Roll thunder

Ray Bradbury‘s "A Sound of Thunder" is a short story that I have remembered even after many many years of reading it. Of course, today, I don’t remember anything much of the plot. All I do remember is the basic premise – that somebody goes back in to the past, steps on a butterfly and causes cataclysmic changes in the future. Of course, I realize that I remember these incidents probably because they have somewhat of a connection to the "Butterfly Effect" – another favourite theory/hobbyhorse of mine 🙂

I got reacquainted with "A Sound of Thunder", albeit in a slightly modified version when we watched the movie version of the story a couple of days ago. The movie version started off pretty much the same way I remember the short story to have been though to be honest, I don’t really remember much about the short story. The story is about a business named Time Safari’s which sends people from the future to the time of the dinosaurs so that hunters from the futures can bag the greatest game that ever walked the earth, or something like that. The Time Safari people take great pains not to introduce anything from the future into the past or to bring back anything form the past back to the future so as to prevent any time paradoxes or alterations to the timeline.

The movie continues on from where the short story ends and in true movie fashion, finds a heroic solution to the whole issue and the protagonist ends up saving the future and putting and end to the time travel menace in one fell swoop. But I gotta tell you, the movie was downhill all the way after the original short story bit ended :p In fact, the movie would have been great as a comedy but it was laughable as a science fiction flick because, as Laurie likes to put it, "there were plot holes big enough to drive a galaxy through" :p

Leaving out the really bad special effects and the extremely timely deus ex machina fashion accidents and saves that happen frequently in the movie, let me move on to the more absurd points. Apparently, Time Safari goes back to the same time in history for their dinosaur kills – that is part of the plot. However, except for the final scene when the protagonist goes back to stop the butterfly being killed, the Time Safari people never meet themselves. Strange? I would think so :p

Then there’s the outlandish "time waves" :p The butterfly being killed in the past introduces changes to the future. But one would think that the changes would be immediate. But no. These changes come in waves. And you can actually see the wave rolling over the landscape. And the wave (of time, mind you) causes actual physical destruction like flipping cars over or flinging the protagonist all over the landscape like a child’s rag doll 🙂

That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are the strange mutated plants which somehow had evolved over 65 million years to be more vicious because a butterfly was killed. Boy those plants sure must have loved that butterfly :p Then there’s the strange baboon dinosaurs who just make me laugh. I can go on and on and on but why bother? If you haven’t seen this movie, don’t go in expecting good SF. But if you do want a good laugh, this one’s just the ticket :p

Syriana, pollyanna, somebody give me a banana

We watched "Syriana" yesterday and I have to ask, what’s all the big fuss about this movie? :p A lot of people seem to think that this is a brilliant movie and a telling tale of our times or something. For me, a movie has to be first entertaining and this was not an entertaining movie at all. In fact, quite the opposite. This was a movie that was totally devoid of life. In fact, it would even put a dead man to sleep :p

The story, what there is of it, just meanders along trying to make a whole lot of points but not really making anything clear. There are so many little things happening which apparently have nothing to do with the main storyline. It looks as if all these little vignettes of life are supposed to make some sort of statement but all they end up doing really is to confuse you and to leave you scratching your head going "what the heck?" What was it all about all the Pakistani guys in the movie living in whatever Gulf state the story was supposed to take place in? They apparently are laid off work and their visas expire but they have some sort of colony of their own and they plan to bring their wives/mothers over? Is that even legally possible? Where I’ve worked in the Middle East, when your work visa was cancelled, you were shipped home. If you decided to stay back illegally, you had to dodge the law all the time.

And what was the point of the police beating up the guy in line for speaking while in line? Is that supposed to make some statement about the oppressive regime? We still live in the same world where Rodney King was beaten up by police officers after a traffic stop. So what exactly is the point there? That brutality is everywhere? That when we humans get a little bit of power, it seems to just go to our heads stronger than the strongest intoxicant?

The problem to me was that the movie makers appeared to be trying to send out some sort of a message instead of simply telling a story. Sure a story has a message of its own. But when you try to twist a story to tell your message instead of letting the message come out naturally from the flow of the story, it just goes nowhere. At least, that’s how I feel 🙂 I came out of the movie wandering whether the movie was supposed to be the voice of the left or the voice of the right? When we as humans can’t see straight does it really matter who is right or what is left anyway?

Walk the walk

We watched "Walk the Line" yesterday and I must say I was enthralled 🙂 However, there are two facts that you need to know first – I don’t much care for Joaquin Phoenix as an actor but I do love music from the ’50s and ’60s (for that matter, I love music from the ’70s and ’80s too :p)

So what do the two facts above have anything to do with "Walk the Line"? A whole lot actually 🙂 Leaving Joaquin Phoenix aside for the moment, as I said before, I love music from the ’50s and ’60s and sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time period because of this love for music from a bygone age (sort of :p). The movie is full of the music of this time period – you get Jerry Lee Lewis, you get Elvis and you get a whole heap of Johnny Cash. So what’s not to like?

As for the main actors, as I mentioned, I haven’t particularly liked Joaquin Phoenix in any of his portrayals before. Not so much due to the actor but due to the roles he’s played. In a way, I guess it is a testament to his acting perhaps – if you don’t like his characters, maybe he played them so well that you were compelled to see the characters for who they were? This argument perhaps might be true of his Commodus in "Gladiator" but I’m not so certain that it holds true for his Merrill Hess in "Signs" :p Be that as may be, he was simply brilliant in "Walk the Line" as far as I was concerned. I loved his acting and his singing (yes, apparently he did all the Johnny Cash vocals in the movie as did Reese Witherspoon for June Carter) was just unbelievable 🙂

As for Reese, I kind of dither back and forth about her acting – I was ambivalent about her in "Pleasantville", hated her in "Election" but have liked her in almost everything else that I’ve seen her in since then. But again, like with Joaquin, it was the characters which drove me and in her case, I believe it is the acting which drove the characters to be liked or hated 🙂 And in "Walk the Line", she portrays a character that I really loved.

In fact, the only thing that I didn’t like about the movie perhaps was the fact that it was so realistic and not sentimental. The movie is supposed to be based on Johnny Cash’s autobiography and if so, Johnny must have been an unforgiving (and accurate) biographer since he seems not to make any excuses for himself. The drugs, the infidelity and the family troubles are laid bare without any excessive blame throwing. In fact, most of the characters in Johnny Cash’s life come out looking good except for he himself. It seems a sign of character but it also makes him seem less than I had come to see him through his music. But then again, the public persona and the private one does not always gel does it?

Essentially, the movie says that he was a good kid who lost his way due to fame and fortune. But he had the good fortune of having friends who helped him through that stage and the courage to get out of the mess he’d gotten himself into. Would I or you fare any better if we had all that attention, money and publicity thrust upon us? That’s what I keep wondering about …

Reel romantic relationships

We watched "Taxi 3" yesterday. This is the third instalment in the French "Taxi" movies – the same one which inspired the so much less funny "Taxi" starring Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah. Of course, the third part of the series wasn’t as funny as the first two or as exciting but that’s a different story. What did strike me while watching the movie was the fact that this is the third part in a series of movies and all the main characters were still with the same partners they started off on the first movie! And they say that Europeans are loose :p

What did strike me was the fact that not many Hollywood movie series actually keeps the same love interest in all the movies. About the only notable exceptions that I can think of are "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" but then again in both those movies, the relationship angle actually took a backseat to the rest of the story line. If I recall correctly, Riggs does not fall in love till "Lethal Weapon 2" and in "Die Hard", McClane divorces his wife by the "Die Hard 2". However, in movies where the love story (sic) does play a part, they have the guy changing girls faster than he changes shirts :p Two classic examples would be "American Ninja" and "The Karate Kid".

Why exactly is that? Is that simply Hollywood saying that you have to have a new girl in each movie to keep the audience interested? Or is it a more subtle message which says that it is OK to not be faithful to your partner? Or that things change and that love is only an illusion? I am not so sure and am also not so certain that Hollywood actually understands the message that they send when they do stuff like that. On the other hand, if you listen to the conspiracy theorists, Hollywood knows exactly what it is doing :p

The weather-vane of life

We watched "The Weather Man" yesterday and if I was asked to describe the movie in one word, it would be "disappointing" :p The previews looked kind of good, it had Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine and so, I was like "what’s there not to like?" But as the movie progressed, I realized that there was a lot not to like …

The biggest problem for me was the fact that David Spritz, Cage’s character, was really anaemic. He just had nothing going for him that made him interesting. He was just a boring, bumbler who just seemed to have no clue about what was going on around him. I believe they were trying to do a "realistic" movie about a "real" guy. But the thing is, I watch movies to be entertained. Not to watch some idiot make a fool of himself over and over again and then be told that this is life, accept it.

I like Michael Caine as an actor. I love watching some of the characters he plays. Here, I liked his Robert Spritzel but not entirely. There seemed to be cracks in the character, things slightly out of synch. For instance, when he says "this shit life, we have to chuck some things" I’m not sure if it’s the character Robert who has trouble saying words like "shit" or if it is Caine himself. But then again, that part might be just my own perceptions rather than anything else.

Overall, the movie seemed like an apology for the current path that the world in general and America in particular, seemed to be taking. It seemed to say that it was OK not to be a good family man, that things would work out as long as you had money, that you didn’t have to try to change yourself because after a while you became who you were destined to be. It was full of a lot of concepts which were just apathetic and self-satisfied. When I watch a movie, I like people to beat the odds, put one over the system, to survive all that’s thrown at him/her or at the least, come out of things with a new understanding of themselves or the world. This movie had none of it and the only entertainment I found was when Shelly said "camel toes are tough" :p

Integrity of imagination

As I mentioned yesterday, we have been watching a lot of television lately. I found myself wondering if this was perhaps because the quality of entertainment available when it comes to movies. Is it just me or does there seem to be a dearth of imagination (or rather a lack of originality) with most Hollywood (and Bollywood) offerings these days?

If you take Hollywood, you mostly seem to get either remakes, adaptations or re-imaginings. There used to be a time when a move based on a comic book character was rare – except of course for "Superman" and "Batman" and the occasional (really bad) "Captain America" :p But then came the Marvel invasion when Hollywood suddenly discovered that there was a whole bunch of already tried ideas and a rabid fanbase behind them. You got "Spider-Man", "X-Men", "Blade", "Hulk", "The Punisher", "The Fantastic Four" and a whole heap of sequels and other movies based on marvel characters. Then there are all the book based adaptations like "Harry Potter", "Lord of the Rings", "Five Children and It" and "Narnia". Not to mention re-makes of old television series such as "The Avengers" or "Bewitched".

On the Bollywood side, things have become even more drastic. Sure, Bollywood has never been known for having very complicate plots :p It used to be boy meets girl, boy and girl falls in love, parents oppose the union, they go through tough times and finally it all works out. Of course, after about 40 years of different variations on the above theme, people began to get a teensy, weensy bit tired of it. They then began "borrowing" from Hollywood movies but were a bit circumspect about it. They wouldn’t "borrow" from well-known Hollywood movies or the latest ones. Instead they’d borrow from older movies or ones which were not so well-known. I’ve seen Bollywood remakes of "Coming to America", "Roman Holiday" and "Big", to name a few. The stories weren’t always quite the same as the Hollywood version and they always managed to add a love story, songs and a few fights in there.

However, there’s a new breed of Bollywood movie today – probably because the Indian audiences got tired of the rehashed Hollywood stuff. The new movies aren’t really "borrowing", they steal lock, stock and barrel and from the latest and most well-known stuff too :p They are dropping the songs and dances and going for a much more Hollywood like feel. At first, I kind of liked the new and slick production values but when you start getting the same old Hollywood movies in a Bollywood format, you begin to get tired of it.

In the past few months, I’ve come across not one but two variations on "The Usual Suspects" – "Dus" and "Chocolate". Then there is "Kaante" which rips off a little bit from "The Usual Suspects" as well as a lot more from "Reservoir Dogs" and "Heat". At the moment we are watching "Ek Ajnabee" which is almost a scene for scene copy of "Man on Fire" though they do say that the ending is different – we haven’t finished it and so we have no idea 🙂 We’ve also got "Main Aisa Hi Hoon" which looks very much like a remake of "I Am Sam" …

So my question is – are the major movie industries of the world just becoming lazy? Or are they just learning from each other that they can make more money by "borrowing"/adapting existing properties that they know have been successful elsewhere or in another medium? Or are we actually witnessing a decline in originality and imagination? Either way, this seems to be a rather sad state of affairs …

So much software …

Who would have thunk there was so much software out there? I’ve been setting up a server for my friend and it’s been one stream of software joy :p First, I had to decide on Apache and figured I might as well go with Apache 2.2 since that was the latest. Then of course, there was the decision as to PHP – I decided to go with 5.1.2 since I wanted to be able to use some of the latest PHP features. Then, there are all the libraries that you need to get PHP installed. So it was a fun bout of software installing.

Once all that was done, I learn that one of the sites to be put on that server needs Apache 1.3 and that 2.2 would not do :p So, it was back to downloading and installing Apache 1.3.34. Now, it feels to me as if PHP 5.x is a bit more slower than the 4.x variety when I actually try using it and so, I find myself wondering if I should perhaps switch to PHP 4.x instead … Not sure if I really want to do that yet though. Sometimes there can just be too much software to deal with :p

In other news, over the last couple of days we’ve been catching a few movies when we had the time. We watched "Aeon Flux" and I’m still not sure what to say about the movie :p They had some really stupid (from a logical perspective) stuff in the movie – like an assassin who goes out on a mission at night wearing all white :p I guess from a stylistic perspective it made sense since she wore white and all the guys she went against wore black but do you honestly think any assassin or thief worth their salt would wear white at night? 🙂 The story itself was OK but I was mostly left questioning the weird stuff in the movie – such as a pool which is supposed to be their monitoring system and another assassin who has hands on her feet (yes, I kid you not) … But given that there appear to be slim pickings for science fiction movies these days, I guess I can’t really complain :p

Spank the panther

We watched "The Pink Panther" yesterday (yes, the new one) and if you are thinking of watching the movie, let me save you the trouble – don’t :p It is one of the most idiotic, mind-numbing, utterly stupid and totally mindless comedies that I’ve seen in a while. I don’t think even my five year old nephew laughed at more than a few scenes. Can you say that I didn’t like the movie? Yeah, I guess you can say that …

I haven’t seen the original Peter Sellers movie and now I really feel the need to watch the original to see if it was just as bad as the Steve Martin version was or if they managed to somehow take the original, drain all the humour out of it and then serve it up as a new movie. In fact, "The Emperor’s New Groove", which I’m watching now for the fifth or sixth time because my nephew Ike loves it, seems to have more humour in it even on the sixth viewing than "The Pink Panther" did on the first.

The problem seems to be that they were just trying too hard. Steve Martin’s stupid French accent, instead of being amusing, was just annoying. Most of the jokes depended just too much on slapstick and the plot was just a bit too stupid for it to be funny. Come on, Chief Inspector Dreyfus is just as stupid as Inspector Jacques Clouseau (if not stupider) and he is supposed to have become chief of police while Clouseau stayed in obscurity? (OK, fine, maybe that one is just true to life and not stupid :p) As far as I’m concerned, most of the movie did nothing for me. The end where Clouseau has to rise against the odds and prove himself was kind of nice but then again that bit was just a predictable attempt at drumming up sympathy.

Even the cameo by Clive Owen as Agent 006 was only slightly amusing – it felt just tired and lame rather than fresh or amusing. Ah well, maybe I was just in a bad mood or maybe this was just one of those really bad movies :p

Heavenly movies and other stuff

I am a sucker for a good love story – anybody who’s read these pages for long enough knows this :p Despite all the bed-hopping that would put an Olympic-class bedbug to shame, Hollywood still manages to put out a good love story every once in a while that leaves both the Bollywood and Mollywood movie industries combined in the dust. "Just Like Heaven" is such a movie.

We got the movie just a couple of days ago and we went in not knowing anything about it. In fact, we got the movie mostly because it had Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon in it. We watched it last night and I was enthralled. Sure, others might call it a typical, run-of-the-mill romantic comedy or something but to me, it was a beautiful, funny and moving cinematic experience :p

There wasn’t anything spectacular or though provoking about the story or the movie. Nothing which makes you sit up and think about stuff. But still, it tells a story about characters that are real – or can be real, in a believable way. I liked the central characters, their mannerisms and the way they interact with the rest of the world. Once you’ve got good, believable characters that you are invested in, the rest is all the way downhill :p If you like a good, solid love story with some good bits of humour thrown in, "Just Like Heaven" is one not to be missed 🙂

In other news, I’ve decided to do a release of Blog 8.0 beta 5 sometime today or tomorrow 🙂 I’ve finally managed to spruce up the Blog page so that it is consistent with the look of the new Bytes page. I have to do the same for the other application pages but haven’t gotten around to doing so yet :p But eventually, I should get that done too. In the meantime, I want to release this beta of Blog since it is at a stage where I feel comfortable about the functionality. However, I must confess that most of the stuff that I’ve been working on these days have been related to XMLRPC-based posting rather than classic Blog posting. But the classic stuff should (hopefully) work fine too 🙂

Let the bubbly flow ..

Yesterday we started watching "Bunty Aur Babli" – another Bollywood extravaganza 🙂 This one did have a few things going for it, it had Amitabh Bacchan, it had Rani Mukerjee and the story was written (and the movie produced) by Aditya Chopra. It was also a kind of a landmark because this was another movie which involved two of the big Bollywood families – the Bacchans and the Chopras. Oh yeah, it also had Abhishek Bacchan in it but more about that as we move on …

The film looked good on principle but as the movie started off, except for the first song, nothing really grabbed me. I like get Abhishek’s movies whenever I can because he kind of has his father’s looks but he just doesn’t seem to have his father’s charisma. He always plays things low-key. In this movie, he seemed to be playing it lower still. The character was somehow muted. And Rani, I again like her but maybe it was the influence of "Black" or maybe I had seen too many movies with her playing various characters but she just seemed too old for Vimmi and each time she pranced or cried for her Mummy, I really wanted to throw up :p Well, no not really but she just seemed way too old to be doing that character – at least 20 years too old :p

But despite the not quite believability of the two main characters (or the actors portraying them), I kind of got into the whole Bunty and Babli (which are the two alter-egos of Abhishek’s and Rani’s characters) looting the rich and giving back to the poor thing. Of course, there were all those little Amitabh homages in there as well though I am not really sure that Abhishek actually carried through any of those with the same flair as his Dad, unfortunately :p We stopped around the mid-way point and so will have to see the rest today. Amitabh entered the movie just before we stopped it and so hopefully, it will get better. It is a likeable story so far but nothing extraordinary – the movie certainly had a few good comic lines but the chemistry between Abhishek and Rani was lukewarm to say the least.