Alexander-The Movie: Review

I’ve wanted to make this post for about 6 months now; anyway better now than never! Immediately after I had completed the Alexander tri-series tome by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, I was all charged up to watch the theatrical version of the story to see the whole lot of characters come alive – Alexander, Philip, Parmenio, Hephastion and Bucephalas.

I promptly picked up the DVD of Alexander (2004) and drummed up all expectations of an out-of-the-world experience. Perhaps, this was one of the reasons for the whole thing turning out to be damp squib. Overall, the movie was largely forgettable having done total injustice to inarguably one of the world’s best military generals. Here go my review (read complaints):

The Cast:
While Colin Farrell had done justice to his role as Alexander, Brad Pitt would have just been brilliant. Considering his exploits on-screen in the movie ‘Troy’, he could have fitted in the role to the ‘T’. Brad Pitt has played the legendary Achilles, who also turns out to be Alexander’s real-life hero which is an added plus. Angelina Jolie as ‘Queen Olympia’ and Anthony Hopkins as ‘Old Ptolmey’ are other classic cases of wasted talent!

Lopsided focus:
It is just unpardonable that the movie tends to zip past Alexander’s achievements and tends to brood too much on his not-so-illustrious periods. The movie creates a strong thread of negativity: right from the blatant reference to homosexuality, to execution of Philotas & Parmenion, to showcasing his temperamental nature at the Hydaspes the focus throughout the movie is on Alexander’s misgivings. This kind of an approach is understandable if the movie had been titled say, ‘The fallacies of Alexander’ or ‘Alexander: The human side’. I’m sure such an approach wouldn’t have managed to create even a peripheral interest in the subject. But then, why mislead the viewers and set wrong expectations? People expect glorification of a legend and projection of the super-human traits of a leader who was considered a Demi-God by even his contemporaries.

Missing Battles & Events:
There are several historic events/battles in Alexander’s history that aren’t recreated or at best just made a passing reference to. This includes Alexander’s tutelage under Aristotle at Pella, Battle of Chaeronea, Undoing of the Gordian Knot, Battle of Granicus & Siege of Tyre. These omissions apart, the movie doesn’t bring out Alexander’s out-of-the-box-thinking, the ingenious use of Phalanx as a fighting unit, unconventional military tactics and his strategies to unify the conquered lands. The only saving grace of the movie is the vivid portrayal of the crucial Battle of Gaugamela.

Here’s hoping that some movie studio would come forward to truly recreate the magic and aura surrounding Alexander’s life, yet again!

M-commerce: Are we ready?

'Move over e-commerce, the time of m-commerce has come..', or so claim the technology gurus. The past month I've been receiving a series of promo messages on my mobile. Some of them go like this:

"Download BookMyShow's mobile application. Use the following pin and get Rs. 100 off on your movie tickets."
"Kotak Mtrade Contest: Enable MTrade application and login atleast 5 times & win exciting prizes."
"Book your air tickets between 15 to 20 March through our mobile application and get a flat discount on all tickets booked in this period."

There is a great deal of push from companies cutting across services to get the customers accustomed to m-commerce. This seems to make business sense given the fact that all these companies stand to gain from a medium that is much more closer to the customer and literally at his/her fingertips. After all, the mobile gaming and mobile application markets are touted as the next big thing in India. So, GPRS services and mobile-commerce are the logical next steps.

However, in a stage where even Internet commerce is not fool-proof and hasn't got the complete buy-in from the Indian customer, will m-commerce cut ice with the targetted segment? When one looks at the percentage of GPRS-compatible mobile phones sold in the market and the maturity of GPRS services, it becomes obvious that this clearly is a market with a long gestation period. In my opinion, m-commerce needs more customer-education and assurance at this stage, for the small base segment thats existent today, before one can jump onto the promos bandwagon.

Another Weekend passes by

Another Saturday, and I’ve just had my breakfast, or should I call it brunch as its noon already. We’re onto the other weekend ritual of picking up groceries and re-filling stuff at Reliance Fresh. Yeah, they’ve finally managed to open their store in this part of Hyderabad after great initial resistance from the kirana shops. Going by the crowds and also the painfully long queue at the billing counter, this store has got a grand opening. Almost simultaneously there was a marked drop in the customers visiting the kirana stores! To hell with the all those business cases on how Big-ticket retailing wouldn’t jeopardize the mom-and-pop stores. Its very obvious as to how they get the small players packing almost immediately once they move in, usually bang next to theses smaller stores and gobbling up huge retail space in the locality.

The retailing experience is interrupted with a call from a like minded brethren, scrambling for some activity over a weekend! In the next few minutes, tickets have been booked for a matinee show at Prasads Imax. The movie is ‘American Gangster’, a much acclaimed movie with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, based on a true story. Watching the picture with absolutely no expectations, it turned out to be a well directed movie with great acting by both the lead actors. The movie vividly portrays the US of the 1960s-70s when the drug trafficking flourished. A relatively unknown afro-american rises from petty crime to the pinnacle of Heroin trade and creates a virtual monopoly. He smuggles his “Blue Magic” dope directly out of Vietnam using the US Army service planes! Just as in movies, here again an honest cop, just like our very own Vijayakanth (!) is entrusted with the responsibility of bringing the trade down, which he does by tracking Frank Lucas to the end. The movie was a brave non-commercial attempt at earnest story-telling with some great acting thrown in. Though this movie was released worldwide in Nov '07 and bagged two Oscar nominations, its being shown here now. By the looks of the hall capacity, it might not stay on for long.

The malls are so crowded on a weekend that one begins to wonder if people just drop into a mall to beat the heat! US recession or economy slowdown, consumerism shows no signs of abating. It remains to be seen in the months to come. After a quick snack at Ohri’s and a couple of laps of the favroite Star Wars theme racing game at the game parlor, the evening show plan was already cooking! With a lot of hype and expectation around “10,000 BC” that had released a day before, it was chosen. With about 30 minutes left for the show, we raced covering 20 km to reach the movie hall on time, but without tickets! Not wanting to miss the movie, we took the front row seats for 10 bucks.. this fact still refuses to sink in that you get tickets at this price in Hyderabad! Its another thing that the car parking fee was 15 bucks!

After one-and-half hours of craning our neck and scanning different ‘areas’ of the screen to catch the action or rather trying to put together the complete scene, we walked out with utter disappointment with this blooper-of-a-movie that had no story line (well, our body pain could still be taken care of). The plot was lifted straight out of “Apocalypto” that can be summed as native-hunters-tribe-enslaved-by-superior-civilization-and-then-the-fight-back-for-freedom. But this was reproduced in a very poor shade, compared to Apocalypto that I consider to be a brilliant movie. This movie had no story line and worse, doesn’t attempt to satiate the expectations generated out of the promos that prominently flaunt the saber-tooth (see picture) and the aura & mystery of the pre-historic times.

With the trauma suffered at the hands of this second movie, the plans for catching the late-show of Jodha Akbar, that would have made it a hat-trick for the day, were dropped. Instead we zipped back from the Mesolithic period directly back to present day and caught up with a sumptuous dinner. Well its another thing that I caught up with a couple of Tamil DVDs after we reached home!

"Life of Pi" - A Review!

After many years of just ‘hearing’ about “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel , winner of the 2002 Booker Prize, I finally read this book over the past weekend. To be honest, I was expecting a shipwreck-and-washed-ashore-an-island-with-animals kind of survival story, a la Cast Away or Robinson Crusoe. Even though it fanned out differently, what a story it was!! I truly savored the book. One of the striking things is the author’s tongue-in-cheek tone wherein he is sincere, frank, mocking and funny at the same time.

In brief, Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel’s family decides to sell-off their zoo in Pondicherry and take a Japanese freighter in a bid to start life anew in Canada. The freighter capsizes in the Pacific leaving behind a handful of survivors – Pi and four wild animals. The story is a remarkable account of how the final two survivors in the lifeboat Pi and a 450 pound Bengal Tiger brave odds to emerge the ultimate survivors of sea tragedy until they are washed ashore 7 months later!

The author builds the character of Pi in the initial part of the story, though it gets a little dragging in certain instances. Soon after the ‘Tsimtsum’ goes to the bottom of the ocean there’s no halting the pace of the story. The account is filled with copious tales of daily battles for survival added with picturesque details of the odds faced and endured at sea. With ample survival tips thrown in steadily, the author makes no bones about the fact that this book would serve to be a promising survival manual for those unfortunate readers who may find themselves in similar dire straits!!

I liked the concept of alpha-beta male that’s so vividly presented in the story, and which is central to the survival strategy – the sole reason behind the protagonist surviving 7 months of sharing a lifeboat with a Tiger. This was the first time I’d come across this concept and it was a real eye-opener that has great potential for use (beyond animals, of course!). This definitely calls for further detailed study and I’m already looking for good references.

The author gets to his funny-sarcastic best towards the ends of the story with the Japanese officials. If this part of the story were really true, it makes me wonder how the Japanese embassy decided to share the uncensored tapes to a writer; the author has sure made best use of the transcripts!!

Orkut – The ‘unnecessary’ makeover??

Orkut had revolutionized the concept of ‘online communites and social networking’. They beat competition by doing what the parent company, Google does best – continuous innovation centred around the consumer needs, thereby retaining it market leader position in this rapidly evolving space. The add-on features its been rolling out have truly caught on with the audience and its popularity has been sky-rocketing, inspite of the on-and-off negative publicity it has been receiving.

However, of late Orkut has brought about some drastic changes in its services - such as locking one’s scrapbook, photos, videos etc in a bid to protect one’s privacy. However well intentioned and convenient this feature might seem to be, it tends to drive users against the basic ‘community’ principle. A series of measures such as these might make Orkut just a convenient extension of its popular Gmail. It remains to be seen on whether this move turns out to be yet another trend-setter in the community space or if this would prove to be the undoing of Orkut’s standing in this area.

Tales about the Monk's Ferrari!!

The other day I was browsing at the Crosswords bookstore, my favorite pastime these days, and came across the book titled "I bought the Monk's Ferrari"! Surprised and amused, I flipped through the volume and realized that it had no relation whatsoever to the bestseller "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" other than the fact that both were self-improvement books.

The author, Ravi Subramanian (an IIMB passout) must be commended for astutely choosing this title to readily bank on the top-of-the-mind recall! The title sure makes heads turn, though the cover could've been designed better. However, I found the book to be just one other amongst run-of-the-mill Self-Help books. The author goes out of the way to establish the 'Ferrari' connection and that looks artifical. Nevertheless, the fact that some of the 'ten commandments' stand out and prod the reader to imbibe them, shows that the author has managed to partly achieve what he set out for.

Traffic Signal

Yet another week day and I'm on my way, driving down to the office. The signal blinks orange briefly before finally turning to red and bringing the traffic to a halt, well almost, except for a handful who honk and rush away as if their life depends on they jumping yet another signal!

As the crowd grumbingly await their turn, the next bout of business has already started. Women carrying babies trot about asking for money to feed the kids. Old men and others horrifyingly disabled move around pleading for change. Urchins run about the vehicles, peering into some and prodding others for money. This is a daily sight, in almost all the city junctions that are even slightly traffic-worthy. This business happens with unbelievable uniformity - people zip in, do their bit and zip out as the signal turns green. One cannot help but notice this similarity to the pit stop of the Formula Racing cars and its nano-second precision

All these bizarre comparisons apart, it is heart-rending to see young and old people toiling the streets for change, by volition or by force. Day-in and day-out they get hardened in the grind of this world and grow up as brazened souls with a can-do-anything-for-money attitude. In my opinion, the only way to cure this is to say NO and discourage all forms of begging.

As the Chinese proverb goes: "Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Whatever little contribution you'd want to make, direct it towards rehabilitation of these people and in aiding them earn a decent living. When people uniformly stop yielding to begging, the needy would be forced to look at other means.

The Kite Runner

I chanced upon this title at a friend's book collection some months back, though I'd heard about it earlier. I was initially a little hesitant about reading this book, as I thought it might be a literary overdose. However, I did finally pick up both the books of the author Khaled Hosseini ('Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns') when I visited Delhi.

The book (Kite Runner) was simple, poignant and brilliant! The author has managed to recreate the average individual in Amir - weak with insecurities, yearning for recognition and acceptance (in his father's eyes) and his scruple gnawing at his heart awaiting redemption.

Hassan’s is a character closer to Bollywood – fiercely loyal and blindly forgiving. Though it may look filmly and slightly unreal, the strength of this character makes you cry, and I was no exception. Even moving out of the narrative, Hassan lives on in the character of his son, and perhaps thats the way the author wanted it to be.

The story and characters apart, some other things I liked most about the book: the author powerfully paints a vivid picture on your canvas and lets you live through the scenes alongside the characters, and quite often deep into their psyche as well; a first-rate account of the contrast of Afghanistan, before the Soviets and after the Taliban; the liberal use of pashtun words and phrases gets you closer to the characters; the Kite festival and its cult following.

For all those still ‘considering’ on whether to read the book – please do, it is highly recommended.

PS: I’ve just browsed through the first few chapters of the next book, ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ and it sure looks promising - equally powerful and moving... 'for you, a thousand times over....!!'