Pokiri: A Review

I am confused. Are totally mindless masala movies like these even supposed to be reviewed? So today let me hit this movie in a totally different way.

20 Things you learn from Pokiri:

1. Heroes have exceptional superhuman strength.

2. Heroes love to fight in sheds because it is a nice place.

3. You should never lose the keys of the shed after locking it.

4. The hero always dances and sings after a successful fight.

5. The hero loves to dance with girls in blue sarees.

6. You should wear 3 shirts on top of one another even in summers to look smart.

7. Guns used by the police have crooked barrels.

8. Girls like it when you stop them in railway stations and stare at their breasts.

9. Hero learns to use a pistol by seeing movies.

10. Police Sub-Inspectors are sex-starved and corrupt.

11. Villains love BDSM.

12. Hero's gun never needs to be reloaded.

13.  The bad guys need to reload after every 2 shots.

14. Girls wear skimpy clothes and sing in hoarse voices to impress the hero.

15. The hero is better than even the desperado Antonio Banderas as he kills all the guys who come to kill him in his house. Even Banderas had to flee.

16. He loves to dance and sing with item girls in between a meeting with the head villain.

17. Good looking girls have bastard boyfriends.

18. All rogues are actually undercover police officers, or brothers of police officers.

19. Police SIs are dull minded.

20. Police Commissioner sends only 1 police officer to take down an entire gang of 20-30 hardened criminals. And that officer doesn't even care to take a gun!

P.S. I Love You: A Review

"This is a movie that will leave you stunned and stupefied from beginning to end, if you don't head for the exits first. The only good things in it are Lisa Kudrow and Swank's wardrobe. The plot is unbelievable, although a competent script could have fixed that. The direction is flabby and uninspired, the casting is wrongheaded, and the performances run the gamut from uninteresting to insufferable ... the film wants terribly to be Ghost without a potter's wheel, but it just succeeds at being terrible."

This is what Mr. David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle had to say. Well as for me, I won't be so harsh on the poor film, but would like to elaborate on a few points.

Firstly I would have liked it immensely if the story had been set in Ireland, as it was originally in the novel. It would had certainly increased the cinematographic options at the very least. Forgetting the rather ambitious plot and storyline, overall it looks quite clean and organized. But it has to be said that both direction and acting were at severe fault, as I felt no connection to any of the characters. Swank just didn't get her act right. Something was missing always. As for the rest of the actors and actresses, they were just about average. You should blame bad casting too. 

Then comes the total duration of the movie which was simply too long. It was really hard to stop myself from quiting at 45 minutes. For a film over 2 hours long, it simply lacked the depth and the approach you would have expected. Even the soundtrack wasn't good enough.

But there were a few bright spots also. One of them being the rather nice chemistry between Hillary Swank and Gerard Butler (girls will love him!). And the other being Lisa Kudrow. And yes, I rather liked the ending. Didn't expect that.

Plus Factors : Story, chemistry between Swank and Butler, and Lisa Kudrow.

Minus Factors : Direction, casting, duration of the movie, script and the soundtrack.

My Score : 5/10

Back from Kolkata

Yes, that's absolutely correct, I am just back after a nice little tour of Kolkata. Enjoyed quite a lot in those 4 days. Hung out with my college friends and old school friends alike. Went to Victoria Memorial after many many years (really liked the cannon with Bengali inscription upon it). Got drenched in rain on Park Street. Chilled out in City Centre. Got lost in Chandni Chowk. Discovered that the metro has no air conditioning system. And finally drank incredibly ordinary coffee costing Rs. 100! It was quite a tour, I must say.

There were some things which I did not like so much such as - the widespread dirtiness and the seemingly invincible aura of overall shabbiness, narrow roads, decadent attitude of the government, lack of any evident development and the low number of public buses and autos.

Now you are going to ask me what I really liked about Kolkata? Well then I have an honest answer - the bookstores, the ready availability of obsolete things (vinyl disc for instance) and the hot and fair girls of Kolkata.

Oxford, Starmarks, Crossword - all are so wonderful that I could easily spend a whole day in any of those. Its really bad that nothing like this exists in Durgapur. Bought some books from Starmarks and Crossword, namely Omerta, The Sicilian, and The Last Mughal.

Also bought some vinyl discs at dirt cheap prices right on the Chandni Chowk sidewalks.

And finally the girls. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. And they are quite different too from the other big city girls. Not as flashy as Delhi girls, nor as decadent as the Mumbai girls. No sir, not yet.   

Presenting the Memory Cleansing Drug

Wow! Is this real man? Science really doesn't know any bounds, does it? I don't know how many of you have seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it very well seems that the science-fiction drama may become a stark reality in the days to come.

In the most brilliant movie mentioned above starring the beautiful Kate Winslet and the equally wonderful Jim Carrey, both of them portray a couple who undergo a medical procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship turns sour. The scientists at Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland have done something remarkably similar. They have developed (at least theoretically) a memory-cleansing drug that has the ability to remove any recollection of unhappy or embarrassing incidents, like childhood teasing or upsetting memories of a failed love affair. Pretty exciting, huh?

During the successful animal trials, the animals were given a drug that dissolves a barrier around amygdala - the almond-shaped organ in the brain where mammals store their memories of fear. It was found that after receiving the drug, the animals stopped being scared of sounds linked to electric shocks, indicating the memories had been erased. Homo sapiens share the same organ which can another way of saying that the drug can work on humans too.

Another big achievement of medical science, but aren't mistakes and unhappy memories the single biggest reason why we learn? With all our memories of our mistakes, our hard earned wisdom might go too, and our ability to learn and store.

ImHalal.com: Porn Free Search Engine

Guess what I found a few hours back while surfing the net - ImHalal.com. It is a completely new search engine especially designed for muslims who wish to avoid any sort of pornographic material from accidentally creeping into their search. According to the makers it is only a tool for searching the net in a clean and safe environment. Their stated intention is to become the number one homepage in all Muslim households. They also plan to introduce Islamic widgets in the near future.

They make use of a two layer filter system. The first filter analyzes the World Wide Web and only returns clean results. The second filter which triggers the 'Haram' rating system is a more aggressive filter and according to them which still needs to be improved on some grounds but already is functioning pretty good.

Well I don't know why but this somehow keeps me reminding of the Chinese censorships imposed on the internet, though the guys at ImHalal are quick to deny any such thing. Anyways I am hoping for the best. So ready to be ranked by Haram ratings?