Late 80s and 90s was the worst time for Indian cinema. Indian movies lost the idea of having a theme in it. People like Salman Khan, Govinda, Shahrukh khan, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol became top actors. Most of them didn’t have any clue of acting. Shahrukh who ruled the industry for some time was merely a joke as far as serious acting is concerned. I do like Shahrukh Khan’s movies, but thats just because its usually a light movie, not because it has some nice theme, or nice acting. People like Naseeruddin Shah, Nana Patekar, Amitabh Bachchan, Shabaana Aazmi were missed. Songs were made basic necessity. Old movies used to have songs as well, but they didn’t come out of blue. Those songs used to move the movie forward. But songs like Kurta Phaad Ke were there for no good reason.
I see a new trend in Indian cinema now. Actors like Kay Kay, Irfan Khan, Rahul Bose, Konkana Sen are proper actors. Their movies may not be “commercial” movies as such, but their movies always have a theme, and more importantly a serious acting. These actors make me like Indian Cinema again.
Update : I have talking about Bollywood, not Indian Cinema as such. Apologies for mixing the terms. Bollywood means just Hindi/English movies, not south/east indian movies. I do not know much about South/East Indian movies.
I was coming back from a meeting. I was standing in the bus stop chilling, waiting for the bus which was late. Then came this girl and a guy. I hardly noticed them. They stood in front of me. Girl was talking on phone. When she finished on phone she asked the guy what he did on weekend. The guy said “Nothing on Saturday. On Sunday I watched Slumdog Millionaire.” <pause> “Its a good movie”. The girl replied, “yeah its a good movie. The part which I was atleast was, was SO India.” <”So” with a stress>. I was standing there, I heard it. My next inpulse asked me to ask her what she knows about India. And those who know me, know that its natural for me. I would fight with this person. But to your surprise, and mine too, I didn’t say anything. I smiled. No, I laughed.
I laughed because some people still think that India is a land of snake. It is full of poverty and thats all it has. I laughed at the ignorance and unintellect of that person. This is specially significant here. Here as in America. Because America has lot of Indians. (I never noticed that untill I started looking at different research groups in academia and industry in general). And after this, if this person could still think that way, I am sorry for her. Now, I am not saying that the life shown in that movie is untrue. With good approximation I can say the story is true (not the millionaire part, but the slum life). But is this India? Oh, not just India, she said “*so India*”.
When I read this post, I thought its just exaggeration, but guess what? I was wrong.
I bought my laptop in India. In India, I didn’t use my DVD drive to play movies much, because all the time when I wanted to watch a movie/song, I used to get the pirated avi/mp3 file. Now, recently I rented few DVDs and none worked. I tried everything, nothing worked. Even when I have been using Linux exclusively for more than 2 years now, I always have a feeling that if things are not working than its the Linux bug. So I cursed Ubuntu for having bugs. But I really wanted to watch movie, so I explored more, and found out it was the region code problem. Some non-social people started this concept of regions so that DVDs work only in a area, and wouldn’t work in other areas. Thankfully, you can change your region code 5 times. So, I change my region from India to US, and things are working now. This is really a ridiculous thing though. I was talking with a friend who is American and she said that she has problems watching international movies because the international DVDs they buy in US they are sometimes in different region code. Now, for people like me who love watching Hindi, English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and what not language movies, its a big trouble. Isn’t it funny that those who are paying money to buy these DVDs face this problem. And those who don’t (like I never bought a movie DVD, I always got the pirated avi files), its so easier. I mean, this is really stupid. The only people who you can restrict are the ones who are paying for it, not the ones who are downloading the pirated copies. I guess its just about putting too much restrictions for no reasons.
So, here I am, seeing probably 8th movie in Umang’08. This times Umang is surely one of the best Umang in these 4 years. And yeah, I am liking doing live blogging. I just had Pizza from Domino who has a stall just near the auditorium where movies are being shown. Apart from that I am having coffee and popcorns. Surely prices are high. Coffee costed me 10Rs, which usually cost only 5Rs. Pizza prices are 10-20rs higher. Popcorn which should cost only 5Rs. costed me 10Rs. But then you always screw your customers, don’t you.
This time there are 3 screens. 1 in auditorium, where you get to see the wide big screen. 1 is open air theatre, just outside the institute auditorium. And the last one is in newly made outreach auditorium. The outreach one has a really small screen, though the sound quality was good. Open air theatre surely didn’t attract people as even after arranging fire and bed, people didn’t come. Auditorium as usual is awesome.
Today they are showing bourne series in one serious. Right now they are showing Bourne Superemacy. Sound is good. So is video quality. And ofcourse this series is good as well. There were 3-4 non-english and non-hindi movies as well. Audience was like zero till thursday. But from friday onward the auditorium which has a capacity of 2000 students is more than half full. Good, isn’t it.
We also had Mr. Chanakya in opening ceremony, which was surely way too cool. They showed us a episode his new series which is about vedas and upnishadas. The episode was cool. I am now desperately waiting for it. I loved Chanakya.
On a serious note. Its good that Umang uses legal CD to show movies. But they were using illegal songs in intervals. And they even copied VCDs to show movie. (it should really be fine, but its still illegal)
So, this was going to be last weekend in US. So, me and Conley decided to do something interesting. We were thinking of a 2 day hike, but we couldn’t plan that. So finally we decided to make a video, and Conley came up with ‘Dragon Hunting’. And then, we decided that Conley will be the dragon hunter and I will be the cameraman. We roamed about Blacksburg and Cascades and asked people some dumb questions. No doubt, it was perfect fun for us. Some people gave real funny reactions to our questions. Some people were boring enough to speak any interesting thing. We tried talking to some shop keepers but most of them refused to come on camera. But anyways, it was a great hunt.
You can download the video using one of these torrents :
Conley did the editing of video and he did that very well. We have used “Steep”‘s songs which are under Creative Commons license. You can find Steep on jamendo.com. Our video is of course under Creative Commons License.
Enjoy the video :
part 1
part 2
part 3
I usually can see any disgusting movie. And I enjoy them. Ocean 12 was a disappointment for me though I enjoyed it. The movie wasn’t as exciting as Ocean 11. This time in Ocean 13, since Al Pacino was there, I was expecting a good time seeing movie. Though it came out that Al Pacino had a small role, which was disaapointment and then his acting wasn’t upto the mark as well. They mentioned ‘Tes’ in the start of the movie, but never showed ‘Tes’. For those who havn’t seen Ocean 11 and 12, it would have been confusing. Role of the camera they put in Al Pacino’s office wasn’t much clear.
Overall the adventure wasn’t bad. Adventure before show and adventure in the show. I had properly planned for the show, though Alli didn’t show up till 10:30PM. The Show was at 10:40PM. But it came out that the movie was 10:54PM not 10:40PM. I didn’t miss anything.
So, my rating for the movie is : 7/10