Musings From New York

The Oscars ... Redux

The people I feel sorry for:

- Jamie Foxx for losing Best Supporting Actor (Collateral)
- Johnny Depp for losing Best Actor (Finding Neverland)
- Don Cheadle for losing Best Actor (Hotel Rwanda)
- Martin Scorcese for losing out Best Director (The Aviator ... plus, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, etc.)
- Brad Bird for losing Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (The Incredibles)

On another note ... where on earth can I find the Best Animated Shorts? Do I have to live in LA to be near a cinema that shows these?

The Oscars

Lessons learnt watching the 77th Annual Academy Awards:

- Chris Rock was gagged. Else, Chris Rock is nowhere near as funny as Billy Crystal. I forget details of Whoopi Goldberg's MC-ing, but I don't think it was this disappointing (i.e.: it was up to expectations). But who can forget Billy's Crystal's excellent comic montage to open last year's Oscars? Update: OK ... Chris Rock just hasn't been funny tonight. I feel sorry for the guy. He had to tame his image down to be acceptable to all those white folks, but lost everything that made him funny in the first place.

- The Academy folks is truly on an another plane (no pun intended). How else can The Aviator get so many awards? e.g.: I thought Collateral had better editting than The Aviator.

- Scarlett Johanssen is gorgeous and is likely to pass out in that corset she's wearing.

- Animated characters do not always work with real life (I'm referring to Edna Bird & Pierce Brosnan)

- Al Pacino was stoned out of his mind. Or maybe that's his real self. Who knows anymore?

- Salma Hayek is waaaaay-hey-hay hotter than Penelope Cruz!!

- Santana totally, totally rocks playing the blues. It was like the guitar was wired directly to my soul!

- Beyonce cannot have enough sequins on her dress. She also looks amazing in black.

- Hillary Swank is this year's Halle Berry. God, when will she stop talking?

- The Academy does not like Martin Scorcese.

- I have to see Million Dollar Baby.

Only In India

As Mr. Indian in "Goodness Gracious Me" says in one skit, many words in the English Language are Indian.

I wonder why "maadi" (for non-Kannadigas, it means "do") never got listed. But as we Bangaloreans say, "Chill maadi"

Ong-Bak 8/10

The Western world is rarely treated to martial arts gems these days. Jet Li is getting old, Jackie Chan is old ... and movies like Hero & Crouching Tiger are being tarred by the same brush (C'mon, Hero is not a martial arts flick. Enter The Dragon is a martial arts flick).

So watching this movie was such a welcome relief from artsy and chop-socky movies that I've watched over the last couple of years. It doesn't have much of a plot - village kid is sent to the big city to recover a stolen religious artifact, and gets involved with a local fight club. Watching the movie, audience reactions can be categorized as follows:

• Huh?
• What just happened?
• Cool!!
• Holy (expletive deleted)!!
• How did he do that?
• Awwwwwwww! (usually when some obviously painful stunt is performed)
• He did whaaaa?

Why these reactions? After all, you find several outrageous stunts in Jackie Chan movies! The reason is that there are no stunt doubles, no CG, and no wires. So while there might be some artistic creativity (e.g.: dusting clothes so when people fall down, a huge billow of dust blows out, making audiences think it was a hard blow), you know its Tony Jaa (the lead) that just jumped through a 2ft coil of barbed wire!

The stunts are outrageous, and obviously downright dangerous. The fight club scenes would put any episode of Ultimate Fighting to shame, and its all a glorious voyeuristic pleasure to see people get twelve kinds of !@#$ kicked out of them.

If you like action movies, you will like Ong-Bak, and it's a movie you should not miss.

Let Me Be The First To Admit ...

... that I was wrong!

(Spoiler Alert)

So the closet gay in Springfield wasn't Barney. It was Patty. Looks like Fox & Groening had fun with playing with our minds and the TV schedules.

Musical Evolution

You know, the entry yesterday about blues being the "core" of my musical tastes got me thinking about how my tastes have shifted and evolved over the years. I think the bulk of the "evolution" was in my 4 years in BITS ('94-'98) for those wondering. In fact, you could look at the whole thing by semesters!

School - Def Leppard, Bryan Adams
Pre-University - Guns 'N' Roses, Metallica-light (i.e.: The Black Album)
BITS Semester 1: Iron Maiden, Metallica
BITS Semester 2: Judas Priest, Yngwie Malmsteen
BITS Semester 3: Joe Satriani, Steve Vai
BITS Semester 4: Dream Theater, Deep Purple
BITS Semester 5: Rush, Led Zeppelin
BITS Semester 6: General Blues/Hard Rock ... AC/DC, Whitesnake, Van Halen, etc.
BITS Semester 7: The Beatles, Black Sabbath

After that, I don't think my core tastes have changed that much ... I'm listening to a lot more electronica & R&B nowadays. Hence my previous lament that I haven't heard anything new or exciting in quite a while. The nearest thing I got excited about was The Darkness ... and that was over a year ago!

Expanding The Office

We've taken on additional office space here ... a little 12ft x 12ft (I guess!) alcove just around the corner from the main office. It's going to be a project management room, leaving the main office for the sales staff.

Guess who needs to setup the IT services? :-p

Well, it's fun - I've never worked on a Sun Solaris machine before (that's a new file server)

A Ray Of Light 8/10

Damn, Jamie Foxx eerily looks like Ray Charles! I watched "Ray" over the weekend. Admitedly, I have never listened to Ray Charles, and knew about him passingly ... And so,  I approached Ray with an open mind.

Now part of my liking of the movie is the fact that I love the blues. It's something I keep deep down inside ... underneath Eminem, The Chemical Brothers, Metallica, and Rammstein ... underneath Joe Satriani, Led Zep, The Beatles and Sabbath ... it's like this core that all my musical tastes are built on. Admitedly, the first time I listened to "pure" blues was in my 3rd year of undergrad, when I heard some Muddy Waters tracks ... and I was referred to that after tripping on Zep.

Anyway, back to the movie. I loved the music! I enjoyed Jamie Foxx's acting (definitely Oscar material) ... but thought the script was a little light. It skimped over details of Ray's early life, jumping from one incident to another ... quantum leaps, rather than continuums! I would have liked to have seen more about how Ray's drug problems affected his music (did it enhance his productivity? There was just one scene where they show him breaking down), and how he brought up his son.

Don't get me wrong, this movie is a must-see, but it left me wanting more!

Now I gotta find a good "Best Of ..." collection!

A New Blog

I chatted with Malz last night. She said she's started a blog of her own. She hasn't posted much, but I'm hoping that driving up the traffic to her site will be incentive to write more!

Go Malz!

WOW!

WoW ... World of Warcraft. The best MMORPG I've played. Granted, I've played only Asheron's Call 2 and beta-tested EQ2. Still ... it's the best!

A lot has been commented on the graphics seeming "lo-tech". For example, EQ2 made a big deal about how their game was developed with future tech in mind. This is a noble concept, but it also means that most people with average systems are not going to be able to enjoy the game. I suffered massive lags and load times, even when I reduced the graphics options. WoW has amazing landscapes that really seem lush and vibrant. Kudos to their art teams! Each race has their own unique look - humans for example live in a very medieval forested landscape. Dwarves live in a frozen tundra. Taureans (high minotaurean creatures) live in open praries (their artworks resemble Native American). The Foresaken live in a gothic nightmare. It's beautiful!

The gameplay is very simple. Most common actions have dedicated hotkeys. The most frustrating thing I've encountered about gameplay so far has been my multiple deaths. Death in WoW is handled beautifully. There is no penalty for death, except for time. When you die, your spirit appears at a graveyard in the nearest village, and you begin a long trek back to your body. When you come close to your body, you can "re-enter it" and take control. There's no loss of XP. equipment, or money.

Money is a bit of a doozy though. It's not very easy to come by. I've slaved and slaved with my mage - put in perhaps 7 hours in all - and racked up about 30sp. Now that can buy you a lot of low-end gear, some pieces of mid-level gear, but a tabbard (that's a piece of clothing you wear to identify your guild) costs 1gp (thats 100sp). To form your own guild and design your own tabbard, you need 10gp (1000sp). So I guess this means you really have a sense of accomplishment when you get a new weapon or spell, etc. ... but the flip-side is that you can get frustrated with the process of accumulating so much wealth. A new feature in WoW is the ability to get mounts at level 40 ... training to ride costs 10gp and a mount itself costs 40gp. Thats a LOT of money! But it looks oh, so cool!

I've got 3 characters right now. My primary character is a (currently) 11th-level human mage, my second is a 7th-level dwarven fighter, and my third is a 7th-level taurean druid. The only reason I have so many is that I wanted to get a look at the other characters and artwork. The taurean look is gorgeous!

Anyway, to heck with Halo 2. WoW rocks!