Movies by Ugadi

Mathrubhoomi - A nation without woman

Quite a shocking-futuristic movie.
Explores the option of polyandry in Indian hindu rural society because bride is hard-to-find for elgible bachelors, which is already plagued with its caste-conflicts.
Latesh Chaudhari as the bride looked real good in this movie, kind of resembles Neha Dhupia.

A fish called Wanda:

Good-racy fun movie.
Jamie Lee Curtis was looking good in this movie.
The American vs Brit fight featuring Ken Kline made up superb viewing.
Ken Kline stole most of the comedy parts in this movie.
Brit-accent also made up entertaining listening all through the movie.

Being Cyrus:

Good movie.
The plot is an oft-repeated one and extremely simple one, but this movie had loads of style with its chic-makeover, one can compare this movie with the presentation style of Rang De Basanti. And the movie had super actors and the dialogue, the background score and the narration by the protagonist all made the movie a pleasure to see. Saif Ali Khan, Boman Irani and Simone Singh had interesting roles-to-play in this movie, though its out-and-out a director's movie.
One worry is that I did not understand much of the Parsi-language(guess Gujarati) that was spoken during some phases in this movie.

Movies by weekend

Monty Python - The Life of Brian and The Holy Grail:

Saw both these movies back-to-back. Guess, both the movies had a fairly decent share of humour(political).
But, these two movies still fall-short of most other parodies or spoofs.
Guess, Adam Sandler or Leslie Nielson or Rowan Atkinson will always be the god of all spoofs or parodies.

Hazaron Khwaishon Aisi:

Good movie.
Concepts like 'naxalism' or 'emergency or police-raj' or 'absolute corruption' are handled in this movie. It takes you down the memory lane.. i.e into days where Indian democracy really fought against evils-within.

I feel naxalism wasnt deftly handled, one reason could be due the large-number of key-characters in this movie. Quite difficult to manage a movie which has many protagonists, since the story always shifts from one key character to another. No director could ever do justice to plots which has many characters. Sudhir Mishra though has tried his best to pull off a coup.

Had Siddharth been the protagonist or Vikram been the protagonist then things would have made spectacular viewing, but here both of them happen to be key characters and thus no justice is done to the ideology(or lack of) to both these characters.

The female-lead Chitrangada Singh was beautiful in this movie.

Taxi Driver:

Good movie.
The work-fatigue that was showcased in this movie by Robert De Niro as an over-worked taxi-driver was kind of similar to another Scorecese movie 'Bringing out the dead' in which Nicholas Cage also goes through similar motions, in which Cage suffers with overworked syndrome as an ambulance driver.

Brokeback Mountain:

Seems to have been a very difficult movie to pull-off on gay relationships.

La Mala Education:

Another movie which involves gay-relationships, the origins of this can be traced to catholic school.
This is a Pedro Almodovar movie.

Yes Minister - Benji episode:

Classic Brit-comedy.
Enjoyed seeing this small episode which makes fun of bureaucrats and how they manipulate politicians

Petronas Advertisements

Petronas advertisements seems to be quite good. Some are funny, but most of them seem to be values-oriented.

Got Marooned

Liked Maroon's song 'She will be loved...'.
Check out the lyrics here

I feel the singing style of Maroon's leadsinger seems to be kind of similar to Coldplay's leadsinger Chris Martin. Some of Chris Martin's songs has this swooning ability thanks to its mushy-factor. Also, Darren Hayes is another singer who also has this falsetto-factor.

Sweet Home Alabama

While listening to 'Sweet Home Alabama' by Lynyrd Skynyrd, first thing that came across my mind was 'Forrest Gump'. Really cant find words to appreciate the super song-picks in that movie. Dont think there will be ever be another movie like Forrest Gump.

Soon, while listening to the same song for the 4th or 5th time, the 'Forrest Gump' part of the flash-memory evaded from me and I was wondering how come Governor Wallace's name is coming in this song. So started googling for this song's lyrics, but could not figure out much info behind the context of this song.

So tried wiki for the 'Sweet Home Alabama', got a good education of American history yet again.

Movies by weekend

The Shining:

This movie is certainly not a Kubrick classic, but more like a Stephen King-one.
The movie had its share of usual pregnant silences which is quite a cliche in most horror movies. The best part of the movie was the trolley shots following the kid riding the tiny cycle.

Found a small technical defect in this movie. When the movie starts with Jack Nicholson driving his car into this hotel-resort in the middle of nowhere, one gets to see some amazing landscapes, forests and valleys, but sadly one also gets to see the shadow of the helicopter from which the aerial shot is taken. Surprisingly this appeared in a Kubrick movie, but I am told this shadow-defect can be seen only in the DVD and not in other prints.

Locks, Stocks and Smoking Barrels:

Guy Ritchie movies are simply awesome. The Brit way of speaking English makes good hearing. And the plot looked more like a Crazy Mohan-style, which made it really entertaining. The movie had a good mix of good-old revenge plot alongwith comedy-sequences.

Crash:

Movie had dark-shades all-around, but in the end brought in the usual feel-good tempo. I think this feel-good factor might have helped this movie clinch the Oscar. The movie was brilliant in the way so many different characters were shown , their stories, kind of reminded me of the movie 'The Traffic' another spectacularly shot movie!

Funny Clip - Call Center

This is a short clip titled Call Center. It runs for just 12 minutes, but it is packaged real good!