Skip to main content

The Darjeeling Limited - film review

A Wes Anderson film. Kind of an indie project.  Smallish budget that earned twice as much at the box office.  So a business success story.

The actual script co-written by Wes and Francis Ford Coppola's son along with Jason Schwartzman an actor, musician himself.

Lead roles by Owen Wilson (who really has a broken nose and highlights that in the movie) along with Jason and Adrien Brody are the protagonist brothers that meet on a train in India in search of their mother who has run away due to a falling apart of sorts.  The journey is part spiritual and part bohemian and forms the basis of this play like film.

The director has gone to great lengths to (with approval) plagiarize background music scores from senior film makers like Ivory Merchant who in turn learned a lot from one Mr. Satyajit Ray, a master film maker from West Bengal in (then British) India.  The making of this film in western India's desert city of Jodhpur required some amazing patience and collaboration with the locals and it is reflected in the narrative arc of the film and the location shoots.

Opening sequence with a one of a kind Bill Murray, playing the role of a harried businessman who rushes on to an Indian train platform only to miss his train is hilarious and tricky bit of photography.

From then on we see the Whitman brothers (as the lead characters are called) scrunched together on this train heading to presumably Darjeeling in the east.  They are seen coming to grips with each other as the train rattles along the track and the three are forced to re imagine their lives in a claustrophobic coupe with the older bro played by Owen Wilson trying to dictate what they ought to be doing each kilometer of the way.

Overall a pretty decent picture if you are bored of watching the same old plots.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A few good books

 On an informal mission to read one book a week as long as the eyes allow for such ambition. Fiction or non is not important as long as it entertains and /or educates. To that end the past few weeks have brought a bounty in the form of some wonderful and then not so engaging literature. Among the notables are - Non fiction category: 1. Good arguments by Bo Seo (how to handle a dispute or debate the most efficient way possible) 2. Genesis by Eric Schmidt (and former US Secy of State Henry Kissinger, who recently passed) - how AI might affect our lives as we know it 3. One in a billion - Zarna Garg (an autobiographical look at an Indian born American woman with a bindi narrated in a standup format - yes it is at times cliched but still funny) Fiction: 1. Personal by Lee Child (a vigilante story with Jack Reacher the giant, nomad protagonist of Child's novels goes hunting for a sniper) 2. Ramayana unraveled by Ami Ganatra (she might disagree about it being a work of fiction but oh wel...

Back in DC

This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...

Costa Rica

 Our first foray into Central America. That elongated isthmus that forms the geographic boundary between two vast continents of North and South America. Specifically landing for NYE 2026 in San Jose, Costa Rica. Capital city for this region that does not have its own army, instead relying on its big bro the Estados Unidos to the north is a metropolis of approx. 500K people. Largely wilderness and with both a Pacific and Carribean/Atlantic coast the country is rich in bio diversity. In Spanish it means the rich coast so named by Columbus landing in early 16th century and being mesmerized by the local tribes sporting gold jewelry.   Our stay included visiting the foothills of a large strato volcano called Arenal and enjoying the naturally heated thermal baths for a while.  Lunching amidst lush forest and watching indigenous species of avian noise makers fly overhead. Toucans, some sort of pea hens, multiple song bird species completed the spectacle. Iguanas and a lonel...