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

Not so fantastic

We watched the "Fantastic Four" yesterday. Or rather, we watched most of the "Fantastic Four" but didn’t get to really see the ending due to a really bad DVD disk which skipped during certain scenes and then got totally stuck towards the very end. However, it was enough for me to go on a rant – so mission accomplished :p

I normally do not watch live versions of comic book movies because they inevitably ruin the magic of the comic-book and the characters for me. I still have not watched most of the Superman movies, have seen only one Batman movie (and that too because that was the only thing on in the flight I was on) and have not seen X-men or Spider-man. However, I did watch the Hulk movie because Ang Lee directed it and I was rather disappointed with the final result. I’ve also seen all the Blade movies but since I never read the comic, I can’t really comment on it one way or another except to say that I liked the movies.

The Fantastic Four? That’s a different kettle of fish altogether. The Fantastic Four aren’t my favourite Marvel characters, not by a long shot. However, I’ve been reading the Fantastic Four for ages and I feel as if I know them really well and there have been certain periods in the writing of the book that I felt really close to them. The best periods that I remember are the ones from just after the whole pocket universe thing when the FF returned to Earth and there were some brilliant stories which emphasized the family aspect of the Fantastic Four.

The movie actually had some of these elements and I really liked the interaction between the different members of the Fantastic Four – the ribbing, the humour the insults. All of that seemed to be spot on. What I hated was the whole Dr. Doom bit. They ruined Victor Von Doom’s transition into Dr. Doom and in the process they also made some major characterization blunders – at least that’s how I see it. In the comics, Dr. Doom wears the mask and the metal armour because of a laboratory accident – unless of course, the story has been retconned and now it is supposed to be something else :p It makes sense for him to wear the mask because he doesn’t like the horrible appearance of his face. In the movie, Von Doom relishes the powers he gets and he doesn’t have metal armour he becomes a man of metal. Why would somebody who relishes his new "godlike" powers want to hide his metal face behind a metal mask? That just does not make sense to me.

Other than for the whole Dr. Doom bit, I enjoyed the movie and it appeared to stay true to form. Except, for one major alteration – another peeve I have with Marvel and their movies. The change? Alicia Masters is now black. I don’t really care whether a character is black or white or purple or grey. Their colour makes no difference to me. What matters is who they are. However, it annoys me when a company goes and changes a story just to be "politically correct". I don’t remember any other black characters in the story at all – maybe some of the firemen that the FF rescue are black, probably some of the waving people are black. But are any of the major characters black? No. Are any of the supporting characters (like Victor’s assistant) black? No. So why go make Alicia Masters black except as a token gesture and perhaps to say that "black people *get* being different"? Do you mean white people or brown people or yellow people or Martians don’t actually "get" what it is to be different? To me that is more racist than telling a story as it was originally told. That means that you feel guilty about what you did before … But then again, YMMV :p

In the soup …

We had seen Prachya Pinkaew’s "Ong-bak" a while back and really liked it. It had really bad sub-titles but then again it was a Thai movie and they may have language issues getting the translations done. The sub-titles still manage to convey the basic meaning and there was a good story, very good action and a really funny trishaw chase scene that Laurie still talks about 🙂 It was a very natural kind of movie and as the tagline for the movie states, "No stunt doubles, no computer images, no strings attached". Plus, Prachya Pinkaew seems to have a bit of Steven Spielberg hang-up and I like that too 🙂

So, when we saw Prachya Pinkaew’s second movie "Tom yum goong", we picked it up immediately. We watched it yesterday and this was a far cry from "Ong-bak" 🙁 This movie had hardly any story and seemed to be simply an adrenalin-pumping action flick which just kept pouring more and more of the action on. This one had very poor sub-titles as well but then again, you don’t really need sub-titles to translate the sound of breaking bones :p That’s what most of the movie consisted of – not much talk but lot of breaking arms, legs, ribs, heads and any other bone out of the 206 in the human body. The language was also mostly really bad English and probably Chinese and so they had Thai sub-titles which totally covered the English sub-titles :p

The action was over the top, and as I mentioned before, non-stop. There is one scene where Tony Jaa beats up black-suited guys who keep coming at him non-stop. When he’s done, the whole room is littered with bodies. Very reminiscent of a similar scene in "Kill Bill" where the Bride leaves a room littered with ninja warriors or something. Then there was the final fight that Tony Jaa’s character has with what I like to call "Blondie and the Steroid Triplets". It’s funny in a way. You have these four huge, muscle bound wrestler types going against this tiny Thai guy. They even throw a baby elephant through a glass-window, I kid you not. And then Tony Jaa straps on a pair of elephant bones to his arms and (literally) hamstrings them :p

Yeah, that’s not the whole story. But if you expect a story, there isn’t much. But if you just want to enjoy some really good martial arts moves and aren’t turned off by the sight of bones being broken and arms pulled out of their sockets as if the bad guys were so many dolls that Tony Jaa’s playing with, by all means go ahead and watch the movie 🙂

Lost …

We watched "The Wild Guys" yesterday and going in, I expected it to be pretty bad. Most of the reviews of the movie said stuff like "this is the worst example of Canadian movie-making", "this sets the bar so low that even a midget would have to do the limbo" (I made that one up :p) etc. I expected it to be utterly bad and the first hour or so appeared to prove them right. The movie was slow moving, lots of talking but nothing much else going on. But then, towards the latter half, magic happened. You could actually sympathize with the characters and come to understand what made them who they are. You could laugh with them, instead of at them, and you could actually empathize with the plights that some of them found themselves in.

It’s not a movie with a lot of action. No siree Bob (and he wasn’t even watching the movie :p). It’s in fact a talking heads movie. But the talk is interesting and meaningful. Well, perhaps not at first but the talk the guys have by the campfire was extremely insightful and made up for the whole of the rest of the movie. I forget the specifics (I’ll have to watch the movie again :p) but it was basically about how all of us are lost in our own ways and are just trying to find our way in this confusing world. It made a lot of sense. So if you have nothing better to do and are feeling in the mood for some soul-searching, get the movie :p

Requiescat in Pace, Artorius

We watched "King Arthur" yesterday. I mean the one released in 2004 with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley since there have been quite a few re-tellings of the Arthurian legend over the years. I was half afraid that this would be another re-hash of the tired old story but those fears were put to rest when the movie began with the following words: "Historians agree that the classical 15th century tale of King Arthur and his Knights rose from a real hero who lived a thousand years earlier in a period often called the Dark Ages. Recently discovered archeological evidence sheds light on his true identity." In fact, I spent most of my time after that worrying about the historical accuracy of the movie to worry about the story :p So this is going to be about the history in the movie and not about the movie itself – it’s fairly entertaining and if you like the Arthurian legends, you’ll definitely enjoy it.

I initially thought that the movie was a bunch of bull and that most of their "historical" facts were inaccurate or misplaced. Upon later investigation though, I found that most of it was either historically accurate and that in fact, they had obtained the services of a historian, who himself believed that the story of Arthur had historical basis, as consultant for the movie. Anyway, for anybody who is as nitpicky as me, here are the points that struck me and a brief discussion about them :p

The movie opens with a story about Sarmatians and I was immediately up in arms. My reaction was, "here’s another movie inventing a fictitious people for story purposes". Turns out that the Sarmatians did indeed exist. They would be Iranians in today’s terminology. Apparently, they were pretty similar to the Scythians (whom I did know about :p) There is an interesting similarity between the Sarmatians and the Picts (who also appear in the movie) – they both had their women participate in warfare. I didn’t find anything about the Sarmatian pact to send their children to serve in the Roman army but there is evidence that Sarmatians served in some of the Roman garrisons in Britain.

Then comes the whole "knight" thing and while it’s a nitpick, it’s a sore point with me :p The term "knight" did not actually come into origin till about 1100AD and this particular story is set around 5th century AD. Since the Arthurian legends are usually set in the medieval period, the term knight is used when referring to Arthur and his men. However, there were no "knights" in the Roman army. The closest term from the Roman period was Equestrian – a member of the upper social classes. While this term (and what it implied) is pretty near that of a knight, I don’t believe that the Sarmatian’s, who were more or less conscripted into the Roman army, were in a position to be part of the upper social class. So the only "knight" in the merry band would have been Arthur. But I nitpick :p

The story progresses and we have the Woads enter the scene. Now what they call Woads in the movie are actually Picts – a group of tribes from what today is called Scotland. The term woad comes from the plant they were supposed to have used to obtain the dye for the intricate tattoos that covered the bodies of the Picts. One comment suggests that the term Woads was used to convey the sense that it was a derogatory military term, like many others used since like Pandy in India by the British or Gook in most of Asia by the US or hundreds of other epithets used by soldiers throughout history to identify the "enemy".

I had other doubts about Christianity in Britain at this time period, about a pope being there in Rome and a few other things. I thought that historically the events were either too early or too late. But turns out I was wrong :p Most of these things did take place (or were at least possible) by around 5th century AD. So overall, it does appear as if the movie is indeed as historically accurate as the movie makers claim. Now I don’t know about the little tiny details – there probably are plenty of anachronisms and slip-ups (there usually are :p) but at least the base facts seem to be straight 🙂

From Ashes …

Laurie and I watched "Cinderella Man" yesterday. I don’t particularly like boxing or movies about boxing. As Laurie put it, "when one man has to knock another man unconscious to win, I don’t like that sport". That’s exactly how I feel – it just has too much of a feel of the old bread and circuses days. And seeing all those people sitting there cheering on two people beating themselves to a bloody pulp does nothing to inspire good feelings about humanity in general – well, at least not for me:

But speaking of blood and circuses, we have General Maximus himself in "Cinderella Man". Actually, for some reason, Russell Crowe looked younger in this movie. I don’t know if anybody else thinks this but he’s got a little Mel Gibson thing going in there. See, all the Aussie actors who make it great in Hollywood have this rugged, unshaven look – think back to Mel Gibson during the Mad Max days and then there was Paul Hogan … not not the wrestler, that’s Hulk Hogan, this is the other guy – remember "Crocodile Dundee"? :p Then there’s Guy Pearce too – even he had that whole unshaven look going on. Anyway don’t know if Crowe calls himself an Aussie or a New Zelander but even when he was shaven, he’s always managed to look menacing and unshaven. Mel Gibson used to be that way and then suddenly he became everybody’s favourite baby-faced boy :p In this one, Crowe too has a completely different personna – he’s got this whole, Irish boyish charm thing going and as I said before, he actually looks younger somehow. So hence the comment about him doing a Mel Gibson.

But getting back to the movie itself, even though I hate boxing, there was the whole underlying thread of one man against all-odds that I always find irresistible. There is something about the victory of human spirit over all adversity that just appeals to me. Then there is the time period – the story is set in depression era New York and the two time periods from American history that I love the most are the pioneer "Westward Ho" days and the depression era 🙂 Add to that the fact that you have a lot of charming characters (and some good actors too – Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Bruce McGill) and then it also has kids, who can resist a movie with kids? :p I loved the scene where Braddock (Crowe’s character) teaches his daughter to spar and gets smacked in the face when he looks away and where he says that he’ll have to buy some turtles if he wins the title because he told his kids that he’d come home with a title and they thought he said "turtle" 🙂 Overall, a pretty good movie to watch!

Entries, Comments and Connections

It’s weird how these things go … Well, not really weird if you stop to think about it for a second but I just like to be amazed … or was that amused? :p I hadn’t received any comments or spam on this site for the longest time and I was beginning to think that my anti-spam measures were finally paying off. Then I made an entry a couple of days ago and then I heard from my friend Edward today – he said that he couldn’t post comments since they don’t appear and that he can’t leave a tag since the tag board tagged anything he posted as spam :p I checked on it and found that there had been a reason for the absence of comments …

Both the comments system and the tagboard have a spam blacklisting feature. Basically, I adapted the WPBlacklist plugin code to work for the tagboard as well. So, they both run off fairly similar blacklists and for some inexplicable reason, the letter "b" had gotten in to the blacklist :p And that meant that you couldn’t post anything with the letter "b" in it without it getting tagged as spam. I fix the problem and what do you know? Barely an hour later, I get my first tagboard spam in ages and I get two comments posted on various entries over the course of the day! I am not even certain if one of the comments is spam or not but the other is not spam. However, it is intriguing that all this happened on the same day because there really were no comments till now for a while – even if the comments had been deleted because they were mis-identified as spam, I would have received a notification, so I know that there were no spam comments 🙂 Anyway, that’s my little bit of wonderment and mystery for the day … Now I’m going back to doing other stuff – like watching the really gory and fairly pointless "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" :p

Back again …

I’ve finally decided to come back to blogland :p When I started to write this entry, I thought I’d never been away from blogging for this long since I started blogging way back in ’99 or so (or was it earlier? :p) But then I took a look at the archives for this site and realized that at least here, I seem to have had a habit of cyclically going offline for long periods. The last time was in October of 2003 and and I didn’t come back till April 2004! So I guess this time is a much faster recovery … that is, if I keep on writing after this and not stop again after this entry or a couple of more entries.

So what has been happening? A lot actually. Around the end of October both my sister and sister-in-law (Laurie’s sister) paid us visits. While my sister’s visit was brief, Laurie’s sister and her family stayed with us for a while and we really enjoyed the visit. Of course, having guests in the house meant going sightseeing, going shopping and so on and time really passed by in a blur.

Then in November, I got a new job through the help of my friend Tracie (thanks Tracie :)) and finally left my previous employer – I’d been with them for close to five years (the longest I’d been with any one employer) over two different periods. I always will remember them with warmth because I truly felt at home there but I was going nowhere there since they really didn’t have anything to keep me occupied full time. My new job on the other hand, keeps me so occupied that I am exhausted at the end of the day :p I work for a hosting company as a remote systems admin now and since I’m administering servers, I am on alert most of my working hours in case one of the servers decides to act up. While it’s not very physical work (I sit on the couch staring at my computer screen the whole day :p), it’s mentally exhausting because you can never really relax. But I’m getting better at it and learning to relax a bit more than I did at the beginning, when I was too scared to look away from the monitoring screen for even one second lest something go wrong with the servers and I might miss an alert :p

The new job, the new schedule, the changes in work habits etc. have kept me busy and away from blogging (or even doing any other stuff like coding …) for the last couple of months. I now seem to be finally getting into a new groove (which I hope does not become a rut :p) and so am able to think about blogging again. Plus, I started blogging as an outlet for all the thoughts crowding in my head and also because I needed to, was compelled to write. But since I’m so busy now, the compulsion to write is gone. Indeed, I found that the couple of articles a month I was doing for two different magazines was getting to be draining because of all the research that I had to do. So I gave up most of my writing too (I still write for one magazine – but that’s on an occasional basis) and become a gentlemen of leisure … albeit without too much leisure time :p

That brings us to about yesterday 🙂 I spent most of my spare time yesterday cataloguing my DVD collection. I’d been keeping tabs on my DVD’s using an application that I’d found online (what geek doesn’t? :p) but had stopped updating it like three years ago. And since we’d been buying a lot of DVD’s recently, I found that we had a lot of DVD’s not in the system and worst still, that we were buying duplicates at times because I didn’t have an updated system! So I finally decided to bite the bullet and update the system. I started with around 220 DVD’s in the system and now have 456 after I’d entered almost all of the new ones :p I still have about 10 more to go which are mostly Tamil or Hindi movies which aren’t in the database of selectable movies of the application that I use – DVD Profiler. So I’ll have to entere those manaually – I’ve become really anal about making sure that the cast and crew information is as correct as possible so that I can do an offline cross-reference of any actor, director, writer etc. based on the movies I own. So, I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of IMDB refrencing to update the last 10 or so movies – yes, that’s something I found out yesterday … even Tamil and Hindi movies are in IMDB! Granted, they don’t have as much information as the Hollywood movies, but they are still there and that’s probably one of the easiest references for referencing Bollywood or Mollywood movies too 🙂

Later in the evening we watched "Ocean’s Twelve" on DVD. Yeah, I hear you going, "What? It’s not out on DVD yet!" :p These were pirated copies of the movie – and bad pirated copies at that since somebody had shot it in a theater (probably) and the camera was slightly slanted and so the whole movie was slightly askew :p Then there were all the French titles, place names etc. which made the story a bit difficult to follow since I like to know all the details :p The movie was good but the ending wasn’t breathtaking – in fact, I could see it coming a mile away. I don’t know whether Hollywood writers are becoming more predictable each year or if I’m just beginning to see the patterns better but I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie more and more easily as time passes. The last movie that I can remember surprising me was "The Sixth Sense" and even that I was able to figure out what was happening before the movie ended.

Speaking of "The Sixth Sense", is M. Night Shyamalan’s career going in reverse or what? He came out with his best movie as his maiden offering and it has been steadily going downhill since then. "Unbreakable" was good but left me feeling as if there was something more – as if I’d seen only half a movie and there was an untold story I was missing. "Signs" was just a bad movie – no two words about it. The story was atrocious, so lame that it probably wouldn’t have floated even in the beginning days of science fiction. Come on, aliens who are afraid of water? I read something very similar in one of my first Sinhalese science fiction novels when I was like thirteen and even then, I was sceptical of that whole idea :p I haven’t even bothered to see "The Village" since the guy at the video store was like "This is the same guy who did ‘Sixth Sense’? But this is such an awful load of crap!" ‘Nuff said 🙂