Rants of a nerd
siva
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Posts by siva
Did you hear about the Morgans?
02 years ago
by siva
in Arts and Culture
Trust me you don’t want to.
This movie was badly written. There’s not much else to tell. I came home and saw that metacritic had a score of 27 for it. The wonder is the one or two positive reviews it seems to have picked up. Some reviewers’ lines are quoted below. Check out the metacritic page for the gory list of quotes. Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker try to do their jobs even though they have no lines for half their screen time. It looks like someone took a TV episode and stretched it out to fill a feature length film.
Selected quotes from reviews:
When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant’s pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he’s making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking. (Onion AV Club)
The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius. (Globe and Mail)
Grant and Parker stand around as if they’re waiting for someone to yell, “Cut.’’ (Boston Globe)
PS. The first line of this post is from the Washington Post review.
PPS. Pay attention: the trailer editor is a genius. There are no lines in the movie outside the trailer. It is not a sampler. It is the movie.
Music: Year in Review
02 years ago
by siva
in Arts and Culture
A little after everyone else has finished publishing their favourite music of the past year, here is my sampling of what got a lot of airplay with me.
Girls Aloud must have been my most listened-to band of the year. The girl band from the UK somehow has continued to deliver good music album after album and the most recent ones (Tangled Up and Out of Control) both lived up to high expectations. It is enough to get me to try a couple of other British girl groups: The Saturdays and Girls Can’t Catch in the coming year. Staying with the Brits, Lily Allen’s sophomore outing “It’s Not Me, It’s You” was a brilliant effort. Also delivering a solid album of ear-friendly material was Pixie Lott’s Turn It Up. Rounding up this solid British year is Paloma Faith. You may not have heard of her, but the album Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful really grows on you.
From across the channel came the hugely successful and foot-tappingly good One Love by David Guetta. The anthem song, When Love Takes Over, introduced us to it during our summer holiday in Europe. Guetta’s other great hit for the year was the collaboration with the Black Eyed Peas on I Gotta Feeling, a crappy song if there was ever one, but how catchy! A trademark BEP outing. Another francophone singer that impressed me this year was the Quebecois Coeur de Pirate.
Staying on this side of the pond for another moment, it would be remiss to not mention Something Sally, a northern European band whose album Familiar Strangers had songs like The Taste and Tip Of My Tongue – the latter a collaboration with Joss Stone. Joss Stone herself had a good year out with Colour Me Free! The other European artiste for me was Lenka, who I found on aurgasm a while ago & whose song The Show is a definite highlight of the recent past in music.
Jumping across the Atlantic, rock music was underrepresented in my playlist. The only band that I played consistently was Cobra Starship after I caught their lovely single Good Girl Go Bad from the album Hot Mess. The single featuring Leighton Meester is itself well made and includes an XOXO text, for those with a keen eye. Also check out Leighton’s single Somebody to Love (featuring Robin Thicke).
Norah Jones’ The Fall is interesting as it is so different from her normally piano focussed songs. These songs are very rock-ish with a much greater guitar emphasis.
That about rounds up my favourite music of the last year (or so). I wanted to mention a couple of albums, Rihanna’s Rated-R and Shakira’s She Wolf, that somehow failed to get me. Both have some good material and I think one resolution for me should be to listen to these two a bit more.
Pongal
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Today was Pongal – a harvest festival of southern India. It is dedicated to the Sun and marks the start of its north-ward journey. There is a decent Wikipedia entry on Pongal that makes for good reading. Pongal marks the start of the Thai month of the Tamil calendar as well. We celebrated with traditional rice based dishes – ven pongal and sakkara pongal with vadais, and sugarcane.
Expression
22 years ago
by siva
in Philosophy
As a break from the regular programming, a poem called “Expression” written by my father-in-law:
From where does the power of expression come..? It comes to us from our experience, the knowledge gained over the years, the inner urge of expressing oneself, the desire to reveal the picture of a thing one has witnessed or felt, and the ability one possesses to do so.
Early in the morning on rare occasions when I come to the balcony standing for a while when the morning mist is just vanishing I see three or four little birds chirping away merrily and streaking across hither and thither, at one time perching on a delicate plant stalk or close to a beautiful red flower which has just blossomed. A strange feeling of quietness comes over me, a peace, a sort of tranquility and I shudder a little with delight, a feeling that is of rare occurrence in this world of unpredictable changes. Immediately one thinks from where does this beauty come from, which makes us feel serene, our hearts full and content, a transient elevation of one’s mind and spirit and a strong thirst to remain such for long. On looking back is it the sweet chirping of the cute little birds with its fleeting movements, its desire to be near a flower and pecking at it ( what for do we know?) makes the whole thing beautiful? Is it our minds natural response that gets triggered off by merely witnessing this beauty and seemingly the mind falls into a trance? Does our past knowledge remind us on this, the creative aspect of our nature infinitesimal it may be and the Creator behind these.
Why not then our minds see in every creature, the plants the surroundings which we see in the waking state, this beauty call it inner or intrinsic beauty and makes us filled with joy all the time? How is that even a short period of such experience charges us to great heights the experience of which will forever remain hidden in our hearts. Oh God! What is the play of yours, which we fall for like bees attracted to a flower for its nectar? Where is the beauty in us, that we too like these little birds can cause a flutter of happiness to our fellow people and the surroundings be it animals or even nature? Oh! God, please reveal this secret if we may call so, give us that humility, that knowledge, that spirit to act, that contentment which would make every act of us beautiful.
The picture above is the nest of a few birds, who had built it within a bunch of betel vines along the wall of his house. The nest was hidden deep into the wines “sufficiently camouflaged from other nosy creatures the cats , crows and humans.”
Please Hanners, don’t hurt ‘em
02 years ago
by siva
in Arts and Culture
A quick shout out to Questionable Content from yesterday.
Hannelore didn’t freak out when Dora hit her on the head. So there has to be a “minimum” physical contact at which she breaks. Has that ever been explored? Hmm.
Madrid: Old Town
0My impression of Madrid would probably have been permanently influenced by the few days I spent there. The hotel I stayed in (Palacio San Martin) was a nice old building in a nice old part of town. (A quick aside – it has creepy lights that switch on when motion sensors detect you moving in corridors)
It was at a fantastic location. Very close to the Puerta del Sol (the plaza which houses the famous bear and tree statue) and the Plaza Mayor, it is at the very center of the old city. Bounded by the Gran Via (Broadway) to the North, the “golden triangle” of museums to the East and the Palacio Real (royal palace) & Cathedral to the West. The second night I was there, I walked up to the Espana square – a 15 minute walk even in the freezing conditions. I did not realize it then, but I was just one block away from the palace itself.
Espana houses a fountain and a column dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes. The column has a statue of Cervantes and he looks upon statues of two of his most famous creations – Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Not too far from this is the temple of Debod. This temple was to be a victim of the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt. Anwar Sadat offered the temple to Spain and it was shipped stone by stone and reconstructed in Madrid. It is a beautiful monument.There is something incongruous about an Egyptian temple surrounded by modern European office buildings, though.
My taxi driver informed me that the monument at the entrance to the the garden that houses the temple was erected in memory of the people killed in the terrorist attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004.
PS – photo above taken with my N900
Update: Fixed a typo “s/wound/would”
Back in Bombay
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
That trip ended finally. It was cold in Europe to the point that the day on which temperatures rose to 3 degrees was the warmest of the trip. This cold spell could be the beginning of a decade or more of lower temperatures, if one were to believe the theory that the global warming / cooling is occurring due to cycles of temperatures. It is terrible timing for the Copenhagen summit to have occurred now during one really big freeze. “Could we be in for 30 years of global cooling?” asks the Daily Mail today quoting scientists who believe in the concept of multi decadal oscillations. What of the low sunspot activity recorded in recent years? Could that presage another Maunder Minimum?
The politicians, especially the ones on the conservative end of the spectrum, have won the battle to confuse the issue completely. No one really seems to care for the science in any case. The really interesting thing is that the so-called conservatives don’t seem to want to conserve the environment. Forget the global warming / anthropomorphic climate change, isn’t it worth it to spend some efforts to clean up the environment of pollutants just so that we have clean air, water and land; and are in a position to leave that as a legacy to future generations?
In this context, I also wanted to highlight a wonderful piece in the Guardian I read yesterday on the flight (the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune were the only English language newspapers available in Madrid): Irrational fears give nuclear power a bad name. It is a wonderful report on how fear-mongering by politicians, contractors and media have led the world to ignore nuclear power as a source of energy.
Back on topic of the freezing cold, if there were to be a global decline in temperatures, I wish that leads to a little cooler clime here in Bombay. At a time the entire northern hemisphere is struggling with the cold, Bombay is almost sweltering at 30 degrees C plus temperatures.
Madrid: Two
0Today is my free day in Madrid. But for the freezing cold, it would have been a much more active day. I had a morning walk to the Puerta del Sol, a few minutes from the hotel. After that I had a two hour city tour covering many highlights including the main cathedral and the old palacio real, san francisco and san andrea churches, plaza Espana, etc. & ending at the Museo Thyssen.
I went in for a few hours. Pretty interesting collection of paintings organized chronologically. Will detail later. Now I am at the Reina Sofia museum, and plan to head to the Prado if energy permits. The cold conditions are worsened by the strong wind. So it is a major problem even walking from one museum to another despite them being fairly close to each other.
By the way, this museum has a vast Picasso collection including the famous Guernica. To tell the truth, it is a bizarre piece of art and I wonder why it is so famous.
Madrid: One
0Landed in Madrid last night after the worrying transit through Paris. Paris took its pound of flesh this time also: my swiss army knife. Plus they made us take a bus ride to the plane. Nuts.
Anyhow the airport was not shut down. And with a half hour delay. I reached Madrid. The guys I was meeting had set up a dinner with an opera like show, but the flight delay put paid to that. Dinner was eventually at a vegetarian place where they tried to make vegetables look like meat. Ugh. Ate what I could.
Today was all in meetings. The only sightseeing I got was the beautiful view over the city from the hotel restaurant and the view of the skyline with the city’s four sky scrapers. These are built on Real Madrid’s former training ground which the club sold to pay for Ronaldo!
Okay time is up. Post more later.