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’ o
f 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!
