Reviews

Pirate Latitudes This is a book by Michael Crichton that was published posthumously. The book starts off with a glimpse of the colonial lifestyle sixteenth-century Jamaica. Soon enough, we are involved in the plotting of a “privateering” expedition. Now privateering is is pretty similar to pirating, except that it is sanctioned by the local governor. The planning part is classic Crichton and is reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery. From there on, however, the plot is predictable, barring sundry adventures on sea as well as land. On the whole, the book doesn’t rank among Crichton’s best.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones This movie is best known for Shahrukh Khan’s bit-part début. It seems to be inspired by Arundhati Roy’s experience in architecture school. Annie is actually a guy named Anand Grover. “Giving it those ones” is probably (90s?) Delhi college slang (see the Hinglish section at this page http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?206041 – “But now giving it those ones is the thing”).  Annie hardly seems to be some spunky rebel, contrary to what the title may suggest. He has been stuck in the final year for four years, maintains a hen coop in his hostel room, and dreams of planting 120000 miles of fruit trees alongside the 60000 miles of train tracks across the country. The other students – unshaven, un-showered, in need of a haircut – reminded me of college life and the farce that out education system can sometimes be. The rest of the plot wasn’t all that interesting.

Salaam Bombay

I watched Salaam Bombay a few months ago along with the DVD extras : the director’s commentary, the special featurettes and the director of photographer’s commentary.

To be honest, I found the movie a bit tedious after about half-way through – it felt like watching a documentary. Later, during Mira Nair’s commentary I found out why — she had only shot documentaries before she made this movie and they used real people and locations for the movie. At times, they incorporated real-life incidents because they were shooting on a limited budget and time.

The DVD extras talked about the lives of some of the child actors, who were actually street children. The makers of the movie established a centre for children called Salaam Balak. The child-actor who played Keeda was adopted by Sandy, the Director of Photography, and moved to America. It wasn’t the same fairy tale for the others. The protagonist, who won the Best Child Actor National Award, tried to carve a career as an actor but now works in Bangalore as a camera person; the girl Manju lives in Bombay and is into the bartan for kapda business. At least they didn’t end up hopeless and destitute.

A movie can be just two hours of entertainment, but Salaam Bombay not only showed the real lives of people but actually changed a lot of lives for the better.

Jurassic Park

I spotted an old copy of the novel Jurassic Park at a used-book sale. The cover proclaimed Soon to be made into a major motion picture!. I recently finished reading it. When I told a coworker that I was reading that book, I was met with a laugh. “Surely you’re joking! Who reads Jurassic Park!”

Usually when people talk of science fiction they mean authors like Asimov and Clarke.  Sci-fi is usually set in the far future, with time travel, space etc being the common themes. I never thought of Michael Crichton as a science fiction writer although now that I think of it there was definitely a lot of science and a lot of fiction in his works. Does science fiction have to have time travel or be set in the future?

As far as the movie is considered, I thought this was a case of very good adaptation. The movie remains faithful to the book (except some minor changes) and and the things that it leaves out are well suited in the book but would have been tedious in the movie. For example, the book is structured around chaos theory. The mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) studies the park and predicts that the island would eventually go out of control. The book is divided into “iterations” demonstrating how complex unpredictable structures emerge out of simple structures. There are some very interesting explanations about chaos theory, genome sequencing and even programming.

A situation in the book that I found really interesting was when they discover that the animals must be reproducing but they aren’t sure. The program that searches for the animals appears to report the correct number. Then they discover that the program stops when the number of animals it is searching for is reached. It assumes that only error condition is when there are missing animals and not extra animals  – it is a very believable bug.

Also quite interesting is the way the mathematician Malcolm deduces that the animals are breeding – the height distribution is a normal distribution and not a tri-modal distribution you would expect given that there are three batches produced at different times.

Lastly, Nedry, the programmer, played by “Newman” — His back story is that he was made to make changes late into the program and wasn’t being paid to do so – enough to make any programmer mad!

Slumdog Millionaire versus Q&A

In my experience, movies based on books rarely live up to the promise of the book. But as I started reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup while comparing it to Slumdog Millionaire I found it hard to unequivocally decide which was better – the book or the movie. So I decided to do it the quantitative way!. I wanted to compare the two and assign points as I went along. Eventually I gave up because it turned into a no contest.

First of all we have the issue to of language/medium. I am okay with everyone talking in English because that is the language of the movie (and the book), but the movie is inconsistent with it’s usage of language. It is as if the director couldn’t make up his movie whether he wanted to use Hindi or not. In the book, this problem is not there but there is another, more serious, problem. The author dumps thoughts and experiences on the narrator that the narrator could not possibly have ever had. I don’t have the book with me right now and I read it a few weeks ago, so I do not have an example, but if you have read The White Tiger or A Fine Balance you would know what I am talking about.
Book: 0 Movie: 0

In the book, the show is called Who Will Win a Billion or W3B. The protagonist wins the jackpot before even the first episode is aired. The producers don’t have the revenue to afford a billion rupee prize until the first eight months. They offer the commissioner of police a cut of 10% (of what?) to prove the protagonist guilty. The police have a confession almost signed before a young female lawyer mysteriously appears and rescues our guy.

I thought that the book was more irreverent and cynical (a prize of a billion! the biggest prize ever!) and the producers have a more credible motive of denying the prize. Book wins.

The first question in the book concerns Armaan Ali (and not Amitabh Bachchan) who is the next big superstar in the tradition of Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. It is the hero’s friend (not brother Salim) who is a devoted fan of the film star, not the hero himself. The whole episode is quite silly in the book but handled pretty well in the movie. Movie wins this one.

In the book, the protagonist is abandoned at a church. He is adopted by a Christian family but his adopted mother runs away and his adopted father returns him to the church where he grows up without realizing the difference between father and Father. The church undergoes the danger of being attacked for “conversions” so the boy is renamed Ram Mohammed Thomas (after a brief debate over the merits of names Ram Thomas and Mohammed Thomas)

The movie turns him into a Muslim boy orphaned by rioting Hindus. More dramatic but I like the book version (even though the book character sounds like Anthony Gonsalves). Book wins.

At some point the stories in the movie and the book start to diverge. A point to note here is that, unlike the movie, in the book the order of the questions does not chronologically align with the incidents of the protagonists life. Thus, the narration jumps back and forth making you do the guesswork to fill the gaps between the different story fragments. I find is hard to understand why the director would throw out this interesting non-linear narration in favour of the straight line and predictable story line in the movie. Book wins again.

In the book I kept waiting for Latika to show up. There happens to be a girl on the train though who Thomas rescues from a dacoit but she is quickly forgotten. There is no mention of the three musketeers. Should the movie lose a point for being too lovey-dovey? Was Danny Boyle attempting a “Bollywood” take on the story here? Not so sure here.

Book: ? Movie: ?

Okay, so after a point, the book loses it completely. No point bothering with the scores because halfway through the story, the book becomes too *fantastic* using too many coincidences and doesn’t even pretend to be realistic. Given that the movie itself is fantasy-like, you have to imagine how worse the book would be.

Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Bhagat has hit the jackpot. After Five Point Someone, one would have thought that he would be a one-hit wonder, but his second book sold more and the latest one has outdone the previous two. Although Five Point Someone was a good read, I didn’t care so much for the second one and haven’t read the third.

His second book has now been made into a movie , and the director Atul Agnihotri has managed to rope his brother-in-law Salman Khan and Salman’s girlfriend Katrina (Atul Agnihotri is married to actor Salman Khan’s sister, Alvira Khan [no, not Priety Zinta’s character from Jhoom Barabar Jhoom :)]).

His first book is also being made into a movie 3 Idiots starring big names Aamir Khan, Madhavan, Sharman Joshi and Kareena Kapoor and is being directed-produced by the team that brought the Munnabhai series.

If that is not hitting a jackpot, I wonder what is.

My interest is purely academic, but I have a feeling these movies are going to be a big hit with “his fanbase”.

By the way, if you are really interested in the Indian Campus Novel genre, I would recommend Amitabha Bagchi’s Above Average. If there’s one that you think is better, your suggestions are welcome!

Bheja Fry

I saw Bheja Fry yesterday. I wouldn’t have if I had trusted the this review , I probably wouldn’t have seen it. However, I did and liked it too. There isn’t much of a story, but there’s good humour – especially from Vinay Pathak who is the star of the movie. Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey (I hope the spelling is correct) used to host a show during FIFA world cup last year and the show was hugely irritating then (except for the rat which was named Fardeen ). Even on The Great Indian Comedy Show (on Star One) Vinay Pathak used to be very irritating.

However, these two were really good in Khosla ka Ghosla (which reminded many of the Amol Palekar/Farooq Sheikh genre of comedy). I didn’t like the way Ranvir played his character in Bheja Fry.

Cons: The movie is a remake of the French movie Le Diner de cons (The Dinner Game) (But then who cares as long as the movie is watchable). Secondly, they could have come up with a better name.

Big blog!

Today
I had an exam today. I didn’t know what to study for the exam as the material covered was quite simple. Naturally, the exam was simple too and it wouldn’t be surprising if every one gets full credit. But then, I have a tendency to goof-up (hopefully this semester would amend last semester’s bad grades!).

Due to the exam, I was able to catch an earlier bus back home – exams days are better than classes!

There’s this guy in my lab called Chao – he happened to be on the same bus today. When I reached home, I was about to say Ciao when I stopped myself. It would have sounded weird if I said Ciao Chao!

Yesterday
My roomates and I have almost developed a habit of eating out and having coffee every weekend evening. Last night we had dinner at Subway and then some coffee (Grande Chai, actually) at Cup-a-Joe’s. While returning, we had some time to kill before the bus came, so we went to the library and my roomies borrowed a few books. One of the books was this :-
The book is about a guy who left his job to work amongst the poor people in Nepal and India. It almost inspired me to the point that I am thinking of contributing to some ngo-type organisation. I googled and found a few organisation which help children and women in and around Ranchi, but the problem is that I don’t know which one deserves help and which one doesn’t. And then, just donating money isn’t as satisfactory as real work – I mean, every penny helps, but other people are already donating (and probably donating enough). I want to contribute with something that I’m good at, but I doubt if they require any software related help!

prasun.info
In other news, I found this amazingly cheap webhosting deal at dreamhost.com ($22 for a year’s hosting : 175GB storage).
So I have a shiny new website : http://www.prasun.info/. And I plan to blog more regularly.

Movies

Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna Unconvincing. If this movie had been made without the stars, I don’t think many people would have seen it. The characters aren’t quite convincing. I didn’t at all sympathize with either Rani Mukherjee’s or Shahrukh Khan’s character. A disappointment overall.

Khosla ka Ghosla Every once in a while such a movie comes and surprises you. I didn’t know much about the movie except the Kailash Kher Chak de Phatte song. The first half of the movie was a little gloomy showing the common man’s frustrations in India when it comes to corruption etc. But the second half was quite cool, funny and not gloomy. A must watch.

When a Stranger Calls Boring. Dumb movie. Enough said.

Taxi no 9211 I knew this was loosely based on Changing Lanes but the story was well written. I expected it end when Nana Patekar and John Abraham sit down for a drink. But then, the director decided to put in a happy ending, malai maar ke.

Dhoom 2 Dump. Soporific. I went to sleep after half an hour.

Talladega Nights There is a fine line between funny and stupid. This movie hops and skips across this line.

Ahista Ahista How can they make a movie without anything in it. Boring. Abhay Deol’s monotone was offset by an interesting story in Socha na Tha. Doesn’t quite work here.

Parinda I had seen bits and pieces of this movie on TV earlier. A well-made but very dark movie.

Woh Lamhe The second Mahesh Bhat-Parveen Babi based movie. Average. Google tells me that Shiney Ahuja studied in SXD for 2 years. I wonder which batch.

Angrez A stupid NRI movie. Some scenes of the two rival gangs were funny.

Crank A weird movie. Probably the first to use Google Earth! I wonder how I sat through the movie.

Bas Ek Pal As my roommate puts it, a very unorthodox movie. A simple story to begin with, but manages to interconnect all characters.While watching the movie I was hoping that it was an original, but it turns out to be a copy of a Spanish movie Carne trémula

Midterm over

My last midterm exam just ended. I was the first to leave the room. I’m not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

10 months after I heard about Layer Cake, I’m going to watch it now. It is one of those gangster comedy movies – the one’s that I like in the genre are Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Be Cool etc.

Friends with Money

I saw the movie Friends with Money. I think they wanted to say that happiness has nothing to do with money. Or something like that.

Dor

I saw Dor yesterday.

It is the story of two women – one in Himachal Pradesh and the other in Rajasthan – whom fate binds in a Dor. Their lives are similar ye unconnected – until, by a twist of fate, Zeenat (played by Gul Panag starts out for Rajasthan to look for Meera, armed only of a photo of their husbands together.

The story could be summarized in a couple of lines, but it is interesting to note how it unfolds – but don’t expect anything dramatic.

Cast :
Gul Panag – Suits well in the role. Good work.
Ayesha Takia – Not convincing at all in the role of a Rajasthani woman. But then she’s Ayesha Takia 🙂
Nagesh Kukunoor – Plays a cameo. Unconvincing.
Shreyas Talpade – Though his character has only a small role to play as far as the story is concerned, he steals the show. Amazing performance.

Bollywood enters Seoul

I was watching this song Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai from the film Gangster on TV yesterday and I noticed that they showed something which looked like the Cheonggyecheon river. In the next scene they are on the Seoul Subway which I know too well. In another scene there is a bus with something written in Korean at the side – so I was thinking that the place was indeed Seoul, but then it could have been some other place.

So, I googled.

• Mahesh Bhatt shooting ‘Gangster’ in Seoul

• From Korean Rhapsody
  

  How did you zero in on South Korea considering this exotic country has never been tapped by any Hindi film-maker before?
  My first choice was Australia. It was Bhattsahab who suggested South Korea. Surfing the net I was impressed with how beautiful the country is. Also, I realised that it would be Fall when we would be shooting there and I was hoping to get lots of red and gold leaves. I have to thank Mukesh Bhatt. I can’t imagine any other producer daring enough to not only give his director the go-ahead to shoot in a strange country but ensure that we were cleared in a week’s time.

  How did the South Koreans react to an Indian film unit in their midst?
  (Laughing) We were like aliens…Aliens who sang while walking on the road. Korea is a very closed world without much of tourist exchange, so they had no inkling what we were up to. Language was a big problem with even our interpreter speaking little English. But it being an Asian country we soon realised that our values and morals were the same.

Ninth of the second month of the sixth year of the century

As the weather in Suwon became warmer through January, I predicted we had seen the last snow of the winter. But to prove things otherwise it snowed again on the 7th. I left Korea on 9th morning (a painful day because :- I hate travelling + I hate getting up at five o’clock in the morning + I barely manage to get out my warm bed in the cold, cold winters).

I slept through the 2 hour bus journey from Suwon to Incheon Int’l Airport and then had a nice cup of mocha at the airport – and then boarded. Very unusually, this time, a female was seated next to me, but the joy was short-lived as she immediately asked me whether I would trade that seat with her husband who was seated ten rows ahead – in a “middle” seat :((

They had a good collection of movies on-board Singapore Airlines – The Legend of Zorro, Pride and Prejudice, Two for the Money, Shopgirl, Elizabethtown, Walk the Line etc etc. Any other day I would have seen ” …Zorro” but I thought I should make the best use of the oppurtunity to watch movies which I would otherwise not get to watch. However, I kept flitting from one to the other as they kept boring me ! However there was one nice movie which I watched partially in the Seoul-Singapore flight which made me watch it fully in the next flight from Singapore to Bangalore. Movie details later in this post.

From 30 degrees fahrenheit to 30 degrees celsius – I was in Singapore a few hours later. Changi airport has this free singapore tour if one has a stoppage of more than 5 hours. I had already been to one last time, but I went again hoping that there would be something new because they had changed the name from Singapore City tour to Singapore Cultural Tour and I guess they do not have the Sentosa Island tour any more. This time around the trip was so boring – the tour guide enamored us with her boring trivia (most of which I remembered from the last time) and her flat jokes at which few people tried to smile. And it was raining so there were no stoppages (or maybe they have totally removed the boat ride which was there last time).

An interesting thing happened as I boarded the flight – I noticed an old guy reading a newspaper who looked like N. R. Narayan Murthy, but I was immediately informed by my fellow passenger that he was the man himself! Later I noticed him waiting for his baggage — without any airs of a celebrity. And yeah, the joke of an airport that Bangalore International Airport is !! I had to wait for forty-five minutes for the luggage and more than 15 minutes for getting a pre-paid cab – and the place was full of these Taiwanese people who apparentlly were there for some Art of Living crap.

Movie reviews :
Zorro – I just caught fleeting glimpses while surfing channels – didn’t hold my attention even once.

Pride and Prejudice – 19th century England – god forbid!

Walk the Line :- I saw Joaquin Phoenix on Leno recently and he came across as a pretty funny guy. He looked good but apart from a few songs I could not bear to watch the movie especially because I had so many to choose from :). And I hate Reese With-Her-Whatever even more now. One song I now love is “The taste of love is sweet ..”.

Two for the money: I saw it just because Al Pacino was in it. The man has either lost ability to pick good movies (remember The Recruit?) or probably isn’t getting any good offers these days.Forgettable experience.

Elizabethtown: Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst – Pretty faces. The movie was slow and rambling – I did not watch much of it except the part where Kirsten’s character says “Being sad is like surrendering to your fate” or something along those lines – I liked that part. Oh and the part where the cousin of the protagonist gets his old band together to perform at the funeral of the protagonist’s father – that song was good and the fireworks – they set a giant eagle toy on fire and send it flying through the hall – people scurry away screaming and the smoke detectors go off and water starts pouring out (Matrix style) and the band never stops while Orlando and Kirsten stand in the “rain” looking at each other – I did not get what that was supposed to signify, but then I did not watch most of the movie.

새드 무비 (Sad Movie): This is a recent korean release. Do read about the movie at imdb. It is really, really, really, really sad – as it involves four interconnected tragic stories. It is quite poignant moments – and some funny moments (but even those had sad undertones – like the part where Jung Ha-suk starts an agency which helps people break up so that he can earn some money to get back his girlfriend). The movie ends on such a tragic note that would make you cry – unless you are an emotionless brute like me! Put it on your must-watch list if you can get it somehow.

Quote of the day

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
— From the movie All the King’s Men

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Two and a half years after the movie was suggested to me, I finally managed to watch this movie. I had loved Snatch when I first saw it (though the last time when we were watching it, people lost patience and we stopped in the middle) — and Lock, Stock .. is made in the same “mould”.

This was one movie I wanted to see for a long time. Ditto for Pulp Fiction, which, believe it or not, I haven’t seen yet!

Goal!

I saw the movie “Goal!” yesterday. It is a very simple rags-to-riches story of a footballer. I liked every bit of the movie — even the soundtrack. However, when I looked it up on the web today, the reviewers did not like at all!

The Insider

The Insider (1999)

It is a wonderful movie.

From the movie: O brother! Where art thou!

Delmar O’Donnell: Them syreens did this to him. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Are you sure that’s Pete?
Delmar O’Donnell: Of course it is! Look at him! … We gotta find some wizard to change him back.

Ulysses Everett McGill: You can’t display a toad in a fine restaurant like this! Why, the good folks here would go right off the feed!
Delmar O’Donnell: I just don’t think it’s right keeping him under wraps like we’s ashamed of him.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, if it is Pete, I am ashamed of him! Way I see it, he got what he deserved, fornicating with some whore of Babylon. These things don’t happen for no reason, Delmar. It’s obviously some kinda judgment on his character.
Delmar O’Donnell: Well, the two of us was fixin’ to fornicate!

Delmar O’Donnell: We thought you was a toad!
Pete: What?
Delmar O’Donnell: [leaning in, speaking slower] We thought you was a toad!

Matrix Reloaded

Saw Matrix. Alone!

And while I sat through the 9-minute long credits, waiting for the Revolutions trailer, I found only 5 people giving me company. Obviously anybody who waits to see the full credits at 12:15 AM must be crazy!

And when I came out the escalators were not working, so I took the elevators to the floor marked “G” which turned out to be parking lot. Then I went up to floor “1”. This too was a parking floor but at least it was on the ground level so that I could walk out and hail a cab.

This is one thing I like about this place – you can get a taxi any time of the night and that too at the same fare as daytime. But what use it is when all shops close by 9:30!

showtime folks

Ordinarily, while watching movies on tv I generally miss the beginings or endings or sometimes both.

I saw a Jennifer Lopez starrer Selena on Sunday night, Remember the Titans yesterday night and some movie about a rigged quiz show (might have been Quiz Show) this morning.

I would have preferred watching all of them fully but fate would have it otherwise. This evening also I managed to catch the end of a Kevin Spacey-Helen Hunt-Halley Joel Osmont(?) starrer.

The ending seemed quite poignant – reminded me of another movie(Edges of the Lord) which has this Osmont kid in its cast. The story is set in early WWII .This boy’s father smuggles him away from Poland to escape the Nazis. The story revolves around this boy and the children of the family he stays with. The movie has a very heart-rending role by a four-year old.

For some reason I saw both Snatch and Edges of the Lord alone, almost exactly an year ago. Having a hostel lan was too good a thing !!

Quote:North! Are we birds!!!(A caterer to a party host, complaining about the address given)

Snatch

Brick Top: You’re always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.
Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?
Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, “as greedy as a pig.”