3 idiots or five point someone

Chetan Bhagat’s five point is man-lit that is not even remotely entertaining or funny or… well it isnt quite anything. It’s disappointing. And 3 idiots is certainly mildly entertaining. But I wouldnt say I enjoyed the movie. It is gain just as average as the Chetan Bhagat’s five point someone.

3 idiots at best is loosely based on five point someone. However average and nondescript these two are, the credit should go to Chetan Bhagat. There is no doubt the core plot is lifted from his book. Ofcourse they have made significantly different twists and added a lot more masala to cater to the Indian mass market. The movie also reminds me of Munna bhai MBBS. It has all the active ingredients of a Bollywood movie. There is the token madrasi loser, a muslim family, a christian is thrown in too( who commits suicide btw) and theres the  pretty proffesor ki beti. It comes off as being too preachy (and unrealistically so). How many wild life photographers do we really need? just 1 perhaps for a thousand computer proffessionals. And we have all fancied being pilots, authors , directors or painters as a child. How many people really dream to be a boring a engineer or a businessman. Not many I am sure. Most of us would rather work in espionage, solve complex criminal cases or write a magnum opus like Leo Tolstoy. But we hardly have any need for art like we do for applied science or even pure science for that matter. Ofcourse we need art, but not every body with a hint of creativity can write or paint or sculpt for a living. However an average not-so-talented programmer can earn a very decent living. I hope young people do not take these movies seriously and ruin themselves.

In that sense, both five point someone and 3 idiots suck. Ofcourse Chetan Bhagat himself is a glaring example of that. His work sucks, BIG TIME. He is not meant to write trust me. But atleast his book want too preachy. 3 idiots goes way too far in driving home a point that you will feel like puking up a little right in your seats watching the movie.

Still dude, 3 idiots is defintely a movie based on five point someone. I wonder why Amir Khan would go as far to deny that ?

[Via http://bathildaa.wordpress.com]

RadioRockeTalk and The 3 Idiots

The New Year started off with a B-A-N-G on Radio RockeTalk with our programming resuming after a short break with the best the New Year had to offer: The undesputed king of Indian cinema- the guy who knows the pulse of his audience sooooo well;  is easy on the eyes; never goes wrong with the choice of music; picks his scripts selectively and still makes half of India feel ‘a flush comes to to my face and my pulse begins to race… it goes boompty, boompty, boompty, boompty, boom, boom, boom…’  Yes, you are right- Aamir Khan.  Well he did it again with his new Bollywood release, 3 Idiots!

Tuesday nights are our very own RJ Ajayr’s night and this time he chose to do a feature or rather a discussion on the 3 Idiots. I must stop right here to tell you that I have not watched the movie yet. Yes, it was screen in San Diego for a couple days and I COULD NOT MAKE IT. Sorry Goldspirt Films. Sorry Vijay and Shalni. Sorry Aamir. But most of all I am sorry for myself  

For all you newbies- every evening and sometimes at other times between 9:30pm and till whenever it ends (usually 3 hrs or so) we have fun ‘events’ like a radio talkshow – but different. There are hosts or RJs who introduce the topics and then everyone participates in the discussion. So very unlike Radio or television where things are pretty one sided, this is a live, all inclusive show where everyone can, well, speak up. As RockeTalk is all about the mobile phones, our audiences and participants are on the mobile phones and are from all over the world. From the well connected US to the remote places in India- anyone can particapte or just listen in.

The highlights of this week Tuesday night’s program:

Ragging scene

Kareena Kapoor: The only idiot? Or is it plain jealousy? LOL

Piracy movie – free movie download controvercy

Amir Khan’s excessive bathing

Hello! Is that a problem? Well thats what the guys said any way.. as for us girls… Aamir in see-thru wear… all wet.. any girls saying ‘no’ to that?

Chetan Bhagat controversy

Chotu_Tapori’s birthday

Today’s pick: Mohobbat ki Baatien on Mehfil @ 2:30 and 9:30 pm IST with Shafeeq

Friday night: Bollywood night on Radio RockeTalk @ 10:00pm IST with Pooji

Also recommended: Monday night, Jan 11, 2010- CarTalk: AutoExpo on  Radio RockeTalk with Karan and Sin

[Via http://blog.rocketalk.com]

Goa Movie Mp3 Songs Download

Goa

Movie Name : Goa

Year : 2010

Banner : Ocher Studios

Cast : Jai, Vaibhav, Premji, Arvind Aakash, Sneha…

Music Director : Yuvan Shankar Raja

Producer : Soundarya Rajinikanth

Director : Venkat Prabhu

Lyrics : Vaali

Download in a Single File : Goa 320 Kbps Mp3 Songs in Single File

Download in a Single File : Goa 128 Kbps Mp3 Songs in Single File

Download Links :

. 01 – Yelelu Thalamuraikkum – Karthik Raaja, Venkat Prabhu, Bhavatharini, Premgi Amaren, Yuvan Shankar Raja

. 02 – Ooru Nalla Ooru – Ilayaraja

. 03 – Adida Nayandiye – SP Charan, Yugendran Vasudeva Nair

. 04 – Goa – Krish, Ranjith, Tanvi, Suchitra, Chynk Showtyme, Pav Bundy

. 05 – Idhu Varai – Ajeesh, Andrea

. 06 – Vaaliba Vaa Vaa – Ilayaraja, SP Balsubramanyam, Chitra

. 07 – Kaadal Endral – Yuvan Shankar Raja

. 08 – Idai Vazhi – Benny Dayal, Mamtha Mohandas

. 09 – Goa (Club-Mix) – Yuvan Shankar Raja

[Via http://survivein.wordpress.com]

Wishing you all a Very Happy New Year...

My wishes are rather belated. This new year’s started off on a rather dull note when Mr. K’s father was hospitalized on New Year’s Eve when he had a slight scare with his heart. Thankfully, things are slowly getting back to normal now, and I am starting to get back to my normal routines.

For some time now, the snubnose like all other kids in India has been obsessed by Bollywood music. She knows the lyrics, songs, and most actors and actresses. Of course, me being the kill-joy mum has to try to divert her attention to more appropriate kind of music- something that does not always work.

One song that both me and the snubnose both enjoy to sing around the house is Aashayein – the song from the very inspiring movie Iqbal about a deaf and dumb boy who tries to get on board the Indian cricket team.

The reason I am posting about this, is because I think this song has a lot of meaning especially during the new year. It’s all about having hopes and dreams, and working towards achieving them.

This blog has the lyrics of the song along with the translation. The translation is a bit clunky. But, I hope you all get the message. I wish you all a very happy new year, where you will work hard and fulfill all the dreams that you have.

I have a feeling in my heart…this year is going to be unlike other years. I don’t know why, but for good or bad, I just know that this year is going to be an impactful one. Hopefully, for the good .

[Via http://nishitak.wordpress.com]

Movie Review : Raat Gayi Baat Gayi (2010)

Raat Gayi Baat Gayi: A classy, slice of life affair

Rating: 3.5 out of 5*

Starring: Rajat Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Neha Dhupia, Irawati Harse Mayadev, Navneet Nishan, Dalip Tahil and Anu Menon

Director: Saurabh Shukla

Advertised hinting the film as the desi version of Hollywood’s 2009 super hit The Hangover, Raat Gayi Baat Gayi is anything but that! But that doesn’t take away the fact that it’s a wonderfully crafted entertaining affair.

It is basically the story of Rahul (Rajat Kapoor) and his wife, Mitali (Iravati Harshe). The couple had, the previous night, attended a party with friends including Saxena (Dalip Tahil) and Amit (Vinay Pathak) and their respective wives, Jolly (Navneet Nishan) and Nandini (Anu Menon). At the party, Rahul had had a drink too many and had been following Sophia (Neha Dhupia), a sexy woman, at the party. The two had escaped to a room upstairs and were about to get naught, but Rahul just cannot remember what happened thereafter and if anything at all happened. Waking up in the morning with a hangover, Rahul is not sure whether his wife knows anything about his one-night stand with Sophia, that is if ever there was one. But his wife is in a foul mood. His friends, Amit and Saxena, don’t make things easy for him. Amit himself is in the midst of a marital crisis because Nandini has thrown him out of his house for cheating on her by prefering online porn over. As for their novelist friend, Saxena, he too has skeletons in his cupboard but he is a smart operator. What funnily shocking revelations tumble out as Rahul goes in search of what exactly happened in the night makes for a fun watch.

Narrated in a non-linear manner by actor cum writer-director Saurabh Shukla, the film is his finest effort as a director. Also, full marks to the production company PNC for delivering what one can truly term a ‘multiplex film’. The production values are of absolute high standards and the setting perfectly upmarket. There is absolutely no sleaze and the adult humour is just what one often hears at the parties. Great one-liners spread across plenty of sequences leave you laughing your guts out. The twist at the end is again a big surprise. The peppy songs are pleasant to the ears and very situational with the Love in C major being the pick of the lot.

[Via http://monadarlingblog.wordpress.com]

Addressing the World's Perceptions of America

(Thane)

A few weeks ago, two Indian guys, just a few years younger than me, approached me in a restaurant to ask me about what life was like in the USA. As we conversed—in their halting English and my even more halting Hindi—I realized that they were particularly interested in one particular issue.

“Is it true that Muslims are discriminated against in America?” one asked.

“Not just Muslims, but everyone with Muslim names,” his friend added.

Now, this question wasn’t too surprising. The media in India often depict the United States as a place of intolerance bordering on hatred toward Muslims.

Sadly, these impressions of America have a fairly substantial grain of truth in them. For example, many Muslims who travel in the United States are detained and questioned at airports. In an irony that almost sounds like it was intentionally engineered to generate publicity for his film, Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan was held for questioning at Newark International Airport just after he finished filming “My Name is Khan”, which is about an innocent Muslim man being aggressively interrogated at an American airport.

Far more troubling, of course, is the fact that hundreds of Muslims were rounded up and imprisoned for years in areas specifically designed to be out of the reach of political or judicial oversight, and many of these people were subjected to an organized program of torture that was officially approved at the very highest levels of the United States government. We now know that a large number, perhaps the majority, of those people had no connections to any militant groups.

So it makes sense that people around the world would have the impression of the United States as a terrible place for Muslims. Of course, the impression is largely false: the United States is actually still a very welcoming place, a place where the average Muslim is far wealthier and has far more political and civil freedoms than the average Muslim in almost any Muslim-majority country in the world. But the global media is far more interested in reporting on the scandalous exceptions than the run-of-the-mill norm.

However, national security demands vigilance, which is where the problems come in. Assume that we could somehow identify whether a particular person is a terrorist with 99.5 percent accuracy. There are around one billion Muslims in the world, and maybe 500 of those are actively plotting to engage in acts of terror. So, if we could identify terrorists with 99.5 percent accuracy, then we would identify 5,000,497 people as terrorists. 497 of those people would be terrorists, and 5 million would be false positives.

That means a whole lot of innocent people being detained and harassed, and perhaps even imprisoned, as well as two or three actual terrorists sneaking through the cracks, maybe by boarding a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. (This discussion is based in part on a similar discussion in the new book SuperFreakonomics, which is a really fantastic book, despite its silly title.)

Given that reality, it is far too easy to create a narrative of civilizational clash, where the West is seen by Muslims as ruthlessly rounding up innocent Muslims, and Muslims are seen by the West as nothing more than terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. But that narrative is toxic. In the end, it will only deepen tensions and breed the very problems that we are trying to avoid—suspicion, fear, and more acts of terror, rather than fewer.

Can we break this vicious cycle? I suggest that we can, but both sides need to make good-faith attempts to understand the legitimate concerns of the other. The American majority should deeply sympathize with stories of detention and abuse, and seek to limit these costs as much as possible. When it becomes clear that we have made a mistake, we should try to rectify it. For example, why isn’t there a popular political movement in America to offer compensation and an apology to those who were wrongly imprisoned, even if that imprisonment was done in good faith? On the other side, Muslims could try to understand that any attempt to screen out terrorists will be imperfect, and that mistakes are caused not by spite against their religion, but by human fallibility. (It would be easier for them to understand this if those of us from the West toned down our rhetoric and showed more sympathy with the innocent and more outrage at those who committed acts of torture and wrongful imprisonment in our names.)

Unfortunately, the trend  toward deepening suspicion and widening the fault lines between cultures is strong. The responsibility is on each of us to break that pattern, to reach out to people who are different from us and do everything in our power to project good will, tolerance, and mutual understanding. There will always be wrongs done, on both sides, but we can choose whether to focus our outrage and energy only on the wrongs of the other side, or whether we should also pay a little attention to the planks in our own eyes as well. It is only through true compassion that the United States can triumph over extremism, by being seen as a city on a hill rather than an evil imperalist power.

[Via http://audreyandthane.wordpress.com]

Film Review: Incarnations

Avatar is the unfortunate consequence of taking a large dose of white liberal guilt and adding half a billion dollars overseen by a master of visual style who couldn’t write to save his life. The story deals with humans out to plunder a new found utopia (named Pandora) that is full of a great new mineral, Unobtainium. This name is announced to us very early in the movie, perhaps we are to realize now that Cameron doesn’t really enjoy writing so we should give up now and just sit back and take in the luscious special effects. But this is a long film, and we movie watchers do not live by special effects alone. You cannot help but hear nails on the blackboard every time you hear people say the word with reverence, “Unobtainium!”

The “avatar” in the movie refers to a trance-like state that humans enter when they are asked to “drive” laboratory-made specimens of Pandora’s native people. When they enter this trance, their avatar wakes up and “lives” in the “outside world,” when the avatar goes to sleep, the humans wake up out of the trance and live in the “real world” inside the lab. Pandora is a beautiful world full of lush greenery, wonderful animals, pretty blue people, and plants and trees that are all connected to each other via their roots. It is a wonderfully imagined world in which one can lose oneself, one imagines repeated watchings of the movie would reveal new rich detail that one had previously missed, the effort that went into the design of this world is obvious. The viewer is easily lost in this beauty, almost trance-like one might say, until he hears a clunker of a line and is jarred back into the harsh reality of an especially poorly written Hollywood blockbuster.

We recommend that this movie be watched in Imax 3-D, preferably with the sound turned off. As a spectacle this movie has no peers. It reminded us of the first time we watched Toy Story, or the Matrix, or even, Terminator 2, each of those times we left the movie theater feeling as if we had just participated in a very moving experience, but even those movies are not a scratch on Avatar’s beauty. With a less obvious plot and better writing, Avatar could have made our list of greatest movies of the decade, as it is, it makes the grade of movies that must be watched, but once only.

Many people have written quite eloquently about the obvious anti-imperialist white-guilt message of the movie. We have but one thing to add. Not all societies plundered by the white man were like the native Americans. That is all.

Sita Sings the Blues is available for high quality download on a Creative Commons license on the film maker’s website. In a world of poor-quality torrents downloaded by eager yet thrifty flat-screen-TV-owning movie buffs, that alone would qualify it for a dekko. It is the story of Sita from the Ramayana, told with a fixation on Sita’s point of view. The movie is animated by Nina Paley who inserts her own story in parallel, one of having her heart broken by a man who leaves her for good when he gets a job in India. The animation is of varying quality, sometimes it is represented by Mughal-era and other ancient Indian paintings speaking the lines of Rama, Sita and so on, sometimes in crude drawings of a South Park like quality, and at other times by an impossibly curvy Sita and equally impossibly muscular Rama doing their Bollywood-inspired movie singing to the backup blues-vocals of Annette Hanshaw. But at all times the animation works. All along, the story of Sita (and Rama and the rest of the Ramayana cast) is told by apparently India-born youth trying to recollect as best as they can the story of the Ramayana, interspersed with musings on a childhood story by adults as they try to mine hidden-depths and back-stories of an ill-remembered epic. A certain irreverence permeates the movie, but it never descends to crude parody or atheistic preaching. Mostly it sounds like the story of the Ramayana as would be discussed by Indian youth today when they are sure their parents are out of earshot. The movie comes with an incredibly beautiful soundtrack. Almost all the songs are by Annette Hanshaw whose turn of the early-20th-century songs seem to have been written precisely for use in this movie. One of those that are not by her, the Rama-praising song sung by Lava and Kusha is comedic genius. We hummed it for days afterward.

For those of us of a certain age, the Channel-V promotions featuring Quick Gun Murugan hold a special place in our hearts. The 30-second parodies of Westerns, Rajnikanth, and south Indians in general made in the service of our MTV variant captured perfectly the adolescent zeitgeist of early 90s India. We were very excited when Quick Gun the movie was released and finally got a chance to watch it recently. The film delivers on every count: as a rich parody of Tamil and other South Indian films, as a parody of Westerns and most of all as a way to lose yourself for an hour and a half in well written and almost always well executed comedy. Dr Rajendra Prasad is brilliant as Quick Gun Murugan, he even manages to parody himself very effectively. Both Sita and Quick Gun are well-timed reminders that one does not need a lot of money to make a great movie just good writing, good acting, and a lot of imagination.

[Via http://justlanded.wordpress.com]