Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain-Review

It was back in 2001,an Indian Movie(Lagaan) made it to final 5 in the best foreign movie category in Oscars and seriously rooted for it to win. Little did i know that a movie like “Amelie Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain“(also popularly know as Amelie) was one of the co-nominees,else i would have not even have dreamt of the Lagaan bagging the title. After seeing the Movie,I’m disappointed that this movie could not win the nomination. I seriously feel this movie deserves something more than just a nomination.

And coming to the movie,it is about a girl named Amelie who had a rather strange and isolated childhood. So she kinda builds up an imaginative and interestingly fictitious world around herself. Self-indulgence is her life style. Amelie discovers the comfort and joy the simpler and little things in life like skimming pebbles on water,plunging her fingers in bag of grains etc. Probably more to do with her unsociable childhood. She has a a taste for trivial and intricate details in simplest of things.

She some how fancies the idea of helping people around her not by giving money,but rather in a subtle way,by making them happy. In her quest to do the same, we can get a sense of importance of her objective. The movie shows how conveniently we ignore the beauty of life around us. Though the movie is not practical,it still mesmerises with the melancholic, nostalgic, joyous, funny, amusing situations which most of us could easily relate to, usually to our childhood.

The camera work is really impressive with it warm tones. It totally adds a different dimension to the feel of the movie. Amelie is in the same league as American Beauty(1999), but just a couple of notches ahead. Though the movie is in French,its still worth watching with the sub-titles. My only complaint with the movie is a couple of unnecessary nude scenes(I’m no kid), but for them it will be a movie to watch with the family.

A 9/10 for Amelie

Goo Goo Dolls-Iris

My favourite song of late….jus played it some 30 times in a row….

And I’d give up forever to touch you
Cause I know that you feel me somehow
You’re the closest to heaven that I’ll ever be
And I don’t want to go home right now

And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your life
Cause sooner or later it’s over
I just don’t want to miss you tonight

And I don’t want the world to see me
Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

And you can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming
Or the moment of truth in your lies
When everything seems like the movies
Yeah you bleed just to know your alive

And I don’t want the world to see me
Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

I just want you to know who I am
I just want you to know who I am
I just want you to know who I am
I just want you to know who I am

It Happens All The Time

I’m still recovering from disaster,i.e the semester results. Though i was anticipating them,the results still were shocker. But I’m glad that i didn’t flunk the paper,which apparently i thought,i would. Unfortunately the problem is that the acads don’t seem to motivate me much,which seems to be the problem with most of the techinical education students in India. Probably the teaching methodology owns half the blame…

My problem is more to do with lethargy and procrastination. However the latter seems to be more of a worry. I do things which i feel guilty of, which at the same time are pleasurable,guilty pleasure as they say. Like i tend to postpone class work until the N’th hour and do some silly things which wont even yield a broken egg. I choose to do some mindless stuff on the Internet or the computer,instead of finishing off my work in advance.And at the last minute lethargy gets better of me,and eventually end up lost in the deadline race.

I wish(not really),I must have flunked in that paper,may be that would be enough of kick towards motivation. The thing with this is that,I get a close shave,but not not close enough to learn a serious lesson. Can somebody teach this desperate,how to motivate oneself     Gotta formulate a plan and prioritise things. I would like to think I’m strictly resolved about this…but you know,There is always a next time…

Digital Memories

How many of us break our heads thinking if some particular thing is worth preserving or archiving….may be an old chocolate wrapper,a pen which I’ve used as a kid,a childhood sketch or an old notebook.

I would hardly remember having them.And neither do i care to look at them or even bother at usual times,may be during the next disposal session,the only time when they come across. But those moments with them are special,though it sounds silly and trivial..some how things like this strangely are a reflection of one self,objective memoirs as they can be called.

This comes to remind me of my dad’s collection of letters,which ranges over a period of 35 years.I envy him for it,though we can pride upon the fact that we can archive every piece of sms or message.E-mails(no matter how well written the are) or any other digital letters,are still are vastly inferior to hand written letters…they simply don’t have the  element of personal touch…

I usually write my personal journals and save them in my Inbox…i write letters,but are stored in the form of binary code…i send and receive greeting cards which don’t last past a month(flash cards)…I get nostalgic when i find an old hand written letter,but rarely do i even feel like reading at my old e-mails. The only good thing about the digital content is their ability to share withe ease and longevity.

Matrix Explained

This Blog is for many those unanswered questions and unclear things in the Matrix triology,I managed to get a excellent summary of the whole movie and Im quite impressed..Just read it..Im sure you would love to…

Since the machines’ main source of energy was solar radiation, mankind decided that their last, best chance to win the war was to darken the skies and block the light of the sun. Hoping this would give them the edge they needed in combat, they scrambled aircraft and “Operation Dark Storm” began.
The Earth’s Atmosphere was already heavily thick with waste and dust from the colossal nuclear attacks on the machine city, all that was needed was a specially designed catalyst that would worsen the situation and prevent the dust from settling.
So the sky was scorched with radioactive nuclear waste combined with nanomachines that put a black blanket between the sun and the surface of the Earth, absorbing all of the sun’s rays and causing eternal electromagnetic storms that would prevent the machines from passing through the dark turbulent layer.
But the robots anticipated such a move and stored great quantities of their power, enabling them to fight under blackened skies. With no sunlight, humans ran out of food faster than the robots ran out of their stored energy.
While the lack of solar power would eventually force the machines to pursue other energy sources, Operation Dark Storm failed to turn the tide in the humans’ favor.
Humanity had also planned ahead of course. They had a facility ready, an underground vault. Hidden very deep in the core of the Earth itself. The plan was to let humanity survive down there till the Earth could be restored.
Meanwhile on the surface, the war continued, horrifically, with excessive brutality on both sides, until, inevitably, the machines claimed victory.
Predictably, the machines’ encyclopedic knowledge of human physiology allowed them to inflict great misery on the war’s casualties.
When the war turned in their favor, their macabre experiments on captured foes were disturbing to say the least. They had no emotion, no mercy, and were only interested in ensuring their own survival.

Matrix Triology Review

I remember watching the movie “Matrix” when i was 13 year old. I had no clue as to what was happening, yawned till the climax but enjoyed those hong kong action sequences in the end. That’s it,don’t even remember watching the movie till i saw it quite a while back. Now i wont forget this movie is years to come.

The movie is one of the best sci-fi movies although the concept of the movie is very simple,the directors of the movie made it more interesting by adding a philosophical dimension to the movie. The conversations through out the movie are quite interesting and they raise many questions about ever eluding answers to humanity. I must say it is a philosophically evolved movie. The characters through out the Trilogy have many similarities to many characters in Hindu mythology and parallels can be drawn between Christian beliefs,however the movie mainly tends to incline on Advitha philosophy and Buddhist principles.

What is more interesting is the way in which Program Computing terminology is inter-twined with the essence of the movie and the names of the characters. For example take Cypher(a character in the first movie) who is a hidden “bad” guy and Cypher also means hidden code.So is NEO,and is quite referred as “The One” in the movie,which is an anagram of Neo.And even Morpheous,meaning “the god of dreams and sleep” “He Who forms shapes and molds”,which is understandably similar to his role in the movie i.e the one who awakens Neo from the Matrix. The Matrix in the movie is quite similar ‘Maya’ or ‘illusion’ which Sri Krishna talked about in the Gita.And Neo could also be the reincarnation which Bible speaks of….or could be an Avtaar of Lord Vishnu in Hindu Mythology which is prophecied in vedas,while in the movie ‘The One’ is prophecied by the Oracle. The different cycles of Matrix are similar to the concept of Yugas in Vedas. The movie talks about yin-yang relation of our existence in an abstract way,like The Architect and The Oracle,Neo and Agent Smith..We could simply bring about any number of similarities as we want.

However the quality of sequels considerably deteriorated in lines of philosophy or mental stimulation.The sequeals leave the audience with more questions rather than answering those in first part.How ever the CGI in sequeals is highly impressive.’Matrix’ triology is one such movie series that any one can afford to miss.If anybody is into religious philosophy,Matrix series is definitely for you…

Matrix 9.2/10

Matrix Reloaded 8.6/10

Matrix revolutions 8.1/10

Most Used Web2.0 Apps

Initially when I was first introduced to web,apart from the web mail and yahoo home page,I hardly knew a couple of sites which could keep me engaged.Now I hardly have time to use all of them,thanks to all those excellently innovative web2.0 Apps.So this post takes inspiration from the techcrunch.com post “15 most useful web2.0 Apps”

Here is my list of most frequently used web2.0 applications:

Flickr is THE ORGINAL of photo sharing and hosting.Probably is the most complete one,among its kind.And the icing on the cake comes when it increased it monthly limit from 20 to 100 MB for free users. All its clones look mere imitators and have nothing radical to offer.If you don?t like Flickr,try PICASA WEB ALBUMS

Bloglines is the my official browser based feed reader.I must be grateful to Bloglines,it is a huge bandwidth saver,it must have saved a lot of money for me Though Google Reader is doing some great job Bloglines is faster and is one step ahead.

WordPress is supposed to be the best of all blogging service providers.I guess its really a powerful application.The free themes in WordPress beat the ones in Blogger by miles.I’m planning to buy some WordPress extras,like custom CSS etc can any one help me out.

Last.fm is my favourite web2.0 music app.It is the metaphorically similar to Flickr,the original social network for music.It scrobbles all my music plays and makes charts of top artists,songs etc.Also has online radio stations and also a separate flash based radio player.For those who didn’t like last.fm,Pandora is a good bet.

Orkut is probably the only site I use,even though I don’t like it. Orkut is a social networking site which is hugely popular in Indian Sub-continent and South America. Since most of my friends use Orkut,I am forced to I would rather prefer using something like facebook.

Technorati is a tagging and blog pinging site.Can mark favourite blogs and it acts as a feed reader for favourites.Could be helpful to increase some blog traffic,though I didn’t see any significant change in mine

Feedburner is probably the most reliable feed provider out there. It provides a very detailed feed stats and is quite helpful for those who want to study their readers. Honestly I still didn’t realize the full potential of this service.

Other applications which I would like to add is

Youtube: Used by millions,could be used even more if people have no bandwidth constraints.Definitely not for people like me.

Wikipedia: Who needs a Google search,if you have wiki to know every damn thing you ever wanted to know.Hail O Wiki.

Del.icio.us: The mother of social bookmarking.Though I use it,I’m not so good at tagging and saving bookmarks for the network.I bookmark links more for myself.

digg: Its a social site for interesting stuff based on user voting,the stories which have high rating move to the top of the page.This site is highly addictive and for geeky ones.

P.S: Im no expert at tech Apps…jus wrote what i knew..he he

Have A Nice Day

New years just keep coming

Firstly Wish You All A Very Happy New Year..It Takes really a lot for me to say “Wish You A Very Happy New Year”.Cause I’m not at ease with the artificiality surrounding those words..Oh! come on who would really want others to have a bad year.LOL

While the rest of the world seem to be stuck up with partying and celebrating,i was watching a “good” movie at a family get together, which went on to become boring since i already saw it N number of times.I was obligated to stay with them and neither did i care to attend a friends party.Just Wanted to be alone but could not.

One thing which simply amazes me is that we humans are experts in discovering new ways to celebrate mediocrity. Coming to new year,its simply a change in the date and time,which we arbitrarily chose to start off at some point of time.Probably people do need a reason to party and stay happy,what more than attaching significance to some date change which appears quite different from others..

New Year is simply market’s blue eyed child,which catalyses consumer activity..the news and entertainment networks,clubs,pubs,malls,bakers simply smile their way to banks. I’m sick of same old stuff that the TVs have been showing,the same ol’things people were doing every succeeding new year.Nothing radical or different.

Resolution is probably HOTTEST WORD in the fourth week of December every year and a kind of word which we obviously wont remember at any other point of time during the whole year.I’m sure most of us forget the things we planned to do by the end of January.

Last year i had a made set of resolutions(for the year 2006) and prepared a wish list which i blogged here Few of my last years resolutions were(along with their status in brackets)

1. Maintain a “Things to do book” (used it in patches)
2. Write a personal Diary. (wrote over four pages,all in the 1st 10 days of Jan)
3. Get some running shoes and sprint every morning.(half accomplished,brought shoes,but didn’t start running)
4. Do things as and when i say, i should do.(no comments)
5. Score 80 percent in current academic year.(mission failed)
6. Organise my pictures ands sort out files staying here.(will never happen)

Bottom Line 1: Its not how many or what resolutions one makes,it is how serious we are about them.

Bottom Line 2: Resolutions are like rules,meant to be broken.

Bottom Line 3: Never make Resolutions,don’t risk breaking the promises you made to yourself.

Bottom Line 4: We dont change when we want to,we change only when when we have to.