Best Wishes Saira on your Birthday …

You're more to me than my sister

You are also my best friend

You're always there for me

For an ear or a shoulder to lend

You're the one to hear of my joys

It's you I go to if I've had a bad day

I love you more than I have words

To express myself or say

Many More Happy Returns of the Day Sairu

May Allah shower blessings on you… Many More Happy Returns of the Day Sairu...

Love Always Haseem

Valkyrie Movie Review

Valkyrie falls into a real no man's land for holiday pictures. It is neither artistically presumptuous enough to make a serious run at the Oscars, nor empty-headed enough to be considered true counter-programming. Instead, it settles for a sort of thinking-man's popcorn picture, detailing the failed 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in the ripping-yarn mode of historical filmmaking. The difficulty with such efforts, of course, is that the outcome is already known, meaning that the characters and details need to be sufficiently interesting to keep the audience involved. Director Bryan Singer knocks the latter out of the park, and has cast his film well enough to let the former slide past some decidedly dodgy points.

At the top of it all stands Tom Cruise, looking for a comeback which he likely won't find here, despite being extremely well suited to the part. He plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the chief architect of the assassination plot, who evinced a genius for military planning as well as a disgust for Hitler that only intensified following a North Africa debacle that left his hands mangled and one eye missing. Cruise portrays him as a man of icy certainty: aware of what he must do, cognizant of the consequences, and perfectly willing to pay the price regardless. He never raises his voice and he never second-guesses himself. Once a decision is made, he commits to the bitter end. That makes him the ideal man to take out the Führer, or so the German Resistance believes. Led by a group of civilian leaders and dissatisfied military officers, they hope to cut off the head of the Nazi party and seize control of the government before the Allies bring the whole thing down on top of them.

Stauffenberg's solution is a variant of one of Hitler's own plans--Operation Valkyrie, which allows for the German reserve forces to take Berlin in the event of an attempted coup. He and the Resistance simply need to pretend that the SS instigated said coup rather than themselves. They can plant a bomb in the Führer's bunker, claim his inner circle did it, and grab the reins before anyone knows what happened. It was a daring and audacious scheme, and Singer understands how to convey the details in uniquely cinematic terms. Valkyrie hits its stride with a plethora of unspoken moments: the hands of workers in a telegraph office slowly rising, the roof of a church removed by Allied bombs, the hypocrisy of Hitler's vegetarian meals, and the dripping scorn of Stauffenberg's Nazi salute delivered with a missing hand. While not always entirely accurate, it strives to present the facts clearly while making only modest adjustments for entertainment's sake.

Somewhat more problematic is Valkyrie's willingness to take motivation as a given. The conspirators all want Hitler gone, but they stand in positions which presumably benefited from the rise of the Nazis. Are they true patriots who recognize the Führer's evil? Or simply rats deserting a sinking ship? The screenplay posits such questions solely in terms of their impact on the conspiracy, limiting the audience's ability to relate to the plotters as people. A good cast helps matters--topped by Bill Nighy's Nervous Nellie version of Friedrich Olbricht--but beyond Stauffenberg himself, the insight into their mindset remains purely perfunctory. That stifles some of the natural suspense of the scenario and lets the foregone conclusion loom higher than it should.

Singer counters that with a highly polished technical production that permits the suspense to flourish in straightforward terms. Strange coincidences and odd bits of misfortune periodically flummox the conspirators, which Valkyriedraws out with an impressive amount of panache. This pays dividends when the coup goes forward and history literally hangs on one or two unremarkable men caught in the middle of it all. John Ottman strengthens Singer's hand further with a tension-filled score, coupled with some first-rate editing to keep the proceedings from dragging.

That doesn't necessarily make for high art, but then again, neither do a lot of would-be Oscar contenders this season.

Verdict: Valkyrie offers something to filmgoers weary of excessive pretense, but not quite desperate enough to watch Jim Carrey flop around on the ground. It engages without insulting the intelligence, and if it cuts a unnecessarily shallow draft, it still moves forward with plenty of drive. A more merciful release date might have benefited it more. As it is, it's likely doomed to relative obscurity: a fate it deserves no more than the bold, desperate men it portrays.

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars on 5

Delhi 6 Movie Review

After Rang De Basanti, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Delhi 6 is sorely disappointing. The movie falls flat in the absence of strong plot, climax or focus.

Roshan Mehra (Abhishek Bachchan) visits India for the first time to drop his grandmother (Waheeda Rehman) who wants to die at home in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. The by lanes of Chandni Chowk, where the story unfolds, provide culture shock to Roshan. He soon falls in love with the vivacious Bittu Sharma (Sonam Kapoor) who wants to cast away the bonds of traditions and be the next Indian Idol.

The story takes a sudden turn when communal tension breaks out in the peaceful area when the Kala Bandar (Black Monkey) that has been terrorizing the entire city, reaches Chandni Chowk. Abhishek tries to do his bit for communal amity but his religious antecedents catapult him into the eye of the storm. However, like typical Bollywood movies, Delhi 6 also ends on a happy note.

Abhishek Bachchan, yet again, plays the ABCD (American Born Confused Desi). However, his American boy act is getting old and over the top. Sonam is natural and beautiful, and lives up to expectations. The supporting characters do justice to their roles. Waheeda Rehman is graceful as ever but Rishi Kapoor is wasted. Amitabh Bachchan's role is amateurish and unnecessary.

The screenplay is interesting at times and preachy at others. Some of the shots by cinematographer Binod Pradhan are simply brilliant. Technically the movie is a slipshod effort. The actors have been shot against the background of visuals shot in Delhi, which looks completely fake.

Verdict: Overall, Delhi 6 disappoints as the director who gave us Rang De Basanti (2006), clearly fails to live up to expectations.

Audience Verdict: Delhi 6's first day first show saw an encouraging turnout at popular suburban theatres in Mumbai. Most viewers came out satisfied but were unambiguous in their opinion: Delhi 6 does not come close to Rang De Basanti (2006). Others found the concept of the Kala Bandar ridiculous. The audience, in all, considered the movie good and watchable.

Rating: 3 Stars on 5

Downadup worm wrecking havoc

A worm by the name of Win32.Worm.Downadup.B. is fast spreading across the net. Within four days, it infected four times the number of computers it was on. The rapid spread is because the worm skirts around AV software by using rarely-used APIs in the system. The worm hides in a folder in the recycle bin, and updates itself by checking upto 250 randomly generated domain names, which have components. The safest way to prevent the spread of this particular worm is to not switch USB drives between computers. If your USB drive has a mysterious recycle bin folder, there is a good chance that you have this worm. Keep your work USB drives separate from the ones for personal use to prevent either your workplace or your home computer from being infected. Microsoft has released a patch, but the fix itself was faulty. The worm affects Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. There are no workarounds as yet. The worm is spreading by exploiting multiple systemic weakness, including weak passwords. The worm restricts some traffic (like system updates), but is otherwise not involved in any malicious activity. The main threat at this point of time is the worm allowing computers to be used by a botnet. These can be used to send spam for example. Downadup is also known as Conficker and Kido.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Movie Review

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies around 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin’s story serves as the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about child rearing, undergraduate behavior and courtship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

From this odd, somewhat unpromising kernel, the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Eric Roth have cultivated a lush, romantic hothouse bloom, a film that shares only a title and a basic premise with its literary source. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald.

While the film’s plot progresses, with a few divagations, in a straight line through the decades of Benjamin Button’s life, the backward vector of that biography turns this “Curious Case” into a genuine mystery. And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate — in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways — are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love.

Above all, though, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a triumph of technique. Building on the advances of pioneers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis — and on his own previous work adapting newfangled means to traditional cinematic ends — Mr. Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac”) has added a dimension of delicacy and grace to digital filmmaking. While it stands on the shoulders of breakthroughs like “Minority Report,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Forrest Gump” (for which Mr. Roth wrote the screenplay), “Benjamin Button” may be the most dazzling such hybrid yet, precisely because it is the subtlest. While he does treat the audience to a few grand, special-effect showpieces, Mr. Fincher concentrates his ingenuity on the setting and the characters, in particular — and most arrestingly — on the faces of his stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt.

Ms. Blanchett is Daisy, a dancer, bohemian and all-around free spirit who ages gracefully, before our eyes, into a stately modern matron and then into a wasted, breathless old woman. Mr. Pitt, for the most part, plays Benjamin, who is born, looking like a man in his 70s, into a prominent New Orleans family in 1918. I say for the most part because near the end of the movie Mr. Pitt is replaced by younger and younger children and also because, at the beginning, he is evoked by an uncanny computer-generated confection that seems to have been distilled from his essence. This creature, tiny and wizened, is at once boy and man, but in every scene the ratio is readjusted, until the strapping figure of a familiar movie star emerges, gradually and all but imperceptibly.

The inner life of Benjamin Button, abandoned at birth by his stricken father (Jason Flemyng) and raised by the infinitely kind caretaker of a nursing home (Taraji P. Henson), is harder to grasp than his outer appearance, in part because Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression. It’s true that Benjamin’s condition imposes a certain detachment: he is at once innocent and ancient, almost never who he appears to be.

But even though Mr. Pitt’s coolness is a perfectly defensible approach to this character, his elusiveness, from one film to the next, is starting to look more defensive than daring. His recent performances have been devoted mainly to the study of his own magnetism, a quality he earnestly explores in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and playfully subverts in “Burn After Reading.” It goes without saying that Mr. Pitt has charisma to burn, and he is a capable and inventive actor, but he will only be a great one if he risks breaking himself open on screen as he did, briefly, in “Babel.”

And so, while Benjamin’s progress through life drives the narrative of “The Curious Case,” he is (as the title suggests) more an object of contemplation than a flesh-and-blood (or bit-and-byte) candidate for our empathy. His jaunt through the 20th century is certainly fun to watch, with an episodic rhythm that recalls old movie serials or, even more, the endlessly dilated adventures of newspaper comic-strip heroes. After some initiation into the pleasures of the flesh and the bottle in the city of his birth, Young Button (Old Button) hires onto a tramp steamer. He tarries a while in Russia, sampling caviar and adultery (with a superbly soignée Tilda Swinton) before World War II intrudes.

Later there will be sailboats and motorcycles as the ambient light turns gold along with Mr. Pitt’s hair. There will not be much in the way of big events or public happenings — Benjamin Button is, finally, no Forrest Gump — and though he is a white Southerner raised by a black woman, he seems untouched by racial turmoil or by much of anything beyond the mysteries of his peculiar destiny.

But the movie’s emotional center of gravity — the character who struggles and changes and feels — is Daisy, played by Ms. Blanchett from impetuous ingénue to near ghost with an almost otherworldly mixture of hauteur and heat. The story of Benjamin’s life is read to Daisy by her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital room in 2005, just as Hurricane Katrina is approaching the city. The imminence of the storm is a superfluous and unduly portentous device, since Katrina brings to mind precisely the hard, real-life miseries the movie has done everything in its power to avoid.

That power, though, is something to be reckoned with, and it resides in Mr. Fincher’s ability to use his unbelievable skills to turn an incredible conceit into a plausible love story. The romance between Daisy and Benjamin begins when both are chronologically pre-adolescents and Benjamin is, physically, a codger, but the initial element of pedophilic creepiness in the relationship gives way to other forms of awkwardness. Their love is uniquely perfect and enduring. At the same time, like any other love — like any movie — it is shadowed by disappointment and fated to end. In the case of “Benjamin Button,” I was sorry when it was over and happy to have seen it.

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars on 5

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some scenes of sex and violence.

Slumdog Millionaire Movie Review

Question: How convincingly and credibly can a British director make a film that’s set right in the underbelly of aamchi Mumbai – with its slums and squalor – and yet tell a life-affirming, buoyant tale with a universal appeal?

Options: (a) Not a chance in hell. (b) It’s a fluke. (c) He’s a cheat. Someone ghost-directed. (d) The guy deserves an Oscar.

Saving the answer for last, let it be said at the outset that Slumdog Millionaire is a kind of movie that is made only once in a while. It requires more than just an accomplished director to tell a story that cuts through cultural barriers while still being rooted in the grime and crime of Mumbai’s netherworld that lies in the shade of the symbols of India Shining – the skyscrapers and malls. It takes more than just a good ensemble cast to make a film like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ work. Everything has to fall in place – the script, screenplay, direction, acting, music, editing – in sync with each other to have a movie as frisky, stark, shocking and uplifting as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. It doesn’t happen often. May be it’s the stuff of destiny.

That’s also what the film’s story is about. An uneducated chaiwala ( Dev Patel ) at a call centre is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’. How did he manage to answer all the questions correctly? Is he a cheat? Well, the show’s host ( Anil Kapoor ) and a local cop ( Irrfan Khan ) certainly think so. But may be he’s not. May be everything that happened in this slumdog’s life somehow conspired to bring him to the hot-seat of the television show where he would know almost all – if not all – the answers!

As we are given flashbacks into the life of the protagonist Jamaal (Dev Patel), we are taken into Mumbai’s underbelly where he grew as a kid with his elder brother Salim and a girl named Lathika.

Orphaned as kids, the three impoverished musketeers of this story have to survive the big bad world of Mumbai. It’s a world where goons take kids under their wing and gouge out their eyes to make them beg on the streets. It’s a world where orphaned girls end up in brothels or as some ganglord’s mistress. It’s a world where young teens take to theft and killing because there’s none but criminals to guide them. It’s a world that Jamaal grew in and out of, but his brother Salim and love Lathika could not.

Against the backdrop of this filth and squalor unfolds a beautiful love story, a story where a guy does the impossible just to find the girl he loves, and in the process wins a few millions as bonus.

Right from the opening reels, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ unspools at feverish pace as Simon Beaufoy’s superbly crafted screenplay – adapted from Vikas Swarup’s book ‘Q&A’ – takes us into the innards of a Mumbai slum. Unflinchingly, the movie mirrors some stark realities that few Indian filmmakers have dared to tell – the killing of Muslims by a rioting mob, the brothels that thrive in the by-lanes of Mumbai, the greedy and cold-blooded gangsters who maim and blind little kids, and the cops who torture the suspects in custody. Yet, against this shocking reality there’s something that jars. That’s the film’s English dialogues. Danny Boyle and Beaufoy have stuck to English, rather than Hindi dialogues for the most part of the film, despite the fact that you would hardly find an uneducated slumkid or a chaiwala in India who speaks English fluently. But why Boyle and Beaufoy did so is understandable. They were making a film for the international audience. If not for this cinematic liberty, the movie would not have cut across the cultural fault-lines as it does now.

The performances in the film are topnotch, right from the kids Ayush Khedekar (as the kid Jamaal) and Azharuddin Ismail (the kid Salim) to Dev Patel (grown up Jamaal) and Freida Pinto (Lathika). Patel, who gets maximum screentime, is quite a find. With conviction he switches from a vulnerable contestant in the hot seat to a confident guy who dodges the trap laid by the game show’s host and even puts all his money on the line on the final question, all for the sake of love.

Anil Kapoor as the deriding host, Irrfan Khan as the empathetic cop and Saurabh Shukla as the cussing constable deliver upto the mark.

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ would not have been the same without A R Rahman ’s gritty, grungy and extraordinary score that literally breathes life into the movie’s frames – be it ‘Paper Planes’ when the kid Jamaal and his brother sell candies in train, or the raunchy ‘Ring Ring Ringa’ when the brothers (as teens) visit the red light area.

There are some brilliantly executed sequences in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ that prove Boyle’s mettle as a director. The kid Jamaal, locked in a makeshift toilet, jumps into a shit-hole just to get the autograph of his favourite filmstar. Or when the grown up brothers meet again on an under-construction building. Or the exhilarating finale when Jamaal doesn’t know the answer to the question that’s ironically the most personal to him. After all the suspense and drama, the movie leaves you in an ecstatic mood with Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’ (a dash of Bollywood song and dance in the end) and sends you home with a bounce in your walk and smile on your face.

As for how good Boyle is in ‘Slumdog’, the answer is –

(d) The guy deserves an Oscar.

And so does this movie.

Rating: 5 stars on 5

THE OSCAR WINNERS...

Best Picture: Producer Christian Colson for Slumdog Millionaire. “It has been collaboration between hundreds of people. All of us are here to share this moment. This was an extraordinary journey,” says the Slumdog... team.

Best Direction: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire

Best Original Song: A R Rahman and Gulzar for ‘Jai Ho...’ (Slumdog Millionarie)

The Indian music maestro, Rahman wooed the audience with ‘O Saya’ and ‘Jai Ho...’ the nominated songs from ‘Slumdog...’, as the nominees for Best Original Song were being announced.

Best Original Score: A R Rahman for Slumdog Millionaire . “I have nothing but my mother and she is there with me. I thank her for making me coming all this way with her blessings,” said a proud Rahman.

Best Film Editing: Chris Dickens for Slumdog Millionaire

Best Sound Mixing: Ian Tapp, Resul Pookutty and Richard Pryke for Slumdog Millionaire. “This is just not a sound award, but a history being handed over,” said Indian receiver Pookutty.

Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle for Slumdog Millionaire

Best Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy for Slumdog Millionaire. “The cast and crew of the film told me so much about India and writing,” said a proud Beaufoy.