Wierd and beautiful

I did not understand what this movie was all about but I can say without a doubt there is something in this movie which connects us with some remote and weird feelings that everyone of us feels at some points in our lives. The surprising factor for me was that the movie was written and directed by the leading lady in the movie, Miranda July. There is something that is mystic, strange and amazing about this woman which made me crazy enough to spend a few hours on googling about her.

Read Roger Ebert’s review on this movie if the movie sounds any interesting to you at:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050623/REVIEWS/50524002/1023

Miranda July’s blog can be reached at the following link.
http://meandyou.typepad.com/

P.S:

Thanks to twisted_dna for mentioning this.
The name of the movie is "Me and you and everyone we know".

As cliched as it can get

I was surprised after watching the trailer of "Krish" while I went to see Rang de Basanti. It was really as they say "no less than a hollywood movie". There were no indications of a routine Rakesh Roshan movie in that trailer and I immediatly made a decision to watch this movie on the very first day of its release and I kept my promise.

"Krish" religiously follows all the cliches of bollywood: a caring and possesive grandmother, an irritating and slapstick comedian, a evil villian, misunderstandings, kidnaps, hero and his girl dancing at the sky scrapers at foreign locales for no apparent reason, a hard working good friend of our hero whose mission is to earn money for his sister's operation who finally dies in the hands of the evil villian so that he can generate sympathy and a chance for our hero to resuce his sister and so..on... the list is endless. Every single moment and every single dialogue of the movie was downright predicatable and the only interesting special-effects were marred by the loud music of Rajesh Roshan.

I am fine with the regular bollywood cliches as long as they work. Rakesh Roshan followed almost all the above cliches in KNPH but somehow he managed to tell the story in a coherent way. "Krish" not only lacks coherence but it takes its audience for granted and tells the story in the same old fashion that we have been used to for the past god knows how many years and wants us to think that we are watching it for the first time.

One of the hilarious scenes in the movie (which was not meant to be hilarous):
Priyanka passes out after seeing Hrithik who she thinks is a ghost and wakes up in the midst of her all her friends who are gaping at her and lets out one of the most predicatable cliched dialogues "Main kaha hoon....."

What was more painful and yet funny than the movie was the review from Taran Adarsh:
http://indiafm.com/movies/review/12415/index.html
Please do not read the review until you watch the movie beacause you wouldn't know how funny that review really is.

Inspirational Movies

I just happened to see this list of 100 most inspirational movies selected by AFI at rogerebert.com. I am not sure if this is a sorted list or not but the moment I saw " It's a wonderful life" right at the top of the list, I was thrilled. It was the same movie I was hoping to see on the top after reading the title of the article. I copied the list to a spreadsheet at once and counted the number of movies that I saw among them. It was 37......hmmmm.. (not too bad for someone who started watching american movies just a couple of years ago).

The complete list can be found at
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060616/COMMENTARY/60616003

P.S.
I don't know how a movie like "Casablanca" could be "inspiring" but never mind. I wouldn't mind placing "Casablanca" in the top 5 of any given genre of film making.

My regular playlist

I have been feeling very lonely every once in a while these days and I am glad that I have enough work at my office to keep me busy. It has become a sort of routine for me to have 4 or 5 beers on every friday night and every time I get drunk as Iam now, I dont feel half asleep as most people think but I see things more clearly. This reminds me of what Ayn rand mentions in her "Atlas Shrugged" about the moment of clarity when one gets drunk. Anyway, the point is that every time that I am in this mood, I yearn to listen to some good music....and I have to confess that I dont have a great ear for either classic indian music or rocking westerns..

My playlist consists of some 20-30 odd songs and in the past one year I did not add or delete even 5 songs out of this. Though I have a very good collection of telugu, hindi and western music I tend to listen to the same old playlist over and over again. Seems like I kind of built up a relation with each of these songs and can't pull myself away from them..and I love the way each song drags me into its mood .... anyway.. Iam listing a few of them here:

1) "I Swear" from All-4-one
2) "Unchained melody" from Righteous brothers
3) "Are you ready for love" from Elton John
4) "La Isla Bonita" , Madonna
5) "Grease is the word" from the movie Grease
6) "In da Club" , 50 Cent
7) "Beat it", Michael Jackson
8) "Unbreak my heart", toni braxton
9) "Where the green grass grows", tim mcgraw
10) "Run to you", bryan adams

....... and a few more...

I listen to my telugu playlist (again not more than 2o odd songs which I hear over & over again) when I am more sober...

Nostalgia

Once in a while on a calm and pleasant night I have this feeling which is both comforting and painful. Comforting in the sense that I underwent those pleasant experiences and met some good people in my life and painful because those moments are now history and no matter what, I cannot get them back.

Today is one of those nights. My evening started as per my normal routine : Came back from work, spent a little time on orkut.com reading the scrapbooks of other people and then browsing through the tv channels ,cooking, eating , talking on the phone etc.. and getting back to bed. But for some reason I couldn't sleep and even today I postponed my plan to call my best friend back in India. I have been making and breaking this promise to myself for quite some time now and I was just wondering the reason for my behaviour. May be I was postponing this because I dont want to make that call and the excuse that Iam busy is just a cover up. And why would I not want to call my once best friend?? and this has setup up a train of thoughts into my memory lane and made me feel nostalgic..

Really, it is quite surprising and shocking what a few years could do to one's life. I dont know how to carry out a 10 minute conversation with the people whom I spent few of my most memorable moments in the past. I am not even sure If I have to work on this and try to maintain my relationships with my friends or just let my life go on and let things happen.

Present india

Guys who are bored visiting normal blogs which picturise the normal day to day activities in one's bored life, visit this link for a difference.
http://presentindia.blogspot.com/
I am sure this guy must have faced a lot of painful issues with women in his life but god save me, his blog occured to me as funny, ridiculous and stupid but it sure has got lot of posts which I would send to my dear friends to share a laugh.
There was this one post on how girls rag which was the funniest for me. Why dont I meet such girls ???
http://presentindia.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-girls-rag.html
I would love to read a similar blog from women's perspective tooo.. please send me the link if you know any.

A good remake

I know its a stupid movie but a good stupid movie which does not take itself seriously. I also know that there is no real reason for remaking this movie but to exploit the 6.6.06 date factor and a good chance of minting money from the teenagers. But here I am at the movie theatre on the very first day of its release. I was intially hesitant of watching this movie when I first saw the trailer back in 2005. I thought it was one of those stupid sequels like the one for the Exorcist. But recently I happened to see another trailer of the movie which revealed to me that it was just a re-make.
Omen is one of those rare horror movies which have a proper story line and as well as some good scares. This movie was good in the sense that it faithfully followed the original and didn't try to screw up with over the top graphics and visuals. One or two scenes in the movie were totally useless (the usual ones in which in a character is in a bizzare incident and we later know that it was just a dream) and it was clear that they were aiming those scenes at those high-school kids who it seemed really enjoyed and for my embarassment they even applauded. The women who played Damien's caretaker's role ( the one who played Rosemary's role in "Rosemary's baby, a great horror by the way) was awesome and Damien himself was not that great and when he gives that omnious look all the time he was more of cute and less scary.
I had some shocking experiences lately at the movie theatres when I witnessed people gave a standing ovation to the movies like "Davinci code" and "United 93". I can understand and would second their response to "United 93" but a standing ovation to "Da vinci code" was ridiculous. With "The Omen", I was praying that they would not do to this and thank god my prayers were answered.

Finally, the bad guy wins

Match point is completely different from what I saw from Woody Allen till date. But no matter how different a movie could be in terms of execution, this movie's ending would be a total shock. Please do not read further if you didnt watch this movie and are planning to watch it sometime.
I was engrossed in the movie but I was a bit sad as I was one hundred percent sure that there was no way this movie could end on a happy note. By "happy note" I mean through the perspective of the movie's protagonist.

I dont know if it happens only with a few people like me or everybody else, but after a certain point in the movie we become the protagonist and no matter what his intentions and actions are we wish that he would come out of the danger unscathed. What this guy does in this movie was definetly unethical, immoral and selfish. But inspite of all his criminal actions, I was constantly hoping that he would not get screwed. Well, I didn't find a movie which was so big hearted that it would forgive such a person... well , this movie does...

Woody had always a knack for the irony.. and I think he is at his best in this one. The only difference is that woody normally used comedy as a cover for his irony but in this one it is crime.

Windows maps

After exploring the google maps for the first time, I felt like there was no room left for anybody to beat them !!! But windows live proved me wrong... I don't remember how I landed up on this site but it was indeed an amazing experience. The maps were not that great but they have this feature called "bird's eye" which beats google flat...
I just typed in my work place's address and when I go to the bird's eye this is what I find. The above scaled version doesn't do justice to the actual picture that this site provided.

This is the link
http://local.live.com/

Essentials for a hollywood movie buff

I always wanted to share this list with someone who loves movies as much as I do. Out of the numerous sites dedicated to movies that I visit regularly, I finalized these:

1) www.rogerebert.com : Roger ebert is the only person who has ever won a Pultizer prize for writing movie reviews. I didn't knew this when I started reading his reviews but of 15 or so critic reviews that yahoo movies usually posts, I found his insights to be very clear. I read his review for every movie I see ( & wouldn't see) and most of the times his reviews are very convincing. If you have time to read books on movies, then dont miss Roger ebert's "Great Movies" and " I hated, hated , hated, hated this movie". His writings are so clear and so impartial that I hardly disagreed with his review in the course of last 4 years since I started visiting this site. I love to read his reviews for the bad ones, especially the ones with zero star ratings, they are so funny. Apart from the reviews, the "Answer-man" section where he responds to the visitors questions is informative and insightful. The "Movie glossary" section is hilarious and the "Great movies" section is the best.

2) www.rottentomatoes.com : For some unexplainable reasons I dont like imdb.com which is considered as the bible for movie buffs. imdb provides a chance for every movie buff to express his/her opinion and rates a movie based on the average of users rating. But rotten tomatoes does much better job in my opinion. You have all the reviews of the nation's top 150 or so critics, and the average of their ratings is given as a percentage. A movie with 60% or more rating is FRESH or else is ROTTEN.
Apart from the rating, you will have the info about the movie, pics, trailers and all the other usual stuff. The best part is the tomato picker where you can search for movies with a certain percentage of rating belonging to particular genre.

3) www.filmsite.org : As Roger ebert calls it, the site is a labor of love for movies. There is no other site on the web which would provide such a detail explanation on a shot to shot analysis for some great movies. On the whole, this site has the shot to shot analysis for 300 odd movies. But if you just want to know more about the great movies, this is the place to look for.

4) www.boxofficemojo.com : Not a great site in terms of content but very informative on the dollar figures. If you wish to broaden ur knowledge on the highest grossers of all time, movies with highest openings, movies with highest ROI etc.. this is your destination.