Category: Movies

  • Don 2

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    It was a quick decision made a little after we boarded the company bus heading to Bharuch. We would watch Don 2. The back rows of the cinema hall was booked and the cinema house had taken the opportunity to hike ticket prices. We got a middle row seats for 9.45 pm show. We managed a dosa before the show by way of something to eat. As the show began, we found more colleagues from work.

    Watching a movie here is an interesting experience. People are not inhibitted from whistling, passing comments loudly or clapping. Quite different from the sophisticated cinema goers to the multiplex in a city like Mumbai. But, here it’s sort of in a good way and it adds to the experience rather than subtract from it. I think if you watch a movie with opinionated Indians, you have to bear with some of their opinions as well.

    The movie itself, despite the reviews I heard was very good. It was awesome. The storyline kept rolling, there was an element of mystery involved and in the end, the jigsaw puzzle is solved for us. The camera work really added in keeping that element of mystery while trying to find out how the hero managed to pull it off at all. The director (I like Farhan Akthar’s movies and believe in the auteur theory of cinema) does do us a service by not trying to force song and dance sequences where they do not fit in. I enjoyed the car chases (though not up to Hollywood quality) and the action sequences in the filmas well. The only bit of criticism that I can offer for the movie was its lacklustre sound track and that there seem to coincidentally seem too many Indians in Germany.

  • Dam 999

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    I wanted to write this before I became biased by any opinion and I doubted if my writing was coloured by said biased opinions. I watched Dam 999 today at FAME, Bharuch. I quite loved the film.

    The story is dedicated to the 250,000 people who died in the Banqio Dam Disaster in 1975. The story apparently took 15 years before it came out from behind the Great Wall. I would thin that one incident would be sufficient to rethink dams and the way dry lands can be irrigated. It also is a story in anticipation on what politics between the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and political gains could potentially be disastorous for 3.5 million people living downstream of the Mullaperiyar Damin Kerala (note that the Wikipedia article seems more about the controversy than the Dam itself!).

    I am not much of a film critic beyond saying whether saying I enjoyed the film or not.

  • Rockstar – Review

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    This is the first movie review I am posting.

    I really had only two options for a movie to watch and I chose Rockstar. The choice was quite easy since the other option was to watch the Adventures of Tintin (in Hindi). I am quite happy that I made this choice. Rockstar is a movie that plays with great character building, stunning visual scenery and awesome music. I like the open ended storyline and a back and forth narration.

  • Watching Snehaveedu in Bharuch

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Yesterday being a Sunday, I took a long walk into the shopping hub of Bharuch. The walk took me about 40 minutes to cover.

    Bharuch has this wonderful collection of cows, buffaloes and donkeys that run around on the street that makes it a unique driving experience if nothing else. It also has quite a number of fountain soda spots for really cheap rates. The other exquisite feature of Bharuch is some of the wonderful mosques that dot the city.

    Bharuch has two multiplexes (multiple screen cinemas) – INOX and FAME. There are several single screen cinemas here as well, which going by the looks still run movies and seemed profitable. I went to FAME cinemas to watch a Malayalam movie, Snehaveedu.

    The movie was okay – a plain story unlike many of the movies that we see today. A very simple story told well. You can learn more or less about the storyline by reading the Wikipedia article linked above.

    This post is more about the experience than the movie. To give you some context, Bharuch is a town playing a Malayalam movie whereas all it plays are Hindi movies. It does not play English movies. The idea of watching a Malayalam movie here seemed surreal, to say the least. Lots of Malayalees from around the city dropped in. The other thing, which I have not yet written here about is the monthly Kerala meals served on the first day of the Malayalam calendar month. More on that, some other day, perhaps.