I Candy = Idiot Candy

Recently, Hollywood, at least as far as the critics and intelligent moviegoers were concerned, experienced a phenomenon where they finally grew fed up of the mindnumbing, brain battering assault of CGI extravaganza. A new tool and element which should have added to their storytelling arsenal, it was exploited as an end unto itself. All manner of story, coherence went

out of the window as film after film piled situations to exploit their Fantasy world creating and visual extravaganza fueled scenarios.

Until of course, Avatar came along. It took technological exploits to new heights, raised the benchmark in CGI inspired storytelling and introduced some groundbreaking visual effects and techniques. 3D effects and CGI were used not for their gimmicky value but because they were integral to storytelling. Cameron put the effects to genuine use to tell a story that would have been impossible to tell some years back - at least not with such grandeur.

But to the average Indian viewer it was just another special effects extravaganza. They embraced previous efforts like Transformers, 2012 because of all the eyecandy. But they failed to notice that Avatar was special among them. To them, it was just another CGI loaded film. And thats just like saying Na'avi Blue and Navy blue are the same. They are not. Only a

fool would not get the not-so-subtle takes on the American Economic-Imperialist tendencies or the climate issue. Or maybe they didnt find the subtexts because they have been brainwashed by nonsensical hindi films to not bother looking for underlined issues/causes. Escapism at work again.

Escapism is not only appreciated, it is revered and preferred. People would rather have a series of Deus Ex Machina, a series of oh so fortunate coincidences. Coincidences that would put Archer's epic novels to shame. A new trend is starting up. The discover yourself genre. Which is an improvement over other trends seen in our film industry. But sadly the genre conveys nothing worthwhile. No useful message. No helpful advice. Lets take Wake Up Sid. Super rich boy, purpotedly lazy and a procastinator. If the journey is about finding yourself about discovering your talents and aptitude, put some effort into it. Make it a worthwhile, gruelling journey like it always is. Within days chappie meets girl, discovers life, and turns photography hobby into a career, starting as intern at a prestigous magazine/weekly or whatever. ABE HALWAA HAI KYAA SAALON????!!!!!! People change courses several times and yet are unable to find their true aptitude. The struggles and fears that they face even when they know their calling, because it is a lesser trodden path - those aspects are conviniently swept under the proverbial rug. How ruggedly Rughoo like, all talk and no substance.

A new movie has come up Three Idiots. As I am yet to see, i shall reserve my comments. But I must say this - It is ironical, that the people who enjoy these self discovery movies about people overcoming pessimism, self doubt or whatever weaknesses, are best enjoyed by talented, happy go lucky, naturally gifted people who happen to be well settled in life for one reason or the other. True strugglers can only laugh their mirthless ironic laughter. We dont empathise with such films. (And in any case while I am looking forward to seeing it, I am looking forward to Sherlock Holmes much more). Its like the classic throwback to eighties cinema. Where the plight of the poor, streetsmart common man was "accurately depicted" and all the middle and upper class enjoyed watching it over a tub of popcorn.

On an unrelated note, Mr. Bhagat quit whining over the credits in the movie. You deserve no credit. If the movie were actually faithful to you book, it would have been the most sinfully boring, pompous, self centred, OOH ME IIT, ME IIM, ME SO GREAT, type of movie that woudlnt be worth the 15 second promo that heralded it. And lastly, to all those gleefully

celebrating the decade end. The new milleneum started with 2001 and so the first decade ends with 2010, not 2009. Samir and his ordinal, cardinal, ordinance, cardiac, oracle, cuticle, cardinal sinfully boring theories be damned. Crappy New Year for me most probably, Hopefully a Happy one for you guys. See ya next year.

Review by the Female Species are oft More Deadbeat Than the Male

Why female movie reviewers suck. Female movie reviewers suck. I know what you are going to say. That I say this because I only like the mindless, CGI loaded action/thrillers. In which case you would be wrong. My reasons are entirely different.

Females have this habit of turning everything into gossip and idle chatter. To see how terrible they are, try catching the Sony Pix show Chicks on Flicks. Only thing worse than a female reviewer is two female reviewers sitting together, wearing skimpy skirts and then crossing and huddling their knees together so as to not overexpose to the camera. Goes to show how bloody brilliant they are to begin with.

With a good review, you get some idea about the movie, and whether you would want to watch it. With female reviewers, you get a female perspective on things. What one wants is a reason to see or not see the movie and decent reviews provide that perspective. But with female reviewers all you get is why they wouldn't watch it or why they would drool all over it. Maybe its their latent passive aggressive tendencies to fight against what they percieve as a male dominant entertainment industry, which manifests as a need to show everything from a female tinted glass (okay, i dunno what that is exactly but you get the point.). And when you do get perspective, its a narrow biased perspective. They probably overcompensate for not getting

their voices heard so often. And end up ruining their one chance to shine. And, true to their penchant for impracticality they will let absurd personal biases hinder them from delivering a neutral stance. In short, the resultant opinion is skewered in so many ways, you end up being more confused and frustrated than you would if you were to watch a rehash of RGV's Aag interspersed with Akshay Kumar scenes from Tashan and CC2C.

Another instance of their malfeasance occured when they were reviewing a decent to average action flick and a mediocre romantic comedy. They ended up vouching for the romantic comedy and trashing the action flick, even though on an unbiased level, the action movie was overall much better. But hey, female perspective right? Trust me, irritating people are quite irritating in general, but nothing irks more than an irritating female. The most irritating of those irritating qualities is probably the fact that they pretend to talk like they actually know what they are talking about. Barring the old veteran female reviewers who happen to write for The New York Times and other such dailies, these women are immature bubbleheads picked more for their looks than their ability to critique the cinematic arts. They have no knowledge of real cinema to

compare from, no idea of what constitutes a good or a bad film and hence no benchmark to go by. They are as lost as the characters in....well, Lost. Sugar coating and candy floss is fine, but let it stick to the movies. Not the reviews.

Someone needs to teach women the difference between Chat Show and Opinion. And between opinions and useful opinions.

I Feel Lazy, Send in My Avatar

Some time ago, a sci fi movie Surrogates, based on a cyberpunk graphic novel of the same name was released. Bruce Willis toplined the feature. It came and went, largely unnoticed. But the frightening fact is, the plot of the movie, or rather the crux of it, could soon be a reality.

It deals with a future where humans live in isolation from the rest of the world and communicate externally through the use of SURROGATES (hence the title, in case ya didnt realise).

We are imperceptibly, gradually getting socially detached. Ironic, considering the array of stay in touch gadgets/widgets splayed at our disposal. Personal contact, face to face interaction is slowly subsiding as video conferencing, chatting and virtual socialising come to the forefront. People shy away from all forms of actual interaction and then promptly enroll in contactotherapy as a cure for their chronic "shyness'. We prefer to go out and socialise using Second Life Avatars. A culture that was possibly parodied intentionally or unintentionally in James Cameron's Avatar.

Slowly and surely we are building a shell around ourselves, brainwashed by mindless entertainment, kept busy by silly fade-in-a-minute crazes and fads. And its not like we are utilising this privacy, this time away from the maddening crowd to self analyse or introspect. We are busy dulling our brains on gimmicks created out of boredom by other numbskulls.

We can exist days, even months, on end without leaving our house. We have almost everything delivered at our doorstep. With almost everything and accessible through the web many of us can and in fact do work from home. Actual interaction with the outside world is not at all necessary to survive - at least, in theory. And if we could have and experience all the pleasures and joy in life from the relative comfort of our own abode, why wouldn't we. As far as we can percieve, there seem to be no pitfalls or flipsides to such an arrangement.

Pleasure and comfort are the hardest to resist. Which explains the influx of entertainment and comfort technologies that we welcome eagerly into the fold. Adaptation to such will of course leave us weak and incapable of facing anything but the mildest and meekest of climate/environment. The illusion of being able to control our world and surroundings is what is at the core of this fatal attraction.

So, I hypothesize that we will all end up staying at home, waiting for the next bit of pleasure to come our way, indirectly interacting with others (but viciously so, because the pleasures of commenting and status updating are overpowering to most). Indulging in artificial exercise and therapy to keep ourselves fit and natural and sustained. And no doubt, some enterprising blighter will use this opportunity to invent an interaction simulation, where we will gladly and gleefully indulge in "realistic and immersive" interaction with other beings.

Phoren Tadka ( Exotic Spices)



Indians like foreign stuff. As long as you properly Indianise them. They want the phirangi stuff drenched in Indian sensibilities. Dish should be foreign, but garnished with local spices. Ok, ok, enough of bad puns, ill elaborate further. They basically want to play it safe but at the same time pretend to project an aura of sophistication.

They think they like Chinese and Italian. But that is only because they have eaten the street side vendor spicy Chinese, or the thick cheese pizza on hard crust bread at the local fast food outlet. Authentic food, with its weird often smelly ingredients and sometimes bland taste would leave them disgusted. And this i say only about the conventional items. I am not even going to speak of acquired taste items like Frog or snakes that might present themselves on the menu. Which reminds me of a funny incident at a Hong Kong breakfast buffet. I took some meatballs on my plate and as I headed back to the table I thought it wise to check the contents in case it was pork. I asked an idle waiter if the contents were chicken or pork. He said something that sounded like pork. Further prodding made him enunciate it equally unintelligibly albeit a little louder. Imagine my horror when I realised the word he was spouting was FROG.

This is not relegated to just food items. They take whatever aspects of foreign culture they like and then Indianise it. The result is not always pretty. Torn jeans that have gaudy glitter patterns on the backside, worn with atrociously loud t shirts. You have to pretend to like exotic stuff. And so you are always searching for exotica. Because at some point the exotic stuff becomes common place. And once everybody else likes it, you have to discard it and move on in search of other exotic stuff. Because, lets face it, there are pretenses to be kept up with.

All this while, the other cultures are discovering the good about our culture. Yoga, vegetarianism and Herbal tea to name a few. Ironically, some of these things became popular only after the West found it cool and hip.


They like modernism, freedom of expressions and casual, open minded approach. They imitate it. But only to a certain extent. Social and class distinctions, communalism have not been discarded. The youth there take up odd end jobs to earn their pocket money. Most of the work here is considered

below standards, sanctity of work has no respect here. So we continue to take and mould, adapt whatever catches our fancy to our convenience. The gadgets, playstations, ipods are all there. Of course wifi zones are scarce. The casual workclothes, and young urban attitude is there, but alternative careers find no takers. We don't move beyond, doctors, engineers, lawyers and MBA.






enough of bad puns, ill elaborate further. They basically want to play it safe but at the same time pretend to project an aura of sophistication.

Moment of Dread/Bewakufi ka Saamna

Indians are an opinionated bunch. They love to offer advice. Even to those who cannot take it, or worse, dont need it. Their voyeuristic tendencies are also linked to this instinct. They tend to snoop and meddle in affairs where they can offer help, advice or opinion though they only

subconciously do so. Paparazzi culture (though i use the word culture in the loosest sense) exists but not at its peak like in the US and so they dont really like to look into others lives all the time especially when they can offer no opinion or affect the outcome by vote. So any reality show that has no public voting system, does not attract them to that extent. They may not realise it yet, but its true.

But producers, dumb as they are in airing all the harebrained shows that they do, have somehow grasped this fact. Which is why every reality show that they ape from the west (yes its true, there is no show on air which doesnt owe its origin to some US primetime show) doesnt fare as well as it did back there. Specially, as i said, if it doesnt have public voting, because then they cant affect the outcome (honestly they can rarely affect the outcome, in any situation, televised or otherwise, but every Indian likes to think that her/his opinion helped.) And so we see celebrity after celerity hitting the stands. As audience, they bring in famous people from every walk of life. He must have made the news enough to make it interesting. Because newsmakers we do care about.

I dread the day when we see convicted felonist or fellows like Ajmal Kasab living in a house or

jungle for a cpl of months on end with our desi celebs. I say forget jail, no better punishment

than some quality time spent in the company of failed tv stars. i guess its because people in the

limelight like staying there that there isnt a dearth of participants. Or someday there might be

reality show where you do something to stay in the limelight...now theres a horrible thought.

Following this line of thought, producers could take this concept to horrendous depths. Where

newsmakers exchanged lives and instead of making a mess of their own proffessions, made a mess of others'. Not much change their since celebrities already multitask. Once you are famous it is like a license to do anything from politics to acting or vice versa, designing, producing, singing, you name it, they decimate it.

A Jar-Jarring Assault on the Senses

See, everybody pretty much hated Jar Jar Binks. And a friend and I couldnt for the life of us understand why. Maybe it was us, maybe we just had a low threshold. Maybe we were too easily pleased, laughing at crude comedies and being awed by any CGI laden feature that came our way!!! OMIGOD!!! Had we turned Bhopali??????? And then we read comments that people had on Jar Jar. Comments that resurfaced when there was debate regarding the steriotypical voice acting of some "black sounding voices" in the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Jar Jar was hated for propagating racial steriotypes. His meesa going bumbling.......reminded people of the Yo Maan!!! Carribean. And not in the Johnny Depp swashbuckling pirate way.

And I ask you this. Is everyone black from gangsta rappers to typical wayans brothers nonsensical sitcoms any less guilty of propagating those stereotypes? With the honorable exception of Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and of course Will Smith in the movie business, isnt everyone black including Samuel L Jackson guilty of propagating that? And i do believe that the Jar Jar similarities may have been unintentional. And in entertainment, only the old jazz artists, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong and coincidentally the late Michael Jackson (may he rest in peace) fall into this category. Who is more guilty then, the people who in all honesty and innocence came up with a buffonlike comical relief or the people who read too much into every piece of harmless fun. Isnt the person who goes "Oh that guy is of so and so religion/race and he is in a negative character......SACRILEGE SACRILEGE!!" guiltier than the filmmaker who was just portraying it in an incidental and unintentional way. Whatever happened to freedom of expression. Artists of all people should be granted that. With limitations of course because their arts can border from the absurd to the scandalously outrageous.

And speaking of stereotypes, what about the Disney stereotype with the mandatory girl lead and the token black goofy friend. A white goof if the central character is black, the vampy bitchy characters who are intentionally less hot than the cental one but everyone pretends otherwise. There is always a pesky annoying brother. And three friends. One guy and two girls. Isnt this nonsensical stereotype even more dangerous considering that its being administered to naive young minds tantamount to shiny new blank slates with nary a smudge on them????

Apparently appearances matter more. That is why superman when bruised, which isnt often, he isnt shown healing rapidly, cuz thats wolverines domain apparently and then it would seem too cliched. Though reality dictates that what with his super high metabolism he should have equally rapid healing if not more. Oh and the time when Gambit was exempted from the earlier x men movies because his powers were thought to be too similar to Cyclops. Well they proved that wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine didn't they? ...oh well, before I start sounding like too much of a geek (tho some might say its too late for that already) ill sign off...bye.

                        Hands On - The Phallic Phascination

There is something about a protruding object that seems to catch the male fantasy.  Now, before you allow your minds to wander and take a leisurely dip in the gutter, I shall proceed to paint a clearer picture, with firm brushstrokes - something that i can only figuratively achieve seeing as the only subject I ever failed in school was drawing.  

    Take a gun for instance.  A gun in any form, airgun, toy pistol, prop item, cigarette lighter seems to attract the male attention.  They hold it in various poses, they take mock aim, they wave it around.  Hell, they even like to shove it around in their waistband and move about.  It helps them exude a sense of confidence and power, for some reason.  It could be argued here that it may be so because even a fake gun invokes the imagery of the real thing.  But this phenomenon is not just relegated to firearms.  Mock swords, daggers, knives nunchuks, anything works.  Even the sad geeks have their Star Trek phasers.  Star Wars fans ( they are not GEEKS!!!!) have their lightsabers - which for some is the paragon of symbolism in the Star Wars universe.  Even a remote control, even that small one attached to your keyring that electronically locks/unlocks your car appears irresistible to the males.  Maybe its the sense of control that subconsciously personifies, the power to change channels, to lock and unlock doors at the press of a button or whatever.  And while we are tossing out examples like confetti, lets not forget the guitar.  That for some males is the ultimate chick magnet ( in their defence, the guitar does seem to attract the female in droves, albeit of a somewhat dumber variety - but then people who take up playing guitar to attract women surely don't bother about their IQ or brainpower).  A few chords here and there and you have female swooning.  Its hard to sound disharmonious or cacophonous with a well tuned guitar, be as musically challenged as you may.

   Maybe what it all comes down to is men need something to do with their hands.  While the empty mind is the devil's playground, it's obvious males find empty hands equally unnerving.  Now that I think about it, I cant recall my hands ever being empty.  I'm either holding the handlebars of my scooter, or a TV remote, a book, fiddling with my ipod or tapping away on my keyboard to generate amateurish, corny crap like this piece right here ( its amazing how often u get stymied by simple spellings.  I typed PIECE three times before getting it right. Maybe it is true when they say that the brain just reads the first and last letters and processes the word as a whole.  But let us leave that.  I digress). If none of these, I'm either handling my mouse and keyboard or my joystick (oh come on, you dirty people get your minds out of the gutter.  I'm speaking literally here, not figuratively) and playing games on my trusty PC.  Oh games, the bone of contention between many a parent and son, between boyfriends and girlfriends.  Men are fascinated by games, controlling characters, even worlds at the press of a button.  And now Nintendo that venerable video game maker has given us the ultimate protruding device, the Wiimote.

  Oh now I just thought of another one.  A camera, especially the big powerful one with a protruding lens.  That is something that males like too. Capturing the moment for posterity with the press of a button.  Hence proved, every man craves power, not just ambitious businessmen or bad politicians.  Do I hear women rejoicing.  Well they shouldn't.  They crave power most of all.  And they use their hands to do achieve it too.  Whether it is folding them wistfully to melt a stone heart or just yanking the puppet strings figuratively tied around their fingers to achieve their petty manipulations.  Yay, I'm so happy i managed to end this one on a female-bashing note as well.  Hmm it appears I do have a sad and empty life.