Tumse zyada logic ek On/Off switch mein hai

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

#DeDePyaarDe2 Trailer is a lot better than my expectations , i hope they haven't exhausted all the jokes in the trailer itself like it happened with Golmaal Again. Everyone looks pretty Good.

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@TheFluffyyGuy i thought you were being sarcastic with the first tweet because it was very obvious that the plates were VFX as their Broken pieces weren't falling naturally on the ground, i made the previous tweet in continuation of your first one which i thought was just hinting at obvious VFX

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

Bhai the more crazier part is how that car chase sequence had vfxed cars and backgrounds!!

[karate panda | fan account @TheFluffyyGuy]

i didn't realize the plates that raghav threw during the barfight scene in #TheBadsOfBollywood were CG.

kaha se itne talented artists dhund lete hai yaar red chillies wale. @vfx_redchillies 🛐

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@MaddockFilms needs to have more item songs per films 2-3 songs per film are too less, even better to invest more into developing eye candy item songs with insta trending meme dialogues , inn sabke beech mein jo kuch budget bachh jaaye uska 2 % se writer se writing karwalo

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@BOWorldwide how hypocritical it sounds , ek indie film ka box office run kam hona even when the own parent company havent spend much on Pr and distribution of this very film lekin ek overhyped , mediocre rom com pe Crores lagake pr aur distribution mein he has nothing to say!!

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

logged back again just to say how mediocre and overhyped this genre of romance is becoming which is being sold in #EkDeewaneKiDeewaniyat , also deewaniyat naam ka koi lafz hi nahi hota!!!!!!!!!!

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@NishitShawHere I wanted this to be an intense horror flick because why is every Film in this universe a surfacial comedy ? this feels like bhediya only but with vampires , the storytelling style is so similar

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

This Man's Smooth with his acting. #IYKYK

[Prayag @theprayagtiwari]

This ad >>> Sydney sweeney soap ad😂😂

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@TheCinesthetic John Wick , Rush Hour , Kung Fu Panda

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@TheCinesthetic Spider-Man Trilogy by Sam Raimi

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

Me as soon as the fence on Mannat is under maintenance. #Badsofbollywood

[Asma Zebari @asmasun01]

😭😭😭

[Sameed Ahmed @Cinephile_Sam]

@RedChilliesEnt They are still in their characters even in this , the girls carry elegance and charm , bobby carries charisma and the boys serve a perfect chaotic vibe- Ghafoooor!!😂