Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Hurt Locker-Bringing the war home...
Not so lovely-The Lovely Bones
Monday, January 18, 2010
5 Minutes to Help a Nation...
Kuruthipunal (1995) - Review
Got to watch this movie a second time recently- just hated it the first time (I was about 10 years younger then). What a classic! This is the closest any Tamil movie has gotten to a Hollywood standard action thriller, at least among the ones I have seen. Just got to know that this was a remake of the Hindi movie 'Drohkal'-want to see the original sometime.
Needless to say, Kamal's performance stands out as an honest, brave police officer, torn between his duty and vulnerabilities as the protector of his family. Surprisingly, the performance of Nassar beats even that of Kamal, except for a few dramatic sequences. The dialogues hit home most of the time, and the cinematography is fantastic (it definitely shows that it is PC Sreeram on the driver's seat). Maybe this movie was way ahead of it's time, kudos to Kamal for bringing such bold stories to Tamil-and for doing it time and again.
Verdict: This one is for the collection.
Photo Source: Google Search
Flawless (2007) - Review
A good one time watch-somewhat cliched storyline, but the setting of the story is different from most other crime thrillers I have seen. Kept me interested till the end.Was a bit surprised at the low IMDB rating.
<spoilers>
Plot: The movie is about a diamond heist set in 1960s, the protagonist is a brilliant manager in the world's biggest diamond company, who has been passed over several times for a well-deserved promotion because of her sex. Now, when she is almost at her breaking point, an interesting acquaintance comes up with a plan to rob the company and get their fair share to settle down in life. But can she be really sure of the motives of this man?
</spoilers>
Verdict: Good one-time watch
Photo Courtesy: IMDB
Reader's Digest
The once-beloved magazine is making news today as it files for bankruptcy protection. As a die-hard fan of Readers' Digest at one time, this might have come as a sad news to me...just about a decade ago, but today, I am simply happy that something is going wrong in the house, for it gives them a reason to take a closer look at who they really are, and fix some of the basics.
The magazine has become just a bunch of crap, from what it used to be 10-15 years ago. I used to love reading RD in my grandpa's house, in fact it formed an important part of my initial literary sojourns, as I am sure was the case for many other adolescents. One of my first expenses when I started earning in India was to subscribe to RD. I had a bad experience with it with so many insert-advertisements, sweepstakes invitations by mail, and lots of irrelevant, completely nonsensical content including interviews with Bollywood damsels! I thought to myself, maybe RD India has gone to the dogs, and the mother-ship would still be intact. Again, when I came to the US, I started subscribing to RD. and found it to be incorrigible! In one copy, I counted the advertisement pages to be around 30% of the book itself! I canceled the subscription after a few months.
There was a time when RD wouldn't even take advertisements, they did a huge readers poll just to start advertising, that too only small unobtrusive ones...from there it has been a steady decline, driven by sole objective of profit making, give your address for subscription and you start receiving all sorts of crap.
I guess, in the magazine industry, there are clear choices, you either go down the advertising path, add on subscribers just to shore up your numbers and make all your money from advertising and other activities (like selling the subscriber base contacts etc.). One good example of this in India was Business Week that gave away the subscription for next to nothing, but you get a lot of ads. And most of the time, these magazines are just "just another" magazine on the desk, you never craved to read it, you never waited for it in the mail, leave alone the thought of preserving one!
The other path, the more courageous one, that made great magazines like Readers Digest and National Geographic was to focus only on building a highly loyal subscriber base and meeting their expectations over and over, being always careful not to annoy them in any way. These were the ones you cherished, you wanted pass on those articles to your family and kids, you tried to preserve these for the future, the whole experience from subscription to reading to preservation was a joy in itself-this is precisely what RD and its owners failed to understand.
The result?
U.S. circulation at Reader’s Digest plunged 14 percent last year to 8.31 million from 9.68 million, compared with a drop of less than 1 percent for the top 10 magazines, according to Magazine Publishers of America.
I might be just the right sample for Readers' Digest, they charged me a subscription fee of $10 for a year and then sent me crap which made me cut that to an expense of just about $3. Instead, if they had charged me double of that ($20) or even more ($25), without the associated advertising crap, I would have still subscribed to the magazine and remained loyal-I have discouraged some of my friends too from taking a subscription; a business can probably do just fine without a loyalist, but an active terrorist is a dangerous proposition :).
Book Reviews
What are the first thoughts that come to you when you think of War? Death? Bloodshed? Glory? Tyranny? Kings? Soldiers? Strategy? Peace Treaties? Have you ever asked the simple question, if you took an army of 30000 people to lay siege on another nation, and it took 3 months to do it, where would you ask them to pee during that time? Assuming that you didn't want to make your entire camp a huge s***hole, you would want to create sanitation facilities on the scale of a city itself, correct? What about food supplies for these soldiers, again assuming that you did not know how long the siege was going to last, you would want to ensure a constant flow of supplies to the camp from *somewhere* right?
This was the first book on I read on war, that was not steeped in the glory or the tragedy or even the suffering. Instead it intelligently approaches war from the perspective of an operational strategist, planning supplies and facilities for an operation. At the same time, there is an enormous human struggle in the background between the attackers and the defenders (who we learn to sympathize with), the war room decisions, the actual execution of grand strategies, their successes and failures, are all told with the tastefulness of a master storyteller that Ismail Kadre is, building up to a fantastic climax.
Palace Walk: By Naguib Mahfouz
This was an immersion experience, into a totally different world. The novel is the first of a trilogy based on contemporary life in Egypt. It revolves around a single family with a dominant patriarch, his submissive wife and their children. What makes the read absorbing is the author's inimitable style of walking through the story, casually, patiently from each character's perspective. There are no magnificent things happening most of the time, still, the plot and the characters are so interesting that it urges you to read on. It gave a glimpse of the life in Egyptian Islamic families in the pre-World war era. Putting down the book, one gets the feeling of having lived in those settings for a considerable length of time, knowing those characters intimately. Am planning to read the next two parts as soon as I get the time.