The Jorney with Harry Potter... So far

As far as I can recall, I never entered the magically magnificent world of HARRY POTTER because of the hype, but it was that I just got a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from somehere (without knowing that it was the second part). I saw it like fools, without having read the novel or being the part of craze, all I had heard was “Harry Potter” from TV may be, I just didn’t knew who played what or what the heck was going on, most of it went over my head. Even if I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to, I loved the movie and no HP movie till date has been able to break its spell.
Later on, when I got the first part i.e. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, i could finally fill the gaps that the second movie left for me. Since then I jumped in the worldwide club of Harry Potter fanatics, that goes gaga over Harry Potter every time he makes a new move. I couldn’t catch up with the books, because I never saved the money for them and whenever I asked for them in the library, they were always taken by someone else before me.
The first movie in which I flowed along the hype, browsed the net, raised my expectations was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I caught this one also on a VCD. It turned out to be very different from the previous editions; it was darker, deeper (along with the voice-boxes) and confusing (because of the time travel). Amidst all the confusion, I still loved the movie and it turned better and better with multiple viewings.
Since then, I watched every outing of the Harry Potter saga in the theaters.
Cut to: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, before I watched the movie, I could finally get my hands on the novel from the library which turned out to be the first novel I actually “loved” and wished that the celluloid interpretation could be as effective. But alas, another change of director, another change in age and the Emma Watson erotism spoiled the movie. I never found Emma Watson so beautiful (specifically in the Ball scene) ever before, may be because finally, I was of the same age as that of the character she potrayed. And most importantly what spoiled the movie for me was that I had read the novel and that they had gulped many of the scenes I wanted to see. Heard from many that the novels are better than the movies, this one proved that true for me. Apart from Emma Watson, the three tasks, the mad-eye moody moments, the voldemort-Harry duel, it all began with the 4th movie, great scenes but something missing.
But with the 5th movie i.e. The Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, the ultimate degradation of the most magical movie series I had ever seen took place with David Yates playing the captain of the ship, which would enhance the CGI effects of the movie, but would submerge the overall FEEL of the movie. The 4th movie hinted at it , but the 5th movie degraded Harry Potter like never before, it crushed my expectations just like ‘The Bride’ crushes the eye of Elle in Kill Bill 2, it was the first movie in which I could find myself getting bored and my younger brother drowsing. The movie was plain boring in the pre – interval part where there was less ‘CG action’. It was dark, it was gloomy, it was action right at frame1, But just like Dursley had lost its fat and gained height, the movie had lost its charm(which had very little to do with the age of the actors) and gained audience.
The only thing I liked in the movie was the final minutes of the movie, the demolition of the prophecies and the death of Sirius black. Leaving a couple of scenes whose credit goes to the CG department, the movie was equivalent to shit. May be it was expectations, may be it wasn’t, the expectations were mine so I could defend them, but Yates wasn’t mine, he was neither of the screenplay nor of the novel. He was the pimp that made Harry Potter a whore.
Finally, this Friday I got the opportunity to catch the first “first day, first show” of my life as The Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince filled the screen with the first movie title which didn’t alter in hindi. No “Aadhe khoon wala RajKumar”. I had already assassinated my expectations the day I came to know that the movie will be directed by David Yates, but when the trailers trudged the screen of my TV, computer, PMP, a tinge of expectations etched my head again. I was expecting a dark insight into Voldemort’s history as I had known from my cousin and the wicked web of novel spoilers about almost everything; still I hadn’t read the novel except the chapter Lightning Struck Tower in which Dumbledore dies. But whatever I knew, it had created the image of the movie as the darkest of the HP movies, but unexpectedly what it turned out to be was a funny partial teeny-bopper, partial tongue in (opposite sex’s) cheek comedy, which had more smooches than spells and for the first time Dumbledore behaved as ‘tharki buddha’ staring at the girl in the hoarding, collecting magazines and keeping check of Harry’s love interests. May be he wanted to ‘live’ before death.
According to Imdb and my cousin who had read the novel (who was snatching my cell phone at regular intervals in the movie, may be because of the boredom, may be because he had felt that the movie had lost somewhere along with him) they had not only altered the scenes but created new ones which were entirely useless apart from showing what they should have. The most to-be dramatic and intense scenes in the movie looked forced (the intro to horcruxes, whore-cruxes as pronounced by Voldemort, the death of Dumbledore, the funeral etc etc) and didn’t created the impact they ought to create. The only scene in the movie, which I liked, was the zombie one. The 5th movie degraded the FEEL; the 6th not only degraded the FEEL but degraded the scenes also.
Now that I have already read the Deathly Hallows part, in which JK Rowling had herself killed the charm of previous novels, what can I expect from Yates Bhai who will make 2 damn movies on it?
May be I can expect something.
Hope Swine Flu takes care of him!

Published at Passionforcinema.com on July 20 2009

Swine Flu - Suar mai&^%$

Swine flu is gripping each and every region of each and every country. TC (literally)

Youtube Screening Room Favourites

The first time my eyes fell on YOUTUBE SCREENING ROOM, i thought it was just another compilations of uselles youtube videos thrown in by amateurs, playing with their cams, or hamming up their heads, but fortunately it turned out to be the updated collection of the best videos i have ever seen on youtube or anywhere else,

the best short movies in high quality.

I havent seen so many movies from YTScreening room, but the ones i saw i loved al,ost all of them.

Some of my favourites:

The Scab

One of the movies that made me LOL.

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Reach
The best possible way to show try try and try again might not lead to success.

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Sebastian Voodoo

What a way to show sacrifice for friendship.

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Skeletons in the Closet
Now thats exemplary storytelling with twists and turns.Truly Brillaint.

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Spider

pranks and their consequences.A movie based on its tagline and the tagline based on the movie.

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Keyboard Scrabble

KEYBOARD SCRABBLE

Shrieking rotating chairs, shouting assholes, chattering nonsense. A so called computer lab filled with handicap students and non-handicap students  or the non handicap students that slide over the ceramic cream color tiles with the wheel chairs with little wheels. The teacher indulged in his sown horrendous duties. Boredom surrounds me. My screwed up mind vibrates. I become the devil and my workshop kick-starts.

The ancient white idiot boxes lie switched off like dormant zombies, waiting to get their asses kicked and get their bodies re-buried.

I see them, they see me and then they see my writometer. I approach them with the pen. Do hell with those 15”/17” CRT, they aren’t my target, I am interested in something that lays lower, THE KEYBOARD.

New and old, black and white keyboards lay in their graves i.e the scrolling drawers. My mind tweaked my hands, and they followed the pen to crack the code.

I inserted the pen tip, under the key to be displaced, and then under the key to be inserted, fast but stealthily. Determination, danger, will, wickedness circled my head as I played with the keys. F1,F2,F3,F4 turned SEXY and F5,F6,F7,F8 changed their sexes to become GIRL.

Not to mention the multiple keyboards I  screwed up with the “F” word.

Hell if I can do it, why not you. The most enjoyable thing about the useless Keyboard Scrabble is that it might slaughter your boredom, though it might do the same with you, if the keyboard ain’t yours. But what’s the fun if you do It on your keyboard.

The most suitable gaming parlors for Keyboard Scrabble are school computer labs, cyber cafes, friend’s/foe’s computer when he/she might not be present.

Get ready, start bashing and mashing!

SPECIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE

SPECIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

My computer knows me better than I do… or it just cares for me… It has got some special artificial intelligence that whenever my examination gives a knock, it locks itself in weird ways, cringes my head with its infertility.

It tries everything, every damn’ thing to frustrate me  and divert my attention from it to me.

It handles my abuses, spanks and nuisances, but still it continues its Satyagraha and Gandhigiri to force  me to immerse myself in the disastrous tree waste i.e. the damned textbooks, so I can atleast pass in the exams.

In 2007, it screwed my head with frequent restarts like it was shivering with malaria, in its case I was the plasmodium.

I tried the non-Gandhian way at the C.P.U (since I suck at hardware messing). I slapped it with variations of forces and velocities, and sometimes it worked, just like a kid beaten by its parent, cries for a minute and then the kid is back to his hell.

Finally I called those S.O.B. computer engineers who show tantrums for a week or two, ignoring calls, handling them and making erratic excuses, as if they have made a deal with telecom companies, so that the moron whose computer turns moron has to shell out the money on telephone calls first and then on those damn bastards.

Now as my half yearly Ist semester exams shrieks are getting nearer and nearer, the Computer is back to haunt me so that I could finally study after wasting a whole lot of months on it.

Now its hanging, crashing, grunting, growling, turning sufi songs into heavy metal. And if that wasn’t enough, it increased the corruption levels by corrupting the windows.

An d now its suffocating along with me. Hope I respect my dear PC’s  temporary sacrifices for my better and let that hope rust in some Ghajini rod.

!!! FIRST FAILURE !!!

Tension trailing down the head, body drenched by sweat, the atrocious chill down the spine- I always thought that the failure would be just like this and much more devastating, but last year I actually experienced the four-lettered worked which starts with ‘F’ but doesn’t end with ‘K’.

My half yearly examinations banged on with the Catastrophic Chemistry taking the lead. The question paper didn’t seem as terrible as I thought it would be, but as my pen trolled across the blank answer sheet. As the time circulated, I reckoned that just like the blank answer sheet, my brain was also blank.
Half-baked answers, otiose cheating attempts and blah blah blah. If those crazy attempts weren’t enough for my crazy head to ‘screw-up’ the puking paper, I began to draw crazy cartoons at the back of the question paper, pierced the eye balls of those cartoons with my pen and passed threads in them, and then tied over a knot around them. Devastating, crazy and true!
…and soon the three hours passed like a whiff of a wind.

Then came the Pathetic Physics, with its evil intentions. The pen was in no mood to wander across the one lined page field, as my head was blank, blanker from the damn’ beginning. No “blahs” to scribble as I ain’t good at notorious numerical and delusional derivations. Sheet by sheet children emptied, I sat still and silent with my hollow head thinking nothing, doing nothing. Was I nuts? Or was the teacher. She allowed me to cheat! Infact she asked me to cheat! , but she did that intelligent thing when the remaining time wasn’t that intelligent. In lieu of giving me the much awaited opportunity earlier, she had been asking me silly questions like “Why aren’t you doing the paper?” and I was retorting in a sillier and eco-friendly way “Just Conserving trees” I replied.
And then came the old n gold(shiny shit) yet not sold M!d@r#h$d Mathematics. Like always he greeted me a much awaited head-ache.

I again tried, tried and tried again,
Alas I came to know that I was just deep-frying my brain!

But by crook fastened with a hook, I somehow managed to shit-up the paper by scribbling over the false and fake marks with someone’s red pen, but still the marks couldn’t cross the border between the pass and fail, so I played with the total marks to cross the border line. Anyhow it worked and it didn’t. I wasn’t pass and I wasn’t fail but landed on the boundary, on the border between the pass and the fail, but the two bloody assholes waited for me there to drag me into the well of wail.
I wasn’t dead, but was I alive???

PAPER- A short movie

Last year, when my papers got over, on a boring day i decided to do something interesting, though the outcome was boring just like that day, but still i think the video is quite bearable.
So spare your 6 mins. to bear my first attempt.

Made using My Sony DCR-HC46E for recording and Windows Movie Maker for editing errors and terrors (Premiere was giving me format headaches)
Please express your burps!


Its NOT inspired from "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets"

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE / SLUMDOG CROREPATI: REVIEW

With the news of Slumdog Millionaire's constant winning streak . I got curious to know what the heck's in the movie. And since its releasing on 23^rd Jan and so are my annual papers, I thought when will piracy play its vital role. So I searched it over the net and finally found the English version of it on orkut.

a still from slumdog millionare

Plotty Potty:

Based on Vikas Swarup's novel "Questions and Answers", Slumdog Millionaire is a not-so-ordinary rags to riches story of a boy named Jamal Malik told in a not-so-ordinary way.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) participates in Kaun Banega Crorepati ( Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionare) to find his childhood love Latika (Freida Pinto) where he is accused of cheating.

The movie starts with Jamal being interrogated by the police about how he knew the answers to all the questions. The movie unfolds as Jamal narrates his sour n' sweet experiences behind every answer.

So is the movie really so good?

1. Ya b) No c) Not really d) Damn' You

and the answer is… 'c' … Slightly overrated and over-awarded.

And about the acting ?

1. Fine b) Yuck c) Good d) Brillaint

   
   

And the answer is… 'c'

It could have been brilliant.

Though the acting is well ( neither good nor bad) but the movie in English is a little bit undigestible. Plus that Mr. Salim, as he grows not only his English improves but he starts speaking with a lil' bit of brit accent (not even gujarati Patel). Anil Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla were good. Irrfan Khan looked boozed. Latika (Freida Pinto) looked beautiful and acted beautifully.

Kudos to the child artists in the movie, especially the youngest Jamal and his brother Salim.

The movie has got its own flaws (KBC was never telecasted live) but the director Danny Boyle knew how to hide the flaws with his intelligent story-telling.

Soundtrack:

The background score by AR Rahman goes along the mood of the movie (the O Saiyya,Ringa Ringa,Sitar music)

Craziest Scene:

When youngest Jamal jumps in shit to get the autograph of Amitabh Bachchan (the fake one)

Coolest Scene:

Old bollywood style of increasing the age, but I really liked the scene when youngest Jamal tries to steal the food from the train.

Sucking Scene:

The AR Rahman's 'Jai Ho' comes before/along the credits with a damn' dance number (which looked similar to ek challis ki last local's kya hua jo lari chuti… but this one was more weird looking)

When expectations exceed, celestial bodies decrease.

For Slumdog Millionare