If you know me, you'd know that I'm not the movie-reviewing type usually, but I felt Endhiran deserves one, not only because it's a sci-fi movie, but it's a good sci-fi movie.
(Warning: Here be spoilers!)
I (as is becoming usual) missed the first ten or so minutes of the movie, entering only when Vasee asks Chitti to drive the car and others back off from the journey. Rajini has a very good scientific nerd look as Vasee, suppressing his action movie image and appearing as the intellectual he should be. Chitti, while managing to look truly handsome, did not impress me at first. "Ok, he's the usual robot that does some things awesomely and some things stupidly".
However, the scenes where Chitti takes care of neighbourhood noises brought me back into the movie. He explains why he's able to operate the stereo (it's infra-red) and then does it without directly fighting the enemy guys off (which would have made this a clichéd action movie scene). Same with the "Chellaattha" loudspeaker guys - he does not pick a fight with them, instead using his electromagnet and disarming them. It turns out to be an amusing comedy (especially with the ladies starting to pray to him as Kaali and then standing confused as he drops the weapons).
The thing that impressed me about the movie was the absence of any glaringly-obvious and embarrassing pseudo-science that's present even in a lot of Hollywood science movies. No superman style flying for long distances, no reading-your-mind-because-I'm-an-awesome-robot stuff.
Ok, the mosquito scene was somewhat stupid. Even if it's the future and we've figured out how to make machines talk to mosquitoes, it doesn't explain the mosquito talking back to Ash. But leaving the scientific viewpoint, it was a well constructed scene, except that they ruined it by making it too long. This is a theme that repeats throughout the movie - almost every single scene in the movie stretches longer than necessary, testing our patience.
Rajini's acting deserves a special mention. The robot and the human are always distinguishable, from their tone, body language and expressions. In the scene where Chitti rescues a bathing girl and is chided by Vasee, his confused response "But she's alive!" reminded me very strongly of Sonny's "But I have to inject the nanites!" in I Robot.
The movie also seemed to contain a lot of references to sci-fi or the-average-Indian-movie. The mosquito scene reminded me of the butterfly scene in Ejamaan where Rajini fetches a butterfly for Meena after jumping through fields and gutter. The scene where Chitti's eye gets damaged and he replaces it with a red colored one feels to be a homage to the Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger does the same. The scene where Chitti takes Ash to his magnificent place guarded by other Chitti's is mildly amusing in that it's the usual "villain kidnaps heroine and takes her to his awesome palace guarded by thugs" in average Indian movies, except the villain and thugs this time are robots.
The robots taking formations into spheres and snakes, while obviously done for the "Wow!" effect, also makes sense in context, and each formation is done for a reason which makes it completely excusable.
What's inexcusable is the all-too-frequent and not-so-pleasant songs. They're made tolerable only by the beautiful visuals and the direction in the songs too. Shankar is awesome in this film's songs, Rahman is not. The re-recording is also too noisy and too obvious, the kind I would have expected from a newbie music director - not Rahman. The "thamizh semmozhi" song and the songs in this film make us wonder if Rahman is no longer concentrating much in the Thamizh side after the Oscar. Hmmm.
On the whole, it's a movie that I left feeling clean and refreshed, happy that the arguably first sci-fi movie in thamizh turned out to be a good sci-fi. To be honest, as a movie by itself, it's not great. It's a somewhat confused mess of a sci-fi movie and a family-sentiment-masala-thamizh-movie. But the sci-fi part taken alone is very well done. Kudos to Shankar for that.
Verdict: It's a film worth watching once in the theatre, and storing on the hard drive for years. If you're a sci-fi fan, don't expect an I Robot or a Terminator, expect an average hollywood movie and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Nov 15, 2010
Nov 4, 2010
A few random things
Blogger has introduced a better preview option. Cool. If nothing else, it at least shows Google is still polishing Blogger and has not abandoned it.
I learnt that German is quite a beautiful language, at least in its pronunciations, while hearing to Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality in audiobook format. Names like Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstal have a beautiful ring to them that I'd heard so far only in French. The book itself is wonderful too, written for a layman interested in the history of the development of quantum physics. We can feel how the physicists themselves were bewildered by the bizarreness of it all, and only reluctantly accepted the theory. I'm now a little more than halfway through the book, where Heisenberg and Schrödinger have just given out their two formulations of quantum mechanics.
As a side note, it's interesting to note that Pauli shared my nocturnal habits, while Dirac too studied electrical sciences due to the urging of his father while his calling lay elsewhere.
Duck Duck Go is proving to be a great search engine to set as the default, with most other searches I need available at a bang's distance. The "bang" is simply the exclamation mark, which within this search engine can take you to most of the common lands on the internet. Search Wikipedia with !wiki, Amazon with !amazon, Wolfram Alpha with !alpha, torrents with !torrent, or resort to trusty old Google with a !g added to the query. In my experience, it's the best search engine when it comes to broad searches on a topic such as "rottweiler" or "diablo 2". There are about 25% of my searches that DDG does not understand and gives nonsense results, and I add "!g" to the query to go to Google's results instead; recently, this has been only needed for filtering out old results with Google's "Past year" tool. For the remaining 75% however, DDG is leaps ahead of Google.
Talking of Diablo 2, I hated that game. As a result of trying it, I've found that:
A. I probably hate the "hack and slash" genre itself, and games should involve some thought and strategy for me to like them
B. For me to enjoy a game, it should be either 2D like most flash games or The Battle for Wesnoth, or very realistic 3D like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed II. The latter two are the most immersive and enjoyable games I've ever played.
Also, factor A seems to be more important than factor B, since Dead Rising too has a realistic 3D, but has failed to impress me at all so far.
I completed Batman a few weeks ago and am now into Assassin's Creed. It's difficult to describe progress in this completely non-linear game, but so far I've unvealed "Il Duomo's Secret" and "Torre Grossa's Secret", and have killed 4 of the major enemies (including at least 2 of de Pazzi family).
I felt compelled to write this post after more than a week of complete lack of communication with anyone I knew, friends or relatives. More and more, I'm coming back to my old ways of hating cell phones and electronic media of communication, and much prefer personal conversations. I keep thinking of visiting my friends at Marathahalli more often, but my laziness and nocturnal habits make that a difficult task.
I said "lack of communication with anyone I knew" because I've been communicating with random strangers at Omegle a lot. Amidst the various "asl?" (asking for age, sex and location, mostly as a prelude to a cybering episode), or "Jesus can save you" stuff, there are a lot of interesting people there with profound ideas.
I chatted with an agnostic guy from the US who knew a surprising amount about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I had the opportunity to clear some things up and show that Hindu Vedanta philosophy was at least an internally consistent and beautiful theory, if not a true explanation of the universe. We agreed that while religion itself was unnecessary and often harmful, the practices discovered by Hindu and Buddhist monks were very helpful to cleanse and improve the mind, and should be adopted purely for their utilitarian value.
I talked with a Chinese woman who found India's arranged marriage system strange, felt all Indian guys she had met were wonderful gentlemen, and recommended two chinese movies to me (one was called "Aftershock" in English, the other translated to "Hawthorn"; I've not been able to find subtitled versions of either).
I also talked with a European guy (was it Sweden? or Switzerland? I forget.) who shared a lot of my interests, was living my dream life with having studied psychology as his major and now going on to neuro-psychology in higher studies. He was also exactly my age and shared my interest in books too. Unfortunately the conversation got disconnected due to a server error and I never got his contact details.
I'm learning a lot through these conversations and they're expanding the limits of my morals, thoughts, knowledge and imagination.
Thank you Tim Berners-Lee, for this wonderful thing called the Internet.
I learnt that German is quite a beautiful language, at least in its pronunciations, while hearing to Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality in audiobook format. Names like Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstal have a beautiful ring to them that I'd heard so far only in French. The book itself is wonderful too, written for a layman interested in the history of the development of quantum physics. We can feel how the physicists themselves were bewildered by the bizarreness of it all, and only reluctantly accepted the theory. I'm now a little more than halfway through the book, where Heisenberg and Schrödinger have just given out their two formulations of quantum mechanics.
As a side note, it's interesting to note that Pauli shared my nocturnal habits, while Dirac too studied electrical sciences due to the urging of his father while his calling lay elsewhere.
Duck Duck Go is proving to be a great search engine to set as the default, with most other searches I need available at a bang's distance. The "bang" is simply the exclamation mark, which within this search engine can take you to most of the common lands on the internet. Search Wikipedia with !wiki, Amazon with !amazon, Wolfram Alpha with !alpha, torrents with !torrent, or resort to trusty old Google with a !g added to the query. In my experience, it's the best search engine when it comes to broad searches on a topic such as "rottweiler" or "diablo 2". There are about 25% of my searches that DDG does not understand and gives nonsense results, and I add "!g" to the query to go to Google's results instead; recently, this has been only needed for filtering out old results with Google's "Past year" tool. For the remaining 75% however, DDG is leaps ahead of Google.
Talking of Diablo 2, I hated that game. As a result of trying it, I've found that:
A. I probably hate the "hack and slash" genre itself, and games should involve some thought and strategy for me to like them
B. For me to enjoy a game, it should be either 2D like most flash games or The Battle for Wesnoth, or very realistic 3D like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed II. The latter two are the most immersive and enjoyable games I've ever played.
Also, factor A seems to be more important than factor B, since Dead Rising too has a realistic 3D, but has failed to impress me at all so far.
I completed Batman a few weeks ago and am now into Assassin's Creed. It's difficult to describe progress in this completely non-linear game, but so far I've unvealed "Il Duomo's Secret" and "Torre Grossa's Secret", and have killed 4 of the major enemies (including at least 2 of de Pazzi family).
I felt compelled to write this post after more than a week of complete lack of communication with anyone I knew, friends or relatives. More and more, I'm coming back to my old ways of hating cell phones and electronic media of communication, and much prefer personal conversations. I keep thinking of visiting my friends at Marathahalli more often, but my laziness and nocturnal habits make that a difficult task.
I said "lack of communication with anyone I knew" because I've been communicating with random strangers at Omegle a lot. Amidst the various "asl?" (asking for age, sex and location, mostly as a prelude to a cybering episode), or "Jesus can save you" stuff, there are a lot of interesting people there with profound ideas.
I chatted with an agnostic guy from the US who knew a surprising amount about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I had the opportunity to clear some things up and show that Hindu Vedanta philosophy was at least an internally consistent and beautiful theory, if not a true explanation of the universe. We agreed that while religion itself was unnecessary and often harmful, the practices discovered by Hindu and Buddhist monks were very helpful to cleanse and improve the mind, and should be adopted purely for their utilitarian value.
I talked with a Chinese woman who found India's arranged marriage system strange, felt all Indian guys she had met were wonderful gentlemen, and recommended two chinese movies to me (one was called "Aftershock" in English, the other translated to "Hawthorn"; I've not been able to find subtitled versions of either).
I also talked with a European guy (was it Sweden? or Switzerland? I forget.) who shared a lot of my interests, was living my dream life with having studied psychology as his major and now going on to neuro-psychology in higher studies. He was also exactly my age and shared my interest in books too. Unfortunately the conversation got disconnected due to a server error and I never got his contact details.
I'm learning a lot through these conversations and they're expanding the limits of my morals, thoughts, knowledge and imagination.
Thank you Tim Berners-Lee, for this wonderful thing called the Internet.
Jul 9, 2010
Forgiveness and me
I never learnt to forgive people. This is perhaps my greatest weakness. There are very very few things that bother me or make me angry, but once it has happened, there are very very very few things that can make me forget it and forgive those who did it.
This has cost me dearly in relationships, has murdered what were otherwise good friendships, but I have no idea what to do.
Because, I never learnt to forgive people.
Jun 11, 2010
Rule yourself
Anywhere you look around on the Internet, you see people having arguments, people trying to convince each other of their own viewpoints. There is the thought that if your opinion isn't the majority opinion, at least within circles you consider important, your opinion becomes invalid. So, people try hard, with logic, profanity and every weapon possible, to win these arguments.
On the other hand, a lot of these arguments can be stopped if the real experts stepped in, whatever the field of conflict is. So, why don't they do it? Some time back, I read an article on some controversial topic, and thought, "That is very good reasoning, but he hasn't presented it in a convincing way at all. Why has he missed this wonderful opportunity? Sad, perhaps he doesn't have the skills to do so."
Today, while reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", a thought sprang up: Why should he try to convince others of any viewpoint of others at all? May be he put it out just as a mental vent, to share his views with those who care. He doesn't need to persuade anybody, and whether or not they see the logic in it is their own problem, their own choice and wish.
In general, why should anyone care what anyone else thinks at all? After all, our life is our own to live, and we can adhere to our viewpoints and act according to them all we want. What base does this desire have, this desire to 'convert' the whole world into our point of view? It's pointless, meaningless, energy-sapping, idiotic endeavour. Most people who are really good at what they do, avoid this kind of argument. That is both partly the cause and partly the effect of them being an expert. They are intelligent enough to see that it's unnecessary, and hence they spend their time better, honing their skills and building their mental energy reserve.
So, I believe that all that time we spend arguing could better be spent in introspection, clarifying our own beliefs and reasoning to ourselves. This will give us a lot of confidence in our beliefs, after which we see more and more that the arguments are pointless - because, either the opponent really has a good point in which case it's time to re-evaluate your point of view, or the opponent refuses to think logically, in which case it's stupid to argue with him/her. There's the other case where your priorities are different, and hence different things are important to you both, in which case too an argument serves no purpose.
So, kindly let me suggest that it's better to seek to rule yourself, instead of trying to rule others' minds. There's a lot of 'you' to rule anyway, you're huge internally.
Thank you.
PS: This isn't an attempt to convince you of anything either. It's just a mental outpour. That's it. I'm not a hypocrite. Really. :)
May 8, 2010
Virtual suicide attempts and success
In the middle of the night, out of thin air, popped the desire to play Contra. For those who don't remember or know, Contra is an awesome game that was created for the consoles - for the common people, that means TV video games and such. I was going to play this in my laptop using the NES simulator I had gotten long back from Venki.
However, the simulator was not where I thought it would be, and even after a lot of search it didn't reveal itself (in the process, I realised Google Desktop search was good for nothing, and uninstalled it - it doesn't even have Advanced Search!). I gave up and started browsing. After some time, purely by chance, I came upon the folder that contained the games. Some wise guy rightly said "Stop seeking, and you will find", though he was probably talking about God, not Contra.
Anyway, as Providence would have it, by the time I found this folder, I had lost the interest in playing Contra, and instead wanted to play some Flash game. "Bow Man" caught my eye, and I started it up (here's an online version, but don't you run away from my blog or I'll find you and make you read it; and that won't be a pleasant experience). After a few games, it got quite repetitive - I had learnt to adjust the angle and force by reading the numbers, and was winning too easily.
It was then that I decided to play around with the settings to make things harder. Thee settings window had:
And the hilarious part was how the opponent Computer player played. At first, he kept shooting as if the wall didn't exist, resulting in all his arrows getting stuck on the wall. Then, he realized the wall's presence, but still didn't realize that there was a wind, resulting in arrows landing far beyond me. After this, he kept alternating between these, resulting in an accumulation of arrows on the wall (I was actually hoping the wall would fall down from the weight of his arrows!) and in the space behind me. As for my part, I managed to create a minor injury on his leg, and that was it. None of his arrows even touched me.
Finally, I decided to take matters into hand and end the game. One obvious way is to close the window, but that is for sissies. Real men never quit a duel just like that. It's victory or valiant death. And so it was decided: I shall kill myself. But I immediately realized this wasn't such an easy job either, because of the presence of the wind. Without the wind, I could have shot straight up, and 4 such shots would probably have killed me. But with a wind blowing, I had to aim perfectly at an angle slightly less than (or more than, depending on the direction of the wind) 90 degrees. After many attempts, I managed to do this too. Here's part of the screenshot of the dead me, along with the arrows of my failed attempts at suicide:
Notice that one of the 'failed' arrows is behind me, which is because the wind suddenly started flowing from left to right before my final arrow. So, I had to shoot to my left for the arrow to reach me, and got it right only in the second attempt.
Also notice the small green leaves on the ground. They indicate the direction of the wind, by flying in that direction. The game designer could simply have used an indicator arrow or something to point to the direction of the wind, but chose to do it in this realistic manner, which impressed me.
Ok, that's all folks, you can now go play Bow Man yourself. Enjoy!
PS: A friend of mine recently wrote a post for the first birthday of her blog, which made me look back into my first post. And whoa, this blog too has had its first birthday come and go (it was on April 17th). Hey blog, I'm sorry for forgetting your birthday, here's a cake for you:
Happy now? Now don't eat all of it yourself, give some to these sweet guests.
And sweet guests, I have provided you the great opportunity to read these wonderful posts, without expecting anything in return. However, I know that many of you are itching to pay me back, so: I accept payments through cash, internet transfer, Mafia Wars reward points, and many other things. However, people sending in bounced cheques are advised to renew their life insurance policies immediately. Thank you.
That's all, this time for real,
Sundar
However, the simulator was not where I thought it would be, and even after a lot of search it didn't reveal itself (in the process, I realised Google Desktop search was good for nothing, and uninstalled it - it doesn't even have Advanced Search!). I gave up and started browsing. After some time, purely by chance, I came upon the folder that contained the games. Some wise guy rightly said "Stop seeking, and you will find", though he was probably talking about God, not Contra.
Anyway, as Providence would have it, by the time I found this folder, I had lost the interest in playing Contra, and instead wanted to play some Flash game. "Bow Man" caught my eye, and I started it up (here's an online version, but don't you run away from my blog or I'll find you and make you read it; and that won't be a pleasant experience). After a few games, it got quite repetitive - I had learnt to adjust the angle and force by reading the numbers, and was winning too easily.
It was then that I decided to play around with the settings to make things harder. Thee settings window had:
- Something called "show index", which probably referred to the angle and force being displayed near the player when we shoot an arrow (this is a bow-and-arrow shooting game by the way, in case you hadn't guessed). I turned this off to make the game a little difficult.
- An "add wall" option, which I enabled to make the game a little more difficult.
- An "add wind" option, which too I enabled, since "the game was too easy, right?"
- A "vitality" option, which I guess to be the number of arrows needed to kill someone. I increased this from 2 to 4. Don't ask me why.
And the hilarious part was how the opponent Computer player played. At first, he kept shooting as if the wall didn't exist, resulting in all his arrows getting stuck on the wall. Then, he realized the wall's presence, but still didn't realize that there was a wind, resulting in arrows landing far beyond me. After this, he kept alternating between these, resulting in an accumulation of arrows on the wall (I was actually hoping the wall would fall down from the weight of his arrows!) and in the space behind me. As for my part, I managed to create a minor injury on his leg, and that was it. None of his arrows even touched me.
Finally, I decided to take matters into hand and end the game. One obvious way is to close the window, but that is for sissies. Real men never quit a duel just like that. It's victory or valiant death. And so it was decided: I shall kill myself. But I immediately realized this wasn't such an easy job either, because of the presence of the wind. Without the wind, I could have shot straight up, and 4 such shots would probably have killed me. But with a wind blowing, I had to aim perfectly at an angle slightly less than (or more than, depending on the direction of the wind) 90 degrees. After many attempts, I managed to do this too. Here's part of the screenshot of the dead me, along with the arrows of my failed attempts at suicide:
Also notice the small green leaves on the ground. They indicate the direction of the wind, by flying in that direction. The game designer could simply have used an indicator arrow or something to point to the direction of the wind, but chose to do it in this realistic manner, which impressed me.
Ok, that's all folks, you can now go play Bow Man yourself. Enjoy!
PS: A friend of mine recently wrote a post for the first birthday of her blog, which made me look back into my first post. And whoa, this blog too has had its first birthday come and go (it was on April 17th). Hey blog, I'm sorry for forgetting your birthday, here's a cake for you:
And sweet guests, I have provided you the great opportunity to read these wonderful posts, without expecting anything in return. However, I know that many of you are itching to pay me back, so: I accept payments through cash, internet transfer, Mafia Wars reward points, and many other things. However, people sending in bounced cheques are advised to renew their life insurance policies immediately. Thank you.
That's all, this time for real,
Sundar
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