Arbitrary stuff from Romania - III - Mutu

Romania is a fierce football-crazy country and till now they have most probably produced one football superstar 'Hagi'. But lately with the emergence of Adrian Mutu, Romanians are seeing the rise of another superstar. Adrian Mutu is currently playing for Juventus and he is the darling of this football-crazy nation. Mutu's name is mentioned frequently in the country's late-night national news(for both his on-field and off-field activities).
Some Romanian club teams also are on the rise beating top-teams from the leagues of England, Scotland, Germany etc. in UEFA cup qulaifying matches.

Arbitrary stuff from Romania - II - DA

'Da' is the most often spoken word in Romanian language(which also obviously, happens to be the national language of Romania). Anyone who picks up the phone invariably says 'Da' rather than 'Hello'. 'Da''s equivalent in English is 'Okay' or Yes' or 'Agreed' or 'Done' etc., I am told that similar to 'Da' in Romanian it is 'Ja' in Dutch. Romanians also have adopted quite a few French-origin words like 'salut'(a greeting equivalent to 'best wishes' or 'my regards' or simply put 'my salutes'), 'merci'(means 'apologies'). Romania also has a few Hindi/Sanskrit-origin words like 'chai' (equivalent to 'tea') and 'zaher'(means sugar in Romanian, while in Hindi 'zeher' means 'poison').

Arbitrary info on Romania - I

Romanian language is supposed to be primarily based on the Romantic languages i.e French/Italian/Spanish/Portugese etc., but what distinguishes Romanian language is the strong influence of Turkish language. Turkish rulers i.e Ottomon empire have had a major impact on this country and it shows clearly in the Romanian language and also in the architecture of the Romanian Orthodox churches which one can find everywhere in the country. The Romanian orthodox churches have 'dome-shaped'(influence of Muslim Ottomon empire) tower unlike the usual cone shaped tower that one sees in most churches all over the world. These Romanian churches were once close to extinction thanks to the communist dictator Caucescu who ruled this country for a fairly long span of time from the 1960's to late 1980's. Caucescu had ordered to demolish most of the churches in the country and also barred his people from worshipping God in his country.(this reminds me of an interesting sequence in the movie 'Forrest Gump' in which Gump appears on a national television alongwith John Lennon)

Harini and Shreya Ghoshal

Liked the song 'Piya bhole ... ' song from the movie 'Parineeta'.
The female-lead of the movie Vidya Balan also looks beautiful!
Thought, the way Shreya Ghoshal giggles and sings is similar to tamil singer Harini.
The giggle brings in a good-dose of innocence to the song!

Harini and Shreya Ghoshal with their quick-giggles and the heavy breaths while rendering songs have manufactured quite a few hit songs.

Note: Kartik - what do you think ? - email me or write what you feel in the comments section!

London Blasts

Why all this hype when London is bombed and no hype when some remote town was bombarded with missiles in Iraq or Afghanistan?
This inconsistency really irritates me.

Look at BBC or CNN crying that London is bombed and casuality as 100, when a similar happening in any third-world country is hardly mentioned inspite of the huge casuality. A natural-disastor like Iran-quake or Asian-tsunami will go also go unnoticed.

NDTV with its 24 X 7 channel is also aping its western cousins quite-well! Every channel have their own prefixes for NEWS i.e 'cnn news', 'bbc news', ' 24 X 7 news', 'sun news' etc., funny how news programme and the news-items are getting prefixed with the 'channel name'!

The Interpreter and War of the Worlds

The Interpreter

Ordinary movie!

Fast-paced movie, but with a rather silly plot!
Nicole Kidman kind of overacts!

One could draw parallels with this movie and the recent happenings in Africa. White-men getting kicked-out, child soldiers, western democracy influencing opposition in that country, dictator getting abused everywhere for his excesses etc., - except for the child-soldiers part the dictator seems to bear a resemblence with Robert Mugabwe(Zimbabwe's Prime Minister).

The role which was played by Roshan Seth in Mississippi Masala is more realistic than the role played by Nicole Kidman in 'The Interpreter'


War of the Worlds:

Ordinary movie!

A boring Spielberg movie.
Dont think Tom Cruise could probably repeat with a performance like 'Jerry Maguire'!

Aussies down :(

Peter Roebeck's columns are a treat to read! Just before yesterday's cricket match(ODI) against Australia and Bangladesh, Peter Roebeck had claimed in his column in 'The Hindu' that Aussies are at a new-low thanks to their defeat in 20-20 against and against a county team in an ODI and Peter said that it wont amuse him if England could beat the Aussies.

Peter Roebeck also claims that Aussies are good-starters and once they are on top they go for the kill, thus not allowing the opponents to comeback. Steve Waugh did the same during the last Ashes tour of England.

Now after reading this coulumn, I got to saw Bangladesh beating the mighty Aussies! That's a major achievement for Bangladesh. It is mostly former Australian players including Richie Benaud who were hard on Bangladesh after their infinite miserable performances. Now with this win, Bangladesh have silenced the Aussie critics!

Aussies did not attack enough all through the match. For most of the match they bowled with only four fieldsmen inside the circle, which is a bad strategy that gave lots of singles to the inexperienced Bangladesh-players.

Another strategy of Aussies which might have got most of the viewers by surprise is 'Jason Gillespie bowling the end-overs with a thirdman up in the circle'. Jason kept bowling the slow offies throughout the slog-overs and at one point of time everyone watching the match knew what ball Jason is going to bowl next(if you wondering what ball - it is the off-spinner!). I think Jason Gillespie is one bowler who bowls with a lot of heart(not with brains unlike Venkatesh Prasad, who bowls extra-ordinary slow-balls). Jason should have bowled his heart-out with his superb length-deliveries, yorkers and the fast-bouncers!
Guess, the Aussie think-tank were over-confident!

The Godfather series

Great movie!
Guess I saw this movie for the nth time, but this time I made it a marathon i.e 1, 2, 3 at one go!
Enjoyed the movie like never before.

The slowness of the movie and the rather sober background music was the best part I liked about this movie. On the contrary, it is because of the same two reasons why I hated watching 'Donnie Darko'(add to that an unexplained story!). 'The Godfather' made sense to me because the plots and sub-plots in this movie was explained, but the plots and sub-plots in 'Donnie Darko' is a mystery!

One of Kill Bill's advertisement reads 'Revenge is a dish best served cold' suits 'The Godfather' movie-series.

Friends and Big Fish

Friends:

Got the chance to see the episodes of Friends season 1, 2 and 3, enjoyed the same!
I think the best episode has to be the one in which Ross and party travel to UK for the wedding and then Rachel also wishes to come-in at the last moment!
Joey and Phoebe were great fun to watch!

Big Fish:

Good movie!
Magical Realism in full-flow!

Photo Connect

Photo A 


Photo B 

Connect these two photos!
Type-in the answers in the 'comments' section of this post!
Clue: this question is cricket-related one!

Donnie Darko

Ordinary movie.
Expected this movie to be of the horror-kind(read the title!), which I normally dont enjoy. But the worst part was that the movie is was too-slow and the music too dull. Remember another movie which was way-too-slow and the music too slow, was 'Ek Chotisi Love Story'.

Wonder how this movie pulled-off a casting coup(including Drew Barrymore(also an Executive Producer of this movie), Patrick Swayze)!

Van Wilder and Born on the Fourth of July

National Lampoon - Van Wilder:

Good college-comedy movie.
Tara Ried looked real hot in this movie!
Had earlier seen another top-class Lampoon movie which was a spoof on Independence Day and other alien movies.
But this Lampoon movie was a lot different with an original story.
American teen-comedy as a movie-genre is great fun to watch - including 'Revenge of the Nerds i, ii, iii and iv, American Pie series, Adam Sandler-movies, Trip-movies.

Born on the Fourth of July:

Ordinary movie.
I had earlier seen a couple of movies set in the backdrop of Vietnam-war and when I watched this movie had nothing new to offer.
'American history' is a great-read particularly the turbulent 60's and early 70's.
Best 'Vietnam' related readings/serials/movies according to me include
a. Art Buchwald's columns(mostly a parody on Nixon and his Vietnam war),
b. 'The Wonder Years' and 'Tour of Duty' television serials,
c. 'Forrest Gump' movie

The 300 Spartans

The 300 Spartans:

Ordinary movie. This War-movie which sings praises on the Spartan-army, also insults everyother army.
Wars are stupid and war-movies are no exception to this stupidity. Just like 'The 300 Spartans', the movie 'Troy' also talks about 'omens' which gives warriors and rulers a false-sense of security about the future. This sounded really stupid!

Hoping to learn a little about Greek history via wikipedia before watching any more Greek war-movies.

Seven Years in Tibet

Good movie.
This movie tries to explore few traces of world-history(my favourite subject in school), so enjoyed those sequences.

Had Johnny Depp played the same role as Brad Pitt, the sequences with Dalai Lama(younger) would have been more interesting. Johnny Depp and his pranks are always a treat to watch and Johnny Depp has great chemistry with young-actors!

Woh Lamhe

The song 'Woh Lamhe' by Atif Aslam is good. But the controversy surrounding it really sucks (the Bhatts and the Pakistan 'Jal' band brigade).

Pakistani-pop bands are rich in talent when compared to Indian pop-bands but guess the financial backing is not there!

Dogma

Dogma:

Inspite of the good star-cast the movie is an ordinary one.
The comedy-content is also mostly below-par except for a few scenes.
Even, George Carlin's humour is not entertaining.
The two prophets are funny when they are courting for the female-lead.

KwK - the final show for this season:

Boring one. No usual embarassing questions for the guests and Karan was going ga-ga about AB and SRK all-through-the-show.

Kingdom of Heaven

Good movie!

Found Orlando Bloom's acting to be good.
The movie's beauty lies in letting the viewers draw a parallel between the movie-plot and the current middle-east problem and Islamophobia among westerners.

'Religious zealots' and 'mercenaries' are strange-folks, it is very difficult to understand what actually drives them to this kind of madness! 'Kingdom of Heaven' tries to explore the reason why Muslims and Christians fought such bloody battles for the holy-land and strangely the movie just-stops of explaining 'the reason behind this madness'.

In the last scene of the movie, inspite of seeing the mindless-violence, both Bloom and his love-interest start their journey back to Jerusalem for yet another fight!

Nice segments in the movie:
i. The protagonist says, 'god doesnt speak to me, even in the place where Christ was crucified'.
ii. Saladin says 'nothing' and later smilingly 'everything'.. in response to Bloom's question as to 'why is he fighting for Jerusalem inspite of the heavy-casuality?'
iii. Last scene when Bloom and his love-interest ride their horse enthusiastically to (my guess follows) join the crusaders in their journey towards Jerusalem.

Hitch

Romantic-comedy

Few observations:
i. Music that runs in the background seems to have been pilfered:
a. When Albert goes after Allegra(i.e just before the board-room sequence) - the background music seems to be an adaptation of James Bond theme music(of course, maybe the film-maker wanted it that way ... but it is truly unoriginal of the music director to have done that)
b. When Will Smith jumps on top of the car which Eva Mendes is driving(during the finishing-stages of the movie), the background music seems to have been lifted from the theme music of the movie 'Life is Beautiful'
ii. The scene in which Eva Mendes starts crying while seeing 'Jerry Maguire' is quite funny. Parallel to this can be seen in 'Sleepless in Seattle' where Meg Ryan starts crying when she sees a romantic movie in TV.
iii. The sequence when Allegra asks Will Smith - whether he taught Albert that she cant whistle or to throw the inhaler before kissing her or to dance in a zany way etc., Will Smith says 'No'.. then she asks 'what did you teach him?' and Will Smith says 'Nothing'. In short this sequences encapsulates the entire-movie.

Notting Hill

Good movie.

The best part in this movie include:
i. Hugh Grant playing the role of a down-to-earth Brit, maybe overacting in the last scene of this movie where he gets down from the limo alongwith Julia and walks down a red-carpet.
ii. 'Brownie' scene in this movie was enjoyable
iii. The stupid blushes of Julia Roberts were a treat to watch and all those conversations she and Hugh Grant have without uttering too many words.
iv. The under-achieving friends of Hugh Grant and their conversations were also fun to watch
v. The songs that come in the background were good.(including 'She' by Charles Aznavour and 'When you say nothing at all..' by Ronan Keating)

After Julia-Hugh breakup, Hugh tries to find new girlfriend with the help of his friends - this segment in this movie is quite distasteful.
Wonder why the protagonist has to search a girlfriend?
Isn't the protagonist self-contained as he started in this movie?
Somehow, during that stage, the independent thinking-guy disappeared!

Brit-movies are a treat-to-watch with their good storyline, unlike most of the American-masala movies!

Shifshuf Naim

This is an Israeli movie. Has loads of comedy-sequences in this movie. It could be classified as an 'teen-comedy-genre'. The english name of this movie is 'Hot Bubblegum'. Guess this movie can be classified as a 'mother of all the american-teen comedies'.