Sounds From The Dungeon

Unlucky Number Slevin

Lucky Number Slevin: oh how I wanted you to be good! And you almost were! You had me captivated & completely entertained during the first half! But then...

I am disappointed. I'll still give you a 3/5 for the first half. And for Lucy Liu... mmm..

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Quick note: I've put most of my Flickr pictures on the map. Take a look!

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September 1st came & went while I completely forgot to post the month's calendar! I seem to be forgetting a lot of stuff these days :(

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movies | 0 comments | permalink | 02.09.2006 23:25 SGT

C'était un Rendezvous

What happens when someone races a Ferrari through Paris: not waiting for pedestrians, not waiting for green lights, not waiting for even a second!

C'était un Rendezvous is what happens. It's like ten minutes of playing Grand Theft Auto in real life! Blurb:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

Here's a torrent for this crazy 35MB quicktime and here's the movie on my server if you are bittorrent challenged.

Update: A study estimating the car's speed and the route map.

movies | 4 comments | permalink | 11.11.2005 22:18 SGT

Salaam Namaste

After the disaster that was Lucky, it took some time before I recovered enough to be able to venture into a theatre to watch a Hindi movie. You see, unlike a VCD, I can't fast-forward through songs and the boring parts when inside a cinema hall. Nor can I stop the movie if it is bad. So yes, I needed some healing after Lucky and this Sunday, feeling good enough, I went and saw Salaam Namaste.

Some thoughts on the movie:

• I didn't know that people get into a live-in relationship with someone they've known for just three days. Clearly, much to learn, I have.
• Javed Jaffrey had me in splits. Now will someone tell me why was he in the movie?
• Why does Bollywood still insist on inserting songs into movies at the worst possible moments? Didn't they learn anything from Ramgopal Verma?
• The cameo at the end was great.
• Preity's first baby was held up during delivery, head sticking half out of mommy for five full minutes. All because that senti ass Saif insisted that Preity agree to marry him before the baby comes out. I am sure the poor kid suffered permanent brain damage.
• Please don't waste Arshad Warsi.

Now don't think that I hated the movie. In fact, it's a quite a decent timepass flick worthy of a 3 on 5. It's just that I am tired of how even good movie ideas tend to fall flat in the final execution because the director succumbs to adopting some (or several) formulaic elements somewhere.

Yes, Bollywood as we all know, simply loves formula based movies. Or, as I prefer to call it, Bollywood confirms to the Object Oriented Style of Film Making.

Need a plot idea? There are several classes to choose from: TriangularLoveStory, SeparatedAtBirth, OppositesAttract, JingoisticPatriotism, etc. Just instantiate any one class and you have a basic movie outline.

Need a sad mom to cry over her 'behka hua budhape ka sahaara' beta? Just create an object of the VidhwaMaa class. Do note that if you don't pass an appropriate name to the constructor, the default is to use name = Rakhee ;-)

As my programmer brethren would've inferred by now, multiple inheritance is permissible. In fact, it's positively encouraged!

class MyMovie (OppositesAttract, BigStars):
    def __init__(self):
        OppositesAttract.__init__(self, boy="poor", girl="rich")
        BigStars.__init__(self, hero="Sharukh", heroine="Rani")
        release_time = diwali

    def need_comic_element (self, duration=5, comedian=None):
        if not comedian:
            comedian = JohnnyLever(as = "Irritating Fake South Indian")

        comedian.do_your_stuff (for_time = duration)

You get the idea.

At the theatre, before Salaam Namaste started, they played a trailer for some upcoming Amitabh Bachchan movie (I forget the title) which looks to be a variant of OppositesAttract. First we had poor boy loves rich girl. Then we had Hindu boy loves Muslim girl. This movie has gone international: desi boy loves caucasian girl. But don't be deceived by this 'novel' twist! The same old base class methods of sanskaar, parampara, maa-baap ki khushi, ghar chodkar chala jaoonga, etc. are available and executed in this derived class. Of course, some methods are suitably overridden. Like the_climax() method, for example, which is overridden to determine exactly which of the involved parties relents and repents in the (guaranteed to be) mushy finale.

I think I have written enough for this time. Before I stop, there's something I'd like to share with you all. I've sworn not to watch any movie or tv serial featuring a precocious kid for the next one year. Precocious kids mouthing grownup dialogues - few things irritate me like them.

movies | 6 comments | permalink | 04.10.2005 23:33 SGT

Batman Begins

Finally, a Batman movie again that's worthy of the superhero! None of your pow-wow bam-bam action from the TV series and the last couple of Batman movies that converted the dark crime fighter into a happy-go-lucky dude in a bid to attract the popcorn munching family crowd. This is the dark and raw Batman that I love!

Story: Great! Builds Bruce Wayne's character really well, explaining how and why he became Batman. Much better than the way Star Wars 3 showed Anakin's going over to the dark side ;-)
Action: Awesome!
Dialogue: aiyo! Mainstream Hollywood movie dialogue just can't rise above cliches.
Acting: Katie Holmes is bad! Everyone else is just okay.

All in all, totally worth the 160 bucks I paid for the IMax ticket! :-)

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 24.06.2005 21:31 SGT

Star Wars III

I loved it. Visually stunning. The strongest story of all six episodes. Great light sabre action. And nice references to the USA's policies of late, like when the Chancellor Palpatine gets the Senate to give himself more executive powers in the name of safety and security. The Chancellor says, "We shall change into the first Galactic Empire for a safe and secure society." When the Senate applauds this decision, Padmé says: "This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause."

Must watch!

PS: There's a new Sexy Losers comic to go with the movie's release. NSFW!

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 21.05.2005 02:38 SGT

A Lot Like Love

Sepia Mutiny has this hilarious bit on Ashton Kutcher with ref to his new movie A Lot Like Love:

Dumping on Ashton Kutcher's thespian handicaps is all too easy, so I'll just say this: Kutcher is the true heir to the Terry Schiavo school of acting. Kutcher makes Keanu Reeves look like Ben Kingsley. Kutcher alternates between two expressions, blank and blank. Kutcher speaks in two tones, dumb and stammering.

Apart from Kutcher (who was surprisingly good in The Butterfly Effect) and Amanda Peet (who I keep confusing with Neve Campbell), the movie stars Kal Penn who I totally dig.

So this movie is on must watch list 'cos its got Kal Penn.

movies | 1 comment | permalink | 24.04.2005 11:58 SGT

Public Interest Announcement

Don't watch Lucky. Can't decide whether to laugh or cry at Rediff's review.

Here's one more movies related article I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at : Is SRK the greatest ever?

movies | 2 comments | permalink | 17.04.2005 02:27 SGT

Where are the lawyers?

Me and my big mouth cave-man hands. Writing about all my brilliant ideas over here, out in the open. What has it been now... three odd weeks since I first wrote about movie ratings aggregation? Google's gone ahead, stolen it right off here and released it to the world.

Damn their monkeys are fast.

movies | 2 comments | permalink | 24.02.2005 21:08 SGT

Slurping delicious

As I said some time ago, I've been using del.icio.us to rate the movies I see. I've added a new side panel on the blog, imaginatively labeled Movies, that pulls the last five rated movies and displays them here.

Since my movie ratings come about as an optimal combination of

• having seen the movie at some point in the past,
• the movie coming up in my thought process and
• having a browser window open

the list shown doesn't chronologically reflect my movie watching habits in any way!

This is hopefully the first step towards the social movie ratings aggregator I described earlier.

PS: SnapShot is dead.

movies | 2 comments | permalink | 24.02.2005 14:37 SGT

del.icio.us

Have you found del.icio.us yet? I've been using it for some time now and it's fabulous. Find my bookmarks here and of course, the RSS feed for them.

My flat mate and I have come up with a couple of tags to help us streamline our complex lives. We've started marking movies we want to see with the towatch tag and the books we want to read with the toread tag.

I've gone one step further and started rating movies I've seen using del.icio.us. I use the movies tag and add ratings (like x/10) using the extended attribute. I was earlier using IMDb's voting option to record my ratings but stopped doing that when I saw there was no way of easily retrieving my vote history. I wrote to them about it but they didn't sound too hot about providing any API for IMDb. (They do provide their entire database for download and offline, personal use!)

Yeah, so? If you guys and gals pick up on the rating through del.icio.us idea, then we can cook up a social movie ratings aggregator. Maybe mash it up with IMDb's downloadable database to provide movie synopsis (synopses?) along with ratings.

Thoughts?

movies | 2 comments | permalink | 01.02.2005 11:52 SGT

War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds trailer is out. Watch here. Direct download here. I won't say what's in there but it looks like a teaser, a very long teaser!

An interesting thing to note. Steven Spielberg directed that classic: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - the first movie that broke the (then) cliched - 'Aliens are evil' - mindset that permeated all Hollywood SF ventures; a mindset that traces its roots to the seminal 'War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells. And now Spielberg directs War of the Worlds. Full Circle.

movies | 1 comment | permalink | 13.12.2004 18:02 SGT

Trailers

• Batman Begins Teaser (8MB Quicktime) Finally!
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (DivX and Real) Finally!!!
• Saw (16MB Quicktime) WTF?!
• Grudge (11MB Quicktime) Sarah set to spoil the show
• Exorcist: The Beginning (23MB Quicktime) Exorcise Manson? ;-) Seriously though, I will certainly watch this on the big screen.
• Code 46 (16MB Quicktime) Looks promising
• Resident Evil: Apocalype (34MB Quicktime) More kick-ass zombie fun!

movies | 4 comments | permalink | 29.07.2004 12:09 SGT

Is it you Carrey?

A lonely man, digging sand on a beach says, "Sand is overrated. It's just tiny rocks." It's starts from there and gets weirder all the time. But the beauty of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, it never leaves you dangling like most of the art house stuff. It achieves closure.

It's a brilliant movie, I haven't seen such a great movie in some time now. Hell, I can't even remember which was the last good movie I saw. Wait - American History X - don't remember anything in between.

As you must have heard by now, Jim Carrey is simply amazing in this movie. Sure we all saw The Truman Show and knew he could do more than playing dumb. But even in that, there were lots of times when his trademark goofy boy style came through. Not so here. This is a new Carrey - fresh and remarkably good.

It's hard for me to write anything more without giving away the plot. Not that the plot is something great, but it's the unfolding of the story that's so beautiful.

9/10

movies | 1 comment | permalink | 22.07.2004 22:31 SGT

Trailers

Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore.

METALLICA: Some Kind of Monster

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 06.06.2004 14:49 SGT

Fairy God Mother v2.0

I saw Shrek 2 last night. One line review: Woohoo!

This movie is a must watch. It's brilliantly funny! Every tiny detail draws upon all the stories we grew up listening to. Except, like in the first part, there's a twist to it all. Like the new, upgraded Fairy God Mother v2.0 who's not as nice as we know her to be. (I am resisting the urge to put in a really bad spyware pun here).

I guess I need a bit of the v1.0 God Mother. Apartment-mate Prerit signs up with blogger.com yesterday to create his blog and immediately gets a Gmail invite. So I sign up with blogger too, even posting some entries. But no such luck - no God Mother looking over me. :(

BTW, do read Prerit's review of Shrek 2. It's better than my rather redundant reams of random rubbish.

I have taken to watching The O.C. I started watching it for the absolutely stunning Ms. Mischa Barton. But I am now hooked to it because of Seth Cohen (played by Adam Brody). He's this really quick-witted, girl-repellant guy. Think of Chandler Bing as a teenager and you are thinking of Seth Cohen. And we all agree that Chandler was the best of the bunch, right?

Before I end, here's a picture of Mischa to soothe some of the nerves frayed by the Aish picture earlier this week.

movies | 1 comment | permalink | 22.05.2004 21:56 SGT

One Line Reviews

I know my opinion decides whether you'll watch a movie or not. I also know you don't particularly like reading the reams of rambling rubbish that accompany my reviews. So I'll be brief.

Troy: Disappointment. Okay, if you don't care about the great epic on which it's based.
American History X: Brilliant.
Swimming Pool: WTF?
Love Me If You Dare: (aka Jeux d'enfants) It's pretty dark. Watch it for a non-American take on the romantic comedy genre.
Wild Things 2: If I wanted to see girls make out, I would rent porn. Not this trash!
Ek Hasina Thi: Nice movie - if you can take Urmila's 'acting'.

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 21.05.2004 10:21 SGT

Spring Break aka Who's getting the popcorn?

I saw quiet a few movies in these past few days. Allow me to bore you with the details.

Love Actually
I had been trying to catch this movie for quite some time. A british comedy with Hugh Grant thrown in for good measure, how can you not watch it?! Think back to Four weddings..., Notting Hill, Bridget... and you'll see what I mean. Good, funny, paisa-vasool movies.

I missed it when it was first released here due to my ahem busy schedule. I missed it again when the screened the 'Uncensored' version for a couple of weeks. Finally got it on someone's PC.

This movie is unlike the ones I mentioned above. There's no cohesive story here. Just the lives of different people (and how they find love) shown in parallel. It could well have been a six-episode BBC production; but then it wouldn't make as much money as the movie did.

Watchable. But you won't remember it like the way you remember Bridget Jones' Diary.

(just wondering what did they censor in the original theatre release here!)

Something's Gotta Give
Jack Nicholson is great as ever. Diane Keaton is good too. Keanu Reeves looks stupid. Amanda Peet looks and acts exactly like Neve Campbell. In fact, I didn't know it was not Neve till I looked up the credits! Turns out, I was wrongly crediting Neve for Igby Goes Down too!! Is it only me or does someone else also think that these girls were separated at birth ;-)

About the movie, it's Watchable. Make that Watchable++.

28 Days Later...
I haven't seen many zombie movies so I don't know how this one compares to them. I think it's a neat movie, with an interesting plot and some good scares. The climax is a bit far-out though, if you ask me.

It's a bit far-out, even if you don't ask me.

Le Papillon
I picked up this dvd 'cos I remembered this movie getting some good reviews at the recent french film festival here. It's about an old entomologist and a young girl. The old man is looking for a rare butterfly; a promise he made to his dead son. The young girl's single 22 yr old mom doesn't have time for her.

Off they go in search of this butterfly. And they find a lot more. Mom and daughter find their love for each other and the old man makes peace with his son's memories.

It's a nice, warm movie. The kid is so adorable - freckles and all! Do watch it if you can find it.

Kate and Leopold
I was a day late in returning the Le Papillon dvd but the guy at the store decided to be nice and didn't fine me for it. So I had to be nice too and had to pick up another movie.

Wish I hadn't. Nothing interesting in this movie. The Victorian dialogues are funny, but just for the first half hour. After that you want to hit Hugh Jackman every time he says, 'I beg your pardon'!

But Meg Ryan lifts it up to Watchable--.

The Royal Tenenbaums
I saw this one a couple of hours ago.

Brilliant.

The story, the acting, the screenplay, all brilliant. It's quirky, it's dark, it's dysfunctional, it's poignant, it's cheesy, it's amazing.

And Owen Wilson wrote this one!! Man that guy's gone up several notches in my books! Who could think that joker can come up with this stuff. ;-)

If you haven't seen it, pleazzzzze do! And when you do, pay some attention to the clothes everyone is wearing... you'll see why when u watch the movie. ;-)

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 25.03.2004 00:00 SGT

Nightfall

The week started on a very dark note. No, nothing sinister.. just dark. Literally dark. The house decided to get back at us for mistreating it and blew some fuses. It started with a malfunctioning water heater and escalated into a power outage and torrential rains.

Maybe escalated is too strong a word 'cos the blackout was limited to our apartment and the rains to one bathroom. Definitely too strong a word. What was I thinking - I am not Bush or Rumsfeld! These words are best left to be used by such pros, they know how to make effective use of them.

Meanwhile. back at home, power has been restored but the bath is still unusable. Every morning has become an interesting exercise in scheduling theory: trying to get all six of us ready in time for the class with just one bathroom available.

Now that classes have started in earnest, things are getting pretty hectic. The profs have promised a tough semester ahead, the same guys had promised an easy one last sem. Aargh!!

I watched The Importance of Being Ernest [imdb] a few nights ago. Funny dialogues, fine acting (esp. Judi Dench) and good screenplay. I haven't read the original Oscar Wilde play so I can't say if it stands up to that. Watch it if you have nothing to do on a lazy afternoon.

And to those who missed it, the title of this post 'Nightfall' is a reference to the brilliant short story by Isaac Asimov. It's one of my favourite SF tales, read it and you'll likely agree with me.

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 07.02.2004 15:59 SGT

Time Out

After 'Operation GunkBuster' on Saturday, I spent the evening watching Rain Man [imdb]. I can't imagine how I missed seeing this movie till now! Dustin Hoffman is absolutely amazing in his portrayal of Raymond, an autist. He won an Oscar for the work while the movie itself won four Oscars (eight nominations) including Best Director for Barry Levison (Sphere/Disclosure).

Today morning, woke up late - in the afternoon. Some movie called Chhal was playing on the boobtube. Initially it seemed like just another mumbai gangsta-flick. But then I noticed there weren't any people in the movie that I recognized. Hmm.. some B-grade flick. But B-grade flicks don't have good acting and a screenplay that made me sit up and notice! This film had a freshness to it - by way of faces and the screenplay among other things. I greatly enjoyed Prashant Narayanan's portrayal of the hot-tempered don. If you think Vivek was good in Company, you've got to see this guy!

Being Sunday, it was customary to go out for the evening. Went to Orchard Road, ate some pasta and watched the third good movie in a row - Mona Lisa Smile [imdb]. I think IMDb's 5.8 rating doesn't do justice to the movie. I liked it a lot, especially the dialogues. My roommate (and others) tells me that it's a lot like Dead Poet's Society, a Robin Williams movie. Okay, one more movie on my 'got to watch' list!

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 12.01.2004 13:26 SGT

Lord Of The Rings

Extracts from the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.

Ring: A round, hoop like object, often worn on appendages as an accessory. also: object of the movie trilogy 'Lord of The Rings', widely regarded as the best movie trilogy of all times. Created on planet Earth.

Earth: Mostly harmless.

It is a spectacle to behold. No matter what the amount of hype you've been exposed to, you will not come back disappointed. Rather, you'll come back thanking the heavens for making sure you were around in the world watching this epic unfold.

Watch it.

As a side note, let me tell you something that happened today. If you haven't caught on yet, I saw LOTR-ROTK today. Liv Tyler makes an appearance thrice onscreen. That's it. Thrice. The first time she comes on, she looks so breathtakingly beautiful, so mindblowingly gorgeous that I forgot all the pain, all the troubles and all of existence for those few minutes. And when she flitted away, I immediately chastised myself for having thought that the dough I spent on the Aerosmith anthology earlier in the day was a bit too steep! Thank you Steven for bringing her into this world!

The second time she comes on screen, I am not even in the hall. As fate would have it, events conspired to lock me out of the theatre. Don't ask me the details. It'll suffice to say that nature picks upon the most inopportune moments to come calling. I managed to regain entry into the hall after ten minutes of heroic efforts. Alas, Princess Arwen was already gone. But I got back in time for what will undoubtedly go down in cinematic history as the best war scene ever created.

Third times a charm.

Enough said. Watch the movie. Weep of joy. Come back and tell me what moved you the most.

On other news, I met my internship advisor today. I informed him of my impending visit to India and he approved of it. So no problems there. Then I had a discussion about the project and boy oh boy, I'll need to do some serious, and I mean damn serious work to finish what they are expecting. It promises to involve some pretty hardcore algorithm design and implementation. So yea to life!

Saip my dear friend. To paraphrase good 'ol Santa (of Aero fame), life's a bitch and we all know that. So despair not. Why don't you give your old friend a call. She's still in Bombay, right?

Cheers!

movies | 0 comments | permalink | 20.12.2003 12:12 SGT