Lost........

Sigh........ If I hadn't gotten hooked to Lost back in 04-05 and If I wasn't such a wikipedia addict, I wouldn't be feeling so strangely sad right now.....Sparto - this is all your fault!

Kites :-/

There's something to be said in favour of internet movie streaming. If I had spent good money on watching Kites in a cinema, I would have kicked myself!! This movie could not have been more predictable if they had tried to make it so!
For example, one scene goes like this:

HR, BM and a sidekick have just gotten away(again) from the goons who are in hot pursuit. Time for a song and dance break for HR and BM, while sidekick goes off to get fake passports made.
Sidekick rushes to HR and BM's house (by which time the song gets over), stands outside a window and screams "I have your passports"
HR and BM grin stupidly at Sidekick.
Sidekick grins back even more stupidly at HR and BM.
Everybody continues grinning stupidly at each other through the glass for a minute without making a move. (you can actually feel the next part coming, the way they all grin at each other through the glass)
And then - bham (surprise!) - sidekick's brain's are splattered all over the window, the goons appear and HR and BM make a run for it. [I had easily 30 seconds to turn my head away - it was that obvious!]


And eventually it turns out that the passports are completely irrelevant to the plot(except maybe as an excuse to finish of sidekick/third wheel). 

The rest of the plot(!?) was just as senseless. HR in the initial scenes as a small time crook/dance instructor, looks and talks like Brad Pitt in Snatch, but the accent and look change very quickly without any explanation. KB plays a casino owner who without hesitation cuts off the ears(before killing) of someone caught cheating in his casino, but says "you have to know when to leave the table" when BM and HR, who are engaged to his children decide to elope with each other, after knocking his son out cold!

The movie is hyped and sold as a "love has no language barrier" romance, but it turns into a chase-n-run after the falling in love bit is quickly dispensed with by using a song, even before the first half hour of the movie is over. The rest of the movie is only made up of not very heart pounding chase sequences.

Maybe I'm just ranting because there was no happy ending for consolation either!
 

@HR: There's a very fine line between having a greek god like physique and looking like Marvel comics mutant. Please tread carefully :)

How to train your Dragon

Loved it! H2TYD was (too?)short, sweet, funny, witty and sarcastic, poignant, moving, layered, beautiful, and so very visually stimulating! The flight scenes were spectacular! - specially when Toothless, Hiccup and Astrid soar through the clouds and the Aurora Borealis. I loved the hot air balloon/plane ride scene from The Mummy Returns and before that ages ago the flying carpet scene from the Disney movie Aladin. And this one was just as exhilarting!
S was just as engrossed as me for the full length of the movie, and that says a lot about H2TYD . This is the guy whom I've to nudge awake during Ice Age, Shrek and other such movies :)
The only tiny little complaint - I wish the dragons themselves had a little more IQ, rather than ending up as "pets" finally.

Going to watch it again, this time in French with subtitles, if I find one uploaded on the net :)

Someone: "But those ships never return..."
Someone else: "We are Vikings, it's an occupational hazard"

P.S. I watched the 2D version

For the love of books :)

Somewhere in her email today was this line - "Sigh! sometimes i wonder y i read those classics...its so hard to ignore the heroes of yore..". I smiled. Because I blame the books too, for many many things :) For things ranging all the way from incurable romanticism to hypochondria. For the rose tinted glasses and the real ones too :) For the love of happy endings and for the depths of misery when things end no-so-happily :(. For being a bit of a drama queen at times. For the total inability to take things at face value. And of course like she said for expecting men (S to be accurate) to be Rhett Butler, Roark, Darcy, and many others all rolled into one :))))

Ravan in a new light and Shobana's Maya :)

Thank God for Shobana!! Was what I was thinking after watching Maya Ravan last night (on DVD :( - wish I could have watched the live performance ) Not because she is such a brilliant actress and so good at Bharatanatyam, but because she brings so much creativity and artistic freedom to a very traditional dance form. Though so much of the dance is based on Bharatanatyam, there are so many deviations from the classical form, that the DVD cover says 'musical dance ballet' :) But the combination of unconventional elements works - the English narration, the voice-over dialogues, the bollywood style dream sequences, the humour, the attempts at cuteness, the costumes, and everything else in it! Really enjoyed it!! Like my childhood dance teacher used to say - there is nothing that a dancer can't depict through Bharatanatyam.

Loved the costumes, loved the music (specially the 'Shree ramchandra kripalu bhajman' in Rama's introduction scene)

Most memorable parts for me - Rama's introduction scene, the scene where queen Kaikeyi is possessed by Ravan, Sita's wedding, and the forest scene with Soorpanaka. And also the debate on the concept of Dharma between Ravan and Mandodari.

The only issue I had with Maya Ravan was that it begins brilliantly but loses its momentum somewhere in the second half and the end though good doesn't live up to the promise of the opening scenes. And for me this was true for the dance, the music and the narration :( I've watched the DVD a couple more times since, and each time until the 'Sita's abduction' scene though. Not that the second half wasn't good, just that the first part is so good, that it leaves you expecting even better things afterwards...

But Shobana and Nasseruddin Shah together as the face and voice of Ravan are the highlights of the performance. Never has Ravan been so charismatic, charming, good looking and so very witty in any TV serial or comic book :)

Avatar....

A post to write down some thoughts after watching Avatar....

Enjoyed every bit of it. Probably because I'm a big fan of fantasy, animation and special effects anyway. So a movie with so much of all of these couldn't go wrong for me. Was like watching a new benchmark being set for movies with CG, like Matrix years ago.

The 3D experience was good, specially in the forest scenes and the 'ash-fall' scene.

Inspite of all the computer rendered characters in the movie, the only one who came across as 'fake' for me was the Colonel. Probably the scars, the 'I'm the meanest meanie there is' attitude was all a bit too cartoonish (specially so soon after Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds) .

The best thing about the movie for me was the landscape, flora and fauna on Pandora!! Beautiful!!

Avatar hasn't displaced Aliens as my favourite 'another planet' movie. Wouldn't mind watching it a couple more times, but not more than that, I think. Aliens though, I can watch everytime its aired :)

The movie reminded me quite a bit of an interesting computer game called 'Heart of Darkness' [have the feeling, there were floating mountains here as well] and an old animated movie called 'Ferngully - the last rainforest'. Specially of 'Ferngully, because the bare-bones story is quite similar, and the animation too to some extent(more 'inspired' than 'rip-off')

N mentioned the other day, that the Na'vi in avatar reminded her of the drawings of 'Shiva' from the Amar Chitra Katha stories we read as children - because of the blue skin, dreadlocks and attire. Since then, I can't help but think the same somehow.

Lastly, I wish I had a GIANT tv at home, for movies like this!!

2 States

Just read Chetan Bhagats '2 States'. It is a very funny, very entertaining, very easy to relate to and hard to put down book :) Being a Bangalorean, the digs at south Indians (geeky, ugly, unsophisticated, stiff, and many more...) didn't go down all that well with me, but then again the Punjabis in the book were portrayed as a bunch of ostentatious, greedy gluttons without too much in the brains department and CB claims that its only because he loves us all he takes such liberties :))

And in the meantime, Andhra Pradesh has been split into 2 states, with the creation of 'Telangana'. Like our country isn't divided along so many lines already :( Every time the government gives in to demands for a new state, the seeds for several more splits are sown :((. I met a friendly guy from one of India's not so friendly neighbouring countries in Dubai recently. He told me that he had heard rumours that a new country(!!!! yes country, not even state) was going to be created from a part of Kerala, and asked me if that was true!!

The timing was just a coincidence, but both the book and the news about the newly created 'Telangana' state underline the fact that we still see ourselves as so-and-so community first and Indians next :( And the whole world seems to be aware of this. Whatever happened to "United we stand, divided we fall" which we had to repeat aloud so many times in school??

The (not so) Lost Symbol !!??

N gave me Dan Brown's latest offering, 'The Lost Symbol', as a gift a few weeks ago, and checked with me soon after to compare views. I was in chapter 3 then, and loving it. Should've suspected something when she said "okay, I don't want to give away anything, we'll catch up when you're done". The book has been been a nice enough bedtime read for the last couple of weeks, but when it was finally over, I was outraged by the con-job Dan Brown has pulled on his unsuspecting readers.

The book does start well, and there are some really gripping chapters. Especially the cat and mouse game in the dark lab. And the inevitable plot twist wasn't too bad (though you can figure it out before the reveal). But thats about it...

It is soon revealed that the lost 'symbol' is not a symbol at all, but a word, and then revealed it is not really a word but a book, which isn't lost either, but is in fact the most published book in the world! (So why is it called the 'lost symbol' again?) The 'revelation' at the end makes you go "OMG!!! I want my money back, you conman". If that was it, then why the secrecy, the multi-layered puzzles etc.?? It was really irritating to think back about the number of times the cheesy line 'tonight the pyramid and the capstone were far closer than they should be' was used if the secret wasn't a secret at all!!!

Wanted to write a review here about how Robert Langdon's IQ has dropped atleast 40 points since 'Da Vinci Code' (maybe because he is the process of morphing into Dan Brown), how all he does in the book is get himself into sticky situations from which someone else rescues him, barely solves a couple of puzzles by himself and keeps on saying "that's not possible...(shown that yes it is)...OMG I never thought that was possible". And most of the other characters and plot situations give you a 'deja-vu' feeling [isn't this villain a variation of another psycho, muscular, high IQ, cold-blooded killer in another one of DB's earlier books?, haven't pyramids with secrets been done to death already in the DVC? Didn't Angel's and Demon's also have a father-son relationship with a twist? and so on.......]

But then I was pretty sure that there would be plenty of other outraged readers who felt the same, so checked my favorite source for book reviews - Amazon. [Incidentally, Amazon was one of the leaders in the hype-creation in the virtual world before this book was released. I remember seeing the equivalent of a full page ad on their home page a while ago. Things went very quiet when the 1-3 star review count became double the 4-5 star ones] Reading the reviews turned to be more fun that reading the book :)) See: http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Symbol-Dan-Brown/product-reviews/0385504225/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 for some entertaining thoughts from others who felt equally cheated by 'The Lost Symbol'