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

Fresh territory

We’ve been watching "Lost" for a couple of days now. When we first bought the DVD set for the first season, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. All I knew was that the series was about plane crash survivors and that it was created by J. J. Abrams, who also created "Alias". Now I’m a major "Alias" fan (at least of the first two seasons) and that was probably the main reason for getting "Lost" since I am not particularly fond of survivor stories and while there seemed to be a lot of fans of the show, as far as I knew, there was nothing more to the series than it being about plane crash survivors.

Now that I’ve seen the first 6-8 episodes, my opinion has changed drastically :p While the story is indeed about plane crash survivors, it is not merely about them. It is also about the mysteries of the island they find themselves on, the past histories of each of the survivors, their day-to-day decisions and how their decisions are affected by their past. In fact, I personally think that some of the characters are extremely well-written and that some of the episodes are actually brilliant 🙂

One of the best episodes so far, again in my opinion, is "The Moth". The writers take the analogy of a moth coming out of the cocoon in so many brilliant ways and tie it all together into the storyline that I just loved it. It was the tones, the nuances, the subtleties about the stories that get me 🙂

But "The Moth" does not stand alone. There are so many other stories, so many other characters. The characters are not one-dimensional, they are not black or white. Most of them have different facets that you get to see as the season progresses and sometimes you root for them and sometimes you find yourself hating them. That is good television!

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 🙂

The not so marvellous side of Marvel

I saw the previews for "Civil War" today and I must say that I have a sinking feeling in my stomach again :p Of late, Marvel just seems to be trailing behind their Distinguished Counterparts and simply playing a game of catch up – but never succeeding to actually do so. Of late, as I keep on writing, DC seems to do much better at telling stories via comics than Marvel can.

First DC had "Identity Crisis". Sure, the ending could have been done better but still, the story was good and it kept you reading month after month and kept you guessing. Then they had the whole "Countdown to Infinite Crisis" storylines which I found to be rather engrossing and introduced some rather good new characters, or brought minor characters back into the spotlight. I especially liked how most of the characters involved in those four mini-series grew and the hints dropped about how they will continue to grow. Then came "Infinite Crisis" itself. At first, I was a bit sceptical of "Infinite Crisis" as it seemed to riff on the original "Crisis on Infinite Earths" but as the story progressed, I see where the similarities came from and why they were needed – they were portents, clues as to what was coming. I still haven’t seen how it all turns out but the story is good and, to me at least, seems even better than the original "Crisis on Infinite Earths".

On the other hand, what has Marvel done recently? First they had, "Avengers Disassembled" which was all about killing off some of their major characters and churning up stuff for the sake of churning up stuff. Then they went on from their to "House of M" which seemed to be their attempt to steal the thunder from DC’s "Infinite Crisis" but it turned out to be rather a damp squib. Again, there were major explosions, people get killed, people lose powers but there seems to be no movement forward for the characters themselves. Then came Spidey’s "The Other" – again not the best Spider-Man story written – in fact, after the events, instead of feeling buoyed by it all, I feel reluctant to read any more Spidey comics … and he used to be one of my favourite characters! (Spider-Man still is one of my favourites – just not under the present batch of writers and the present storyline) Despite the fanfare of a new beginning, all I see is the same old guy, the changes are more statements than fact that you see in the story itself – it’s all tell, no show :p

And now we have "Civil War" coming up. The previews shows Nitro blowing up a school bus and perhaps a ground full of school kids. Appropriate for Marvel these days. They go for the big, "Oooh, look at all those kids blown up!" kind of reaction than the little personal touches. I’ll certainly read "Civil War" to see how it shapes up (eventually) but unless they make a shift in storytelling style, I think the days are gone when I said, "Make mine Marvel!"

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.

The Distinguished Competition and the Marvels of comics

I think I wrote a while back about how I really liked what DC was doing with their various comics. I also wrote about how I picked up a couple of Marvel titles after that and found that surprisingly, I liked them too. That was over a year ago. Since that time, my perception of comics (both Marvel and DC) has changed again.

Originally, I wasn’t so sure about "Infinite Crisis" since it seemed to be just another effort to cash in on the old "Crisis on Infinite Earths" twenty years later. But as the story progressed, it has become interesting, engrossing and I love how the story affects so many corners of the DC universe. I just finished reading the "Rann-Thanagar War Infinite Crisis Special" and all I can say is "Wow!" One of the changes I’d hated about the new DC universe was that Hal Jordan was back (not to mention the way he made the entrance – decking Batman, eerily similar to how Batman decked Guy Gardner when the JLI was formed. That seemed like a cheap shot on the part of Geoff Johns to me but YMMV). I actually liked Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern way more than I’d liked Hal Jordan and now that Hal was back, it looked as if Kyle was going to take a back seat. But the "Rann-Thanagar Special" shows that Kyle is going off in a completely new direction and Ron Marz is writing the story. Wow! Double wow!! (Yeah, I like Rayner, think Jordan never amounted to much – get over it :p)

While all that (and more) is going on with DC, what about Marvel? They actually seem to be sinking again. The "Young Avengers" started off well but now seems to be bogged down in the sexual choices of the characters and some weird Skrull storyline at the moment. It’s stopped being fresh and new. Marvel did the whole "House of M" thing which did nothing for me – I’d hoped that they’d at least bring Hawkeye back and while there are hints that he might be back, we don’t know for sure. The "Thunderbolts" have again gotten really convoluted and uninteresting. Peter Parker’s life is being turned upside down in Spider-man and I’m not really sure that’s a good. Basically, Marvel seems to be making waves just to be making waves or trying to play catch up with DC and not really concentrating on writing good stories. Now I hear that they have a "new" cross-over event coming up, "Civil War" and that Spidey’s going to get a new costume designed by Iron Man – wahoo. Yeah, doesn’t really spark much interest. But let’s see what the new year brings, maybe they’ll surprise me …or maybe not :p

When copies attack …

We started watching a Tamil movie yesterday, "Ghajini" and it turned out to be a copy of, of all things, "Memento". Now I loved "Memento" but wouldn’t have for a moment thought that it would have worked as a Tamil film. While flashback’s are common in Indian cinema, the constantly backward flowing storyline of "Momento" is something that would have been hard for the usual Tamil cinema audience to grasp. Tamil cinema, which I love, isn’t usually about innovation – it’s about mass appeal, just as Hindi cinema is, but then again, on a slightly different level. Hindi cinema seems to be more about the glamour factor as well as the sugar-sweet love stories. Tamil cinema on the other hand, has a much stronger family value thread running through it though the ever-present love story does rear its head even there.

But I digress – back to "Ghajini". Within the first couple of scenes, it was evident that this movie was totally "inspired" by "Memento". What I was curious about was whether they retained the original backward story telling. They didn’t. Instead, they opted for a standard forward moving storyline with many flashbacks to fill in the full story. And no, it isn’t the exact story of "Memento" – that again would not have worked with Indian viewers. This was simply the story of somebody suffering from short-term memory loss who appears to be on a rampage killing people for an unspecified reason. As the story unfolds, we learn why he’s on this killing spree bit by bit and also how he came to get short-term memory loss.

We only watched part of the movie last night – unlike Hollywood movies, the Indian ones tend to be close to 3 hours :p So I still don’t know how it all works out but I have a feeling that the flashbacks and the normal storyline will culminate in one event where the protagonist will have one last flashback which reveals what real happened to him and then he’ll end up killing the guy he is after – the guy responsible for the whole thing. Confusing? Yeah, probably :p Go watch the movie!

Daggers drawn

We watched "House of Flying Daggers" yesterday and the imagery from the movie still flits through my mind. Visually, it was stunning. I don’t know what it is about Chinese movies but they seem to work a lot in primary and secondary colours :p You see breathtaking scenes of impossibly green trees or fields and autumn leaves of dazzling yellow and orange that make you just ache to watch them – they are that beautiful. Then you have the warriors in all shades of blue and the beautiful maidens in red and so on. I absolutely loved the scenes in the movie as far as the visuals went – the colours were so crisp, so bright that it was as if somebody had taken the world, washed all the grime away and hung it out to dry in all its newly cleaned glory 🙂

The story itself, what can I say about the story? I liked the story though there were certain stylized points that I found hard to believe. Such as the fact that they’d have like 20-30 drums (or more) waiting around just in the off-chance a captain of the guard will wander in and want to play an "echo game" :p I didn’t like the ending but then again, I never like sad endings. There was however, a moment towards the end that I thought was absolutely brilliant. (If you haven’t watched the movie and don’t want spoilers, don’t read the rest of this paragraph – simply read the next paragraph :p) You have the two male protagonists (or is it the protagonist and antagonist? :p) facing off against each other. One of them, Leo, has just stabbed the girl, Mei, whom both he and the other guy, Jin, love. Leo is of the opinion that if he can’t have Mei, nobody can have her. Now, he’s about to kill Jin and Mei rises up and tells him that she’ll pull out the dagger that Leo stabbed her with and will kill Leo if he harms Jin, because she loves Jin. Jin is screaming at her not to worry about his life because pulling out the dagger from her breast will mean that she will die. You get this perfect moment of tension where you can see the different emotions on the faces of the characters and I was thinking, OK, perhaps Leo will realize what love is all about now – it’s not about killing the one you love because you can’t have her but about being ready to die so that she could live. The way the movie ends, I am not sure if Leo every actually understood that or not …

The actors did a great job in the movie. I could see every emotion, every thought mirrored in their faces and gestures. Half the time, I wasn’t even reading the sub-titles, I was just too busy watching their body language 🙂 And the title song, ah the title song. It was beautiful, it was haunting and so very sad. I couldn’t help humming it even though I didn’t know the words. Overall, a great movie – if you don’t mind foreign movies that is 🙂

Is Kong king?

We watched "King Kong" a couple of days ago. I wanted to write about the movie then but other entries intervened :p However, I’ve been reading a couple of other reviews of the movie since then and they, to say the least, were rather gushing. Since I was bored to death (and annoyed) by most of the movie, I decided to go ahead and present my opinion of the movie.

I have not seen the original though I know it has cult status. I had a basic idea of what the story line of the original was but I had never considered the fact that the movie was more horror than action/adventure. So I went into this version of "King Kong" expecting an action/adventure and received a mishmash of horror, romance, action and adventure. Of course, that’s not a fault of the movie. I don’t fault them for the mixture. But I do fault them for not making any of it actually work for me :p

I was in actuality on the edge of my seat till the ship got to Skull Island. The story was gripping till then and while I did know that they’d get to Skull Island eventually, I still was kept wondering as to what would happen next. But once they got to Skull Island, it was mostly downhilll from that point on – in fact, I believe I actually yawned a few times through the rest of the movie :p It was just a lot of (unnecessary to me) footage of Kong running through the jungle clutching Ann in its paws like a rag doll (let’s not even go into how she survived Kong’s grip and the break-neck hand movements) and way too many instances of strange creatures popping up and getting bashed all across the landscape by Kong.

I liked the performances of quite a few of the actors but Naomi Watts annoyed the heck out of me. Somebody wrote that you could see a range of emotions on her face. But to be honest, all I could see were two buck teeth that would have put both Bugs Bunny and Chip ‘n’ Dale combined to shame :p I kid you not, in all of her shots, all you can see of her mouth are two teeth, try it and see if I’m wrong 🙂 And the screaming, oh, the screaming! I know that the role of "Ann Darrow" is supposed to be a screamer but boy, couldn’t they tone it down a bit? She screams and the whole island seems to hear it. Heck, at one point she screams on the island and the people on the ship seem to hear it. I’ve heard of suspension of belief but they are to need anti-gravity lifts to suspend belief like that!

They say that Peter Jackson was initially unable to make the movie back around 1996 but the studios pulled the plug on the project. He was only able to make the movie after the success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy assured him he-can-do-no-wrong status. If the failure of "Lord of the Rings" would have assured that we’d be spared "King Kong", no matter how much I liked LotR, I wish it had tanked :p