Book Review : The White Tiger

Rating: 6/7
Author: Aravind Adiga
     
   This book is the debut novel of Aravind Adiga for which he won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. The book follows the life of the driver Balram Halwai from his beginnings in a village in Bihar, his experiences in Delhi while serving his master Ashok to his breakout from the rooster coop and forming a new life in Bangalore. The story is told from Balram's perspective in the form of a letter he writes for the Chinese Premier on the pretext of educating the Premier on entrepreneurship.
   The book is smart, witty and most of the time biting in it's portrayal of the people from the opposite extremities of the social class. Even though the book is written in a first person narrative as told by our hero Balram, you could see the authors presence while writing about the various injustices the 0.01% inflict on others. Through it's narrative, it feels like the book is not addressed to the average indian but to outsiders who have a very misconstrued perception that is projected outside our country or even to the upper elite who want to believe these lies. There are some very smart observations the author has made about the life of a poor rural villager and the forces which try to keep him in his place without any way of escape-  the author uses the concept of a rooster coop to describe the prison that are born into to illustrate this.
   Even though words in the book drag the reality of the situation to the ground and shoves it in our face, I am partly skeptical to the overall realism of the story which the author narrates. There is an article which contests the reality that the author paints. Here's the article
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2008/11/02/stories/2008110250010100.htm .
   I would recommend this book to people who are dissatisfied with how our country presently is, the people who are lucky enough to be born into affluence and people whose drivers practice Yoga and anyone one who can enjoy harsh criticism at ones own country. This is not a game changer but it does make you see the people who service you in a new way. I would also like to say that no one book can contain the spirit of a billion people and anyone who claims so is lying. This book provides a much needed picture but not a full picture.
   If you have already read this book I would recommend a gem called The Guide by a little known author called R.K.Narayana which is a pure and bittersweet version of The White Tiger or you can go with Vikas Swarup's Six Suspects which has a murder mystery, non linear story line and deals with similar themes of The White Tiger but on a larger scale.

What to make of The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games - Rating 6/7  
   If anyone asked me what was the story of The Hunger Games my answer would have been "24 teenagers battling to death in a jungle until only one remains". After watching the film I think this answer is right and wrong at the same time. Right because this seems to grab the attention of your listener rather quickly and wrong because they don't start killing until the second half. Well, what happens in the first half then? The first half is about how and why these teenagers are chosen to kill each other and the circumstances surrounding about why and for what purpose these games are created.

   This movie talks about various points of views of this event as seen from the inhabitants of The Capitol where the hunger games are held, the tributes (teenagers) who are brought from 12 districts of Panem the country where the movie is set, previous winner of the hunger games who is assigned with the task of mentoring Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of district 12 and more individual observations that seems to be mirror the class differences of our own present times. 

   Fighting the critic in me: One year ago, I read Suzanne Collins book The Hunger Games and I have to concede that I was impressed by the book. The only thing which won my admiration was Collins narration of the story entirely from the first person view of Katniss Everdeen. And then I heard they were making a movie, which brought the critic out like a boss. Until the moment I walked into theater my boss ego kept going "They will screw up the movie big time. There is no way they can capture the book in the way it was written and this will be another franchise for the twilight bitches."  Watching jennifer Lawrence bringing the character to life is the only reason I would be interested going again for seconds. The film was very faithful to it's book and didn't pull any punches.
 
   Fighting other movies: Another reason which my boss ego was vehemently betting against this movie was because of the overworked storyline which seems to be used more times than my friend saying "This is the last fag". The major contender is the Japanese film Battle Royale where the no of players is upped  to 40. My only argument in defending THG is that while Battle Royale is more about group dynamics and keeping a birds eye view on the whole, THG invests screen time only on our protagonist. There have been others like The Condemned, The Death Race, Logans Run, Lord of the Flies which deal with similar story lines.

   Fighting the fans : For this I was thinking of an analogy...

  
    Building up the fanbase for THG must have been the same as campaigning for President of US. On the right we have all the dumb and stupid people a.k.a the twilight fans who could be persuaded with a simple "This is the new twilight(I refuse to use CAPS for twilight)". In the center we have the Independents like myself, who made curious with the trailer and the book to film period which was rather short. On the left are democrats who are proud fans of HP series reeling under the loss of beloved series with the promise of a bold new series tailor made for them. The campaign ignored the Tea party people generally meaning old people who were better put to use as a vessel for carrying the 13 year old's to the theater.
   
   Even though all the above bull shit doesn't amount to shit, this movie did what films were supposed to do - Forgetting everything outside the screen for two hours.

Arbit Awards 2012

2011 is over and we have entered into 2012 with a host of award shows at our window, so I thought I'll make up my own awards. Here goes,

Best film in the category "Fuck the book, let's make a kick ass action movie" -
       - Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows part2

Best film to show to your bible loving friend -
      - Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

Best movie to show your kids to teach them to wash their hands after using bathroom -

      - Contagion

Best Buddy Cop movie -

     - Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

Best film in the category "Sneeze and u confuse the whole fucking story" -

     - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 

Best weird fighting technique -
     - In Time

Best dance sequence in a film -
     - Real Steel

Dumbest sequel of the year -
     - Hangover 2

Best movie in the category "Let's make a animated film for children inspired from all the violent western films of the 60's and 70's which I used to watch as a kid" - 
      - Rango

Best movie which was marketed as science fiction but had nothing to do with it -
     - The Adjustment Bureau

Best movie for being the only good court room drama in 2011 -
     - The Lincoln Lawyer

Best movie for using as a prank -
     - The Tree of Life

Best movie for testing your noise cancellation headphone on -
     - Transformers 3

Best movie for having the most "wowww" moments -
     - Mission Impossible 4: Ghost protocol
     - Tintin : The Secret Of The Unicorn(seems that you really cannot compare two infinities. Until now I thought it was a conspiracy made up by all the mathematicians to get grants for inventing new numbers)

Best movies which were awesome just from the premise -
     - Limitless
     - Source Code

Best movie to watch when you are dating a Literature major -
     - Midnight In paris

Best Psychotic movie -
     - I Saw The Devil (Seriously for the hardcore people. I am not kidding)

Best hand to hand fighting movie -
     - Warrior

Best comedy movies -
     - Crazy, Stupid, Love
     - Bad Teacher

Best movie to watch other than Bridesmaids -
     - The Help

Best political drama -
     - The Ides Of March

2nd Best Animation Movie -
     - Rio    (1st tintin ob)

Music Muzik 'Musing

   Recently I began listening to UK top 40 singles album and found these 5 songs to be very interesting.

1. Labrinth - Earthquake ft. Tinie Tempah
  
   First up, my favourite song in the list is this song by Labrinth containing full bass, synthetic beeps and sounds and all that that shit. It's seriously good when listening at full blast on my ipod.

2. We Found Love - Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris (Boyce Avenue piano acoustic cover)

   I heard the original and it was good, but this one takes the cake. His voice and the piano's a definite hit.

3. Videogames - Lana Del Rey

   This song is very mesmerizing to from start to finish and Lana Del Ray captures everything. 

4. Super Bass - Nicki Minaj

   Very funky rap and a titillating background.

5. Loca People - Sak Noel

   First time I'm hearing a song like this. It's wacky, beat busy, dead pan vocals. Addictive.

Movie Review: The Dirty Picture (2011) (Hindi) - 3/7

 
Rating: 3/7

   This is not exactly a review per se since I haven't watched the whole movie. I came in 15 minutes late for the beggining and left 30 minutes early before the credits rolled in. Yes, I left the theater halfway into the second half and this is my second such incident.

   As for the movie, I hardly think this was based on Silk Smitha's life, and I feel like it's always a matter of coin toss on whether they are lying or not when the producers say it is not based on someone's life story.

   But credit has to be given for Vidya Balan for attempting to play a daring character the likes of which hasn't been done before in Bollywood and also for Naseeruddin Shah for giving a commendable performance as always. There is enough skin show, sexual innuendo's, mindless dialogues, one line punch lines etc for everyone to get through the film. If on the other hand if you were looking out for something deep like a psychological biopic of the persona of a dancer who raised eyes during a point of time when women in various fields were still looked down , then I would suggest you give it a miss.   

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) – 6.5/7

When I first saw the trailer of this movie, I was mildly interested. Then the movie was released and it was met with good response. Since then, I have been waiting for a Blu-ray rip to watch the movie. I live in Pilani by the way (BITS-Pilani), so the wait for a Blu-ray rip instead of watching the movie in a theatre. Please, don’t get me started about the cons and cons of living in Pilani.

Anyway, coming to the movie, here is what IMDB says about it:

Rating: 7.8/10

Description: During experiments to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, a genetically-enhanced chimpanzee uses its greater intelligence to lead other apes to freedom.

What IMDB doesn’t say is that the movie’s graphics are quite literally from another planet, on another level. Caesar’s (hero ape) emotions reach out to you and frighten you and also make you sympathize for him. One moment you want him as your pet, and the next you want to urge James Franco (the scientist who raises Caesar) to get rid of him when you see his menacing eyes as the years grow on him.

Fortunately, the movie doesn’t have any gory scenes of apes stamping and crushing humans to death. That is a big, big relief after watching a season of ‘Game of Thrones’.

It has not got full 7/7 rating only because of its predictability. There are no twists in the tale; you can easily expect what’s going to come next (apart from the apes’ movements while they attack of course). Download a Blu-ray rip like me, go full volume with a 2.1 like me, and just sit back and enjoy the movie like me.

VERDICT: Watch it with full volume. It might not be an edge-of-the-seat thriller, but the action and sound effects might tip you off your seat every now and then. And of course, the visual effects are simply superb.

Witness For The Prosecution (1957) – 7/7

If you are wondering why this movie has been given full marks, then I have only one thing to say. Because it is damn good!! This is not a high school English or Hindi exam where you can never score full marks and also I am not someone who is a hard man to please or who looks at all the technical intricacies of a movie. In short, I am no Rajeev Masand, I am just a teen who loves watching a movie with a friend and a pack of chips.

Anyway, after coming out of three exams on a trot with one major casualty, I was sitting in my room, strangling IMDB so that it pukes out some above average movie that I haven’t seen. And puke it did, Witness For The Prosecution.

IMDB Description: Agatha Christie tale of a man on trial for murder: a trial featuring surprise after surprise.

And it is exactly that. I had heard about this novel vaguely and so I decided to watch it after convincing my “no-not-black-and-white” friend to bear with me just this once. Thankfully, he did not regret it.

There is subtle humor throughout with the promised twists and the usual trial in the court where all hope is lost for the defendant until our brilliant defense lawyer pulls one out of the bag. But, the story just doesn't end there (picture abhi baaki hain dost!!) and that is where the movie makes all the difference in the world.

The protagonist Charles Laughton, the defense lawyer, steals the show and I don’t really know all those actors, but I guess all of them did pretty well.

As I said already, I have given it full marks because frankly, I can’t see where the movie could have been better. I am a big fan of movies that involves trials and lawyers, a love that has started from A Few Good Men and I am glad to have found another movie to match it.

VERDICT: Must Watch!!!

Our New Rating System of 7

The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity Of Processing information By George A. Miller(1956)  http://cogprints.org/730/1/miller.html

 A landmark paper in the field of cognitive science, George A.Miller studies the human body as a communication  system with input as stimuli and output as responses for the stimuli while trying to the determine the channel capacity. This paper should be read by everyone who has taken a course in Information Theory as channel capacities of humans by absolute judgments of uni dimensional stimuli are plotted in a graph using simple and ingenious experiments on sound, taste, vision and touch. Similarly the span of immediate memory is studied using binary, decimal, alphanumeric and words by plotting their their ability to hold a number of bits and the process of recoding.

What does this have to do with the new rating of 7 in the blog? Nothing. There are many rating systems in the internet with some of the famous being that of imdb's scale of 10, metacritic and rotten tomato's scale of 100, critics rate of 5 or 4 or alphabetic scale. Well, anyone familiar with these systems of rating know well to spray an odour of skepticism for a movie with a rating of 8.3 or 92 and to give a fragrance of second chance for 6.8 or "racist insult to the audience". 

I'm not saying this system of 7 will not have any problems but it feels good to me, so you are stuck with it.

6 Black and White movies I would say yes to in a heart-beat.

   I know that a lot of people have an unreal bias against old movies with reasons ranging from black and white is dull to they don't have giant robots banging their heads against each other. Well, some reasons which I can lend some neurons to are the apparent temporal shift in the folkways and morays of their cultural and social setting of the content which does not connect with the audience of our present epoch or 'no S**T is F***ING going on in the movie'.   
   Here are six movies which I have chosen to get you acquainted with the golden age of hollywood. The only thing which I had in mind while compiling this list is a) the easiness with which the viewer could connect with the story and it's characters b) entertainment value as dictated in our present form of mainstream movies (which ironically are the rules handed over by the very movies i am evaluating) c) timeless factor of the movie. The movies are chronologically arranged and is not representative of their relative merit.

1. City Lights (1931)
    Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Virginia cherrill ; Directed by: Charlie Chaplin ; Genre: Comedy, Romance

    Charlie Chaplin, the genius, the true artist, the laughter pill and I could go on and on. The story is simple, the tramp(immortalized by Chaplin) falls in love with a blind girl who sells flowers and helps her with her troubles. This is a silent movie with music, so sit back back and feast your eyes on the tramp. The ending scene where the tramp and the blind girl meet is one of the best scenes of all time.

    You can continue watching the tramp in Modern Times, The Kid, The Gold Rush and chaplin as dictator in The Great Dictator.

2. Rebecca (1940)
    Starring: Laurence Oliver, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders; Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock; Genre: Drama, Mystery, Romance

   It is ironic that I should select Rebecca which is not a good representation to Hitchcock's body of work. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier, this movie is one of my favourite psychological thriller. Anyone who has any misapprehensions over character depth driven by psychology in old movies will have mouth shut by this movie. For me, the twist - good, ending - even better.

   Following the footsteps of Rebecca are big foots such as Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Notorious, Strangers On A Train, Dial M For Murder etc. 

3. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
   Starring: HUMPHREY BOGART, Mary Astor; Directed by: John Huston; Mystery, Crime, Hard Boiled, Noir

   Humphrey Bogart, the guy who represents all the machoness in the world, the hardboiled cynic who doesn't fall for femme fatale, the guy who everyone who looks up to for finding their manliness. This movie also marks the directorial debut of John Huston who will go on to make some of the best movies cinema has known. Add to this potent combination, the novel written by Dashiell Hammett upon which the movie is made. This film serves as the best example of film noir genre and one of the greatest movies ever.

   Other film noir include The Big Sleep, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Ace In The Hole, The Third Man and more.
 

4. Casablanca (1942)
    Starring: HUMPHREY BOGART, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid; Directed By: Michael Curtiz; Genre: Romance, Drama

   Casablanca is the name of place in unoccupied Africa during the early days of Second World War which acts as a gateway for immigrants from Europe to the gates of America. In this setting is our hero Rick Blaine who owns a club and is one day visited by his former lover with an another man and requiring help which can only be provided by the hero. 

   You will also love The Apartment, The Philadelphia Story, Notorious, A Streetcar Named Desire etc.

5. Stalag 17 (1953) 
    Starring: William Holden, Don Taylor; Directed By: BILLY WILDER; Genre: Comedy, Drama, War

   From one of my favourite directors, Billy Wilder presents Stalag 17 which is about a group of American airmen held in a Nazi prison camp who suspect one of their own(i.e the hero) to be an informer. William Holden plays a cynic who cares only for his own skin and the unknown traitor in the background who keeps us guessing until the end. Becoming a fan of Billy Wilder is a natural thing after watching this movie and William Holden got an Oscar for this film(which was already due in Sunset Boulevard).

   Other movies include Some Like It Hot, Its a Wonderful Life, All About Eve etc
 

6. 12 Angry Men (1957)
    Starring: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb; Directed By: SIDNEY LUMET; Genre: Courtroom drama, suspense

    Passing my respects to Sidney Lumet who passed away earlier this year, 12 Angry Men was his first work for the film audience and who goes on to make Network, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon among others(watch them). This is only black and white movie in the top 10 of imdb's top 250 list. The entire movie takes place in single room with 12 guys just saying words. This is the best courtroom drama ever made and will stay there.

   Other movies include Paths Of Glory, Witness For The Prosecution, Anatomy Of A Murder, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Quick Book Reviews 2

1. Percy Jackson & The Sea Of Monsters - Rick Riordian (2005-09) ; Fantasy adventure, mythology

                                The Titans Curse

                                The Battle Of The Labyrinth

                                The Last Olympian  

   A series of five books with Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief leading the list is told by the protagonist Percy Jackson who is a demi-god meaning that he's the son of Greek god Posiedon and a mortal woman who is his mother. The book's main theme is reinventing greek mythology in the present modern setting of US. The books are laden with american teenage humour and appreciable action pieces. The books are a quick read which could work as a nice substitution for a no-good bollywood movie. Those people who are thorough in their mythology fundas or have passed the stage where going near the young adult section in a bookstore is beneath them will not regret in missing this book.

2. The Immortals Of Meluha (Book 1) - Amish Tripathi ; Historical fiction, action-adventure

   The book starts with our hero Shiva deciding to start a new life in a new place known as meluha for his group. There he drinks a potion called somras which makes his neck shine blue; therefore according to a prophecy he is proclaimed as the saviour of meluha and the destroyer of evil who have come to help help them, and the rest of the book deals with whether shiva accepts this responsibility and if so he is confronted with the nature of evil, and other such questions? A very interesting book from an indian author who succeeds in combining mythology and history to give a very enjoyable read. With action- good, language- simple & understandable for masses, dialogues - at times taking a philosophical tone in matters of good and evil. This book is wholesome fun and a great way to start historical fiction genre.

3. The Secret Of The Nagas  (Book 2) - Amish Tripathi

    Picking up right where book 1 ended, The Secret Of The Nagas exceeds all expectations laid out by Immortals of Meluha. The book is high on somras and the twists will catch you off-guard if you aren't careful enough. The book ends with a i-knew-he-would-be-alive cliffhanger while leaving you gasping for more. Secret of the Nagas is faster, cleverer and much better than its predecessor with the signs pointing to a very satisfying finale for the fans.
It would not be prudent on my part to suggest buying this book without reading Immortals of Meluha first.