A sleepy Sunday evening and I was wasting my time on my laptop. My roomies suddenly pop out with the idea that its been a while since we saw a movie. Well, having spent half of the weekend in hibernation I thought I should give my body a stretch and I nodded. The only tickets that were available at such short notice in PVR (unfortunately the only theatre at walkable distance from our abode) were for Ram Gopal Verma’s Phoonk. Ok, so we thought let’s scare us a bit.

We thankfully missed out on the first 10 minutes of the movie owing to a faulty ticket machine. Hmm.. but the movie began pretty well actually in retrospect. The acting was ok, but then nothing scary seemed to happen. Then again I thought they were just preparing us for that big 5-lakh rupee moment. Well, the thought and the wait persisted till the end. The general pattern was to build up some excitement, focus on some random objects ranging from a giraffe to Elmo to a pic of Lord Hanuman and then suddenly fade out to daylight without anything happening. There was just one slightly scary scene in the whole movie. Other attempts were too cheesy and the entire theatre audience was laughing, me included, during those supposed-to-be-BOO! moments. My friend, Jithin, kept defending the director (don’t understand why, but he has this habit of liking all the worst movies on planet Earth) saying that what else could he do in a horror movie? Well for starters, he could make me scared for god’s sake!

Not everything was bad. Amongst the positives the movie was only 2 hours long :) and didn’t use too many B(ollywood)-grade special effects (when RGV had a chance to actually make it worse with those added in). The real positive was the camera work though. It was just brilliant. Sad it was wasted on a poor movie. The long single shot of the kid entering school and the camera panning to crow.. well masterpiece!

All in all, I don’t recommend this at all. Quoting Arnab Goswamy from Times NOW, “If you wan’t to watch something really scary, try RGV ka Aag” but don’t waste your time and money on this! Should have stayed at home and slept!

I came across this new kid in the block when it comes to search engines. It’s called Cuil, it’s pronounced as ‘kool’, it claims to have the largest index of them all and it was launched today. I was playing with it and this is infact an interesting one, probably good competition to Google in the long run.

The best thing I liked is the way the results come up on screen. Instead of going the Google’s famous sweet and simple way, the results page is more detailed, with longer content from the pages coming up. This works pretty good especially for more broad one word searches, for example : “cricket“. The results come neatly organized, presented in a visually rich manner but at the same time keeping it not too complicated. And there is a nice little info box on the right, which is pretty smart, where you can browse cricket related stuff by category.

But at the same time, try for a more targeted search like : “the best con movies“. It churns out all irrelevant results and the best you would get is a list of horror movies! You can’t go more wrong can you? Well let me give it some benefit of doubt, after all it is only 1 day old. Things should improve. And if it does, who knows it might be astalavista Google… naa, maybe not ;) Anyways worth a try, play around!

A good informal interview with one of my favourite journalist and author, Sir Mark Tully.
Watch it on ndtv.com.

I am currently reading one of his books – India in Slow Motion. Highly recommended reading! Maybe I will post a review in a few days too :)

Saturday morning. My friend and I were determined to see a movie. No tickets for anything else, so we decided to see ‘Sunshine‘. Had no idea what it was all about. Had never heard of this one before. But we badly wanted to see a movie, any movie. Before it began, I was expecting some sort of a romantic comedy, judging from the name. But the first frame told me, this was going to be Sci-Fi. I was a bit unhappy, not that I do not like Sci-Fi, but I have seen too many that are worthless. (and I had already spent 170 bucks for the ticket!)

But it was not bad. This is one Sci-Fi movie worth seeing. The plot, set about 50 years in the future, revolves around the 8 member crew of a spaceship Icarus which is on a journey to the Sun. Their mission is to bring the dying Sun back to life, by exploding a bomb the size of Manhattan island.

The best thing about the movie is that the cast and crew have done brilliantly to make it all look real and believable. The acting is excellent by the entire cast especially Chris Evans (“Mace”) and Cillian Murphy (“Capa”). The graphics are awesome too, and to some extent it creates a world which you won’t think is graphics at all. But they have not gone overboard with all that. They are all well within the limits of imaginable reality. Same goes with the characters. They are not depicted as super humans, who either have no emotions or have too many emotions as is the case with many other Sci-Fi flicks. This one though, they do feel like real human beings, who are just doing their job, making mistakes like everyone of us do.

[[Warning : Spoilers ahead]]
Now to whats bad. The plot is excellent, the movie is excellent, till about 75% of it all. Then comes the part about the intrusion of the captain from a previous failed mission. Apparently he has gone nuts and wants to sabotage the mission. The way he is shown is all crap. Too many unnecessary effects, too much blurring, they make it bad. The limits of reality are breached here. I don’t really understand why this element was treated so. Hmm. That made it disappointing.

Generally though it is nice to watch. The movie is kind of like a mix of Armageddon and Forbidden Planet, that’s what I thought. My friend was telling, she had this triumphant-good feeling after the end of Armageddon, but with this one that feeling was absent. Well.. do you really see a Sci-Fi fiction to get this good feeling? Hmm. it all depends on your perspective.

Overall I give it a 7 on 10. Worth a watch.

After all the hype and controversies the film finally released yesterday in Trivandrum and I was there to see it first day first show. And… hmm, the book was better! To make it clear, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book either. Thought it was a fairly good novel, but not as good as it was made out to be. Just too much hype! So all in all, it was a bit disappointing.

There are some flashes of brilliance in the movie. The scene in which Sophie’s parent’s gets killed is one of the best I have ever seen. Kudos to Ron Howard for that shot! Technically the movie was sound and the location choices were excellent. But there aren’t too many more good things I can point out about the movie though. I would have expected much more from the team that made Apollo 13 and the likes. Well, Tom Hanks didn’t have much acting to do, just delivering long dialogues as if he was reading passages from the novel. Audrey Tautau was disappointing too. She was amazing in Amelie, but in this her acting seemed a bit artificial. Paul Bettany is an exception here. His role as Silas the albino is commendable.

The part I least liked about the novel was the over-dramatic ending. This was made even more over-dramatic and dragged out in the movie. Even the theatre audience, who have seen many a masala climax, seemed to agree with hoots, sighs and loud wise-cracks.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie unless you are die-hard fan of the book and want to see how everything translates on screen or if you can’t resist the temptations, and is too curious to find out what all the hype is about.

So my review: An ordinary movie, nothing amazing. 6 on 10 :)