James Bourned - Action packed weekend

This weekend I watched 3 movies - This post is about 2 of them - Casino Royale (the latest Bond flick and Bourne Identity - the first edition of the Bourne trilogy). Review of the third one (Lost in Translation) to follow.

Growing up, I was always a James Bond fan. Liked some of the Bonds better than the others... Sean Connery > Pierce Brosnan > Roger Moore > Timothy Dalton > George Lazenby..... and too early to talk about Daniel Criag and I've liked all the films. Really liked Casino Royale as well, although many elements of the movie surprised me.

It's been 45 years and 21 films since the first edition in this epic series and the character of Bond has never changed - he's suave, stylish, very British, drinks his martini shaken (not stirred), drives fast cars, sleeps with hot women and doesn't fall in love. Until now.

James Bond, with Casino Royale, has gotten just a little more soppy (falls in love with a woman who actually dupes him. Even worse - he's still moony eyed in love even after he discovers that). He's gets beaten up a couple of times and has had to perform rigorous action scenes to earn his bread like any other action star today.

Therein lies the problem (and the connection with the other film I watched this weekend). What makes Bond, well, Bond is the unbelievability of the whole thing with all the points I mentioned above. Now when you depart from that, Bond is like any other action star - like Jason Bourne!!

This past weekend, I also watched Bourne Identity (I guess I was catching up with a new breed of Hollywood action blockbusters which everyone in the world bar me seems to have watched... next up is the Oceans series). Really liked this film as well. Great plot - fast and fantastic - very Robert Ludlum. Jason Bourne is this super-human-esque secret agent who has lost his memory and the CIA is trying to kill him off as they think he's a rogue agent. In the meanwhile he's just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Now there's nothing wrong with being Jason Bourne (heck, he makes a lot of money and is very very popular among the girls), but when you're James Bond, you don't aspire to be Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne aspires to be you. Put differently, its kinda like Jason Bourne aspires to be you. Jason gets the girls, James gets the women.

My opinion - Let Bond be Bond. James Bond.

On a not so separate note, after watching Casino Royale, E, V, L and I were pondering the possibility of creating local Bonds for the subcontinent - (a) Joginder Bhogle from Bhatinda, India, (b) Jeetu Bandaranayake from Colombo, Sri Lanka. That's work in progress. Will post a more fleshed out email once we copyright the idea... NOT.

October 7 - This day in history!

I was born on October 7, 1978 in a small nursing home in Central Bombay. Little did I know what a great day it was!! This is what I found on Wikipedia... and if they say it, it must be true!!! :).. Some highlights...

3761 BC - The origin of the modern Hebrew calendar(!!!)

1714 - Beer Tax riots in Netherlands (Go the Dutch!!! That's why Amsterdam is such an aspiration for me!)

1849 - Edgar Alan Poe (think of the Ramsay brothers with stiff upper lips) died.

1919 - KLM was founded (and interestingly - it's the world's oldest airline still operating under its original name!

1982 - Cats opens on broadway and goes on to run for almost 18 years!

2003 - Arnold "I'll be back" Schwarzennegger becomes Cali governer.


I also share a birthday with Vladimir Putin (Russian president), Genji Hashimoto (Japanese racing driver and my name-sake, Sami Hyppia (supremely talented Finnish footbal player), Zaheer Khan (rejuvenated cricketer - even born in the same year as me).

And just like my facebook profile says - I'm thrilled to be a year older, but not a day wiser!!!

The Shining - One helluva scary flick

I'd always wanted to watch this but just never got down to it until last night.

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King and stars Jack Nicholson at his twisted best and Shelly Duvall (this was probably her best film) who fits the bill of panic-stricken mid western housewife to the tee. And it's one scary film. Not in your usual Ramsay (Indian's will know this) or even Evil Dead / House of Wax kind of way. The plot itself is scary to start with.

It's about a lovely family of 3 - Jack, Wendy and little Danny Torrance - who take up the responsibility to watch over an isolated hotel during the off season (think winter storms). Now this hotel has a bit of a history with a past caretaker who went crazy in the winter isolation and killed his family. The rest of the plot is predictable with Jack going crazy and Wendy and Danny left to protect themselves from someone who should be loving and protecting them.

Now this movie could so easily have been botched into another scare-a-minute-run-of-the-mill isolated hotel film, except Stanley Kubrick was directing it. As it turns out, he made yet another masterpiece. He handles been-done-before subjects like telepathy and dead people appearing very seamlessly and naturally. Surprisingly, that adds to the spook factor big time.

Jack Nicholson is clearly fantastic. Shelly Duvall was the perfect choice for the role. But the show stopper was the kid - Danny Lloyd. He's done an absolutely fantastic job at a very young age. Apparently the kid didn't know it was a horror film until years later when he was legally allowed to watch it (I don't buy this story, but what the heck... wiki says so!).

There are two scenes in the movie that are VERY memorable... "REDRUM! REDRUM!" and "HEEEERREEEEES JOHNNNNNYYYY"...... Click on 'em to watch the clips (you've gotta love YouTube)!!!

Check out the movie trailer here.

If you've already seen the movie, you'll love this...

Faster than light, slower than a good idea!

Nothing travels like a good idea. Not even company gossip (unless it's a good idea - and I shall not illustrate with examples).

Detour to cricket - India won the T20 World Cup in a humdinger (which, incidentally, means "a person, thing, action, or statement of remarkable excellence or effect") against arch rivals Pakistan. In the end, Misbah ul Haq, without whom the Pakistanis wouldn't have stood a chance, played a bad stroke to get out 5 runs short of the target and handed the cup to India. Now this post is not about the cricket. It's about a great idea.

Someone somewhere - ONE PERSON - came up with this joke right after the game -
KNOCK KNOCK
WHO'S THERE
MISBAH
MISBAH WHO
YOU MIS BAH 5 RUNS MAAN! (for best effect say this with a carribean accent)

Now over the course of yesterday, 4 different people who don't know each other and live in different countries emailed/SMSd me this joke! Now think about this - after the match, ONE smart ass who was probably watching the game with a bunch of friends came up with the joke. His friends laughed. They loved it so much that as soon as they left the bar they were watching it at, in their drunken stupor, SMSd 4-5 of their friends, who in turn probably shared this with their families and them with their friends. And just like that within 24 hours - hundreds of thousands of people were laughing at the same thing! All of this at ZERO COST!!!

Looking out into the future, 2 things come to mind -
1) Reaching your consumer is getting easier. You're spoilt for choice. The consumer has millions of different ways of recieving a message through the day. Mobile and internet technologies have changed our lives completely and I think we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.
2) Ironically, it's also harder to REALLY reach her with your message. As a result of the media explosion, she is being bombarded by so many more messages vs what she's ever had before. Now she's suddenly more discerning, more savvy about what she chews and what she spits out. So ideas, are going to have to be more hardworking.

I'm nervously excited to see what happens next.

Quirks!!!

You know how you get all those emails with soppy stories with the worst chiken-soup-for-the-asshole type of moral at the end of it and a message that asks you to forward this to 2500 people or you might either suffer from instant combustion or a bad sex life!... well - this blog post is succumbing to something similar....

shiv (young bengali lad, a good friend, a bad cricketer, but the best whinger) recently resumed his blogging career (like me) and his second post upon resumption (like this one for me) was about his quirks... and he "tagged" me (among others) with that post. And I'm giving in...

Honestly didn't have to think long and hard because I was exchanging notes on this with a friend visiting from India this past week. Think I have 2:

1) My CD Collection! It has to be in alphabetical order. Yep - I'm the nerd who arranges his CD collection!!! If you must know - it's sorted based on last names for individual performers and, well, band names for bands. The compilations follow all the albums (in order of the names of the compilations). OSTs and musicals follow the compliations. Instrumentals, Classicals, World and Chill Out follow the OST's. And then my Hindi collections - in alphabetical order also. This rule does not apply for my DVD collection (which is assorted in 3 different baskets - one for the ones I've seen, 2 for the one's I haven't.

2) Picture Frames and Paintings. I think this stems from the fact that I'm a Libran - I need picture frames, paintings and the like to be in order. They can't be leaning on one side even by the smallest perceptible degree. It bothers me. Couldn't, for the life of me, resist the urge even if I was visiting someone's house. I just have to.

Apart from these two - I'm a fairly easy going guy. Unfazed and uncluttered. Just don't mess with my CD collection. I might have to kill you.

3 things I hate about Harry Potter

Ok - Don't get me wrong. I like the series and all that. But there are some things that pissed me off in the course of the adventures of this young wizard!

1) HERMIONE THE HERMAPHRODITE. I can think of 3 different girls from my own version of Hogwarts (well it was Christ Church School, Byculla, Mumbai - no wands allowed. Brooms optional - but we'll let that pass, won't we) who annoyed the poo out of me. Teachers pets. Hands always raised before the question is done. Prim, proper and haters of all things male. Didn't really get along with the cooler chicks either. They're the kind of people who should be cursed to a life devoid of sex - with men or women. We have some of them at work as well... but we won't go there. Clearly, school scarred me (wasn't a lightning shaped scar on my forehead though).

2) HARRY "PRE-PUBESCENT-WHINING-PRICK" POTTER (EXCLUSIVE TO BOOK 5). JK got it wrong in Order of the Phoenix. Strayed close too close to reality with Harry's pre-pubescent issues. She might as well have called him WHINY POTTER in that book... Boo-hoo... nobody loves me. No one will snog me.... Kinda reminds me of the WORMS song...

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I'll go eat worms, Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,
Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.

Down goes the first one, down goes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.
Up comes the first one, up comes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.

... except WHINEY POTTER wasn't funny! On the upside, it's good JK never got to Harry and Ron discovering masturbation!

3) QUIDDITCH AND ITS SEXUAL CONNOTATIONS. Bunch of wizards flying around on brooms, chasing a snatch (yep - I know it's snitch, but you know the connection I'm trying to make!). And those who're not chasing the snatch are called beaters... like they've given up chasing snatches... resorted to beating the monkey!??!! OK JK!

Feel free to add.

Sport treats galore!

Now here's the sporting action I'm looking forward to for the next few months...

1) Cricket... India is up one test with one to go. England is going to come hard at us. Praying for another test ton from Tendulkar at the Oval. All of this followed by the one dayers and of course the 20-20 world cup.

2) Cricket (again)... P&G is in the semi-finals of the Singapore Cricket Association Knock Out tournament (field of 20 teams and we're in the last 4). We play Indi CC or Polaris (both very formidable teams) on Aug 19. Plus the Super League games in Sep/Oct to determine whether we're really getting promoted to Div 3 next year.

3) Soccer... It's EPL time again. Watched a cracking lung opener last night between ManU and Chelsea. The reds prevailed of course in a bizarre penalty shoot out.

4) F1... this one's tricky. I don't like Hamilton (he's English) or Alonso (he's a shit). Ferrari has a lot of work to do to catch up. But this is shaping up to be a cracking season with more things going wrong than right for the leading teams.

PS: It's good to be back on blogosphere.