The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Interesting Disney movie. It has narration by Stephen Fry and a very cute robot Marvin who is depressed! We have the President of the Galaxy who signs an order to destroy Earth by affixing “Love and Kisses Zaphod” at the end of the order. Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford whose brain is fuelled by lemon juice! Dolphins had tried to warn the humans that the world is about to end. The mice have actually created the world and mankind is under the false impression that it is the brainiest.
The imdb link is here with the funny quotes here.
The official site is here.

My mantras

My mantras are as follows:

• Look, listen and learn ( Remember that you have two ears and only one mouth).
• Communicate
• Think smart….. Don’t reinvent the wheel. (definitely required in IT industry where developers keep on recoding the same stuff!)
• Think think think….. God has given you a brain… use it. (even if you don’t believe in God, you still have a brain !)
• Every experience comes with a lesson. Learn from it and move on to the next stage.
• As you sow, so shall you reap (GIGO) .
• Be flexible, respect others and be  compassionate.

Casino Royale

 

The following has Spoilers – don’t read if you have intentions of seeing the movie. 

Saw ‘Casino Royale’ today (treat from office). Movie starts off in black and white – maybe as a tribute to the old time feel of Ian Fleming’s novel. Although it should be the first of the James Bond series where Bond earns the ‘00’ of the ‘007’ it is set up post 9/11 of 2001 when we have the villainous banker Le Chiffers who funds the terrorists. We have cell phones, GPRS, modern medical technology (Bond has a heart attack because he is poisoned by the villain’s girl friend and is saved by the latest technology – he staggers to his fancy car in a daze and connects to M by phone – the car has a medical treatment system and he can treat himself in Montenegro…. with the doctor’s instructions coming from London), a Sony Vaio laptop is prominently used (M and later Bond seem to have the same model – hmm maybe MI6 give bulk orders to Sony), Bond’s girlfriend (Vesper played by Eva Green) uses a cell phone to stay in touch with the actual villain (her ex lover). After the opening scene where Bond earns his 00 title by committing the 2^nd required murder, the scene shifts to Africa where we have a lengthy chase sequence at a construction site (the stunts done by Craig himself supposedly) that leads to an embassy blow up and a very unhappy ‘M’ (played by the oh so very British Judy Dench). Bond land up at Ms home and M is very unhappy with him and threatens to feed him to the people who are after him. Bond in the meanwhile has traced a SMS call that the person he shot at the embassy blowup to a place in the Bahamas and Le Chiffre. There he comes across a henchman of Le Chiffre who gets killed by Bond (at a body part exhibition and his body is left as a showcase!) and whose girlfriend is later tortured by Le Chiffres team to get Bond’s whereabouts as she had got intimate with him (hmm – that is some old language!). Then Bond spots a man leaving the exhibition who had picked up a bag that the henchman had left. This trail leads to the Miami airport where an unveiling of a ‘huge’ aeroplane is to take place. Bond comes to the conclusion that the plane is going to be blown up and after another well shot thrilling blood-pumping sequence at the airport where a truck is mangled awfully, the plane is saved. Le Chiffre had plotted the whole thing because it would have brought the aeroplane’s company’s shares down and he was planning to make a 100million dollar windfall there. He loses that and now wants to know who spolit the whole plan. M now lands up the scene and explains to Bond that there is going to be a poker game where Le Chiffre is going to play at a table for 10. The stake is 150 million (or thereabouts). They want him to lose and Bond to deliver him to them alive so that they can get the info from him. Bond gets to meet a female accountant of MI6 (Eva Green) who puts in $5 million in an account and is sent along with him to the game to keep an eye on things. There is another MI6 operative there who is actually the informant (or maybe not as events later prove). The accountant and Bond have a nice snappy conversation where both prove each other to be orphans and a relationship is set up between them. The game begins, Bond tells the girl and the suppose-to-be informant that he suspects that Le Chiffre rubs his eyebrows when he is bluffing. At the next game where Bonds relies on this cue, he loses because the eyebrow ruse backfires on him. The accountant and he are also beaten up by goons at break time. We have a scene in a shower where Eva Green is sitting hunched up while the shower is on because she is so traumatized by the beating. Bond joins her there and the true romance begins! In the next session of the game, Bond is poisoned and we have the cardiac arrest scene. When he recovers from this, he asks Eva ‘are you ok?’. The heart-broken Bond (in more ways than one) goes back to the game and guess what – wins the game by making a straight flush! Le Chiffre is hopping mad and wants access to the account in which the winnings has been deposited and Bond has the password to that. After Bond and Eva have dinner to celebrate and they talk about Vesper, Eva goes out after a phone call from the informant. Bond smells a rat and follows her. He sees her being pushed forcibly in a car and follows her in his jazzy car. While going at full speed in the dark night, he spots her lying on the road and swerves the car thereby losing control. Le Chiffre’s team comes and takes Eva and him to a torture chamber. But the torture is very simple. Bond is put nude in a chair and is whipped with a thick rope by Le Chiffre. In the meantime, one can also hear Eva being tortured in another room. Suddenly when the torture is at its nadir, another person enters the room and kills Le Chiffre. Bond wakes up in a hospital and shortly, Eva appears hale and hearty with no apparent damage to her. A man appears along with her who appear to be from MI6 and takes the password from Bond. Bond tells Eva that she already knows the password. She denies it and when James says the letters VESP..she gets the rest of the initials ER. Bond and she go into a honey moon period and Bond decides to resign from the service and play the love-sick Romeo. They have a merry time and one day when they are on a gondola (?), Eva sees a figure and kind of becomes apprehensive. The next morning, she goes off leaving behind Bond in the hotel room. Bond gets a phone call from M asking him about the whereabouts of the money and Bond without revealing anything promises to get it by end of day. He checks Eva’s cell phone that she has left behind and follows her to the meeting that she had specified there. She has a box full of money and there are other people after her. They get trapped in an old building where she is trapped in a lift. The building gets flooded because water from tanks is released because of the shooting. Eva is trapped and alth’ Bond tries to rescue her, she drowns and dies. Bond has given up on girls and tells M to keep the pressure on the informant also. M explains to him that when they were tortured by Le Chiffre and people had barged in, that Eva had made a deal with her French Algerian boyfriend to let you go and that she would get him the money. So, Eva was true to Bond and had not betrayed him. Bond gets a call from Mr White on Eva’s phone asking for a meeting. He goes to the meeting and shoots Mr White there. And then says “I am James Bond”. Finito.

 

 

Have fun – game links

Some links:

Vivalagames
Troyis game
Popcap games
Gamezebo
Pogo

Murder Rooms

This movie stars Ian Richardson as Dr Joseph Bell who influenced Sir Artur Conan Doyle (played by Robin Laing) during his formative years at universtity. Elspeth Scott is Doyle’s love interest whose brother-in-law is an influential person in London society (played by Charles Dance who played an important role in Four Jewels and the Crown)  and also plays a part as a consumer of the services offered by ladies-available-for-hire. This displays the seedier side of London society.

More information is available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212903/.

Engadget and Crossfire

Engadget has a review of Crossfire machine at http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/30/hp-iq770-crossfire-19-inch-touchscreen-media-pc-revealed/3#comments.

Mother

‘Mother’ stars Anna Reid and Daniel Craig. Anna Reid plays the role of a grandmother who is staying with her daughter in London after her husband dies. She takes up with her daughter’s boy friend as an expression of her new found freddom that she could not exercise during the life-time of her husband as she perforce had to live by the  pre-feminism ideals.The movie is restrained and does not fall into melodrama. As expected, she has to move back home as the family is not interested in accepting her new found freedom specially the daughter who can’t cope with the unloving mother who has now snatched her boy friend also. What a double whammy! At the end of the movie, Anna Reid is shown riding off into the sunset (or is it morning?) with a ticket in hand – to another adventure maybe!

One of those restrained British films that I enjoy. And stars a bearded and scruffy blooking Daniel Craig ( the latest Bond whose Casino Royale is still generating buzz).

 More information can be found at http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/m/mother.htm. Surprisingly, information about this movie is not there at imdb or at Yahoo Movies.

Capote

This Academy award winning movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper.I had heard of this movie because of the Oscar buzz and got a chance to see it.From a perspective of somebody who had read and seen “To Kill a Mockingbird” and seen “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” but had not heard of ”In Cold Blood” or read it, the movie sheds some light on the author and the times he lived in. However, the practices he employs in writing THE criminal book seem to be highly questionable. He becomes a confidant of one of the killers and doesn’t reveal to him the name of the book or that he has given a reading at a book store.  Most probably if he had written an account in today’s times then he may have been vilified instead of praised.

Capote is also depicted to so self-absorbed (an egoist), he keeps on talking about his own problems when he goes to attend Harper Lee’s movie screening.

Some usefull links: 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379725/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capote_%28film%29

http://www.sonyclassics.com/capote/