Movie Review: Vettaiyadu Vilaiyaadu

In: movies, experiences

Major Movie Spoilers ahead...

Do you remember that famous sequence from Hot Shots Part Deux where Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) goes on a killing spree as the body count meter keeps ticking away, until the movie becomes the bloodiest movie of them all. Do you remember all the movies and characters named in that sequence? Well you don't need to. But if you see Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu, you will think to yourself that this movie will surely deserve a mention in that list if Hot Shots was still to be made. I had heard the soundtrack of the movie a few months ago on Raaga.com and knowing that Kamal Hassan and Jyothika were in that movie I had it on my have-to-see movie list. So when I saw a review of the movie on Blogical Conclusions that the movie had released, I immediately made it a point to catch the movie over the weekend. So a friend and I went to see the movie. I was under the impression that the movie will have subtitles like the Bollywood movies do. Turns out they didn't. Luckily my friend knows Tamil. So he translated some of the dialogs for me. But most of the movie is easy to understand just by looking at the scenes. The movie is about a cop Raghavan (Kamal Hassan) investigating a murder which leads him from Chennai to NYC and back to Chennai following a pair of psychopathic serial killers. While the movie luckily doesn't take the approach of so many ordinary murder thrillers that keep the audience trying to guess who the culprit is only to identify the murder in the end with a very bad link to connect the murderer with his motives, I did feel it kind of went overboard with the killing parts. There is a scene in the movie where the two killers are shown in a house with bloodied bodies strewn all over the place with a sub-title that goes like "House in Mangalore". The only purpose of that scene is to show how cold blooded the killers are. But we know that already from the condition of their first victim. I felt that that scene was entirely unneccessary as were many others. But then the movie had to be three hours long right. But the investigation is only one part of the story. While the murder investigation is main thread of the movie, also interleaved with this investigation is the building romance of Raghavan and Aradhana (Jyothika) - a "mature" romance as the Blogical Conclusions review refers to it. Both Raghavan and Aradhana have been shown to be married earlier and both are single now (for different reasons.) Aradhana even has a kid. Its just chance circumstance and the nature of the two individuals that brings them closer. And I also agree with the Blogical Conclusions review of the movie that the romance part was probably the better part of the movie. The antagonists of the story seem too artificial. For instance there is a scene where the two partners in crime are talking and the wall behind them has the Hannibal movie poster stuck up on it again probably to show that they aspire to be serial killers. I didn't like Hannibal much (I preferred Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon). And I think Vittaiyadu Villayadi didn't match my expectations for the movie either. Kakha Kakha also directed by Gautham was much better. Anyways thats my review! You could see it for the acting of Kamal Hassan and Jyothika I guess.

iPod Shuffle Feature

In: apple, music, experiences

Been listening to the iPod in the shuffle mode for a while now. Its made sure that I do listen to most (if not all) of the music I have on it. If I had not used the shuffle mode, I probably would have been listening to Dream Theater, Alice in Chains, Metallica and Queensryche in a continuous loop. But the shuffle mode has brought out some novel side-effects though. For one, sometimes I get to listen to Ganesh Bhaktimala bhajan by Veena Sahasrabuddhe just after 'The Number of the Beast' by Iron Maiden. I'm not sure if God is trying to send me some message here. But that apart, lately I've found some things quite unusual with the whole shuffle thing, which is supposed to be truly random. I've about 40 Jagjit Singh songs on my iPod out of a total of around 2300 songs. But in the span of one hour, the shuffle mode played four Jagjit Singh songs, two of them back to back. Also it played YYZ by Rush and the cover of the same song from the Working Man album back to back as well. Now the latter certainly cannot be put forth as evidence for something not being random. It may indeed have been strange co-incidence. But what about four Jagjit Singh songs in one hour? Now please don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Jagjit Singh. But it just strikes me as strange that on this day Jagjit Singh songs were played more often; just as a few days ago Jethro Tull songs were played more often - in fact many times more often than tracks by any other artist. I'm not sure if there is a relation between the current date on the iPod and the artists on the iPod. I checked for that as well. The date on the iPod is way behind - its 22nd January of some year. And Jagjit Singh was born on 8th February. Not the same. But not much difference either. Although I think it did play more Doors tracks around the day Jim Morrison (RIP) passed away. But then the whole thing may be a conspiracy theory I concocted at 12.43 am on a Saturday morning with lots of work still pending. But I thought I might just jot this down for shits and giggles.

Btw, Alice in Chains is touring again. And so is Queensryche. Hoping to see them both live in concert soon.

MPA Against Guitar Tablature Sites

In: news

So the Music Industry has now trained its guns on guitar tablature sites. Not good news for budding guitar players (like myself :-)). I guess its me on my own now.

Traditional Press Media and the Internet

In: news, opinion

Traditional Press Media has not yet come to terms with the Internet as a medium. This shows glaringly when they don't adapt their content for the hyperlinked web. A good case in point is this article about Mobile Film Awards - a contest organized and sponsored jointly by Discover Networks Asia and Nokia. This is the second year in running that the two are collaborating on this event to recognize mobile fimmakers - or film-makers who make use of portable video equipment such as camera phones, camcorders, etc. While the newspaper - Indian Express's online edition - did a good job in covering this storyline (although a little late in the game I must say as the deadline for submitting entries is over), they didn't make full use of the medium in which the article appeared. The Contest has a website (http://www.mobifilms.net), where readers could get more information and even watch some award winning movies captured using the mobile phone medium. But no such information is available anywhere in the article, thus missing the whole point of using the internet as a media. I think its time some of these agencies have an editor just for the internet edition making sure they do provide "relevant" information along with the content. 

Bloglines+Digg Mashup

In: Ideas

A suggestion to Bloglines about a possible Bloglines+Digg mashup:

Hi,

I've been a long time user of bloglines and I have submitted suggestions before. I would like to suggest another one. Infact a similar suggestion was posted on another blog earlier. A Google translated version of the post can be found here (http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=...).

What I'm suggesting is bloglines ranking posts based on recommendations by peer-reviewed social sites such as Digg, etc. The reason for this is that I subscribe to a large number of blogs - many of them are news or opinion sites that are updated daily. Its hard for me to go through all these sites daily. If certain new posts are color-coded based on their Digg ratings, then it makes it easier for me to only ready the highly recommended ones. Of course there is the option of simply subscribing to a Digg feed. But that doesn't help much because a lot of the sites I like to read don't always make it to the top of the Digg billboard which is not to say that they don't have Digg rankings. It may only be that their rankings are not as high as probably a slashdot.org posting. But that said another think that I would love to see is a 'thumbs-up' or a 'thumbs-down' checkbox right next to each item on the bloglines right frame that directly goes to Digg. Makes it easier to rank feeds that are already subscribed to by Bloglines users.

Thanks.
Satchit (http://www.satchit-haridas.net)

Movie Review: Omkara

In: movies, experiences

I finally saw Omkara after reading a lot about it on the blogosphere (here and here for instance) last Sunday. And so that I can enjoy it fully I saw Maqbool the day before so that I'm in a Shakespearean mode. To be frank, I haven't read any Shakespeare. But I'd seen Throne of Blood which was Akira Kurosawa's take on Macbeth and so I was able to identify the main characters in Maqbool quite early on. I had seen the ending of Maqbool before, even before I saw Throne of Blood. So I knew what was going to happen in the end and I was enjoying how the various characters were portrayed. It was also quite enjoyable trying to identify how the various characters in Maqbool differed from or were similar to the corresponding ones in Throne of Blood. But Omkara was slightly different. I knew it was based on Othello. But the only things about the story of Othello that I knew were: 1. Its a tragedy, 2. both the heroine and the hero die in the end and 3. that a close acquintance of the hero has a role to play in 2. And I knew all this because I saw the end of 'O', the movie starring Mekhi Phifer, Julia Stiles and Josh Hartnett. But I didn't know anything about the rest of the movie. So this time except for those three characters there wasn't anything else in the movie I could identify. So I was enjoying the language in the movie - the raw, hardcore hindi of the Hindi Heartland. To put it in one word 'Amazing'. Rough on the ears probably, but amazing. Nothing has felt more real-life than listening to the dialogs there-in. I didn't feel like I was sitting in a movie theater watching a movie called Omkara; It felt like I was in UP sitting next to a thug spitting tobacco before he utters his next word. And I enjoyed the experience of the movie. But I also felt a little hurried - because I knew the ending. It as hard to see a person played like a puppet by his sub-ordinate. As Essar pointed out in her review, we hope that like a typical hindi movie the hero will go against all odds and overcome his weaknesses. But then it doesn't. And that says something about the direction mainstream Bollywood movies are taking - something that I'm personally happy to see. But knowing how the story was about to end lessened my enjoyment a bit. Interestingly, although the same happened with Maqbool as well, the experience of watching Omkara for some reason felt different. And I'm not sure why. But I came home after the movie and directly proceded to read Baradwaj Rangan's review of the movie which I knew was favourable. Mr. Rangan's review of the movie is a great example of how a movie review has to be written. I enjoy reading his review for a lot of the same reasons I used to enjoy reading Roger Ebert's reviews of the movie. Their reviews do more than just rate the movie. They inform you about how to appreciate the movie; how to identify the nuances of the actors and the film-makers and more importantly they inform you about how a movie has to be experienced. A lot of small but critical details that I missed when I saw the movie were brought to my attention when I went through Mr. Rangan's review. I do plan to watch the movie one more time if possible. But I digress. Coming back to his review Mr. Rangan writes about the movie:

"Omkara is Bhardwaj’s take on Othello, and by that I mean it’s based on the text of Othello and not merely the themes in Othello."

But later in the review identifying where the movie may have actually deviated (intentionally or unintentionally) from the Shakespearean tragedy, Mr. Rangan writes:

"Othello, similarly, is a great warrior whose actions are driven mainly by the insecurity of being a misfit in his society, a black man in the midst of whites. But Omkara has no reason to be insecure. The director makes him half-Brahmin, and gives us a scene where someone insults him about being a half-breed. But nothing much comes of this except one of the movie’s few lapses into triteness; when Omkara talks about this to Dolly, she consoles him that a half-moon is still the moon. But everywhere else, he’s a confident man at the top of his profession."

As I read this and then later as I thought more about this movie a thought occured to me. That it wasn't just the Omkara character that seemed out of place. It was that and the character of Langda Tyagi (played by Saif Ali Khan in one of the most mature roles I've seen him play) together that seemed to deviate from the original. Now before I say more, I think I must repeat that my knowledge of Othello is based on a wikipedia article and the review of 'O' by Roger Ebert. So please note this disclaimer before you read ahead. But coming back to my point: Othello is supposed to be a misfit in the society in which the story is cast and Iago is supposed to be a sub-ordinate to the former. Also Iago hates Othello and his intention is to put down the latter making use of the latter's jeolosy as a weapon. For this he uses Desdemona and Cassio as pawns without their knowing. While this is true in Omkara, what differs is the shade of difference and the and the portrayal of relationship between the characters of Othello and Iago as played by Ajay Devgan and Saif Ali Khan. In the movie, Saif Ali Khan displays the perfect loyalty to the Omkara character through most of the first half of the movie right until Omkara promotes Kesu Firangi (Vivek Oberoi - Cassio in Othello) over him (Langda Tyagi) as the 'Bahubali'. This slight hurts Landa Tyagi's plight and paves the way for revenge. But nowhere in his subsequent actions does the Tyagi character indicate that his vengence is single-pointedly targeted towards Omkara. Most of his actions including the dialog just before he shoots Kesu where he refers to the latter as "bhootpurva bahubali" or ex-General seem to indicate that he hated Kesu more than he hated Omkara. This I believe is a significant difference from Othello (and also 'O' for that matter). But this may have been an intentional deviation from the original. Vishal Bharadwaj is an amazing director (Its hard to believe that he started his career as a music director) and I doubt this subtle but important difference (at least in my opinion) could have been because of an over-sight on his part.

But to summarize, I think the movie is a landmark and I do hope Vishal Bharadwaj does continue this series and adapts more of Shakespeare's plays for Bollywood movies. Atleast I'll get to know them that way. :-). But to end this review, I would like to quote Mr. Rangan one last time. This quote I think captures the skill of Vishal Bharadwaj:

"EACH time Vishal Bhardwaj comes out with a Shakespeare adaptation, it’s tomtomed to the heavens as this Great Enterprise No One’s Ever Thought Of (Let Alone Attempted) Before. This is mainly because, I think, most people are intimidated by the Bard."

The real skill of Vishal Bhardwaj lies in the fact that he chose the right settings for these plays - making them accessible to an audience a quarter of a globle away from the place they were originally written. And that takes talent!

Movie Review: Corporate

So I finally got to see Madhur Bhandarkar's Corporate today. I'd heard exactly one good review about the movie and that too the the person thought the movie was good because the ending was different. Yes, the ending is different and yes, I liked the movie. While I could see hints of how things might turn up in the end, the movie is not as predictable as most Bollywood movies. It kept my attention right till about 30 mins to the end at which point I knew exactly what was going to happen. While I'm certainly not going to give away the plot for the sake of those who haven't seen it yet, I'm going to share some of my observations about the movie - all technology related as thats the line of profession I work in:

That phone is a Sony Ericsson K750i. But don't really know who that number belongs to. Wonder if someone in Mumbai actually has that mobile number. hmm...

Fizzy? What's that? Is that a new Operating System? Why can't they stick to plain old Windows?

File transfer application for the Fizzy OS. Why go through such a hassle to create your own file-transfer software with such an unusable interface. It doesn't even have a 'Cancel' button. And it just tells you the number of files being copied. It doesn't tell you the total number of files to be transferred.

A Neat looking Blog

Speaking of all the guidelines about how blogs should be designed, here's one by James Holderness that doesn't really care for following any of those guidelines. A very simple and a neat looking site that I think is going to be very informative. Can't say if its good from a usability perspective. But I like the utter simplicity of it. :-)