movie time - part 2

watched 'Sherlock Holmes' played by Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law.. it can only be described as a travesty of the original image of Sherlock Holmes... Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have turned over in his grave.. it was absolutely despicable..

i have nothing against the actors - robert downey is pretty good, as is jude law.. i have nothing against the direction and portrayal of tense situations.. i would have watched this movie happily and even appreciated the suspense were it the movie of a completely new fictional character who the movie writer just made up...

but unfortunately this is not true.. they are trying to portray Sherlock Holmes! and i have this indelible image of him.. have read all the books and have the complete anthology back home in India.. have read those books as a kid and completely cherish them..

Sherlock Holmes - he is not a man of action - he can fight if he needs to but not crassly like in the movie - every chance he gets.. he makes brilliant deductions and only describes the conclusions.. and gives the details behind it only if he is asked to.. he does experiments on many things but only when he needs to.. he is not described as extremely dirty is any of the books..

the movie makes him look like a bumbling idiot and goofball who is capable sometimes of making good deductions and seems to be dependent on Watson more than he should be.. and the encounter with Irene Adler is horrible.. the whole experienced wasn't one i'd go thru again..

i do not discourage making of period movies with suspense and thrilling incidents... but just the defacing of the indomitable spirit and image of a beloved storybook character

movie time... part 1

saw 'what's your rashee' last weekend... finally!
as with most Ashutosh Gowariker movies some of the prevalent social issues and situations came to light in the movie.. a flash of the Indian spirit - you could call it.. and also some scenes that can only be described as pseudo-emergencies... a relatively normal situation heightened and portrayed as more tense than it really is.. his signature is very clear..

the storyline was not that impressive.. Priyanka Chopra did a decent job.. but the issues i was talking about: like girls not being let to study further, marriage being the only way of escape for some girls.. i dont know if it's still there in India, not in major cities but may be in villages?

i don't believe much in zodiac signs as a sure indicator of a person's nature or behavior.. but observe some things sometimes..

why i love google - part 1

Google is one company most adored.. different people have different reasons.. and i have many..
take this for instance: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-acquires-aardvark.html
aardvark searches with social context (was reading the white paper).. is something that is really cool and until further tuned slightly bumpy.. i just adore it that google invests in such cool things.. some turn out great, some don't... but they invest in future and nobody can predict exactly how it would turn out..
must read lawrence lessig's stuff some time..

50 states

was watching the tahnksgiving episode of friends (7th season) where ross tries to remember the name of all 50 states.. so was trying to recollect the names myself.. could only remember like 45 of them..

here are the ones i could remember:

1. illinois
2. pennsylvania
3. maryland
4. new york
5. indiana
6. wisconsin
7. iowa
8. nebraska
9. new jersey
10. massachussets
11. connecticut
12. ohio
13. vermont
14. new hampshire
15. georgia
16. alabama
17. arkansas
18. kansas
19. missouri
20. oklahoma
21. california
22. nevada
23. utah
24. texas
25. new mexico
26. florida
27. tennesee
28. north carolina
29. south carolina
30. rhode island
31. north dakota
32. south dakota
33. washington
34. d.c
35. virginia
36. arizona
37. kentucky
38. minnesota
39. mississippi
40. montana
41. colorado
42. west virginia
43. wyoming
44. idaho
45. michigan

forgot:
- delaware
- maine
- alaska
- hawaii
- louisiana
- oregon

not bad i guess... left all the ez ones..

if life is just a show...

i want my money back! LOL!

old times...

'workspace augmentation of photon impingement through impurities removal'... suddenly remembered... used to read this a lot in grad school days... http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=18

this is going to hurt just a little bit...

went to the dentist today and every time i visit i think about this poem by Ogden Nash called 'This is going to hurt just a little bit' that i read in school.. i remember asking my brother to read it before his visit to the dentist thereby scaring him..

today was not so bad.. the doctor and the nurse were chatty and i was chatting along with them.. while waiting for the local anesthesia to kick in the doctor was asking me about movies that i liked.. i was generally saying that of the recent movies i had enjoyed 'avatar' and so on.. he was talking about the movie 'slum dog millionaire' and violent scenes that were there and how he couldn't watch it...

he said: 'i just hate to see people suffer so much, you know...'
i said: 'but you're a dentist!'

the doctor and the nurse were laughing for a whole minute.. it looked like i relaxed them more than they did me.. LOL!

windows media

why is windows media player playing a VOB file I had better than VLC???

like a kid in a candy store....

i was looking so hard for 2 videos online.. stuff in tv that i had watched in my younger days.. and i found one this weekend and it made me go back to the good old days...
one was an animation series that i used to watch on AXN (the action channel).. technology and animation that awed me... am so glad somebody else also liked it enough to post it online..
the second one... i'm still looking for it.. it's a series called 'animate your world'.. it used to come on cartoon network (i used to watch cartoon 24x7 when i was a kid.. god knows why.. i was totally happy..).. the video i'm talking about is not a 30-minute series.. it would be just for a minute or 2.. and it would be really thought-provoking (for kids and some older kids).. stuff like: 'its ok to make a mistake', 'think different' and lots of other stuff... i'm still not able to find it online.. but if i find it i would be one happy girl..

big bang theory...

i was watching episodes of season 1 and 2 for like the 4th time when i realized that there were some bloopers..

- in the dumpling paradox episode, penny plays halo 3 with sheldon, leonard and raj. but according to sheldon, halo night is wednesday night but penny wakes up in their apartment the next morning saying that its 'saturday' morning..

- rajesh actually talks in the first season in some episodes when penny is around.. esp the same halo night episode, he says something like 'oh sure.. cut the indian in half.. there are a billion more where he came from'...

n whats the deal with the name 'Rajesh Koothrapalli'... sounds like a telugu name but he lives with his family in delhi... and he also sings hindi lorees...

btw sheldon (jim parsons) rocks! i'm gonna build a fan site for him someday..

read this somewhere....

they say you will only change when the pain of remaining the
same is greater than the pain of changing...

impairment...

more often than not we resent some of our actions because we didn't think it through, or for that matter even think... a long time back i guess most of the indian people were very much concerned about this fact... drinking or tobacco was frowned upon since they were likely to impair judgement... even onions, garlic, drum sticks were all banned... interesting..

Kaminey

watched it last weekend... was really good.. priyanka chopra did superbly as a normal girl, enjoying her role every bit.. shahid kapur also shone.. the story is ok.. a little but not too violent... really funny in some places...

songs were the attention-grabbing feature... 'dhan te nan' was the best, followed by 'raat ke dhai baje' and then 'fatak'.. awesome choreography.. liked it a lot.. vishal bhardwaj has done a good job again..

memory associations...

memory associations are like soft links.... the target can be changed in time.. :D

unwritten

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins

The rest is still unwritten.....

natasha bedingfield - unwritten... like the music... love the lyrics :)

to be or not to be [choosy]....

watching tv flipping through the numerous channels i was getting bored of most of the stuff being telecast... i'm sure everyone must have felt this at one time or another.. i thought about the time when i was younger and we only had 2 channels in Doordarshan.. DD1 and DD2! and whatever program they decide to show i was watching it! the minute i was back from school.. i loved some.. others not so much... but i watched them all.. and when there was cable there was more channel surfing.. strange trend..

it led me to wonder... the more the options that we have, the less likelier it is to find something that we like! and the question: 'are we choosy because of the existence of so many choices?? or were all these options created because we were choosy??' !! i mean even in coffee shops you can customize a drink to infinity! 'non-fat no-whip 108 degrees with a shot of french vanilla'...

so if we take away all the choices and give only 2 (regular/decaf) does that mean people will go for one of these without thinking twice? it makes me think about all the choices we make... would be an interesting social experiment..

to finding yourself (your fragrance?)

from Arziyan (Delhi 6)... one of my fav songs in that movie...

Ohhh ek khushbu aati thi,
Oh ek khushbu aati thi,
Main bhatakta jaata tha,
Reshmi si maaya thi,
Aur main taktaa jaata tha,

Jab teri gali aaya, sach tabhi nazar aaya
Mujh mein hi woh khushbu thi,
Jisse tune milwaya
Maula maula maula mere maula

parents and kids...

a person i know was telling me about his daughter... as to how she is at the right age for traveling (she's not too crabby) and how he is going to enjoy the vacation with his family.. he said that he was enjoying every minute of this age when his daughter 'still liked them, and thought that they [her parents] knew something'...

hmm... profound statement.. do kids really stop liking parents when they grow up... sure they learn a lot more, and know more than parents after a certain age (discounting some life's lessons that parents know thru experience)... i think its ok for parents to not know everything.. kids will be ok with it...

as to not liking them... well understanding might be lacking... if each were more open to the others ideas, and paid some attention and made an effort to understand the other might that solve the problem??

Surya Movies!

I was just googling about Surya.. it was sad to see that there are not many websites dedicated to him or listing his recent or to be released movies... :D
so i'm going to try to make a compilation of his movies to start with, and am really looking forward to his next one...

i found an imdb entry after looking for a long time.. it should have been the first one in the list!! ;)

ok.. found a fan site after some looong search...
http://www.suryafansclub.com/filmography/surya-filmography/
some cool photos there... movies... hmm ayan wasn't that good.. didn't like it.. so next movies:

aadhavan - k.s ravikumar, surya and nayantara... should be time pass... estimated for release sometime this year...

singam - same director as vel (haven't seen that one - so can't comment), cop movie, should be good to see surya in cop uniform again..

mugamoodi - not too much info yet

ratha charithra - RGV movie!! wow! looking forward to this :)

formula for bypassing trouble....

read this quote today....

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around.
Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble; that's
as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for
you'll see a lot of it and you had better be on speaking terms with it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

liked it... by trouble of course i think he means trouble that we come across in our life that we can't control.. things that happen to us...

there's another sort of trouble which we cause to ourselves by the choices we make.. if those choices were made because we didn't have enough information, we can make better choices in the future based on our experience.. so its good..

if the choices were made because we didn't think, then we live with the consequences and/or choose to think before we make choices the next time..